US Military

Subterms

    More stories

    • 238 Shares82 Views

      in US Politics

      Nature, books and naked bike rides: Portlanders push back on Trump claims that city is ‘like living in hell’

      by

      In Portland, Oregon, a city Donald Trump claims to have seen “burning down to the ground” on his television, residents are pushing back on the US president’s false depiction of their tranquil city as a war zone.Trump, who refuses to accept firsthand accounts from Oregon’s governor and the Portland mayor that the widespread unrest he thinks he’s seen on television is not actually happening, has ordered the military in to the Pacific north-west city.Portland police made three arrests on Thursday night after fistfights broke out between demonstrators and a pro-Trump influencer from Washington DC at an Ice field office, and 200 national guard troops are expected to arrive in the coming days. But a visit to the Ice field on Thursday afternoon showed that, far from being “under siege” by militants, there were fewer than 10 protesters on the sidewalk, nearly outnumbered by journalists.Now residents, frustrated with the president’s false claims that Portland is “war ravaged”, are showing a different side of their city from the one depicted by Trump and Fox News.A raft of Instagram and TikTok videos from Portlanders are poking holes in Trump’s claim that life in their city is “like living in hell”, showcasing verdant hiking trails, trees in rich fall colors and a thriving food scene. Plans are also being drawn up for the most Portland of all possible responses: an Emergency Naked Bike Ride against “the militarization of our city”.View image in fullscreenOn a rainy Thursday in the city, the kitchen at Kann, Portland’s award-winning Haitian restaurant, was busy preparing for dinner. Jokes about Trump’s war were shared at Coava, a cafe with a single-origin coffee menu that changes seasonally which is popular with Japanese tourists. Business was brisk at Powell’s Books, the downtown icon which inspired the new protest slogan: “Portland isn’t a war zone; it’s a bookstore with a city around it.”The parking lot was full at Providore Fine Foods, a culinary marketplace whose owner, Kaie Wellman, said she was concerned about how Trump’s “threats against our city” could be “devastating for local businesses” like hers, which worked so hard to survive the pandemic only to be hit first by Trump’s tariffs and now his “100% false” portrayal of a minor protest at the Ice field office in the city’s south waterfront district. “It’s really profoundly upsetting,” she said.Wellman, a fifth-generation Oregonian, is opening a bistro this month in the Portland Art Museum’s new Mark Rothko Pavilion, a $110m expansion that has taken a decade to complete. “It really is such a cornerstone for our community, for downtown Portland, to have such a significant new building,” she said. She describes her leap of faith in opening a new restaurant just blocks from where the 2020 protests for racial justice took place as “a love letter to Portland and what a vibrant community we are.“One of the main reasons that we’re opening up this cafe downtown, and do what we do here in town, is because of our deep love for the state and for the city. And to see it portrayed anything less than what it is, you know, is just so frustrating. It’s a place that people want to come and live and raise their families. And it’s kind of unmatched in beauty,” Wellman said.View image in fullscreen“Yes, we’ve had issues here, but we’ve had the same issues that basically every other city around this world has had. And we’re coming at these issues from a thoughtful place and not trying to sweep them away. But the issue that’s being portrayed right now does not exist in this town.”Asked about Trump’s claims of lawlessness, Wellman said it was “not the case at all”. “And I am in the south waterfront at least two to three times a week because my 92-year-old mother lives in the south waterfront,” she added. “So I can tell you firsthand what’s been happening down there. And what I have seen, at the quote-unquote very worst, it’s still been peaceful protests. Maybe there’s been some strong words thrown around.”“I would say right now, if there is any disturbance that’s been going on, it’s Black Hawk helicopters that are circling around a neighborhood that is filled with many retirees and older people … causing all of them fear and a lack of sleep,” she added.View image in fullscreenBack at the Ice field office protest, Amanda Cochran, a US army veteran, was holding a homemade sign that read “Vets Against Militarization” on one side, and “Immigrants Are Not the Enemy’ on the other. She wore a tour shirt for the Canadian rock band Three Days Grace with the lyrics “Let’s start a riot.”“I’m here because I’m really fed up with the fact that Trump is talking about using the military to go into cities and to train the forces,” she said.“I served in the US army for six years and this is my first time ever protesting,” she said. “I just felt really strongly that if we don’t stand up and say something then this could easily become a militarized country and the citizens will be under the control of the military, and I don’t think that that is OK, and that’s not what I fought for.“Us veterans, we have the privilege of being able to express our opinions because we’re out, and hopefully we can kind of give those soldiers that don’t want to be there a voice. If enough of us show up, maybe Trump will back off,” she added.Across the street, the Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin, who has been reporting from inside the facility, prepared for a live hit out front, accompanied by three men with covered faces who appeared to be private security guards.Just to their left, a young protest organizer, Jack Dickinson, who achieved a measure of viral fame this week for the chicken costume he wears to mock Trump, was being interviewed for the local news.Why a chicken? One of the advantages of the costume, Dickinson explained, is that “it disarms people.“We’re dealing with a real influx of rightwing agitators right now,” he continued. “It becomes difficult for them to interact in certain ways, I think, when there’s the chicken suit, but not just the chicken suit, it’s then somebody who tries to have a conversation with them about the soybean situation that we’re facing right now,” referring to the collapse in crop prices for US farmers due to Trump’s trade war with China.View image in fullscreen“We do not want this to escalate,” he said, agreeing with local officials who suggest that Trump wants to provoke a response from the protesters.“There is definitely a desire for a response. We saw this most clearly on Sunday night because for that protest, we had 30 people that were down here associated with rightwing Twitter accounts or rightwing YouTube channels,” Dickinson said. “There is a clear desire to get somebody reacting in a way that they can frame as a justification for what they are doing. And Portland just isn’t giving them what they want.” More

    • 125 Shares82 Views

      in US Politics

      When will US generals stand-up to Trump? | Moustafa Bayoumi

      by

      At what point will the US’s top military brass decide that enough is enough, that loyalty to the constitution and the rule of law supersedes blind fealty to job and Donald Trump?The question is hardly academic. The president has been rapidly intensifying military operations on United States soil during his second term. In April, he began expanding the military presence along parts of the US’s southern border by establishing so-called “national defense areas”. Troops are now authorized to search, question and detain people in those zones, dangerously muddling the line between military rule and civilian law enforcement.By the summer, Trump sent in the marines and the national guard to Los Angeles, against the wishes of the governor, and later to Washington DC. Similar deployments of the national guard, also against the wishes of the respective state governors, are expected for Chicago and Portland, Oregon.Needless to say, US law, under the Posse Comitatus Act, generally prohibits the use of the military in civilian law enforcement roles. A federal judge ruled in September that Trump’s troop deployment in Los Angeles violated the act, but Trump is doing it anyway. And he expects the military to follow him.Not just follow him. He expects the military to venerate him. Trump turned a 250th Anniversary Parade for the Army, which we already didn’t need, into his own 79th birthday celebration, which we definitely didn’t need. (Both anniversaries were on the same day. Attendance at the parade was not only sparse, but was dwarfed by the estimated 5 million people who turned out for the “No Kings” demonstrations across the country on the same day.)And most recently, he joined his recently renamed secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, in an abruptly summoned meeting of the country’s military commanders on 30 September. (“I love the name,” Trump said, referring to the Department of War. “I think it’s so great. I think it stops wars.”) At the meeting, Trump told the leadership: “We’re under invasion from within, no different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways because they don’t wear uniforms.” His evidence was that “Democrats run most of the cities that are in bad shape,” even though all the cities he listed – San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles – have some of their lowest levels of violent crime in decades. And then he said: “We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.”Trump and Hegseth are attempting to reshape the US military into a partisan force committed to preserving Trump’s power, a prospect which is not only anathema to our tradition but should also worry all Americans. And they want to make this restructuring into a spectacle. Everything Hegseth said at this highly publicized and very expensive meeting could have been issued by memorandum, and in fact was. But Hegseth in particular needs a rebrand. He is, at this point, much less known for leading military operations than he is for leaking them. For Hegseth, the very public lecture was a vainglorious attempt at buffing his own tarnished image. Unfortunately for him, it came across more like a condescending Ted talk that had possibly been directed by the ghost of Leni Riefenstahl.But far more significant, and infinitely more troubling, was Trump’s foreshadowing of even greater numbers of troops on our American streets. So, I return to my initial question: when will the nation’s top military brass decide that enough is enough?There’s every reason to believe that high ranking members of the military might already be worried about getting sacked by this president, either for being insufficiently loyal to Trump, insufficiently white, or insufficiently male, based on past actions from this administration. Within weeks of assuming office, Trump sacked the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Air Force Gen CQ Brown, only the second Black man to hold the position. Adm Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to be named to chief of naval operations, the US Navy’s highest rank, was also dismissed.Trump also got rid of judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force, and fired Gen Tim Haugh, the head of the National Security Agency and US Cyber Command, reportedly at the request of far-right activist Laura Loomer, who claimed Haugh was insufficiently loyal to the president. There are many more examples.While it’s true that every administration does some house cleaning upon assuming power, it’s also true that the scale and mission to restructure the military during this administration is unprecedented. As Peter Feaver and Heidi Urben write in Foreign Policy: “No previous administration exercised its power in this dramatic fashion for fear that doing so would effectively treat the senior officer corps as akin to partisan political appointees whose professional ethos is to come and go with changes of administration, rather than career public servants whose professional ethos is to serve regardless of changes in political leadership.”Hegseth claimed that he will also now get rid of “stupid rules of engagement”. Those rules, however, define what is lawful and unlawful behavior by the military, a line made more difficult to discern as the administration decimates the legal wing (the judge advocate generals) of the military. Clearly, there has been plenty of illegality in the US military behavior from its inception until today. But if you are a member of the military, you have the right, if not the duty, to refuse illegal orders.The Trump administration is currently engaged in blatantly illegal acts being carried out by the US navy. Lethal strikes are being launched against vessels in the Caribbean that the US claims are drug smuggling boats. No evidence has been provided, and now the administration is claiming the US is in a “non-international armed conflict” with drug cartels and the people who were murdered by the US in the strikes are “unlawful combatants”.This is ludicrous, of course, and is reminiscent of the worst legal reasoning developed during the early War on Terror era. Even if the people on those boats were participating in drug smuggling (which is quite unlikely), being involved in the sale of a controlled substance does not rise to the standard of engaging in hostilities, as noted by Geoffrey Corn, a retired judge advocate general lawyer and formerly the army’s senior adviser for law-of-war issues.When a state intentionally kills a person outside of armed conflict and without due process, it’s a form of murder. It’s already happening in the Caribbean Sea. Is that the path we’re headed down on the streets of our own cities? Trump may have drawn up his own battle plans for his purposes, but it’s the members of the military who will have to carry them out. With all our institutions currently on the line, including the military, we need a much stronger defense against his idea of war.

      Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the award-winning books How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. He is Professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York More

    • 125 Shares110 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump signs order promising measures, including military, to defend Qatar

      by

      Donald Trump has signed an executive order vowing to use all measures including US military action to defend the energy-rich nation of Qatar – though it remains unclear just what weight the pledge will carry.The text of the order, available Wednesday on the White House’s website but dated Monday, appears to be another measure by Trump to assure the Qataris following Israel’s surprise attack on the country targeting Hamas leaders as they weighed accepting a ceasefire with Israel over the war in the Gaza Strip.The order cites the two countries’ “close cooperation” and “shared interest”, vowing to “guarantee the security and territorial integrity of the state of Qatar against external attack”.“The United States shall regard any armed attack on the territory, sovereignty or critical infrastructure of the state of Qatar as a threat to the peace and security of the United States,” the order says.“In the event of such an attack, the United States shall take all lawful and appropriate measures – including diplomatic, economic, and, if necessary, military – to defend the interests of the United States and of the state of Qatar and to restore peace and stability.”The order apparently came during a visit to Washington on Monday by Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump organized a call by Netanyahu to Qatar during the visit in which Netanyahu “expressed his deep regret” over the strike that killed six people, including a member of the Qatari security forces, the White House said.Qatar’s foreign ministry described the US pledge as “an important step in strengthening the two countries’ close defense partnership”. The Qatari-funded Al Jazeera satellite news network declared: “New Trump executive order guarantees Qatar security after Israeli attack.”Trump also spoke on the phone later Wednesday to Qatar’s ruling emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, according to a White House official who was not authorized to speak publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.The White House did not release details about the call, though Qatar later said the two men spoke about Doha’s efforts to reach a ceasefire in the Israel-Gaza war.The true scope of the pledge by the US remains in question. Typically, legally binding agreements, or treaties, need to receive the approval of the US Senate. However, presidents have entered international agreements without the Senate’s approval, as Barack Obama did with Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers.Ultimately, any decision to take military action rests with the president. That uncertainty has clouded previous US defense agreements in Trump’s second term, such as Nato’s Article 5 guarantees.Qatar, a peninsular nation in the Persian Gulf, became fantastically wealthy through its natural gas reserves. It has been a key partner of the US military, allowing its Central Command to have its forward operating base at its vast Al Udeid airbase.Joe Biden named Qatar as a major non-Nato ally in 2022, in part due to its help during the US’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. And Qatar has maintained close ties to Trump, from a real estate project with his eponymous Trump Organization to offering him a Boeing 747 to use as Air Force One.In the aftermath of the Israeli attack, Saudi Arabia entered a mutual defense agreement with Pakistan, bringing the kingdom under Islamabad’s nuclear umbrella. It’s unclear whether other Gulf Arab countries, worried about both Israel as well as Iran as it faces reimposed United Nations sanctions over its nuclear program, may seek similar arrangements with the region’s longtime security guarantor.“The Gulf’s centrality in the Middle East and its significance to the United States warrants specific US guarantees beyond President Donald J Trump’s assurances of nonrepetition and dinner meetings,” wrote Bader al-Saif, a history professor at Kuwait University who analyzes Gulf Arab affairs. More

    • 175 Shares166 Views

      in US Politics

      What do Trump and Hegseth’s inflammatory speeches to military generals signal? | Moira Donegan

      by

      Shortly after Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s defense secretary, summoned all the military’s generals to Quantico, Virginia, from their positions around the world in an unusual demand for an in-person assembly, Ben Hodges, a retired general, took to social media to evoke a bit of history. “July 1935,” Hodges said. “German generals were called to a surprise assembly in Berlin and informed that their previous oath to the Weiman constitution was void and that they would be required to swear a personal oath to the Führer. Most generals took the new oath to keep their positions.” Hegseth’s account replied to Hodges post: “Cool story, General”.Yet when the meeting finally happened on Tuesday morning, the army generals and navy admirals were treated to a 45-minute speech by Hegseth, followed by a rambling, hour-long address by Trump, which confirmed at least some of what Hodges seemed to fear. The defense secretary emphasized the army’s appearance, decrying “fat troops” and “fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon”, and signaled his intent to reshape the military’s culture so as to purge “wokeness” and evoke a more masculine image. “No more identity months, DEI offices, dudes in dresses,” he said. “No more division, distraction and gender delusions. No more debris. As I’ve said before, and will say again: We are done. With that. Shit.” The military, Hegseth suggested, would become an advertisement for the Trump regime’s preferred cultural style, and this transformation will evidently involve many changes to what the armed forces look like when they are photographed.To this end, Hegseth announced that he would also be eliminating or drastically curtailing the equal opportunity, whistleblower, inspector general and complaint procedures that allow military personnel to report harassment and misconduct. The changes seemed designed to particularly roll back efforts undertaken over the course of the 2010s to reduce sexual assault in the military and end its impunity.“No more frivolous complaints, no more repeat complaints, no more anonymous complaints, no more smearing reputations,” said Hegseth, who settled a lawsuit brought by a woman who accused him of sexual assault in 2020. (The settlement terms are confidential. Hegseth has said the allegations were false). “No more walking on eggshells.” One former official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told CNN: “I think what this is, is people are sick and tired of not being able to make inappropriate or sexually explicit jokes at the staff meetings.” Hegseth, it seems, is committed to restoring this treasured freedom.Hegseth similarly declared that he would be changing procedures that have allowed the military to be more diverse – such as eliminating special permissions for soldiers to grow beards, frequently used by Black soldiers, and raising physical fitness standards for specialized, often high-pay and high-status combat roles to what Hegseth seemed to believe is a threshold only men will meet. Hegseth, who has opposed women serving in combat roles, said that candidates for such jobs will be held to the “highest male standard”, which he also said was “gender neutral”. “If that means no women qualify for some combat jobs, so be it,” Hegseth said. “That is not the intent,” he added, questionably. “But it could be the result.”As for the officers themselves, a group which included several Black men and women of various races, Hegseth seemed to offer what he evidently thought was a flattering assessment of their masculine violence and virility. “You kill people and break things for a living,” Hegseth said to the assembled generals. “You are not politically correct and do not necessarily belong always in polite society.” The speech was repetitive and heavy on moments of self-conscious macho posturing. “To our enemies,” Hegseth said at one point “FAFO” – or, fuck around and find out. The defense secretary paused, seeming to wait for applause, but nobody clapped.Trump, meanwhile, also signaled that he seeks to transform the military into a partisan tool of his regime, repeatedly telling the assembled leaders that they would be tasked with missions targeting Americans. “America is under invasion from within,” the president said. “We’re under invasion from within. No different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways because they don’t wear uniforms. At least when they’re wearing a uniform you can take them out. It’s war from within.” Trump, who just days ago deployed 200 national guard troops to Portland, Oregon, with orders to use “full force, if necessary” offered that he had instructed Hegseth to use American cities as “training grounds”. At other times, Trump meandered, as he often does, into off-script comments that were difficult to parse. “But they’re not going to stand in our way, ever again,” Trump said. “You’re not going to see four years like we had with Biden and that group of incompetent people that ran that should have never been there. Because we have the United States military, the best, the boldest, the bravest, that the world has ever seen, that the world has ever known.”Trump, like Hegseth, sometimes paused, seeming to expect the generals to clap or laugh. But the laughs were not forthcoming; the military audience was largely silent.There is something pathetic about Hegseth and Trump, who have schemed and failed their way into positions of power and prestige that are comically outsized to their character. It is telling that Hegseth is so preoccupied with making the military into a photogenic spectacle of masculine strength – an anxious fixation on surface and spectacle that only highlights the US’s declining influence abroad.It is telling, too, that Trump can barely string sentences together, appearing distracted, sleepy, and barely coherent as he tells the armed forces to train their guns on his own people. There is no pretext that can sustain the delusion that these are serious people, or that their instructions to the military come from any motive other than their own desire for narcissistic gratification.They do not want to be strong to pursue the nation’s interests; they do not want to be strong to pursue any principles; they certainly do not want to be strong so that they can ensure the safety of the innocent. They want to be strong so that they can look big and important on TV. And for that, they flew the generals in from around the world, at tremendous taxpayer expense, to force them to sit as a captive audience for a pair of speeches that sounded like poor imitations of an action movie monologue.But as Hodges suggested, the ostentatious idiocy of these men does not mean that the generals and admirals assembled will not follow their orders. These military leaders have received the signal that their troops are to become whiter and more male; they have received the instruction that their next missions will involve suppressing domestic dissent. They have a choice between following their orders and keeping their jobs, or following an abstract set of principles, and leaving them. Most of them will choose the former.The US military, for all its wreckage and violence it imposes abroad and for all the cruelty and exploitation of the poor that it inflicts at home, has one consistent virtue: it has always been under quite firm civilian control. Most of the time, that’s a good thing.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

    • 188 Shares187 Views

      in US Politics

      Portland residents scoff at Trump threat to send military: ‘This is not a war zone’

      by

      A visit to downtown Portland, Oregon, on Saturday, hours after Donald Trump falsely declared the city “war ravaged” to justify the deployment of federal troops, made it plain the US president’s impression of the city, apparently shaped by misleading conservative media reports, is entirely divorced from reality.There were just four protesters outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) field office in an outlying residential neighborhood that the president had claimed was “under siege” by antifascists and “other domestic terrorists”. Jack Dickinson, 26, wore a chicken costume draped in an American flag and held a sign that read “Portland Will Outlive Him”. Passing motorists honked in appreciation.Dickinson, who is from Portland and has helped organize the small but persistent protest at that location, which is going on three months, said he was not surprised to see Trump focus his attention on the city. But he called the president’s threat to have soldiers use “full force” against the protesters, whose numbers occasionally swell into the dozens, unwarranted.“There’s no justification, no reason for the national guard or military to be using ‘full force’ on people,” Dickinson said, “but they have this narrative about Portland that’s been helped by selectively edited videos to set themselves up for a crackdown.”The Ice field office, which the city of Portland recently accused the agency of illegally using for detentions, is also attractive to protesters because it sits directly next to a Tesla dealership. Another protester held up a sign that read “Tesla Funds Fascism/Stop Buying Teslas”.A third protester, a young man who goes by the nickname Burrito, said that he was “protesting them wrongfully kidnapping random individuals based on their skin color”.He also rejected the president’s characterization of the city and of the anti-Ice protesters. “This is not a war zone and it’s disgusting the way that he talks about us,” he said.The activist said that the point of the protests was to frustrate and wear out the federal agents, who, he said, have been responsible for any violence that has taken place: “As the day progresses, we get more numbers, they start to show more force and our people come out. It’s just a matter of how they escalate things, because they are the escalators, not like the one that Trump took that doesn’t work.”The number of protesters was vastly smaller than the number of people in nearby coffee shops and restaurants, where Portlanders went about their usual weekend business, joking about life during wartime.The city’s downtown blocks, which were the scene of mass protests in 2020, first against racist policing and then against Trump’s deployment of federal agents to guard a courthouse, were similarly placid.View image in fullscreenThe only person on the sidewalk outside the federal courthouse was a street sweeper, wearing a neon-green vest with the words “Clean & Safe” on the back. The fence that surrounded the building five years ago had long since been removed, as had the plywood boards that covered the windows of the adjacent police headquarters, where thousands of racial justice protesters rallied after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020.There was also no sign of activity at the nearby Edith Green federal building, with its distinctive facade clad in vegetated screens, one day after a local TV reporter recorded the arrival of a convoy that included masked federal agents in an armored homeland security truck.By contrast, the nearby Portland farmers’ market was packed with residents and tourists buying produce and eating acaí bowls from a thriving local business started by a yoga and meditation teacher.On social media, Portlanders continued to mock Trump’s false claims about the city as they have for weeks, by posting images of themselves enjoying life in the city with audio of the president saying, earlier this month, that it is “like living in Hell”. More

    • 125 Shares171 Views

      in US Politics

      Donald Trump says he is deploying troops to Portland, Oregon

      by

      Donald Trump said on Saturday he is deploying troops to Portland, Oregon, “authorizing Full Force, if necessary”, ignoring pleas from local officials and the state’s congressional delegation, who suggested that the president was misinformed or lying about the nature and scale of a single, small protest outside one federal immigration enforcement office.Trump made the announcement on social media, using references to antifascists and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice). He claimed that the deployment was necessary “to protect War ravaged Portland, and any of our ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists”.Oregon’s governor, Tina Kotek, rejected the president’s characterization. “There is no national security threat in Portland. Our communities are safe and calm,” she wrote on social media. “My office is reaching out to the White House and Homeland Security for more information. We have been provided no information on the reason or purpose of any military mission.”A visit by the Guardian to downtown Portland on Saturday morning confirmed that the city is placid, the farmers’ market was packed and the protest against immigration enforcement in an outlying residential neighborhood remained small. There were just four protesters on the sidewalk near the Ice field office Trump claimed was “under siege”. One, wearing a chicken costume and draped in an American flag, held up a sign that read: “Portland Will Outlive Him.” Passing motorists honked in appreciation.The White House did not provide details in connection with Trump’s announcement, including a timeline for the deployment or what troops would be involved.Portland’s mayor, Keith Wilson, said at a hastily assembled news conference on Friday night that the city had become aware of “a sudden influx of federal agents in our city. We did not ask for them to come. They are here without clear precedent or purpose.”“The President has sent agents here to create chaos and riots in Portland, to induce a reaction, to induce protests, to induce conflicts. His goal is to make Portland look like what he’s been describing it as,” Oregon’s junior senator, Jeff Merkley said. “He wants to induce a violent exchange. Let us not grant him that wish. Let us be the force of orderly, peaceful protest.”The senator also drew attention to video evidence from the local newspaper, the Oregonian, which showed federal agents using force against a small number of protesters outside the Ice facility, who remained peaceful.Although a spokesperson for the Oregon national guard told the Oregonian that no official request for troops had been made yet, convoys of dozens of federal agents, in marked and unmarked SUVs, were seen on Friday entering a federal building downtown and an Ice field office in a residential neighborhood that has been the scene of regular protests by dozens of protesters.“The President of the United States is directing his self-proclaimed ‘Secretary of War’ to unleash militarized federal forces in an American city he disagrees with,” Representative Maxine Dexter wrote in a social media statement on Saturday, referring in part to the Pentagon chief, Pete Hegseth. “This is an egregious abuse of power and a betrayal of our most basic American values. Authoritarians rely on fear to divide us. Portland will not give them that.”Both of Oregon’s US senators and three of its House representatives had in recent days strongly rejected Trump’s claims about mass anarchy in the city as a fiction intended to justify the unnecessary deployment of federal troops as part of an “authoritarian” crackdown.Ron Wyden, the state’s senior Democratic senator, told reporters on Friday: “It’s important to recognize that the president’s argument is a fable – it does not resemble the truth.”“If he watches a TV show in the morning and he see Portland mentioned, he says it’s a terrible place,” Wyden added.During an Oval Office event on Thursday to announce that the administration intends to investigate and disrupt what it claims is “organized political violence” funded by leftwing groups, Trump made several wild claims about Portland, which was a center of racial justice protests in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. But life has long since returned to normal, and barriers around the federal courthouse and police headquarters downtown have been removed.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe president, however, apparently deceived by video of a handful of protesters gathered outside the Ice facility in a south-west Portland neighborhood broadcast by conservative outlets, insisted that the city has been in non-stop “anarchy” since 2020 and is barely livable.“Portland is, I don’t know how anybody lives there, it’s amazing. But it’s anarchy out there,” Trump said. The president then claimed, falsely, that most of the city’s retail stores had closed, due to arson attacks, and “the few shops that are open” were covered in plywood.Describing the small number of protesters who have gathered outside an Ice facility that has been illegally used for detentions in a residential neighborhood, Trump claimed, without evidence: “These are professional agitators, these are bad people and they’re paid a lot of money by rich people.“But we’re going to get out there and we’re gonna do a pretty big number on those people in Portland that are doing that.”Representative Suzanne Bonamici, an Oregon Democrat, said on Friday: “This proclaimed ‘war on Antifa’ is completely a fallacy. Antifa is an ideology, it is not a group, and so we’re extremely concerned with what he’s going to try to do with that pronouncement.”“Donald Trump does not care about safety. If he cared about safety he would not have released 1,600 convicted insurrectionists into the streets. He cares about control and authoritarianism,” she added, referring to Trump’s clemency for those who carried out the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol after he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden. “Portland does not need the military. We do not want them, we do not need them, we do not welcome them to come here under his orders.”Trump, a Republican, has sent military troops to the Democratic-controlled cities of Los Angeles and Washington DC so far in his second presidency. He has discussed doing the same in Memphis and New Orleans, which are also Democratic strongholds. More

    • 150 Shares190 Views

      in US Politics

      US military brass brace for firings as Pentagon chief orders top-level meeting

      by

      US military officials are reportedly bracing for possible firings or demotions after the Trump administration’s Pentagon chief, Pete Hegseth, abruptly summoned hundreds of generals and admirals from around the world to attend a gathering in Virginia in the upcoming days.The event, scheduled for Tuesday at Marine Corps University in Quantico, is expected to feature a short address by Hegseth focused on military standards and the “warrior ethos”, according to the Washington Post.The order to attend the meeting, which has been described as unusual and unprecedented, was reportedly issued with little explanation – and prompted military personnel stationed overseas to have to make last-minute travel arrangements.The Pentagon has not disclosed details about the meeting or its agenda. But a senior Trump administration official told the New York Times on Friday that Hegseth intends to deliver a “rally the troops” message – and that one of the primary goals of the gathering is to “get our fighters excited” about the new posture of what was recently rebranded the Department of War.A White House official told CNN that the event is intended as a “show of force of what the new military now looks like” during Donald Trump’s second presidency.“It’s about getting the horses into the stable and whipping them into shape,” the military official familiar with the planning told CNN. “And the guys with the stars on their shoulders make for a better audience from an optics standpoint. This is a showcase for Hegseth to tell them: get on board, or potentially have your career shortened.”Hegseth’s team reportedly plans to record and publicly release the address later, according to CNN, which cited three of its sources.A Pentagon spokesperson confirmed the upcoming gathering to the Guardian, saying that Hegseth “will meet with his senior military leaders”, but did not provide any further details.According to the Times, the Pentagon informed congressional committees overseeing the military on Friday that Hegseth intends to use the gathering to share with “most senior service members his intent for the department”, including new guidance on “military fitness standards and several other areas of interest”.Sources cited by the Post say that Tuesday’s address will be the first of three short lectures by Hegseth. The second, the Post reported, will reportedly focus on the defense industrial base, and the third on deterrence.The meeting has reportedly stirred unease and anxiety among some military officers, especially given Hegseth’s efforts to reshape the Pentagon and his recent firings of several senior officers.In May, he ordered a 20% reduction in the number of four-star generals and admirals across the military and a 10% cut in the number of flag and general officers. And in recent months, he has dismissed more than a dozen senior military officials, according to the Times.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn an interview on Thursday on MSNBC, retired army Lt Gen Mark Hertling described Tuesday’s planned gathering as highly unusual, adding that it was something he had “never seen before”.“There are a couple of reasons why he might be calling this meeting,” Hertling said. “It could be about a shifting national security strategy, or cuts to the general officer corps, which is something he has talked about several times – he’s floated it, to shrink the number of flag officers in the military. It could be a preparation for a potential budget stalemate next week, or it could be concerns over information leaks.”“Secretary Hegseth has fired 12 senior ranking general officers, so he could be firing more,” Hertling added. “Or is it performative theatre?”In a post on social media on Friday, Lt Gen Ben Hodges of the army compared Tuesday’s gathering to a 1935 “surprise assembly in Berlin” where German generals were “required to swear a personal oath to the Führer”, Adolf Hitler, in the lead-up to the Holocaust and the second world war.Hegseth, a former army national guard officer and ex-Fox News host, responded to Hodges by writing: “Cool story, General.” More

    • 138 Shares181 Views

      in US Politics

      Hegseth says Wounded Knee massacre soldiers will keep Medals of Honor

      by

      Defense secretary Pete Hegseth has announced that 20 US soldiers who took part in the 1890 massacre of hundreds of Lakota men, women and children at Wounded Knee will keep the Medals of Honor that were awarded to them.The move is the latest in a number of contentious actions taken by the Trump administration to reinterpret US history.The long debate over the events at Wounded Knee includes a dispute over its characterization as a “battle” given that, according to historical records, the US army killed about 250 Lakota Sioux people – many of whom were unarmed women and children – despite fighters in the camp having surrendered.“We’re making it clear that [the soldiers] deserve those medals,” Hegseth said, announcing the move in a video on social media on Thursday. Calling the men “brave soldiers”, he said a review panel had concluded in a report that the medals were justly awarded. “This decision is now final, and their place in our nation’s history is no longer up for debate.”Hegseth’s Democratic predecessor at the Pentagon, former defense secretary Lloyd Austin, ordered the review of the honors in 2024 after Congress called for it in the 2022 defense bill. Announcing the review, the Pentagon said Austin wanted to “ensure no awardees were recognized for conduct inconsistent with the nation’s highest military honor”.But in Thursday’s video, Hegseth – who has a history of Christian nationalist sympathies – said his predecessor had been “more interested in being politically correct than historically correct”. It is unclear if the report will be made public.Hegseth’s move also halts a push from Democratic lawmakers to revoke medals tied to the massacre at a camp on what is now the Lakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. For Native Americans, the massacre marked a devastating climax to the tragedy of Indigenous removals from their land.“We cannot be a country that celebrates and rewards horrifying acts of violence against Native people,” senator Elizabeth Warren said in a statement earlier this year after reintroducing the proposed Remove the Stain Act.After the massacre, 19 soldiers from the seventh cavalry were awarded the Medal of Honor for their “bravery” and “gallantry” over actions ranging from rescuing fellow troops to efforts to “dislodge Sioux Indians” hiding in a ravine.Native Americans have long pushed for revocation of the medals. As time has gone on, the isolated site has become a place of mourning for many tribes, symbolizing the genocidal history of brutality and repression they have suffered at the hands of the US government. While Congress issued a formal apology in 1990 to the descendants of the massacre, the medals were left in place and no reparations offered.Thursday’s announcement is the latest move to sanitize the nation’s history taken by the Trump administration since Donald Trump signed an executive order in March titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”.In recent months, Hegseth has reverted the names of several US army bases back to Confederate-linked names, monuments to the Confederacy and Confederate figures have been restored, and he renamed a US navy ship that honored gay rights activist Harvey Milk.The Trump administration has also gone after cultural institutions like Smithsonian museums for exhibits it considers “unpatriotic”, purged and rewritten federal webpages related to topics including slavery, diversity and discrimination (some of which were later restored), and cut funding to grants to institutions that honor the lives of enslaved people.Some historians took to social media to denounce the administration’s latest move.“Only an administration intent on committing war crimes in the present and future would stoop to calling Wounded Knee a ‘battle’ rather than what it truly was,” Columbia University history professor Karl Jacoby posted on Bluesky.Jacoby added: “Fortunately, history does not work as Hegseth seems to believe. It is never “settled” and the government cannot (at least for now!) impose its interpretation of events on the rest of us.” More