Does the Pentagon (or the Cops) Know What Side of the Bed You Sleep On?

July 9 2024

In the wake of 9/11, a massive surveillance system quietly made its way onto our smartphones. The data of millions of Americans is for sale to the highest bidder — and it’s not always clear who’s buying. Here’s how information about everything, from where you got a drink last night (and maybe even with whom) to where you sleep, might be available for purchase by the national security apparatus — or even your own local police department. And they don’t need a warrant.

How Tiny Qatar Became a Global Player

July 2 2024

These days when a thorny international conflict is resolved, more and more often a major player in the negotiation has been the small Persian Gulf state of Qatar. The country has made itself uniquely indispensable on the global stage by trying to play nice with pretty much everyone, including Hamas and Iran. And also by keeping on very good terms with the United States. Peter visits Qatar to see this high-wire act of diplomacy up close.

The One Way Out of an Israeli-Palestinian Forever War

New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman has been thinking about the Middle East since he was 15 years old and he’s been covering the region for 45 years. He remains adamant that the only way forward for Israelis and Palestinians is through a two-state solution. He tells Peter what it will take to get there.

The Presidential Debate: Trump’s bogus claim on terrorism, CNN.com

The topic of terrorism played an unusually large role in this presidential debate, with former President Donald Trump making inaccurate or misleading claims.

Early on, Trump attacked Biden on immigration by claiming that the US is currently seeing the largest number of terrorists coming into the country — a misleading claim that also ignores the fact that the vast majority of the “encounters” by US Border Patrol agents with people on the terrorism watch list in 2023 took place at the northern border with Canada.

Later on, Trump did correctly point out that as president, he authorized the operations that killed the founder and leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and the leader of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force, Major General Qassem Soleimani.

But Trump then went on to make a bogus claim (one he has made before) that there was “no terror” during his administration. This one is a real whopper. There were several people charged with terrorism during his presidency. Notably, in October 2017, an Uzbek man carried out a terrorist attack in Manhattan by using a rented truck to fatally strike eight people on a bike path.

It’s also worth pointing out that Trump seems to have a major blind spot when it comes to right-wing domestic terrorism that took place on his watch. In 2019, a 21-year-old White man touted xenophobic and White supremacist beliefs online just minutes before he targeted Latino shoppers at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. He killed 23 people in what was the most lethal right-wing terrorist attack in decades, according to the research institution New America.

And, of course, the most spectacular act of domestic terrorism in decades took place at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Some 140 police officers were assaulted while Trump failed to put a stop to it for hours while it unfolded. If elected, Trump has promised to pardon a “large portion” of the rioters — a point that Biden also reminded viewers of during the debate.

Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University, and the host of the podcast “In the Room.”

What Biden and Trump have in common might surprise you, CNN.com

Opinion by Peter Bergen, CNN
11 minute read
Updated 8:53 AM EDT, Wed June 26, 2024

Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University, and the host of the Audible podcast “In the Room,” also on Apple and Spotify. He is the author of “The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and the World.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own. Read more opinion on CNN.

CNN
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You might think President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are worlds apart on most international issues. But look a little closer, and you will see that the two candidates actually share some surprising commonalities on foreign policy, trade and even immigration.

While you are unlikely to hear much about those commonalities during Thursday’s presidential debate on CNN — it is, after all, a debate — it’s worth bearing these in mind when Biden and Trump take the stage for what could be one of the most consequential debates of any presidential campaign in recent memory.

Voters should also consider issues like temperament, consistency and predictability when comparing the two candidates as the future commander in chief. After all, both American allies and rivals want a certain amount of predictability when dealing with the world’s leading superpower.

American allies want and deserve to be treated with respect, not contempt. An excellent example of this is the effort to get all the members of NATO to spend 2% of their GDP on their own defense by the end of this year.

This was a policy goal agreed to during the Obama administration when Biden was vice president, but you wouldn’t know that from how, when he was in office, President Trump constantly publicly berated NATO members to spend more on their defense and claimed falsely, the US was “owed” many billions of dollars by NATO allies who weren’t meeting the 2% target.

Trump’s inaccurate berating didn’t do much of anything to move the needle on defense spending among key American allies like Germany, but it certainly engendered resentment amongst Germans against Trump. In 2018, only 11% of Germans had a favorable view of Trump, and favorable views of the US in general also dropped by 20% during his administration, according to a Pew/Körber Foundation poll.

Also, rapid changes in American policy, such as Trump publicly proclaiming his “love” for the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un — whose rogue nuclear-armed regime has been a headache for American presidents going back decades — are unsettling to US allies and even rivals like China. China may be a nominal ally of the North Korean dictator, but Kim’s expanding nuclear and ballistic missile programs combined with his mercurial temperament are unnerving to the Chinese, who prize stability in East Asia.

China

On what is arguably the key foreign policy issue of the 21st century — US relations with China — there is little daylight between Biden and Trump. Trump inaugurated a far more combative approach to China than his presidential predecessors.

The longtime belief that China would liberalize politically as it grew economically was officially abandoned in Trump’s 2017 national security strategy. Instead, the Trump administration started treating China as a peer competitor that had to be reckoned with and started shoring up its Indo-Pacific partnerships like “The Quad” made up of Australia, India, Japan and the US. Trump also slapped a wide range of tariffs on Chinese goods, long anathema for free marketers in both parties.

Then, guess what? When Biden got to the White House, he doubled down, keeping those tariffs in place and even slapping a 100% tax on Chinese electric vehicles. Biden also banned investments in China by US companies that might benefit the Chinese military in areas such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing and advanced computer chips. And Biden, on 60 Minutes in 2022, said that the US would defend Taiwan if China invaded, appearing to abandon the longstanding US policy of “strategic ambiguity” on Taiwan, which is supposed to keep the Chinese guessing about what an American response would be if they were to attack the island.

Our contributors rewatched the 2020 Biden-Trump debates for clues. Here’s what they predict will happen Thursday
What I will be looking for in Thursday’s debate would be how the candidates see US military commitments to Taiwan, given that US intelligence has assessed that China’s President Xi Jinping, the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao, has told his military to be ready to invade the island by 2027, a year that would fall inside the next presidential term.

I’ll also be looking for — given that inflation continues to be a persistent worry for many Americans — how the candidates might address the continued imposition of US tariffs on everyday goods that are made in China, like shoes and luggage, which function as an additional tax on ordinary Americans,

The Gaza War

Then, go to the Middle East, where the war in Gaza rages on. Previously, the Trump administration failed to seriously address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and arguably inflamed the issue with actions such as moving the US embassy from its longtime location in Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. That provoked protests in which dozens of Palestinians were killed. Like Israelis, Palestinians believe that Jerusalem is their rightful capital.

When he was in office, Trump not only turned a blind eye to Israel’s much-expanded settlement building in the West Bank, but he also appointed as US Ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, who said publicly, contrary to longstanding US policy, that he did not believe that Israeli settlement activity was illegal, and the Trump administration could support Israel if it annexed parts of the West Bank.

Meanwhile, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner — a family friend of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — negotiated the Abraham Accords, which established diplomatic relations between Israel and some Arab states but gave nothing to the Palestinians.

It was the seemingly impending extension of the Abraham Accords to include the normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel — a deal encouraged by the Biden administration — that seems to have, in part, precipitated Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7th. In a rare interview two weeks before the Hamas attack, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince bin Salman, told Fox News, “Every day we get closer” to normalizing ties with Israel.

Hamas wanted to disrupt this Israel-Saudi normalization, according to President Biden, speaking at a campaign event in October.

The Biden administration has largely continued the Trump administration’s uncritical embrace of the Netanyahu government despite mounting frustration with Israel’s leader. Biden’s support of Netanyahu even has its own name — “the bear hug”— and while Biden and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken have occasionally protested publicly about the level of casualties in Gaza and, of late, they haven’t been doing too many bear hugs with Netanyahu, their de facto policy remains strong support for Israel. To underline this point, the Biden administration is going forward with the sale of $18 billion of F-15 fighter jets to Israel.

The US government has provided many of the bombs Israel has used in its all-out war on Hamas, while the much-ballyhooed American-built pier in the Mediterranean to help get aid to starving Gazans has been a fiasco. It’s hard to recall a war in which the US supplies one of the belligerents with many of its weapons and the other side with aid supplies.

What I will be looking for during the debate is how the candidates will address how best to end the war in Gaza given the stalling of the peace plan that Biden laid out publicly at the end of May that would start with a six-week ceasefire and the release of some of the hostages held by Hamas.

Iran and Saudi Arabia

Trump’s first overseas trip as president was to Saudi Arabia, where he was given a princely welcome since his anti-Iran stance closely aligned with Saudi interests. Trump pulled out of the Obama administration’s nuclear agreement with Iran in 2018 and, two years later, authorized the killing of a key Iranian military leader, Major General Qasem Soleimani, in a drone strike in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, because, according to Trump, he had “targeted, injured, and murdered hundreds of American civilians and servicemen.”

When he was campaigning to be president, Biden vowed to reevaluate America’s long alliance with the Saudis following the 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by officials working for the de facto ruler of the kingdom, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS. But Biden officials are now all in on MBS because they believe the road to long-term peace between Israel and the Palestinians lies through Riyadh if the Israelis and the Saudis can agree to normalization of relations tied to some two-state solution.

Despite some early efforts to resuscitate the Iran nuclear deal, the Biden administration has not renewed the agreement. Early this year, Biden also authorized a drone strike that killed the leader of an Iranian-backed militia in Baghdad, in response to the killing of three American soldiers in Jordan.

After the Israelis killed a top Iranian general in Syria, the Biden administration led an international coalition to protect Israel when Iran, in retaliation, fired hundreds of drones and missiles against Israel in mid-April. None of the strikes ended up causing significant damage in Israel.

Following the nuclear agreement with the Obama administration, the Iranians kept their enrichment of uranium far below the threshold needed for nuclear weapons. In the wake of Trump’s withdrawal from that agreement, the Iranians now have enough fissile material for several nuclear weapons, according to a report by the US Congressional Research Service earlier this year.

The Biden administration is currently negotiating a defense pact with the Saudis, which is clearly intended to assuage their concerns about the Iranians and their nuclear capabilities. This would be similar to US agreements to defend allies like Japan or South Korea

During the debate, I’ll be listening for how the candidates will deal with the theocratic regime in Iran now that it is close to being armed with nuclear weapons.

Abandoning an American ally

Trump and Biden jointly engineered what is perhaps the most embarrassing and cynical abandonment of an American ally in history when Trump signed a withdrawal deal from Afghanistan with the Taliban in 2019, and Biden went through with that deal two years later.

The panicky, deadly US withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 made the hasty American retreat from Saigon in 1975 look like the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace.

Opinion: I was Bill Clinton’s press secretary. Here’s what Democrats need to say to defeat Trump
The Americans left tens of thousands of Afghans who had worked with them behind and allowed the Taliban to re-establish their misogynist theocratic rule, while the country is now home to some twenty terrorist groups, according to the United Nations. Biden’s repeated invocations of his love for democracy didn’t play well during this episode.

The Association of Wartime Allies, an advocacy group for Afghans who had worked for the US, estimated that only about 3% who had worked for the US government and had applied for special visas were evacuated out of Afghanistan, leaving 78,000 behind.

Given that each candidate bears some responsibility for this mess, I’m hoping that the candidates might address how best to bring those American allies out of Afghanistan, since the US doesn’t recognize the Taliban regime or have an embassy in the country.

The border

And even on an issue as fraught as the southern border — something that we will surely be hearing a lot about from Trump during Thursday’s debate — for two years, Biden kept in place a Trump-era COVID health code known as Title 42, that kept most migrants to the US from being able to claim asylum. Title 42 resulted in 2.8 million immigrant expulsions from the US, many of them during Biden’s term in office. The Biden administration did try to lift Title 42 in 2022 but was challenged in the courts, so the measure remained in place until May 2023.

After Title 42 expired, the largest wave of migrants in US history, many of them claiming asylum, surged across the southern border. In response this month, Biden ordered that migrants who cross the border illegally cannot claim asylum if migrant arrests at the border surpass an average of more than 2,500 a day, which has been the average since he came into office. In plain English, the Biden administration has effectively closed the southern border to asylum seekers.

Biden also even allowed portions of Trump’s southern border wall to continue to be built, saying the money for the wall had already been appropriated.

To be sure, there are real differences between Trump and Biden on immigration; this month, Biden said that hundreds of thousands of spouses of American citizens who are in the US illegally could get a path to citizenship, while Trump has promised if he were reelected that there would be mass deportations of illegal immigrants.

When Trump was in office, his administration also presided over the cruel practice of separating more than 3,000 migrant children from their families. But the fact remains that when you look at the larger picture, Trump and Biden’s policies on the southern border now more resemble each other than not.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated this year that immigrant workers will add $7 trillion to the US economy over the next decade. Given the significance of immigrants to the American economy, I’m hoping to hear both candidates’ plans for how best to encourage legal immigration that go beyond bumper-sticker slogans like “Build the wall.”

Ukraine and NATO
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Then there is the rather large elephant in the room, which is Trump’s bizarre bromance with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Were Trump to be reelected, might he end all US support for the war in Ukraine?

That is a real possibility, especially since Trump has said he could end the war within 24 hours. (Since the Ukrainians and the Russians have been fighting for a decade since Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, this claim seems improbable at best.)

Also, Trump’s former national security advisor, John Bolton, told me for the podcast In the Room that he believes if Trump were reelected, he would carry through on threats he made privately while in office to pull out of NATO.

But consider that this spring, Trump didn’t get in the way of a massive $61 billion US aid package for Ukraine. Given Trump’s iron grip on his party, he could have opposed this package, and it then would have surely failed to pass in the US House; instead, Trump kept silent, which last month gave more than 100 Republican House members permission to vote for the desperately needed aid to Ukraine.

So what I will be listening for during the debate is some explanation of what the Trump plan is for the Ukraine war and more broadly for NATO in general, which his own former defense secretary, Jim Mattis, publicly described as the “most successful and powerful military alliance in modern history.”

To be sure, Biden and Trump have striking differences in style and temperament. But it’s also helpful to recognize that beyond their shared, advanced ages, on some key policy issues, Biden and Trump also share some of the same positions — even if it’s politically inconvenient for them or their supporters to admit it.

The Rise, and Maybe Downfall, of Liberal Democracy

Veteran journalist and CNN host Fareed Zakaria has made a career of putting hard questions to many of the world’s most powerful people. Taking the temperature of global politics these days, he’s worried democracy is on a dangerous downward slide. He explains why — and where — leaders are taking their countries down dark paths, and what can be done to rescue democracy as we know it.

The Right-Wing Plan for Trump to Root Out the “Deep State Department”

You may have heard some ruckus about Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s 887-page plan to overhaul the federal government, fire thousands of career bureaucrats and bring in loyalists if Trump wins a second term. But what would this look like in practice? You’ll hear from the author of one chapter of the plan who says curing what ails the US State Department should start with replacing many of its diplomats. And you’ll hear why a couple of veteran US diplomats believe doing so will threaten national security.

How Women Became Central to the Central Intelligence Agency

Peter speaks with a former CIA officer who entered the CIA in 1968, another who got her start just before 9/11, and the author of The Sisterhood: The Secret History of Women at the CIA.

India’s Modi Will (Likely) Get the Most Votes in Human History. Why?

Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India is the most popular leader in the world — and he’s poised to win reelection to a third term. With his embrace of religious nationalism, is India’s secular democracy in peril? Or is Modi just giving the country’s 1.1 billion Hindus what they want?

The fanatical Hamas leader who calls the shots, CNN.com

Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University and the host of the Audible podcast, “In the Room,” also on Apple and Spotify. He is the author of “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own.

In February, the Israeli Defense Forces released a grainy video showing the back of a man they identified as Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’ leader in Gaza. A dark figure seen only from behind was hurriedly making his way through one of the labyrinths of Hamas tunnels that wend their way deep underground in Gaza.

Since the video didn’t show Sinwar’s face, there was no independent confirmation that the shadowy figure was indeed the Hamas leader.

It’s an apt image for Sinwar, who seems to have vanished like a ghost following Hamas’ attack October 7 attack on Israel, during which some 1,200 people were killed and 250 abducted. The Israeli military quickly asserted that Sinwar was a “dead man walking.” Yet eight months later, Sinwar remains stubbornly alive.

Sinwar has lived much of his life mainly in the shadows, and relatively little is known about him even though he is arguably the most critical player in the Middle East today. Israel accuses Sinwar of being the “mastermind” of Hamas’ attack on October 7.

He is now also calling the shots for Hamas, including whether or not to agree to a ceasefire in Gaza in exchange for a release of Israeli hostages held by Hamas and a release of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel in a potential deal that was announced by President Joe Biden at the end of last month.

Meanwhile, Sinwar’s attack on Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza has brought attention to the Palestinian issue in a way that hasn’t been the case for many years.

‘Necessary sacrifices’

Sinwar characterizes the many Palestinians who have lost their lives in the war in Gaza as “necessary sacrifices,” according to The Wall Street Journal, which obtained leaked messages from Sinwar to fellow Hamas officials. “We have the Israelis right where we want them,” Sinwar reportedly said to members of his terrorist group involved in negotiating with the US and Israel.

So, who is Sinwar, aged 61, and what drives him? An answer to that question can be found in an illuminating profile in The New York Times of an Israeli prison official, Dr. Yuval Bitton, who got to know Sinwar during the more than two decades that the Hamas leader spent in Israeli prisons. Bitton, a dentist, once helped save Sinwar’s life when he ensured that Sinwar was rushed to a hospital after he became ill with what turned out to be a malignant brain tumor that was successfully operated on.

Following Sinwar’s recovery, Bitton and Sinwar spent many hours talking to each other; Bitton to better understand the mindset of Hamas and Sinwar to understand better the mindset of the Israelis, of whom he made a careful study, including becoming fluent in Hebrew while he was imprisoned.

Like Osama bin Laden before him, Sinwar is a zealot whose opposition to the state of Israel is not so much political as it is religious. Sinwar told Bitton that the land of Israel was, in fact, Muslim land and that Muslims had a religious right to take it back, and as a result, any kind of two-state solution was impossible.

Like Osama bin Laden before him, Sinwar is a zealot whose opposition to the state of Israel is not so much political as it is religious.

Sinwar also knows the Quran by heart, a prodigious feat of memory since the holy book contains more than 6,000 verses.

Sinwar was in prison for abducting and killing two Israeli soldiers, for which he received four life sentences, according to the US State Department’s 2015 designation of Sinwar as a terrorist.

While he was in prison, Sinwar admitted that he had killed several Palestinians who he believed were collaborating with the Israelis. According to a 1989 interrogation of Sinwar published by the Israel Hayom newspaper, Sinwar told Israeli interrogators that he strangled one of those collaborators with his bare hands and used a keffiyeh head scarf to suffocate another.

While he was in prison, Sinwar became the leader of his fellow Hamas inmates, according to The Washington Post.

Sinwar and the stalled ceasefire negotiations

The proposed ceasefire agreement that Biden publicly laid out at the end of last month has stalled, with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken blaming Hamas for the impasse on Tuesday, saying, “I don’t think anyone other than the Hamas leadership in Gaza actually is the ones who can make decisions.”

It is Sinwar who is central to those decisions, and Blinken even obliquely referred to Sinwar on Tuesday when he said, “We await the answer from Hamas, and that will speak volumes about what they want, what they’re looking for, who they’re looking after. Are they looking after one guy who may be pronounced safe, buried — I don’t know — ten stories underground somewhere in Gaza….”

While the details of the ceasefire negotiations are tightly held, there are any number of issues that Hamas and Israel might differ on, including the length of the first phase of the ceasefire, which Biden had said would last six weeks; the precise role of Israeli troops during that first phase of the ceasefire who Biden said would be withdrawn from Gaza’s population centers, and the exact numbers of Hamas-held hostages to be exchanged for Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails.

It must surely weigh heavily on the minds of Israeli negotiators that Sinwar himself was an Israeli prisoner and was released with more than 1,000 other prisoners in 2011 in exchange for Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier who was being held in Gaza.

Sinwar’s release from prison has since come with both a high cost for Israel and for the Gazans he purports to represent, some 37,000 of whom have died in the war, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

All of that is to say that Sinwar is a brutal, calculating military leader driven by religious zeal that the Palestinian cause is a righteous one. Negotiating with such a leader will never be easy.