Day after day, anything related to the concept of justice in Turkey resembles a bitter parody of Franz Kafka’s works of literature.

The domain of the judiciary has turned into a battlefield for partisanship and clashing political interests in which various flanks of Turkey’s far-right, extreme nationalist and Islamist groups elbow each other to gain influence.

It is apparent that the power struggle in the defunct system of justice is a symbol for a showdown between Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the militarist right.

The opposition is only a pawn in this cruel game. While the oppressive measures against the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) on central and local levels become unbearable, Turkey’s lonely and alienated dissidents and journalists bear the brunt of what they regard as acts of revenge for their standing up against the injustice.

The case of Ahmet Altan, former editor-in-chief of the shutdown liberal daily Taraf, is telling of the agony. He was sentenced to aggravated lifetime imprisonment for spreading “subliminal messages” supporting the 2016 attempted coup in Turkey and, when his sentence was recently reduced to 10 years, he was released — but only for five days.

A court agreed with the prosecutor that he must be sent back to prison and he was put back in his cell. During his brief period of freedom, he filed a powerful article to Le Monde.

“In the few days I’ve spent ‘outside’ the prison, the things I’ve heard and watched gave me the feeling that life might only comprise a prison and a madhouse,” he wrote. “It is as if a strange ideology one might call ‘lumpenism’ has, in various guises, taken hold of the ‘outside.’

“A lowly case of madness has penetrated the texture of society. The intellectual hierarchy of society has been turned upside down and those with the poorest acumen and skills have gained the right to speak the most. Intelligence, skills, knowledge and creativity are demeaned.

“One of the most horrifying questions of humankind determines everyone’s place in society: How much do you like your homeland? Everyone loves their homeland; they love it like crazy, love it to death and, in order to prove it, they keep shouting out how much they love their homeland.

“Political authority has the final say on who loves their homeland more. In this terrifying competition, there is no place for those who have not lost all wisdom and reason. Any reasonable objection, any belief in law and human rights will suffice to leave you out of the race… Lumpens have planted their flags everywhere.”

The pattern was repeated when journalists of the secular daily Cumhuriyet had a lower court defy the overturn of their lengthy prison sentences by the High Court of Appeals. The case will continue to agonise them because it means the process will begin from scratch.

These examples help understand how acrimonious the internal battle in the power echelons in Turkey has become. As a part of bureaucracy tries to prevent things from getting out of hand completely, the other part pushes for crossing all the lines in order to establish a full-scale police state.

If the cases of Altan and Cumhuriyet are not clear enough to see through the patterns, a look into the series of devastating measures employed against the HDP — with 62 seats, the third largest party in the Turkish parliament — would leave one with no doubts.

On the central level, there are more than 100 subpoenas against its deputies, all on terrorism charges. It is a question of Erdogan’s tactical timing before their immunities are lifted, paving the way for prison.

Of the 69 municipalities won by the HDP, 27 have been imposed with state trustees appointed by Erdogan. Thirteen HDP mayors are in pretrial detention, along with tens of municipal council members. They are added to the 41 former mayors of the HDP who were removed from their posts before the elections in March and sentenced to a total of about 237 years in prison.

There is another pattern: Erdogan is determined to break the backbone of the HDP’s rather solid structures and continue to conduct, to the very end, what could be defined as “ethnic cleansing in Turkish politics.” The aim is to copy-paste the Sri Lanka experience, which crushed the Tamil movement.

The despair is so deep among Turkey’s Kurdish politicians that an extraordinary meeting took place in Ankara with the question on whether the party should withdraw from parliament and local councils. After stormy debate, the decision was to continue but the HDP knows that, under such dire circumstances, it would only serve the purpose of a postponement, an act of winning some time.

Turkey continues to breathe under the state of emergency, however de facto it seems to be. Realism is useful: it will have to be much worse, before the tide eventually turns.

Yavuz Baydar is a senior Turkish columnist, and news analyst. A founding member of the Platform for Independent Journalism (P24) in Istanbul, he has been reporting on Turkey and monitoring media issues since 1980. A European Press Prize Laureate in 2014, he is also the winner of Germany’s ‘Journalistenpreis’ in 2018.

Copyright ©2019 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 26 November 2019
Word Count: 809
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It has become increasingly clear that Devin Nunes, the ranking Republican in the House impeachment hearings, has been working directly or in tandem with Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal attorney. Donald Trump’s most powerful defender could be a fact witness in an international conspiracy to defraud the American people.

To explain, I have to put on my Leo Tolstoy hat. When this chapter in our history is written finally, it’ll look like War and Peace and feature characters by the hundreds.

CNN reported late Friday that the California representative traveled to Vienna in December of 2018 after the midterm elections. He met with Viktor Shokin, Ukraine’s former head prosecutor. That’s according to Lev Parnas, Giuliani’s henchman.

Parnas is under federal indictment for campaign-finance violations. His attorney told CNN that Parnas worked with Shokin and Giuliani to smear former Vice President Joe Biden and promote a Kremlin lie: that Ukraine, not Russia, attacked the US in 2016.

I’ll get back to Nunes in a minute, but first: Shokin was the Ukraine prosecutor whom Biden lobbied to be fired when he was the vice president. It wasn’t because Shokin was too hard on the gas company Hunter Biden worked for. It was because Shokin wasn’t hard enough. (Biden was speaking for the Obama administration, the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. They were pushing an anti-corruption agenda.)

Shokin is the author of a statement dated September 2019, per Bloomberg, in which he claimed — falsely — that Biden had him fired to protect Hunter Biden and that Ukraine, not Russia, conspired with the Democrats to undermine US national sovereignty.

Importantly, Shokin’s immediate predecessor as Ukraine’s top prosecutor, Yuriy Lutsenko, said the same thing — Biden/Burisma + 2016 — when John Solomon, at The Hill, interviewed him. Solomon’s series of interviews and columns were cited by the anonymous whistleblower complaint, which started the current impeachment process.

Shokin and Lutsenko were corrupt Ukrainian government officials. They were in bed with Vladimir Putin. According to a New York Times report over the weekend, and according to testimony by Fiona Hill last week, the argument that Ukraine, not Russia, attacked the 2016 presidential election is standard-issue propaganda straight from the Kremlin. In other words, both Shokin and Lutsenko were repeating an already established lie.

Shokin and Lutsenko are connected in another way.

John Solomon’s attorneys are Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing. (You may know them for their frequent appearances on Lou Dobbs’ show on the Fox Business Network.) DiGenova and Toensing put Solomon in touch with Lutsenko via Lev Parnas. Parnas was working with DiGenova and Toensing’s law firm. Indeed, Parnas watched Solomon interview Lutsenko at The Hill, according to a Pro Publica report.

DiGenova and Toensing were also hired by a Ukrainian oligarch (i.e., mobster) who’s fighting extradition to the US. That oligarch is Dmitry Firtash. Firtash’s henchman procured the false statement from Shokin (that Biden had him fired and Ukraine attacked America). DiGenova and Toensing billed Firtash $1 million, according to Bloomberg.

When you’re digging up dirt on the American president’s rival in the hope that the US Department of Justice will go easy on you, legally speaking, that’s money well spent. Firtash probably wrote a check for that amount in Vienna, where he is on the lam. And Vienna, as you’ll recall, is where Viktor Shokin met Devin Nunes in December 2018.

We now know, thanks to reporting this morning from the Times, that Rudy Giuliani and his goons worked directly with Firtash. They offered to help with his legal problems in the US if Firtash hired attorneys Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing.

DiGenova and Toensing later went to the Justice Department to plead his case with Bill Barr. They probably hinted that they had “evidence,” thanks to Firtash, that confirmed everything Barr’s boss already believed was true but was entirely false. This “evidence,” moreover, could rationalize Barr’s internal investigation into the origins of Robert Mueller’s Russia probe, which the president has repeatedly said is a hoax. This “evidence,” remember, comes from the Kremlin. What we’re seeing is the making of a conspiracy to defraud the American people and undermine popular sovereignty.

I haven’t yet seen reporting connecting Nunes to Dmitry Firtash. Moreover, Nunes has said he and his staff were conducting an investigation separate from Rudy Giuliani’s. But it happens their “investigations” have the same contours. They’re both about the Bidens. They’re both about the 2016 election. They both originated in the Kremlin. These are the same talking points Nunes brought to House impeachment hearings last week, talking points that Fiona Hill blasted as aiding and abetting Russian interests, partly because they create conditions in which the Kremlin can repeat its 2016 attack.

At the very least Nunes is a fact witness to a crime.

At the most, he’s implicated in a criminal conspiracy that dwarfs Watergate.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 25 November 2019
Word Count: 802
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There is some incongruity between my role as an editor of a book about the costs of America’s wars and my identity as a military spouse. I’m deeply disturbed at the scale of human suffering caused by those conflicts and yet I’ve unintentionally contributed to the war effort through the life I’ve chosen.

I am the co-editor with Catherine Lutz of War and Health: The Medical Consequences of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a new volume of social science research from Brown University’s Costs of War Project. At the same time, I am a practicing therapist-in-training and I specialize in working with veterans who have post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. Through the scholarly research I review and the veteran clients I have seen, I am committed professionally to bearing witness to the human costs of America’s forever wars, and to alleviating suffering where I can.

I am also married to a submarine officer in the Navy. We are so fortunate in so many ways. We have two beautiful children, pets, loving friends, and extended family. We both have graduate degrees. While our finances take hits from relocations without adequate job and childcare support, we don’t face the continuous fears that many military families experience when a loved one is sent into a war zone. In many respects, my family’s life does not look like that of most American military families profiled in my book.

And yet I have misgivings.

During one of my husband’s deployments, I was relieved to hear our 2-year-old son talk about war in a way that, despite his innocence, was more nuanced than the usual tales of “sacrifice,” “honor,” and “fighting terror” that one hears routinely in the mainstream media and in local command newsletters.

It was spring 2017 and we had just seen Kim Jong-un displaying one of North Korea’s new missiles on the TV news. Our son asked me what a war is. I gave my best explanation and his reply, undoubtedly garnered from preschool discussions about conflict resolution, was: “They don’t use words? They hit?”

Sort of, I told him. I did my best to explain what a weapon was, a description I suspect that many of my liberal mom friends would balk at. In our military community, however, such imagery is all around us. Real missiles and replicas are, for instance, often used as decorations lining the streets of naval bases or as lampposts or even wall hangings in military family households.

My son did his best to take it in. Later, at the waterfront near our home, he tossed a piece of his donut into the ocean and told me it was for his father who, he insisted, was under the water “playing hide-and-seek.” Of course, he doesn’t connect the relentless training and deployments characteristic of our military life with the fighting of war itself, though our family feels the strain and implicit sense of danger in our daily lives.

In writing my recent book on the costs of this country’s post-9/11 wars, I learned about Afghan war widows who use heroin to make it morally possible to live amid grief and poverty after seeing their spouses and children killed; about NGO workers who leave their own families, facing threats of kidnapping and death, to aid refugees in the Pakistani-Afghan borderlands. And I read about the experiences of the million war-wounded, ill, or traumatized American combat veterans, the sorts of patients my therapy will someday (I hope) help, who have sought health care and social support and so often come up desperately short.

As I do this, there’s always a low buzz of guilt somewhere in my gut, even about my own voluntary, unpaid work in support of other military spouses, even after I’ve relinquished travel assignments in my work as an activist that would have compromised my husband’s security clearance, even as I abide by harsh security restrictions in my personal life. I worry, in other words, about aiding the very military that, 18 years after the 9/11 attacks, still continues to rack up war’s costs without an end in sight.

The costs of war at home I see firsthand trends affecting all military communities in the United States. Deployments during these wars have come more frequently and often last longer than in past American wars. The specter of death by suicide hangs over all our lives, because everyone in such communities knows someone who has died that way or has threatened to do so.

In 2012, for the first time in our history, American service members began to die by suicide at higher rates than civilians. Today, they are more likely to take their own lives than to perish in combat. As anthropologist Kenneth MacLeish points out, military suicides are most prevalent among those who have deployed to our war zones just once or not at all, or who left the military involuntarily with a “bad paper discharge” or other than honorable discharges of some kind. Moreover, mental illness is rampant among active-duty military service members. According to the nonprofit National Alliance on Mental Illness, in 2014 roughly one in four active-duty service members showed signs of mental illness, including mood and trauma disorders such as PTSD, depression, and anxiety (though this figure is conservative, given that the study did not include the prevalence of traumatic brain injuries among combat vets. Many soldiers seek relief from the stresses of training and combat through alcohol and other drugs and, in our military community, it’s common knowledge that seeking professional support for such problems can place you at risk of social stigma.

And don’t forget military families either. Training and fighting both take a toll on us, too. What modest figures we have on the subject make the point. For example, as anthropologists Jean Scandlyn and Sarah Hautzinger point out in our book, among servicemembers who entered the military between 1999 and 2008, the more months spent deployed, the more likely they are to divorce, with the vast majority of such divorces occurring soon after returning from deployments.

Local reports of domestic violence in military communities suggest that the problems leading to such divorces are only growing, though documentation on the subject is unreliable. It wasn’t until 2018 that, under pressure from Congress, the military made domestic violence a crime under its own legal code. Deployments of nine months or longer or frequent redeployments leave spouses at greater risk of depression, anxiety, and sleep problems, which, in turn, often affect the mental and physical health of their children as well.

Young children with deployed parents visit the doctor more frequently for behavioral health issues than those whose parents have not been deployed. Yet, as many spouses like me have discovered, community-based physicians are often unprepared to help in such situations, tending instead to blame the behavioral and mental-health issues of children on their parents or even on the children themselves, while not making referrals to services that could help (often, sadly, because there are none in the community).

“They were as hard off as me and I was killing them” Such collective problems are, of course, experienced individually and I’ve felt many of them in my own life. My spouse, for instance, departed for sea tours at moments when most of our family’s ducks were anything but in a row, whether it was a matter of childcare, work schedules, my health needs, or our other family obligations. Our son, for instance, has trouble sleeping because he was sad and scared for his dad, given what he hears in passing about Syria, North Korea, and — from other well-meaning military spouses and our own extended family — his own father’s attempts to “keep us safe” from unnamed others who might want to harm us.

I’m edgy and uneasy, knowing that my husband’s commander, a combat vet, has been angry at our family because I refused at one point to volunteer to work with a spouses group. When our house gets broken into, mid-deployment, and I’m alone with our toddler and pregnant, I wonder briefly if payback could have been involved before I dismiss the thought.

After I have our second child, a woman from the base with no mental-health or social-work training calls me weekly to ask about my baby’s health and safety. When I request that she stop, she refuses, telling me the same commander has ordered her to check in on each new mother in his command during deployment. I receive capitalized, hysterically punctuated emails from this woman warning all spouses not to jeopardize national security by talking to anyone about the submarine’s movements or, for that matter, emailing anything to our partners that they might find “distressing,” even details about a family member’s illness. Repeatedly, I am reminded that the U.S. is fighting a war on terror and our individual problems should never get in the way of that.

Things aren’t exactly a cakewalk between deployments either. It seems that, wherever I go, I find stigma, not support. For example, shortly after giving birth, I consulted a psychiatrist for help with post-partum depression. He was the only psychiatrist within 30 miles of our town who accepted military health insurance. Upon meeting me for the first time, he asked me to sign paperwork allowing him discretion to commit me to a psychiatric hospital “because military spouses often get psychotic during deployments.” I decided to tough it out rather than see him again.

And I try to keep in mind that my problems don’t add up to much, given the true costs of war out there. As a start, it’s a stretch to draw comparisons of any sort between an educated, white millennial family here and those who directly pay war’s costs like combat vets or, above all, civilians in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other American war zones. As my co-editor Catherine Lutz and others have shown, though, combat and the home front are connected in unexpected ways.

If you spend 18 years fighting wars you grossly underestimated how to pay for, if you embark upon those wars without first considering alternatives like diplomacy, if you assume that social support for this country’s wars and those fighting them will come from military families that are patriarchal ideals from the white 1950s, and if you imagine an enemy — terrorism — that could be anywhere at all any time at all, then you’re already in a battle that’s going to prove unwinnable and morally unnerving for everyone involved.

I obviously can’t speak for how people from groups in this country more vulnerable than mine think about our never-ending wars and their costs, but my guess is that at least some of them feel connections to those in the war zones far more intimately than I do, no matter how hard I try. I will never forget a neighbor of ours, a Mexican-American Vietnam vet whom I would find smoking on our street when I completed my daily runs. One evening, when we were chatting, he told me that what haunted him most was how many of the rural, poor Vietnamese he’d shot at looked more like him than most of the American officers in his unit. “They were as hard off as me and I was killing them,” he suddenly said, tears in his eyes. Among veterans, he’s not alone in feeling an affinity for those on the other side.

On bearing witness When Catherine Lutz, Neta Crawford, and I first founded the Costs of War Project at Brown University in 2011, we took a close look at the kinds of public assumptions we wanted to upend. As a start, we wanted to show that, contrary to the Bush administration’s stated rationales for invading Afghanistan and then Iraq, Washington had not effectively protected human rights — not to safety, liberty, or for that matter freedom of speech — nor brought “democracy” with us into those distant lands. Instead, by then, those countries had already seen spikes in gender-based violence and the deterioration of the most basic protections that led to everything from the collapse of prenatal care to the killing of civilians to the kidnapping of journalists, aid workers, and academics.

We wanted to go beyond the Pentagon’s focus on the deaths of American soldiers and focus instead on the tens of thousands of Afghan and Iraqi military deaths that had taken place and especially the soaring death rates of civilians in those lands. And, of course, we wanted to show that our grim wars should not be described in sterile terms via the usual imagery of families embracing upon a smiling service-member’s return or the by-then-familiar photographs of neat coffins draped with flags being carried out of planes by uniformed service members as spouses (usually white, female, and non-disabled) looked on sadly.

That, we knew, was not the essence of America’s already ongoing war on terror. My colleagues and I wanted people in this country to refocus on the staggering death and injury rates that only grew as the years passed, the ever-more-crippling ways in which all sides learned to kill and injure, and the long-term mental-health effects of arduous family separations.

A therapist mentor once taught me that, when working with veterans who have PTSD, I should, as he put it, “Ask them to start their story a little before they think it began and have them keep going even after they think it’s over.” My colleagues and I wanted to do that when it came to our wars, focusing not just on the obvious newsworthy photographs that tended to appeal to the American psyche, but on the missing context in which those photographs were taken. That’s the best way I can think of to describe the purpose of our new book (and our future work). None of us should stop trying to refocus in that way, not until America’s war story is declared over — and not even then, given how long the costs of war are likely to take to play out.

One sunny afternoon in May 2011, as Catherine Lutz and I sat in her office in Brown’s Anthropology Department sifting through media images for the initial launch of the Costs of War website, we happened upon a video of a screaming young Iraqi child with open burn wounds covering his face and body, a relative clutching him in her arms as they hustled through a crowd. Gunshots and explosions were audible in the background. The before, the after, the neighborhood where the violence was taking place, the weapons used, who was even fighting whom — none of that was evident from the clip.

For years, that image and the sound of that child has haunted me. Who was he? Did he get to the hospital? Was there even a hospital for him to get to? Would he ever go to school or play again? Who was the woman and what had her life been like before the American invasion of Iraq in 2003? What was it like now? What services could she access? Was she safe?

I think of this image when I wake up at night, when I hear patients describe the screams of children in war zones, when I hear my own children scream during tantrums. It’s like a nightmarish echo that spurs me to keep working because all of us, regardless of where we are, should be bearing witness to the costs of war until somebody in power decides to end the suffering.

Andrea Mazzarino co-founded Brown University’s Costs of War Project. She is an activist and social worker interested in the health impacts of war. She has held various clinical, research, and advocacy positions, including at a Veterans Affairs PTSD Outpatient Clinic, with Human Rights Watch, and at a community mental health agency. She is the co-editor of the new book War and Health: The Medical Consequences of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This article originally appeared at TomDispatch

Copyright ©2019 Andrea Mazzarino — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 25 November 2019
Word Count: 2,572
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US foreign policy has bipolar disorder. It swings wildly between low and high moods. This is why US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo can say that Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territories are not “inconsistent with international law” but that China’s increasingly threatening actions towards Hong Kong raise grave concerns.

Recognition of the Israeli settlements was presented as bowing to “the reality on the ground.” Not so Hong Kong’s plight — more than five months of escalating protests against Beijing’s attempt to limit the freedoms enjoyed by the largely self-governing city.

Pompeo’s statement on Hong Kong was the Trump administration in a high mood. It was bullish, pushing the pro-democracy, pro-freedom narrative traditionally expected — nay, demanded — of the United States.

Never mind that US President Donald Trump, who hardly ever speaks about human rights, has offered no particular statement of support for the Hong Kong pro-democracy activists. Never mind that Trump even told the Chinese president some months ago that he would not publicly back the protesters if talks to resolve US-China trade tensions continue to progress.

The announcement on Israeli settlements was the US administration in a low mood. It wasn’t vision stuff, just realpolitik, recognising, as Pompeo said, that decades of US policy “didn’t work.”

That, no matter the United States’ chosen terminology, Israeli governments, whether led by Likud or Labour, have consistently built and expanded settlements for the past half-century. There appears to be no way to turn the clock back, without Israeli acquiescence to international pressure.

However, the international pressure necessary to force Israeli acquiescence does not exist so, these settlements — hundreds of them, some official, some not — in East Jerusalem and in the West Bank — will stay. It is hard to see any Israeli government or anyone else removing the settlements by force, as long as Israel, backed by the United States, insists on its own interpretation of international law.

Yet, international law is very clear. The Fourth Geneva Convention, ratified by 192 countries after World War II, says that an occupying power “shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” The UN General Assembly, the UN Security Council and the International Court of Justice say Israeli settlements on the West Bank violate the convention.

Nine successive US administrations refused to accept that Israel is justified in allowing settlers to build homes in the West Bank as their biblical birthright. In 1978, President Jimmy Carter’s administration said settlements were illegal. Ronald Reagan disagreed, in 1981, but acknowledged that settlements were an impediment to peace. The Obama administration said that settlements were “illegitimate.”

In light of the weasel words on settlements from multiple US administrations, it’s fair to ask why the Trump rebranding makes a difference. Israeli settlers had perforce created the facts on the ground — they are firmly in possession of land to which Israel does not have any right, at least by international law, and no one seems able or willing to do anything about it. The peace process is notable only for being absent. Why decry the Trump administration for recognising hideous, organic reality?

There are two reasons. First, it takes a two-state solution off the table but without any indication of how Israel will treat Arab residents of the de facto single state that is inexorably coming into being. Will Palestinians in the new, engorged Israel have full citizenship rights or second-class status?

Second, the low mood of US bipolar disorder affects the whole world. In validating the transgression of international law, the Trump administration is dismantling a crucial pillar of an order based on rights, both as an aspiration and a hope.

Rashmee Roshan Lall is a regular columnist for The Arab Weekly. She blogs at www.rashmee.com and is on Twitter @rashmeerl

Copyright ©2019 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 25 November 2019
Word Count: 608
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The president’s last line of defense, according to Bloomberg reporting this morning, is that he never told anyone explicitly to extort Volodymyr Zelensky into a conspiracy to defraud the American people. If that sounds absurd, that’s because it is. But absurdity has a deep history in the tradition of political theater. That Donald Trump didn’t state clearly the magic words — Go forth and commit criminal acts in my name — may be all the Senate Republicans need to protect the worst president since the nation’s founding.

Emphasis on “may.” The Senate Republicans have already moved their original line of defense to keep pace with damning evidence that came to light this week. Lindsey Graham led a resolution in the Senate last month to condemn the House investigation. More recently, he’s told home-state supporters that as the head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he would kill off a trial before it got started. He’s less resolute now.

During a meeting yesterday at the White House with Trump and a group of Senate Republicans, Graham revealed there weren’t enough votes in the Senate to dismiss the case outright. There are 53 GOP senators. He would need 51 to dismiss. So some Republicans seem to be feeling the squeeze between party and country. That’s probably why Graham and the Senate Republicans had to convince the president that the question, as of now, wasn’t whether the case should be heard but how long the trial should be. The consensus appears to be about two weeks, according to the Washington Post.

That depends on what the House Democrats decide the next step is. Before Gordon Sondland testified, the Democrats were focused on abuse of presidential power. After testimony by the EU ambassador, however, the Democrats have grounds for returning to obstruction of justice. Sondland said everyone was “in the loop,” meaning everyone knew what Trump wanted from the Ukrainians and why. “The loop” included the vice president, the secretary of state, the former head of the White House National Security Council and the acting White House chief of staff. These are the same people whom Trump has barred from working with the House investigators. As long as he forbids their cooperation, the Democrats are justified in charging Trump with obstruction.

As the Post’s Ruth Marcus argued earlier this week: “The administration’s high-handed order that witnesses not cooperate with the House probe and refusal to turn over relevant documents is an act of obstruction — and a likely count in the articles of impeachment. But the goal isn’t proving obstruction — it is getting at the truth.”

The truth has been in plain sight for months. Robert Mueller outlined in his report to the Congress at least 10 instances in which Trump obstructed his investigation into Russia’s disinformation campaign to move public opinion against the Democratic candidate in favor of the Republican. The House Democrats now appear ready for the next phase of the impeachment process. Politico reports this morning they want to hold at least one hearing related to Mueller’s report. But there should be many more.

The blinding takeaway of Mueller’s report was that the Russians hurt Hillary Clinton to help her opponent. Implicit but crystal clear in that conclusion is that the president cheated to win. Furthermore, he thought he got away with it after Mueller’s report and subsequent House testimony had little if any affect on the public’s opinion of him. (Trump has always been unpopular, but the report didn’t make him more so.) Emboldened, the president tried cheating again, this time by involving Ukraine’s vulnerable president in a conspiracy to undermine another rival. The phone call at the heart of impeachment hearings took place the day after Mueller finished testifying.

Cheating (via bribery, in this case) is betrayal. Betrayal is a violation of public trust. Public trust is the root of the Constitution’s “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Here’s how House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff explained it recently:

“Bribery … as the founders understood bribery … was not as we understand it in law today. It was much broader. It connoted the breach of the public trust in a way where you’re offering official acts for some personal or political reason, not in the nation’s interest. Here you have the president of the United States seeking help from Ukraine in his reelection campaign in the form of two investigations that he thought were politically advantageous, including one of his primary rival” (my italics).

The truth being in plain sight, however, is no guarantee of removal. I really want liberals to understand that. We are entering a dark period in which the true and awesome power of indoctrination, disinformation and propaganda will be revealed. The truth will set you free, as they say. In politics, though, the truth must be set free.

And only the people can do that.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 22 November 2019
Word Count: 804
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For what seems like a long time, I have not let a week go by without reminding Editorial Board readers that Donald Trump wasn’t only involving Volodymyr Zelensky in an illegal scheme to benefit himself personally. He’s trying also to rewrite the history of the 2016 election to wound enemies (Joe Biden and the Democrats) and help friends (Vladimir Putin).

The entire Republican establishment has backed him up. Devin Nunes and others have shamelessly advanced the “false narrative” that it was not the Russians who attacked the US in 2016 but the Ukrainians, and that it wasn’t Trump’s campaign that conspired with foreign saboteurs but Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and the Democratic Party.

This narrative has its roots in Russia. As if to remind us, Putin said yesterday that he’s glad to see the “political battles” in the US have taken the focus off his country: “Thank God, no one is accusing us of interfering in the US elections anymore; now they’re accusing Ukraine.” Indeed, everything we are seeing coming to light now has been an effort to validate — to make real — this hoary Kremlin lie. Turning falsehoods into political reality is what fascists do. There’s more here than the abuse of executive power. The president has betrayed his own country by serving another’s interests.

If Putin’s lie sticks, we won’t be able to defend ourselves adequately against Russian disinformation going into 2020, thus leaving ourselves vulnerable to a repeat of 2016. I don’t need to remind you that liberal democracy is about self-government, and that self-government relies on good information. Leaders are supposed to govern by the consent of the governed. But what is consent when the electorate believes lies?

I worry about repeating myself but it can’t be helped. For one thing, all of the above is just not getting the attention it deserves. For another, fact witnesses in the House impeachment hearings keep bringing us back to the same place, to the chagrin, it should be said, of Democratic leaders who’d like to get away from Russia talk. Today, Fiona Hill, a former National Security Council official, is set to blast the GOP for carrying Putin’s water. The following is from Hill’s prepared opening statement:

In the course of this investigation, I would ask that you please not promote politically driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests. I refuse to be part of an effort to legitimize an alternate narrative that the Ukrainian government is a U.S. adversary, and that Ukraine — not Russia — attacked us in 2016 (my italics).

Gordon Sondland’s testimony has been problematic. He has lacked candor, as they say in the FBI. But the EU ambassador has been consistent about suggesting a difference in Trump’s mind between Ukraine investigating its “meddling” in the 2016 election (a lie) and saying it was going to, and that saying it was more important than doing it. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff: “[Zelensky] had to get those two investigations if [he was going to get a White House visit].” Sondland: “He had to announce the investigations. He didn’t actually have to do them, as I understood it.”

Later, in an exchange with House Democratic counsel, Daniel Goldman:

Goldman: You understood that in order to get that White House meeting that you wanted President Zelensky to have and that President Zelensky desperately wanted to have, that Ukraine would have to initiate these two investigations. Is that right?” [The second investigation was into Hunter Biden’s job at a Ukrainian energy firm.]

Sondland: Well, they would have to announce that they were going to do it.

Goldman: Right, because they — because Giuliani and President Trump didn’t actually care if they did them, right?

Sondland: I never heard, Mr. Goldman, anyone say that the investigations had to start or had to be completed. The only thing I heard from Mr. Giuliani or otherwise was that they had to be announced in some form. And that form kept changing.

Goldman: Announced publicly?

Sondland: Announced publicly.

It would be illegal for Trump to elicit foreign help in winning reelection. So the Republicans have seized on the difference between saying and doing as if it proves the president is guiltless. But it’s the reverse. It’s damning. As Editorial Board subscriber Rhea Graham put it in a question to me: “So the impeachable act was using a quid pro quo to create propaganda for treasonous purposes?” The answer to that must be yes.

I don’t want to repeat myself. But I guess I should.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 21 November 2019
Word Count: 750
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He might have a chance if he stayed silent. He won’t.

The Wall Street Journal reviewed White House emails to reveal Monday morning that Gordon Sondland, the US ambassador to the European Union, had kept senior officials abreast of efforts to pressure Volodymyr Zelensky into investigating the Bidens before Donald Trump’s infamous July 25 phone call with the young Ukrainian president.

So: A plan was underway, a plan predating the whistleblower complaint.

This is important to note, because a key pillar of the Republican Party’s defense has been pushing to reveal the identity of the CIA analyst whose report to the Congress started the current House investigation into impeachable offenses by the president.

The Republicans persist though witness after witness has given credence to, or verified details of, the complaint. For instance, Bill Taylor, the current ambassador to Ukraine, said last week his aide overheard a phone call in which Sondland told Trump that Ukraine was ready to move on “the investigations.”

They persist in spite of that fact because intimidation is what these Republicans do. The whistleblower’s anonymity neuters their kill-or-be-killed instinct, but it doesn’t stop them from trying. And the more they try, the more they prove critics right: today’s GOP is unfit to govern.

To critics, the problem isn’t a lack of evidence. The problem is getting the American people to understand that intimidation, and outright thuggery, is what the president’s core supporters like about him. And the problem, for his critics, is that the American people don’t fully understand that intimidation is an abuse of power at odds with democracy. We can’t govern ourselves when one side aims to humiliate the other.

This is why Friday was an important day for democracy. Marie Yovanovitch, the former US ambassador to Ukraine, described in open testimony to the House Intelligence Committee “her role advancing U.S. interests in some of the most dangerous countries in the world until a smear campaign led by Rudy Giuliani and other Republicans led to her being recalled,” according to Bloomberg News. As if confirming that Yovanovitch is not imagining things, Trump posted an intimidating tweet at the moment she said she felt intimidated by him and his Republican allies.

Not only was it important for the American people to see these events collide in real time; it was important that Adam Schiff, the committee chairman, drew our attention to Trump’s tweet and to Yovanovitch’s reaction to it. “It’s very intimidating,” she said.

Intimidation works in a closed space where only power matters, not norms of human behavior. But by bullying a female career diplomat out in the open, where rules of conduct are as varied as the American people, Trump told on himself, as they say. Once he did that, he couldn’t take it back. No president has that kind of power.

In a closed space, Trump can act with impunity, but in public, his impudence can be damning. He ends up underscoring the claims against him. Yovanovitch said she felt intimidated. Trump intimidates her for saying she felt intimidated. Case closed. Yes, some Republicans, hangers-on like Ari Fleischer, want us to wonder how a tweet could possibly intimidate anyone. Others rationalize it, saying Trump has a right to free speech. I’d guess any woman who’s ever felt bulldozed has something to say, and I’d guess quick attempts to excuse actual presidential harassment are going to backfire.

Because the president’s present misconduct is evidence of past misconduct, House investigators are right to use it. Think of it this way: Anything you say can and will be used against you. Trump is ignoring, actually vaporizing, his best defense, which is silence. If he didn’t say anything, he might have a chance. But he’s using the world’s biggest and loudest megaphone to declare his guilt. Schiff seems ready to see Friday’s attempt to intimidate a witness (Yovanovitch) as yet another impeachable offense.

(Trump intimidated another witness on Sunday. Jennifer Williams is Mike Pence’s foreign policy advisor. In testimony this weekend, she said she took notes on the July 25 phone call and thought it was “inappropriate.” She also implicated the vice president in Trump’s attempt at bribery. Trump in essence called her a nobody.)

The thing about the Yovanovitch case is that Trump, Giuliani and their Republican allies (especially former Republican Congressman Pete Sessions who took Russian cash in exchange for lobbying for Yovanovitch’s ouster) did not have to smear her to get rid of her. There was no need for that. Any president can call back any ambassador at any time for any reason. That’s any president’s legal and constitutional prerogative. But there’s a good reason to mount a campaign to smear a career diplomat. You don’t want anyone to believe what she says. Why? Because what she says is a threat to you.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 18 November 2019
Word Count: 800
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US President Donald Trump continues to muddy the waters on the policy of the United States in north-eastern Syria.

Trump pulled US troops out of border regions of north-eastern Syria in October, immediately after a phone call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. This allowed Turkish troops and their Syrian allies to occupy the area, kill more than 100 Kurdish fighters and civilians and cause the flight of more than 100,000 Kurds. Still, Trump said he was determined to withdraw all 1,000 US troops from the country.

That policy elicited widespread criticism in the United States, even among his congressional Republican allies and evangelical Christian supporters.

US Defence Department officials, civilians and military alike, who were not consulted about his decision, were especially angry since it meant abandoning the United States’ Syrian Kurdish allies who had taken the brunt of the casualties in the anti-Islamic State (ISIS) campaign and because of the concern that without a US military presence in the area, ISIS could rebound.

Hence, there was considerable pushback from the Pentagon, so much so that Trump agreed to keep about 600 troops in north-eastern Syria, south of the area under Turkish control. This idea was apparently sold to Trump as a way of holding on to the oil fields in the Deir ez-Zor region, which are in an area controlled by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

The oil idea especially appealed to Trump, who likes transactional foreign policy. He initially made comments to the effect that the revenues from the fields would accrue to the United States but Pentagon officials “clarified” his remarks to say the objective would be to keep the oil fields out of ISIS’s hands, with revenues from the fields used to support the SDF.

The policy was refined further when Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff US Army General Mark Milley stated on US television November 10 that the 600 US troops would be used primarily to ensure “the enduring defeat of ISIS.”

Milley stressed that “there are still ISIS fighters in the region and unless pressure is maintained… there’s a very real possibility that conditions could be set” for ISIS’s re-emergence.

That protecting the oil fields would be a secondary objective was underscored by US Navy Rear-Admiral William Byrne, vice-director of the Joint Staff, who said: “The mission is the defeat of ISIS. The securing of the oil fields is a subordinate task to that mission and the purpose of that task is to deny ISIS the revenues from that oil infrastructure.”

However, Trump, during his news conference with Erdogan November 13, said the sole purpose of the US troop presence in north-eastern Syria was to protect the oil. He stated: “We’re keeping the oil. We have the oil. The oil is secure. We left troops behind only for the oil.”

This comment caused a negative reaction. Not only did Trump appear to contradict the Pentagon, he also caused confusion among US allies in the anti-ISIS fight who were gathering in Washington. Unnamed diplomats said Trump’s comments sowed doubt that whatever agreements were struck with the United States could be reversed by his impulsivity.

It is possible Trump made the comments about protecting the oil as the sole US mission to assuage Erdogan that the United States would no longer be the protector of the SDF, whose Kurdish fighters Erdogan claims are terrorists. However, in doing so, he upended the Pentagon’s claim that it will continue to work with the SDF against ISIS. Undoubtedly, there will again be pushback from the Defence Department to Trump’s statements.

The new US policy leaves many unanswered questions. The SDF has sold oil to the Syrian government, so does that mean US officials will do to the same? If not, where and to whom will the oil be sold? Presumably, it could be sent by lorries to Iraq. However, under international law, oil in Syrian territory must be under the purview of the Syrian government. So, how does Washington square this circle?

Second, what about the more than 100,000 Syrian Kurdish refugees who fled, mostly to Iraq, during the Turkish invasion in October? Does the United States have a moral obligation to help them? It is certain that Erdogan does not want them to return to their former homes; instead, he is planning to resettle many Syrian Arab refugees in Turkey in that area to ensure that the Kurds cannot reconstitute their statelet there.

Finally, what about the SDF and the prison camps that it controls that are full of ISIS fighters and their families? Will part of the 600 US troops be deployed to these camps? Will those troops continue to support the SDF to root out ISIS cells?

Unfortunately, none of these questions have been answered, which is indicative of Trump’s confusing and erratic Syria policy.

Gregory Aftandilian is a lecturer at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University and is a former U.S. State Department Middle East analyst.

Copyright ©2019 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 18 November 2019
Word Count: 803
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Friday morning saw the second stage of public hearings in the House investigation into impeachable offenses by the president. Friday’s witness was Marie Yovanovitch, the former US ambassador to Ukraine. She was pushed out by the Trump administration.

I’ll digest her testimony later. For now, I’m going to focus on the opening statement by Devin Nunes, the ranking Republican member of the House Intelligence Committee. I won’t bore you by decoding it bit by bit, but I do want to raise awareness of a larger theme: what he’s doing is fascism.

I don’t mean to dismiss Nunes by using the F-word. To the contrary, I’m using that word to draw attention squarely to his statements and deeds, and to the stakes we are facing. Too few of us fully appreciate the stakes, I suspect, even otherwise brilliant reporters and pundits paying close attention to the ins and outs of the investigation.

Too few fully appreciate the stakes because of the nature of Nunes’ behavior. From the perspective of someone deeply informed about the known facts of the Trump-Ukraine scandal, Nunes probably sounds, well, you know, crazy. I can imagine reporters and editor not having the foggiest idea of what he’s saying, and deciding to just not include some of his crazy out of respect for him and the need for getting on with the job.

But the crazy should get as much, or nearly as much, focus as the facts of the case against this president. The crazy tells us how committed many of the Republicans are to liberal democracy, which is to say little apparent commitment. Some might say the crazy suggests the Republicans don’t take these proceedings seriously. I think it’s the reverse. They are meeting a serious challenge with something injurious and sinister.

What something? This: The president is the victim of an international conspiracy to undermine the 2016 presidential election in favor of his political enemies. It was the Ukrainians, not the Russians, who attacked our sovereignty. It was the Democrats, not Trump’s campaign staff (i.e., Paul Manafort), who conspired with foreign spies to defraud the United States and sabotage the will of the people. They tried once and failed, and now they’re trying again, this time to “overthrow the president,” Nunes said. This isn’t the literal word of his opening statement, just the spirit. As Jonathan Bernstein said this morning, Nunes is “100% committed to loony conspiracy theories.”

This conspiracy theory has its roots in the Kremlin, you will be shocked to learn. It is, moreover, the “false narrative” that compelled Army Lt. Col. Alex Vindman to come forward and testify. He feared rightly that it threatened to subsume the findings of the special counsel’s report as well as imperil national security and US interests abroad.

This conspiracy theory, furthermore, was in the whistleblower complaint. It cited a series of interviews and columns in The Hill featuring Yuriy Lutsenko, a former top prosecutor in Ukraine. Lutsenko said unnamed “officials” had evidence of Ukraine’s interference in the 2016 election in collaboration with the Democratic National Committee. He said Barack Obama blocked Ukrainian prosecutors from delivering “evidence” about the election to America. He said Joe Biden pressured Ukraine’s former president to fire a prosecutor investigating an energy firm his son worked for.

This conspiracy theory, in fact, can be traced to Rudy Giuliani, who’s in connection with Ukrainian mobsters turning Russian lies about 2016 into reality. (Lev Parnas put The Hill’s John Solomon in touch with Lutsenko by way of Solomon’s attorneys, Victoria Ann Toensing and Joseph diGenova, who are frequent guests on Fox News.) This conspiracy theory, finally, has purchase at the highest levels of American power. It doesn’t have to be true for powerful people to force it into being “the truth.”

To put all this another way, most normal people tend to believe that truth is power. But that’s not how fascist politics works. In fascism, power is “truth.” If this president is not impeached, it will be in part because Trump and the Republicans successfully created a fake reality wholly antithetical to the goal and practice of liberal democracy.

This is why calling it a “conspiracy theory” and leaving it at that isn’t enough. Even if Trump is removed, some Republicans will not be chastened. They will instead point to his downfall as evidence of what they’ve been saying all along — that the president is a victim of an international conspiracy. And they will use that “truth” as the basis for whatever future moves they make, and that future could be worse than Donald Trump.

The way to begin combating the crazy is paying attention to it, however crazy-making that might feel. We can’t dismiss it. Indeed, dismissing it works in favor of fascist politics. What Devin Nunes is doing is serious. It is injurious. It is sinister.

To few people fully appreciate that.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 15 November 2019
Word Count: 811
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The Western leaders running the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East are playing with the lives of millions of Palestinian refugees.

An internal report by the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services into the goings-on at senior levels of the relief agency, known by the initials UNRWA, leadership and revealed by Al Jazeera and Agence France-Presse (AFP) last July unveiled a damning culture of nepotism, graft and abuse. UNRWA Commissioner-General Pierre Krahenbuhl resigned November 6.

Conducted late last year and to be released in the coming weeks, the report’s authors said they uncovered “sexual misconduct, nepotism, retaliation, discrimination and other abuses of authority, for personal gain, to suppress legitimate dissent and to otherwise achieve their personal objectives.”

AFP said the report “paints a picture of a small number of mostly foreign senior leaders centralising power and influence while disregarding UN checks and balances.”

Krahenbuhl is alleged to have created a position for Maria Mohammedi, with whom he was allegedly romantically involved, and taken her with him on business-class flights around the world. Both Krahenbuhl and Mohammedi are married to other people. The author of the internal report has been targeted by Hakam Shahwan, a senior UNRWA staff member, who left the agency in July.

UNRWA and the individuals named in the internal investigation vehemently deny the report’s charges and say they are cooperating with the investigation.

While the findings of the internal investigation have yet to be officially released, the incidents of bullying and the corporate misuse of critical funding uncovered show that the mostly European leaders at the head of the organisation have little regard for the people they are to help and represent and that their priorities lie somewhere else entirely.

The Israeli and pro-Israel media around the world, which for years singled UNRWA out for criticism, has had a field day with the scandal. Opinions put forward by pro-Israel press — from Canada’s National Post to the New York Post and the constellation of Israeli media — call for the organisation to be disbanded. Some even claim that UNRWA “promotes the dream nurtured among Palestinians to destroy Israel.”

None, perhaps unsurprisingly, offers a solution or alternative to an organisation that provides vital assistance for millions of displaced people — as well or as poorly it may have been run at its top levels.

More than this, in the eyes of conservative and nativist regimes in the West, the troubles facing UNRWA mirror — as US President Donald Trump and others say — broader problems within the United Nations itself. Troublingly, the scandal gives weight and prescience to the Trump administration’s decision to cut its annual $360 million funding to the agency last year. Even more worrying is that UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has known about the alleged wrongdoings since December.

This speaks to something bigger than UNRWA itself — that the international community cares little for what remains the most intractable problem in the Middle East — how to solve the issue of the Palestinian right of return.

None of this is the fault of the Palestinian refugees the organisation was created to help. While such incidents and cultures are unfortunately commonplace at corporations and private institutions, in UNRWA’s case, the lives and futures of millions of Palestinians are at risk because there is a growing possibility that the agency, crippled by the loss of millions of dollars of US funding, may be closed. In addition to the United States, Switzerland, Holland, Belgium and New Zealand have pulled their funding since the scandal became public.

UNRWA is an extraordinarily disadvantaged behemoth. It’s responsible for educating, housing and providing health care for millions of refugees but boasts almost no political power and few international friends. It’s expected to operate and perform near miracles in desperate conditions in Gaza, Syria and Lebanon without any of its own money. It has not been a properly functioning organisation for a very long time, its brief and mandate severely and continually slighted and crippled over the decades.

Undoubtedly some will say these are exactly the reasons why it should be pulled apart and discontinued as an organisation.

With UNRWA’s mission to expire in June, it finds itself in a desperate place. Does Guterres tear up the playbook and shut UNRWA down? Such a move would depend on who is left to donate money to the organisation.

If other countries, especially any of Germany, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom or the European Union (though the latter is unlikely to do so) should pull its funding as a result of the scandal, then the United Nations’ senior leaders might find themselves faced with little choice than to pull the plug and subsume the organisation into the UNHCR, the UN agency for refugees, which is what pro-Israeli voices have long called for.

What would happen then? Nothing positive at least, since a refugee agency’s job is chiefly to resettle said refugees and Israel refuses to concede on the right of return.

With major donating backers likely to stand behind UNRWA when faced with no serious alternative, the organisation will probably continue to struggle on. What’s unfortunate is that much of the leadership that’s brought UNRWA close to its knees is likely to remain in place.

Stephen Starr is an Irish journalist who lived in Syria from 2007 to 2012. He is the author of Revolt in Syria: Eye-Witness to the Uprising (Oxford University Press: 2012).

Copyright ©2019 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 13 November 2019
Word Count: 869
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