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      Defense secretary Lloyd Austin demands US military sexual assault reports

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      In his first directive since taking office, US defense secretary Lloyd Austin has given his senior leaders two weeks to send him reports on sexual assault prevention programs in the military, and an assessment of what has worked and what hasn’t.Austin’s memo, which went out Saturday, fulfils a commitment made to senators last week during confirmation hearings. Joe Biden’s pick, a retired army general, vowed to immediately address the problems of sexual assault and harassment in the ranks.“This is a leadership issue,” Austin said in his two-page memo. “We will lead.”Senator after senator demanded to know what Austin planned to do about the problem. Reports of sexual assaults have steadily gone up since 2006, according to department reports, including a 13% jump in 2018 and a 3% increase in 2019. The 2020 data is not yet available.The 2018 increase fueled congressional anger and lawmakers have repeatedly called for action, including changes in the Code of Military Justice.“You do agree that we can’t keep doing the same thing that we’ve been doing for the past decade?” Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York Democrat, said during Austin’s confirmation hearing. “Do I have your commitment to be relentless on this issue until we can end the scourge of sexual violence in the military?”Austin agreed, telling senators: “This starts with me and you can count on me getting after this on day one.”Austin arrived at the Pentagon on Friday but spent his first hours in meetings with key leaders. He was in the Pentagon again on Saturday, making calls to counterparts around the world, and he signed the memo.In his hearing and in the memo, Austin acknowledged that the military has long struggled with the problem, but must do better.The directive calls for each leader to submit a summary of the sexual assault and harassment measures taken in the last year that show promise, and an assessment of those that do not. And he asked for relevant data for the past decade, including efforts to support victims.“Include in your report the consideration of novel approaches to any of these areas,” he said, adding that “we must not be afraid to get creative.” Austin said he plans to host a meeting on the matter with senior leaders in the coming days.Nate Galbreath, acting director of the Pentagon’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office, said last April that he was cautiously optimistic that the lower increase in 2019 suggested a trend in declining assaults. But he also said sexual assaults are vastly under-reported.Galbreath and military leaders have rolled out new programs, including increased education and training and efforts to encourage service members to intervene when they see a bad situation. Last year officials announced a new move to root out serial offenders.Many victims don’t file criminal reports, which means investigators can’t pursue alleged attackers. Under the new system, victims who don’t want to file a public report are encouraged to confidentially provide details.Galbreath and others also have contended that the increase in reports was a good sign in that it showed that victims were more willing to come forward. More

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      in US Politics

      US man charged with threatening to 'assassinate' Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

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      A Texas man who participated in the attack on the US Capitol on 6 January has been charged with threatening to “assassinate” the New York Democratic representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.Garret Miller of Texas faces five criminal charges arising from his participation in the pro-Trump riot, including “knowingly entering or remaining in any restricted buildings or grounds without lawful authority” and making threats.According to court documents, he allegedly tweeted: “Assassinate AOC.”He is also charged with violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds, obstructing or impeding any official proceeding, and certain acts during civil disorder.Asked for comment on Saturday, Miller’s lawyer, Clint Broden, said in an email: “The charges are based on an inappropriate comment made in the heat of the moment on Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez’s Twitter feed.”On Friday night, Ocasio-Cortez, a progressive Democratic congresswoman from New York, responded to news that Miller had been arrested, and had posted a selfie to Facebook, writing that he “just wanted to incriminate myself a little lol”.Ocasio-Cortez tweeted: “Well, you did!”She added: “On one hand you have to laugh, and on the other know that the reason [the Capitol rioters] were this brazen is because they thought they were going to succeed.”Miller is also alleged to have said an officer who shot and killed a Trump supporter inside the Capitol “deserves to die” and would not “survive long” because it’s “huntin[g] season”.Broden said: “Mr Miller regrets the actions he took in a misguided effort to show his support for former President Trump. He has the full support of his family and has always been a law abiding citizen.“His social media comments reflect very ill-considered political hyperbole in very divided times and will certainly not be repeated in the future. He looks forward to putting all of this behind him.”The criminal complaint filed in Washington DC federal court lists example after example of social media posts apparently placing Miller on Capitol grounds, participating in the riot.Several hours after the insurrection, authorities allege, Twitter user @garretamiller publicly posted a video from within the Capitol captioned: “From inside congress”.“In examining Miller’s Facebook account, there are many posts relating to his involvement in criminal activities at the Capitol,” officials wrote.On 2 January, Miller allegedly wrote on Facebook: “I am about to drive across the country for this trump shit. On Monday … Some crazy shit going to happen this week. Dollar might collapse … civil war could start … not sure what to do in DC.”On 3 January, Miller allegedly said he was bringing to Washington “a grappling hook and rope and a level-3 vest. Helmets mouth guard and bump cap”. The last time he was in Washington for a pro-Trump rally, Miller allegedly added, he “had a lot of guns” with him.Miller also seems to have sought to set the record straight about participants in the riot. When someone wrote on Twitter that “the people storming The Capitol are not Patriots. They are PAID INFILTRATORS”, Miller allegedly responded: “Nah we stormed it. We where [sic] gentle. We where [sic] unarmed. We knew what had to be done.”In a 15 January Facebook chat, Miller allegedly wrote that he was “happy to make death threats so I been just off the rails tonight lol” and was “happy to be banned now [from Twitter]”. Asked if police knew his name, he allegedly wrote: “[I]t might be time for me to … Be hard to locate.”A bail hearing was scheduled for Monday.The Washington Post, meanwhile, reported that the FBI and Department of Justice were considering not charging some of the hundreds of people arrested over the riot.It was “a politically loaded proposition”, the paper said, “but one alert to the practical concern that hundreds of such cases could swamp the local courthouse”.Donald Trump was impeached for inciting the Capitol attack. He will face trial in the Senate. More

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      'This is not justice': supreme court liberals slam Trump's federal executions

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      The supreme court justices Sonia Sotomayor and Stephen Breyer have excoriated the Trump administration for carrying out its 13th and final federal execution days before the president leaves office.Dustin John Higgs died by lethal injection at the federal correctional institute in Terre Haute, Indiana, on Friday night, after his 11th-hour clemency appeal was rejected.Higgs, 48, was convicted of murdering three women at a Maryland wildlife refuge in 1996, even though it was an accomplice who fired the fatal shots. Willis Haynes was convicted of the same crime but sentenced to life.“This was not justice,” Sotomayor, a Barack Obama appointee, wrote in an order issued late on Friday.Sotomayor, who was critical of the Trump administration’s July 2019 announcement that it would resume federal executions after a two-decade hiatus, condemned what she saw as “an unprecedented rush” to kill condemned inmates. All 13 executions have taken place since July 2020.The government executed more than three times as many people in the last six months than in the previous six decades“To put that in historical context, the federal government will have executed more than three times as many people in the last six months than it had in the previous six decades,” she wrote.“There can be no ‘justice on the fly’ in matters of life and death,” Sotomayor added. “Yet the court has allowed the United States to execute 13 people in six months under a statutory scheme and regulatory protocol that have received inadequate scrutiny, without resolving the serious claims the condemned individuals raised.”Breyer, a fellow liberal on the nine-justice high court, was equally scathing, naming each of the 13 executed prisoners and noting a lower court’s observation that Higgs had significant lung damage. The lethal injection of pentobarbital, Breyer said, would “subject him to a sensation of drowning akin to waterboarding”.He said the court needed to address whether execution protocols risked extreme pain and needless suffering and pressured the courts into last-minute decisions on life or death.“What are courts to do when faced with legal questions of this kind?” he wrote. “Are they supposed to ‘hurry up, hurry up?’”Breyer went further than Sotomayor by questioning the constitutionality of the death penalty, the first member of the current panel to do so. The third liberal justice, Elena Kagan, also dissented in the Higgs case but did not give an explanation.Higgs’s petition for clemency said he had been a model prisoner and dedicated father to a son born after his arrest. He had a traumatic childhood and lost his mother to cancer when he was 10, it said.He was convicted in October 2000 by a federal jury in Maryland for the first-degree murder and kidnapping in the killings of Tamika Black, 19; Mishann Chinn, 23; and Tanji Jackson, 21. Although Haynes shot the women, Higgs handed him his gun.“He received a fair trial and was convicted and sentenced to death by a unanimous jury for a despicable crime,” the US district judge Peter Messitte wrote in December.Arguably the most high-profile execution of the Trump administration came just days ago when Lisa Montgomery received a lethal injection at Terre Haute and became the first woman put to death by the federal government almost seven decades.Her lawyer accused the Trump administration of “unnecessary and vicious use of authoritarian power”.Many believe officials rushed to complete a series of executions before Joe Biden is inaugurated on 20 January. Biden has stated his desire to have the death penalty abolished at federal and state level. More

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      Schwarzenegger used to exemplify politico-showbiz ridiculousness. Now he's our true moral governator | Peter Bradshaw

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      How amazing. Until a few years ago – 2016, in fact – if you asked people for the most absurd example of the politico-showbusiness complex in the 21st-century United States, they would have said Arnold Schwarzenegger’s recall election as governor of California in 2003, his candidacy being announced on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno. He was re-elected in 2006, and just about maintained a cheerfully Reaganesque public image of a moderate Republican – uneventfully standing down in 2011 to resume his movie career.We all took the mickey out of the governator. But, right now, he is America’s moral governator with real moral authority. It was the governator who uploaded a video telling Americans to stay home during the Covid crisis. And now it is the governator who has issued a clarion call for decency on YouTube with his admittedly cheesy but genuinely stirring, heartfelt and relevant rebuke to the Trumpians and their desecration of the Capitol – a desecration that even now many Republicans and many sophisticates on the right cannot bring themselves to condemn fully.In his mature Reaganesque style, Schwarzenegger addressed the nation from a presidential-style desk, with the stars and stripes and Californian flag in the background, and a photo of himself in his bodybuilding pomp. With Hollywood-style music on the audio track, he denounced the complicit enablers of Trump’s fascism – culminating in a hilarious flourish of Conan the Barbarian’s sword.That should have been ridiculous. It should have been silly. But, compared with the seedy rightwingers and Fox News alternative-fact merchants and the giggling cynics who said Trump didn’t matter, Schwarzenegger’s sword was rather glorious. I found myself thinking of Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy – and, yes, however preposterous, there was something honourable about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Conan sword.Schwarzenegger called the vandalising of the Capitol (and the killing of Capitol police officer Brian Sicknick) America’s “Kristallnacht”. Like many others, I have seen it as America’s beer hall putsch (and who knows if that may not turn out to be the closer analogy?). But, for the time being, Schwarzenegger is absolutely right. And from personal experience, Schwarzenegger was able to address the openly Nazi stylings of the Capitol attackers, with the “Camp Auschwitz” T-shirts, because he grew up in an Austria that, in contrast to Germany, went into fierce denial about its role in the second world war. Schwarzenegger spoke about his angry, depressed and abusive father who beat his children. (Schwarzenegger did not speak in detail, but throughout his governorship much press research went into Gustav Schwarzenegger, the Austrian police chief and Stalingrad military veteran who applied for Nazi party membership in 1938 before the Anschluss, but was not found to have been responsible for war crimes or abuse.)Schwarzenegger’s video today, however schmaltzy and hokey in style, was a real reminder to the fatuous callow right that Nazis and nazism are not just death-metal icons or gamer fantasies. They really did exist, with America-first cheerleaders such as Joseph Kennedy and Charles Lindbergh encouraging their fellow citizens to look the other way. And he also showed us that the immigrant experience can bring wisdom.Arnold’s video is exactly what we all needed. More

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      in US Politics

      Saving Justice review: how Trump's Eye of Sauron burned everything – including James Comey

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      With the storming of the Capitol, the fired FBI director’s earnest attempt to help America recover has been overtaken by eventsComey: Trump should not be prosecuted after leaving officeA centuries-old norm has been broken. The inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will not mark the peaceful transition of power. On Wednesday, American carnage arrived. Five people including a police officer are dead. Related: After Trump review: a provocative case for reform by Biden and beyond Continue reading… More

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      Trump pardons debase the presidency further – and he can and will go lower | Lloyd Green

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      With hours to spare before Christmas, Donald Trump has delivered pardons to Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Charlie Kushner, a passel of war criminals and a bent congressman or two. There is no reason to believe our “law and order” president’s pardon binge is over. Too many people in his immediate orbit remain exposed to future prosecution, including the president himself.Come noon on 20 January 2021, Trump and his inner circle will be private citizens again. Devoid of legal immunity, stripped of the air of invincibility, they become fair game for federal and local law enforcement alike. The potential for prison hovers over them like the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.Cyrus Vance, Manhattan’s district attorney, is circling Trump and his business. Eric Trump has testified at a court-ordered deposition conducted by New York’s attorney general. As for federal prosecutors in the southern district of New York, they labeled Trump an unindicted co-conspirator in the case of Michael Cohen. The statute of limitations has not expired.And then there is Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer. According to reports, he remains on the radar of federal law enforcement in connection with possible election law violations, and doesn’t like it one bit. On Wednesday Giuliani lashed out, calling investigators “secret police” and accusing them of toadying to Joe Biden, the president-elect. Trump has gone so far as to unequivocally claim authority to pardon himself, something Nixon refused to doIn case anyone needs reminding, once upon a time Giuliani was the No3 lawyer at the justice department and US attorney for the southern district. Back then, he was viewed as one of the good guys. As it happens, he prosecuted Marc Rich, the recipient of an infamous pardon from Bill Clinton. But as the Lincoln Project’s Rick Wilson repeatedly remarks, everything Trump touches dies.The list doesn’t end with Rudy. The justice department and the Federal Election Commission may soon want to talk to Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, about his role in the Trump re-election campaign.Reportedly, Kushner was a driving force in establishing a shell company, American Made Media Consultants, which made shrouded payments to Trump family members and friends. Indeed, Kushner purportedly directed Lara Trump, the wife of Eric Trump, John Pence, the vice-president’s nephew, and the campaign’s chief financial officer to serve on the shell company board.Think of it as the Trump Organization 2.0. Or the deep campaign.In the end, AMMC spent nearly half of the campaign’s war chest, with payments going to Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald Trump Jr’s girlfriend, and Lara Trump, who is now contemplating a Senate run in North Carolina. Suffice to say, the legality of this opaque arrangement is unclear.Three House Democrats have requested investigations by the Department of Justice and the FEC. Without a pardon, Jared’s fate will rest in the hands of a Biden DoJ. Said differently, Hunter Biden is not the only person with a troubled road ahead.The constitution confers the pardon power upon the president, and the circumstances of its use speak volumes about the occupant of the Oval Office. Whether a president may pardon himself has yet to be legally tested.Richard Nixon resigned rather than face impeachment by the House and almost certain conviction in the Senate. In August 1974, he left office without pardoning himself or those convicted in the Watergate scandal. Instead, Gerald Ford issued a pardon to his former boss.Trump is no Nixon. In so many ways. The 45th president has gone so far as to unequivocally claim authority to pardon himself, something Nixon refused to do.By any measure, Trump has set a new standard for debasing the presidency. As he stares at an ignominious exit, the ex-reality show host has even managed to make Clinton’s pardon of Rich look quaint. And that takes effort.Yet unlike the Clinton pardon of Rich, a fugitive financier, which sparked a review by James Comey and a barrage of Republican condemnation, among the GOP in Congress Trump’s pardons have elicited little more than a yawn. With the exception of Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska, who called the pardons “rotten to the core”, they have been met with a collective shrug. None of this should come as a surprise. Trump has recreated the GOP in his image. Republicans know he commands the party’s base, and they stand one primary away from oblivion. In the end, what’s a pardon between friends? More

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      Death penalty kills belief that people can change | Letters

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      Austin Sarat writes powerfully about the Trump administration’s rush to execute federal prisoners (Trump is spending the last days of his presidency on a literal killing spree, 15 December). In the past weeks, it was Brandon Bernard and Alfred Bourgeois. Next in line are Lisa Montgomery, Corey Johnson and Dustin Higgs.
      Joe Biden proposes to introduce legislation to abolish the federal death penalty. This will take time and its success is not guaranteed. But there is something he could do as soon as he takes office. This is to use his clemency power to spare the lives of the 50 or so individuals who will remain on federal death row. I estimate that it would take him four minutes to sign the required notices of commutation. This would ensure that the trail of bodies Sarat describes could not grow any longer.
      Is it too much to hope that Biden will set aside the time to do this during his first 100 days? It would be a magnificent gesture. Prof Ian O’Donnell School of Law, University College Dublin
      • When my friend, Brandon Bernard, was executed this month, he was a different man from the 18-year-old accessory to a double-murder (Trump administration puts Brandon Bernard to death amid rushed series of executions, 11 December). Spending two decades in solitary confinement changed him. Brandon never had a single infraction on death row. He did church youth outreach to help teens make better choices in life.
      He taught me many life lessons. To be open-hearted yet level-headed. To remain calm and patient. To be respectful and thoughtful and an attentive listener. To be kind. To live with a sense of optimism like one I’ve never witnessed. I want to hate the sin, but forgive the sinner after a horrible mistake and two decades of regret and reform. Martin Luther King Jr said “violence begets violence” and that holds true when the violence is committed by the government. Brandon became a beautiful person. When we killed Brandon, we killed the belief that one can change. Jen Wasserstein Washington DC, US
      • It has long been my view that any country that condones judicial murder in the name of justice cannot be deemed civilised. Suellen Pedley Stanford in the Vale, Oxfordshire More

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      'It is serious and intense': white supremacist domestic terror threat looms large in US

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      On 6 October Chad Wolf, the acting secretary of homeland security, released his department’s annual assessment of violent threats to the nation. Analysts didn’t have to dig deep into the assessment to discover its alarming content.In a foreword, Wolf wrote that he was “particularly concerned about white supremacist violent extremists who have been exceptionally lethal in their abhorrent, targeted attacks in recent years. [They] seek to force ideological change in the United States through violence, death, and destruction.”Two days later, the FBI swooped. It arrested 13 rightwing extremists who had allegedly been plotting to carry out a range of attacks in Michigan, including the kidnapping of Democratic governor Gretchen Whitmer.Later revelations revealed that a group of anti-government paramilitaries that included some of those arrested had also discussed kidnapping the governor of Virginia.The double strike, just days apart, of the threat assessment and the Michigan plot arrests marked an important moment in America’s tortured history of racist terrorism. US authorities appeared not only to have woken up finally to the extent of the white supremacist threat but were actually doing something about it.As the FBI director Christopher Wray told Congress in February, “racially and ethnically motivated violent extremists” have become the “primary source of ideologically-motivated lethal incidents” in the US. The danger overshadowed the jihadist threat that has dominated the security debate since 9/11.Last year was the deadliest on record for domestic extremist violence since the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995. White supremacists were responsible for most of that bloodshed in 2019 – 39 out of 48 deaths, including 23 people who died at the hands of an anti-Hispanic racist in El Paso, Texas, and a Jewish worshipper murdered at Poway Synagogue in California. More