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Bess Levin | Donald Trump: Actually, Osama Bin Laden Wasn't That Bad
Bess Levin, Vanity Fair
Levin writes: "As we approach the 20-year anniversary of 9/11, Donald Trump has been doing the rounds with conservative media outlets to talk about terrorism. One of his new takes? That Osama bin Laden, best known as the architect of the September 11 attacks, wasn't actually as bad as everyone makes him out to be."
Two weeks before the 20th anniversary of 9/11, Trump is out there claiming bin Laden “only” did one terrorist attack, and that he wasn’t a “monster.”
s we approach the 20-year anniversary of 9/11, Donald Trump has been doing the rounds with conservative media outlets to talk about terrorism. One of his new takes? That Osama bin Laden, best known as the architect of the September 11 attacks, wasn’t actually as bad as everyone makes him out to be.
Speaking to radio host Hugh Hewitt on Thursday, the following words actually came out of the ex-president’s mouth: “We took out the founder of ISIS, [Abu Bakr] al-Baghdadi, and then of course [Iranian military leader Qassem] Soleimani. Now just so you understand, Soleimani is bigger by many, many times than Osama bin Laden. The founder of ISIS is bigger by many, many times—al-Baghdadi—than Osama bin Laden. Osama bin Laden had one hit, and it was a bad one, in New York City, the World Trade Center. But these other two guys were monsters. They were monsters. And I kept saying for years, why aren’t they getting them? For years, I said it. I got them. The press doesn’t talk about it. They don’t talk about it because they don’t want to talk about it.”
There’s a lot to unpack here but we should probably start with the fact that while Trump is trying to claim that bin Laden was some kind of one-hit wonder for terrorist attacks, the reality is that he was actually also linked to the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings that killed more than 200 people and the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, which killed 17 U.S. Navy sailors. Then there’s the bizarre way he talks about 9/11, where you can tell he doesn’t really want to admit its magnitude because that would somehow undermine his argument, so he begrudgingly calls it a “bad one.” And, of course, there’s the assertion that al-Baghdadi and Soleimani were “monsters,” but bin Laden—the man responsible for the deadliest terrorist attack in U.S. history—not so much. Which may be news to the families of the 2,977 victims killed that day.
Meanwhile, the sickest part here—aside from trying to claim bin Laden gets a bad rap—is that Trump is undoubtedly saying all this because Barack Obama oversaw the operation that killed bin Laden, and he’s pathologically jealous of the guy. Also because he’s a stunted man-child and needs people to pat him on the head and tell him he did a great job and it kills him that, supposedly, “the press doesn’t talk about it.”
Anyway, can’t wait to hear his remarks on the actual anniversary of 9/11. Will he claim bin Laden deserves a posthumous Nobel Peace Prize? That if the guy was still alive he’d try to set him up with his daughter? Stay tuned!
Don’t forget to blame Trump administration bigot Stephen Miller for the debacle in Afghanistan
While the world-renowned xenophobe is out there claiming, “Biden’s flippancy when it comes to American lives is breathtaking,” it’s important to remember that a considerable amount of what’s going on in Afghanistan is his (and his former boss’s) fault. Per HuffPost:
As the United States potentially abandons tens of thousands of Afghans who helped two decades of military and diplomatic efforts there to the mercies of the Taliban, a single person may deserve more credit than any other: top Trump White House aide and immigration foe Stephen Miller. Miller, who worked for all four years as former president Donald Trump’s immigration adviser pushing restrictive policies across the board, was instrumental in slowing down the processing of Special Immigrant Visas (SIV) for Afghan interpreters, embassy staff, and others who are now top targets for Taliban assassination, according to both refugee advocates and those who have worked with him.“The seeds of the insanity that we’re seeing right now were planted in Stephen Miller‘s brain,” said Matt Zeller, a former Army officer who served in Afghanistan and cofounded the group No One Left Behind, adding that Miller is as much to blame for the deaths of interpreters and others as the Taliban themselves. “He’s complicit in their murders.… He’s brilliant at how evil he is.” Olivia Troye, who worked in the White House for former vice president Mike Pence, said Miller had a knack for using the bureaucracy to effect his agenda. “He does it in a very crafty way. You can trace the steps of everything he did along the way,” she said, describing how Miller was even able to use the COVID-19 pandemic to slow down the of processing of SIV applications. “This was just another opportunity to push his anti-immigration agenda.”
Miller became a top adviser to candidate Trump in 2016, then moved to the White House when Trump took office in 2017. With Trump’s encouragement and support, he began implementing anti-immigration policies across the executive agencies, including a slowdown of the SIV program. A State Department Inspector General’s report in June 2020, for example, found that the Afghan visa program suffered from processing times on average more than twice the nine months that Congress had demanded back in 2013. It blamed, in part, the failure of the Trump administration to appoint a senior coordinating official for the SIVs, which Congress had also mandated, as well as the bureaucratic hurdle of requiring the “human resources” employer letter.
“As a result, the stage to determine Chief of Mission approval is a bottleneck in the Afghan SIV program,” the report stated. “As of December 29, 2019, 8,444 of 18,695 applicants (45 percent) were waiting for a Chief of Mission decision.” Spencer Sullivan, a former Army cavalry officer, told HuffPost he could not understand the purpose of requiring such letters if a military service member’s recommendation already existed, but he ventured an idea. “My guess is that is in line with Stephen Miller’s policy of keeping brown people out of the country,” he said.
Miller, who now runs the pro-Trump group America First Legal, did not respond to HuffPost’s requests for comment. Recently, he has claimed that the U.S. should not be bringing Afghans to the U.S. because they might be terrorists and also because it costs too much money. “It’s extraordinarily expensive to resettle a refugee in the United States. They get free health care. They get free education. They get free housing. They get free food. They get cash welfare,” he said on Fox News last week, HuffPost noted. “If the United States takes the policy that every person suffering under Sharia law has a right to live in the United States of America, we’re going to have to make the room for half a billion people.”
And then, of course, there’s the handiwork of Miller’s former boss
Which conservatives demanding Biden resign conveniently fail to remember, and which reporter Scott Dworkin has helpfully recalled:
In Afghanistan, President Biden got dealt yet another losing hand from the Trump Administration. Their Doha Agreement with the Taliban violated the most basic principles of self-government for the Afghan people. There was no way to enforce it or make sure the Taliban kept its word. There was no denunciation of al-Qaeda terrorists. Worst of all, the deal didn’t mandate the Taliban stop attacks against Afghan security forces.
Trump’s deal with the Taliban was flawed from the start, which is why Trump’s own officials are now scrambling to distance themselves from it. “To have our Generals say that they are depending on diplomacy with the Taliban is an unbelievable scenario. Negotiating with the Taliban is like dealing with the devil,” tweeted Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, who certainly voiced no such objections while working for Trump. She was not alone. “Our secretary of state signed a surrender agreement with the Taliban,” Trump's former national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, told journalist Bari Weiss. “This collapse goes back to the capitulation agreement of 2020. The Taliban didn’t defeat us. We defeated ourselves.” Even Mike Pompeo, Trump’s secretary of state and the man who negotiated the deal with the Taliban in the first place, is now denouncing it. He had the audacity to tell Fox News that the “debacle” in Afghanistan “will certainly harm America's credibility with its friends and allies.” He certainly didn’t seem to think so while he was laying the groundwork for the debacle in the first place.
“We’re letting the Taliban run free and wild all around Afghanistan,” moaned Pompeo in that same interview, strangely failing to mention that, as Dworkin notes, he was the guy who “cut the deal to release the Taliban’s leader from prison in the first place,” or the inconvenient fact that Trump agreed to a deal to release 5,000 Taliban fighters.
As for the ISIS attack in Kabul today
Remember this?
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An eviction. (photo: John Moore/Getty Images)
Biden, Progressives Look for Solution to Stem Evictions
Reuters
Excerpt: "The Biden administration has written to state and local officials urging that they block unnecessary residential evictions, after the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday ended a federal moratorium aimed at keeping people housed during the COVID-19 pandemic."
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Sirhan Sirhan arrives for his parole hearing. (photo: AP)
Sirhan Sirhan Has Served 53 Years for Killing Robert F. Kennedy. Soon He May Be Free
Martin Kaste, NPR
Kaste writes: "Sirhan Sirhan, the man convicted of assassinating Sen. Robert F. Kennedy during a Los Angeles presidential campaign stop in 1968, was recommended for parole Friday in San Diego."
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An immigrant detention center. (photo: ABC)
Seven Women File Complaint Alleging Abuse, Medical Neglect at Florida ICE Detention Center
Carli Teproff, Miami Herald
Teproff writes: "Seven women being held at a Florida immigration detention facility filed a federal complaint Thursday detailing what advocates call 'an appalling pattern of abuses' - including medical neglect, sexual misconduct and Covid-19 protocol violations."
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A Starbucks barista. (photo: USA TODAY)
Starbucks Workers in New York Are Organizing to Form First US Union
Michael Sainato, Guardian UK
Sainato writes: "Fifty Starbucks workers in New York are trying to form a union, which would be the first in the US for the coffee chain if successful."
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Protesters rallying in support of Brazil's Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, in Sao Paulo, Brazil. (photo: Andre Penner/AP)
Bolsonaro Is Criminalizing the Brazilian Left
Sabrina Fernandes, Jacobin
Fernandes writes: "With the help of liberals and centrists, Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro has politicized the military and the courts to hold onto power. For Brazil's establishment, authoritarianism is preferable to socialism."
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A worker mixes pesticides, which will be sprayed on a field. (photo: David Bacon/Report Digital-REA/Redux)
EPA Is Falsifying Risk Assessments for Dangerous Chemicals, Say Whistleblowers
Tom Perkins, Guardian UK
Perkins writes: "Whistleblowers say the US Environmental Protection Agency has been falsifying dangerous new chemicals' risk assessments in an effort to make the compounds appear safe and quickly approve them for commercial use."
Agency scientists say management silences and harasses them to appease chemical industry
histleblowers say the US Environmental Protection Agency has been falsifying dangerous new chemicals’ risk assessments in an effort to make the compounds appear safe and quickly approve them for commercial use.
Over the past five years, the EPA has not rejected any new chemicals submitted by industry despite agency scientists flagging dozens of compounds for high toxicity. Four EPA whistleblowers and industry watchdogs say a revolving door between the agency and chemical companies is to blame, and that the program’s management has been “captured by industry”. The charges are supported by emails, documents and additional records that were provided to the Guardian.
“The depth of it is pretty horrifying,” said Kyla Bennett, New England director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), a non-profit whose attorneys are representing the four scientists. “I don’t sleep at night knowing what I know from the whistleblowers.”
Their July allegations, which were sent to lawmakers and federal oversight bodies, sparked an investigation by the EPA’s inspector general into the office of chemical safety and pollution prevention, and the House of Representatives this month requested information from the new EPA administrator, Michael Regan. The whistleblowers say similar problems existed during the Obama administration, accelerated under Trump, and have persisted under Biden.
Congress enacted legislation in 2016 designed to tighten oversight of the toxic chemical approval process. Instead, career EPA managers have worked to sabotage the process by altering risk assessments, waging harassment campaigns against employees, internally accelerating the approval process and retaliating against staff who raise concerns, according to the four agency scientists.
The charges also reveal how management has systematically undermined scientists while working to quickly rubber-stamp dangerous chemicals as safe for use by industry and in consumer products. The managers in question are employees rather than political appointees, making the situation more difficult to address because they don’t turn over with a new administration, Bennett said.
The alterations to risk assessments mostly involved the deletion of health hazards without the authors’ knowledge after assessments were submitted. Documents show that in one file managers deleted all references to a chemical’s carcinogenicity. In other cases, managers asked scientists with less expertise on a subject to sign off on changes without informing the assessment’s author.
The chemical industry has regularly objected to EPA scientists’ conclusions about the dangers of new chemicals, and whistleblowers say it was clear that companies were pressuring management to make changes. In one case, a manager allegedly yelled that a company “went apeshit” over a risk assessment that flagged a chemical’s carcinogenicity, and demanded that the scientist delete that portion, a request that was refused. The scientist was soon transferred out of the division.
Documents show that cases in which scientists and industry were at odds were labeled “hair on fire”, and taken over by a manager who would expedite the approval process and overrule EPA chemists. A management schedule showed managers on daily “HOF duty”, highlighting how frequently industry and scientists disagreed.
In one case, management requested a “button”, or software function, to bypass scientific review in “hair on fire” cases, a November 2020 recording of a conversation between an information technology consultant and managers revealed.
Management also appeared to sabotage the review process by barring staff from talking with other agency experts about a new chemical, which scientists say is critical to developing a complete risk assessment. Whistleblowers said management punished employees who didn’t complete the assessments within 90 days, which scientists say is too short a timeframe.
“Managers seem to think their job is to get as many new chemicals on the market as fast as possible,” Bennett said.
Those who pushed back against management were often berated, threatened and insulted, one former scientist who declined to use their name for fear of retaliation told the Guardian. In one instance, a manager allegedly threw a memo at a chemist. Emails show that management asked a scientist to make bogus harassment charges against another chemist who wouldn’t make changes to a risk assessment that managers had demanded.
Managers’ motivation appeared to be financial, Bennett said. They regularly bounce between the EPA and industry, and the access to the EPA helps them land lucrative private sector jobs. “They’re selling their soul,” Bennett said. “It’s money, it’s greed, but it doesn’t make sense. Don’t these people have any children or grandchildren? Don’t they care?”
The EPA did not respond to requests for comment.
In an interview with the Guardian, a whistleblower with a PhD in toxicology detailed confrontations with management. In one instance, the whistleblower found that a single dose of a chemical could cause malformation in a rodent’s brain. Workers would be handling the chemical five days a year, so the risk assessment draft included a warning about the danger of exposure to a single dose.
That would have caused restrictions to be placed on the chemical’s use, but a manager claimed that the malformation would happen only after repeated exposures, and objected to the inclusion of the warning because workers wouldn’t be handling the chemical on consecutive days. Management instead wanted to change the assessment to say that the chemical presented a low risk, the whistleblower said, which was too vague and put workers in danger.
“It’s frustrating because the majority of people who I work with, including myself, came to the EPA to carry out the agency’s mission of protecting human health and the environment, and to have this kind of pushback in the agency – it makes no sense,” the whistleblower said.
In another instance, managers wouldn’t let the whistleblower use an analog chemical because they were concerned the analog was too toxic. Analogs are existing chemicals that are structurally similar to new chemicals and used to assess a new chemical’s potential health risks. Using an underprotective, less toxic analog could underestimate the new chemical’s health threat. The whistleblower said a manager berated them in front of co-workers for using the more toxic analog, telling them that they weren’t qualified for their position.
“The managers basically said that the company was going to think that we were bad at our jobs and [management wasn’t] going to defend us,” the whistleblower added.
The assault on the division’s scientific process has left its scientists demoralized. A 2020 survey of EPA employees found the chemical division had the most negative view of management and the highest overall dissatisfaction rate in the agency.
Whistleblowing in this situation was “a matter of common good” and EPA employees were facing an ethical obligation to speak out, said Joan Harrington, director of social sector ethics at Santa Clara University.
“The reason we have whistleblower statutes is to reveal this kind of thing, so assuming the allegations are correct … they are sort of ethically obligated to come forward and reveal this information, because the harm that could come by not fairly evaluating these chemicals is extraordinary,” Harrington said.
The EPA inspector general appeared to be conducting a serious evaluation, Bennett said, and it will eventually make corrective recommendations to the EPA, though she added that the agency has a history of ignoring them. The inspector general could forward the case to Congress for action if the EPA doesn’t act.
The House committee on energy and commerce letter to Regan, the EPA director, called the whistleblowers’ allegations “troubling”.
“We … firmly believe EPA’s scientific staff must be able to perform their work of protecting human health and the environment free from inappropriate interference and retaliation,” the letter reads. It questions whether EPA leadership grasps the situation’s gravity and whether any chemicals that have been approved will be reassessed. The committee could potentially open a full investigation and hearing.
In response to concerns raised by PEER, EPA chemical program leadership claimed that it eliminated management’s rule that barred employees from speaking to one another, though Bennett said it was unknown whether the rule has been changed in practice. She added that PEER was “not confident but hopeful” that EPA leadership will take more meaningful action and remove the managers.
“We’re banking on the Biden administration doing the right thing by holding people accountable. We’re not 100% confident that that’s going to happen, but we’re trying,” Bennett said.
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