US Politics

Vlad sheds light on politics and policingCryptic crossword commentary | The recorder in pop music | Post Office inquiry | Whitechapel library surprise | Stuff with mushrooms Marina Hyde and John Crace have been unmissable for their take on recent events in Downing Street and the Met police. But on Friday, Vlad did it backwards and in heels (Cryptic crossword, 11 February), centring on George Washington’s reputed admission of truthfulness. Whether readers do cryptic crosswords or not, I urge them to read the clues for this extraordinary encapsulation of the same events.Clare Smedley Rudyard, Staffordshire The recorder can also sound beautiful in modern music, eg Fool on the Hill by the Beatles, Ruby Tuesday by the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven (Letters, 11 February).John Rix Rugby, Warwickshire I welcome the opening (finally) of the Post Office public inquiry (‘I knew something was wrong’: first witness in Post Office hearing breaks down, 14 February). But can someone please explain to me why this is a public inquiry rather than a police investigation? Peter Hughes Newton, Cambridgeshire I worked at Whitechapel library in London (Letters, 9 February) in 1967-69. A few years ago, I booked a meal at Angela Hartnett’s Whitechapel restaurant. Imagine my surprise to find that not only was my office now a restaurant but the card catalogue held the cutlery.Moira Gray Newcastle upon Tyne At the risk of propelling mushrooms into the same arena as those once-popular 35mm film canisters, could I suggest replacing the small knob of butter (Letters, 11 February) with a healthy squirt of mayonnaise?Mark Hainge Hay-on-Wye, Powys TopicsPoliticsBrief lettersUS politicsPost OfficelettersReuse this content More

Ocasio-Cortez: ‘Very real risk’ US democracy won’t exist in 10 years Efforts by Republicans to restrict voting rights could result in return to Jim Crow era, says progressive in New Yorker interview The progressive New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez believes the Republican-led pressure on political systems is so great that there is “a very real risk” democracy will cease to exist in the US within a decade.The leftist Democratic politician derided efforts by Republican legislatures around the country to restrict voting rights as the “opening salvos” in a war on democracy, which she said could result in a return to the Jim Crow-era disenfranchisement of racial minorities.In the interview with the New Yorker, she warned that the clock was ticking for Joe Biden and other Democratic leaders to do anything about it, with huge chunks of the president’s agenda, including legislation to protect voting rights, stalled in Congress by more conservative or moderate members of her own party.“Honestly, it is a shitshow,” Ocasio-Cortez said of working in the same Democratic-controlled Congress in which centrist senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have blocked both electoral reforms and Biden’s ambitious Build Back Better social spending initiative.“We don’t have much time,” she said. “The president has not been using his executive power to the extent that some would say is necessary.”The issue of voting rights was a dominant theme of the interview with New Yorker editor David Remnick, who asked her about her previous use of the phrase “if we have a democracy 10 years from now”.“There’s a very real risk that we will not,” she said. “What we risk is having a government that perhaps postures as a democracy, and may try to pretend that it is, but isn’t.“We’ve already seen the opening salvos of this, where you have a very targeted, specific attack on the right to vote across the United States, particularly in areas where Republican power is threatened by changing electorates and demographics.“You have white nationalist, reactionary politics starting to grow into a critical mass … the continued sophisticated takeover of our democratic systems in order to turn them into undemocratic systems, all in order to overturn results that a party in power may not like.”Although she believes the situation “is not beyond hope”, Ocasio-Cortez fears inaction will lead to a “return to Jim Crow”, a reference to repressive laws in the US south to the mid-20th century designed to enforce racial segregation and disenfranchise Blacks.“You have it already happening in Texas, where Jim Crow-style disenfranchisement laws have already been proposed,” she said.“You have the complete erasure and attack on our own understanding of history, to replace teaching history with institutionalized propaganda from white nationalist perspectives in our schools. This is what the scaffolding of Jim Crow was.“The question we’re really facing is, was the last 50 to 60 years after the Civil Rights Act just a mere flirtation that the United States had with a multiracial democracy that we will then decide was inconvenient for those in power? And we will revert to what we had before?”TopicsAlexandria Ocasio-CortezUS politicsRepublicansnewsReuse this content More

The Guardian view on a Kabul heist: snatching money from the starvingEditorialAfghans are not to blame for 9/11, though they have paid for it many times over. Cruelly, they are being punished again The average Afghan was not even alive when planes were flown into the twin towers on 11 September 2001. This is only one of the reasons why handing money from the Afghan central bank to the families of 9/11 victims would be unconscionable. Parents are already selling their organs to feed their children, 98% of the population is short of food, and unless cash starts flowing again things are about to get much, much worse.The executive order signed by the Biden administration on Friday would allow Afghanistan’s $7bn US-held assets, frozen when the Taliban swept to power, to be halved. One half would be held pending the outcome of lawsuits brought against the Taliban by the families of 9/11 victims who have persuaded a judge to attach their case to the Afghan assets. The other half, if courts agree, would be used for humanitarian aid. The administration’s argument is that this may help get assistance to Afghanistan more swiftly, without having to await the outcome of the cases. The government can step into lawsuits to say what it believes is in the national interest, but decided that it would not object to any decision to award half the money to the families.Though central bank funds are supposed to enjoy diplomatic immunities, it appears that the administration can act if a “recognised representative of the Afghan government” approves – raising obvious questions about who might now qualify. Whatever the legal technicalities, the moral case is clear. Afghans are not to blame for 9/11, though they have paid for it many times over. Some of the bereaved have already condemned the idea of taking Afghan money as a betrayal. Thousands of American families were devastated that day, and $7bn compensation was disbursed to bereaved relatives and the injured (many of whom faced huge medical bills); another $10bn is still being paid out. This is in stark contrast with Afghanistan, where, on the very rare occasions that the US made compensation or “condolence” payments for civilian deaths, relatives usually received a small four-figure sum. The administration cannot claim the moral high ground because it proposes using some of the money for aid. Though most of it originally came from international donors, including the US, it is no longer theirs to spend, and some represents the personal savings of Afghans.In any case, humanitarian relief is no substitute for a functioning, if floundering, economy. It is not merely that it raises the prospect of starving Afghans paying the salaries of western aid workers, and of a flood of food aid causing more long-term damage by crippling agriculture. The UN had already warned that the financial system could collapse within months; seizing the central bank’s assets could be the last straw. It’s true that those funds alone can’t solve Afghanistan’s underlying problems – but they are desperately needed to stave off some of the worst consequences.Afghan experts and others have worked on imaginative solutions to restore liquidity without simply ceding control of assets to the Taliban. The problem is not a lack of means, but of will: relief is an easier political sell in the US, which is also believed to have blocked other countries from unfreezing funds. No one wants to aid the Taliban, whose primary victims are Afghans. But no one should claim the administration’s plan is in the best interests of the Afghan people.TopicsAfghanistanOpinionTalibanJoe BidenDemocratsUS politicsSeptember 11 2001United NationseditorialsReuse this content More

The US government is deploying robot dogs to the Mexico border. Seriously?Moustafa BayoumiAs if the border isn’t surveilled and militarized enough, the Department of Homeland Security wants to go full Black Mirror Are we all doomed to live in Charlie Brooker’s techno-dystopia? In Metalhead, an episode from season four of his famed Netflix show Black Mirror, a woman navigates an austere post-apocalyptic landscape while running for her life from a murderous robot dog. What makes the mechanized beast in the show particularly frightening is the lethal combination of the single-mindedness of a computer program with the extreme ferocity of an angry, feral dog.But it’s just TV, right? Not exactly. The military, technological, security and political classes in this country appear united in their desire to make robot dogs part of our future, and we should all be worried.The latest example came on 1 February, when the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a press release titled “Robot Dogs Take Another Step Towards Deployment at the Border”. DHS dressed up their statement with the kind of adorable language made to warm the hearts of dog lovers everywhere. “The Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) is offering US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) a helping hand (or ‘paw’),” read the release. Isn’t that cute? A picture of the “four-legged ground drone” accompanied the release, and the “Automated Ground Surveillance Vehicle”, as it’s called, looked remarkably (and scarily) similar to the monstrous quadrupeds seen in the Black Mirror episode. But let’s not judge based on appearance. The real issue is that we keep rushing to militarized and technological solutions to what ultimately are human and political questions, creating more problems along the way.These particular robot dogs are made by Ghost Robotics, which claims that its 100lb machine was “bred” to scale “all types of natural terrain including sand, rocks and hills, as well as human-built environments, like stairs”. Each robot dog is outfitted with a bevy of sensors and able to transmit real-time video and information feeds. The devices are not yet in operation on the US-Mexico border, but a testing and evaluation program is under way in El Paso, Texas.To listen to DHS, it all sounds so utterly charming and so very next-gen – until you realize that what we’re talking about is the further encroachment of government surveillance on our daily lives. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation notes, “people who live along the border are some of the most heavily surveilled people in the United States. A massive amalgamation of federal, state and local law enforcement and national security agencies are flying drones, putting up cameras and just generally attempting to negate civil liberties – capturing the general goings-on of people who live and work in proximity to the border.”Then there’s the question of lethal force. These specific ground drones may not be armed, but Ghost Robotics is already infamous for the combination of robot dog and robot rifle. In 2021, small arms manufacturer Sword International (must these companies choose such dystopian names?) outfitted a robot dog from Ghost Robotics with a custom-made weapon, called a “special purpose unmanned rifle” or Spur. This darling invention was unveiled at the annual conference of the Association of the United States Army.Incidentally, US policy not only does not “prohibit the development or employment” of killer robots (officially known as “lethal autonomous weapon systems,” or Laws) but also opposes any international preemptive ban. Meanwhile, as the Congressional Research Service notes, Israel has already exported what many consider a lethal autonomous weapon system to Chile, China, India, South Korea and Turkey. We’re fast running out of time for robust international dialogue on this issue.Domestically, the short history of the use of the robot dogs in our cities is also troubling. The Honolulu police department used about $150,000 of pandemic funding to buy their robot dog, which they then used to scan the eyes and take the temperatures of unhoused people to check for symptoms of Covid. The practice raised the alarms of advocates who said the practice was fundamentally dehumanizing. Needless to say, no housed person was treated that way.And after public outcry in 2021, the New York police department returned its $94,200 robot dog, Digidog. That robot was deployed to a home invasion in the Bronx and to a tense situation in a public housing building in Manhattan, attracting the angry notice of New Yorkers. Once again, many Black and brown New Yorkers felt over-policed, over-surveilled and under-resourced.“You can’t give me a living wage, you can’t raise a minimum wage, you can’t give me affordable housing; I’m working hard and I can’t get paid leave, I can’t get affordable childcare,” said Representative Jamaal Bowman in a video he posted to Twitter. “Instead we got money, taxpayer money, going to robot dogs?”Bowman is hardly alone. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez criticized both the NYPD’s robot dog in 2021 and the recent news of robot dogs at the border. “It’s shameful how both parties fight tooth + nail to defend their ability to pump endless public money into militarization,” she recently tweeted. “From tanks in police depts to corrupt military contracts, funding this violence is bipartisan + non-controversial, yet healthcare + housing isn’t. It’s BS.”She’s right, of course, as is Bowman. Where exactly are our priorities?The Biden administration has a chance to stop this program in its tracks before the border becomes even more of a militarized, technological dystopia. We’re so easily mesmerized by the massive capabilities of technology, but the fact is that techno-military solutions to human problems too often create more problems than they solve. Just ask the unhoused populations in Honolulu, the urban poor in New York, and – if the program’s not cancelled – asylum seekers on the border. These are the people whose daily realities are increasingly being militarized by this technology. And because they are vulnerable and without political clout, they’re the ones closest to living in a Black Mirror episode. Meanwhile, the rest of us are sold a hi-tech bill of goods that unites everything that Americans love – technology, dogs and guns – and told to believe it’s all for the best.Look, I love my tech and all it can do as much as the next person, but when our embrace of technology reduces rather than enhances our dignity, then we have a problem. Humans deserve better. And frankly, so do dogs – even robot ones.
Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the award-winning books How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. He is a professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York
TopicsUS politicsOpinionUS-Mexico borderUS militaryUS policingcommentReuse this content More

Bipartisan members on Capitol attack panel say they expect Giuliani to testifyComments come after report that Trump ally is in talks about options, including in-person interview or submitting a deposition Bipartisan figures on the congressional committee investigating Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn his 2020 election defeat said on Sunday they expected the former president’s close ally, Rudolph Giuliani, would comply with a subpoena to give testimony.Giuliani is among a number of Trump sphere insiders who have so far refused to cooperate with the bipartisan House panel looking into Trump’s subversion efforts and the January 6 Capitol insurrection the then president incited that claimed five lives. Giuliani was scheduled to testify last Tuesday, after the committee issued a subpoena last month, but did not appear.Elaine Luria, a Virginia Democratic congresswoman and member of the select committee, said Giuliani had already been in touch, seeming to confirm the substance of a New York Times report that Giuliani was in talks about options including an in-person interview or submitting a deposition.“He has been in contact with the committee,” she told MSNBC of Giuliani. “He had an appearance that has been rescheduled but he remains under subpoena and we expect him to cooperate fully with the investigation.”Rep. Elaine Luria (D-VA) confirms that Rudy Giuliani is in talks to testify before the committee investigating January 6th.”We expect him to cooperate fully with the investigation.” pic.twitter.com/sJdT7rtwnK— The Recount (@therecount) February 13, 2022
And Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois Republican and committee member, indicated in an appearance on CBS that he was of the understanding, also, that Giuliani would comply.“He’s been subpoenaed [and] our expectation is he was going to cooperate, because that’s the law, same as someone subpoenaed to court,” Kinzinger told CBS’s Face the Nation.He added: “There may be some changes in dates and moments here, as you know, lawyers do their back and forth, but we fully expect that in accordance with the law, we’ll hear from Rudy.“But regardless of when we hear from Rudy, or how long that interview is, we’re getting a lot of information and we’re looking forward to wrapping this up at some point.”Giuliani was prominent in Trump’s failed plotting to hold on to power and prevent Joe Biden taking office, and is reported to have been at the center of an unprecedented plan to order the Department of Homeland Security to seize voting machines in contested states.The Times report notes that Giuliani has not yet agreed to cooperate, but the specter of his evidence about maneuverings inside the White House during the final weeks and days of the Trump administration is another milestone moment in an already turbulent week for the former Republican president.The Washington Post reported on Thursday that Trump took boxes of records, including top secret documents, to Mar-a-Lago, his Florida retreat, when he left office, in possible violation of government record-keeping laws.And an upcoming book from New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman claims that Trump periodically clogged White House toilets by attempting to flush away printed papers. Trump has denied the allegations.In recent days, meanwhile, several senior Republicans have criticized the party’s censure of Kinzinger and Wyoming congresswoman Liz Cheney for serving on the committee, and the Republican National Committee’s controversial characterization of the riot as “legitimate political discourse”.Mike Pence, Trump’s vice-president, called Trump’s efforts to overturn the election “un-American” at a conservative conference in Florida, while on Friday the Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell added his voice to the growing Republican backlash against Trump’s big lie that the November 2020 election was stolen from him by the Democrats.“It was a violent insurrection for the purpose of trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after a legitimately certified election, from one administration to the next,” McConnell said of the January 6 riot, adding that it was “not the job” of the Republican party to single out members “who may have different views from the majority.”Larry Hogan, the Republican governor of Maryland and a frequent Trump critic, also slammed the RNC’s position over the insurrection.“To say it’s legitimate political discourse to attack the seat of our capital, and smash windows and attack police officers, and threaten to hang the vice-president and threaten to overthrow the election, it’s insanity,” he told CNN’s State of the Union show on Sunday.“The Republican party I want to get back to is the one that believes in freedom and truth and not one that attacks people who don’t swear 100% fealty to the ‘Dear Leader’ [Trump].”Giuliani, if he testifies, could impart invaluable first-hand knowledge of Trump’s plotting, although the Times notes that negotiations could yet fall apart.Its report cites three anonymous sources stating that Giuliani has had talks with the committee about the format and content of his possible testimony, including how much of his interaction with Trump he would yet look to shield under attorney-client privilege.The article suggests Giuliani could be seeking to avoid a costly legal fight and trying to evade a criminal referral for contempt of congress, by dangling a promise of testimony.In November, Steve Bannon, a former Trump adviser, pleaded not guilty to criminal contempt of Congress for his refusal to comply with a committee subpoena, while the House of Representatives has recommended charges for former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.Kinzinger, who will not seek re-election in this year’s midterm elections, also believes senior party figures such as Pence and McConnell speaking out could help provide “political cover” for anti-Trump Republican candidates.“I don’t care if you’re running for city council, Congress, Senate, etc, every Republican has to be clear and forceful on the record, do they think January 6th was legitimate political discourse?” he asked.TopicsRudy GiulianiUS politicsUS Capitol attackDonald TrumpUS elections 2020newsReuse this content More

Ukraine crisis: miscalculation could trigger unintended wider conflict‘Risk of something going down like a mid-air collision, or a trigger-happy Russian or American, can really escalate things quickly’ The unprecedented Russian military encirclement of Ukraine has not only brought closer the prospect of a devastating war in that country, it has also raised the risks of triggering an unintended wider conflict.The US and Nato have been adamant that their troops will not enter Ukraine no matter what happens, and the Pentagon has pulled out the 160 national guard soldiers who were acting as military advisers.Biden warns Putin: you’ll pay a heavy cost if you attack UkraineRead moreEven during the cold war, Washington and Russia made sure their forces did not clash, and Joe Biden has made clear he would seek to keep it that way.“That’s a world war when Americans and Russia start shooting at one another,” Biden said.However, the massing of Russian troops in Belarus and the deployment of a substantial Russian naval force in the Black Sea, matched on a smaller scale by Nato land, sea and air reinforcements on the alliance’s eastern flank, means there is much far more military hardware in close proximity than is normal. And with proximity comes the increased danger of accidents and unintended consequences.“The risk of something going down like a mid-air collision, or a trigger-happy Russian or American, can really escalate things quickly,” said Danny Sjursen, a former army major and director of the Eisenhower Media Network.“You’re setting yourself up for accidents and miscalculation, and that’s when you can get out of control real quick, because there are domestic considerations both in Russia and in the United States. An American pilot dies – now what? I’m not saying that necessarily means we go to cataclysmic nuclear war but it escalates things.”The US national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, told CBS News on Sunday that the US had sought to be transparent about its troop deployments in eastern Europe in order “to avoid mistake miscalculation or escalation and also to send a very clear message to Russia we will defend every inch of Nato territory”.There is a long history of close encounters over the Baltic and Black Seas. Earlier this month US jet fighters scrambled to intercept Russian warplanes operating close to Nato airspace while British and Norwegian planes took off to monitor Russian aircraft flying into the North Sea.While Russia has shut off large parts of the Black Sea to conduct its manoeuvres, Nato navies have stayed out of the immediate vicinity for now, while building up their presence in the Mediterranean. If they do decide to go through the Bosphorus in a show of strength, or to safeguard commercial shipping, the risk will rise again.Elisabeth Braw, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said the danger is further heightened by Russia’s suspected use of “GPS spoofing”, interference with the navigational equipment of other vessels.On several occasions recently, civilian ships traveling in the Black Sea have encountered mysterious GPS troubles that showed the vessels being in a different part of the Black Sea or even on land. It was widely though the incidents were caused by Russia testing its technology.“It raises the risk for naval vessels that are in the Black Sea, which we should remember is not that big, and it’s crowded,” Braw said. “There’s enormous shipping activity in the Black Sea, and so all those crews face the risk of having no GPS.”The transfer of combat troops from Russia’s far east to Belarus has not only significantly increased the imminent threat to Ukraine, but also made eastern European Nato members increasingly nervous.“The closest training ranges in Belarus are 150 to 200km from Vilnius or Warsaw,” said Kristjan Mäe, the head of the Nato and EU department at Estonia’s ministry of defence. “This is a Russian force posture that hasn’t been there previously.”A refugee crisis at the Polish-Belarus border year led to a close encounter between the troops facing each other, with Warsaw complaining that Belarus forces opened fire in the direction of their soldiers.“We have to remember that the people who are actually out on the frontline are very young men and women and they face enormous responsibility,” Braw said. “Yes there is a chain of command but if there is some sort of provocation or aggression, intentional or unintentional, that is directed against them, then they have to respond.”The close encounters so far have occurred in peacetime. In the event of war, nerves will be far more on edge, communications could be hampered or flooded with disinformation.“We cannot be entirely confident that in the lead up to or during a conflict that Nato and Russia will be able to communicate, especially as current civil and military communication systems between them are not as robust or technically resilient as they should be,” Sahil Shah, a policy fellow at the European Leadership Network, said.“The world’s two largest nuclear-armed states have returned to the brink of conflict exactly 60 years after the Cuban missile crisis. If diplomacy is not pursued to the fullest extent, the risks of miscalculation and miscommunication could potentially pull in wider Europe into a devastating war. Without dialogue on how to manage de-escalation, it will be as if our leaders are running into a monsoon with newspapers over their heads.”TopicsUkraineEuropeRussiaJoe BidenVladimir PutinVolodymyr ZelenskiyUS politicsanalysisReuse this content More