Charisma-free al-Zawahiri was running al-Qaeda into the ground, CNN.com

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/08/02/opinions/al-zawahiri-al-qaeda-death-osama-bin-laden-bergen

“Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. Bergen’s new paperback is “The Rise and fall of Osama bin Laden.” from which this article is, in part, adapted. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.”

(CNN)The airstrike that killed al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri over the weekend in Afghanistan is part of the long and justified campaign by the United States to bring all the heads of the terror group to justice.

Let’s be clear about who Zawahiri really was. In remarks at the White House on Monday, President Joe Biden described Zawahiri as a terrorist mastermind “deeply involved in the planning of 9/11,” as well as the bombings of the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000 and two US embassies in Africa in 1998 that killed more than 200 people.

But in my two-and-a-half decades of intensive reporting on al Qaeda, and based on discussions with key CIA and FBI officials tracking both Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden, as well as militants who knew both men, I have found little or no evidence for those assertions.

As for Zawahiri’s role in recent years as al Qaeda leader, he was unable to resuscitate the terrorist group, which hasn’t carried out a major attack in the West since al Qaeda-trained suicide bombers killed 52 commuters in London in 2005.

Zawahiri was not a charismatic leader of al Qaeda in the mold of Osama bin Laden. Instead, he had all the charisma of a boring uncle given to long, arcane monologues, someone that you would best avoid sitting next to at Thanksgiving dinner.

This is not to undercut the significance of killing bin Laden’s successor. But let’s be realistic about Zawahiri’s importance historically in the hierarchy of al Qaeda and his role in the organization in more recent years.

While Zawahiri was influential in the very early years of al Qaeda in turning bin Laden against the regimes in the Middle East, he wasn’t involved in bin Laden’s most important strategic decisions — that is, turning him against the US and planning 9/11. And Zawahiri proved to be an incompetent leader of al Qaeda when he took over the group more than a decade ago.

Looking ahead, might there be a plausible successor to Zawahiri waiting in the wings who could revive the group’s flagging fortunes?

The strike against Zawahiri indicates that his successor will likely have substantial freedom of movement to operate in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Indeed Zawahiri was living in downtown Kabul, a fact that was well known to some leaders of the Taliban, according to senior US government officials.

Zawahiri’s marginal role in al Qaeda before 9/11

Before 9/11, Zawahiri was a relatively marginal player in al-Qaeda, despite his role as one of the public faces of the organization.

In 1986, bin Laden first met Zawahiri, an Egyptian surgeon, at a hospital in Peshawar, Pakistan where bin Laden was giving a lecture. Bin Laden was intrigued by the older, more politically experienced Zawahiri, who had joined a jihadist group at 15 and had served three years in prison in Egypt. The two became close and Zawahiri encouraged bin Laden to imagine the possibilities of overthrowing the regimes in Arab countries such as Egypt.

As a result, during the late 1980s Zawahiri influenced bin Laden’s thinking about the need to fight the “near-enemy” Arab regimes such as Egypt. But by the time bin Laden had taken up residence in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan in 1996 the two men’s relative importance on the “field of jihad” had changed quite dramatically. Zawahiri was a penniless refugee with virtually no followers whereas bin Laden was a well-known jihadist hero the Taliban had appointed to be responsible for all the Arabs living in Afghanistan.

But bin Laden found a way to use Zawahiri for his own purposes — to advance his goals instead of those of this fellow jihadist whose focus was not on the US but on Egypt. Bin Laden released a statement on behalf of the “World Islamic Front,” a joint declaration made by himself, Zawahiri, and other militant leaders from Bangladesh, Egypt and Pakistan on February 22, 1998. The declaration claimed it was now a religious duty for any Muslim to kill American civilians anywhere in the world.

This declaration of war made no mention of Zawahiri’s lifelong goal of overthrowing the “near-enemy” Egyptian regime and instead was focused on bin Laden’s “far-enemy” goal of attacking America. Bin Laden had co-opted Zawahiri to be part of his holy war against the US, not the other way around, which was the dominant narrative in the years after the 9/11 attacks.

There is no evidence that bin Laden’s decision to target the US had any input from Zawahiri, despite later claims that Zawahiri was really the “brains” behind bin Laden.

The troika who founded and ran al-Qaeda was bin Laden at the apex and his two key lieutenants, the Egyptian military commanders, Abu Ubaidah and Abu Hafs al-Masri (whose real name was Mohammed Atef), both of whom had been on bin Laden’s payroll since the beginning of 1987. They were bin Laden’s men, not Zawahiri’s.

Like other reporters, I had inflated Zawahiri’s importance to bin Laden’s thinking in my 2001 book, “Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama Bin Laden.” After examining all the evidence, I have since concluded that Zawahiri was a marginal figure when it came to influencing bin Laden’s views, and that he played only a small role in the actions of al-Qaeda in the years leading up the 9/11 attacks.

This view is also shared by Michael Scheuer, who led the bin Laden unit at CIA from 1996 to 1999, by Daniel Coleman, the most knowledgeable FBI agent investigating bin Laden in the years before 9/11 and by Montasser al-Zayyat, who spent years in prison in Egypt with Zawahiri.

Noman Benotman, a leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, who knew both men, also said it was bin Laden who told Zawahiri, “Forget about the ‘near enemy’ [the Egyptian government]. The main enemy is the Americans because they dominate the whole area and they’re supporting these Arab regimes.”

According to the 9/11 Commission, it was bin Laden, Abu Hafs al-Masri, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, an operational planner of 9/11, who discussed what American targets to hit. They selected the US Capitol, the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. Zawahiri was not involved in deciding to attack these targets, according to the Commission.

Bin Laden formally merged Zawahiri’s own Egyptian Jihad Group into al-Qaeda in June 2001. Feroz Ali Abbasi, a Ugandan Briton who was then training at an al-Qaeda camp, described the merger as “more like the assimilation” of Zawahiri’s group. At this point, Zawahiri’s group consisted of only ten men, according to Abu Walid al-Misri, who edited the Taliban’s Arabic-language newspaper. Abu Jandal, one of bin Laden’s key bodyguards, put the number of Zawahiri’s followers at seven Egyptians.

It was only in the summer of 2001 that bin Laden told Zawahiri the details of the upcoming attacks on New York and Washington.

Months after the 9/11 attacks, Abu Hafs al-Masri was killed in a US airstrike and Zawahiri succeeded him as bin Laden’s deputy. For the next decade bin Laden and Zawahiri both disappeared until bin Laden was tracked down by the CIA to the Pakistani city of Abbottabad, where he was killed in a US Navy SEAL operation in early May 2011.

Zawahiri takes over al Qaeda

Even though Zawahiri had been bin Laden’s deputy since 2001, it took more than six weeks for the group to announce Zawahiri’s ascension to the top spot. Saif al-Adel, an Egyptian former Special Forces officer was appointed “caretaker” leader of al Qaeda in the wake of bin Laden’s death, according to CNN. Adel had long played a prominent role in the terrorist group.

Eventually Zawahiri was appointed to the top job but proved so incompetent in the job that al-Qaeda and its most successful affiliate, ISIS, formally split in 2014. It was the first time in its history that al-Qaeda had officially rejected one of its affiliates, and this was not a sign of strength since ISIS was now the most lethal terrorist group in the world.

During Zawahiri’s time as leader of al Qaeda, the terrorist group was never able to launch an attack in the US, nor against American interests around the world. (An al Qaeda affiliate in Yemen was in communication with a Saudi military officer who killed three US sailors at Naval Air Station Pensacola in 2019, but the central al Qaeda organization led by Zawahiri seems to have had no role in that attack.)

A possible successor?

The Taliban takeover of Afghanistan has given al Qaeda “increased freedom of action” in Afghanistan according to a report by the United Nations released in May. Zawahiri apparently felt comfortable at his safehouse in Kabul where he produced video messages, according to senior US officials.

According to the UN, Zawahiri “issued more frequent recorded messages after the Taliban took over Afghanistan last August,” appearing in eight videos. And al Qaeda also renewed its pledge of allegiance to the leader of the Taliban, according to the UN.

The most likely successor to Zawahiri is Saif al Adel — the former al Qaeda caretaker when bin Laden was killed — who lived in Iran for years after 9/11 and could already be back in Afghanistan.

Adel fought the Soviets in Afghanistan during the 1980s, which is how he became part of al Qaeda during its earliest days. According to senior Saudi counterterrorism officials, from Iran, Adel authorized al Qaeda’s branch in Saudi Arabia to launch a campaign of terrorist attacks in the Saudi kingdom that began in May 2003, a campaign that killed scores of people.

If it is Adel who is tapped for the top job in al Qaeda, he will likely do a far better job of resuscitating al Qaeda than Zawahiri did, which, admittedly, is a low bar.

Opinion: The January 6 hearing witness who should make Trump nervous, CNN.com

“Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. Bergen’s new paperback is “The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and the World.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.”

(CNN)Matthew Pottinger is one of the very few senior officials to have served for almost the entirety of the Trump administration. He only submitted his resignation on the day of the US Capitol riot — January 6, 2021.

Pottinger is expected to be a star witness at Thursday’s climactic final summer public hearing of the House select committee investigating the attack on the US Capitol. As the deputy national security adviser when the insurrection happened, Pottinger is the most senior Trump administration official to testify before the committee publicly.

His words are likely to carry a lot of weight. Throughout each step of his career, Pottinger, now in his late 40s, has shown a marked streak of independence and fortitude. It will be difficult for Team Trump to paint Pottinger as a junior official who wasn’t “in the room” for the events that he will testify about, or that he is part of the purported “deep state” — since he was appointed to the administration by Trump’s first national security adviser, retired Lt. General Michael Flynn, who has since been at the forefront of the efforts to overturn President Joe Biden’s electoral victory.

Pottinger’s long service in the upper echelons of the Trump administration is why committee members saved him for what they must be hoping will be a dramatic prime time moment on Thursday. (Disclosure: I was interviewed by staff members of the committee who were interested in discussing the history of right-wing terrorism).

Pottinger is also far from a typical Trump apparatchik, nor is he a typical civil servant. He has had a very varied career from working as a reporter in China for the Wall Street Journal; to serving as an officer in the US Marines in Afghanistan; to working at an investment fund in New York before he served as a top national security official at the White House.

Pottinger’s father, John Stanley Pottinger, was a lawyer in the civil rights division of the Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford administrations. He was educated at the Massachusetts prep school Milton Academy and then at the University of Massachusetts where he studied Chinese. Pottinger is now married to the medical researcher and virologist Yen Pottinger, who fled Vietnam as an infant.

As a reporter in China, Pottinger faced down threats from the Chinese security services, as he recounted in a 2005 essay in the Wall Street Journal. “I’ve been arrested and forced to flush my notes down a toilet to keep the police from getting them, and I’ve been punched in the face in a Beijing Starbucks by a government goon who was trying to keep me from investigating a Chinese company’s sale of nuclear fuel to other countries,” he wrote.

After his posting in China, Pottinger took the unusual step for a journalist of joining the US Marines in 2005 at the relatively late age of 32. The Marines then deployed him to Afghanistan and Iraq.

It was in Afghanistan that he crossed paths with then-Major General Michael Flynn. Together they co-authored an influential paper “Fixing Intel,” which made the case that US intelligence agencies officials had to do a better job of getting out among the Afghan population if they really wanted to understand what was going on in Afghanistan. The paper’s publication in 2010 caused a stir, as it was published outside of regular government channels by a Washington DC-based think tank.

In 2017, after Flynn was appointed Trump’s first national security adviser, he tapped Pottinger to be the top official on Asia policy at the White House. Pottinger’s years working as a reporter in China proved to be quite consequential for the Trump administration, as his experiences there deeply informed his skeptical attitude to the Chinese and were subsequently reflected in the Trump administration’s policies on China. Those experiences also colored Pottinger’s perception of the threat posed by a mysterious new disease originating in China known as Covid-19.

Flynn served only three weeks as national security adviser before he was fired because he had lied to then-Vice President Mike Pence about the content of his discussions with the Russian ambassador to the United States.
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Flynn’s successor as national security adviser, Lt. General H.R. McMaster, relied on the Mandarin-speaking Pottinger and his deep expertise on China. In McMaster’s book “Battlegrounds,” which recounts his work at the Trump White House, he describes Pottinger as “my ‘professor'” on China.

The fruits of McMaster and Pottinger’s work on China could be seen in the Trump administration’s national security strategy, released in 2017, which took a far more skeptical and hardline approach to China than previous administrations had. The Trump strategy accused the Chinese of stealing US intellectual property every year valued at “hundreds of billions of dollars” and warned that China “is building the most capable and well-funded military in the world, after our own.”

When Covid-19 first emerged as a public health issue in early 2020, Pottinger — who had covered the SARS outbreak in China when he was a reporter — took the possibility of the emergence of a pandemic far more seriously than most Trump officials did. Trump himself was largely dismissive of the threat and denigrated mask-wearing, which was one of the only effective public health measures before vaccines against Covid-19 became available.

According to Pulitzer Prize-winner Lawrence Wright’s authoritative book about the Trump administration’s response to Covid-19, “The Plague Year,” Pottinger bucked the prevailing winds at the Trump White House, wearing a mask to meetings beginning in March 2020 when no other Trump officials were wearing masks. He was also instrumental in persuading Trump to close down most travel from China to the US in the early days of the pandemic, according to Wright.

Pottinger persuaded leading American public health expert, Dr. Deborah Birx, to come to the White House to coordinate the coronavirus task force that was overseeing the response to the virus, according to Birx in her memoir “Silent Invasion.”

On Thursday, Pottinger, who has stayed largely out of the spotlight during his career, will step forward into what will surely be the most well-publicized role of his life, as a witness to what his commander-in-chief was doing during the assault on the US Capitol. That role will be informed by Pottinger’s career as a journalist reporting under difficult circumstances in China, as a US Marine officer serving at the height of the Afghan War and as an official who survived almost four years in the tempestuous Trump White House.

It will be the role of a lifetime. And I anticipate his testimony will be both highly credible and quite damaging to Trump and his gross dereliction of duty while his supporters swarmed and attacked the Capitol.

The global jihadist movement is down — but not out, CNN.com

“Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. Bergen’s new paperback is “The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and the World.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.”

(CNN)ISIS and al Qaeda have largely receded from the headlines. It’s been three years since ISIS lost the last vestiges of the vast geographical “caliphate” that it had once lorded over in Iraq and Syria, while al Qaeda has found it hard to regroup after the death of its founder Osama bin Laden more than a decade ago.

Yet ISIS is far from defeated in its heartland. The United Nations points to the continued presence of ISIS fighters in Iraq and Syria, estimating their total strength to be between 6,000 and 10,000 fighters, according to a report published on Tuesday.

That strength was underlined by a dramatic prison break in January at a prison in Hasakah in northeastern Syria, where more than 3,000 ISIS fighters reportedly were held. ISIS fighters and US-allied Kurdish forces fought a 10-day battle at the prison, during which 100 to 300 ISIS fighters escaped, according to the UN report.

As a result of this resilience, the US continues a campaign of special operations forces ground raids and airstrikes against ISIS leaders. In February, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, the group’s leader, died in a US ground operation, while earlier this month, a US airstrike killed another militant who was part of the group’s leadership, according to US Central Command.

But these military operations will not achieve much in the long term if the thousands of ISIS fighters and tens of thousands of displaced women and children from multiple countries remain unrepatriated in lightly secured and unsafe prisons and camps in northeastern Syria, creating what could be a whole new generation of ISIS recruits.
The solution is for the many countries that have their nationals in prisons and camps in northeastern Syria to take back their ISIS fighters for prosecution in cases where it’s merited. As for women and children living in the camps, they should be reintegrated back into their home societies and entered into deradicalization programs if that should prove necessary.

Senior US government officials, speaking Wednesday at a conference at the Middle East Institute in Washington, stressed that ISIS is far from defeated. Joshua Geltzer, US deputy homeland security adviser, told me in a discussion at the institute that ISIS remains “a threat to countries where it continues to have a presence, which is about 30 countries worldwide. It is still a threat to the region, Iraq, Syria and neighbors. And it is still a threat to the United States and our allies and partners.”

Of particular concern are more than 10,000 ISIS fighters and around 60,000 mostly women and children who are being held by America’s Kurdish allies, the Syrian Democratic Forces, in prisons and camps in northeastern Syria. The United Nations estimates that 30,000 of those held in the camps are under the age of 12 and are “at risk of radicalization” by ISIS ideologues.

Few countries will take back their nationals who are living in the squalid camps, fearing that they may be importing an ISIS problem. In the past three years, Iraq has taken back more than 600 fighters and nearly 2,500 “displaced Iraqi nationals,” according to Timothy Betts, the acting US special envoy for the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS. This month, France took back 51 women and children, while 39 Americans have been returned to the United States, according to Betts.

Yet that number is less than 5% of the mostly 60,000 women and children — the majority from Iraq and Syria — and the more than 10,000 ISIS fighters who are being held in northeastern Syria.

At the current slow rate of repatriation, the ISIS fighters and tens of thousands of women and children might take decades to return to their home countries. By that time, even the youngest children in the camps could be adults in their 30s and will have spent almost their entire lives living in the filthy, disease-infested camps, which are ripe for ISIS indoctrination.

A wild card causing considerable consternation among US national security officials is the saber rattling by Turkey in recent weeks that it plans to send its military into neighboring northeastern Syria to annex territory controlled by the US-allied Kurdish groups fighting ISIS and running the facilities where the ISIS fighters and the women and children are being held. Turkey considers those Kurdish groups to be terrorists.

Dana Stroul, deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East, warned last week, “The United States opposes any Turkish operation in northern Syria. Such an operation puts at risk US forces, the coalition’s campaign against ISIS, and will introduce more violence into Syria. It would effectively end a ceasefire that has been in place for years at a time when violence is at its lowest levels since the onset of the conflict.”

Also concerning is that the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan almost a year ago because of President Joe Biden’s foolhardy decision to pull out all US troops from the country has given both al Qaeda and ISIS greater room to maneuver there, according to Tuesday’s UN report. Biden’s move was bad policy, and the US pullout was terribly executed, allowing the Taliban to maintain their alliance with al Qaeda and to bar women from jobs and teenage girls from education.

The UN report noted that Ayman al-Zawahiri, who replaced bin Laden as al Qaeda’s leader, is issuing “regular video messages that provided almost current proof of life” and “Zawahiri’s apparent increased comfort and ability to communicate has coincided with the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan. …”

In Afghanistan, both ISIS and al Qaeda have acquired “night vision equipment, thermal imagers, and steel-penetrating bullets,” according to the UN report.
The United Nations assessed, however, that — for the moment — al Qaeda does not pose an “immediate international threat from its safe haven in Afghanistan … and does not currently wish to cause the Taliban international difficulty or embarrassment.”

That’s the good news. But the bad news, according to the UN, is that al Qaeda now has key allies within the Taliban’s de facto government in Afghanistan, which will doubtless give al Qaeda more resources to regroup. Meanwhile, the local branch of ISIS in Afghanistan is now one of the “most vigorous” of ISIS’ regional networks globally, according to the UN.

The global jihadist movement, whether in Afghanistan, Iraq or Syria, and whether part of ISIS or al Qaeda, is down but not out. And these groups will continue to take advantage of ungoverned or lightly governed spaces in the Muslim world, where they will remain a threat to the governments and populations of Muslim-majority countries — and to the West — for the foreseeable future.

Mr. Biden goes to Riyadh (hat in hand), CNN.com

“Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He has made multiple reporting trips to Saudi Arabia since 2005. Bergen’s new paperback is “The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and the World.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.”

(CNN)A cynic is rarely disappointed by the actions of his fellow human beings, and President Joe Biden’s trip to Saudi Arabia this week won’t disappoint many cynics because it is so entirely
Sure, Biden as a presidential candidate may have said that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s kingdom was a “pariah” for sending operatives to Turkey who murdered the US-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi, dismembering him in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul in 2018, according to a US intelligence report. (The Saudi Foreign Ministry reacted to that report, saying it “completely rejects the negative, false and unacceptable assessment … pertaining to the Kingdom’s leadership, and notes that the report contained inaccurate information and conclusions.”)

MBS, as he is widely known, also was the prime driver in the Saudis’ military intervention in Yemen’s civil war in 2015, helping to precipitate what the United Nations warned could be the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.

Not only that, MBS’ feckless intervention spectacularly backfired; instead of ridding Yemen of Shia Houthi rebels, they are now even more entrenched in the country and are today aligned with Iran, which supplies them with missiles and drones that have repeatedly targeted Saudi Arabia as well as its close ally the United Arab Emirates.

MBS has also imprisoned pretty much anyone in Saudi Arabia who might threaten his absolute power, from former Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef to Saudi women who had simply demonstrated for the right to drive.

He arrested scores of Saudi Arabia’s top businessmen, accusing them of corruption. They were detained in the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Riyadh, and after more than $100 billion reportedly was obtained in settlements from them, the majority of them were released in what must be the most expensive hotel tab in history.

In March, the regime carried out a mass execution of 81 men, Saudi authorities said, Reuters reported. According to Human Rights Watch, 41 of the men belonged to the kingdom’s Shia minority group who are sometimes imprisoned or executed simply for taking part in protests. (Saudi Arabia denies accusations of human rights abuses, according to the Reuters report.)

But now high gas prices are contributing to the worst inflation in the United States in four decades. So, Biden will go to Riyadh and meet with MBS. The Crown Prince will no doubt ensure that there are well-publicized images of his meeting with the US President.

Every US president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt has made similar calculations of the kind that Biden is making about the House of Saud. Sure, the Saudi monarchs may be despots — slavery was only officially abolished in the kingdom in 1962, and MBS granted women the right to drive four years ago — but Saudi Arabia is one of the world’s top oil producers and has around a sixth of the world’s proven oil reserves, which means that the Saudis can open up the taps and let the price of oil fall, or they can close the taps and the price of oil will rise.

Relations between nations are based on shared interests, and the US-Saudi relationship is bound up not only with ensuring a steady supply of reasonably priced oil but also with counterterrorism initiatives and efforts to try and contain Iranian influence in the region. For successive American governments, these interests have tended to trump any concerns about the Saudis’ generally dismal human rights record.

This calculus about the Saudis was well-described by then-President Barack Obama, who told CNN in 2015, “Sometimes we have to balance our need to speak to them about human rights issues with immediate concerns that we have in terms of countering terrorism or dealing with regional stability.”

As long as the US economy remains deeply tethered to hydrocarbons — aircraft, for instance, won’t be flying on electric batteries anytime soon — and as long as the Saudis sit on an ocean of oil, this calculus will surely continue. And MBS is 36 so he could rule over Saudi Arabia for decades to come.

To be sure Biden is not embracing the Crown Prince in the same obsequious manner that former President Donald Trump did. Trump made his first overseas visit as President to the kingdom and strongly endorsed the subsequent Saudi blockade of its neighbor Qatar, even though Qatar houses the largest US military base in the Middle East, which was then playing a key role in the wars against ISIS and the Taliban.

Trump also pulled out of the Iranian nuclear deal, a key Saudi foreign policy goal, even though that deal was working, according to international inspectors and US intelligence agencies.
Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who was effectively the President’s shadow secretary of state, led the administration’s campaign to cozy up to MBS, whom he texted with regularly on WhatsApp.
Kushner’s cultivation of the Crown Prince would eventually provide a handsome payday. Six months after the Trump administration left office, against the advice of its advisers, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, which is led by MBS, invested $2 billion in Kushner’s equity fund, according to The New York Times.

Unlike Trump/Kushner, however, Biden is not a complete patsy for Saudi interests. When Biden came into office, his administration ended the Trump White House’s designation of the Houthis as a terrorist organization, which was complicating aid efforts to the Yemenis, hundreds of thousands of whom have died of disease or malnutrition because of the civil war.

On his trip to Riyadh, Biden will surely also have his requests of the Saudis, such as maintaining a recently negotiated fragile truce in Yemen, which is now more than three months old. Another ask will be encouraging closer ties with Israel, which would likely fall far short of any formal recognition of the Jewish state but could involve confidence-building measures such as allowing planes flying to and from Israel overflight rights in Saudi airspace.

And, of course, Biden’s main goal will be getting the Saudis to help bring down oil prices, which they already began to do in a modest manner in May.

But MBS will also get what he wants, which is a well-publicized meeting with the US President, demonstrating to the world that his kingdom is no pariah.

Biden Admin’s Counter-ISIS Strategy, Middle East Institute, DC

At 1545-1615, a Fireside Chat on the #Biden Administration’s Counter-#ISIS Strategy in the Middle East, with:

– Joshua Geltzer (@jgeltzer
Deputy Assistant to the President & Deputy Homeland Security Advisor, @WHNSC

Peter Bergen, @NewAmerica & @CNN

Former journalist Peter Jouvenal among five UK nationals to be released in Afghanistan, CNN.com

By Peter Bergen, Zahid Mahmood, Masoud Popalzai and Aliza Kassim, CNN

Businessman and former cameraman Peter Jouvenal is among five British nationals to be released in Afghanistan, his wife Hassina Syed told CNN.

“We are thrilled Peter is coming home. Thanks to the Afghan administration for releasing him,” Syed said on Monday.

Jouvenal was detained by the Taliban in mid-December. He was visiting Afghanistan on business, according to his wife. Along with the four other British citizens, he had been held for six months by the Taliban.

Jouvenal previously owned the Gandamack Lodge, a hotel in Afghanistan’s capital Kabul popular with journalists, aid workers and diplomats, which opened in 2002 after the Taliban was toppled by US forces. It closed in 2014.
Peter Jouvenal, pictured in 2004, has been detained by the Taliban.

At least 6 British citizens and 1 American are being held by the Taliban in Afghanistan

Jouvenal filmed CNN’s interview with Osama bin Laden in 1997. He had covered the wars in Afghanistan since the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan during the 1980s.

Earlier on Monday, the UK’s Foreign Secretary, Liz Truss, announced the government had secured the release of five British nationals detained in Afghanistan.

“They will soon be reunited with their families. I am grateful for the hard work of British diplomats to secure this outcome,” she said.

However, the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) made no reference to the British nationals’ identity in its statement.

Earlier on Monday, the FCDO said in a statement that the British nationals’ travel to Afghanistan was a “mistake,” adding that they had gone there against government advice and apologized for any breach of Afghan culture or laws.
Safiullah Rauf

“The UK government regrets this episode,” the FCDO said.

Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid confirmed the release of the five British nationals on Monday.

“A number of British nationals who had been involved in activities that were against the laws and traditions of Afghan people were detained around six months back,” Mujahid wrote on his official Twitter account.

“After repeated talks and meetings between the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan and the British side, yesterday they were released and handed over to their country, according to an agreement.”

The detained nationals have “pledged to adhere to the laws of Afghanistan, the traditions and culture of the people and won’t violate them again,” said Mujahid, who also said that Afghanistan was a safe place.

“Afghanistan is safe for all, anyone can come to Afghanistan for charity works and tourism,” he said.

Forensic psychologist largely dismisses common talking point that mass shootings are caused by individuals with mental disorders, CNN.com

Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. His new paperback is “The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and the World.” View more opinion on CNN.
CNN —

Last month, the massacre at a supermarket in a Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, that left 10 people dead was followed just days later by another massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, in which 21 people – 19 of whom were young children – were murdered. This string of violence has many Americans wondering: Can mass murderers be stopped?

Reid Meloy, a forensic psychologist and a former professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego, has been researching this question since the 1980s, when he started examining stalkers who sometimes carried out violent attacks. Meloy published “The Psychopathic Mind,” a key text about aggressive behavior, in 1988. After the 9/11 attacks, Meloy expanded his research to examine terrorists who share some characteristics with other kinds of mass murderers and started working with the Behavioral Analysis Unit of the FBI.

I spoke to Meloy earlier this week. Our conversation was edited for clarity.

BERGEN: What are the most ridiculous things people tend to say after a school shooting or a terrorist attack?

MELOY: When people claim that it is all about mental disorder, that sets my teeth on edge. If you say it’s about mental disorder, how do you then account for the millions of people in the United States who struggle with mental disorders and are not violent?

Our first studies of murderers began to be published in the mid-to-late 1990s. We see a small proportion of these individuals having a diagnosed mental disorder, but it’s typically not the majority of cases. And it also became apparent that murderers did not, as the public then believed, simply “snap” – which was also a term that was widely used at the time by the media – but that these individuals had spent considerable time planning their targeted attacks.

BERGEN: Are there commonalities between a terrorist and a school shooter?

MELOY: Typically, what we see in these cases, whether they’re terrorism-driven or whether they’re not ideological, is that there will be planning and preparation. Typically, research precedes that. It will go on for weeks, if not months – this is what we term being on a “pathway to violence.”

Another characteristic that’s shared is that even when you peel away the ideology motivating some of these individuals, you will oftentimes find in both groups a personal grievance, and the grievance typically is a major loss that may be cumulative, or it may be one event that has happened to them. The loss could be the loss of a job. It could be the loss of an important relationship. Typically, it is a loss that heavily impacts their day-to-day life.

There is first the loss, and then there’s humiliation, anger and blame, and then what follows is the person deciding that there is only one solution to this grievance, and that is to carry out a violent act. That element is very important because everyone has had a personal grievance at various times in their lives, often multiple grievances, but they don’t typically choose violence as a solution to their problems.

BERGEN: Can you walk us down the “pathway to violence”? What’s the process?

MELOY: The stages are as follows. The first one is a personal grievance. Secondly, there’s what’s called ideation or violent ideation. In other words, a person decides that violence is the only solution to this particular issue or problem, and they then make the decision to intend to be violent. Thirdly, they start to research how they could carry out an attack on what their targets might be. Fourthly, they begin to plan and prepare for the attack, and that typically tends to be much more of a tactical and specific focus because you’ve decided whom you’re going to attack and the means by which you’re going to attack. The next stage is typically a probing or breaching of the security surrounding the target. Lastly is carrying out the attack.

BERGEN: What are some interventions that might work to stop an individual from going down the pathway to violence and carrying out an attack?

MELOY: We think of interventions in three ways. One is way upstream on the pathway to violence, by trying to change the motivation of the individual to carry out an attack. It could be getting a depressed and angry student in high school into psychotherapy. The paradox here is if you make that intervention successfully, you never can know for sure whether he would have attacked if you hadn’t done anything. So way up on the pathway, the interventions tend to focus on trying to effect motivation.

In the midrange of the pathway to violence that’s where, for instance, gun safety and gun control becomes very important. You’re going to try to inhibit and prevent an angry 18-year-old from getting an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle. So you’re trying to inhibit at the level of means.

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And then way down on the pathway just before an attack, the focus is on the opportunity. How do you harden the target so the person cannot access the target?

The movement along the pathway to violence with its different stages is typically the same, whether it’s a terrorist or a school shooter, and along the way, one of the most fascinating things is these individuals will engage in “leakage,” which is communication to a third party of the intent to attack. And in one study, we saw that more than half of the time, the individual told a third party what they were planning to do.

What frustrates me is that there is a continuous failure of many individuals to take “leakage” seriously and report it to some authority. They often hear a person articulating their violent intent, and they minimize it or deny that they actually heard what they heard, and then they don’t report it. And then a horrible event unfolds. That for me is always very difficult to see repeated again and again as these attacks unfold and to see events such as those in Buffalo and Uvalde, where these killers were troubled and made a number of warning behaviors prior to their attacks, and there was little or nothing done to try to stop them from doing what they were about to do.

However, there are also people who engage in “leakage” who don’t carry out an attack. So you’ve got this paradox that is sometimes very difficult for the public to understand. I worry about complacency, and that even affects people like me who are looking at these cases all the time. You might think: “Well, here’s another case of leakage where there was actually no intent to carry out the attack.” But you just don’t know that. What that means operationally is you have to investigate every case of leakage.

BERGEN: What are typical warning behaviors that should be concerning, and why do people not report them?

MELOY: I want to highlight three warning behaviors. The first one is what we call “pathway,” and pathway is where the individual is engaging in very specific tactical planning and preparation for their act of violence. This could be doing specific research about how to build a bomb, trying to secure materials to do so, and some people are aware that something suspicious is going on and they don’t report it.

It could also involve an individual accumulating firearms or accelerating their frequency of practicing with those firearms and then making comments to people about their intent to attack. We call that “pathway warning behavior” when we start to see those markers of tactical planning.
FILE – This June 29, 2016, file photo shows guns on display at a gun store in Miami. Support for tougher gun control laws is soaring in the United States, according to a new poll that found a majority of gun owners and half of Republicans favor new laws to address gun violence in the weeks after a Florida school shooting left 17 dead and sparked nationwide protests. (AP Photo/Alan Diaz, File)

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A second warning behavior its what we call “identification,” which is where an individual identifies oftentimes with previous shooters and they make statements on social media. They put out information to other individuals in their social circle, and much of this now is being done on the internet through various chat rooms or it may be more private direct messaging.

It could be posting on a Facebook page, where the individual will post photos or images or make statements about admiring a particular attacker or a school shooter. The best example of that is the attacker at the high school in Parkland, Florida, where 17 people were killed in 2018. A few months before he carried out the massacre there, he had posted on a YouTube channel this statement: “I’m going to be a professional school shooter.” That kind of statement is a statement of self-identity or identification, where you want to become an attacker.

We see this also in the terrorism realm. Would-be terrorists might show, for instance, a preoccupation with ISIS, and then they post on their social media. They may make admiring statements about certain terrorist groups or certain individual terrorists, and then one day, they post this statement, “I am a soldier for ISIS.” What they’ve done is they’ve shifted from a preoccupation with ISIS to identification with ISIS, shifting from what they’re thinking about all the time to who they want to become.

The third warning behavior is what we call “last-resort behavior.” What that means is that the person decides in their mind, “I must act, and I must act now.” So we’re always looking for last-resort statements that the individual is making, and a lot of times, this information will be posted on social media accounts, but the attackers are becoming smarter, and, typically, they’re not posting this material until an hour or two before the attack because they know that these statements might also play a role in whether or not they’re going to be stopped.

BERGEN: Many Americans are unaware of this “pathway to violence” framework, and they aren’t aware of the emerging discipline of “threat management” to try and prevent individuals from going down that path. When did work on this start?

MELOY: The work in this area began in earnest in the mid-to-late 1980s. Traditionally, law enforcement understood acts of violence as individuals getting very angry, and they’d lose control and be violent toward another person. But what emerged out of this work was the understanding that there was another mode of violence called “predatory violence,” which differs from simply getting angry and becoming violent in that it’s premeditated. And this predatory violence and its understanding became a core aspect of targeted attacks and how these individuals moved forward and carried out attacks.

As a result of the better understanding of the “pathway to violence” in the first decade of the 21st century, you did see a rapid growth in threat assessment and threat management teams at the secondary school level, and you began seeing a federal push to establish threat management teams. Threat management teams are now very embedded in various entities within the federal government, ranging from the Department of Defense and the FBI to the Capitol Police and the US Marshals Service.

BERGEN: Seeking some kind of fame seems to be an important driver for a number of mass shooters. Is a solution to that not naming the perpetrator in media accounts, whether they’re a terrorist or a school shooter?

MELOY: I’m very happy that the responsible media has taken that approach where typically they’re not publicizing the photograph of the shooter, particularly in tactical gear, which used to happen all the time. Secondly, the suspect’s name is not being publicized to the degree that it used to be, and I think that does tend to dampen down one of the dark ripple effects of these events, which is other individuals will follow prior shooters and want to learn as much about them as possible so they can do two things: They can imitate them, and they can also try to kill more people than them.

BERGEN: In the what-can-be-done category, we’ve talked about the media, not inadvertently lionizing some of these perpetrators. What else do you recommend?

MELOY: I think the approach we have to take is the public health approach. There are two main levels to this: There’s primary prevention like we saw with Covid-19 vaccines. You don’t know who’s going to get Covid-19, but what you do is you try to get as many people vaccinated as possible.

Now, the translation of that into the threat management of potential mass shooters is the better regulation of firearms in the United States, and that is the primary prevention approach that you see being carried out at the federal level in a very weak form.

What we need is universal registration of firearms and much closer regulation of individuals purchasing firearms. And that’s primary prevention, because you don’t know which one of those individuals is going to want to carry out an attack and try to access a firearm amid the millions of very responsible gun owners all over the country. So you protect the Second Amendment, but none of our freedoms are absolute: You typically have certain conditions and measures of responsibility for exercising your rights.

A secondary prevention is the identification of symptomatic individuals. So in a medical scenario, if an individual started to experience symptoms, you would intervene medically. So secondary prevention in the case of those who might be on the pathway to violence is to identify symptomatic individuals and then intervene to try to divert them from that pathway.

Some states now mandate threat assessment management teams in their secondary school systems. Way upstream on the pathway to violence, that may mean more publicly available mental health care. Way downstream close to an attack, it becomes oftentimes law enforcement intervention. So you tailor the intervention to where you see this individual, where they are on the pathway to violence, how fast are they moving, and what kind of intervention can be done to try to mitigate the risk.

An earlier version of this article had an outdated biographical line. Reid Meloy is a former professor at the University of California, San Diego.

Filmmaker witnessed the moment the Proud Boys attacked on January 6, CNN.com

Filmmaker witnessed the moment the Proud Boys attacked on January 6

Updated 11:22 AM ET, Sat June 11, 2022
The most impactful moments from the first night of the January 6 hearing

The most impactful moments from the first night of the January 6 hearing 05:03

“Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. His new paperback is “The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and the World.” View more opinion on CNN.”

(CNN)Nick Quested, a British documentary filmmaker, testified on Thursday evening before the House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol insurrection. I spoke with Quested on Friday. He told me that he wanted the public to understand the truth of what happened on January 6 and expressed worries that the riot could be a dress rehearsal for another attack on America’s constitutional order.
Quested, a producer of the Oscar-nominated Afghanistan War documentary, “Restrepo,” has worked on several other films on subjects ranging from the Mexican drug cartels to the rise of ISIS in Syria.

Quested and his producing partner Sebastian Junger became interested in the far-right group, the Proud Boys, and followed them in the weeks leading up to January 6. Quested, who captured key footage of the group during the attack at the Capitol, shared his work and his personal account of the events of that day during the committee’s first televised hearing.

He told me about the scenes of mayhem that he and his colleagues filmed that day, as well as the mysterious meeting between the leaders of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, another far-right group, that took place in a Washington, DC, parking garage the night before the assault on the US Capitol.

Disclosure: I have appeared as an interviewee in one of Quested’s documentaries. Our interview was edited for clarity.

PETER BERGEN: Why did you decide to testify?
NICK QUESTED: Because we’re approaching living in a post-factual world, and I think it’s important that these facts about January 6 are brought to bear and in an unpartisan way, especially if we can use these hearings to make sure that something like this never happens again.

BERGEN: And you had a subpoena to appear before the committee?
QUESTED: I had a subpoena. I spoke to the authorities in an interview beforehand, but when they were using my work in the way that they did, I felt it was only appropriate for them to subpoena me.
BERGEN: Your work — did you just hand it over to them, or did they request it? How did that work?
QUESTED: Well as a journalist, having filmed what were potentially many crimes, I didn’t feel there was any journalistic jeopardy giving that to authorities. I called a friend who is a US Attorney, and I said, “Listen, I have filmed I don’t know how many crimes. What do you think I should do with this?” He said, “We’ll call the DC Criminal Division.” I was then referred to an agent from the FBI. And we still had to process the footage because we shoot very high-quality video, which needs to be processed. So, we did that and then I gave it to the FBI.
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Opinion: The big question about the January 6 hearings goes beyond Trump
BERGEN: On the morning of January 6th, what happened in terms of the Proud Boys?
QUESTED: I turned up on the National Mall around 10:30 am and the Proud Boys were already marching in an easterly direction towards the western side of the Capitol, and I immediately kicked into gear and started trying to cover the scene. I’m shooting a wide shot. I’m shooting long lens. I’m in the middle of the crowd with them. I’m shooting slow motion. I’m just trying to edit a sequence in my head, because I’ve done a lot of marching with these guys. They love marching up and down the Mall. We’d done that on December 12, 2020.
So I thought that’s what we were doing again. And we walked around the Capitol, and still they were marching. They’re singing their songs. It felt like hooligans at a soccer match. There were bawdy jokes. There’s sort of been an evolution in the Proud Boys, and at one point, people said that they were a drinking club with a political problem. I’d say they’re a political club with a drinking problem now.
And it wasn’t until that crowd moved near the barrier around the Capitol that I felt the world shift. At 12:54 pm, I feel the commotion and run over, and soon, the barriers are coming down and people are streaming forward and running towards the Capitol.
BERGEN: Were you frightened?
QUESTED: I wasn’t frightened at that point. But the language had started to change. There were more challenges to police to “respect their oath” and comments like, “We pay your wages. Do your job. Choose a side. Respect the oath.” And then people are starting to kick down the next fence. They’re starting to break up the fence and take pieces out of it to use as makeshift weapons, and it was different. It felt like some people were in rapture. It felt like a crusade, like they felt they were right, and they were unappreciative of the irony of using violence to overthrow a constitutionally elected body and justifying that violence by citing the Constitution.
BERGEN: Their interpretation of the Constitution.
QUESTED: Yeah.
BERGEN: How and when did you decide to profile the Proud Boys?
Trump claims daughter Ivanka 'checked out' and wasn't looking at election results
Trump claims daughter Ivanka ‘checked out’ and wasn’t looking at election results
QUESTED: In the summer of 2020, I was chatting with the war reporter and my producing partner Sebastian Junger, and we were talking about the psyche of the country at that time. We were in the first few months of Covid-19. People were scared because they had no idea what this virus’ potential was. The hospitals were full. There was a hospital ship in the harbor in New York. The emergency rooms were overflowing. There were stories in the papers about pressure on the food supply and Covid ripping through meatpacking plants.
And then you have the murder of George Floyd, and you literally have medieval-style pitched battles in the cities of America. And we asked ourselves this question: Why is America so divided when Americans have so much in common?
So, we thought, let’s see what the far right has to say and what the far right and the far left actually have in common here. And we wanted to ask both sides: What does it mean to be American? If you can’t define it, then how can you find commonality, if there is commonality to be had here?
BERGEN: So, you reached out to the Proud Boys.
QUESTED: Yeah. We called up the Proud Boys. On November 4, 2020, when President Donald Trump falsely claimed that he won the election before a winner had been declared, we were like, “Oh, here you go.” Because one of the fundamental tenets of America is having a peaceful transfer of power. I called up Enrique Tarrio, the head of the Proud Boys. He liked the film “Restrepo” that war reporter Tim Hetherington, Sebastian, and I made together. And he just said to come down. So we went down to DC on December 11, 2020 and started working.
BERGEN: When a revolution happens, even the revolutionaries sometimes have no idea what is going to happen. To what extent did the Proud Boys know this was going to happen on January 6?
QUESTED: I don’t know. We did definitely look at the Proud Boys and say, “Well, are Proud Boys Jacobins? Are they Brown Shirts? Or are they football hooligans?” Or is it just Trumpism? Because that was a very unifying factor throughout the Proud Boys. There are no RINOs in the Proud Boys. It is the cult of Trump, and they were the muscle.
BERGEN: The footage that you have, why is it of interest to the committee, and what does it show?
QUESTED: It was shot with very high-end cameras at a very high resolution with high-quality lenses by trained professional journalists. There were three of us there and also a freelancer that we met on the day. I was shooting as well. So, basically, what we have is a full view of the day because, even though we were separated at the beginning, we managed to have parallel experiences that have nexus points. We were able to cut documentary scenes from different angles because we’re all seeing the same parts at the same time.

BERGEN: What are the key scenes?
QUESTED: The Proud Boys walking down the Mall, the Proud Boys at lunch, the barriers coming down, the Proud Boys just as the barriers come down at the West Plaza of the Capitol, the fight on the lower West Plaza, and the fight at the tunnel on the west side of the Capitol.
BERGEN: The battle scene in the tunnel? You were there?
QUESTED: I was there.
BERGEN: What did you see?
QUESTED: Chaos and mayhem. I mean, mayhem in the true sense of the word.
BERGEN: Had you ever seen that in the United States?
QUESTED: I have not seen that in the United States, no.
BERGEN: Have you seen it anywhere?
QUESTED: Yeah. I’ve seen it around the world.
BERGEN: Where?
QUESTED: Venezuela 2017, Nicaragua 2018.
BERGEN: Were you scared?
QUESTED: I wasn’t scared because I’m so living in the moment, and my job is to document this. I have a task. So, I focus on my task. I got beat up pretty bad. My camera was broken. I got shot by a beanbag or pepper balls. I got tear-gassed.
BERGEN: What was that like?
QUESTED: Well, it’s not great. It’s not great because you’re in a big crowd, and you know no one in this crowd. You lose all sense of awareness, everything. But for all those in the crowd who were violent, there were many people that were just there to witness the event. They might have chanted or whatever, but there were also people there helping others. Someone came and poured water into my eyes, and I was like, “Don’t do that?” because I was worried I was going to get Covid. And I was like I’d rather be tear-gassed.
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Opinion: American leadership is thriving abroad. It’s a disturbingly different story at home
My phone didn’t work, so I couldn’t communicate what I was doing until basically six o’clock, when I called my family and said it’s all good.
BERGEN: You also filmed a meeting on January 5 between the leaders of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers?
QUESTED: This meeting was in a parking garage. We picked Enrique Tarrio up by car from jail, as he had just made bond. (Editor’s note: Tarrio had been arrested on January 4, 2021 on a warrant charging him with burning a Black Lives Matter banner taken from a historic Black church and he was also found with high-capacity magazines, which are illegal in Washington, DC. He was later sentenced to a total of five months in jail for both crimes). We went to pick his stuff up from a lock-up garage south of the Mall. Then we went back up to pick up some bags from the Phoenix Park Hotel in downtown DC, and outside the hotel, we bumped into Stewart Rhodes, leader of the Oath Keepers. We picked up the bags, and somebody said, “You’ve got to come over to this parking garage.” So we went over to this garage, and there was Enrique Tarrio and Stewart Rhodes, along with a few other people.
BERGEN: And what were they doing there?
QUESTED: Ostensibly, they said they were meeting to discuss the issue that Enrique felt he had, which was that he had brought extra capacity gun magazines into DC, which is illegal.
But there were also discussions about his communications and how they were potentially compromised. I heard him say, “I want to stay close to my boys,” and assumed he was having a discussion about where he was going to go next. But that’s all I heard.
I was close to them but at the request of Enrique Tarrio, I put down my camera. My colleague Nico Lupo, who was approximately 20 feet away from Tarrio and Rhodes, was filming from behind a car, so the mic wasn’t picking up the sound as well as we would have hoped.
BERGEN: Do you think it was a planning meeting for the following day?
QUESTED: I don’t know. I can’t say it was a planning meeting. I can tell you it looks pretty bad that you see the two leaders of the two groups that have been charged with seditious conspiracy in a meeting beforehand, but I can’t say what they were doing.
Opinion: History offers a surprising warning about January 6 hearing drama
Opinion: History offers a surprising warning about January 6 hearing drama
BERGEN: What are your hopes for your film?
QUESTED: Well, so we pivoted from our film about why America is so divided to a film that looks at the 64 days from the 2020 presidential election to January 6, 2021.
BERGEN: Is there interest in this film?
QUESTED: It took a lot of time to get interest in this film. We made an experiential film, which was just footage from the day, and we submitted it to a bunch of film festivals and hardly even got a reply, and when we did get a reply, they were like, “No, thank you. We’re not here to give any oxygen to these people.” And I said, “But if we don’t discuss this and bring truth to light, then how are we going to make this better?”
So, our film wants to lay out the facts of what happened in those 64 days in a fair and objective manner as we possibly can.
BERGEN: How much time did you spend with the committee and their investigators?
QUESTED: I had a few interviews, but my testimony of record lasted for seven hours.
BERGEN: What were the key points that you made?
QUESTED: Basically, my testimony revolves around my footage. So, I was explaining the context for my footage and what I saw.
BERGEN: Your entire life is about reporting and making a narrative. Is that what the congressional committee is doing?
QUESTED: I think that is, but, you know, we’re in a world where the narrative is driven by the politics.
BERGEN: Do you think these hearings will lay out the evidentiary basis of what happened on January 6?
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QUESTED: I think they will. From my conversations and the line of questioning, I think that they have a group of investigative counsels that are legitimately interested in being able to show the truth and prove it.
BERGEN: And you didn’t have any problem cooperating with them as a journalist?
QUESTED: Look, I’m in the business of truth, and I think they’re in the business of truth, and however people use the truth, that’s not my interest. My interest is having the truth out there.

BERGEN: Did you ever imagine that you would be where you were testifying on Thursday night?
QUESTED: Oh, hell, no. I like to ask the questions. I don’t like answering questions

Geography is Destiny: A 10,000 Year History of Britain and the World, New America Online with Ian Morris

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[ONLINE] – Geography is Destiny: A 10,000 Year History of Britain and the World
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Geography plays a central role in shaping international politics and security. The importance of geography and how people interpret it was on full display for Britain, as the country debated and then voted for Brexit. Yet, the role of geography and debates over how to understand it have a much longer history for the British. For seventy-five hundred years, the British were never more than bit players at the western edge of a European stage, struggling to find a role among bigger, richer, and more sophisticated continental rivals. By 1500, however, new kinds of ships and governments had turned the European stage into an Atlantic one; with the English Channel now functioning as a barrier, England transformed the British Isles into a United Kingdom that created a worldwide empire. Since 1900, thanks to rapid globalization, Britain has been overshadowed by American, European, and―increasingly―Chinese actors. In Geography Is Destiny, Ian Morris examines 10,000 years of British history and the ways geography and how people relate to it have shaped the British story.

To discuss his new book, Geography Is Destiny: Britain and the World: A 10,000-Year History, New America welcomes Ian Morris. Morris is the Rebecca Willard Professor of Classics and Professor in History at Stanford University. He is also the author of Why the West Rules―for Now.

Join the conversation online using #GeographyisDestiny and following @NewAmericaISP.

Speaker:

Ian Morris
Author, Geography is Destiny
Professor of Classics and History, Stanford University

Moderator:

Peter Bergen, @PeterBergenCNN
Vice President for Global Studies and Fellows, New America
Professor of Practice, ASU
When
Jun. 7, 2022
12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
Where
Online Only
Webcast link
RSVP

The cost of Trump’s chaos just keeps accumulating, CNN.com

by Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst

Updated 3:56 PM ET, Sat May 28, 2022

“Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. His new paperback is “The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and the World”, from which this essay is adapted. View more opinion on CNN.”

(CNN)On January 20, 2021, Donald Trump departed the White House on a helicopter that took him to Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, where he delivered the final remarks of his presidency to some of his supporters. Before boarding Air Force One for the flight to Mar-a-Lago, his gilded palace in Florida, Trump promised them, “We will be back in some form.”

Some Americans took that as an exciting promise; others took it as more of a threat. Either way, Trump is, indeed, back.

A CNN poll released in February found that among Republican voters who were considering candidates for the 2024 presidential race, 54% supported Trump, which made him the top choice for securing the party’s nomination. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis polled second at 21%, while other possible candidates such as former Vice President Mike Pence polled at no more than 1%.

There is a strong possibility that Trump will win his party’s nomination should he run again, which seems as likely as warm weather at Mar-a-Lago this summer.

Also, should he be nominated, Trump could even win the general election since only 39% of Americans approve of President Joe Biden’s performance in office, according to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Research poll released earlier this month.

Given Trump’s dominance of the GOP going into 2024, it’s a propitious moment to assess his failures and successes as commander in chief, which I attempt to do in my book, “The Cost of Chaos, The Trump Administration and the World.”
Trump has the distinction of being the only US president who publicly and consistently refused to accept his electoral loss. His lies about the 2020 election have poisoned America’s politics for the foreseeable future, as Trump has made signing on to those lies a de facto litmus test for many Republican candidates running for office.

Meanwhile, the bravery of the Ukrainians now fighting the Russians underlines the idiocy of Trump’s embrace of Russian President Vladimir Putin and also of his efforts to hold back military aid to the Ukrainians.
And when Trump was confronted by a real crisis — the Covid-19 pandemic — he largely embraced wishful thinking and quackery over any real leadership of the nation, resulting in much unnecessary further suffering.
But before examining in more detail Trump’s many failures as President, it’s worth stipulating that Trump also had some successes.

What Trump got right

Trump got one big foreign policy issue mostly right, which was China. While the United States was distracted by its post-9/11 wars, China made great advances economically and militarily — in part, by stealing American secrets through cyber espionage.

The Trump administration correctly identified China as a strategic US rival. This was an important conceptual shift because previous administrations had emphasized US engagement with the Chinese, believing that they would play by the rules of the international system and liberalize their economy and then, as they prospered, they would also liberalize their authoritarian form of governance. As it turned out, that was a fantasy that the Trump administration correctly called out.

Trump’s 2017 national security strategy asserted that the Chinese were “building the most capable and well-funded military in the world, after our own.” The Trump strategy also warned that Chinese “land reclamation projects and militarization of the South China Sea flouts international law, threatens the free flow of trade, and undermines stability.” As a result, the Trump administration authorized at least double the number of US Navy ships transiting the South China Sea performing “freedom of navigation” exercises.

Also, the Trump administration’s “Operation Warp Speed” saved many lives during the pandemic. Under it, the US invested $2.5 billion in Moderna, which produced a testable vaccine on humans in only two months using novel mRNA technology. Pfizer and German biotech firm BioNTech didn’t take US government funding, but the government placed a $1.95 billion order for 100 million doses, and in doing so guaranteed demand for its vaccine. After the first clinical trials, both Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna produced vaccines that were more than 90% effective, an efficacy that eventually waned. These were astonishing results given that the US Food and Drug Administration had put its threshold for approval for any vaccine at 50% effective or above.

‘Schizophrenic nature’: Dr. Birx describes what it was like working in Trump’s White House 03:44
Trump also presided over the destruction of the ISIS geographical “caliphate” in Iraq and Syria. Trump was largely following the battle plan that the administration of President Barack Obama had waged to defeat ISIS, but it was during Trump’s presidency that ISIS was finally defeated. And Trump ordered the Special Operations raid in 2019 during which Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the founder of ISIS, died.

The worst deals

But so many other of Trump’s actions as commander in chief were spectacular failures. The seizure of Afghanistan by the Taliban last year was one of Trump’s most disastrous foreign policy legacies. Biden certainly deserves blame for claiming that he was bound by Trump’s 2020 “peace” deal with the Taliban, which really was a “surrender agreement” to the Taliban in the mordant words of H.R. McMaster, Trump’s former national security adviser. And Biden also deserves blame for the botched execution of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan last summer.

But it was Trump, not Biden, who had laid the groundwork for the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. In 2018 Trump authorized his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, to begin negotiations with the Taliban, an effort that was led by US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad

Khalilzad made an agreement with the Taliban that, in exchange for a total US withdrawal from Afghanistan, they would break with al-Qaeda and engage in genuine peace talks with the Afghan government. The Taliban simply ignored those agreements.

Trump often asserted he was as a great deal maker, but his administration’s agreement with the Taliban was one of the worst deals in American diplomatic history. The Taliban received everything that they wanted without offering anything substantive in return, other than an agreement not to attack US forces as they withdrew from Afghanistan. Since the Taliban’s main goal in their negotiations with the US was a total American withdrawal, this was an easy concession for the Taliban to make.

And so it went with many other of Trump’s foreign policy initiatives. He apparently believed that by dint of his personal charm he could persuade the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Un, to give up his nuclear weapons. American Presidents going back to Bill Clinton had tried to persuade the nuclear-armed hermit state to rein in its nuclear weapons program, and all of them had failed.

While he was President, Trump met with Kim three times, first in Singapore in 2018, a year later in Hanoi and then at the border between North and South Korea. Those meetings generated intense media frenzies and gave Kim and the US President equal billing on the world stage, which was a huge coup for the dictator of a country whose GDP was around the size of the state of Vermont.

At the Singapore meeting, Trump unilaterally gave a key concession to Kim — canceling joint US-South Korea military exercises, which were a longtime cornerstone of containing the North Korean rogue state — and got nothing in return. Trump and Kim also exchanged 27 letters, some of which had the ardent tone of suitors writing each other. Trump publicly described the missives as “love letters.”

Yet, these summits and exchanges of letters yielded nothing. While Trump was in office the North Koreans continued producing fissile material and tested short range ballistic missiles in contravention of UN Security Council prohibitions. They also developed hard-to-detect submarine-launched missiles.

Trump’s efforts to constrain North Korea’s nuclear program failed, while his erratic diplomacy encouraged Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Trump regularly castigated Obama’s 2015 nuclear agreement with the Iranians as the “worst deal ever.”

But unlike Trump’s peace agreement with the Taliban, the Iranians were observing their end of the nuclear deal. Trump’s own intelligence agencies concluded that the Iranians were adhering to the terms of the 2015 deal. Yet, Trump was determined to get out of Obama’s Iran agreement, which he did in 2018.

As a result, by the time Trump left office in January 2021, the Iranians were planning to enrich uranium up to 20% purity, far above the 4% purity agreed to in their deal with the Obama administration, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. While this was well short of the 90% purity needed for a nuclear bomb, the Iranian nuclear program took a large step forward as a result of Trump’s ham-handed approach to the Iranians.

Undermining NATO

Throughout his presidency, Trump embraced Putin, while regularly taking pot shots at key American allies such as the British, French and Germans. What was the strategic benefit to the US of all this geopolitical trumpery? It was never clear, although it was certainly a key aim of Putin’s to weaken the NATO alliance, which Trump’s own Defense Secretary, Jim Mattis, described as the most successful alliance in modern history.

The importance of that alliance was underlined when Russia invaded Ukraine in February. The Ukrainian military, trained by NATO advisers, imposed huge costs on the Russian invaders, and the Biden administration together with its NATO allies transferred large numbers of anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons to the Ukrainians.

Undermining democracy

Trump’s affinity with dictators overseas — a key part of his foreign policy — dovetailed with his attempts to undermine democratic processes and norms at home, best exemplified by his continued refusal to accede to the will of the people in the 2020 presidential election and his support for his followers, who stormed the US Capitol days before Biden’s inauguration.

Trump’s antidemocratic stance — which he still promotes with the “Big Lie” conspiracy theory — has poisoned American politics.

In part because of Trump’s anti-democratic tendencies, during his presidency current and former senior military leaders issued more than 250 public statements that were critical of Trump’s leadership, according to a tally by New America, the research institution where I serve as a vice president.

This was unprecedented, as military leaders, both those in uniform and in retirement, generally stay out of politics. Following the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020, Trump threatened to send the federal military to quell the unrest that was roiling American cities. On a call about the protests with the nation’s governors on June 1, Trump told them, “If you don’t dominate, you’re wasting your time. They’re going to run all over you, you’ll look like a bunch of jerks.”

Later that evening protesters gathered outside the White House and were met with violence when Trump walked to St. John’s Episcopal Church wielding a Bible, which resulted in a now-infamous photo op.

Mattis broke his long silence about Trump, issuing a blistering statement: “Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people — does not even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort.”

The events of January 6, 2021, further turned the leaders of the US military against Trump. On that day a crowd of many thousands of his supporters gathered outside the White House — some wearing body armor and many wearing quasi-military outfits. To the assembled crowd Trump spouted a geyser of baseless conspiracy theories about his loss in the presidential election. Trump then urged them to go to the Capitol. A mob then assaulted the building.

That evening, Trump was unrepentant about the mayhem he had helped to foment, tweeting: “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!” This tweet was later deleted. Twitter then suspended Trump from its platform.

The service chiefs of all the branches of the military — led by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Mark Milley — took the extraordinary measure of sending a joint letter to the 2 million members of the active-duty, National Guard and Reserve units of the US military decrying the insurrection and confirming that “President-elect Biden will be inaugurated and will become our 46th Commander in Chief.”

The message was clear: The US military would not be assisting Trump in any of his efforts to mount a coup against the Constitution they had sworn an oath to serve.

The assault on the Capitol triggered Trump’s second impeachment trial. He was once again acquitted by the Senate, but he now had the distinction of being the only American President to be impeached twice.
The Covid disaster

It was, above all, in his mishandling of the Covid-19 pandemic that Trump revealed his many weaknesses as a leader. First, he never did any homework, meaning his understanding of complex issues, such as how best to mitigate a pandemic, was always cartoonish. Related to Trump’s first failing was his second: He always believed he knew more than the experts about any given subject. Third, Trump always trusted his own gut. This was not likely to produce relevant knowledge or coherent policy. And it didn’t.

Trump had a lot to say publicly about the coronavirus, a great deal of it misleading or simply false, and he also modeled and even encouraged irresponsible behavior.

Before effective vaccines, there were two tools that worked to stop the spread of the virus; they were social distancing and wearing a mask in public. Trump denigrated mask-wearing and he also hosted events at the White House with large numbers of attendees socializing without masks, such as the celebration of Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court on October 26, 2020.

As Americans first became aware of the threat from the coronavirus, Trump said on February 26, 2020, that cases of the virus would go down to zero “within a couple of days.” He also wrongfully claimed that the coronavirus was no more dangerous than the seasonal flu.

In the first phase of the pandemic, the federal government abdicated its role by not issuing a national shutdown order and a mandate to wear masks. In late April 2020, Trump suggested that injecting bleach might prove to be a treatment for the virus. A month later Trump said that hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug, was likely a “game changer.” In June 2020, the FDA revoked “emergency use” of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine for Covid-19 patients because it could cause heart problems.

Even when Trump had the chance to make a public statement that really might have made a difference to the scope of the pandemic, he failed to do so. He and his wife, Melania Trump, were vaccinated at the White House during the closing days of his presidency. Any leader with the slightest regard for his own people would have allowed the media to cover this event, especially given the prevalence of vaccine hesitancy in the country. Trump chose instead to be vaccinated in secret.

His weak leadership produced grave results: More than 400,000 Americans died from Covid-19 during Trump’s final year in office, which was more than the death toll of all the Americans who had died in wars going back to World War II. Many of those deaths could have been avoided with better leadership; Covid mortality in the US was 40% higher than the average of other advanced nations such as Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United Kingdom, according to a report from the medical journal The Lancet.

Dr. Deborah Birx, Trump’s coronavirus response coordinator, told a congressional committee in October that “we probably could have decreased fatalities into the 30-percent-less to 40-percent-less range.”

The first duty of the commander in chief is the protection of US citizens, and Trump clearly was derelict in this duty. In short, Trump was the most incompetent President in modern American history.