09 November 21
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Last week, six left-wing House Democrats refused to bow to party leaders to support the bipartisan infrastructure bill. More of their colleagues should have taken the same stand.
Though somewhat convoluted at the level of detail, what happened on Friday represented a marked and undeniable shift away from this position. While less surprising from the likes of Biden and Pelosi, who in the wake of last week’s elections are quite desperate for anything they can call a political win, Jayapal’s maneuver is altogether more puzzling. In brief: Friday saw the passage of BIF through the House by a margin of 228 to 206, with only six Democrats (Jamaal Bowman, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley, Cori Bush, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) refusing to cave to leadership pressure and voting against the bill.
Officially, progressives have a commitment from centrists to vote for BBB pending the provision of a financial analysis from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) sometime later this month. The risk, of course, is that the CBO’s analysis will be used as a pretext by Democratic centrists to withdraw what is currently their nominal support for the bill — a possibility that is distinctly difficult to ignore amid its endless watering down.
With BIF now safely through the House, progressives no longer have their only real bargaining chip and could emerge from the process empty-handed as a result — a fact emphasized by Representative Omar as she explained her No vote: “Passing the infrastructure bill without passing the Build Back Better Act first risks leaving behind childcare, paid leave, health care, climate action, housing, education, and a roadmap to citizenship.” (The American Prospect’s David Dayen, for what it’s worth, offers a charitable reading of Jayapal’s calculus here.)
One way or the other, we’ll probably know the fate of the BBB Act soon enough. But there was always something else at stake in these negotiations and, whatever ultimately comes of Jayapal’s decision to abandon her own red line, it has likely weakened the credibility of Congressional progressives in the future. In effect, a leadership that reflexively defers to centrist and Blue Dog lawmakers has been sent the message that progressives will fold with sufficient pressure. By voting against the BIF, meanwhile, members of the Squad displayed the kind of basic political consistency that might have forced the leadership to alter its strategy if other progressive members had cleaved to it as well.
An F-35. (photo: U.S. Navy)
Today, TomDispatch regulars and Pentagon experts William Hartung and Mandy Smithberger consider the way the funding of the U.S. military and the industrial complex that goes with it has headed for what used to be called “the wild blue yonder.” After all, it’s just about the only thing a Congress that can’t otherwise seem to reach an accord agrees about.
In a strange sense, given our intensifying new Cold War with China, something else seems to be threatening to go wild as well. There’s clearly a new arms race brewing with hypersonic missiles at its heart. Only the other day, General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, raised a warning flag about a reputed Chinese test of just such a potential weapon. “I don’t know,” he said ominously, “if it’s quite a Sputnik moment, but I think it’s very close to that.”
Uh-oh, shades of the previous Cold War with the Soviet Union! And how convenient for the nation that funds its military at levels commensurate with the next 11 countries combined. After all, the Afghan War is in the garbage can and the rest of our “forever wars” are seemingly in the rear-view mirror. Yet that military certainly needs something — and some enemy — to justify the continued pumping up of its budget to stratospheric levels. So, now the head of the Joint Chiefs is hyping (if you’ll excuse the pun) the dangers of Chinese hypersonic weaponry, even as this country pours billions of dollars into just such experimental missiles itself, while engaging in a multi-decade, $2 trillion “modernization” of its already gargantuan nuclear arsenal.
God forbid that — unlike in the previous Cold War (and even with Russia today) — there would be any discussions with the Chinese about putting a lid on the global nuclear threat or on a new arms race on Planet Earth. Heavens no! Which is why it’s so important for Hartung and Smithberger to explore the possibilities available to us today when it comes to putting a lid on that stratospheric military budget of ours. Tom
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
Reining in the Pentagon
Can It Possibly Happen?
After all, in its consideration of the bill that authorizes such budget levels for next year, the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives recently voted to add $25 billion to the already staggering $750 billion the Biden administration requested for the Pentagon and related work on nuclear weapons at the Department of Energy. By any measure, that’s an astonishing figure, given that the request itself was already far higher than spending at the peaks of the Korean and Vietnam Wars or President Ronald Reagan’s military buildup of the 1980s.
In any reasonable world, such a military budget should be considered both unaffordable and deeply unsuitable when it comes to addressing the true threats to this country’s “defense,” including cyberattacks, pandemics, and the devastation already being wrought by climate change. Worst of all, providing a blank check to the military-industrial-congressional complex ensures the continued production of troubled weapon systems like Lockheed Martin’s exorbitantly expensive F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which is typically behind schedule, far above projected costs, and still not considered effective in combat.
Changing course would mean real reform and genuine accountability, starting with serious cuts to a budget for which “bloated” is far too kind an adjective.
Three Options for Reductions
At the request of Senate Budget Committee Chair Bernie Sanders (I-VT), the CBO devised three different approaches to cutting approximately $1 trillion (a decrease of a mere 14%) from the Pentagon budget over the next decade. Historically, it could hardly be a more modest proposal. After all, without any such plan, the Pentagon budget actually did decrease by 30% between 1988 and 1997.
Such a CBO-style reduction would still leave the department with about $6.3 trillion to spend over that 10-year period, 80% more than the cost of President Biden’s original $3.5 trillion Build Back Better proposal for domestic investments. Of course, that figure, unlike the Pentagon budget, has already been dramatically whittled down to half its original size, thanks to laughable claims by “moderate” Democrats like Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) that it would break the bank in Washington. Yet such critics of expanded social and economic programs rarely offer similar thoughts when it comes to the Pentagon’s far larger bite of the budgetary pie.
The options in the budget watchdog’s new report are anything but radical:
Option one would preserve the “current post-Cold War strategy of deterring aggression through [the] threat of immediate U.S. military response with the objectives of denying an adversary’s gains and recapturing lost territory.” The proposed cuts would hit each military service equally, with some new weapons programs slowed down and a few, as in the case of the B-21 bomber, cancelled.
Option two “adopts a Cold War-like strategy for large nuclear powers of making aggression very costly and recognizing that the size of conventional conflict would be limited by the threat of a nuclear response.” That leaves nearly $2 trillion for the Pentagon’s planned “modernization” of the U.S. nuclear arsenal untouched, while relying more heavily on working with allies in conventional war situations than current strategy allows for. It would mean that the military might take longer to deploy in large numbers to a conflict.
Option three “de-emphasizes use of U.S. military force in regional conflicts in favor of preserving U.S. control of the global commons (sea, air, space, and the Arctic), ensuring open access to the commons for allies and unimpeded global commerce.” In other words, Afghan- or Iraq-style boots-on-the-ground U.S. interventions would largely be avoided in favor of the use of long-range and “over-the-horizon” weapons like drones, naval blockades, the enforcement of no-fly zones, and the further arming and training of allies.
But looking more broadly at the question of what will make the world a safer place in an era of pandemics, climate change, racial injustice, and economic inequality, reductions well beyond the $1 trillion figure embedded in the CBO’s recommendations would be both necessary and possible in a more reasonable American world. The CBO’s scenarios remain focused on military methods for solving security problems, assuring an all-too-narrow view of what might be saved by a new approach to security.
Nuclear Excess
The CBO, for instance, chose not to look at possible savings from simply scaling back (not even ending) the Pentagon’s $2-trillion, three-decades-long plan to build a new generation of nuclear-armed missiles, bombers, and submarines, complete with accompanying new warheads. Scaling back such a buildup, which will only further imperil this planet, could easily save in excess of $100 billion over the next decade.
One significant step toward nuclear sanity would be to adopt the alternative nuclear posture proposed by the organization Global Zero. That would involve the elimination of all land-based nuclear missiles and rely instead on a smaller force of ballistic missile submarines and bombers as part of a “deterrence-only” strategy.
Land-based, intercontinental ballistic missiles were accurately described by former Secretary of Defense William Perry as “some of the most dangerous weapons in the world.” The reason: a president would have only a matter of minutes to decide whether to launch them upon being warned of an oncoming nuclear attack by an enemy power. That would, of course, greatly increase the risk of an accidental nuclear war and the potential destruction of the planet prompted by a false alarm (of which there have been several in the past). Eliminating such missiles would make the world a far safer place, while saving tens of billions of dollars in the process.
Capping Contractors
While most people think about the Pentagon budget in terms of what it spends on new guns, ships, planes, and missiles, services are about half of what it buys every year. These are the contracts that go to various corporate “Beltway bandits” to consult with the military or perform jobs that could often be done more cheaply by federal employees. Both the Defense Business Board and the Pentagon’s own cost estimating office have identified service contracting as an area where there are significant opportunities for large-scale savings.
Last year, the Pentagon spent nearly $204 billion on various service contracts. That’s more than the budgets for the Departments of Health and Human Services, State, or Homeland Security. Reducing spending on contractors by even 15% would instantly save tens of billions of dollars annually.
In the past, Congress and the Pentagon have shown that just such savings could easily be realized. For example, a provision in a 2011 defense law simply capped such spending at 2010 levels. Government spending data shows that, in the end, it was reduced by $42 billion over four years.
Closing Unneeded Bases
While the Biden administration seeks to expand domestic infrastructure spending, the Pentagon has been desperate to shed costly and unnecessary military facilities. Both the Obama and Trump administrations asked Congress to authorize another round of what’s called base realignment and closure to help the Defense Department get rid of its excess capacity. The Pentagon estimates that it could save $2 billion annually that way.
The CBO report cited above explicitly excludes any consideration of such cost savings as politically unfeasible, given the present Congress. But considering the ways in which climate change is going to threaten current military basing arrangements domestically and globally, that would be an obvious way to go.
Another CBO report warns that the future effects of climate change — from rising sea levels (and flooding coastlines) to ever more powerful storms — will both reduce the government’s revenue and increase its mandatory spending, if its base situation remains as it is now. After all, ever fiercer tropical storms and hurricanes, as well as rising levels of flooding, are already resulting in billions of dollars in damage to military bases. Meanwhile, it’s estimated that, in the decades to come, more than 1,700 U.S. military installations worldwide may be impacted by sea-level rise. Future rounds of base closings, both domestic and global, should be planned now with the impact of climate change in mind.
Turning Around Congress, Fighting Off Lobbyists
So far, boosting Pentagon spending has been one of the only things a bipartisan majority of this Congress can agree on, as indicated by that House decision to add $25 billion to the Pentagon budget request for Fiscal Year 2022. A similar measure is included in the Senate version, which it will debate soon. There are, however, glimmers of hope on the horizon as the number of members of Congress willing to oppose the longstanding practice of shoveling ever more funds at the Pentagon, no questions asked, is indeed growing.
For example, a majority of Democrats and members of the leadership in the House of Representatives supported an ultimately unsuccessful provision to strip some excess funds from the Pentagon this year. A smaller group voted to cut the department’s budget across the board by 10%. Still, it was a number that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. That core group is only likely to grow in the years to come as the costs of non-military challenges like pandemics, climate change, and the financial impact of racial and economic injustice supplant traditional military risks as the most urgent threats to American lives and livelihoods.
Opposition to increased Pentagon spending is growing outside of Washington as well. An ever wider range of not just progressive but conservative organizations now support substantial reductions in the Pentagon budget. The challenge, however, is to translate such sentiments into a concerted, multifaceted campaign of public pressure that will move a majority of the members of Congress to stop giving the Pentagon a yearly blank check. A new poll from the Eurasia Group Foundation found that twice as many Americans now support cutting the Pentagon budget as support increasing it.
Any attempt to curb Pentagon spending will run up against a strikingly powerful arms industry that deploys campaign contributions, lobbyists, and promises of defense-related employment to keep budgets high. In this century alone, the Pentagon has spent more than $14 trillion, up to one half of which has gone to contractors. During those same years, the arms industry has spent $285 million on campaign contributions and $2.5 billion on lobbying, most of it focused on members of the armed services and defense appropriations committees that take the lead in deciding how much the country spends for military purposes.
The arms industry’s lobbying efforts are especially insidious. In an average year, it employs around 700 lobbyists, more than one for every member of Congress. The top five corporate weapons makers got a return of $1,909 in taxpayer funds for every dollar they spent on lobbying. Most of their lobbyists once worked in the Pentagon or Congress and arrived in the world of arms contractors via the infamous “revolving door.” Of course, they then used their relationships with their former colleagues in government to curry favor for their corporate employers. A 2018 investigation by the Project On Government Oversight found that, in the prior decade, 380 high-ranking Pentagon officials and military officers had become lobbyists, board members, executives, or consultants for weapons contractors within two years of leaving their government jobs.
A September 2021 study by the Government Accountability Office found that, as of 2019, the top 14 arms contractors employed more than 1,700 former military or Pentagon civilian employees, including many who had previously been involved in making or enforcing the rules for buying major weapons systems.
The revolving door spins both ways, with executives and board members of the major weapons makers moving into powerful senior positions in government where they’re well situated to help their former (and, more than likely, future) employers. The process starts at the top. Four of the past five secretaries of defense have also been executives, lobbyists, or board members of Raytheon, Boeing, or General Dynamics, three of the top five weapons makers that split tens of billions of dollars in Pentagon contracts annually. Both the House and Senate versions of the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act extend the periods of time in which those entering the government from such industries have to recuse themselves from decisions involving their former companies. Still, as long as the Pentagon continues to pluck officials from the very outfits driving those exploding budgets, we should all know more or less what to expect.
So far, the system is working — if you happen to be an arms contractor. The top five weapons companies alone split $166 billion in Pentagon contracts in Fiscal Year 2020, well over one-third of those issued by the Department of Defense that year. To give you some sense of the scale of all this — and our government’s twisted priorities — Lockheed Martin alone received $75 billion in Pentagon contracts in Fiscal Year 2020, nearly one and one-half times the $52.5 billion allocated for the State Department and the Agency for International Development combined.
Which Way Forward?
The Congressional Budget Office’s new report charts a path toward a more rational approach to Pentagon spending, but the $1 trillion in savings it proposes should only be a starting point. Hundreds of billions more could be saved over the next decade by reassessing our national security strategy, cutting back the Pentagon’s nuclear buildup, capping its use of private contractors, and scaling back the colossal sums of waste, fraud, and abuse baked into its budget. All of this could be done while making this country and the world a significantly safer place by shifting such funds to addressing the non-military risks that threaten the future of humanity.
Whether our leaders meet the challenges of today or continue to succumb to the power of the arms lobby is an open question.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
Kellyanne Conway, former senior adviser to President Donald Trump, speaks Nov. 6 during the Republican Jewish Coalition annual leadership meeting in Las Vegas. (photo: Bridget Bennett/Bloomberg News)
A report from the office of Special Counsel Henry Kerner describes a “willful disregard for the law” known as the Hatch Act that was “especially pernicious,” given that many officials abused their government roles days before the November election. President Donald Trump — whose job it was to discipline his political appointees — allowed them to illegally promote his reelection on the job despite warnings to some from ethics officials, the report says.
“This failure to impose discipline created the conditions for what appeared to be a taxpayer-funded campaign apparatus within the upper echelons of the executive branch,” investigators wrote in the scathing 60-page report.
“The president’s refusal to require compliance with the law laid the foundation for the violations,” the report says. “In each of these instances, senior administration officials used their official authority or influence to campaign for President Trump. Based upon the Trump administration’s reaction to the violations, OSC concludes that the most logical inference is that the administration approved of these taxpayer-funded campaign activities.”
The special counsel found that two Cabinet officials, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and acting homeland security chief Chad Wolf, broke the law when Pompeo gave a speech from Israel and Wolf led a taped naturalization ceremony for newly minted citizens on White House grounds, both during the Republican National Convention.
The investigation was prompted by an unprecedented swell of complaints to the independent agency that enforces the Hatch Act following Trump’s decision during the coronavirus pandemic to hold the convention at the White House. The probe started when Trump was still president.
But the report concluded that while the Hatch Act bars most federal employees — excluding the president and vice president — from politicking while on duty or in a federal office, it does not impose similar restrictions on others who were, in this case, hosting, organizing or attending the convention.
The Office of Special Counsel, led by a Republican appointed by Trump, lays out a series of violations that the authors underscore were not innocent mistakes or slips of the tongue.
No punishment is expected to be assessed because, by most legal interpretations, the president in office at the time is the only person who can take action to fire or reprimand his political appointees when they act illegally. The office’s lengthy treatment of how the administration flouted a law intended to ensure that civil servants and political appointees operate free of political influence was meant to illustrate that the law lacks teeth and needs stronger enforcement mechanisms, the report says.
“OSC is issuing this report to educate employees about Hatch Act-prohibited activities, highlight the enforcement challenges that [the office] confronted during its investigations, and deter similar violations in the future,” investigators wrote.
The political appointees who violated the law by blatantly promoting Trump’s reelection or disparaging rival Joe Biden in media interviews were Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette; senior counselor Kellyanne Conway; White House director of strategic communications Alyssa Farah; U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman; senior adviser Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law; press secretary Kayleigh McEnany; White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows; senior adviser Stephen Miller; deputy White House press secretary Brian Morgenstern; Marc Short, chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence; and national security adviser Robert C. O’Brien.
The Trump White House was well aware of the Hatch Act’s restrictions, the report says, having received an unprecedented 15 letters from Kerner’s office during his presidency laying out violations and two reports on a repeat violator, Conway.
Pompeo and Wolf both ignored repeated warnings from career ethics officials and attorneys that they would be breaking the law with their appearances at the convention, the report found. An ethics official even warned Wolf 45 minutes before the naturalization ceremony was taped that he should not move forward.
The report found that the naturalization ceremony “was orchestrated for the purpose of creating content for the convention” and that both events stemmed directly from requests that originated from the Trump campaign or possibly the president himself.
“Thus they reflect the Trump administration’s willingness to manipulate government business for partisan political ends,” the report says.
Pompeo changed a long-standing State Department policy to allow himself to speak at the convention. The policy had prohibited the secretary and all other political appointees at the agency from engaging in partisan political activities. He approved the change only for himself days before he delivered a taped speech from Jerusalem to the convention, the report says.
Investigators also said Pompeo violated a State Department rule on speaking about politics while abroad.
Internal emails show that the White House had planned to publicize a naturalization ceremony hosted by a “high level principal” in September 2020 but moved the event to the convention at the last minute.
In a written statement to the special counsel’s office, Wolf said he did not know whether video of the ceremony was going to be made publicly available or that it would be used at the Republican National Convention, the report says.
In Farah’s case, she appeared on Fox News in her official capacity on Oct. 9, weeks before the election, and told an interviewer of the two presidential candidates, “I can’t think of a starker contrast of two candidates against each other than even while sick with covid the president’s got boundless energy and is taking questions and being as transparent as possible on his positions and the fact that we still don’t have basic answers on policy from the Joe Biden campaign.”
O’Brien appeared June 25 on “The Hugh Hewitt Show” and was asked how a Biden victory would affect policy toward China. Rather than answer a question nominally about policy matters, as the law requires, O’Brien instead argued for Trump’s reelection.
“I expect the president to be reelected and reelected overwhelmingly,” he said. “I think the president’s going to come out on top. The American people see the leadership that he’s providing not just with respect to China; they saw him build the greatest economy in the history of the world. We took a very bad hit because of this virus that came from China. But who do you want to turn to to rebuild the economy — the guy who’s proven he can do it, President Trump, or somebody who’s been in Washington for 40 years?”
The cumulative effect of this flouting of the law has been to “undermine public confidence” in the nonpartisan operation of government, the report concludes.
The Biden administration has been cited once for a similar violation: The special counsel’s office gave Housing and Urban Development Secretary Marcia L. Fudge a warning in March about comments she made at a White House news conference when she weighed in on the possibility that Democrats could win the 2022 Senate rate in Ohio. Fudge apologized for the comments.
Last month, a watchdog group filed a complaint that White House press secretary Jen Psaki violated the law by appearing at a White House briefing to have endorsed Democrat Terry McAuliffe, who last week lost the race for Virginia governor.
In the Obama administration, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius apologized in 2012 for partisan remarks she made to a gay rights group in North Carolina in which she promoted President Barack Obama’s reelection. Julián Castro, then-secretary of housing and urban development, endorsed Hillary Clinton for president in 2016 in an interview in his official capacity. Both were explicit violations, and both officials were reprimanded. The White House barred the Cabinet from speaking at the Democratic National Convention to avoid similar mishaps.
The 1939 law was originally titled “An Act to Prevent Pernicious Political Activities.” It applies to civil servants and political appointees alike. But the Trump administration showcased that there appears to be a two-tiered system of consequences; the special counsel’s office fined and in some cases fired hundreds of career employees for violations during the four years when Trump was in office.
Joe Biden. (photo: Michael Stravato/The Texas Tribune)
The resettlement challenge has dogged the administration since the frenzied evacuation from Afghanistan in August: resettling tens of thousands of people -- many of whom worked with or on behalf of the US -- within only weeks or months.
The administration will now exempt Afghan evacuees -- many of whom arrived in the United States with little to nothing -- from paying costly application fees to get authorization to work or apply for lawful permanent residence.
The filing fee for work permit applications -- which Afghans need to legally work in the US -- is $410 and fees for obtaining lawful permanent residence can be up to $1,225.
"By providing these evacuees with access to streamlined processing and fee exemptions, we will open doors of opportunity for our Afghan allies and help them begin to rebuild their lives in communities across our country more quickly," Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement.
"Today's announcement provides some much needed financial relief to our newest Afghan neighbors," tweeted Krish O'Mara Vignarajah, the president and CEO of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service. "Most of the families we're serving have no nest egg to draw from, and every expense is a source of stress and anxiety."
Afghans who were paroled into the US on or after July 30 are eligible for the fee exemptions, according to DHS.
Last month, a group of Democratic senators urged DHS and US Citizenship and Immigration Services to waive fees for Afghans applying for humanitarian parole to come to the US, arguing the "burden of application fees is weighing heavily on communities here in the United States."
According to DHS, there are approximately 51,000 people at eight Department of Defense sites in the US and roughly 2,500 at sites in Europe and the Middle East.
A total of 68,000 Afghans have come to the US since August 17 -- shortly before the US military withdrawal from their country at the end of that month. More than 14,000 of them have been resettled in the US, per DHS.
A scene from the January 6th riots at the Capitol. (photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)
California man caught on police camera punching officers given sympathetic interview on Belarus television
The man, Evan Neumann, 48, of California, acknowledged in an interview with the state TV channel Belarus 1 that he was at the Capitol on 6 January but rejected the charges, which include assaulting police, obstruction and other offenses. The channel aired excerpts of the interview on Sunday and promised to release the full version on Wednesday.
“I don’t think I have committed some kind of a crime,” Neumann said, according to a Belarus 1 voiceover of his interview remarks. “One of the charges was very offensive; it alleges that I hit a police officer. It doesn’t have any grounds to it.” Neumann spoke in English but was barely audible under the dubbed Russian.
US court documents state that Neumann stood at the front of a police barricade wearing a red “Make America Great Again” hat as a mob of pro-Trump rioters tried to force their way past officers. Prosecutors say Neumann taunted and screamed at the police before putting a gas mask over his face and threatened one officer, saying police would be “overrun” by the crowd.
“I’m willing to die, are you?” prosecutors quoted Neumann saying to the officer.
Police body-camera footage shows Neumann and others shoving a metal barricade into a line of officers who were trying to push the crowd back before he punches two officers with his fist and then hits them with the barricade, according to court papers.
Neumann was identified by investigators after someone who said they were a family friend called an FBI tip line with Neumann’s name and home town of Mill Valley, California. He was charged in a US federal criminal complaint, meaning a judge agreed that investigators presented sufficient probable cause that Neumann had committed the crimes.
Neumann is one of more than 650 people who have been charged for their actions on 6 January, when the pro-Trump mob attacked the Capitol building and delayed Congress’s certification of Joe Biden’s electoral college victory.
Neumann told Belarus 1 that his photo had been added to the FBI’s most wanted list, after which he left the country under the pretense of a business trip. Neumann, who owns a handbag manufacturing business, traveled to Italy in March, and then through Switzerland, Germany and Poland he got to Ukraine and spent several months there.
He said he decided to illegally cross into neighboring Belarus after he noticed surveillance by Ukraine’s security forces. “It is awful. It is political persecution,” Neumann told the TV channel.
Belarusian border guards detained the American when he tried to cross into the country in mid-August, and he requested asylum in Belarus. Belarus doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the US.
The US embassy in Belarus declined to comment. The Department of Justice said it does not comment “on the existence or non-existence of requests for apprehension to foreign governments”.
The Belarus 1 anchors described Neumann as a “simple American, whose stores were burned down by members of the Black Lives Matter movement, who was seeking justice, asking inconvenient questions, but lost almost everything and is being persecuted by the US government.”
In a short preface to the interview, the Belarus 1 reporter also said that “something” made Neumann “flee from the country of fairytale freedoms and opportunities” – an apparent snub towards the US, which has levied multiple sanctions against Belarus over human rights abuses and violent crackdown on dissent.
Belarus was rocked by huge months-long protests after election officials gave the authoritarian president, Alexander Lukashenko, a sixth term in the August 2020 presidential election that the opposition and the west have denounced as a sham.
Lukashenko’s government unleashed a violent crackdown on the protesters, arresting more than 35,000 people and badly beating thousands of them. The crackdown elicited widespread international outrage.
ISIS. (photo: Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy)
The terrorist group is in all-out panic mode—and it shows.
No doubt, the pattern is alarming: Ever since the suicide bombing that killed roughly 100 Afghans and 13 U.S. servicemembers on Aug. 26, the group has persisted with more mass-casualty attacks across the country, including a suicide bombing at the funeral for Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid’s mother, another suicide bombing against the Shi'a Hazara mosque in Kunduz, and a dual suicide attack on Shi’a Bibi Fatima mosque in Kandahar just a couple of weeks ago.
“We’re concerned that ISIS-K can take advantage of a significantly weakened security environment,” after the U.S. withdrawal, FBI Director Christopher Wray told lawmakers last month. In the same hearing, National Counterterrorism Center Director Christine Abizaid expressed worry that ISIS is “building off the notoriety it received” from the Kabul airport attack.
But is that really the case? Are these signs of a more emboldened, rejuvenated ISIS?
While on the surface, ISIS’s shift toward mass-casualty attacks, accompanied by a targeted anti-Taliban media campaign, can be seen as signals of confidence—it’s far more likely that the group is acting out of pure desperation. Both locally and globally, the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan threatens ISIS in profound new ways, and marks yet another major defeat from which ISIS will likely not recover.
ISIS’s Khorasan Province, also known as ISKP or ISIS-K, originated from the Taliban and allied groups in 2015. Its pitch to the radical jihadists of Afghanistan was easy to make in those days: With the U.S. still in Afghanistan, and with its “caliphate” then growing rapidly across the world, ISIS was the group that could finally change the course of the region.
It didn’t take long before the Taliban asserted its overwhelming dominance, though. Much like the Shabaab al-Mujahideen did to ISIS-pledged militants in Somalia, the Afghan Taliban steadily rooted out the vast majority of ISIS’s Khorasan Province. The former Afghan government and U.S. government put further pressure on ISIS in the years that followed, helping to cut its ranks from an estimated 3,000 to 300.
Now, with the Taliban in control of Afghanistan and the U.S. military gone, the ISIS sales pitch becomes a much harder sell: no “infidel” invasion of Muslim lands to rail against, and no significant ranks to resemble a “caliphate.”
Today, ISIS is instead reserved to cell-based terrorism and guerrilla warfare. Its unsophisticated attacks in the last year point to its limited capabilities: IED attacks, dismantling power lines, sniper attacks, and suicide operations. And with the Taliban now armed with scores of U.S. Humvees, armored fighting vehicles, and other major weaponry, it seems very implausible that ISIS will ever have a stable base in Afghanistan.
This new reality has required ISIS to reconfigure its pitch to Afghans. The Taliban, after all, has now established an “emirate” far more secure than the “caliphate” ISIS failed to hold onto. All that considered, ISIS may have even been better off with the U.S. in Afghanistan than it is now.
The group’s new media campaign has reframed its role from a Taliban rival to a righteous opposition force. ISIS and ISIS-aligned media groups are now punching up, referring to the Taliban as “the security guard for the interests of America” while declaring a “a new stage in their blessed jihad” in Afghanistan.
Then there’s ISIS’s new phase of mass-casualty operations. These attacks are not intended to sway the United States one way or another, because it knows war-weary America will not be coming back in the same capacity as before. Nor does ISIS expect that its suicide bombings will somehow increase its odds at facing the ever-powerful Taliban, which it stands no real chance of challenging.
What ISIS is doing with attacks like that at Kabul’s airport is exactly what it did when it publicly burned a Jordanian pilot alive or drowned prisoners in cages in Hollywood style productions: making sure that its name continues to occupy headlines.
For ISIS, staying relevant and staying existent are one and the same. And to survive under the Taliban, the group will go to any and all extremes to maintain relevance. The airport attack was just another effort to hijack the conversation.: Headlines, news shows, and social media veered away from the U.S. withdrawal and Taliban takeover, and instead focused once more on the threat of ISIS. The group’s deadly suicide operations against Shi’ites and other soft targets in Afghanistan since then have done the same—all without any significant numbers or resources.
The Taliban’s Afghanistan takeover had other global implications for ISIS as well, because it was a mutual victory for an even deeper-rooted ISIS rival: al Qaeda.
While ISIS took a fast path to the caliphate, al Qaeda, the group from which ISIS split, urged patience. This was among ISIS’s favorite places to jab at al Qaeda, arguing to the global jihadi movement that its longer-standing rival had lost its way since 9/11 and had become useless in pursuing true Islamic statehood.
But in the end, ISIS lost it all while al Qaeda is finally seeing its strategy and narrative vindicated. This creates a powerful narrative within the global jihadist community, which is driven in no small part by narratives of victory and uncompromising piety.
Here is al Qaeda’s most powerful and longstanding ally, the Taliban, having established an “Islamic Emirate” after defeating the world’s most powerful military. And here is al Qaeda—its bonds with the Taliban just as strong as ever—sharing in that historic victory with a guaranteed place to regroup and grow after enduring so many tribulations. Al Qaeda’s past losses or its leadership’s lack of charisma no longer hinder it, because it can boast that its long-preached steadfastness is paying off.
And meanwhile, here is ISIS: everything lost, its propaganda machine a shell of what it once was, and its methodology a demonstrable failure. A so-called “Islamic State” that is anything but.
ISIS is no longer the same group it was in the days of the 2015 Paris attacks and its sweeping “caliphate” across Iraq, Syria, and beyond. The group was once able to flaunt itself as a serious military force via propaganda of training camps and fighters parading through controlled territories in rows of weapons-mounted trucks. Not anymore.
Sure, it has built presences in regions like West Africa, but it no longer holds a substantial base in any Sunni-majority country. Its propaganda now shows meagerly constructed training camps, and poorly equipped fighters confined to hidden bases.
While the impact of ISIS losing territories like Mosul and Raqqa are immeasurable, the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan is its own unique nightmare for ISIS, even if only symbolically. It is the final nail in the coffin for the pretensions of statehood it had still been holding onto. Whether it keeps with the gimmick or not, they know, just as the global jihadi community knows, that there is no viable path back to sweeping territories anymore. Not in Afghanistan, not in Syria, not anywhere.
A kayaker paddles down an interstate in Pennsylvania after flooding from Hurricane Ida earlier this year. Several dozen people died, some in cars and basement apartments, during extreme flash flooding. (photo: Branden Eastwood/AFP/Getty Images)
That's the global climate change goal world leaders agreed to strive for. By limiting the planet's warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, by 2100, the hope is to stave off severe climate disruptions that could exacerbate hunger, conflict and drought worldwide.
The 1.5 degree target has long been championed by developing nations, where millions of people are among the most vulnerable to climate change. At the 2015 Paris climate negotiations, they pushed industrialized countries to improve on the 2 degree Celsius goal held at the time, since wealthier nations are responsible for most greenhouse gas emissions since the Industrial Revolution.
At the climate negotiations now underway, nations are touting new commitments to cut their heat-trapping emissions by switching to clean energy and reducing deforestation. India is pledging, for the first time, to be carbon neutral by 2070. More than 100 countries, including the United States, joined a global pact to cut methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
Still, added together, the recent pledges don't go far enough. Even with more ambitious emissions cuts from some countries, warming is still on track for more than 2 degrees Celsius (or 3.6 Fahrenheit) by the end of the century. The Earth is already 1.1 degrees Celsius hotter than it was 150 years ago.
Though a half-degree Celsius difference in temperature increase might seem inconsequential, the difference for life on Earth could be huge. Here's what scientists expect, if average global temperatures exceed 1.5 degree Celsius warming by 2100.
Coral reefs face almost complete die-off
Off the coast of Australia, the Great Barrier Reef is known for being large enough to be seen from space. It's the size of Germany — a biodiversity hotspot that was once thought to be too big to fail. But over the last few decades, marine biologists like Ove Hoegh-Guldberg of the University of Queensland have watched its rapid decline.
"My career is one of going from a period of when it was wonderful and abundant to now, staring down the barrel," Hoegh-Guldberg says. "We're staring down the barrel of something really horrific."
Oceans are warming along with the atmosphere, since they absorb much of the excess heat from climate change. Repeated marine heat waves over the last five years have turned much of the Great Barrier Reef a ghostly white color. When temperatures rise, corals expel the microscopic algae inside them, losing their food source in the process. Sometimes the corals can recover, but increasingly, they're dying off.
"Something around 50% of the shallow water corals were killed literally over a couple of months, in some cases over a couple of weeks," Hoegh-Guldberg says. "If you extend that out into the future, we'll get to a point where the damage overwhelms the ability of corals to bounce back."
Marine heat waves have already doubled in number since 1980 and are expected to become more intense as temperatures rise. At 1.5 degrees Celsius, it's likely that 70 to 90% of coral reefs will die off worldwide. At 2 degrees Celsius of warming, 99% are lost.
"If we delay even a year or two more, we really are going down a pathway where there will be no return," Hoegh-Guldberg says. "We need to act and we need to act decisively, without question and solve this problem."
'Unheard-of' storms become more common
Water has taken a heavy toll in 2021, all over the world. In September, the remnants of Hurricane Ida swept into the Northeast, killing more than 50 people in New Jersey, New York and other states. Many drowned in cars and basement apartments, overwhelmed by rushing water. In August, two dozen people died when heavy rains caused flash flooding in Tennessee.
Scientists warn that a hotter atmosphere is a wetter atmosphere. Warmer air can hold more water, helping produce more intense rainfall and stronger storms. With ocean temperatures higher in the Gulf of Mexico, hurricanes are intensifying at a more rapid rate.
As the climate warms, storms once thought to be extremely rare are expected to become more frequent. And the chances don't just go up a little bit.
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