“Bin Laden’s Hard Drive” National Geographic, 9pm EST

Mana
August 3, 2020 10:00am

National Geographic has greenlighted a pair of specials to air in the coming months. Bin Laden’s Hard Drive, which spotlights newly declassified information on the notorious terrorist, premieres September 10, and Virus Hunters, about the experts working to prevent the next pandemic, bow November 1.
Osama bin Laden and his followers. Karga Seven Pictures

In Bin Laden’s Hard Drive from Karga 7 Pictures, author and CNN National Security Analyst Peter Bergen examines 470,000 digital files seized from al-Qa’ida founder Osama bin Laden’s compound and decodes their secrets with analysis from CIA profilers, criminal psychologists, religious scholars and military experts. Home videos, photos, audio files, GIFs, personal documents and downloads reveal the contradictory personality and personal life of the mastermind behind 9/11 and other terrorist attacks nearly a decade after his death.

“Osama bin Laden’s files left behind an imprint of a complex man, responsible for the murder of thousands of people,” said Bergen, who produced the first televised interview with bin Laden in Afghanistan in 1997. “History will remember him for that, but, in order to cut through the perception of this ascetic in a cave on a holy crusade, it’s important for us to see how he crafted the videos that went out to his followers. … Understanding him is vital in order to combat other potential bin Ladens in the future.”

[ONLINE] – The Madman Theory: A Book Discussion with Author Jim Sciutto

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[ONLINE] – The Madman Theory: A Book Discussion with Author Jim Sciutto
Event September 10 1p-2p

Join the International Security Program for an online discussion with New America’s Peter Bergen in conversation with Jim Sciutto, author of The Madman Theory: Trump Takes On the World. In his new book, Sciutto shows how President Trump’s supporters believe he has a strategy for long-term success, that he is somehow playing three-dimensional chess, while his critics believe the president focuses on short-term headlines. Sciutto has interviewed a wide swath of current and former administration officials to assemble the first comprehensive portrait of the impact of Trump’s administration’s foreign policy.

After more than two decades as a foreign correspondent stationed in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, Sciutto returned to Washington, D.C. to cover the Defense Department, the State Department, and intelligence agencies for CNN. His work has earned him Emmy Awards, the George Polk Award, the Edward R. Murrow award, and the Merriman Smith Memorial Award for excellence in presidential coverage.

Participants:

Peter Bergen, @peterbergencnn
Vice President Global Studies & Fellows, New America
National Security Analyst, CNN

Jim Sciutto
Author, The Madman Theory: Trump Takes On the World
Chief National Security Correspondent, CNN

A colossal failure of Trump’s leadership, CNN.com

A colossal failure of Trump’s leadership

Opinion by Peter Bergen

Updated 6:04 AM ET, Wed July 29, 2020

“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)During his campaign to become president, Donald Trump repeatedly claimed that other countries were “laughing” at the United States. Of course, Trump never cited any evidence for this.
Today, those countries are not only not laughing at the US, they are treating Americans like lepers.
The dark blue US passport used to open pretty much every door around the globe; now those doors are slammed shut. A roll call of some of America’s closest allies that won’t let Americans visit include Canada, France, Germany and Italy.

And for good reason: This past week, 18 American states set records for their numbers of confirmed coronavirus cases. There are now more than four million confirmed cases in the US; a quarter of the total number of known cases in the world, yet Americans make up just over 4% of the global population.

This isn’t the “first wave” of the coronavirus; it’s the first tsunami.

And how the US got here has much to do with a catastrophic failure of national leadership.

The federal government abdicated its role by not issuing a national shutdown order and a mandate to wear masks. After the expiration of the voluntary 45-day federal advisory to “slow the spread,” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance on how to reopen carefully in phases was ignored in many states.

By prioritizing “reopening” over public health, the nation has chosen to accept that many hundreds of thousands of Americans will die of Covid-19. The CDC estimates that nearly half of Americans have underlying conditions that put them at risk of contracting a severe case of the disease. Many millions more are then likely to have a severe case that may not end in death, but will nonetheless result in prolonged illness.

The agency said more than a third of those surveyed had not returned to their normal good health two to three weeks after being diagnosed with the disease.

There are few tools that we know that work to stop the spread of the virus; they are social distancing and wearing a mask in public.

Trump, of course, has for months denigrated mask-wearing and has almost invariably refused to wear a mask himself. In doing so, he has turned masks into political footballs rather than symbols of sound public health policy.
Trump pressed states to “open” early before many of them had met CDC thresholds for doing so. In many states, social distancing went out the window.

In defiance of CDC guidelines on large gatherings, Trump held a large indoor rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, last month which “likely” contributed to a spike of cases there, according to local health officials.

One of the attendees at the Tulsa rally was Republican Governor Kevin Stitt, who subsequently became the first US governor to test positive for the virus.

Trump is pressing now for schools around the United States to fully reopen and is threatening to withhold federal funds to school systems that don’t comply.

Meanwhile, the private school in Maryland attended by Trump’s son Barron is contemplating either going fully online or some sort of “hybrid” of in-person and online teaching.

Trump has consistently placed faith in the wisdom of his own gut over science, claiming that hydroxychloroquine was a “game changer” when in fact it can increase the chance that Covid-19 patients might die of heart failure. As recently as Tuesday, Trump continued to tout the drug at the White House. He has also suggested without evidence that warm weather would chase away the virus.

Instead of taking a summer vacation, the virus has barreled through Arizona, Florida and Texas, all sweltering in the heat of summer and all of which have set records for their numbers of coronavirus cases.

Trump has trumpeted the number of coronavirus tests done in the US and has claimed falsely and repeatedly that the rising numbers of cases results from the rising number of tests, rather than the result of widely spreading infections.

One could go on about the marginalization of the CDC and the White House attempts to besmirch scientists like Dr. Anthony Fauci and the litany of other failures of the most incompetent administration in memory, but it’s all too depressing.

Finally, for Trump the buck never stops at his desk. Trump has tried labelling the virus “the China virus” the “Wuhan virus’ and even the “kung flu.”

But these diversionary efforts are increasingly falling flat. A poll released two days ago by the Associated Press-NORC found that Trump’s approval rating on his handling of the virus has fallen to an all-time low of 32%.

Trump team’s circular firing squad goes after Fauci, CNN.com

Trump team’s circular firing squad goes after Fauci

Opinion by Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst

Updated 8:45 AM ET, Thu July 16, 2020

“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 here are his own. View more opinion at CNN.”

(CNN)The Trump administration is notable for its unusual behavior. But it’s unheard of for a senior administration official to write an op-ed under his own name in a national newspaper trashing by name another senior administration official.
P
That’s what happened Tuesday when Peter Navarro attacked Dr. Anthony Fauci in USA Today, writing that Fauci “has been wrong about everything I have interacted with him on.”

That’s the Peter Navarro with a doctorate in economics who is the top trade adviser to President Donald Trump. Navarro’s skeptical views about free trade are largely dismissed by most economists. And without any medical expertise, he’s the one critiquing Dr. Fauci for his advice about the coronavirus. Meanwhile, Fauci has served six US presidents as their top infectious disease expert.

Navarro says that Fauci fought against the decision to curtail travel from China early this year and in Navarro’s USA Today piece, he provided a link that purportedly buttressed that claim. But the link provided in his USA Today op-ed in fact shows that while Fauci had at first cautioned against curtailing travel from China, by late January Fauci was one of the key public health officials advocating to a skeptical President Trump to do just that, which Trump then implemented.

Navarro correctly points out that at first Fauci told the American public that the risk from the virus was “low.” At the time Fauci made that statement in mid-February that seemed like a reasonable point since there were only 15 cases in the US. According to John Hopkins University, today there are around 3.5 million cases in the US and Fauci — who has largely been blocked by the White House from appearing on TV in recent months — has warned in other venues that there could be as many as 100,000 new cases a day in the US.

This has not made Fauci the flavor of the month at the White House which is following President Trump’s lead to erroneously claim that all is hunky dory on the Covid-19 front.

In his op-ed, Navarro accuses Fauci of “flip-flopping on the use of masks,” but in fact when Fauci warned the general public not to wear masks this was early in the pandemic and in the context of ensuring that masks — then in short supply — went to front line health workers rather than being hoarded by ordinary Americans.

Navarro’s USA Today op-ed linked to a story that made precisely this point, undercutting Navarro’s own argument that Fauci was flip-flopping on masks rather than simply providing his best public health advice — which has evolved as the situation has evolved.

Navarro also says Fauci was wrong on the efficacy of Trump’s “game changer” drug, hydroxychloroquine, to fight Covid-19, citing “a recent Detroit hospital study showed a 50% reduction in the mortality rate when the medicine is used in early treatment.”

But there are a whole raft of studies that conflict with the Detroit study. They include a study of more than 1,400 Covid-19 patients in New York published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in May that found that hydroxychloroquine gave no benefits to coronavirus patients and actually significantly increased their risk of cardiac arrest.

A separate New England Journal of Medicine study concluded hydroxychloroquine neither helped nor harmed 1,376 patients who were admitted to a New York City hospital between March 7 to April 8.

USA Today even appended a note to Navarro’s op-ed, noting the inconvenient fact that “The Food and Drug Administration has revoked its approval for treating COVID-19 with hydroxychloroquine.”

Navarro also took Fauci to task for saying “a falling mortality rate doesn’t matter when it is the single most important statistic to help guide the pace of our economic reopening.”

Of course, the rising infection rates we have seen this month in 40 out of 50 states will surely push the mortality rate back up, as there is typically a lag of many weeks between a first infection and those who eventually die of the disease, and the falling mortality rate today is a reflection of stay-at-home measures and, perhaps, better informed medical care than was in place in past months, not that the coronavirus has suddenly decided to take a summer holiday.

In a note published after Navarro’s piece first appeared, USA Today’s editorial page editor Bill Sternberg acknowledged problems with it: “Several of Navarro’s criticisms of Fauci — on the China travel restrictions, the risk from the coronavirus and falling mortality rates — were misleading or lacked context. As such, Navarro’s op-ed did not meet USA TODAY

The attacks on Fauci by Navarro are symptomatic of a deep problem in the Trump administration that begins with Trump himself, which is to prioritize wishful thinking over science. And instead of providing any element of national leadership to combat the coronavirus, the Trump White House is employing the oldest political trick in the book which is to shoot the messenger who brings unwelcome news, in this case a 79-year-old doctor who 67% of the public trust to give them accurate information about the virus as opposed to only 26% for Trump, according to a New York Times/ Siena College poll last month.

White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows said Wednesday that Navarro’s op-ed was an “independent action that was a violation of well-established protocol that was not supported overtly or covertly.”

Yep, that fully explains why the White House over the weekend provided a background briefing to reporters that made much the same points that Navarro made in his op-ed about Fauci’s purported errors. This White House seems to believe that Americans have the historical recall of gnats.

Speaking to The Atlantic magazine in an interview published Wednesday, Fauci said of the Trump White House efforts to discredit him, “I cannot figure out in my wildest dreams why they would want to do that … I think they realize now that that was not a prudent thing to do, because it’s only reflecting negatively on them.” Fauci added, “I can’t explain Peter Navarro. He’s in a world by himself.”

Indeed.

Saudi Arabia detains senior members of its royal family, CNN.com

Saudi Arabia detains senior members of its royal family

By Nic Robertson, Peter Bergen and Jonny Hallam, CNN

Updated 11:44 AM ET, Mon March 9, 2020

(CNN)Two senior Saudi royals are among several members of the royal family arrested on Friday, two sources with knowledge of the arrests have said, confirming an apparent bid to consolidate Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s power.

The brother of Saudi Arabia’s King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud and a former crown prince were among those detained, one Saudi source, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal, said Sunday.

He told CNN that several senior royals were detained in the capital Riyadh on Friday, including Prince Ahmed bin Abdulaziz al Saud, a brother of Saudi King Salman, and Prince Mohammed bin Nayef bin Abdulaziz al Saud, the king’s nephew who is known as MBN.

Prince Ahmed was arrested along with a security detail, the source said. The prince had been on vacation in Morocco, and was arrested two days after returning to the kingdom.

The newly arrested royals have been taken to the same detention facility as the former King’s son Turki bin Abdullah, the source added.

A separate Saudi source also confirmed the arrest of former crown prince MBN and the king’s brother.

The detentions, which were first reported by the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, have not been announced by the Saudi government or state media. Senior government sources told CNN they had no knowledge of the arrests.
Mohammed bin Nayef, or MBN, has been under house arrest since June 2017 when he was forced to hand over the crown prince title to Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS.

Mohammed bin Salman demonstrated his grip on the country later that year, detaining 200 people, including at least 17 Saudi princes, at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Riyadh in what the kingdom described as an anti-corruption sweep.

The house arrest of MBN had never been acknowledged publicly, raising questions as to why he has been taken into custody now and what could have prompted the move.

This story has been updated throughout.

CNN’s Tara John wrote from London.

Trump’s crazy designation of Antifa as terrorist organization. CNN.com

Trump’s crazy designation of Antifa as terrorist organization
Peter Bergen

Opinion By Peter Bergen

Updated 7:05 AM ET, Mon June 1, 2020

“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 the editor of the Coronavirus Daily Brief and author of “United States of Jihad: Who Are America’s Homegrown Terrorists, and How Do We Stop Them?” The opinions expressed here are his own. Read more opinion at CNN. ”

(CNN)President Donald Trump’s announcement that his administration will designate Antifa as a terrorist organization is surely unconstitutional because it would effectively criminalize joining an American domestic ideological group.

Thanks to the First Amendment, the US government has historically avoided designating domestic groups on both the left and right as terrorist. Belonging to such groups is consistent with the legitimate exercise of your First Amendment right to freedom of speech and belief — whether you are a white supremacist or an environmental activist.
Of course, should an American citizen commit a crime in service of her extremist beliefs she can be prosecuted for that crime, but she can’t be prosecuted for merely belonging to the group, no matter how objectionable its views might be.

The situation is quite different when it comes to terrorist groups based overseas. If you look at the National Counterterrorism Center’s list of designated terrorist groups, you will see that all the groups that are listed are based outside the United States. Joining such designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations is not protected by the First Amendment and is prosecuted as a crime. In recent years scores of Americans, for instance, have been convicted of joining ISIS or attempting to join the terrorist group, which can carry a sentence of up to 20 years.

If Trump succeeds in designating Antifa it potentially opens the door for American citizens to be charged for merely holding their beliefs — even if they are extreme and at times, militant.

It also begs the question why analogous extremist right wing groups are not similarly designated by the Trump administration, since violent right-wing extremists in the US kill far more Americans than leftist terrorists.

According to data gathered by New America, a research institution, since 9/11 right-wing terrorists in the United States have killed 110 people for political reasons, while Antifa supporters have killed exactly no one for political reasons. Meanwhile, those motivated by black nationalist ideology have killed 12 people.

In other words, the threat posed by lethal right-wing terrorists since the 9/11 attacks is almost 10 times greater than that posed by leftist terrorists.
To its credit, the Trump administration designated the Russian Imperial Movement, a white supremacist group based in Russia, as a terrorist organization in April.

Yet there is no indication that the Trump administration will effectively criminalize being a member of an American right-wing extremist group. And for good reason: The First Amendment is the first for a reason, and it allows Americans to hold extremist beliefs of all flavors without fear of prosecution — including Antifa supporters.

Trump threatens to unleash the military in the US. When will the generals speak out? CNN.com

Trump threatens to unleash the military in the US. When will the generals speak out?
Peter Bergen

Opinion by Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst

Updated 8:23 PM ET, Tue June 2, 2020

“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 book is “Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos.” The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion at CNN.”

(CNN) Not since one of President Donald Trump’s heroes, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, led a mounted charge in 1932 to disperse an encampment of homeless veterans just outside the White House has the country seen such an application of violence against unarmed protesters outside “the People’s House.” On Monday evening police, with National Guard troops in reserve, attacked peaceful protesters gathered outside the White House with rubber bullets and tear gas. It’s the kind of scene we associate with dictatorships, not western democracies.

Even worse was the purpose of this travesty — which was to allow President Trump a photo op outside St. John’s, the “church of the presidents” just outside the White House grounds.

There Trump held up a bible for the cameras, which will surely be an iconic image of his presidency as the coronavirus ravages the United States and riots and protests rage in its cities.

Just as bad as the attacks on the peaceful protesters outside the White House were Trump’s threats Monday to send the federal military to quell unrest in American cities, which is simply not their job. What makes it particularly odd is that Trump frequently complains that US troops in Afghanistan are acting as a “police force.” Like so much of what Trump says that isn’t true, but even the President realizes on occasion that the federal US military doesn’t perform a law enforcement function for good reason; it’s not what it is trained to do. Also, the Pentagon simply can’t go to war with its own citizens.

Indeed it is barred from doing so by the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, although under some very rare circumstances, federal troops have been deployed in the US. The last time they were called up for such duty was almost three decades ago during the 1992 Los Angeles riots which followed the acquittal of police officers who brutally beat Rodney King. More than 50 people were killed in the riots. The federal troops were called in at the invitation of California’s governor and they were not unilaterally deployed as President Trump has threatened to do.
Trump’s discussion of the sometimes violent protests that have occurred across the United States over the past week with US governors on a phone call Monday that became public in a leaked audio confirms that he and his “war cabinet” have a militarized view of the unrest in American cities.

Trump said that he had put US Joint Chiefs Chairman Army Gen. Mark Milley “in charge,” which is a strange formulation since the United States’ top military officer is not supposed to be responsible for domestic law enforcement. That’s the role of the police and in some cases, the National Guard under the control of each states’ governor.

On Monday’s call with the governors, US Defense Secretary Mark Esper blathered about dominating “the battle space” as if the protests and riots in American cities were taking place in Baghdad in 2003.

Gen. Tony Thomas, who ran US Special Operations Command and also US Joint Special Operations Command — the unit that killed Osama bin Laden — tweeted to his relatively small group of some 1,300 followers on Monday night: “The “battle space” of America??? Not what America needs to hear…ever, unless we are invaded by an adversary or experience a constitutional failure…ie a Civil War…”

Good for Thomas, but his tweet has received scant attention as yet. We need more senior retired generals to say that violence against peaceful protesters is unacceptable and that using the US military aside from the national guard to police protests is fundamentally an un-American idea.

A retired top military officer who also just stepped up the plate is former US Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen, who wrote in The Atlantic Tuesday evening: “It sickened me yesterday to see security personnel—including members of the National Guard—forcibly and violently clear a path through Lafayette Square to accommodate the president’s visit outside St. John’s Church. I have to date been reticent to speak out on issues surrounding President Trump’s leadership, but we are at an inflection point, and the events of the past few weeks have made it impossible to remain silent.”

Adm. Bill McRaven, the architect of the bin Laden raid, and Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who turned Joint Special Operations Command into one of the most lethal fighting forces in US history, have been willing to call out the President for his dishonesty and divisiveness.

But isn’t it time to hear now also from former US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, a retired four-star general who commanded CENTCOM that oversees America’s wars in the greater Middle East and who led the US Marines into Baghdad in
Or from former national security adviser Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster who fought heroically both in the first Gulf War and the Iraq War and whose PhD dissertation that became a book about the Vietnam War is one of the key texts about the proper role of relations between a US president and his generals?

It’s past time for Mattis to abandon his position that he won’t speak out against President Trump. In his 2019 autobiography “Call Sign Chaos,” Mattis observed, “I’m old fashioned: I don’t write about sitting Presidents.” This conception of the proper role of retired senior US generals that they shouldn’t make statements about contemporaneous political matters may work in times of normalcy but this is not one of those times.
During his 2019 book tour Mattis told Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic that his duty of silence about Trump wasn’t “eternal.”

Now would be an important time for Mattis to break his silence. Mattis can use his considerable stature for the common good to push back on Trump’s dangerous ideas about deploying the US federal military in American cities and also to condemn the President’s role in attacking peaceful protestors outside the White House.
Retired four-star Marine Gen. John Kelly also has the experience and gravitas to make similar points. Kelly led SOUTHCOM which oversees all of US military operations south of the US-Mexico border and later became Trump’s chief of staff.

And McMaster could also use his considerable stature to speak out about the politicization of the US military by the Trump administration.

McMaster’s book described the failures of American generals to stand up to President Lyndon Johnson and to provide him truthful military advice about the conduct of the Vietnam War, which Johnson saw largely through the lens of his domestic political fortunes.

We have reached a similar point in the United States where the Pentagon is being used for Trump’s political purposes and it’s time to push back.

This column has been updated to include a reference to Admiral Mike Mullen’s new article in The Atlantic.

Why Mattis’ verdict on Trump is devastating, CNN.com

Why Mattis’ verdict on Trump is devastating
Peter Bergen

Opinion by Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst

Updated 7:43 AM ET, Thu June 4, 2020

“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 book is “Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos.” The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion at CNN.”

(CNN)A dam has broken. Former US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis — who President Donald Trump has compared to one of his heroes, General George Patton — on Wednesday issued a blistering statement saying, “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.”

Mattis’ statement came after police on Monday attacked peaceful protesters outside the White House with rubber bullets and a noxious gas so Trump could have a photo op with a bible outside St. John’s Church near the White House.
There are three reasons that Mattis’ statement is so important. First, Mattis spent two years working closely with Trump as his first secretary of defense and so he is well-positioned to make the charge that the President has deliberately pursued a policy of division while in office. This is not a charge made by some armchair critic, but by one of the most senior members of Trump’s cabinet who spent untold hours working directly with him.

Second, Mattis is largely revered by the US military and in national security circles for his stellar military record which includes commanding the longest aerial assault in history from an US warship at sea to a landing zone in Afghanistan during the war against the Taliban in 2001. Then Mattis led the US Marines into Baghdad to topple Saddam Hussein in 2003, and he later commanded CENTCOM that oversaw all American wars in the Middle East during the Obama administration.

Third, Mattis has previously gone out of his way not to criticize Trump. He wrote in his 2019 autobiography “Call Sign Chaos,” “I’m old fashioned: I don’t write about sitting Presidents.” And when he was on his book tour promoting his book during multiple interviews, Mattis would not be drawn about his real views about Trump.
At a book party in Washington, DC, for Mattis that I attended, Mary Louise Kelly, the co-anchor of NPR’s “All Things Considered,” asked Mattis what it would take for him to criticize Trump publicly. Could there ever come a time when he felt he had to speak out if he felt that the country was truly imperiled? Mattis became animated saying he would never do that.

Obviously Mattis does now feel that the country is imperiled, and he has spoken out in a clear and unambiguous manner that Trump is a threat to the Constitution saying in Wednesday’s statement, “When I joined the military, some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens — much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief.”
Trump, who revels in the ceremonial aspects of being Commander in Chief, now has an emerging bloc of senior retired generals forming against him. Trump will, of course, perform his usual tricks of denigrating them, but he should be aware that if this bloc starts to organize itself to oppose him as he seeks re-election, the President will find it hard to paint these senior generals as a bunch of weak “deep state” types since so many of them performed heroically in the long post-9/11 wars.

Predictably, only hours after Mattis released his statement, Trump struck back with tweets calling him “the world’s most overrated general” and saying he didn’t like his leadership style.

Mattis joins a growing anti-Trump chorus of revered retired senior military officers that includes former US Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen, who wrote in The Atlantic Tuesday: “It sickened me yesterday to see security personnel … violently clear a path through Lafayette Square to accommodate the president’s visit outside St. John’s Church. I have to date been reticent to speak out on issues surrounding President Trump’s leadership, but we are at an inflection point, and the events of the past few weeks have made it impossible to remain silent.”

Retired four star Marine General John Allen, who runs the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, wrote in Foreign Policy magazine Wednesday evening, “To even the casual observer, Monday was awful for the United States and its democracy. The President’s speech was calculated to project his abject and arbitrary power, but he failed to project any of the higher emotions or leadership desperately needed in every quarter of this nation during this dire moment.”
Trump has now been on the receiving end of multiple blistering critiques by many of the top retired US military generals and admirals. Leading retired four-star officer, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, told ABC News in 2018 that he found Trump to be both immoral and dishonest.

Adm. William McRaven, the architect of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, wrote in The Washington Post, in 2018, “Through your actions, you have embarrassed us in the eyes of our children, humiliated us on the world stage and, worst of all, divided us as a nation.”

Retired three-star Gen. Mark Hertling, a CNN analyst, has also been quite critical of Trump on a number of issues — for instance, when Trump attacked Adm. McRaven for not finding Osama bin Laden sooner, Hertling described this as a “disgusting” attack.

Even Trump’s current Defense Secretary, Mark Esper, a former officer in the US Army, is distancing himself from Trump, saying publicly on Wednesday that he does not agree with an idea the President has suggested of using the federal military against American protestors who are exerting their First Amendment rights.

Esper has now made the cardinal Trumpian sin of telling the truth in public about the Great Leader, so we should not be surprised if he is eventually booted from Trumpworld to be replaced with someone more compliant.

Tom Cotton’s ‘Send in the troops’ op-ed is just wrong, CNN.com

Tom Cotton’s ‘Send in the troops’ op-ed is just wrong
Peter Bergen

Opinion by Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst

Updated 8:48 PM ET, Thu June 4, 2020

‘On another planet’: Tapper reacts to Trump’s virus comment

“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 book is “Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos.” The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion at CNN.”

(CNN)Republican Sen. Tom Cotton, a military veteran who is close to President Trump and who is sometimes mentioned as a future US defense secretary, wrote an op-ed Wednesday in the New York Times under the headline, “Send in the Troops’ in which he made the case that federal troops are needed to stamp out “anarchy” caused by the protests sweeping the United States that Cotton claimed recalls “the widespread violence of the 1960s.”

But this comparison is off base. The riots that racked US cities in 1968 following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. were of a far deadlier and more destructive nature than the occasionally violent protests we have seen during the past week. In 1968, more more than 40 were killed, according to the Atlantic.
I write only three blocks away from 14th Street NW in Washington DC, a key commercial corridor, much of which went up in flames during the 1968 riots. During the four days of riots in Washington, more than 1,000 fires were set, 8,000 people were arrested, 13 people were killed, and more than 900 businesses were damaged. It took more than three decades before 14th Street ever really fully recovered.

Nothing remotely close to this is happening now in Washington where there certainly has been some unforgivable vandalism during the past week, but the demonstrations have been largely peaceful affairs and that is true for many of the protests around the country.

So far there have been some dozen deaths that may be linked to the protests that have spread across the United States over the killing of George Floyd. That is a dozen too many deaths, but would bringing in federal troops really help solve this issue?

For good reason, federal troops are only brought in as a last resort to quell violence in the United States since they generally are not trained in crowd control nor in law enforcement techniques, duties that are better performed by the police, sometimes supported by National Guard units under the order of each states’ governor.

That is why US Defense Secretary Mark Esper, himself a retired US Army officer, publicly said from the podium in the Pentagon press briefing room on Wednesday, “The option to use active duty forces in a law enforcement role should only be used as a matter of last resort, and only in the most urgent and dire of situations. We are not in one of those situations now. I do not support invoking the Insurrection Act.”

In saying this, Esper publicly contradicted President Donald Trump, who has suggested deploying federal troops to US cities, which would require invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807 which is intended to quell public unrest.

In his op-ed, Cotton claims that “the rioting has nothing to do with George Floyd, whose bereaved relatives have condemned violence. On the contrary, nihilist criminals are simply out for loot and the thrill of destruction, with cadres of left-wing radicals like antifa infiltrating protest marches to exploit Floyd’s death for their own anarchic purposes.”

Despite the Arkansas senator’s assertions, no evidence has emerged that cadres of left-wing radicals like Antifa are organizing the vast nationwide protests that at times turn violent. Instead the protesters are mostly ordinary young people fed up with police brutality directed against black Americans, and many of the protests are also aimed at the fecklessness of Trump himself in his handling of the coronavirus pandemic as well as of all the racial inequities that continue to plague the United States.

Cotton goes on to assert that “…Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson called out the military to disperse mobs that prevented school desegregation.” This is quite disingenuous because it points to cases where governors in the 1950 and 1960s for political reasons refused to enforce federal desegregation laws and presidents had to step in to enforce them. But in the case of the current protests, governors are mobilizing law enforcement and National Guard units to respond to them.

Cotton’s op-ed has caused a storm of protest inside the New York Times precisely because of its factual inaccuracies and historical analogies that make scant sense. Reporting by the Times had already debunked the notion that the protests were being led by Antifa and some journalists working at the newspaper said that Cotton’s arguments about sending in the troops could even put the lives of black New York Times staff members in danger.

Late Thursday afternoon, a spokeswoman for the Times said the Cotton op-ed was published after a “rushed editorial process” and “did not meet our standards.”

The elite military club that’s scorning Trump, CNN.com

The elite military club that’s scorning Trump
Peter Bergen

Opinion by Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst

Updated 8:28 PM ET, Mon June 8, 2020

“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 book is “Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos.” The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion at CNN.”

(CNN)You join the most elite club in the US military when you pin on your fourth star; there were, as of 2019, only 39 four-star general officers across the various services of the US armed forces, according to the US Congressional Research Service.

Once those four-star generals and admirals retire, with a very few exceptions they avoid taking any kind of public stance on political issues, seeking even in retirement to uphold the apolitical nature of the US military, a key to its widespread popularity among Americans.

Because of this norm, when retired three-star general Michael Flynn went on the campaign trail for then-presidential candidate Donald Trump and led crowds at the 2016 Republican convention chanting “Lock her up” of Trump’s opponent Hillary Clinton, his behavior was widely viewed by his peers as completely beyond the pale.
So, it has been extraordinary to see over the past week the flood of public criticism of President Donald Trump for his handling of the protests over the death of George Floyd coming from so many of the United States’ leading retired generals and admirals, including unprecedented criticism from four who have served in the post of top ranking military officer in the nation: chairman of the joint chiefs.

Gen. Martin Dempsey, former chairman of the joint chiefs, told NPR that Trump’s threat to use military force against protesters was “very troubling,” and “dangerous.”

Dempsey’s predecessor Admiral Mike Mullen wrote in The Atlantic that he was “sickened” to see peaceful protestors “forcibly and violently” removed from around the White House last week so President Trump could visit St. John’s Church nearby, and be photographed holding aloft a bible.

Speaking of the forcible removal of the peaceful protesters outside the White House, Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the joint chiefs under President George W. Bush, told CNN, “that should not happen in America. And so, I was sad. I mean, we should all shed tears over that, that particular act.”

Then on Sunday came Gen. Colin Powell, the chairman of the joint chiefs under President George H.W. Bush, who told CNN’s Jake Tapper that President Trump lies “all the time” and that he had “drifted away” from the Constitution.
This came on top of a week in which retired four-star Marine Gen. Jim Mattis, who served as US Secretary of Defense for President Trump, broke his long silence about the President that he had served for two years saying in a statement to The Atlantic, “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.”

Trump’s former chief of staff, retired Marine Gen. John Kelly also weighed in to say, in an interview Friday, that he agreed with Mattis, adding for good measure, “I think we need to look harder at who we elect. I think we should look at people that are running for office and put them through the filter: What is their character like? What are their ethics?”

Other top retired officers have added their voices to the chorus of criticism of the President. The architect of the operation that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011, Admiral William McRaven, told MSNBC on Friday, “You’re not going to use, whether it’s the military, or the National Guard, or law enforcement, to clear peaceful American citizens for the President of the United States to do a photo op. There is nothing morally right about that.”
Gen. Vincent Brooks, who commanded all US troops in South Korea under President Trump until he retired last year, released a statement in which he outlined his “dismay and disappointment” at the “the manipulation of the image of the military by our President.”

Trump has long had a boyish fascination with the military, idolizing World War II generals George Patton and Douglas MacArthur and reveling in his stint at a military-style boarding school in New York when he was a teenager. Trump’s administration has presided over a major expansion of US military budgets.

But historians will surely find that when President Trump took his short walk from the White House to St. John’s Church, his path violently cleared of peaceful protesters, he lost the support of key elements of the US military that he so reveres.

During the 2016 presidential election, Flynn was an outlier when he took an active role in the Trump campaign. Now that so many top retired military officers are speaking out against Trump as the 2020 presidential election campaign heats up some of these officers may organize to try to defeat him.