Gorilla Radio is dedicated to social justice, the environment, community, and providing a forum for people and issues not covered in State and Corporate media. The G-Radio can be found at: www.Gorilla-Radio.com, archived at GRadio.Substack.com, and now featuring on Telegram at: Https://t.me/gorillaradio2024. The show's blog is: GorillaRadioBlog.Blogspot.com, and you can check us out on Twitter @Paciffreepress
Trump continues the rich man’s rampage to maintain power
While it has been mildly entertaining to watch Trump’s healthcare plan slammed by liberals and conservatives, that’s only a thin silver lining to the unconscionable piece of garbage that has been named the American Health Care Act.
While conservatives have been concerned that the tax credits for insurance premiums are simply one more entitlement programs for the poor (which in it of itself is confusing as tax-funded vouchers for private schools have been a longstanding strategy for the Republicans), the reality is that the bill is actually an entitlement program for the already rich and powerful.
Healthcare analysts estimate that 10-20 million Americans will lose their health insurance under this plan.
The populations that stand to lose the most? Low-income Americans, our elders, and women. What’s going unsaid is that rich men stand to gain the most.
The American Health Care Act touts the same fiscal bullshit that has never helped the average American: deregulation and tax cuts. The fact is that tax cuts to the wealthy never “trickle down.” It’s so crazy that we even tout “trickle down” as a reasonable option. Why would we think that under-resourced Americans with the cards stacked against them should get a trickle?!
The same criticism applies to Medicaid block funding, another part of the Republican plan. Not only does Trump want to repeal the Medicaid expansion that was part of the Affordable Care Act; he wants to move to block funding of that program too. That means that states will get a hunk of money without any guidance or regulation on how it must be spent. Legislators will have free reign to redefine who qualifies for Medicaid without any accountability to make sure that our most disenfranchised communities get the coverage. People of Color, Women, those who suffer from mental illness, are wll groups that have never gotten what they deserve when getting it depends upon the goodwill of those in power.
The bottom-line is that deregulation always benefits those in power. For those white, middle-class Americans who voted for Trump because they wanted to “drain the swamp?” This is the opposite and it’s just proving what the rest of us knew all along: Donald Trump is a rich, white man and the definition of the swamp. In fact, that swamp used to be a beautiful pond until people like Trump polluted it in order to amass their fortunes.
Healthcare costs continue to be a major cause of bankruptcy. Under the Affordable Care Act, the credit amount that citizens got towards buying insurance was based on the actual cost of insurance in their local market. Under Trump’s new plan, everybody gets a flat rate voucher that is a pittance compared to actual premium costs. The result? Americans can’t afford health insurance and that only exacerbates the bankruptcy problem.
Furthermore, the Republicans are abusing their power in the most fiscally unethical way possible. When it will benefit them to deregulate, they do. But where’s their precious deregulation when it comes to Women’s health? Republicans don’t like Planned Parenthood, so bam! like the bully on the elementary school playground, they’ve banned ALL funding to Planned Parenthood despite the fact that most Planned Parenthood operations don’t even perform abortions.
But I won’t waste my breath citing facts. Our current presidential administration has no regard for them and freely synthesizes “alternative facts” in the blink of an eye. We elected a ruthless businessman to lead a corrupt military-industrial-congressional complex. It’s no surprise that the result is a healthcare plan that won’t actually improve the health of the average American.
Dystopias have recently achieved full-spectrum dominance. Kids are drawn to such stories -- The Giver, Hunger Games -- like Goths to piercings. TV shows about zombie apocalypses, pandemics, and technology run amok inspire binge watching. We’ve seen the world-gone-truly-bad a thousand times over on the big screen.
This apocalyptic outpouring has been so intense that talk of “peak dystopia” started to circulate several years ago. Yet the stock of the doomsday cartel has shown no signs of falling, even as production continues at full blast. (A confession: with my recent novel Splinterlands I’ve contributed my own bit to flooding the dystopia market.) As novelist Junot Diaz argued last October, dystopia has become “the default narrative of the generation.”
Shortly after Diaz made that comment, dystopia became the default narrative for American politics as well when Donald Trump stepped off the set of The Celebrity Apprentice and into the Oval Office. With the election of an uber-narcissist incapable of distinguishing between fact and fantasy, all the dystopian nightmares that had gathered like storm clouds on the horizon -- nuclear war, climate change, a clash of civilizations -- suddenly moved overhead. Cue the rumble of thunder and the flash of lightning.
Tomgram: John Feffer, Next Stop: The Deconstruction Zone
[Note
for TomDispatch Readers: Consider today’s striking post by John Feffer a
reminder that you really should pick up his remarkable new dystopian
novel, Splinterlands,
which is also the latest Dispatch Book. As Barbara Ehrenreich has
pointed out, Feffer's tale from the year 2050 “paints a startling
portrait of a post-apocalyptic tomorrow that is fast becoming a reality
today.” (And keep in mind that she wrote that before Donald Trump became
president!) When you buy the book, you’ll not only get a great, if
chilling, read, but also give a bit of much-appreciated extra support to
this website. Or, if you’re in a generous mood, for a $100 donation
($125 if you live outside the USA), you can get a signed, personalized
copy of Splinterlands from the author. Check out our donation page for the details. Tom]
“More
than 25 years ago, as I sat on the roof of our house watching the
neighborhood’s furniture float down the street, I thought things
couldn’t get any worse. Everything I owned was under water. The capital
of my country was ruined. Mother Earth was exacting its revenge upon
its most arrogant inhabitants. As it turned out, things got a lot
worse.”
I’m sure, like the rest of us, you haven’t forgotten
that disastrous event either, that moment in 2022 when a climate-charged
Hurricane Donald tore through Washington leveling the city, and our
nation’s capital was subsequently moved to Kansas. While no one could
have predicted such an event in all its details, there were few
firsthand observers of that rampaging super-storm who had foreseen the
fragmented, degraded world we now inhabit in a more clear-eyed manner
than Julian West (the observer quoted above) whose 2020 bestseller
Splinterlands eerily foresaw this present shattered globe of ours.
Okay,
okay, here’s where I fess up: it’s true that geo-paleontologist Julian
West (a namesake for the hero of Edward Bellamy’s nineteenth century
utopian novel, Looking Backward) is just a fantasy stand-in for John
Feffer, the author of the actual dystopian novel Splinterlands.
And if that isn’t complicated enough for you, keep in mind that Feffer
named that hurricane after Donald Trump while he was still writing his
book back in 2016 just as the election campaign was gearing up, so he
certainly does have a Julian West-style sense of what’s to come. Now,
of course, Hurricane Donald has hit Washington in a tweet-charged storm
of chaos and dystopian energy. And so today, Feffer turns his attention
to what to make of that human hurricane at a moment when Americans are
signaling their dystopian fears by driving novels like 1984 to the tops of bestseller lists -- and not just in bastions of anti-Trumpist feeling either. So strap your jet pack to your back and take off with Feffer into a present that feels all too much like some dystopian future to all too many of us. Tom
Doubling Down on Dystopia:
Preventing the Triumph of Trump’s Will
by John Feffer
The response among those horrified by the results of the recent presidential election has been four-fold.
First came denial -- from the existential dread that hammered the solar plexus as the election returns trickled in that Tuesday night to the more prosaic reluctance to get out of bed the morning after. Then came the fantasies of flight, as tens of thousands of Americans checked to see if their passports were still valid and if the ark bound for New Zealand had any berths free. The third stage has been resistance: millions poured into the streets to protest, mobilized at airports to welcome temporarily banned immigrants, and flocked to congressional meet-and-greets to air their grievances with Republicans and Democrats alike.
The fourth step, concurrent with all the others, has been to delve into the dystopias of the past as if they contained some Da Vinci code for deciphering our present predicament. Classics like Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, George Orwell’s 1984, and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale quickly climbed back onto bestseller lists.
It might seem counterintuitive -- or a perverse form of escapism -- to turn from the dystopia of reality to that of fiction. Keep in mind, though, that those novels became bestsellers in their own time precisely because they offered refuge and narratives of resistance for those who feared (in order of publication) the rise of Nazism, the spread of Stalinism, or the resurgence of state-backed misogyny in the Reagan years.
These days, with journalists scrambling to cover the latest outrage from the White House, perhaps it was only natural for readers to seek refuge in the works of writers who took the longer view. After all, it’s an understandable impulse to want to turn the page and find out what happens next. And dystopian narratives are there, in part, to help us brace for the worst, while identifying possible ways out of the downward spiral toward hell.
The dystopian classics, however, are not necessarily well suited to our current moment. They generally depict totalitarian states under a Big Brother figure and a panoptical authority that controls everything from the center, a scenario that's fascist or communist or just plain North Korean. Certainly, Donald Trump wants his face everywhere, his name on everything, his little fingers in every pot. But the dangers of the current dystopian moment don’t lie in the centralizing of control. Not yet, anyway.
The Trump era so far is all about the center not holding, a time when, in the words of the poet Yeats, things fall apart. Forget about Hannah Arendt and The Origins of Totalitarianism -- also a hot seller on Amazon -- and focus more on chaos theory. Unpredictability, incompetence, and demolition are the dystopian watchwords of the current moment, as the world threatens to fragment before our very eyes.
Don’t be fooled by Trump’s talk of a trillion-dollar infrastructure boom. His team has a very different project in mind, and you can read it on the signpost up ahead. Next Stop: The Deconstruction Zone.
The Zombie Election
In February 2016, when Donald Trump won his first primary in New Hampshire, the New York Daily News headlined it “Dawn of the Brain Dead” and likened Trump’s GOP supporters to “mindless zombies.” Not to be outdone, that conspiracy-minded purveyor of fake news, Alex Jones, routinely described Hillary Clinton supporters as “zombies” on his Trump-positive website Infowars.
The references to zombies spoke to the apocalyptic mindset of both sides. Donald Trump deliberately tapped into the end-of-days impulses of Christian evangelicals, anti-globalists, and white power enthusiasts, who view anyone who hasn’t drunk their Kool-Aid as a dead soul. Meanwhile, those fearful that the billionaire blowhard might win the election began spreading the “Trumpocalypse” meme as they warned of the coming of ever more severe climate change, the collapse of the global economy, and the outbreak of race wars. There was virtually no middle ground between the groups, aside from those who decided to steer clear of the election altogether. The mutual disgust with which each side viewed the other encouraged just the kind of dehumanization implied by that zombie label.
Zombies have become a political metaphor for another reason as well. What’s frightening about the flesh eating undead in their current incarnations is that they are not a formal army. There are no zombie leaders, no zombie battle plans. They shamble along in herds in search of prey. “Our fascination with zombies is partly a transposed fear of immigration,” I wrote in 2013, “of China displacing the United States as the world’s top economy, of bots taking over our computers, of financial markets that can melt down in a single morning.”
Zombies, in other words, reflect anxiety over a loss of control associated with globalization. In this context, the “rise of the rest” conjures up images of a mass of undifferentiated resource consumers -- hungry others who are little more than mouths on legs -- storming the citadels of the West.
During the election campaign, the Trump team appealed to those very fears by running ads during the popular TV series The Walking Dead that deliberately played on anti-immigration concerns. Once in office, Trump has put into motion his campaign pledges to wall off the United States from Mexico, keep out Muslims, and retreat into Fortress America. He has put special effort into reinforcing the notion that the outside world is a deeply scary place -- even Paris, even Sweden! -- as if The Walking Dead were a documentary and the zombie threat quite real.
The concentration of power in the executive branch, and Trump’s evident willingness to wield it, certainly echoes dystopian fears of 1984-style totalitarianism. So have the extraordinary lies, the broadsides against the media (“enemies of the people”), and the targeting of internal and external adversaries of every sort. But this is no totalitarian moment. Trump is not interested in constructing a superstate like Oceania or even a provincial dictatorship like Airstrip One, both of which Orwell described so convincingly in his novel.
Instead, coming out of the gate, the new administration has focused on what Trump’s chief strategist and white nationalist Stephen Bannon promised to do several years ago: “bring everything crashing down.”
The Bannon Dystopia
Dystopians on the right have their own version of 1984. They’ve long been warning that liberals want to establish an all-powerful state that restricts gun ownership, bans the sale of super-sized sodas, and forces mythic “death panels” on the unwary. These right-wing Cassandras are worried not so much about Big Brother as about Big Nanny, though the more extreme among them also claim that liberals are covert fascists, closet communists, or even agents of the caliphate.
Strangely enough, however, these same right-wing dystopians -- former Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin on the (non-existent) death panels, Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) on gun control, right-wing pundit Ann Coulter on soda bans and other trivial pursuits -- have never complained about the massive build-up of government power in far more significant areas: namely, the military and the intelligence agencies. Indeed, now that they are back on top, the new Trumpianized “conservatives” are perfectly happy to expand state power by throwing even more money at the Pentagon and potentially giving greater scope to the CIA in its future interrogations of terror suspects. Despite falling rates of violent crime -- a tiny uptick in 2015 obscures the fact that these remain at a historic low -- Trump also wants to beef up the police to deal with American “carnage.”
So far, so 1984. But the radically new element on the Trump administration’s agenda has nothing to do with the construction of a more powerful state. At this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, Bannon spoke instead of what was truly crucial to him (and assumedly the president): the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” Here, Bannon was speaking specifically of unleashing Wall Street, polluting industries, gun sellers, while freeing a wide range of economic actors from regulation of just about any sort. But Trump’s cabinet appointments and the first indications of what a Trumpian budget might look like suggest a far broader agenda aimed at kneecapping the non-military part of the state by sidelining entire agencies and gutting regulatory enforcement.
Even the State Department hasn’t proved safe from demolition. With professional diplomats out of the loop, Pennsylvania Avenue, not Foggy Bottom, will be the locus of control for international relations. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is being reduced to little more than an ornament as the new triumvirate of Trump, Bannon, and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner take over foreign policy (though Vice President Pence hovers in the background like a chaperone at the prom). Meanwhile, with a proposed $54 billion future hike in its budget, Trump’s Pentagon will remain untouched by the wrecking ball, as the new president presides over a devastating shrinkage of the government he dislikes and a metastasis of what he loves. (Think: giant, shiny aircraft carriers!)
Thus far, the Trump administration has acted with highly publicized incompetence: administration figures contradicting each other, executive orders short-circuiting the government machinery, tweets wildly caroming around the Internet universe, and basic functions like press conferences handled with all the aplomb of a non-human primate. Trump’s appointees, including Bannon, have looked like anything but skilled demolition experts. This is certainly no Gorbachev-style perestroika, which eventually led to the unraveling of the Soviet Union. It’s nothing like the “shock therapy” programs that first knocked down and then remade the states of Eastern Europe after 1989.
However, since deconstruction is so much easier than construction and Bannon prides himself on his honey-badger-like persistence, the administration’s project, messy as it seems so far, is likely to prove quite capable of doing real damage. In fact, if you want a more disturbing interpretation of Donald Trump’s first months in office, consider this: What if all the chaos is not an unintended consequence of a greenhorn administration but an actual strategy?
All that dust in the air comes, after all, from the chaotic first steps in a projected massive demolition process and may already be obscuring the fact that Trump is attempting to push through a fundamentally anti-American and potentially supremely unpopular program. He aims to destroy the status quo, as Bannon promised, and replace it with a new world order defined by three Cs: Conservative, Christian, and Caucasian. Let the media cover what they please; let the critics laugh all they like about executive branch antics. In the meantime, all the president’s men are trying to impose their will on a recalcitrant country and world.
Triumph of the Will
I took a course in college on the rise of Nazism in Germany. At one point, the professor showed us Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl’s famous 1935 documentary that covered the Nazi Party Congress of the previous year and featured extensive footage of Adolf Hitler addressing the faithful. Triumph of the Will was a blockbuster film, our professor assured us. It spread the name of Hitler worldwide and established Riefenstahl’s reputation as a filmmaker. It was so popular inside Germany that it ran for months on end at movie theaters, and people returned again and again to watch it. Our teacher promised us that we would find it fascinating.
Triumph of the Will was not fascinating. Even for students engrossed in the details of the Nazi surge to power, the nearly two-hour documentary was a tremendous bore. After it was over, we bombarded the teacher with questions and complaints. How could he have imagined that we would find it fascinating?
He smiled. That’s the fascinating part, he said. Here was this extraordinarily popular film, and it’s now nearly impossible for Americans to sit through the whole thing. He wanted us to understand that people in Nazi Germany had an entirely different mindset, that they were participating in a kind of mass frenzy. They didn’t find Nazism abhorrent. They didn’t think they were living in a dystopia. They were true believers.
Many Americans are now having their Triumph of the Will moment. They watch Donald Trump repeatedly without getting bored or disgusted. They believe that history has anointed a new leader to revive the country and restore it to its rightful place in the world. They’ve been convinced that the last eight years were a liberal dystopia and what is happening now is, if not utopian, then the first steps in that direction.
A hard core of those enthralled by Trump cannot be convinced otherwise. They hold liberal elites in contempt. They don’t believe CNN or The New York Times. Many subscribe to outlandish theories about Islam and immigrants and the continuing covert machinations of that most famous “Islamic immigrant” of them all, Barack Obama.
For this hard core of Trump supporters, the United States could begin to break down, the economy take a nosedive, the international community hold the leadership in Washington in contempt, and they will continue to believe in Trump and Trumpism.
The president could even gun down a few people and his most fervent supporters would say nothing except, “Good shot, Mr. President!” Remember: even after Nazi Germany went down in fiery defeat in 1945, significant numbers of Germans remained in thrall to National Socialism. In 1947, more than half of those surveyed still believed that Nazism was a good idea carried out badly.
But plenty of Trump supporters -- whether they’re disaffected Democrats, Hillary-hating independents, or rock-ribbed Republican conservatives -- don’t fit such a definition. Some have already become deeply disillusioned by the antics of Donald J. and the demolition derby that his advisers are planning to unleash inside the U.S. government, which may, in the end, batter their lives badly. They can be brought over. This is potentially the biggest of big-tent moments for launching the broadest possible resistance under the banner of a patriotism that portrays Trump and Bannon as guilty of un-American activities.
And it’s here in particular that so many dystopian novels provide the wrong kind of guidance. Trump’s end will not come at the hands of a Katniss Everdeen. A belief in an individual savior who successfully challenges a “totalitarian” system got us into this crisis in the first place when Donald Trump sold himself as the crusading outsider against a “deep state” controlled by devious liberals, craven conservatives, and a complicit mainstream media. Nor will it help for Americans to dream about leading their states out of the Union (are you listening, California?) or for individuals to retreat into political purism. Given that the administration’s dystopian vision is based on chaos and fragmentation, the oppositional response should be to unite everyone opposed, or even potentially opposed, to what Washington is now doing.
As readers, we are free to interpret dystopian fiction the way we please. As citizens, we can do something far more subversive. We can rewrite our own dystopian reality. We can change that bleak future ourselves. To do so, however, we would need to put together a better plot, introduce some more interesting and colorful characters, and, before it’s too late, write a much better ending that doesn’t just leave us with explosions, screams, and fade to black.
John Feffer is the author of the new dystopian novel, Splinterlands (a Dispatch Books original with Haymarket Books), which Publishers Weekly hails as “a chilling, thoughtful, and intuitive warning.” He is the director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies and a TomDispatch regular.
In trying to unravel the debates over U.S. foreign policy currently being fought out in the editorial pages of the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the magazine Foreign Policy, one might consider starting in late December on a bitter cold ridge in northern Wyoming, where 81 men of the U.S. Army’s 18th Infantry Regiment were pursuing some Indians over a rocky ridge.
The year was 1866 and the U.S. was at war with the local tribes—Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho—in an attempt to open a trail into the Montana gold fields.
The fighting was going badly for an army fresh from the battlefields of the Civil War.
Oglala Sioux leader Red Cloud and his savvy lieutenant Crazy Horse did not fight like Robert E. Lee, but rather like General Vo Nguyen Giap a hundred years in the future: an ambush by attackers who quickly vanished, isolated posts overrun, supply wagons looted and burned.
The time and place was vastly different, but the men who designed the war against Native Americans would be comfortable with the rationale that currently impel U.S. foreign policy. In their view, the Army was not fighting for gold in 1866, but was embarked on a moral crusade to civilize the savages, to build a shining “city on a hill,” to be that “exceptional” nation that stands above all others. The fact that this holy war would kill hundreds of thousands of the continent’s original owners and sentence the survivors to grinding poverty was irrelevant.
Is that very much different than the way the butcher bills for the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the overthrow of Libya’s government and the Syrian civil war is excused as unfortunate collateral damage in America’s campaign to spread freedom and democracy to the rest of the world?
“We came, we saw, he died,” bragged then U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about the murder of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. Libya is now a failed state, wracked by civil war and a major jumping off place for refugees fleeing U.S. wars in Yemen, Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan.
In his book The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire, author and former New York Times reporter Stephen Kinzer traces the roots of this millennium view that America’s mission was to “regenerate the world.” That this crusade was many times accompanied by stupendous violence is a detail that left unexamined by the people who designed those campaigns.
Kinzer argues that this sense of exceptionalism was developed during the Spanish-American War (1898) that gave the U.S. colonies in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Guam and the Philippines. But, as John Dower demonstrates in his brilliant book on WW II in the Pacific, “War Without Mercy,” that sentiment originated in the campaigns against Native Americans. Indeed, some of the same soldiers who tracked down Apaches in the Southwest and massacred Sioux Ghost Dancers at Wounded Knee would go on to fight insurgents in the Philippines.
The language has shifted from the unvarnished imperial rhetoric of men like Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge and Senator Albert Beveridge, who firmly believed in “the white man’s burden”—a line from a poem by Rudyard Kipling about the American conquest of the Philippines.
Today’s humanitarian interventionists have substituted the words “international” and “global” for “imperial,” though the recipients of “globalism” sometimes have difficulty discerning the difference. At the ideological core of exceptionalism is the idea that American, in the words of former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright—and repeated by presidential candidate Hillary Clinton—is the “one essential nation” whose duty it is to spread the gospel of free markets and democracy.
On the surface there appear to be sharp differences between what could call “establishment” foreign policy mavens like Zbigniew Brzezinski, Paul Wasserman, Jonathan Stevenson, and Robert Kagan, from the brick tossers like Stephen Bannon, Sebastian Gorka, and Stephen Miller. To a certain extent there are. Bannon, for instance, predicts a major land war in the Middle East and a war over the South China Sea. Next to those fulminations, liberal interventionists like Kagan, and even neoconservatives like Max Boot, seem reasoned. But the “old hands” and sober thinkers are, in many ways, just as deluded as the Trump bomb throwers.
A case in point is a recent article by the Brookings Institute’s Kagan entitled “Backing Into World War III,” in which he argues the U.S. must challenge Russia and China “before it is too late,” and that “accepting spheres of influence is a recipe for disaster.” Kagan has generally been lumped in with neo-cons like Boot, Paul Wolfowitz, Elliot Abrams, and Richard Perle—the latter three helped design the invasion of Iraq—but he calls himself a liberal interventionist and supported Hillary Clinton in the last election. Clinton is a leading interventionist, along with former UN representative Samantha Power and President Obama’s natural Security Advisor, Susan Rice.
Kagan posits,
“China and Russia are classic revisionist powers. Although both have never enjoyed greater security from foreign powers than they do today—Russia from its traditional enemies to the west, China from its traditional enemy in the east—they are dissatisfied with the current global configuration of power. Both seek to restore hegemonic dominance they once enjoyed in their respective regions.”
Those “regions” include Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia for Russia, and essentially everything west of the Hawaiian Islands for China.
For Kagan this is less about real estate than “The mere existence of democracies on their borders, the global free flow of information they cannot control, the dangerous connection between free market capitalism and political freedom—all pose a threat to rulers who depend on keeping restive forces in their own countries in check.”
There are times when one wonders what world people like Kagan live in.
As Anatol Lieven, foreign policy researcher, journalist and currently a professor at Georgetown University in Qatar, points out concerning Russia,
“A child with a map can look at where the strategic border was in 1988 and where it is today, and work out which side has advanced in which direction.”
The 1999 Yugoslav War served as an excuse for President Bill Clinton to break a decade-old agreement with the then Soviet Union not to recruit former members of the Warsaw Pact into NATO. In the war’s aftermath, the western coalition signed up Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Romania. For the first time in modern history, Russia has a hostile military alliance on its borders, including American soldiers. Exactly how this gives Russia “greater security” from her enemies in the West is not clear.
Of course, in a way, Kagan has a dog in this fight. His wife, former Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasian Affairs, Victoria Nuland, helped organize the 2014 coup that overthrew Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych. Prior to the coup, Nuland was caught on tape using a vulgar term to dismiss peace efforts by the European Union and discussing who would replace Yanukovych. Nuland also admitted that the U.S. had spent $5 billion trying to influence Ukraine’s political development.
As Lieven argues,
“Russia’s intervention in Ukraine is about Ukraine, a country of supreme historical, ethnic, cultural, strategic, and economic importance to Russia. It implies nothing for the rest of Eastern Europe.”
Kagan gives no evidence of Russia’s designs on Central Asia, although one assumes he is talking about the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Since that trade and security grouping includes China, India and Pakistan, as well as Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan—Iran has applied for membership—exactly how Russia would “dominate” those countries is not clear.
Kagan’s argument that “accommodation” with Russia only encourages further aggression is, according to Lieven, a “view based upon self-deception on the part of western elites who are interested in maintaining confrontation with Russia as a distraction from more important, painful problems at home, like migration, industrial decline and anger over globalization.”
As for “free market capitalism,” the fallout from the ravages that American style capital has wrought on its own people is one of the major reasons Donald Trump sits in the Oval Office.
According to Kagan, U.S. allies in Asia—he presents no evidence of this—are “wondering how reliable” the U.S. is given its “mostly rhetoric” pivot to Asia, its “inadequate” defense spending,” its “premature” and “unnecessary” withdrawal from Iraq, and its “accommodating agreement with Iran on its nuclear program.”
One wonders through what looking glass the Brookings Institute views the world. The U.S. has more than 400 military bases in Asia, has turned Guam into a fortress, deployed Marines and nuclear capable aircraft in Australia and sent six of its 10 aircraft carriers to the region. It spends more on defense than the rest of the world combined. The illegal invasion of Iraq was an unmitigated disaster, and Iran has given up its nuclear enrichment program and its stockpile of enhanced uranium.
But in a world of “alternative facts,” the only thing that counts is that the U.S. no longer dominates the world as it did in the decades after World War II. “Only the United States has the capacity and unique geographical advantages to provide global security and relative stability,” writes Kagan, “there is no stable balance of power in Europe or Asia without the United States.”
The fact that the “security” and “stability” that Kagan yearns for has generated dozens of war, a frightening nuclear arms race, growing economic inequality and decades of support for dictators and monarchs on five continents never seems to figure into the equation.
Where the politics of Trump fits into all this is by no means clear. If the President goes with Bannon’s paranoid hate of Islam—and given conspiracy theorist and Islamophobe Frank Gaffney has just been appointed special advisor to the President that is not a bad bet—then things will go sharply south in the Middle East. If he pushes China and follows Bannon’s prediction that there will be a war between the two powers, maybe its time to look at real estate in New Zealand, like a number of billionaires—40 percent of whom are Americans—are already doing.
But no matter which foreign policy current one talks about, the “indispensible nation” concept—born out of the Indian and Spanish-American wars “weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living,” as Karl Marx wrote in the “18th Brumaire.
A century and a half ago on a snowy Wyoming ridge, a company of the 18th Infantry Regiment discovered that not everyone wanted that “shining city on a hill.” From out of a shallow creek bed and the surrounding cottonwoods and box elders, the people whose land the U.S. was in the process of stealing struck back. The battle of Lodge Pine Ridge did not last long, and none of the Regiment survived. It was a stunning blow in the only war against the U.S. that Native Americans won. Within less than two years the Army would admit defeat and retreat.
In the end the Indians were no match for the numbers, technology, and firepower of the U.S. Within a little more than three decades they were “civilized” into sterile, poverty-ridden reservations where the only “exceptionalism” they experience is the lowest life expectancy of any ethnic group in the United States.
The view that American institutions and its organization of capital is superior is a dangerous delusion and increasingly unacceptable—and unenforceable—in a multi-polar world. The tragedy is how widespread and deep these sentiments are. The world is not envious of that shining “city on a hill,” indeed, with Trump in the White House “aghast” would probably be a better sentiment than envy.
President Bashar al-Assad said that the solution to the crisis in Syria
should be through two parallel ways: the first one is to fight the
terrorists, and this is our duty as government, to defend the Syrians
and use any means in order to destroy the terrorists who’ve been killing
and destroying in Syria, and the second one is to make dialogue.
The
president added in an interview given to Chinese PHOENIX TV that any
foreign troops coming to Syria without our invitation or consultation or
permission, they are invaders, whether they are American, Turkish, or
any other one.
Here is the full text of the interview:
Question 1: Thank you Mr. President for having us here in Dimashq, the capital of Syria. I think this is the first interview you have with Chinese media after the national ceasefire and after so many fresh rounds of talks, both in Astana and in Geneva, and of course after US President Donald Trump’s inauguration, and these days, as we have seen, your troops are making steady progress in battlefields, but peace talks do not seem just as productive. So, as far as the Geneva talks is concerned, your chief negotiator, Mr. Jaafari, was trying hard to find out who should be sitting on the other side of the negotiation table. So, according to your idea, who should be sitting there?
President Assad: This is a very crucial question. If you want those negotiations to be fruitful, we have to ask “who is going to be sitting there?” I mean, there could be a lot of good people with good intentions, but the question is: who do they represent? That’s the question. In this situation, you have different groups, you have people who are, let’s say, patriotic, but they don’t represent anyone, they represent themselves. You have others who represent the terrorists, and you have terrorists on the table, and you have others who represent the agenda of foreign countries like Saudi Arabia, like Turkey, like France, UK and maybe the United States. So, it’s not a homogeneous meeting. If you want it to be fruitful, going back to the first point that I mentioned, it should be a real Syrian-Syrian negotiations. In spite of that, we went to that meeting because we think any kind of dialogue could be a good step toward the solution, because even those people who are terrorists or belonging to the terrorists or to other countries, they may change their mind and go back to their normality by going back to being real Syrians, detach themselves from being terrorists or agents to other groups. That’s why I say we didn’t expect Geneva to produce anything, but it’s a step, and it’s going to be a long way, and you may have other rounds, whether in Geneva or in Astana.
Question 2: But anyway, it is an intra-Syrian talks, right? But the matter of fact is, it is proxy dialogue. I mean, main parties do not meet and have dialogue directly.
President Assad: Exactly.
Journalist: Are you personally satisfied with the current negotiation format or mechanism?
President Assad: we didn’t forge this mechanism; it was forged by de Mistura and the UN with the influence of the countries that wanted to use those negotiations in order to make pressure on Syria, not to reach any resolution. As you just said, each one represents a different agenda, even the opposition delegations, it wasn’t one delegation; different delegations of the opposition. So, if I’m going to – as a government – if I’m going to negotiate with someone, who’s it going to be? Which one? Who represents who? That’s our question. So, you are right, this time there was no negotiations in Geneva, but this is one of the reasons, that’s why it didn’t reach anything. The only thing we discussed in Geneva was the agenda, the headlines, what are we going to discuss later, that’s it.
Question 3: But as we see, lot of time, money, energy have been put into this effort, and the clashes are still going on, people are still dying, and the refugees are still increasing.
President Assad: Exactly.
Journalist: What is the possible way of having a negotiation?
President Assad: Again, you are correct. The more delay you have, the more harm and destruction and killing and blood you’ll have within Syria, that’s why we are very eager to achieve a solution, but how and in which way? You need to have two parallel ways: the first one is to fight the terrorists, and this is our duty as government, to defend the Syrians and use any means in order to destroy the terrorists who’ve been killing and destroying in Syria. The second one is to make dialogue. This dialogue has many different aspects; you have the political one, which is related to the future of Syria; what political system do you need, what kind? It doesn’t matter which one, it depends on the Syrians, and they’re going to have referendum about what they want. The second part is to try to bring many of those people who were affiliated to the terrorists or who committed any terrorist acts to go back to their normality and lay down their armaments and to live normal life in return for amnesty that has been offered by the government, and we’ve been going in that direction for three years, and it worked very well. It worked very well. So, actually, if you want to talk about the real political solution since the beginning of the crisis, of the war on Syria, till this moment, the only solution was those reconciliations between the government and the different militants in Syria, many of them joined the government now, and they are fighting with the government. Some of them laid down their arms
Question 4: But talking about the Syria war, you can never exclude the foreign factors. The Saudi-backed high negotiating committee, HNC, are saying that they are counting on the Trump administration to play a positive role instead of the mistaken policies under his predecessor Barack Obama. So, from your side, what do you expect from Trump’s Middle East policy, particularly policy on Syria?
President Assad: The first part that you mentioned about their hopes, when you pin your hopes on a foreign country, doesn’t matter which foreign country, it means you’re not patriotic, and this is proved, because they should depend on the support of the Syrian people, not any other government or administration.
Now, regarding the Trump administration, during his campaign and after the campaign, the main rhetoric of the Trump administration and the president himself was about the priority of defeating ISIS. I said since the beginning that this is a promising approach to what’s happening in Syria and in Iraq, because we live in the same area and we face the same enemy. We haven’t seen anything concrete yet regarding this rhetoric, because we’ve been seeing now certain is a local kind of raids. You cannot deal with terrorism on local basis; it should be comprehensive, it cannot be partial or temporary. It cannot be from the air, it should be in cooperation with the troops on the ground, that’s why the Russians succeeded, since they supported the Syrian Army in pushing ISIS to shrink, not to expand as it used to be before that. So, we have hopes that this taking into consideration that talking about ISIS doesn’t mean talking about the whole terrorism; ISIS is one of the products, al-Nusra is another product, you have so many groups in Syria, they are not ISIS, but they are Al Qaeda, they have the same background of the Wahabi extremist ideology.
Question 5: So, Mr. President, you and Mr. Donald Trump actually share the same priority which is counter-terrorism, and both of you hate fake news. Do you see any room for cooperation?
President Assad: Yeah, in theory, yes, but practically, not yet, because there’s no link between Syria and the United States on the formal level. Even their raids against ISIS that I just mentioned, which are only a few raids, happened without the cooperation or the consultation with the Syrian Army or the Syrian government which is illegal as we always say. So, theoretically we share those goals, but particularly, not yet.
Question 6: Do you have personal contact with the President of the United States?
President Assad: Not at all.
Journalist: Direct or indirect.
President Assad: Indirect, you have so many channels, but you cannot bet on private channels. It should be formal, this is where you can talk about a real relation with another government.
Question 7: As we speak, top generals from Turkey, Russia, and the United States are meeting somewhere in Turkey to discuss tensions in northern Syria, where mutually- suspicious forces are allied with these countries. So, do you have a plan for a final attack on Daesh when the main players actually do need an effective coordination in order to clear Syria of all terror groups?
President Assad: Yeah, if you want to link that meeting with ISIS in particular, it won’t be objective, because at least one party, which is Turkey, has been supporting ISIS till this moment, because Erdogan, the Turkish President, is Muslim Brotherhood. He’s ideologically linked and sympathetic with ISIS and with al-Nusra, and everybody knows about this in our region, and he helped them either through armaments, logistically, through exporting oil. For the other party, which is the United States, at least during Obama’s administration, they dealt with ISIS by overlooking their smuggling the Syrian oil to Turkey, and this is how they can get money in order to recruit terrorists from around the world, and they didn’t try to do anything more than cosmetic against ISIS. The only serious party in that regard is Russia, which is effectively attacking ISIS in cooperation with us. So, the question is: how can they cooperate, and I think the Russians have hope that the two parties join the Russians and the Syrians in their fight against terrorism. So, we have more hopes now regarding the American party because of the new administration, while in Turkey nothing has changed in that regard. ISIS in the north have only one route of supply, it’s through Turkey, and they’re still alive and they’re still active and they’re still resisting different kinds of waves of attacks, because of the Turkish support.
Question 8: Now, US troops are in Manbej. Is the greenlight from your side? Did you open the door for these American troops?
President Assad: No, no, we didn’t. Any foreign troops coming to Syria without our invitation or consultation or permission, they are invaders, whether they are American, Turkish, or any other one. And we don’t think this is going to help. What are they going to do? To fight ISIS? The Americans lost nearly every war. They lost in Iraq, they had to withdraw at the end. Even in Somalia, let alone Vietnam in the past and Afghanistan, your neighboring country. They didn’t succeed anywhere they sent troops, they only create a mess; they are very good in creating problems and destroying, but they are very bad in finding solutions.
Question 9: Talking about Russia and China, they just vetoed a new UN sanction on Syria last week. What do these Chinese vetoes mean exactly for your country?
President Assad: Let’s be very clear about their position, which is not to support the Syrian government or the Syrian president, because in the West they try to portray it as a personal problem, and as Russia and China and other countries and Iran support that person as president. It’s not the case. China is a member of the Security Council, and it’s committed to the Charter of the United Nations. In that veto, China has defended first of all the Charter, because the United Nations was created in order to restore stability around the world. Actually, the Western countries, especially the permanent members of the Council as a tool or means in order to change regimes or governments and to implement their agenda, not to restore stability, and actually to create more instability around the world. So the second part is that China restored stability in the world by creating some kind of political balance within the United Nations, of course in cooperation with Russia, which is very important for the whole world. Of course, Syria was the headline, the main headline, this is good for Syria, but again it’s good for the rest of the world. Third, the same countries that wanted to use the UN Charter for their own vested interested are the same countries who interfered or tried to intervene in your country in the late 90s, and they used different headlines, human rights, and so on, and you know that, and if they had the chance, they would change every government in the world, whether big country or small country, just when this government tries to be a little bit independent. So, China protected the Chinese interests, Syrian interests, and the world interests, especially the small countries or the weak countries.
Question 10: If I’m not mistaken, you said China is going to play a role in the reconstruction of Syria. So, in which areas you think China can contribute to bring Syrian people back to their normal life after so many years of hardships?
President Assad: Actually, if you talk about what the terrorists have been doing the last six years, it’s destroying everything regarding the infrastructure. In spite of that, the Syrian government is still effective, at least by providing the minimum needs for the Syrian people. But they’ve been destroying everything in every sector with no exception. Adding to that, the Western embargo in Syria has prevented Syria from having even the basic needs for the livelihood of any citizen in Syria. So, in which sector? In every sector. I mean, China can be in every sector with no exception, because we have damage in every sector. But if we talk about now, before this comprehensive reconstruction starts, China now is being involved directly in building many projects, mainly industrial projects, in Syria, and we have many Chinese experts now working in Syria in different projects in order to set up those projects. But of course, when you have more stability, the most important thing is building the destroyed suburbs. This is the most important part of the reconstruction. The second one is the infrastructure; the sanitation system, the electricity, the oil fields, everything, with no exception. The third one: the industrial projects, which could belong to the private sector or the public sector in Syria.
Question 11: Alright. And it seems no secret that there are some Chinese extremists are here, fighting alongside Daesh. I think it is a threat to both Syria and China. What concrete or effective measures do you have to control border and prevent these extremists from free movement in the region?
President Assad: When you talk about extremists or terrorists, it doesn’t matter what their nationality is, because they don’t recognize borders, and they don’t belong to a country. The only difference between nationality and nationality, is that those for example who came from your country, they know your country more than the others, so they can do more harm in your country that others, and the same for Syrians, the same for Russian terrorist, and so on. So now, the measures, every terrorist should be defeated and demolished, unless he changed his position to the normal life. Second, because you’re talking about different nationalities -more than 80 nationalities – you should have cooperation with the other governments, especially in the intelligence field, and that’s what’s happening for example with the Chinese intelligence regarding the Uyghur terrorists who are coming from China through Turkey. Unfortunately, the only means that we don’t have now and we don’t control is our borders with Turkey, because the Uyghur in Particular, they came from Turkey, the others coming maybe from Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, form the sea, maybe, and the majority from Turkey, but the Uyghur terrorists coming mainly from Turkey. Why? I don’t know why, but they have the support of the Turkish government, and they were gathered and collected in one group, and they were sent to the northern part of Syria. So, the mission now is to attack them, wherever they existed. Of course, sometimes you cannot tell which one… who is who, they mix with each other, but sometimes they work as separate groups from different nationalities. And this is very crucial kind of cooperation between the Syrian and the Chinese intelligence, and we did many good steps in that regard.
Question 12: Mr. President, as you may be fully aware that the “White Helmets” took an Oscar this year for the best documentary short, but folks are saying that the truth about this “White Helmets” is not like what Netflix has presented, so what is your take on this?
President Assad: First of all, we have to congratulate al-Nusra for having the first Oscar! This is an unprecedented event for the West to give Al Qaeda an Oscar; this is unbelievable, and this is another proof that the Oscars, Nobel, all these things are politicized certificates, that’s how I can look at it. The White Helmets story is very simple; it is a facelift of al-Nusra Front in Syria, just to change their ugly face into a more humanitarian face, that’s it. And you have many videos on the net and of course images broadcasted by the White Helmets that condemn the White Helmets as a terrorists group, where you can see the same person wearing the white helmet and celebrating over the dead bodies of Syrian soldiers. So, that’s what the Oscar went to, to those terrorists. So, it’s a story just to try to prevent the Syrian Army during the liberation of Aleppo from making more pressure on the attacking and liberating the districts within the city that have been occupied by those terrorists, to say that the Syrian Army and the Russians are attacking the civilians and the innocents and the humanitarian people.
Question 13: Right. Now Palmyra. I took a one-day trip to Palmyra this time. Now, the city is under your control, so as its strategic position is concerned, because Homs is the heart of Syria, it’s right in the middle, now, when you have Palmyra, what is your next target? Are you going to expand a military operation into Raqqa and Dier Ezzor?
President Assad: We are very close to Raqqa now. Yesterday, our troops reached the Euphrates River which is very close to Raqqa city, and Raqqa is the stronghold of ISIS today, so it’s going to be a priority for us, but that doesn’t mean the other cities are not priority, in time that could be in parallel, because Palmyra is on the way to Dier Ezzor city in the eastern part of Syria which is close to the Iraqi borders, and those areas that have been used by ISIS as route for logistic support between ISIS in Iraq and ISIS in Syria. So, whether you attack the stronghold or you attack the route that ISIS uses, it has the same result.
Question 14: How many days do you think this war is going to last?
President Assad: if we presume that you don’t have foreign intervention, it will take a few months. It’s not very complicated internally. The complexity of this war is the foreign intervention. This is the problem. So, in the face of that intervention, the good thing that we gained during the war is the unity of the society. At the very beginning, the vision for many Syrians wasn’t very clear about what’s happening. Many believed the propaganda of the West about the reality, about the real story, that this is against the oppression. If it’s against the oppression, why the people in Saudi Arabia didn’t revolt, for example? So, now what we gained is this, this is our strongest foundation to end that war. We always have hope that this year is going to be the last year. But at the end, this is war and you can’t expect what is going to happen precisely.
Question 15: Mr. President, you are President of the Syrian Republic, at the same time, you are a loving husband and a father of three. How can you balance the role of being a President, a father, and a husband?
President Assad: If you cannot succeed in your small duty which is your family, you cannot succeed in your bigger duty or more comprehensive duty at the level of a country. So, there is no excuse that if you have a lot of work to abandon your duties; it’s a duty. You have to be very clear about that, you have to fulfill those duties in a very good way. Of course, sometimes those circumstances do not allow you to do whatever you have to do, your duties, fully, let’s say.
Journalist: During a day, how much time you spend on work, and how much time you spend with your family members?
President Assad: Actually, it’s not about the time, because even if you are at your home, you have to work.
Journalist: Okay.
President Assad: Let’s say, in the morning and the evening, you have the chance, but in between and after those times, you have the whole day to work.
Question 16: Have you ever thought of leaving this country for the sake of your family?
President Assad: Never, after six years, I mean the most difficult times passed; it was in 2012 and 2013, those times we never thought about it, how can I think about it now?
So, no, no, this is not an option. Whenever you have any kind of reluctance, you will lose. You will lose not with your enemies; you lose with your supporters. Those supporters, I mean the people you work with, the fighters, the army, they will feel if you’re not determined to defend your country. We never had any feeling neither me nor any member of my family.
Question 17: And how is Kareem’s Chinese getting along?
President Assad: He learned the basics of Chinese language, I think two years ago. Unfortunately, the lady and the man who taught him had to leave, because they were members of the Chinese Embassy. They went back to China. Now, he stopped improve his Chinese language.
Question 18: Do you think it is a good choice to learn Chinese for him?
President Assad: Of course, of course, because China is a rising power.
Journalist: You didn’t force him to learn Chinese? It’s his own option, right?
President Assad: No, no, we never thought about it, actually. I didn’t think that he has to learn Chinese, and I didn’t expect him, if I thought about it, that he would say yes, because for many in the world the Chinese language is a difficult language to learn. He took the initiative and he said I want to learn Chinese, and actually till this moment, I didn’t ask him why. I want him to feel free, but when he’s getting older, I’m going to ask him how? How did it come through your mind to learn this language, this difficult language, but of course important language.
Journalist: You didn’t ask him before?
President Assad: No, not yet.
Journalist: So, you think it’s a good choice?
President Assad: Of course, of course. As I said, it’s a rising power, it’s important. I mean, most of the world has different kinds of relation with China whether in science, in politics, in economy, in business, I mean, in every filed you need it now. And our relation for the future is going to be on the rise. It was good, but it’s going to be on the rise because when a country like China proves that it’s a real friend, a friend that you can rely on, it’s very natural to have better relation on the popular level, not only on the formal level.
Journalist: Thank you Mr. President, thank you for your time.
President Assad: Thank you for coming to Syria, you’re most welcome.
On the morning of March 7, Donald Trump tweeted an outrageous lie about Guantánamo — “122 vicious prisoners, released by the Obama Administration from Gitmo, have returned to the battlefield. Just another terrible decision!”
That number, 122, was taken from a two-page “Summary of the Reengagement of Detainees Formerly Held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba,” issued by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in July 2016.
The summaries are issued twice a year, and, crucially, what Trump neglected to mention is that 113 of the 122 men referred to in that summary were released under President Bush, and just nine were released under President Obama.
In the latest ODNI summary, just released, the total has been reduced to 121, with just eight men released under President Obama.
This is a disgraceful lie to be circulated by the President of the United States, and it is depressing to note that it was liked by over 85,000 Twitter users, and that Trump apparently has no intention of withdrawing it.
It is also worth noting that, although the ODNI issues these summaries every six month, no evidence is provided to justify the claims, and other analysts believe that the figures are exaggerated. In 2013, for example, when the DNI had a figure of 16.1 percent of released prisoners as “confirmed” recidivists, the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C. came up with a figure of just 4 percent.
This is not the first time that Donald Trump has provided misleading information about Guantánamo. On the campaign trail, he spoke about keeping Guantánamo open, and “load[ing] it up with some bad dudes,” misunderstanding quite who has been held at Guantánamo over the years, and under what circumstances (mostly, low-level soldiers and civilians, held, fundamentally, without any rights whatsoever, in defiance of domestic and international norms), and on January 3 he tweeted, “There should be no further releases from Guantánamo. These are extremely dangerous people and should not be allowed back onto the battlefield,” failing to recognize that those approved for release had had those decisions taken unanimously by representatives of major government departments and the intelligence agencies.
And then, in his first week in office, a leaked draft executive order was circulated, which contained another outrageous lie — that “[o]ver 30 percent of detainees released from Guantánamo have returned to armed conflict.” As I explained at the time, in this he was following the lead of much of the mainstream media, which, for years, had been adding up the figures in the ODNI reports that dealt with “confirmed” and “suspected” recidivists and publishing and publicizing them as though they were all “confirmed.”
However, even on this point Trump’s people couldn’t resist exaggerating. As I explained, in the DNI report from July 2016, the ODNI claimed that those “confirmed of reengaging” was 17.6%, while those “suspected of reengaging” was 12.4% — a total of 30%, not “[o]ver 30%.”
On March 8, the day after Trump’s lie, his press secretary, Sean Spicer, muddied the waters further, telling reporters that Trump “meant that the total number of people released from Gitmo was 122. Just to be clear, there’s a big difference: under the Bush administration, most of those were court ordered.”
Politico’s Josh Gerstein quoted verbatim Spicer’s confused efforts to defend his boss. “The Obama administration took great steps, they talked about — it was a campaign promise frankly from day one to close Gitmo,” he said, adding, “The reason the Bush administration did it was in many cases they were under court order … The Obama administration made it actually a priority to let people go and to actively desire to close that camp and to release more and more of those people especially in the waning days. There’s a huge contrast between the posture and the policy of the last two administrations on how they were dealing with Gitmo.”
In the first place, it is absolutely unfair to single out President Obama for having wanted to close Guantánamo, when, in George W. Bush’s second term, stung by unprecedented criticism at home and abroad, that was what he too intended to do. However, Spicer’s main mistake was to assert that “most” or even “many” of the releases under Bush “were court-ordered.”
Sabin Willett, who represented a number of prisoners at Guantánamo, and wrote a very powerful piece when the court of appeals in Washington, D.C. gutted habeas corpus of all meaning for the Guantánamo prisoners in 2011, said, “That’s loony … That’s just flat out not true. You can count on one hand, and not even use all your fingers, the number of people a district court ordered released where that was not reversed on appeal.”
Although 28 men were approved for release by the courts between 2008 and 2010, after the Supreme Court granted the prisoners constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights (in June 2008), and the D.C. Circuit Court’s rewriting of the rules, which meant that, from July 2010, no more prisoners were able to get their habeas corpus petitions granted, and six additional successful habeas petitions were reversed or vacated, legal experts pointed out to Josh Gerstein that “no more than three of the 532 Guantánamo detainees transferred out under Bush were moved because they won a court challenge.”
Greg Craig, the White House Counsel in President Obama’s first year, who was “deeply involved in Obama’s early Guantánamo policy,” responded to Spicer’s claims by stating, “The truth is that Sean Spicer doesn’t know what he is talking about and doesn’t care enough to take the time to find out.”
David Remes, an attorney who has represented numerous Yemeni prisoners, told Gerstein, “It’s nonsense. There were cases where the rulings went against the government and the government chose not to appeal and let the guy go, but the D.C. Circuit held that the courts cannot force the president to release anybody.”
Most of the 532 men released by George W. Bush were released before the Supreme Court’s habeas ruling, in Boumediene v. Bush, in June 2008, just seven months before Bush left office. Those Gerstein spoke to told him that, “In the months between that ruling and the end of Bush’s term, judges ordered the release of 23 Guantánamo detainees. However, only three were actually transferred out before Bush left office.”
My definitive Guantánamo habeas corpus list confirms that this is the case. As Gerstein reported, “In October 2008, a federal judge ordered the transfer of 17 Uighur prisoners from Guantánamo to his D.C. courtroom for potential release into the US. The ruling was stayed, the Uighurs were never brought to the US and were not released until the Obama era.”
Gerstein added, “Another judge granted relief to five more prisoners the following month, three of whom were released in December 2008.” These five were Algerians who had been living in Bosnia, and who, without any evidence of wrongdoing being provided, had been kidnapped by the US in January 2002 and brought to Guantánamo.
Gerstein also noted, “An additional prisoner won his habeas case In January 2009, before Bush left office, but wasn’t released until June of that year.” That man was Mohammed El-Gharani, a former child prisoner, who had grown up in Saudi Arabia, to parents who were Chadian nationals, and who, on his release, was returned to Chad, where he knew almost nobody. In 2015, he was the subject of an acclaimed installation in New York by the artist Laurie Anderson.
On Guantánamo, as the above shows, the Trump administration cannot be trusted. Donald Trump lies, his press secretary Sean Spicer lies, and so too does Sebastian Gorka, a deputy assistant to Trump, who previously worked for Breitbart News and is worryingly Islamophobic. On Fox News, on February 22, speaking about Jamal al-Harith, the former British prisoner who had reportedly blown himself up in Iraq, Gorka made two false claims, as FactCheck.org explained: that al-Harith had been released under Obama, when he had been released by George W. Bush in 2004; and that, amongst the prisoners released by Obama, “almost half the time, they returned to the battlefield.”
To return to where we started, the ODNI’s “confirmed” release rate of those who have “returned to the battlefield” under President Obama is just 4.4%, compared to a “confirmed” rate of 21.2% under President Bush, revealing that Gorka not only lied, but did so by deliberately reinterpreting 4.4% as nearly 50%.
On Guantánamo, then, it is abundantly clear that Donald Trump and his advisors have no idea what the truth is about Guantánamo, are dismissive of the truth, and are not to be trusted. In a world where every criticism is deflected as “fake news,” however, I can only wonder how many people are actually paying attention.
Please support my work! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000)
to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues
over the first three months of the Trump administration.
[Iwrote this article for the “Close Guantánamo”
website, which I established in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary
of the opening of Guantánamo, with the US attorney Tom Wilner. Please join us
— just an email address is required to be counted amongst those opposed
to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, and to receive updates of our
activities by email. - AW]
