Finally, the US gets a strategy on fighting domestic terrorism, CNN.com
For the first time the United States has a government-wide strategy to counter domestic terrorism. The policy, which the Biden administration rolled out on Tuesday, is long overdue.
After all, the most lethal terrorist attack in the United States before 9/11 was the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building a quarter of a century ago, in which 168 people were killed by right-wing terrorists.
In recent years, right-wing extremists have carried out a number of lethal attacks, such as the <>assault in El Paso, Texas in 2019 that killed 22 people, the attack at a Pittsburgh synagogue a year earlier that <>killed 11 people and the attack at a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015 that killed nine congregants.
And in January, there was the unprecedented assault on the US Capitol by right-wing extremists seeking to overturn the results of the presidential election.
The new strategy issued by the White House points out that the domestic terrorism threat is principally from “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists… and militia violent extremists” who present “the most persistent and lethal threats.”
The strategy explains that these domestic extremists “often radicalize independently” because of what they are reading online “making detection and disruption difficult.”
The difficulty of stopping “lone actor” terrorists also characterized US government efforts after 9/11 when it came to preventing Americans from radicalizing because of propaganda from al-Qaeda or ISIS that they had read online. Omar Mateen, for instance, killed 49 people at an Orlando nightclub in 2016. Mateen had no contact with ISIS, yet he had become radicalized by what he had read and seen online and in the name of ISIS he carried out the most lethal act of terrorism in the US since the 9/11 attacks.
The issue is also made more complicated because being a radical is, of course, not a crime in the US, given the First Amendment, and relatively few people with radical ideas actually turn to violence.
So how do you stop radicals from committing violent acts?
The White House strategy rests on a number of actions. First, by acquiring a better government-wide understanding of the scope of these threats, which can come not only from extremists motivated by white supremacism but also from, for example, anti-abortion activists, animal rights and environmental militants, and so called “incel” — involuntary celibate — extremists.
Domestic extremists in the borderless world of the Internet are also communicating and in some cases training with extremist groups overseas. Indeed, it was for these types of reasons that the Trump administration for the first time an overseas white supremacist group, the Russian Imperial Movement, as a Foreign Terrorist Organization in 2020.
The Biden administration also plans to designate foreign militant groups if domestic extremists are receiving support or training from them.
The White House, sensibly, intends to enforce “legal prohibitions that keep firearms out of dangerous hands.”
The US government will make also publicly available a “Mobilization Indicators” booklet “that will include for the first-time potential indicators of domestic terrorism–related mobilization,” which is the kind of information that will be useful to local law enforcement, as there is often a “pathway to violence” that violent extremists predictably go down, beginning with their “grievance” and ending with a violent act.
The government will disseminate more widely intelligence about “domestic terrorism iconography, symbology, and phraseology,” since this is often closely held information by extremists. And the government will work to more strongly enforce laws already on the books prohibiting the existence of private militias.
The White House asserts that the “2022 Budget will include significant additional resources for the Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation to ensure that they have the analysts, investigators, and prosecutors they need to thwart domestic terrorism.”
For its part, the Department of Defense will do more work to educate those with military training about how they might be recruited by violent extremists, and there will be better mechanisms by which veterans can “report recruitment attempts by violent extremist actors.”
And, of course, the US government will do its best to work with the private sector to reduce the amount of online terrorist content, by providing Internet companies with information that will help them enforce their own terms of service, which prohibit terrorism-related activities on their platforms.
This was also an issue when ISIS was at its height from 2015 to 2016 and when it was recruiting online many dozens of Americans to fight in Syria and Iraq or encouraging its followers to carry out lethal attacks in the United States.
These are all commonsense measures which will help to reduce the scourge of domestic terrorism. Most importantly the new strategy shows that the US government has finally adopted an overall approach to counter the threat posed by the violent extremists living among us.
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Michael Flynn is playing with fire, CNN.com
Opinion by Peter Bergen
Updated 10:23 AM EDT, Wed June 02, 2021
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. He is author of the book “Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos.” The views expressed here are his own. Read more opinion at CNN.)
(CNN) It’s hard to get a grip on what’s happened to one-time war hero, retired lieutenant general Michael Flynn.
Flynn, a former national security adviser to President Donald Trump, shockingly appeared to support a military coup in the United States during a Sunday keynote address to a Dallas conference organized by supporters of QAnon conspiracy theories.
To the extent that QAnon has a coherent worldview, it is that Trump will be returned to the White House following a military coup, similar to the one that happened in Myanmar in February.
An audience member at the Dallas event asked Flynn: “I want to know why what happened in Minamar (sic) can’t happen here?” The audience raucously cheered this question. Flynn replied, “No reason. I mean, it should happen here. No reason. That’s right.” Again, the audience cheered heartily.
Those who served with Flynn in Afghanistan and Iraq are mystified why he has now embraced a QAnon worldview. But you don’t have to be a veteran to know it is a danger for the republic for a senior, retired officer to be undermining democracy in this fashion.
Flynn is also playing with fire on a personal level. As a retired flag officer, he is subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Article 94 of the code says that active duty and retired Armed Force members engaged in acts of sedition can face the death penalty.
On Monday, Flynn seemed to be trying to dial back, saying on social media that he doesn’t support a military coup. Yet Flynn’s comments in Dallas Sunday were made on video, which can be seen here by anyone who wants to judge Flynn’s response for themselves.
And Flynn has more than flirted with such ideas before. After Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, Flynn told a host on the conservative Newsmax channel that Trump “could take military capabilities, and he could place those in states and basically rerun an election in each of those states.” Flynn added for good measure, “I mean, it’s not unprecedented. These people are out there talking about martial law like it’s something that we’ve never done. Martial law has been instituted 64 times.” (Then, as now, he seemed to back away from what he’d just said, stating “I’m not calling for that. We have a constitutional process,” and “that has to be followed.”)
Flynn and his lawyer Sidney Powell also participated in a White House meeting in mid-December with Trump in which they discussed how they might reverse the purportedly “rigged” presidential election, which Biden had won by large margins both in the electoral college vote and in the popular vote. And state and federal courts around the country dismissed dozens of cases challenging Biden’s win.
Flynn’s recent musings about coups, martial law and overturning legitimate presidential elections are all a very long way from the period after 9/11, when he served in the elite Joint Special Operations Command as a highly regarded intelligence officer in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Flynn was so well thought of that he was eventually promoted to lieutenant general and to run the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), but Flynn’s overseers in the Obama administration thought he was an ineffective manager of DIA, a large agency with 17,000 employees, and in 2014 he was pushed out of his post.
Flynn seemed embittered by his dismissal and a year later he was on the campaign trail with then-candidate Trump, with whom he shared similar views about the purported menace posed by Muslims. During the campaign, Trump said he had seen thousands of Arabs in New Jersey cheering the 9/11 attacks, while Flynn said that Democratic legislators in Florida were planning to install Sharia law. These claims were, of course, false.
After Trump won the presidency in 2016, he appointed Flynn his national security adviser, a post in which he served for the record briefest amount of time; only 24 days.
Flynn was fired for lying to Vice President Mike Pence about the content of conversations he had had with the Russian ambassador to the United States during the presidential transition. Flynn later pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about the same issue.
Trump pardoned Flynn, but the eradication of his conviction doesn’t seem to have impacted Flynn’s continuing lack of good judgment: Calling for the overturning of a legitimate presidential election; floating the imposition of martial law and appearing to approve of a coup in the United States.
Like so many who have entered into Trump’s orbit, Flynn’s once-sterling reputation is ever more seriously damaged.
[ONLINE] – Inside Money: Brown Brothers Harriman and the American Way of Power with Zachary Karabell, New America online
Event
Brown Brothers Harriman is among the oldest private banks in the United States, and throughout its history, conspiracy theories have swirled around it. And not without reason. It has played an important role in the story of how American power developed. In the nineteenth century, amid repeated financial panics, Brown Brothers quietly went from strength to strength, propping up the U.S. financial system at crucial moments. By the turn of the twentieth century, Brown Brothers was at the heart of the American Establishment. As America’s reach extended beyond its shores, it worked hand in glove with the State Department, notably in Nicaragua, where the firm essentially took over the country’s economy. In his new book, Inside Money, Zachary Karabell offers a look inside this institution against the backdrop of American history. Drawing upon complete access to the company’s archives, Karabell traces how its and America’s power evolved from the early 1800s to the present.
New America’s International Security Program and The Progress Network welcomes Zachary Karabell, author of Inside Money: Brown Brothers Harriman and the American Way of Power to discuss these topics. Zachary Karabell received his PhD from Harvard. He is the author of a dozen previous books, including The Last Campaign, which won the Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Prize, and The Leading Indicators. He is also a longtime investor, former financial services executive, and the founder of the Progress Network.
Join the conversation online using #BrownBrothers and following @NewAmericaISP.
PARTICIPANTS
Zachary Karabell, @zacharykarabell
Author, Inside Money: Brown Brothers Harriman and the American Way of Power
Founder, The Progress Network
MODERATOR
Peter Bergen, @peterbergencnn
Vice President, New America
Copies of Inside Money are available for purchase here through our bookselling partner Solid State Books.
Jared Kushner’s Middle East fantasy explodes, CNN.com
A decade later, Tim Hetherington’s work lives on, CNN.com
After he was killed, Tim’s life was documented by the writer Sebastian Junger in the 2013 HBO film, “Which Way is the Frontline From Here?” and a biography, “Here I Am,” was published the same year. Tim’s work has continued to be exhibited around the world, including at the
National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC.\
The day after Tim’s death, I
wrote this for CNN:
The first words that were used to describe Tim by almost anybody who knew him were “humble” and “modest.”
Yet, Tim was a guy who had great talents. He took highly artistic photos and had released a photography book, “Infidel,” which consists of his portraits of American soldiers fighting in the Afghan War.
He was also someone who would go out in the field and take the grittiest pictures of combat.\
For one of those photographs, he won the World Press Photo award in 2007. The photo showed an exhausted, battle-weary GI resting in a bunker in northern Afghanistan, an apt metaphor for what was then fast becoming the longest war in American history.
Tim had also gone to Oxford to study literature, something he never mentioned in the long days we spent talking and working together on stories for CNN while embedded with a group of Marines in southern Afghanistan in September 2009.
The Marine base in Nawa, Helmand province, was the kind of place that had no water or electricity, and where large barrels of human feces were burned off on a daily basis.
Tim loved it and his enthusiasm for the Marines and for Afghanistan in general was infectious.
Tim was a lot of fun to be around; a mensch, that not-completely-translatable Yiddish word that means someone people find to be an admirable man; someone they want to be around.
Then there was “Restrepo,” the film Tim codirected and coproduced with the author Sebastian Junger. Tim worked for more than a year shooting the film, flying back and forth from his apartment in Brooklyn to spend months in the Korengal Valley, then pretty much the most dangerous place in Afghanistan.
At one point during an intense firefight, Tim fell and broke his leg and had to be medevaced out. Yet, he soldiered on to complete the film.
“Restrepo” was a labor of love for Tim. He had a great deal of empathy for the young soldiers he documented. The resulting film is not only the best documentary about war I have ever seen, it is simply one of the greatest of all war films, sharing the epic quality of movies such as “Apocalypse Now” or “Full Metal Jacket.”
It is also very beautifully shot, revealing Tim’s great sense of picture composition.
“Restrepo” took no strong position on the Afghan War. When Tim screened it for audiences nationwide, he made it clear that he did not want the film to be seen as either an indictment or a celebration of the Afghan war, but more about what war does to small units of men.
And he wanted American audiences to have a more informed discussion of what this particular war was doing to its soldiers.
The approach made “Restrepo” so universal, it could have been made in Vietnam or World War II or in any other conflict where men kill other men; some die, some are wounded and others survive.
When Tim was nominated for an Oscar for “Restrepo” earlier this year, he was “completely delighted,” as he put it in an email to me.
In the end, he didn’t win the Oscar, but he wrote me afterward saying something that says a lot about Tim Hetherington: “While we didn’t get to take home the little gold man, going down the red carpet with those soldiers (from the film) was one of the highlights of my life so far … and a real finale to an incredible journey. And although this particular journey may be over, the film lives on!”
Tim lived and worked in the toughest environments in the world from, Liberia to Afghanistan, to Libya, where he died while chronicling violence in the war-torn city of Misrata.
But he was never jaded by those experiences, nor was he a showboat about his many years on the front lines.
He was a very gentle man. A gentleman.
The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden
Named one of the Best Nonfiction Books of the Year by LOS ANGELES TIMES and KIRKUS REVIEWS
NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, Editor’s Choice
AMAZON, Editors’ Picks: Best History
“Meticulously documented…fluidly written…replete with riveting detail… It is a page-turner that weaves back and forth between the man and the terrorist, providing poignant glimpses of key figures and carefully chronicling all the missed opportunities, ignored warnings and strategic blunders of the United States.”
—New York Times, Louise Richardson, vice chancellor of Oxford University.
“The 20th anniversary of 9/11 is a good occasion for a detailed political biography of the architect of these attacks…The portrait he draws is intimate and detailed….”
—Washington Post, Bernard Haykel, professor of Near Eastern studies, Princeton University
“Fine, rigorous and riveting account of the life of the founder of al-Qaida”
—The Guardian, Jason Burke
“A compelling, nuanced portrait of America’s erstwhile public enemy No. 1….Throughout, Bergen turns up revealing details and sharp arguments against received wisdom….Essential for anyone concerned with geopolitics, national security, and the containment of further terrorist actions.”
—KIRKUS, starred review
“Bergen adds intriguing new details to the story of Osama bin Laden in this solid, well-sourced biography..Surprising insights…and fluid prose enrich this authoritative portrait of the terrorist leader and the movement he inspired. Foreign affairs buffs will be fascinated.”
—Publishers Weekly
“…comprehensive, authoritative, and compelling…”
—H.R. MCMASTER, author of Dereliction of Duty and Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World
“Bergen’s detailed, incisive, and clarifying biography is an invaluable work marking 9/11’s twentieth anniversary….deepens readers’ understanding of Osama bin Liden, founder of the terrorist group al-Qaueda and the force behind the 9/11 attacks….The narrative gains speed and suspense as Bergen recounts bin Laden’s ruthless rise to power, al-Qaeda’s early successes, and bin Laden’s last bitter years, leading to an excellent summary of bin Laden’s effect on American and international politics.”
—Booklist
In The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden, Peter Bergen provides the first reevaluation of the man responsible for precipitating America’s long wars with al-Qaeda and its descendants, capturing bin Laden in all the dimensions of his life: as a family man, as a zealot, as a battlefield commander, as a terrorist leader, and as a fugitive. The book sheds light on his many contradictions: he was the son of a billionaire, yet insisted his family live like paupers. He adored his wives and children, depending on two of his wives, both of whom had PhDs, to make important strategic decisions. Yet he also brought ruin to his family. He was fanatically religious, yet willing to kill thousands of civilians in the name of Islam. He inspired deep loyalty yet, in the end, his bodyguards turned against him. And while he inflicted the most lethal act of mass murder in United States history, he failed to achieve any of his strategic goals.
The lasting image we have of bin Laden in his final years is of an aging man with a graying beard watching old footage of himself, just another dad flipping through the channels with his remote. In the end, bin Laden died in a squalid suburban compound, far from the front lines of his holy war. And yet despite that unheroic denouement, his ideology lives on. Thanks to exclusive interviews with family members and associates, and documents unearthed only recently, Bergen’s portrait of Osama will reveal for the first time who he really was and why he continues to inspire a new generation of jihadists.
“Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos,” University of Virginia, online presentation
HIPC proudly presents : A presentation by Peter Bergen, Author and Documentary Producer, on his book, “Trump and His Generals : The Cost of Chaos”
Thursday, April 29, 2021
6:30 PM 7:45 PM
Digitally on Zoom (map)
Historic & Intellectual Programming Committee proudly presents:
A Presentation by Peter Bergen, Author and Documentary Producer,
on his book, “Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos”
Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos is a 2019 book by Peter Bergen that offers an insider’s perspective of former President Donald Trump’s approach to foreign policy during the first three years of his presidency.
A fair and comprehensive overview of Trump’s foreign policy.” Max Boot, Foreign Affairs
“Timely . . . insightful . . . Through meticulously documented interviews and research.” —KIRKUS
Thursday, April 29, 6:30 p.m.
Webinar Link will be emailed to all registrants on the day of the event.
Peter Bergen
Peter Bergen is a journalist, author, documentary producer, and Vice President for Global Studies and Fellows at New America; a professor of practice at Arizona State University; a fellow at Fordham University’s Center on National Security and CNN’s national security analyst. He has held teaching positions at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.
Q & A session will take place after the discussion.
Registration is required, complimentary for members, and guests.
Biden’s magical thinking on Afghanistan, CNN.com
Biden’s magical thinking on Afghanistan
Peter Bergen
By Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst
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 reported from Afghanistan since 1993.The views expressed in this commentary belong solely to the author. View more opinion at CNN.
(CNN)President Biden’s decision to announce a date for pulling all US troops out of Afghanistan by the 20th anniversary of 9/11 sets the stage for a predictable disaster.
The absence of American troops doesn’t equal peace, although, in the minds of many on both the left (the Biden administration) and the right (former President Donald Trump), the withdrawal of US soldiers is seen as a way to “end the war.” A tour through history shows the fallacy in this thinking.
The United States has made this kind of blunder before, with disastrous consequences. In Afghanistan, in the 1990s. After occupying the country for a decade, the Soviet Union pulled out of the country in early 1989. The CIA officer responsible then for arming the Afghan resistance against the Soviets sent a cable to headquarters saying simply, “WE WON.”
As the Soviets withdrew, the US closed its embassy in Afghanistan, abandoning the country.
The US was largely “blind” in Afghanistan during the years of civil war that followed. That led to the emergence of the Taliban, which then gave sanctuary to al Qaeda. Al Qaeda, of course, planned the 9/11 attacks from its base in Afghanistan and trained its hijackers there.
After 9/11, the United States then had to invade Afghanistan to topple the Taliban and remove al Qaeda from the country.
A lesson from Iraq
A similar dynamic played out a decade later when then-Vice President Joe Biden and his then-national security adviser, Tony Blinken, negotiated the pullout of all American troops from Iraq in December 2011. A headline from Reuters nicely captured the hubris of the moment: “Last U.S. troops leave Iraq, ending war.”
Of course, the war didn’t end after the US withdrawal, it got much worse.
Three years later, ISIS took over much of the country, including Mosul, the second-largest Iraqi city. The group also seized large sections of neighboring Syria.
In its safe haven, ISIS then trained terrorists for large-scale attacks in Western cities, such as Paris, where ISIS claimed credit for killing 130 people in coordinated attacks in November 2015. The group also inspired attacks in American cities such as Orlando, where 49 people were killed by an ISIS-inspired terrorist in 2016.
The US then had to send thousands of troops back into Iraq to destroy the ISIS regime, a process that took three-and-a-half years.
History often rhymes
There has to be some magical thinking going on for the Biden White House to expect that there will be a different outcome in Afghanistan. Yes, al Qaeda is a mere shadow of what it was on 9/11. That’s because for the past two decades, the US and its allies have prevented Afghanistan from becoming a safe haven for al Qaeda and allied groups. It’s a policy that has worked.
Now, that sound policy is being abandoned. Once the US leaves Afghanistan, America’s NATO allies, who have 7,000 soldiers on the ground, will leave as well, since they rely on an American security umbrella. President Biden confirmed this in his speech to the nation Wednesday afternoon.
The pullout of US and NATO troops will likely enable the Taliban to take over much of the country.
Despite much wishful thinking that the Taliban won’t host al Qaeda and other jihadist groups as they did before 9/11, according to a report by the United Nations released last year, “the Taliban regularly consulted” with al Qaeda during its recent peace negotiations with the United States, while guaranteeing that they “would honor their historical ties” with the terrorist group.
The UN also assessed that the links between al Qaeda and the Taliban “have remained strong” and “have been continually reinforced by pledges of allegiance” by al Qaeda’s leaders to the leader of the Taliban.
And then there is also the small matter of ISIS, which maintains a foothold in Afghanistan.
Of course, US policy failures in Afghanistan didn’t begin with Biden. Trump often called for a total US withdrawal from the country, undermining the elected Afghan government and emboldening the Taliban, with predictable consequences.
A tragic split screen
Right now, the US is abandoning Afghanistan for no discernible reason. The small footprint of no more than 3,500 US troops in Afghanistan has meant that for more than a year no American soldiers have been killed there. (By contrast, there were 56 deaths of US Army soldiers overall caused by accidents in the most recent fiscal year.)
It’s worth recalling, too, that South Korea was one of the poorest countries in the world at the end of the Korean War in 1953.
Seven decades later, under an American security umbrella that includes more than 28,000 US troops posted there today, it has become one of the richest countries in the world. And during much of that period of growth, South Korea was an authoritarian state, not the democracy it is today.
Afghanistan isn’t South Korea, of course, but change in both countries did happen, albeit slowly and unevenly. Even a senior Biden administration official in a background briefing about Afghanistan with reporters Tuesday conceded that “a lot has changed in two decades. In 2001, there were fewer than nine hundred thousand children, almost all boys, in school. Today, there’s over 9.2 million children, forty percent of which are girls, in school. Life expectancy has gone from 44 years to 60 years.
Which raises the question: What PR genius in the Biden administration thought that a good way to memorialize the 20th anniversary of 9/11 was to abandon the country where the plot was incubated?
On September 11, it’s going to be a tragic split-screen to watch the Taliban celebrate their “defeat” of the American superpower, while the victims of 9/11 are memorialized in downtown Manhattan.
Biden is walking a tightrope on Saudi Arabia, CNN.com
Biden is walking a tightrope on Saudi Arabia
Peter Bergen
Opinion by Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst
“Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. The views expressed in this commentary belong solely to the author. View more opinion at CNN. ”
(CNN)Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman approved an operation that led to journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s brutal assassination in 2018, according to a declassified US intelligence report the Biden administration released on Friday.
While the four-page report supports a conclusion already reached in 2018 by the CIA — that the man known as MBS was responsible for Khashoggi’s murder — it sends a new signal: that President Joe Biden is willing to publicly challenge what he once called a “pariah” state.
The US State Department also announced on Friday a new “Khashoggi Ban” that restricts the visas of 76 Saudis as part of a wider effort to retaliate against anyone who is involved in state-sponsored efforts to crack down on dissidents around the world.
This, however, falls far short of taking direct action against MBS.
The administration’s decision reflects the reality of the longtime marriage of convenience between the world’s longest-standing democracy and the world’s most absolute monarchy established by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Saudi King Adul Aziz in 1945. This relationship has always been based on mutual interests around oil and, in recent years, counterterrorism against al-Qaeda and ISIS.
Biden is now trying to walk a tightrope. By releasing the damning intelligence report late on Friday and announcing the new “Khashoggi ban,” the new administration is hoping a mere rebuke and a slap on the wrist will be enough to signal the changing tides of US foreign policy after the Trump administration. At the same time, the Biden administration wants to maintain an alliance that has served both countries’ interests reasonably well for the better half of the last century.
Indeed, the story of Khashoggi’s murder says a great deal about bin Salman, and the Trump administration’s desire to ally with him, seemingly at any cost, including brushing Khashoggi’s assassination under the carpet.
MBS and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, both the scions of enormously wealthy, powerful families and only a few years apart in age, bonded early on during the Trump administration over a belief that together they could transform the Middle East.
The Saudis understood the power of family relationships and an alliance between the House of Saud and the House of Trump made sense to them, particularly after their tense relationship with President Barack Obama, who seemed intent on upending the traditional power dynamics of the Middle East with his nuclear agreement with their archrivals, the Iranians.
For his part, Kushner believed that MBS could help deliver a US-brokered solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and that their personal relationship could achieve what decades of professional diplomacy hadn’t.
This was part of the geopolitical backdrop against which the murder of Khashoggi — a 59-year-old contributor to the Washington Post who was critical of the Saudi regime — played out.
In September 2018, Khashoggi entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey to obtain paperwork verifying his divorce so he could marry his Turkish fiancée, Hatice Cengiz.
Officials told him to come back to pick up the paperwork, and a 15-man team of Saudi intelligence agents, military officers and members of the Saudi Royal Guard traveled from Riyadh to Istanbul on October 2 — the day Khashoggi returned to the consulate.
The US intelligence report released Friday states some of the members were associated with the Saudi Center for Studies and Media Affairs at the Royal Court — led by a close adviser of MBS who once publicly claimed he did not make decisions without the crown prince’s approval.
Others were identified by the report as members of the Rapid Intervention Force, a subset of the Royal Guard that answers only to MBS. It had taken part in other “earlier dissident suppression operations” and it was unlikely to have participated in the operation against Khashoggi without MBS’s approval, according to the report.
Audio recordings from the Saudi consulate revealed Khashoggi struggling and saying, “I can’t breathe,” before his body was dismembered with a saw as the perpetrators were advised to listen to music to block out the sound. Khashoggi’s remains were never found, which is particularly grave in Islam, a religion that puts a great premium on the swift burial of the body.
The then-Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Khalid bin Salman, who is MBS’s brother, quickly said claims that Saudi Arabia killed or detained Khashoggi were “absolutely false, and baseless.”
This was the beginning of a series of lies, cover stories and rationalizations that the Saudi government told about Khashoggi’s murder. The Saudis floated a story that the murder was the result of rogue killers during an interrogation gone wrong.
This story was undercut by the fact that the hit team included a forensic pathologist and that Khashoggi’s body was dismembered with a saw, which suggested a high degree of premeditation.
Despite the fact that Khashoggi was both a legal resident of the United States and a journalist who was contributing regularly to a major American media institution, President Trump stood with the Saudis and issued a statement that conflicted with the CIA’s own assessment that MBS authorized the killing. “It could very well be that the crown prince had knowledge of this tragic event — maybe he did and maybe he didn’t,” the statement read. “We may never know all of the facts surrounding the murder of Mr. Jamal Khashoggi. In any case, our relationship is with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.”
According to journalist Bob Woodward’s book “Rage,” Trump doubled down on protecting MBS and said, “I saved his ass. I was able to get Congress to leave him alone.”
Trump rationalized his inaction when he told CBS 60 Minutes that “we’d be punishing ourselves” by canceling American arms sales to Saudi Arabia, deals that he frequently trumpeted as amounting to more than $110 billion, even though that figure was wildly inflated.
Trump’s defense of MBS was of a piece with his repeated defenses of other tyrants, such as Russian President Vladimir Putin in his efforts to swing the 2016 American presidential election against Hillary Clinton and the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, who Trump has praised lavishly.
Having enjoyed a very close relationship with the Trump administration, the Saudis are now getting just a taste of what could be a recalibrated relationship with the Biden administration. Biden will almost certainly not be looking to cause permanent damage to the US-Saudi relationship, but MBS will no longer have a free pass to murder his opponents outside of the kingdom, which is saying something.
The release of Friday’s report should leave no doubt that the US government, from President Biden to the intelligence community, holds him personally responsible for Khashoggi’s death.
Hold Trump accountable for incitement, CNN.com
Hold Trump accountable for incitement
Peter Bergen
By Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst
“Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is senior editor of the Coronavirus Daily Brief and author of the new book “Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos.” The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.”
(CNN)On Wednesday a pro-Trump mob assaulted the Capitol, breaking through windows and doors, resulting in five deaths. They also interrupted the election certification of President-elect Joe Biden and the peaceful transfer of power that has been the hallmark of American democracy for more than two centuries.
These domestic terrorists attacked the great symbol of American democracy and they should be held accountable — and so should their Inciter-in-Chief, President Donald J. Trump.
Let’s start with the President. There are limits to the First Amendment. It is a crime to incite or solicit others to commit crimes if you have reason to believe they may actually carry out those crimes. The relevant statute is U.S. Code, Title 18, Section 373.
Take Zachary Chesser, who is serving a long prison sentence, in part because he incited violence against the creators of the cartoon show “South Park” on a jihadist forum in 2010 after they portrayed the Prophet Mohammed in an unflattering light.
To a crowd of thousands of his supporters, some wearing body armor and many wearing quasi-military outfits, on Wednesday Trump spouted a geyser of baseless conspiracy theories about his loss in the presidential election.
Trump then urged the mob to go to the Capitol, saying, “You’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong.” The mob, unfortunately, took the President at his word.
Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who has lost the moral standing he had as mayor of New York during the 9/11 attacks, also incited the pro-Trump mob on Wednesday, telling them they needed to contest the election results with “trial by combat.” Giuliani should also be charged with incitement and/or solicitation of violence.
The domestic terrorists who assaulted the Capitol should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, especially if investigators find that there were leaders of the mob who conspired to commit these crimes. Conspiracy laws are often used in jihadist terrorism cases and result in lengthy prison terms.
As we approach the 20th anniversary of 9/11, Americans are long overdue to understand the reality that domestic, right-wing terrorists now threaten the United States far more than foreign terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda and its affiliates, which have not carried out any successful terrorist attacks in the US since 9/11. (There remains some debate about whether al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen actually directed the terrorist attack in Pensacola, Florida, in 2019 in which three US sailors were killed by a Saudi military officer, or whether the Saudi officer simply apprised al-Qaeda of his plot.)
Meanwhile, according to the think tank New America, far-right terrorists have killed 114 people in the US since 9/11, while jihadist terrorists have killed 107, and a far-left terrorist killed one person.
The US should wage a real campaign against far-right terrorism, as it did against jihadist terrorism in the years after 9/11. There is no federal domestic terrorism statute since that charge is exclusively related to individuals who have some association with a foreign terrorist organization. But now that Congress has been on the receiving end of a domestic terrorism assault, surely it is time for congressional action to implement such a statute.
A quarter of a century ago, in his book “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” the critic Neil Postman warned Americans, “Our politics, religion, news…have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.”
President Trump’s antics stopped being amusing some time ago, but now they also have had lethal consequences. It’s long past time for him, his family and his entourage to depart for Mar-a-Lago, where hopefully they will all have plenty of time to consult with their lawyers about criminal prosecutions that may proliferate against Trump once he no longer has the shield of the presidency.
