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      in US Politics

      Spy Jonathan Pollard expected to fly to Israel after US lifts parole

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      Jonathan Pollard, a US citizen jailed for 30 years after being convicted of spying in one of the most dramatic espionage cases of the cold war, is expected to fly to Israel after being released from parole.
      The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, welcomed the lifting of travel restrictions, his office said in a statement on Saturday, adding that he had “consistently worked towards securing Pollard’s release”.
      “The prime minister hopes to see Jonathan Pollard in Israel soon, and together with all Israelis, extends his best wishes to him and his wife Esther,” the statement said.
      The US justice department on Friday announced Pollard’s parole would not be renewed, freeing the former spy from strict restrictions that have kept him in the country since he left jail five years ago.
      Pollard’s lawyer, Eliot Lauer, also suggested his client would soon depart for Israel: “We are grateful and delighted that our client is finally free of any restrictions, and is now a free man in all respects. We look forward to seeing our client in Israel.”
      Having been arrested by FBI agents in 1985 after unsuccessfully seeking refuge at the Israeli embassy in Washington, Pollard was sentenced to life in prison in 1987. He had pleaded guilty to handing thousands of classified documents to Israel.
      The initial shock between the US and its close ally, and Pollard’s continuing imprisonment, has long strained relations between the two countries.
      Pollard’s release was the latest in a series of gestures by the departing Trump administration towards Netanyahu’s government.
      This week the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, became the first top US diplomat to officially visit an Israeli settlement in the West Bank. He later declared that products from settlements – considered illegal under international law – could be labelled “Made in Israel”, despite being made in the occupied Palestinian territories.
      Netanyahu has long pushed for Pollard’s release. During the longtime leader’s first term in the late 1990s, Pollard was granted Israeli citizenship. Netanyahu later made a personal plea to allow him to attend his father’s funeral. The US denied that request. Repeated attempts to persuade US presidents to grant him clemency have failed.
      In his statement on Saturday, Netanyahu thanked his ambassador to the US, Ron Dermer, for “responsibly and sensitively leading the contacts with the [Trump] administration”. More

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      The Guardian view on Biden and the world: undoing Trump’s damage | Editorial

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      Donald Trump is a “symptom of malaise, and decline, and decay” in the US, his former top Russia expert Fiona Hill has observed. If some countries have thus seized upon his presidency as an opportunity, many have been horrified.
      Few US elections were watched quite as anxiously as this one around the world. Widespread relief at Joe Biden’s victory is evident. Much foreign policy, unlike domestic, can be enacted by executive order, without the backing of the Senate. At the most basic level, he will be a president who is patient enough to read a report and knowledgeable enough to understand it; who grasps that America cannot prosper alone; who does not lavish praise on dictators while humiliating democratic allies; who listens to his own intelligence services over Vladimir Putin; and who will entrust Middle East policy to seasoned officials rather than his son-in-law.
      Mr Biden has already vowed to undo many of Mr Trump’s decisions, rejoining the Paris climate change agreement and rescinding the order to withdraw from the World Health Organization. He plans to extend the soon-to-expire New Start treaty with Russia – the last arms control agreement standing. Tackling the pandemic is likely to be a priority for his international diplomacy: signing up to Covax – the global initiative to ensure that poorer nations also get a share of coronavirus vaccines – would send a powerful signal. More than 180 countries have already done so, including China.
      The wait to enter the White House has dangers of its own. Other nations may take advantage of US distraction. The president-elect is not receiving intelligence briefings, leaving him in the dark as he prepares for office. There are anxieties that Mr Trump’s replacement of the defence secretary, Mark Esper, and other senior officials with loyalists may not just be payback for public disagreement, but about paving the way for action at home or abroad. Key administration officials have visited Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia since the election to discuss Iran, raising concerns that Mr Trump might yet pursue a scorched-earth policy – perhaps upping the pressure on Tehran so that it hits back, making it far harder to salvage the nuclear deal.
      The Trump administration has been much tougher on Beijing than anticipated, and has taken measures such as imposing sanctions on officials over human rights abuses in Xinjiang. Yet on this relationship, as elsewhere, the president has been both erratic and crudely transactional, making it clear that human rights concerns are barterable for a better deal on trade. The turn against China has also come across the political spectrum, in response to its actions in Hong Kong, Xinjiang and above all internationally. Countering such behaviour will require intelligence, experience (the state department has been hollowed out and politicised) and consistency. Shoring up international alliances is essential. Finding ways to support Taiwan that don’t backfire in the response they trigger from Beijing will be crucial – and extremely hard.
      Critics of Mr Trump have sometimes taken an overly rosy view of US foreign policy before him. Mr Biden is likely, in essence, to pursue the status quo ante. But if Mr Trump recognised that America’s place in the world was changing, he has also sped its decline. That such a man could become president, and that he could govern as he has, has fundamentally diminished US standing. The world has watched in disbelief as the president has allowed coronavirus to ravage his nation – and now as he refuses to concede. Last week, Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, attacked Beijing for crushing democracy in Hong Kong – but while opining, with a smirk, that at home there would be “a smooth transition to a second Trump administration”.
      If large parts of the world thought the US was malign or at least deeply flawed before, they also thought it mostly functioning and competent, and often enviable. Demolition is an easier task than construction. Mr Biden will undo some of the worst aspects of the last four years, but he cannot erase them from the record. More

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      in Elections

      'An embarrassment': Joe Biden criticizes Trump's refusal to concede election

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      Joe Biden said Donald Trump’s refusal to concede the election was “an embarrassment”, vowing to move forward with the presidential transition despite resistance from the White House and Republican leaders.
      Biden, answering questions for the first time since he was declared the winner of the 2020 election, intensified his criticism of the president, who continued to baselessly allege voter fraud, and said Trump’s denial would “not help his legacy”.
      Though the situation at the White House has caused deepening alarm over whether the US would witness a smooth transfer of power that has been a hallmark of American democracy for generations, Biden promised his team was “going to get right to work” confronting the compounding crises facing the nation.
      Pointing to unfounded claims of voter fraud, Trump, with the support of senior Republicans in Washington, has maintained that the election is not over and is contesting the results in several states, despite it being called for Biden on Saturday morning almost four days after the polls closed.
      In a call with reporters on Monday, transition officials said the General Services Administration had yet to issue a letter of “ascertainment” that would recognize Biden as the president-elect and allow his team to begin the transfer of power.
      Until the decision is made, Biden’s staff cannot meet with their counterparts in the White House and other federal agencies, begin to perform background checks for potential appointees or receive security briefings.
      Biden insisted the delay “does not change the dynamic at all of what we’re able to do”. Receiving the intelligence briefings that are traditionally shared with the incoming president “would be useful,” he said, but added: “We don’t see anything slowing us down, quite frankly.”

      Biden was joined by the vice-president-elect, Kamala Harris, at a theater near his home in downtown Wilmington, Delaware, where they delivered remarks after the US supreme court heard the latest challenge to the Affordable Care Act.
      The Democratic leadership have vowed to protect and expand the signature legislation from the Obama administration, in which Biden served as vice-president, during the worst public health crisis in more than a century.
      The US recently surpassed 10m cases of coronavirus, as most states struggled to contain outbreaks during the latest wave of infections.
      “In the middle of a deadly pandemic that’s affecting more than 10 million Americans, these ideologues are once again trying to strip health coverage away from the American people,” Biden said of the Republican state officials who brought the lawsuit that has ended up before the supreme court, aiming to invalidate the healthcare law.
      Democrats made healthcare a central theme of the election, and a focus of the supreme court hearing last month for Judge Amy Coney Barrett, whose confirmation cemented a 6-3 conservative court.
      The health coverage of millions of Americans hangs in the balance if the court rules in favor of Republicans, though Tuesday’s arguments indicated that the justices were skeptical of striking down the entire law.
      “Each and every vote for Joe Biden was a statement that healthcare in America should be a right and not a privilege,” Harris said in her remarks. She added: “And Joe Biden won this election decisively.” More

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      in Elections

      Biden calls Trump's behavior 'embarrassing' as Pompeo dismisses election result – video

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      The US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, has predicted ‘there will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration’ while US allies offered their congratulations to the president-elect, Joe Biden.
      Pompeo focused on the various legal challenges being pursued by the Trump administration, while Biden, who said he has not spoken to Donald Trump since the election was called in Biden’s favor on Saturday, said Trump’s refusal to concede defeat was ‘an embarrassment’
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      Pompeo makes baseless claims about ‘smooth transition to second Trump administration’ More

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      in US Politics

      Pompeo makes baseless claims about ‘smooth transition to second Trump administration’

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      The secretary of state, Mike Pompeo has predicted “there will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration” on a day when US allies offered their congratulations to the president-elect, Joe Biden.
      Pompeo made his remarks to reporters at the state department on Tuesday, and gave a slight smile after referring to a “second Trump administration” – leaving it unclear whether he was joking.
      He did not refer to the fact that Biden has been projected as the winner, and held a lead of 4.7m nationwide in the vote count so far, while being ahead in the four critical battleground states.
      Instead, Pompeo focused on the various legal challenges being pursued by the Trump administration, none of which so far have been found to have any merit.
      “We’re ready,” Pompeo went on. “The world is watching what’s taking place. We’re gonna count all the votes. When the process is complete, there’ll be electors selected. There’s a process – the constitution lays it out pretty clearly. The world should have every confidence that the transition necessary to make sure that the state department is functional today, successful today and successful with a president who’s in office on January 20 a minute after noon, will also be successful.”
      The state department is not currently communicating with the Biden team and all government agencies have been told to proceed with their budgets as if Trump had been re-elected, to the outrage of Democrats.
      “Secretary Pompeo shouldn’t play along with baseless and dangerous attacks on the legitimacy of last week’s election,” said Eliot Engel, the Democratic chairman of the House foreign affairs committee. “The state department should now begin preparing for President-elect Biden’s transition.”
      Pompeo said he was receiving “calls from all across the world”, but did not say who from. The leaders of America’s main allies, including Canada, the UK, France, Ireland and Germany have congratulated Biden in phone calls on Monday and Tuesday.
      “They understand that we have a legal process. They understand that this takes time,” the secretary of state said, comparing the situation now to the 2000 election. In 2000, George W Bush was leading by 537 votes in Florida, when the supreme court intervened to stop vote counting. Biden is ahead by tens of thousands of votes in four states.
      Echoing Trump’s line – which has become the party line for Republicans – Pompeo said: “We must count every legal vote, we want to make sure that any vote that wasn’t lawful ought not be counted – that dilutes your vote, if it’s done properly. Got to get that right. When we get it right, we’ll get it right. We’re in good shape.”
      When a journalist asked whether Trump’s refusal to concede discredits US promotion of democratic norms abroad, Pompeo replied irritably: “That’s ridiculous and you know it’s ridiculous, and you asked it because it’s ridiculous.”
      He added: “We want the law to be imposed in a way that reflects the reality of what took place, and that’s what I think we’re engaged in here in the United States and it’s what we work on every place all across the world.” More

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      in US Politics

      US reframing of human rights harms women and LGBT people, advocates say

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      Mike Pompeo has stepped up his campaign to change the US approach to human rights, reframing them as “unalienable rights” rooted in American traditions, with a particular emphasis on religious freedom.Since establishing a commission on unalienable rights, made up mostly of religious conservatives, the secretary of state has had its report formally adopted by the state department on 26 August, despite widespread objections from human rights groups.Those groups argue that Pompeo’s approach establishes a hierarchy of rights, downgrading the status of issues like women’s right to reproductive health and LGBTQ+ rights to a second, optional tier. They also point out that it legitimises claims by authoritarian regimes that rights are based in national traditions.“Pompeo has ramped up his efforts around this commission,” said Molly Bangs, the director of Equity Forward, a reproductive rights watchdog organization.“Other foreign governments are now armed with this blueprint, the commission’s report, which they can feel free to use to rubber-stamp their own very concerning human rights practices.”On launching the commission’s draft report in July, Pompeo, an evangelical Christian, said: “Many [rights] are worth defending in light of our founding; others aren’t.” He added that “foremost” among traditional American rights are property rights and religious liberty.Since then, he has placed special emphasis on religious freedom, hosting ministerial meetings on the issue and pursuing partnerships with religiously conservative governments. The next meeting will be in Warsaw, hosted by a Polish government that has gained a reputation for restricting civic freedoms.Speaking to the Atlantic Council on Tuesday, Pompeo said: “America’s foreign policy ought to be based on its traditions and our human rights policy around the world ought to be grounded in the American founding.”In emails and meetings, Pompeo has urged state department staff to use the report to guide their daily work. At a town hall meeting on 9 September, which Pompeo insisted should be an in-person gathering despite Covid-19 restrictions, he was asked about how the new approach affected LGBTQ+ rights.According to someone familiar with the meeting: “His response was these ‘things’ – he wouldn’t even say LGBT – these things are up for debate.”The phrase “unalienable rights” has been inserted into a new gender equality policy document drafted last month by the US Agency for International Development (USAID). References to LGBTQ+ issues and abortion in the 2012 version of the document have been removed.The section on reproductive health in the previous policy document has been renamed family planning and makes no mention of abortion. It emphasises “communication between spouses regarding fertility, finances, and household issues”.In response, 15 Democratic senators wrote to the USAid acting administrator, John Barsa, saying the policy paper was “riddled with shortcomings and problematic characterizations of fundamental rights”.“It is a stark demonstration that politics have overtaken principle at USAID under this administration and compromised the agency’s mission,” the senators wrote.The state department is also seeking international support abroad for its approach, with limited success. Pompeo has called a meeting on 23 September, on the sidelines of the UN general assembly, which was initially billed as being on unalienable rights. The response was so tepid from Washington’s traditional allies that the meeting was recast as being about the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But diplomats at the UN said the agenda was the same: to relegate LGBTQ+ and reproductive health rights.Louis Charbonneau, UN director of Human Rights Watch, said the meeting was intended “to promote the commission, an exercise to ‘re-examine’ internationally recognized rights”.The US has circulated a declaration to member states calling on them to sign it and “recommit ourselves today to the Declaration and its foundational ideal that certain principles are so fundamental as to apply to all human beings, everywhere, at all times”.It makes no mention of the treaties and conventions adopted since 1948 seeking to bolster the rights of vulnerable groups, and the establishment of treaty bodies like the committee on the elimination of discrimination against women, the committee against torture, and the committee on the rights of persons with disabilities.“We don’t want to turn the clock back to a time before there were these important protections,” Charbonneau said. “Reaffirming the foundational treaties, without reaffirming the follow up treaties and treaty bodies, risks implying that those things are not essential.”Rori Kramer, a former deputy assistant secretary of state, said she believed that the promotion of a new human rights doctrine was already influencing US diplomats around the world.“From day one when Pompeo announced this, the intention was always to change the actual working policy of the department to fit his narrow religious views in a way that really upends the normal working order of the department,” Kramer, now director of US advocacy for American Jewish World Service, said.“The human rights officers in the embassies have always historically been the person that supports the human rights activists, supports the LGBT activists who have been jailed by their authoritarian government and sort of stands with those people … They’re sending a very clear message they want that to change.” More

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      in World Politics

      The Mad Complicity of Trump, Pompeo and the Media

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      In an article published by Al Jazeera with the title, “What is behind the hype about the new Iran-China partnership?” Pakistan-based journalist Tom Hussain weighs in on how media in the US have become dedicated to magnifying real events not to further our understanding of them, but to create a climate of conflict, if not war in the Middle East. 

      Hussain cites two stories that US media have been running with in recent weeks to generate emotional heat while depriving them of the light of intelligible analysis. The first is the strategic partnership agreement between Iran and China. The second is the normalization of diplomatic and trade relations between the United Arab Emirates and Israel.

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      Hussain notes that both stories have been interpreted in the US as “escalations in the geopolitical conflict between the US and Iran.” Seeking some needed perspective, he points out that “the first development was a media creation. The New York Times (NYT) ran a front-page story citing a ‘leaked’ draft of the 25-year strategic partnership agreement under negotiation between China and Iran since 2016.” The Times story summed up its case in its misleading headline: “Defying U.S., China and Iran Near Trade and Military Partnership.”

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Media creation:

      1) Fabricated melodrama masquerading as news provided by respectable media outlets to prove that they can be just as disrespectful of the truth as social media 
      2) The state of hyperreality induced by society’s obsessive addiction to professional media and the entertainment industry, effectively canceling the public’s relationship with reality 

      Contextual Note

      The methodology of media creation has achieved something close to perfection in the Donald Trump era. It reflects a complex team effort shared by an infinitely creative political superstructure and the complicit media.

      Before Trump, this novel dynamic that now regulates the news cycle had never existed in the political world. Trump didn’t invent “alternate facts,” even though a member of his team made the term a permanent item of US political vocabulary. Politicians have always lied and exaggerated, but it was always about specific issues. With Trump, it has now become a way of life. Without hyperreality, the news would be too boring to pay attention to. The public now expects it. For their profitability, the media now depend on it.

      Building the hyperreal system required two critical components. At its core is a democratically elected clown show whose members are skilled at turning every utterance into a deliberate distortion and often inversion of reality. President Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have perfected that role. For a while, they were accompanied by John Bolton, the former national security adviser. But when that began to look too much like the Three Stooges, the production team pared it back to make it look more like Abbot and Costello.

      Embed from Getty Images

      One member of the show’s technical crew, Senior Adviser Jared Kushner, has compared the Trump administration’s show to Alice in Wonderland. Once the hyperreal wonderland sets were in place, the media could play their role of amplifying every absurdity in the actors’ actions and discourse and presenting it as the essential news of the day. The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC and many others then had an open field for manufacturing scoops designed to reveal how artificial and distorted the starring team had become.

      In the example Hussain examines, the lead player was Pompeo, a man whose commitment to hyperreality includes a personal belief in a marvelous work of American evangelical fiction that claims to be inspired by the Bible: “the rapture.” Hussain recounts that when interviewed by Fox News in early August, “Pompeo claimed that the prospective China-Iran deal would put Communist cash in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s hands.” Hussain then mentions Pompeo’s warnings: “China’s entry into Iran will destabilize the Middle East. It’ll put Israel at risk. It’ll put the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Emirates at risk as well.”

      No patriotic American is allowed to doubt that Israel, Saudi Arabia and the UAE are the good guys on the world stage. It doesn’t matter that any of these good guys may from time to time slaughter civilian populations (in Gaza or Yemen), seize land that is not theirs in violation of UN resolutions, ambush, assassinate and dismember the occasional dissident journalist or blockade an allied nation (Qatar) that doesn’t toe their line. Washington long ago elected those three nations to the good guys club. If any of the three detects or even invents a threat from elsewhere, the US will be by their side.

      In the interview with Fox News, Pompeo amplified his warning: “Iran remains the world’s largest state sponsor of terror, and to have access to weapons systems and commerce and money flowing from the Chinese Communist Party only compounds that risk for that region.” It doesn’t matter how much truth or falsehood there may be in Pompeo’s claim. What matters is that the evil force he has identified combines the two permanent objects of US paranoia in a single historical event: terrorism and communism.

      Breaking free from the envelope of hyperreality his reporting has focused on, Hussain offers this extraordinary moment of sincerity so rare in today’s media: “At the risk of spotlighting my own inadequacies as a journalist, I [cannot] help wondering why editors and writers seem so willing to fan the flames of war.” 

      To answer his own question, he might have simply reviewed the past 75 years of US history to realize that the Cold War has always been a Hollywood production, courtesy of the military-industrial complex and its pervasive economic logic. But unlike Hollywood action films, US foreign policy as modeled by the media has real world consequences. Hussain makes this clear: “The long-suffering peoples of the Middle East could do without journalists once again playing cheerleader for American politicians who perpetuate their domestic power by igniting conflict in others’ backyards.”

      Russiagate is one obvious manifestation of the hyperreal campaign. It’s the one chosen by the Democrats. Pompeo and the Republicans prefer demonizing China. The New Yorker has just published an article debunking in glorious detail the entire Russiagate ideology so assiduously pursued by the most respectable media in the US, starting with The New York Times. But the principle goes beyond Russia and President Vladimir Putin. “Foreign interference is now a trope in American politics, at risk of becoming as cheap and meaningless as the term ‘fake news’ became once it was co-opted by Trump,” The New Yorker reports.

      Historical Note

      Future historians centuries from today will wonder why the US empire of the late 20th and early 21st centuries required the non-stop fabrication of an imaginary all-powerful enemy to maintain its identity as an empire. The Roman Empire did quite well for centuries without requiring a cold war ideology. Neither did the British Empire, Genghis Khan or the ancient Persian Empire. Once they had the military might to move and conquer, they focused on the supposed pragmatic rationality of their ability to control and exploit resources to occupy an ever-expanding geographical zone of influence.

      Analyzing the US empire from the perspective of Pakistan, Tom Hussain reminds those Americans who happen to read his column of this simple truth: “There is no grand alliance or ‘evil axis’ – just tentative diplomacy and proxy warfare amid shifts in the balance of power in the Middle East, necessitated in part by the withdrawal of US combat forces from the region, as well as the seepage of power to Beijing from Washington.”

      Only a small minority of Americans today are willing to accept the idea of “shifts in the balance of power,” knowing that the “greatest nation in the history of the world” has monopolistically exercised power over the globe for decades. Nor are they about to countenance the idea of “seepage of power” because that would call into question America’s divine mission to spread its enlightened but fundamentally elitist democratic-capitalist ideology across the globe.

      In the age of Trump, it appears useless to point out that enlightened leaders — and even benevolent despots — have throughout history consistently recognized and dealt with the historical reality of shifts in the balance of power. Power is never absolute and never stable, but when it does approach becoming absolute — as happens, at least in people’s minds, when hyperreality takes over — Lord Acton’s wisdom dating from 1887 ends up prevailing: it “corrupts absolutely.”

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More