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      Texas national guard soldier shoots and wounds migrant at Mexico border

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      Texas national guard soldier shoots and wounds migrant at Mexico borderInjuries not life-threatening after soldier fires at migrant in the shoulder as he was attempting to detain migrant A Texas national guard soldier has shot and wounded a migrant in the shoulder along the US-Mexico border.According to Texas military records reviewed by the Military Times and the Texas Tribune, the soldier fired at the migrant on 15 January as he was attempting to detain the migrant.The shooting is believed to be the first time that a national guard member deployed to the border as part of Texas’s border security mission Operation Lone Star has shot and injured a migrant.The incident occurred west of McAllen, Texas, at around 4.20am when two national guard soldiers and border patrol agents tracked several migrants to an abandoned house.Records reviewed by the Military Times and the Texas Tribune showed that upon the two soldiers entering the house, three of the migrants surrendered. A fourth migrant tried to escape from a window and one of the soldiers attempted to apprehend the migrant.The migrant was reported to have wrestled with the soldier and struck him with his fists and elbows. At one point, the soldier drew his M17 pistol, fired once and shot the migrant.Military records reviewed by the outlets does not indicate that the migrant had fired any weapons towards the soldier. It remains unclear whether the soldier intended to fire his gun.The soldier has been identified as specialist Angel Gallegos. Gallegos shot the migrant in his left shoulder who was then transported to McAllen Medical Center for evaluation and treatment, the outlets reported. The migrant’s injuries are not life-threatening.According to a federal law enforcement source who spoke to CNN, the migrant was from El Salvador.“Customs and bBorder protection’s office of professional responsibility is reviewing the incident,” US Customs and Border Protection spokesperson Rod Kise told CNN.TopicsUS-Mexico borderUS immigrationUS militaryUS politicsTexasnewsReuse this content More

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      How the US far right and progressives ended up agreeing on military spending cuts

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      AnalysisHow the US far right and progressives ended up agreeing on military spending cutsJoan E GreveProgressives and ‘America first’ Republicans in Congress both want to re-examine US military budget – but for vastly different reasons Progressives have recently found themselves in an unfamiliar position: in agreement with members of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus.Some of the latter caucus’s members have recently called for re-examining the amount of money spent by the US military, echoing demands that progressives have issued for years. Although progressives are clear-eyed about their ideological differences with “America first” Republicans on foreign policy, they encourage a renewed debate over the Pentagon’s budget.McCarthy may be speaker, but Trump is the real leader of House RepublicansRead more“The idea that effective American foreign policy requires this [level of spending], I think, is not only wrong,” said Matt Duss, a former foreign policy adviser to progressive senator Bernie Sanders, “it’s just absurd and unsustainable.”The Freedom Caucus reportedly pushed for spending cuts as part of their negotiations with Kevin McCarthy, who offered concessions to fellow Republicans to secure the House speakership earlier this month. One of those concessions involved a promise to cap fiscal year 2024 discretionary spending at fiscal year 2022 levels, after Republicans expressed outrage over the $1.76tn omnibus funding bill that Joe Biden signed into law last month.If such a fiscal policy were evenly applied to all federal agencies, the department of defense would see its budget cut by $75bn compared with this fiscal year.That possibility has simultaneously sowed division among House Republicans and attracted the interest of progressives. They hope the latest dust-up over the Pentagon’s budget will spark what they consider to be an overdue conversation over US defense spending, which will hit a record high of $858bn this fiscal year. Among House Republicans, the proposal to cut the Pentagon’s budget has won some support from far-right members who have embraced Donald Trump’s “America first” approach to foreign policy. Speaking to Fox News this month, Congressman Matt Gaetz, one of the Republican holdouts in the speakership battle, partly blamed the Pentagon’s large budget on America’s financial assistance to Ukraine amid its war against Russia.“We can defend this country and project power more efficiently and more effectively than we do,” Gaetz said. “How about we start with Ukraine?”McCarthy himself previously promised that Republicans would not provide a “blank check” to Ukraine if they won back the House. But aid to Ukraine has continued to win bipartisan support in Congress.“I do not see that money getting taken away from us,” Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said earlier this month. “It is there. It is rock solid through nearly all or all of 2023.”McCarthy has expressed openness to examining the Pentagon’s budget, but the proposal has stoked outrage among many of the more hawkish members of his conference. Republican congressman Tony Gonzales of Texas cited the potential cuts to explain his opposition to the House rules package, saying he thought the proposal was a “horrible idea”.“How am I going to look at our allies in the eye and say, I need you to increase your defense budget, but yet America is going to decrease ours?” Gonzales told CBS News.Republicans’ dysfunction over speaker threatens the health of US governmentRead moreWhile a number of House Democrats have joined Gonzales in rejecting the idea of defense spending cuts, the idea of reconsidering the Pentagon’s budget has long held sway with progressives. When Biden called for an increase in funding for the defense department last year, leaders of the Congressional Progressive Caucus attacked the proposal as “simply unacceptable”. Progressive activists and their congressional allies note that the US military has a larger budget than the next nine largest militaries combined and urged lawmakers to reallocate some of that funding to other needs, such as healthcare or education.“For far too long, we have blindly and excessively pumped money into the Pentagon, which – despite its massive budget – has yet to pass an audit,” said the progressive congresswoman Barbara Lee, who has long championed fiscal reform at the defense department. “Imagine what we could do with even a fraction of [the Pentagon’s funding]. We need to rethink our foreign policy priorities and invest in diplomacy first and defense second.”Ro Khanna, a progressive congressman from California, said he would welcome a bipartisan conversation about the Pentagon’s budget, but he rejected Republicans’ efforts to tie spending cuts to the looming fight over the debt ceiling. The US hit its debt limit this month, and the treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, has warned that the government is at risk of defaulting this summer if Congress does not increase its borrowing capacity – a move that would have catastrophic effects on the US economy. Democrats fear that House Republicans will attempt to extract concessions on government spending in exchange for helping to raise the debt ceiling.“I do not support any debate on spending demands that threaten a debt-ceiling showdown. If Republicans want to have conversations about future defense cuts that are strategic, then I am open to that,” Khanna told the Guardian. “While I support the funding for Ukraine’s defense, we need to take ourselves off the path to a trillion-dollar Pentagon budget.”Progressive advocates similarly rejected the notion that the US must choose between cutting the Pentagon’s budget and supporting Ukraine. Stephen Miles, president of the progressive group Win Without War, blamed the Pentagon’s ballooning budget on ineffective weapons systems and excessive contracts to private companies, which have accounted for as much as half of US defense spending in recent years.“The spending on Ukraine is not what’s driving the Pentagon’s growth,” Miles said. “We’re talking about major weapon systems procurement; we’re talking about private service contracting. We’re talking about a lot of things that aren’t being driven by Ukraine.”Duss, now a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the war in Ukraine should not prevent any debate over defense spending. He noted that politicians like Sanders and Lee have demanded reductions in the Pentagon’s budget for years, long before the war in Ukraine began.“There’s always going to be some crisis of the moment that prevents us from thinking about how to spend less on defense,” Duss said. “But this is a conversation that we absolutely have to have.” As of now, the prospects for enacting Pentagon budget cuts appear bleak. Even some of the House Republicans who, like Gaetz, initially opposed McCarthy’s speakership bid have downplayed the possibility. Congressman Chip Roy of Texas, a key negotiator in the talks between McCarthy and his Republican detractors, claimed that “cuts to defense were NEVER DISCUSSED” during the speakership fight.“In fact, there was broad agreement spending cuts should focus on NON-DEFENSE discretionary spending,” Roy’s office said on Twitter.US heads for debt-ceiling standoff as House Republicans refuse to budgeRead moreA funding bill that solely cut non-defense discretionary spending would almost certainly be rejected by Democrats, who still control the Senate and the White House. In addition to the procedural hurdles of Roy’s proposal, Miles mocked the idea of excluding defense spending from potential cuts as utterly unrealistic.“You can’t look at the level of spending that the US government is doing and say we’re going to exempt more than half of discretionary spending,” Miles said. “When you have the Pentagon taking up as much money as it is now, there’s no way to look at cutting government spending without it.”Even if Congress could somehow reach an agreement on the need to reduce the Pentagon’s budget, conservatives would inevitably clash with progressives over what programs to cut and how to reallocate that funding.“The reason Matt Gaetz wants to cut defense spending is not the reason why I would,” Duss acknowledged.Still, Duss argued that progressives and some lawmakers on the right have a “shared interest” in starting a reinvigorated conversation over defense spending. That communal goal could work to progressives’ advantage.“If Republicans want to prize this open and look inside this budget … that’s a debate I think everyone should welcome,” Duss said. “And I think it’s quite telling who’s not welcoming it.”TopicsUS politicsRepublicansUS CongressUS militaryJoe BidenDemocratsUS national securityanalysisReuse this content More

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      Three active-duty US marines arrested for participating in Capitol attack

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      Three active-duty US marines arrested for participating in Capitol attackMen were taken into custody on Wednesday, bringing the number of US military members charged in connection to insurrection to 12 Three active-service US marines, all with ties to intelligence work, were arrested this week for taking part in the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol, according to federal documents newly unsealed.The men, all long-serving, were taken into custody on Wednesday on four charges, bringing to 12 the number of US military members charged in connection with the deadly insurrection by supporters of outgoing president Donald Trump as they tried to prevent the certification by Congress of his defeat by Joe Biden. The news was first reported by military.com.The three were named as Micah Coomer, Joshua Abate and Dodge Dale Hellonen. According to the documents, unsealed on Thursday, they spent more than an hour together wandering around the Capitol rotunda, and at one point placed “a red Maga hat on one of the statues to take photos with it”, indicating Trump’s Make America Great Again election slogan.Investigators noted social media posts by Coomer, including one where he stated he was “glad to be apart [sic] of history”, and a chat with another Instagram user in which he explained he was there because he was “waiting for the boogaloo”, a term popular with rightwing extremists and white supremacists to signify a race-related civil war.Marine corps records provided to military.com show all three have been enlisted for more than four years, have good conduct medals, and that each works in “demanding jobs” tied to the intelligence community. At least one holds a “significant” security clearance.In a statement to the outlet, a spokesperson said the service is “aware of an investigation and the allegations” and said it was “fully cooperating with appropriate authorities in support of the investigation”.The men face misdemeanor charges including trespass, disruptive and disorderly conduct and obstructing government business. According to the 13-page document compiled by FBI special agent Kelsey Randall of the agency’s joint terrorism taskforce, investigators “learned” of Coomer’s social media posts and, after obtaining a search warrant, identified the two others from images contained in them.Security footage from the Capitol showed the three entering the building together through a door near the Senate chamber, and moving further inside as part of a mob of dozens of others, many wearing Trump’s signature Make America Great Again red caps.Additional proof came from cell phone records showing the three were in the building, Randall wrote..TopicsUS Capitol attackUS militarynewsReuse this content More

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      US military ‘downplayed’ the number of soldiers exposed to ‘forever chemicals’

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      US military ‘downplayed’ the number of soldiers exposed to ‘forever chemicals’ Analysis of Pentagon report reveals that soldiers exposed to PFAS pollution at much higher rate than military claims The number of US service members who have been exposed to toxic “forever chemicals” is much higher than the military has claimed, a new independent analysis of Department of Defense data has found.A Pentagon report that aims to assess the scope of PFAS chemical exposure on its bases, as well as health threats posed to service members, estimated about 175,000 troops across 24 facilities had drunk contaminated water.But an analysis of the military’s report by the Environmental Working Group (EWG), a non-profit that tracks PFAS pollution, found the numbers are probably much higher and could top more than 640,000 people across 116 bases, and potentially even millions of people when past service members are factored in.Moreover, the report seemed to omit health issues linked to PFAS exposure, such as kidney disease, testicular cancer and fetal effects. The overall report is “frustrating”, said Scott Faber, senior vice-president of government affairs with EWG.“The Department of Defense is trying to downplay these risks rather than aggressively seeking to notify service members and clean up its legacy pollution,” he said. “It has long history of looking the other way when it comes to PFAS pollution.”The DoD did not immediately respond to a request for comment.PFAS are a class of about 12,000 chemicals often used to make products resist water, stain and heat. They are called forever chemicals because they do not naturally break down and persist in the environment. The chemicals are linked to cancer, liver disease, high cholesterol, thyroid disorders, birth defects and autoimmune dysfunction.PFAS are thought to be contaminating drinking water for more than 200 million people nationally, and contamination has been found in and around hundreds of DoD bases at high levels because the chemicals are the main ingredient in firefighting foam the military uses.Congress mandated the DoD report in the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act, but the military has not published it on the department’s PFAS website, so it is unavailable to the public or service members except upon request.“That’s the part that ought to bother every American,” Faber said. “It’s not just that they purposefully underestimated how many service members were exposed … it’s that they didn’t tell anyone.”The DoD’s analysis, dated April 2022, seemed designed to reduce the exposure estimates in several key ways, EWG noted.It only included bases where levels for two types of PFAS – PFOS and PFOA – exceeded the Environmental Protection Agency’s previous health advisory limit of 70 parts per trillion (ppt). But the EPA lowered that level in June to less than 1 ppt for each compound.Though the report came out about two months before the change, the military often lobbies the EPA on environmental rules, the pending change was publicly known, and the military likely rushed to get its report out ahead of the EPA’s formal announcement, Faber said.“This is clearly what it appears to be,” he said.The numbers also did not include four large bases – Fort Bragg, Yakima Training Center, Fort Leavenworth and Picatinny Arsenal – where levels ranged from 98 ppt to 647 ppt.The levels peaked at over 21,000 ppt at Horsham air national guard base in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania.The report also only considered military members who were on bases at the time of the analysis, meaning it is a “snapshot in time”. The military began using firefighting foam with PFAS over 50 years ago.“The real question is how many millions of service members drank the contaminated water over the last half century?” Faber asked.The numbers would probably be higher if the military also included other kinds of PFAS. PFOA and PFOS are two of the most common, but thousands more are in commercial use, and the EPA also has health advisory limits for two other compounds.Though Congress required the DoD to include an assessment of health risks to troops, the military excluded risks for fetal and maternal health because it “focused on military members and veterans”, the department wrote. EWG noted that about 13,000 service members give birth every year, and many live on DoD facilities. The military also made no mention of increased testicular and kidney cancer risks.“It’s shocking and there was no explanation,” Faber said.It is unclear what’s next for the report. Congress has ordered the DoD to phase out firefighting foam that uses PFAS by October 2023, and develop a cleanup plan. The military already missed a deadline to submit a cleanup plan to Congress, but Faber noted it has new political leadership in place, and the Biden administration has been more serious about addressing PFAS contamination than Trump.“The next few years will be critical to resetting when it comes to the DoD addressing toxic chemicals, like PFAS,” Faber said.TopicsUS militaryPFASUS politicsPollutionnewsReuse this content More

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      Senate passes $1.7tn funding bill to avert US government shutdown

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      Senate passes $1.7tn funding bill to avert US government shutdownBill includes $45bn in military aid to Ukraine after lawmakers reached agreement on a final series of votes The US Senate on Thursday passed a $1.7tn government spending bill, sending it to the House to approve and send to Joe Biden for his signature, averting a partial government shutdown.‘No money, nowhere to stay’: asylum seekers wait as Trump’s border restrictions drag onRead moreThe legislation provides funding through 30 September 2023, for the US military and an array of non-military programs.The legislation provides Ukraine with $44.9bn in wartime aid and bans the use of Chinese-owned social media app TikTok on federal government devices.Progress on the bill slowed after the conservative Republican Mike Lee introduced an amendment meant to slow immigration. That prompted Democrats to put forward a competing amendment that would boost funding for law enforcement agencies on the border. Both amendments failed, which allowed lawmakers to move forward.The massive bill includes about $772.5bn for non-defense programs and $858bn for defense. Lawmakers raced to get it approved, many anxious to complete the task before a deep freeze could leave them stranded in Washington for the holidays. Many also wanted to lock in funding before a new Republican-controlled House makes it harder to find compromise.On Wednesday night, senators heard from the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy, about the importance of US aid for the war with Russia.“Your money is not charity. It’s an investment in the global security and democracy that we handle in the most responsible way,” Zelenskiy said.The funding measure includes emergency assistance to Ukraine and Nato allies above Joe Biden’s request.The Democratic majority leader, Chuck Schumer, said the worst thing Congress could do was give the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, any signal the US was wavering in its commitment to Ukraine. He also said he met Zelenskiy.“He made it clear that without this aid package, the Ukrainians will be in real trouble and could even lose the war,” Schumer said. “So that makes the urgency of getting this legislation done all the more important.”But when lawmakers left the chamber, prospects for a quick vote looked glum. Chris Coons, a Delaware Democrat, said the funding bill was “hanging by a thread”.Republicans were looking to ensure a vote on a proposed amendment from Lee, of Utah, seeking to extend coronavirus pandemic-era restrictions on asylum seekers at the US-Mexico border, known as Title 42. Passage of the amendment would have doomed the bill in the Democratic-held House.“Senator Schumer doesn’t want to have a vote on Title 42 because he presumably knows it will pass,” said Mitt Romney, the other Utah Republican. But the House won’t go along in that case, he added, in which case “everything falls apart”.Lee told Fox News: “I insisted that we have at least one amendment, up-or-down vote, on whether to preserve Title 42. Because Title 42 is the one thing standing between us and utter chaos [at the border]. We already have mostly chaos. This would bring us to utter chaos if it expires, which it’s about to.”The spending bill was supported by Schumer and the Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, for different reasons.McConnell cited the bill’s 10% boost in defense spending but faced pushback from Republicans resenting being forced to vote on such a massive package with so little time before a shutdown and Christmas. It was expected, however, that enough Republicans agreed with McConnell that the bill would reach 60 votes.Schumer touted the bill as a win on the domestic front, saying: “Kids, parents, veterans, nurses, workers: these are just a few of the beneficiaries of our bipartisan funding package, so there is every reason in the world for the Senate to finish its work as soon as possible.”Lawmakers worked to stuff priorities into the package, which ran to 4,155 pages. It included $27bn in disaster funding and an overhaul of federal election law to prevent presidents or candidates trying to overturn an election. The bipartisan overhaul was a response to Donald Trump’s efforts to convince Republicans to object to Biden’s victory.Hunter Biden hires Jared Kushner lawyer to face Republican investigatorsRead moreThe bill also contained policy changes lawmakers worked to include, to avoid having to start over in the new Congress next year. Examples included the provision from Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, to ban TikTok on government cellphones. A provision supported by Maine would aid the state’s lobster and Jonah crab fisheries, delaying regulations to help save North Atlantic right whales.On the healthcare front, the bill requires states to keep children enrolled in Medicaid on coverage for at least a year. Millions could still start to lose coverage on 1 April because the bill sunsets a requirement of the Covid-19 emergency that prohibited kicking people off Medicaid.The bill also provides roughly $15.3bn for more than 7,200 projects lawmakers sought for their states. Fiscal conservatives criticize such spending as unnecessary.The Senate appropriations committee chairman, Patrick Leahy, a Democrat retiring after nearly five decades in the chamber, praised bipartisan support for the measure following months of negotiations.His Republican counterpart, Richard Shelby, who also is retiring, said of the 4,155-page bill: “It’s got a lot of stuff in it. A lot of good stuff.”House Republicans, including Kevin McCarthy, probably the next speaker, had asked colleagues in the Senate to support only a short-term extension. A notice sent by leadership to House members urged them to vote against the measure.TopicsUS CongressUS SenateUS politicsUS domestic policyUS foreign policyUS militaryUS healthcarenewsReuse this content More

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      Republican who urged Trump to declare ‘Marshall’ law only regrets misspelling

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      Republican who urged Trump to declare ‘Marshall’ law only regrets misspellingText from Ralph Norman to Mark Meadows, Donald Trump’s final chief of staff, urged president to declare martial law A Republican who urged the Trump White House to declare martial law to stop Joe Biden taking office has only one regret: that he misspelled “martial”.Ron DeSantis leads Donald Trump by 23 points in Republican pollRead moreThe text from Ralph Norman of South Carolina to Mark Meadows, Donald Trump’s final chief of staff, was given to the January 6 committee by Meadows and revealed by Talking Points Memo.On 17 January 2021, 11 days after the deadly Capitol attack and three days before Biden’s inauguration, Norman wrote: “Mark, in seeing what’s happening so quickly, and reading about the Dominion law suits attempting to stop any meaningful investigation we are at a point of no return in saving our Republic !! Our LAST HOPE is invoking Marshall Law!! PLEASE URGE TO PRESIDENT TO DO SO!!”No response from Meadows was revealed.On Tuesday, a HuffPost reporter asked Norman about the message.Norman said: “Well, I misspelled ‘martial’.”He added: “I was very frustrated then, I’m frustrated now. I was frustrated then by what was going on in the Capitol. President Biden was in his basement the whole year. Dominion was raising all kinda questions.”The reference to Biden’s basement was to the then Democratic candidate’s decision largely to stay off the campaign trail in 2020, the year of the Covid pandemic.Dominion Voting Systems has filed major lawsuits, notably against Fox News, regarding claims its machines were involved in voter fraud.Trump insists his defeat by Biden – by more than 7m votes and by 306-232 in the electoral college – was the result of electoral fraud. It was not.Norman was among 147 Republicans in the House and Senate who objected to results in key states even after Trump supporters stormed the Capitol on January 6, a riot now linked to nine deaths.Trump was impeached for inciting an insurrection, proceedings which were ongoing when Norman texted Meadows.According to CNN, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right Georgia congresswoman, also texted Meadows on 17 January, writing: “In our private chat with only Members, several are saying the only way to save our Republic is for Trump to call for Marshall law.”This week, Greene said that if she and Steve Bannon, Trump’s former strategist, had organised the Capitol riot, “we would have won”. She also said rioters “would’ve been armed”.According to the Congressional Research Service, “crises in public order, both real and potential, often evoke comments concerning a resort to martial law.“While some ambiguity exists regarding the conditions of a martial law setting, such a prospect, nonetheless, is disturbing to many Americans who cherish their liberties, expect civilian law enforcement to prevail, and support civilian control of military authority.”The CRS also says that since the second world war, “martial law has not been presidentially directed or approved for any area of the United States. Federal troops have been dispatched to domestic locales experiencing unrest or riot, but in these situations the military has remained subordinate to federal civilian management.”Marjorie Taylor Greene: Capitol attack ‘would’ve been armed’ if I was in chargeRead moreOn Tuesday, Norman told HuffPost: “I was frustrated at the time with everything that was happening. It was a private text between a friend and myself, nothing more, nothing less.”On Wednesday, the White House issued a rebuke.“Plotting against the rule of law and to subvert the will of the people is a disgusting affront to our deepest principles as a country,” the deputy press secretary, Andrew Bates, said.Referring to Trump’s slogan, Make America Great Again, Bates added: “We all, regardless of party, need to stand up for mainstream values and the constitution, against dangerous, ultra-Maga conspiracy theories and violent rhetoric.”TopicsRepublicansUS CongressHouse of RepresentativesUS elections 2020US Capitol attackUS politicsUS militarynewsReuse this content More

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      Republican who wanted Trump to declare ‘Marshall’ law only regrets the misspelling

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      Republican who wanted Trump to declare ‘Marshall’ law only regrets the misspellingText from Ralph Norman to Mark Meadows, Donald Trump’s final chief of staff, urged president to declare martial law A Republican who urged the Trump White House to declare martial law to stop Joe Biden taking office has only one regret: that he misspelled “martial”.Ron DeSantis leads Donald Trump by 23 points in Republican pollRead moreThe text from Ralph Norman of South Carolina to Mark Meadows, Donald Trump’s final chief of staff, was given to the January 6 committee by Meadows and revealed by Talking Points Memo this week.On 17 January 2021, 11 days after the deadly Capitol attack and three days before Biden’s inauguration, Norman wrote: “Mark, in seeing what’s happening so quickly, and reading about the Dominion law suits attempting to stop any meaningful investigation we are at a point of no return in saving our Republic !! Our LAST HOPE is invoking Marshall Law!! PLEASE URGE TO PRESIDENT TO DO SO!!”No response from Meadows was revealed. On Tuesday, a HuffPo reporter asked Norman about the message.Norman said: “Well, I misspelled ‘martial’.”He added: “I was very frustrated then, I’m frustrated now. I was frustrated then by what was going on in the Capitol. President Biden was in his basement the whole year. Dominion was raising all kinda questions.”The reference to Biden’s basement was to the then Democratic candidate’s decision largely to stay off the campaign trail in 2020, the year of the Covid pandemic.Dominion Voting Systems has filed major lawsuits, notably against Fox News, regarding claims its machines were involved in voter fraud.Trump insists his defeat by Biden – by more than 7m votes and by 306-232 in the electoral college – was the result of electoral fraud. It was not.Norman was among 147 Republicans in the House and Senate who voted to object to results in key states, even after Trump supporters stormed the Capitol on January 6, a riot now linked to nine deaths including suicides among law enforcement.Trump was impeached for inciting an insurrection, proceedings which were ongoing when Norman texted Meadows.According to CNN, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right Georgia congresswoman, also asked Meadows about “Marshall law” on 17 January, writing: “In our private chat with only Members, several are saying the only way to save our Republic is for Trump to call for Marshall law.”This week, Greene said that if she and Steve Bannon, Trump’s former strategist, had organised the Capitol riot, “we would have won”. She also said rioters “would’ve been armed”.Marjorie Taylor Greene: Capitol attack ‘would’ve been armed’ if I was in chargeRead moreAccording to the Congressional Research Service, “crises in public order, both real and potential, often evoke comments concerning a resort to martial law. “While some ambiguity exists regarding the conditions of a martial law setting, such a prospect, nonetheless, is disturbing to many Americans who cherish their liberties, expect civilian law enforcement to prevail, and support civilian control of military authority.”The CRS also says that since the conclusion of the second world war, “martial law has not been presidentially directed or approved for any area of the United States. Federal troops have been dispatched to domestic locales experiencing unrest or riot, but in these situations the military has remained subordinate to federal civilian management.”On Tuesday, Norman told HuffPost: “I was frustrated at the time with everything that was happening. It was a private text between a friend and myself, nothing more, nothing less.”TopicsRepublicansUS CongressHouse of RepresentativesUS elections 2020US Capitol attackUS politicsUS militarynewsReuse this content More

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      ‘A sacred space’: Sebastian Junger and Seth Moulton on Vets Town Hall

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      ‘A sacred space’: Sebastian Junger and Seth Moulton on Vets Town Hall The bestselling author wants to help Americans understand those in the military. On Veterans Day, the Democratic congressman hosted a hometown eventOn Friday, Veterans Day, the Democratic congressman Seth Moulton hosted a town hall in Marblehead, his home town in Massachusetts. He first staged such an event in 2015, working with Sebastian Junger, author of bestsellers including The Perfect Storm, War and Tribe, which considers how veterans might be better understood and helped after coming home from war.‘I almost died last summer’: Sebastian Junger on life, death and his new book FreedomRead moreOn the page, Junger considers how Indigenous peoples treated warriors who returned from “intimate and bloody warfare”. Before the Marblehead event, he said: “I’d read about the gourd dance, this process that some of the Southern Great Plains tribes had. I’m sure all of them had some variant on allowing for warriors to recount what they did.”What Moulton did is this. After graduating Harvard in 2001, he joined the US Marines. In the wars after 9/11, he completed four tours in Iraq, taking part in the invasion in 2003 and the Battle of Najaf the following year. Moulton did not buy George W Bush’s case for war. As he said in Marblehead, even in action he thought the invasion “probably shouldn’t have happened”. But he was determined to lead his troops through it.In 2014, he won a seat in the US House. Speaking before the event on Friday, he described how he had “read Sebastian’s book, and said, ‘This is an amazing idea. We should actually do this.’ So I reached out to him and said, ‘Hey, I just got elected to Congress. I’m a marines vet. And I want to start this tradition. So he and I started putting together what would have to happen.”The project grew. It now has a name, Vets Town Hall, a new organisational structure as a non-profit and established rules. Politics are left at the door. Any veteran can speak. There are no questions. Attendees simply listen.Junger reported from Bosnia during the Balkan wars and later made Restrepo, a searing documentary about American soldiers in Afghanistan, and its sequel, Korengal. His co-director, the British photojournalist Tim Hetherington, was killed in Syria in 2011. In his book War and elsewhere, Junger has described being shot at and surviving a roadside bomb. But as he says, when he and Moulton staged their first Vets Town Hall, he had no role to play but to listen.There was, Junger said, “this extraordinary moment where an old lady stood up and said that she fought in Vietnam as a man and came home and got a sex change. Marblehead – it’s one of the more conservative enclaves in Massachusetts. Certainly traditional. And I watched that sort of blow people’s hair back. It was great. It was quite extraordinary.”Marblehead counts itself the home of the US navy. On Friday, busts of François Joseph Paul de Grasse, admiral of the French fleet off Yorktown in the revolutionary war, and Charles Snellen, a gunner’s mate on the USS Monitor, the first civil war ironclad, looked over the town hall speakers.A Marine veteran described a moment in 1967 when he and a North Vietnamese soldier both decided not to fire, then a visit to Vietnam, years later, and a salute to his unknown foe.A former soldier described his service in Afghanistan and what happened on 15 August 2008, when 1Lt Donald Carwile and Pfc Paul Conlon Jr, of the 101st airborne division, were killed by a roadside bomb.A retired naval commander described the wrench of deployments far from his wife and children. Other speakers, men and women, described work on the home front, supporting veterans or advocating for them.Before the event, as Moulton spoke outside Abbot Hall, a man with a prosthetic leg made his way into the venue. He later rose to speak about his struggles since leaving the marines, an edge of anger in his voice.“I took care of myself,” he said, “because I’m a veteran.”In this “dire time of polarisation”, Junger said, Vets Town Hall might provide “kind of a sacred space. I’m an atheist, but I use the word sacred all the time. It’s a sacred space in the sense that ordinary life is suspended and here we are in this place, and we’re honoring something, and we’re healing something, we’re doing something together. And it doesn’t matter if you were for or against the war, or you’re Republican or Democrat, Black or white, rich or poor. None of that matters.”He added: “Anytime you are in a space where you have to be respectful, and you hear things that are anathema to your ideology, it forces you to reconsider. To conservative America, America is always right. The virtuous nation. And the veterans are the heroes in the conservative ideology, almost beyond reproach. And then here, you have a veteran who’s just in a rage about a war we fought. Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam. Whatever it is, that’s healthy for a conservative psyche, to have to navigate through that.Geoff Dyer on war reportageRead more“But likewise, I’m a liberal, but it’s very healthy for liberals to share space with a veteran who’s saying, ‘You know what, I’m not a victim of all this. Going off to war was the best thing that ever could have happened to me. I was a troubled young man, and it was exactly what I needed. And I chose it freely. It wasn’t because I needed money. This was an amazing thing for me, and I miss it a lot.’ That’s great for liberals to hear.”Moulton was less keen to discuss political divisions, saying he thought the town halls might instead help bridge a social chasm between the general public and the “very small percentage of Americans who have served”. He did say the “no politics” ground rule established seven years ago “feels like it’s even more important now, with how divisive politics has become, especially in the last five years”.When Moulton ran for Congress – six years before campaigning, briefly, for president – it took an investigative reporter to find out he had been decorated, in part for “fearlessly expos[ing] himself to enemy fire”.Speaking to the Boston Globe, Moulton described “a healthy disrespect among veterans who served on the frontlines for people who walk around telling war stories” and said he was “uncomfortable calling attention to his own awards out of respect to ‘many others who did heroic things and received no awards at all’”.Through Vets Town Hall, he seeks to provide a forum. He said: “I have told stories at this town hall that I’ve never told before because I think this is the one place where it is appropriate. And I learned from Sebastian the value of telling some stories from war that helped explain both the experience overseas and how it influences our lives back home. And that’s what we really need to share with non-veterans, to help bridge that divide.”Junger described a story Moulton has told. It is about Najaf, where, in a hellish fight in a cemetery, Marines faced the Mahdi army, a militia loyal to Moqtada al-Sadr, a powerful Shia cleric.“He told a story about taking a break, because he’d been up for 48 hours straight. And it was a hot day. And he personally was just really starting to get wobbly. And they took a five-minute break. And because they stopped, the 19-year-old sitting next to him got a bullet in the forehead. And that’s the ghost he lives with.“You know, that’s combat. These random things. ‘If we hadn’t stopped’ or ‘If we had stopped’, or ‘If I hadn’t tied my shoe …’ If you’re a lieutenant or a captain or whatever, you take on responsibility for all the random shit that happens. It’s all your fucking fault. It’s not, of course, but psychologically that’s what it feels like. And it’s really, really hard.“Hearing Seth say that story? I was choking back tears. Everyone was choking back tears. It was absolutely brutal. You might ask him, if he doesn’t bring it up.”In Marblehead, Moulton did not bring up Najaf. Instead, he described a moment outside Baghdad, “dug into the mud” and freezing cold, when intelligence indicated that he and his marines were about to meet a column of Iraqi tanks without protection from their own.Tribe by Sebastian Junger review – why we need the solidarity felt during wartimeRead more“I remember thinking to myself, ‘What the hell am I doing here? I’m about to die, in the mud, in a town nobody’s ever heard of, in a country on the other side of the globe, in a war that probably shouldn’t have happened.’ I knew my buddies back home were probably on a good night in a Boston bar. ‘Why am I here?’ But that thought lasted for about 10 seconds, because I remembered why I signed up.“I didn’t want someone else to fight my place. I didn’t want to be in the Boston bar. And after that, I felt a little bit more warm. A little bit more comfortable. A little bit happier, perhaps, because I was exactly where I wanted to be.”TopicsUS militarySebastian JungerUS politicsUS CongressHouse of RepresentativesUS national securityfeaturesReuse this content More