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Quotes of the Day:
“In truth, O judges, while I wish to be adorned with every virtue, yet there is nothing which I can esteem more highly than being and appearing grateful. For this one virtue is not only the greatest, but is also the parent of all the other virtues.”
— Cicero
“Without courage we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can’t be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.”
— Maya Angelou
"I hope our wisdom will grow with our power and teach us that the less we use our power, the greater it will be."
––Thomas Jefferson
1. As irregular warfare comes to a crossroads, Congress chips in
2. Election 2024: You Asked for It, America
3. Foreign Affairs: The Best of Books 2023
4. Ukrainian Strikes Have Changed Russian Naval Operations in the Black Sea
5. Newly Formed Operation Prosperity Guardian To Protect Red Sea Shipping
6. Israeli Troops Raid Hamas Top Leader Sinwar's Vacation Home, Finding Weapons and Tunnels Inside
7. How China’s assertive diplomacy has reached ‘another level of disrespect’ and become the new normal
8. China is flooding Taiwan with fake news/disinformation ahead of a major election. Here’s how it’s fighting back
9. State Dept.’s Fight Against Disinformation Comes Under Attack
10. Wrath of God II: To win, Israel must assassinate Hamas leaders everywhere
11. SBU, AFU behind joint attack on Morozovsk air base in Rostov region - sources
12. Ukrainian special ops commandos are freelancing top-secret sabotage missions, poisonings, and assassinations in Russia, says military source
13. The mystery of the missing binder: How a collection of raw Russian intelligence disappeared under Trump
14. The jungle between Colombia and Panama becomes a highway for migrants from around the world
15. Federal Reserve on cusp of what some thought impossible: Defeating inflation without steep recession
16. What elite universities — and their critics — get wrong about campus antisemitism
17. A top-secret Chinese spy satellite just launched on a supersized rocket
18. China's risky maneuvers around the US military are part of a long-running plan to use 'the enemy to train the troops'
19. Addressing Military Recruitment Challenges Through Data Sharing
20. MOLLE vs. ALICE: Which pack reigns supreme?MOLLE vs. ALICE: Which pack reigns supreme?
1. As irregular warfare comes to a crossroads, Congress chips in
I have heard that SWCS will bring back Psychological Warfare. Let's go back to our roots.
Excerpts:
“Fundamentally, we need to develop advanced capabilities, and we need to up our game in the information dimension. And that the way I frame it to the team is, I talk about, ‘Hey, we are really good in the human dimension. We can gain human advantage. And that's fundamentally where warfare will be, one is in the human mind and the humans on the ground.’ So we need to continue to refine and develop our human advantage, you have to add information advantage to that to create physical advantage,” Beaurpere said.
He’s established a special school within the Special Warfare Center to look at cyber and psychological warfare, “which would really up our game and psychological cooperations and the branch itself by creating a branch commandant and bringing doctrine and training together under one school system that is joint-accredited,” he said. “The Marines are already there. We want to track the Navy and the Air Force to this to create a joint synergy on psychological operations capabilities, and really explore this concept of influence to change behavior. I think that's absolutely critical.”
As irregular warfare comes to a crossroads, Congress chips in
IW proponents are wrestling with how to bring their domain into a new era—and to convince others it’s still needed.
BY PATRICK TUCKER
SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY EDITOR, DEFENSE ONE
DECEMBER 17, 2023 08:00 AM ET
defenseone.com · by Patrick Tucker
Twenty million dollars doesn't usually change much in the U.S. military, but lawmakers hope it’s enough to usher the Pentagon’s irregular-warfare efforts into a new era.
A provision in the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act provides $20 million and “funding authority, direction, definition, and Congressional reporting requirements to make permanent SOF’s ability to conduct Irregular Warfare by, with, and through our partners,” according to a statement from the office of Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa.
Many military observers are concerned that the military’s ability to wage irregular warfare—like working with combatants not formally associated with nation-states, skills honed during more than a decade of wars in the Middle East—will be discarded as the Pentagon readies itself to take on great-power states such as China. That concern reflects debate about how to revamp U.S. irregular-warfare capabilities and training—and even whether such capabilities are still needed. The Army, for example, is proposing to cut its special-operations forces by up to 20 percent.
“Special Operations are our nation’s premier force during peacetime and war. As China increases the pace of its own power and will, and Iran-backed proxies threaten our servicemembers, the United States must be prepared to take on the risks of the 21st century and deter aggression. To counter these growing threats, I’m expanding authority for Special Operations to better achieve their mission,” Ernst said in a statement to Defense One.
The Defense Department’s top leader for irregular warfare concedes that its proponents have not always made the best case for it.
“We need to do a better job communicating what irregular warfare is and what it isn't,” Christopher Maier, the assistant defense secretary for special operations and low-intensity conflict, said at the recent Irregular Warfare Forum event. “I think we've made some strides on that by now having a written definition.”
Maier said one of the last things Gen. Mark Milley did before retiring as Joint Chiefs chairman was to formalize a new definition of irregular warfare: “A form of warfare where states and non-state actors campaign to assure or coerce states or other groups through indirect, non-attributable, or asymmetric activities.” (The definition was published in Joint Publication 1, Volume 1, “Joint Warfighting,” released to the Pentagon but not the public in August.)
Maier said developing irregular-warfare strategies, tactics, and tools is even more important now than during the Mideast wars because China and Russia are already fighting irregular campaigns against U.S. partners.
“We talk about campaigning in the sense of logically linked military activities to achieve strategic realigned objectives over time, across a whole range of things, certainly not only irregular warfare. So, carrier strike groups, freedom of navigation, having aircraft appear in different places that they weren't traditionally is not traditionally thought of as irregular warfare, but I think we need to think of this example and other things as being part of campaigning,” he said.
But more importantly, Meier said, the Pentagon has to build a better understanding across the government of what irregular warfare is and emphasize the importance of civilian leadership in employing it.
“I can tell you firsthand: if you engage in interagency conversations, at almost any level, and you start talking about all the irregular-warfare capabilities of the Department of Defense, people either shut down at most or other departments and agencies or become very alarmed, because it sounds to them like it's DOD looking for more opportunities, or places that we don't traditionally operate,” he said. “We need to be very explicit and talk about what we're doing to sustain the military advantage where we encounter adversaries, competitor activities, and we have military tools that can be applied. In most cases, it's not going to be the Department of Defense that takes the lead.”
The U.S. military also has work to do in training operators for irregular warfare, particularly the use of space, cyber, and special forces. Brig. Gen. Guillaume “Will” Beaurpere, commanding general of the Army’s John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School, said one training challenge is enabling operators with new high-tech skills that will be useful in situations where they may face a small, non-state group backed by a larger, high-tech state adversary.
“How to integrate advanced technology advanced skills into the tactical level…How do you talk about digital literacy with our operators, not just receiving data, but understanding a little bit of how to code and develop algorithms to process large amounts of information?” Beaurpere said in an interview.
He said the U.S. must do more to match Chinese and Russian irregular warfare capabilities in information and influence campaigning.
“Fundamentally, we need to develop advanced capabilities, and we need to up our game in the information dimension. And that the way I frame it to the team is, I talk about, ‘Hey, we are really good in the human dimension. We can gain human advantage. And that's fundamentally where warfare will be, one is in the human mind and the humans on the ground.’ So we need to continue to refine and develop our human advantage, you have to add information advantage to that to create physical advantage,” Beaurpere said.
He’s established a special school within the Special Warfare Center to look at cyber and psychological warfare, “which would really up our game and psychological cooperations and the branch itself by creating a branch commandant and bringing doctrine and training together under one school system that is joint-accredited,” he said. “The Marines are already there. We want to track the Navy and the Air Force to this to create a joint synergy on psychological operations capabilities, and really explore this concept of influence to change behavior. I think that's absolutely critical.”
defenseone.com · by Patrick Tucker
2.Election 2024: You Asked for It, America
This is one of the best diagnoses of the American political problem I have read. It will securely upset and bring down the wrath of political supporters of both parties. But this should be objectively read and reflected upon by members of both parties and more importantly by all American citizens.
- POLITICS
- THE SATURDAY ESSAY
Election 2024: You Asked for It, America
The prospect of a Biden-Trump rematch shows how far U.S. democracy has fallen—and we have no one to blame but ourselves.
https://www.wsj.com/politics/election-2024-you-asked-for-it-america-8028bc04?st=supkhcxl0j9s127&utm
By Kevin D. Williamson
Dec. 15, 2023 11:00 am ET
The problem with campaign rally songs is that nobody ever picks the right one. Franklin Roosevelt chose “Happy Days Are Here Again” in the middle of the Great Depression with Adolf Hitler rising to power in Germany. Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” has charmed Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump, none of whom apparently ever actually listened to the lyrics of that lament for post-Vietnam malaise and economic decline. George H.W. Bush used Woody Guthrie’s pinko anthem “This Land Is Your Land.”
Lately, Trump has been using Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.,” a diabetes-inducing hunk of treacle that makes me want to join the Islamic State, while Joe Biden has gone back to the Guthrie well with a version of “Shipping Up to Boston” by the Dropkick Murphys, a band that, like Joe Biden, is still getting by playing hits from the 1990s.
I have my own theme song for the 2024 election, David Bowie’s magnificent 1995 collaboration with Brian Eno: “I’m Afraid of Americans.” It is an anthem for our times.
Presidential elections are almost always showy, nationalistic affairs, full of appeals to patriotism and unity, occasions upon which even Ivy League diversity officers wave the flag and festoon the public square in red, white and blue. And that points to the tension at the heart of the dreadful and contemptible 2024 presidential election, which almost certainly will be fought out by Donald Trump, a depraved game-show host who tried to stage a coup d’état when he lost his 2020 re-election bid, and Joe Biden, a plagiarist and fabulist first elected to public office 53 years ago who is going to be spending a lot of time this campaign season thinking about his family’s influence-peddling business and the tricky questions related to it, like whether you can deduct hookers as a business expense.
Run Old Glory up the highest flagpole you can find, but 2024 is going to be the least patriotism-inspiring election in American history so far, a reminder of what a depraved, decadent, backward, low-minded, primitive, superstitious and morally corrupt people we have become.
Don’t blame “the system,” you gormless weasels. You chose this.
Rioters at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. PHOTO: SAUL LOEB/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
For most of my life, the dominant myth that informed American politics was that there was too much “big money” in the system, that Washington lobbyists in Gucci loafers gathered with self-seeking party bosses in smoke-filled rooms to subvert the will of We the People and foist their preferred candidates and policies upon the country. The moral of the story was that the common people do not have enough of a voice.
But that’s the great lie of American politics (and of democracy at large): that the people cannot fail but can only be failed.
Conservatives told themselves a carefully tailored version of that story, one in which Republican Party careerists insufficiently committed to limited government allowed themselves to be pushed around by the liberal media, selling out their principles and the electoral interests of the GOP so that they could feel welcome “at Georgetown cocktail parties,” as the slavering imbeciles of talk radio still put it. The left told itself a similarly inane story, with Big Business turning the Democratic establishment into corporate shills with no interest in anything more radical or fundamental than smoothing out the rougher edges of capitalism rather than—finally!—“putting people over profits,” as the idiots over in their village put it.
And then, a funny thing happened. Two funny things, in fact.
First, the Internet broke the old media oligopoly, which at the height of its power had consisted of three newspapers—the
New York Times, the Washington Post and this one—alongside three television networks that aped those three newspapers, and the Associated Press, which digested all that and regurgitated it, birdlike, into the pages of 10,000 local newspapers. This ensured that the same biases that shaped the political coverage of the Washington Post ended up in the Sacramento Bee and the Tulsa World, serving up D.C.-N.Y.C. gruel at a hundred million breakfast tables across the fruited plain.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican. PHOTO: TOM WILLIAMS/ASSOCIATED PRESS
With the old media gatekeepers gone, right-wing content creators rushed in and filled the world with QAnon kookery on Facebook, conspiracy theories powerful enough to vault the cretinous likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene into Congress, fake news sponsored by Moscow and Beijing and fake-ish news subsidized by Viktor Orbán and his happy junta, and whatever kind of poison butterfly Tucker Carlson is going to be when he emerges from the chrysalis of filth he’s built around himself. The prim consensus of 200 Northeastern newspaper editors has been replaced by the sardonic certitude of 100 million underemployed rage-monkeys and ignoramuses on Twitter. The news was democratized, and, as such, it became corrupt, irresponsible and ugly.
Second, the same forces that disintegrated the old media cabal have radically democratized fundraising for political campaigns and committees. Whatever control those smug party bosses once lorded over candidates mostly had resided in the power of the purse. But the Internet made it possible for politicians and hustlers to go straight to the people, who don’t want to hear about the need to raise their Medicare premiums and reduce their Social Security checks to avoid a national fiscal crisis.
No, We the People want to hear more from that Marjorie lady about the Jewish space lasers and how Donald Trump is going to wreak vengeance against the “communists” and “Marxists” who run…
Microsoft, and how vaccines are what gave them lumbago. The digital masses may not be dropping bundles of C-notes into the campaign contribution tip jar, but they hit that tip jar pretty often with smaller change, and there are an awful lot of them.
Whatever real power big-money donors had to shape the political agenda has been dwarfed by the power—the much more thoroughly corrupting power—of small-dollar donors, who, unlike the National Association of Realtors or the AFL-CIO, do not have a long-term policy agenda or the attention spans to maintain one, because they are in this regard not citizens in a meaningful sense but only content-consumers. Spend a couple of hours reading political posts on Facebook and tell me that the smoke-filled room doesn’t look pretty good by comparison.
Like the protesters’ placards say: “This is what democracy looks like.” And it’s kind of gross.
An Occupy supporter in Denver, November 2011. PHOTO: ED ANDRIESKI/ASSOCIATED PRESS
The great political players of our moment include university presidents who cannot explain why they’ll expel students for failing to use made-up genderless pronouns (Zie! Zim! Zir! Zis! Zieself!) but not for calling for a global pogrom against Jews, which needs “context.” They include Jan. 6 vandals and goons and the former (possibly future) president who insists that the ones convicted of crimes are “hostages” and “political prisoners.” They include Proud Boys cosplaying revolutionaries and the college professors who are sure there were some very fine people sawing the heads off Jewish children in Israel.
Meanwhile, the family-values guys over in the evangelical Christian world are showing more loyalty to Donald Trump than he ever showed to any of his wives, insisting that the lying, chiseling, philandering, coup-plotting grifter and occasional porn-movie performer is Jesus’ Own Personal Guy chosen to hold off the forces of darkness in Anno Domini 2024. Apparently, all that old “Thou shalt not bear false witness” stuff has gone right down the theological toilet.
SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS
How do you feel about American politics and the upcoming election? Join the conversation below.
Nobody makes boots tall enough to wade through the avalanche of B.S. headed our way in the next 11 months. Republicans, having decided that knee-walking Trump sycophant Kevin McCarthy was not quite sycophantic enough, have entrusted their legislative agenda to Mike Johnson, a swamp grotesque from Louisiana who was among the leading 2020 coup plotters and apparently believes that he is the second coming of Moses. And so critical national priorities will be taking a back seat, for the foreseeable future, to utter kookery.
If you think Ukraine aid has been held up by legitimate concerns about border security, you are not paying attention. Ukraine aid is being held up because a sizable portion of Republicans are Putinists, in and out of the closet to varying degrees, and believe (or pretend to believe) Tucker Carlson’s claim that Volodymyr Zelensky, a Jew, simply wants to persecute Christians and that pro-Ukrainian elements in the U.S. hate Vladimir Putin because he—a former KGB goon—is a defender of Christian piety. Meanwhile, Rep. Rashida Tlaib and her Squad can’t get entirely on the right side of the massacre-the-Jews issue.
Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a Michigan Democrat. PHOTO: JEMAL COUNTESS/GETTY IMAGES
If Trump wins, he’ll try his best to act like some kind of midcentury caudillo, the unholy spawn of Augusto Pinochet and Don Rickles. If he loses, then expect something along the lines of Jan. 6 or worse. But if you think Democrats can’t hold their own when it comes to irresponsible claims about election-rigging and voting-machine tampering, then you weren’t around for 2016, 2004, 2000—or any other big election that Republicans have won going back to 1864.
Sometimes, a country is doing so well that it can afford a silly season. This is not that time, and the U.S. is not that country. The government has a very, very large military budget—but as of 2023, spending on interest payments for federal debt now exceeds defense appropriations. Which is to say, we are spending more money refinancing Medicare subsidies for the dentures your granddad got 20 years ago than we are spending on things like infrastructure, scientific research or, you know, building aircraft carriers and making sure all those nuclear missiles we built back in the Reagan years still work. And the Reagan-era stuff is the new stuff: We’re still enriching uranium in the same facility they were using back in Robert Oppenheimer’s day.
So who do we want sitting across the table from Xi Jinping? Do we prefer the guy who got flummoxed celebrating the musical legacy of “LL…Jay…Cool…J…Uhh” before calling him “boy,” or do we want the guy who was in “Playboy Video Centerfold: Playmate 2000 Bernaola Twins” and who, you know, tried to overthrow the government by invalidating the lawful election of his feckless successor last time around?
Your choice, America. Enjoy all that pure, uncut democracy.
A QAnon supporter at a rally in Olympia, Wash., May 2020. PHOTO: TED S. WARREN/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Democracy isn’t our form of government. It is a feature of our form of government—an important and irreplaceable element—but it is only a means. The end is well-ordered liberty. Democracy works well only when it is enabled and fortified by a great many institutions that are not in themselves democratic—or that at least aren’t supposed to be democratic.
One of those important institutions is functional political parties, which, in a sane world, would keep figures such as Donald Trump—and here I mean 2016 Donald Trump, to say nothing of the Caligula-Travis Bickle hybrid he has become—well away from political power, along with, at this stage in the game, Joe Biden. All those gatekeepers occupying the party offices, running the fundraising operations, working in the media, conspiring at the bar at Café Milano in D.C.—it turns out they were doing something really quite valuable, whether they intended to or didn’t.
Some of the institutions that make democracy work—that make it tolerable—are formal, like the Bill of Rights. Some of them are the result of longstanding conventions. But many of them are organic and ad hoc, institutions and norms that evolved in particular conditions for particular purposes—and that have been swept aside by the radically democratic and relentlessly homogenizing forces of political life in the digital age.
China, Israel, the debt: Dealing with any of the urgent issues before us is going to be hard in the best-case scenario. And say what you will about Donald Trump or Joe Biden, nobody outside of a few daft cultists believes that either one of these senescent miscreants represents the best-case scenario. Being president is hard, it’s harder if you’re stupid, and it’s even harder if you are stupid and your next
3. Foreign Affairs: The Best of Books 2023
A year's worth of reading here.
The Best of Books 2023
Foreign Affairs · by December 17, 2023 · December 17, 2023
Editors’ Picks
In a timely and thought-provoking book, Zahra delves into the tumultuous years between World War I and World War II to argue that it was resistance to globalism and globalization that ended up weakening Europe’s then-fragile democracies, eventually contributing to the continent’s slide into dictatorship.
read the review
Bass’s magnificent book, an account of the post–World War II Tokyo war-crimes trial, encourages a deeper understanding of the Asian experience of war and occupation. His work also sheds light on an enduring debate about liberalism and international politics, showing how the trial played formative roles both in postwar Asian politics and in the making of the postwar global human rights regime.
read the review
by Martin Wolf
In a sophisticated and expansive account, Wolf, a veteran economics commentator, suggests that the root cause of today’s political and economic malaise lies in the breakdown of the relationship between capitalism and liberal democracy—and the failure of institutions to counter poverty and marginalization.
read the review
Political and Legal
In this masterful work, Snyder offers a bold explanation for why, how, and when societies make progress in expanding political rights and freedoms, arguing that breakthroughs occur when human rights serve the interests of a country’s dominant political coalition.
read the review
by Peter Trubowitz and Brian Burgoon
Trubowitz and Burgoon argue in this groundbreaking study that the current backlash against the Western-led liberal international order can be traced to the 1990s, when the United States and European governments encouraged globalization at the expense of social and economic protections at home.
read the review
Moving beyond the standard account of the twentieth century as an epic struggle between democracy and autocracy, Maier examines how a wide range of actors tried to harness industrial modernity in the pursuit of power and material interests, weaving an alternative narrative about the explosive interplay of economic privilege and political grievance.
read the review
Economic and Social and Environmental
By Martin Daunton
Daunton’s sweeping narrative assesses the history of international economic cooperation and the institutions that organize and sustain it.
read the review
by Richard N. Langlois
Langlois describes the origins of the modern business enterprise—and looks to the future, arguing that important policy decisions, not just technological developments, will shape how markets and corporations will interact moving forward.
read the review
by Chris Miller
At once edifying and entertaining, Miller’s book traces the history of the global semiconductor industry—and examines the key flash points today, with Beijing seeking to build up design and manufacturing capabilities and Washington hoping to slow China’s progress.
read the review
Military and Scientific and Technological
by Colin Martin and Geoffrey Parker
Martin and Parker’s superb account of the ill-fated Spanish effort to invade England in 1588 is remarkable in its level of detail, drawing on naval archeology and manuscripts to provide a full and vivid history.
read the review
by Calder Walton
Walton engagingly charts the complex interactions between the intelligence services of the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Soviet Union (and its successor, Russia), and how the duplicity of their spies influenced key political moments.
read the review
Thomas’s gripping account of the decision-making in Washington and Tokyo at the close of World War II focuses on the perspectives of three people: Henry Stimson, the aging U.S. secretary for war; General Carl “Tooey” Spaatz, the American officer in charge of the Pacific air campaign; and Japanese Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo.
read the review
The United States
by Jonathan Eig
Drawing on sources unavailable to previous biographers, Eig brilliantly portrays the many dimensions of the civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., who appears as an extraordinarily courageous, deeply troubled, terribly flawed, and incredibly talented figure. Eig’s balanced treatment of King turns an icon back into a man—and produces a biography that will be very difficult to surpass.
read the review
by Monica Duffy Toft and Sidita Kushi
Examining patterns of U.S. military activity and intervention since 1776, Toft and Kushi argue that the data show a sharp uptick in the United States’ use of force in recent decades, amounting to an increased propensity for force-first diplomacy that threatens the country’s long-term interests.
read the review
by Shana Kushner Gadarian, Sara Wallace Goodman, and Thomas B. Pepinsky
Gadarian and her co-authors’ sophisticated study, based on voluminous data and public opinion polling, is a revealing portrait of U.S. politics throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, finding that the key explanation for the United States’ calamitous performance is President Donald Trump’s handling of the crisis.
read the review
Western Europe
Bartels, a leading analyst of electoral democracy and public opinion in the United States, argues that it is the machinations of political elites, not waning public support for democratic institutions, that have led to the decline of democracy, multilateralism, and tolerance in countries across Europe.
read the review
by Vasily Astrov, Richard Grieveson, Christian Hanelt, Veronika Janyrova, Branimir Jovanovic, Artem Kochnev, Miriam Kosmehl, Isilda Mara, Markus Overdiek, Thiess Petersen, Olga Pindyuk, Oliver Reiter, Nina Vujanovic, and Stefani Weiss
In this uniquely detailed and indispensable study, a team of researchers systematically review the extraordinary extent to which Europe’s neighbors are economically dependent on the continent—and suggest ways Europe can optimize and defend its preeminence.
read the review
by Zsuzsanna Szelenyi
Szelenyi, herself a former Hungarian politician, provides a balanced and detailed account of Hungary’s slide from liberal democracy toward right-wing populist nationalism under Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
read the review
Western Hemisphere
Neal’s highly entertaining biography of the writer Carleton Beals, whose work on Latin America foreshadowed later anti-imperialist critiques, sheds light on the United States’ relationship with the ruling elites of Latin America throughout the twentieth century.
read the review
In this splendid, well-balanced history of an extraordinary but seldom studied period in inter-American relations, Herman argues that pragmatic accords between the United States and Latin American countries enabled a brilliant if brief chapter of solidarity in the Western Hemisphere throughout World War II.
read the review
by Javier Zamora
Zamora’s deeply moving, highly personal memoir details his arduous and heroic trek, at age nine, from El Salvador through Guatemala and Mexico to Arizona in 1999, graphically describing the many daunting obstacles migrants must overcome to reach the United States.
read the review
Eastern Europe and Former Soviet Republics
by Franck Billé and Caroline Humphrey
Based on their firsthand field research, anthropologists Billé and Humphrey present an enthralling portrayal of the 2,600-mile border between China and Russia as the line dividing two essentially different civilizations.
Tread the review
Eaton’s extremely rich historical account sheds light on the Kremlin’s decision in late 1947 to expel the German population of Königsberg, the region that would become the Soviet territory (and now Russian exclave) of Kaliningrad.
read the review
Edgar’s absorbing historical study examines the consequences of a Soviet social engineering project that encouraged intermarriage between ethnic groups with the aim of building a Soviet nation, one free of ethnic or racial biases. Instead, Edgar notes, this campaign contributed to the rise of racialized notions of nationality.
read the review
Middle East
by Shahzad Bashir
In this dazzlingly creative and thought-provoking digital book, Bashir argues that Islam needs to be understood not as a monolithic, unchanging faith but as an accumulation of beliefs and practices that people have labeled “Islam” over time and across regions.
read the review
Jones’s astonishing study details the use of social media and communication technology by governments, notably Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, as tools of tyranny and propaganda. This deception pollutes public discourse across the Middle East and, more important, inhibits the critical thinking of the citizenry.
read the review
by Steffen Hertog
Hertog’s brisk, clear, and devastating portrayal of the consequences of decades of misguided economic policy in the Arab world traces the development of two-tiered economies throughout the region.
read the review
Asia and Pacific
Dimitrov brings to light the lesser-known techniques of mass surveillance in Leninist party-states, showing how such governments obsessively collected information on dissenters, not just to target them but to preempt protest by granting economic concessions in restive areas.
read the review
In this fascinating and original study, Green explores sources in Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and other languages to see how Bahai, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, and Zoroastrian travelers, merchants, and polemicists tried to understand and influence the societies and cultures of China, Japan, and Southeast Asia.
read the review
In this wide-ranging and shrewd analysis of the Chinese state, Huang predicts that the crackdown on freedom under Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s modernized version of imperial rule may bring an end to the country’s brief spurt of dynamism.
read the review
Africa
by Noah L. Nathan
Nathan makes the counterintuitive claim that a limited state can still have a large impact on local populations, focusing on the hinterland of northern Ghana to show how the thinness of the state in a region can still powerfully shape social inequality and local power relations.
read the review
by Thula Simpson
Armed with fascinating details and anecdotes, Simpson finely traces the political history of South Africa since the beginning of the twentieth century, concluding that the historical legacies of apartheid, violence, and fractious governance continue to cast a heavy shadow over the country today.
read the review
Reid brilliantly and ably tells the account of the 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s first elected prime minister, in what was one of the emblematic episodes of both the Cold War and the end of colonialism in Africa.
read the review
Foreign Affairs · by December 17, 2023 · December 17, 2023
4. Ukrainian Strikes Have Changed Russian Naval Operations in the Black Sea
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/ukrainian-strikes-have-changed-russian-naval-operations-black-sea
UKRAINIAN STRIKES HAVE CHANGED RUSSIAN NAVAL OPERATIONS IN THE BLACK SEA
Dec 16, 2023 - ISW Press
Ukrainian Strikes Have Changed Russian Naval Operations in the Black Sea
Nicole Wolkov, Daniel Mealie, and Kateryna Stepanenko
December 16, 2023
Key takeaway: Ukrainian strikes against Russian Black Sea Fleet (BSF) assets have changed Russian naval operating patterns, causing the BSF to move some ships away from its main base in occupied Sevastopol, Crimea and hampering the BSF’s ability to interfere with maritime trade in the western part of the Black Sea. Ukrainian strikes have likely caused the BSF to set conditions for a more permanent basing pattern along the eastern Black Sea coast as it transfers naval assets away from Crimea and expands a small port in de facto Russian-controlled Ochamchire, Abkhazia. Ukrainian strikes against BSF assets have successfully facilitated the use of Ukraine’s Black Sea grain corridor as international support for the corridor continues to increase despite Russia’s withdrawal from the Black Sea Grain Initiative and military threats against it.
Ukrainian forces launched a successful preemptive strike campaign against the Russian BSF in the summer and fall of 2023, which aimed to disrupt Russia’s efforts to impose a de facto blockade on Ukrainian ports and to undermine the BSF’s ability to conduct naval operations in the Black Sea. In summer 2023, Russia sought to use its withdrawal from the Black Sea Grain Initiative to posture the BSF in a way that would deter Ukraine and international community from maritime activity in the Black Sea – effectively establishing a de facto blockade on Ukrainian ports without having to enforce an actual blockade. The United Nations (UN) and Turkey had originally brokered the Black Sea Grain Initiative with Russia in July 2022 that allowed cargo ships to sail between ports in Odesa Oblast and the Bosphorus Strait without fear of Russian attacks.[1] Russian officials began signaling their intent to withdraw from the Black Sea Grain Initiative in May 2023 shortly after agreeing to extend the deal until July 18, likely in an effort to set information conditions for the de facto blockade.[2] Ukrainian forces, however, began setting military conditions to prevent Russia from establishing such a de facto blockade by launching an intricate missile and drone campaign targeting BSF assets and vessels starting in June 2023.[3] The Ukrainian strike campaign inhibited Russia’s ability to use the BSF to halt maritime activity in western Black Sea and helped Ukraine deprive Russian forces of the maritime initiative in the Black Sea.
Satellite imagery indicates that Ukrainian strikes caused Russian forces to move BSF assets away from occupied Sevastopol to ports in the eastern part of the Black Sea on an enduring basis. Satellite imagery from June to December 2023 indicates that Russian forces have moved BSF assets, both surface vessels and submarines, away from the main base in Sevastopol, Crimea to the port in Novorossiysk, Krasnodar Krai, further away from Ukrainian launch points on an enduring basis and are setting conditions for a more permanent basing pattern on the eastern Black Sea coast.[4] ISW previously assessed in early October that the Ukrainian strikes successfully degraded the BSF’s ability to operate as a combined arms headquarters and to support logistics routes in southern Ukraine, although the effects on the BSF as a naval actor at the time remained unclear.[5] Satellite imagery shows, however, that Russian forces started to move naval assets away from Sevastopol on an enduring basis following Ukrainian strikes on naval infrastructure in Crimea and the BSF Command headquarters in Sevastopol on September 22, 2023.[6] Satellite imagery suggests that, although the BSF continues to base some assets at the main port in Sevastopol, the Russian military has redeployed several vessels, including surface combatants such as Krivak-class frigates and smaller vessels such as Grisha-class and Tarantul-class corvettes from Sevastopol to Novorossiysk.[7] Satellite imagery from December shows that Russian force have redeployed most of their specialized Kalibr cruise missile carriers including Admiral Grigorovich-class frigates, Buyan-M-class corvettes, and Kilo-class submarines from Sevastopol to Novorossiysk.[8] Recent satellite imagery indicates that vessels moved to Novorossiysk over the fall have not returned to Sevastopol.
ISW's estimates reflect the availability and spatial resolution of satellite imagery as well as meteorological conditions over the target areas. This table excludes auxilliary ships, amphibious ships, and most minor combatants apart from those capable of housing vertical launch systems. ISW's estimates count vessels observed in port.
Ukrainian strikes targeting BSF assets and ports have changed Russian naval operation patterns and are hindering the BSF’s ability to operate aggressively in the western part of the Black Sea. The United Kingdom Ministry of Defense (UK MoD) assessed on September 26 that Ukrainian strikes have diminished the BSF’s ability to conduct wide security patrols, carry out routine maintenance, and enforce blockades of Ukrainian ports in the western Black Sea although the BSF retained the ability to launch sea-based missile strikes.[9] The Russian military has also been unable to return two BSF vessels to the Black Sea, reportedly the Kildin Moma-class surveillance ship and the Admiral Grigorovich, lead ship of the class, because Turkey invoked the relevant provisions of the Montreux Convention blocking transit through the Turkish Straits on February 28, 2022.[10]
Imagery of the Russian naval base in occupied Sevastopol, Crimea. June 8, 2023.
Imagery of the Russian naval base in occupied Sevastopol, Crimea. December 3, 2023.
Imagery of the Russian naval base in Novorossiysk, Krasnodar Krai, Russia. June 8, 2023.
Imagery of the Russian naval base in Novorossiysk, Krasnodar Krai, Russia. December 5, 2023.
The BSF is permanently building a naval port near Russian-controlled Ochamchire, Abkhazia, likely signaling Russian long-term intent to move more naval assets away from Crimea. Russian-backed Abkhazian President Aslan Bzhania announced on October 5 that he had signed an agreement with Russian authorities for the construction of a permanent Russian naval base near Ochamchire, Abkhazia.[11] Deputy Chief of the Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) Major General Vadym Skibitskyi reported on October 23 that Russian authorities started dredging and constructing port infrastructure in Ochamchire in order to construct a base for some warships currently stationed in Crimea, which could not be redeployed to Novorossiysk.[12] Bzhania stated on November 9 that Abkhaz authorities have started work to expand the Ochamchire port so that it can accommodate large-capacity vessels with a displacement of up to 13,000 tons, a notable increase from its current capacity to handle vessels with deadweight of 3,000 tons.[13] The port’s expansion will reportedly take over 2.5 years.[14] The Russian military is likely intending to develop the existing port into a subsidiary rather than a main base since the surrounding terrain largely consists of sandy beaches unsuitable for the construction of naval infrastructure.[15]
Ukrainian strikes have severely degraded Russian military efforts to disrupt the movement of commercial vessels through the Ukraine’s grain corridor. Ukraine announced that it would continue to export grain and other goods along the western coast of the Black Sea after Russia refused to renew the Black Sea Grain Initiative on July 17, 2023.[16] Russian forces launched extensive missile and drone strikes for several consecutive days against port and grain infrastructure in southern Ukraine shortly after Russia’s withdrawal to disrupt the corridor.[17] Subsequent Ukrainian strikes on Russian BSF assets and military installations in Crimea seriously undermined Russian efforts to curtail maritime traffic, however.[18] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) unsuccessfully attempted to discourage commercial traffic in the western Black Sea by announcing on July 19 that it would consider all ships en route to Ukrainian ports to be potential carriers of military cargo (and therefore potential military targets) and forcibly stopping and searching a commercial vessel en route to Izmail port in Odesa Oblast on August 13.[19] Persistent Ukrainian drone and missile strikes against BSF assets caused the Russians to adjust their maritime posture in a way that made these threats largely ineffective.[20]
International actors have signaled their support for the continued use of Ukraine’s Black Sea grain corridor, demonstrating that Ukrainian forces continue to successfully block Russian attempts to threaten commercial vessels from using the corridor. The Financial Times (FT) reported on November 15 that the Ukrainian government reached a deal with insurance broker giant Marsh McLennan to provide up to $50 million in hull and liability insurance from Lloyd’s of London firms for each vessel carrying agricultural goods through the grain corridor.[21] The West continues to show support for long-term Ukrainian naval operations that will likely strengthen Ukrainian forces’ ability to operate in the Black Sea, most recently with the December 11 announcement that the UK and Norway would lead the Maritime Capability Coalition to provide short-term assistance to Ukraine and help in long-term efforts aimed at making the Ukrainian navy more interoperable with NATO.[22]
Ukraine’s long-range strikes against BSF assets have facilitated humanitarian and military successes in the Black Sea and allowed Ukraine to seize the initiative in the Black Sea even without an effective navy of its own. US Ambassador to Ukraine Bridget Brink reported on November 13 that 100 vessels had successfully transited the corridor and exported 3.7 million tons of food and other goods, presumably since the first civilian vessel successfully departed from a Ukrainian port through the corridor on August 15.[23] Brink reported on December 15 that 256 ships have successfully used the Black Sea grain corridor and exported almost nine million tons of grain and other cargo from Ukrainian ports, suggesting that continued successful Ukrainian strikes coupled with increasing international support for Ukraine’s corridor has contributed to a dramatic increase in food exports.[24]
Western provision of additional long-range missiles to Ukraine would support ongoing Ukrainian efforts to keep the Black Sea open for maritime traffic and keep the BSF away from NATO coastlines in the Black Sea. No single Western-provided system will provide Ukraine with a decisive advantage or a direct path to victory. Consistent Ukrainian strikes have allowed Ukraine to seize the initiative in the Black Sea, prevent a Russian blockade, and curtail Russian expansion in the Black Sea, however. The increased Western provision long-range missiles would allow Ukraine to retain the initiative in the Black Sea, enabling continued military and humanitarian successes.
5. Newly Formed Operation Prosperity Guardian To Protect Red Sea Shipping
Excerpts:
While there will be a new task force created next week, whether there will be any direct response against Houthi military targets remains to be seen.
This is a developing story.
Newly Formed Operation Prosperity Guardian To Protect Red Sea Shipping
A soon to be announced multi-national effort to protect Red Sea shipping comes after the U.S. and U.K. downed 15 Houthi drones Saturday.
BYHOWARD ALTMAN|UPDATED DEC 16, 2023 1:47 PM EST
thedrive.com · by Howard Altman · December 16, 2023
During his visit to the Middle East next week, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin will announce the formation of Operation Prosperity Guardian, a new international effort deal with Houthi threats, a U.S. military official told The War Zone. That information comes as U.S. and British warships shot down drones the Houthis launched in a wave from Yemen early Saturday morning local time, marking the latest escalation of attacks on shipping in the Red Sea.
The Arleigh Burke class guided missile destroyer USS Carney downed 14 drones today, a U.S. military official told The War Zone. The Type-45 destroyer HMS Diamond downed one drone targeting merchant shipping in the Red Sea with a Sea Viper missile, U.K. Defense Secretary Grant Shapps said in a statement. It was the first time the Royal Navy shot down an aerial target in anger since the First Gulf War in 1991 when the Type 42 Destroyer HMS Gloucester destroyed an Iraqi Silkworm missile bound for a U.S. warship.
The two destroyers, which were in constant communications, shot down the drones during a 45-minute attack wave near the Bab al-Mandab Strait, the official told us, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss operational details.
While the British say the drones were attacking a merchant ship, the Carney engaged the drones because there were so many at once they were deemed a threat to the ship, the official said.
The official declined to say what weapons the Carney used because the U.S. does not want the Houthis to be able to figure out its munitions stocks.
In a Tweet, CENTCOM stated the drones "were shot down with no damage to ships in the area or reported injuries. Regional Red Sea partners were alerted to the threat."
Houthi spokesman Yahya Sare'e said today that the Iranian-backed Yemeni rebels launched a wave of drones toward Israel, but did not mention either warship.
Today's drone intercepts come a day after the Houthis set two cargo ships in the Red Sea ablaze and threatened a third vessel. Two of the world's largest shipping companies, Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd, told us they were temporarily pausing transits into the Red Sea as a result of the Houthi attacks. You can read more about those incidents in our story here.
Austin, who will be visiting the region early next week with Joint Chiefs Chairman Air Force Gen. C.Q. Brown, will announce Operation Prosperity Guardian, which will be similar to the existing Task Force 153, the official told us. That's an international effort focusing "on international maritime security and capacity building efforts in the Red Sea, Bab al-Mandeb and Gulf of Aden."
The official could not say Saturday how many nations will be involved or exactly what missions they will perform beyond patrolling the Red Sea against Houthi threats.
Shapps on Saturday noted that the Diamond recently arrived in the Red Sea "to bolster international efforts to maintain maritime security" as we previously reported.
“The recent spate of illegal attacks represent a direct threat to international commerce and maritime security in the Red Sea," Shapps said. "The U.K. remains committed to repelling these attacks to protect the free flow of global trade.”
The Type 45 destroyer HMS Diamond downed a drone fired from Houthi-controlled Yemen, according to Defense Secretary Grant Shapps. (U.K. Defense Ministry photo)
“One-sixth of the world's commercial shipping passes through the Bab-al-Mandeb Strait and Red Sea,” said First Sea Lord, Adm. Sir Ben Key in a statement. “HMS Diamond deployed at short notice to the region from Portsmouth just two weeks ago and is already delivering effect together with our American, French and other allies and partners.”
“The Royal Navy is committed to upholding the right to free use of the oceans and we do not tolerate indiscriminate threats or attacks against those going about their lawful business on the high seas,” he added.
While today's incidents mark the first time a U.K. warship downed an aerial threat since 1991, it was at least the third time since the start of the Israel-Hamas war that the Carney has.
On Dec. 3, three missiles fired from Houthi-controlled territory in Yemen struck three commercial ships in the Red Sea, CENTCOM said at the time. Carney responded to distress calls from two of those vessels and downed three drones approaching it.
Oct. 19, Carney shot down four land attack cruise missiles and 19 drones, a U.S. official told The War Zone the next day.
As we reported earlier this week, a French warship has also engaged in intercepting Houthi drones. The FREMM Frigate Languedoc, patrolling off the coast of Yemen, shot down a drone threatening a Norwegian-flagged chemical tanker.
While there will be a new task force created next week, whether there will be any direct response against Houthi military targets remains to be seen.
This is a developing story.
Contact the author: howard@thewarzone.com
thedrive.com · by Howard Altman · December 16, 2023
6. Israeli Troops Raid Hamas Top Leader Sinwar's Vacation Home, Finding Weapons and Tunnels Inside
No surprise.
Israeli Troops Raid Hamas Top Leader Sinwar's Vacation Home, Finding Weapons and Tunnels Inside
'We found weapons, tunnels inside vacation homes of senior Hamas officials,' Col. Elad Tzuri said
Published 12/17/23 08:57 AM ET|Updated 2 hr ago
Yelena Dzhanova
themessenger.com · December 17, 2023
Israeli forces say they found tunnels and weapons inside a vacation home that belongs to Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, according to a report.
The Times of Israel reported that soldiers with the Israel Defense Forces conducted a raid on Sinwar’s vacation home, in addition to the vacation homes of other Hamas leaders.
“We found weapons, tunnels inside vacation homes of senior Hamas officials,” Col. Elad Tzuri said, according to the Times of Israel. “We see a lot of tunnel shafts here, still encountering the enemy but gaining operational control of the area,” he adds.
Yahya Sinwar attends the opening of a new mosque in Rafah town in the southern Gaza Strip on Feb. 24, 2017.SAID KHATIB/AFP via Getty Images
Sinwar is the Hamas leader Israeli forces have been citing as the mastermind behind the Oct. 7 surprise attack on Israel.
As the conflict between Hamas and Israel continues to escalate, Israeli leaders have been calling for and promising Sinwar’s death.
"Yahya Sinwar, the ruler of the Gaza Strip, decided on this horrible attack, and therefore he and the entire system under him are doomed,” the Israeli Defense Forces chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi said just days after the Hamas-led attack. “We will attack them, we will dismantle them, dismantle their system."
themessenger.com · December 17, 2023
7. How China’s assertive diplomacy has reached ‘another level of disrespect’ and become the new normal
How China’s assertive diplomacy has reached ‘another level of disrespect’ and become the new normal
- Chinese ambassador to the Philippines Huang Xilian and his counterparts have come under scrutiny more than once for their controversial comments
- Such assertive diplomacy could come off as ‘bullying’ other nations and undo the hard work China has put into building bilateral ties with neighbours
Listen to this article
Maria Siow
+ FOLLOWPublished: 10:00am, 15 Dec, 2023
https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/opinion/article/3245076/how-chinas-assertive-diplomacy-has-reached-another-level-disrespect-and-become-new-normal
Few countries’ diplomats have generated as much controversy in recent months as those from China.
Take the most recent incident where Chinese ambassador to the Philippines Huang Xilian was said to have confronted and aggressively pointed at his host country’s armed forces chief, General Romeo Brawner Jnr, while saying “don’t provoke us”.
Describing Huang’s behaviour as “very hostile”, Philippine Senator JV Ejercito said in an interview with Filipino media on Tuesday that an ambassador should not be “disrespectful” and “rude”, especially to a high-ranking government official.
“Imagine, Huang is bullying our chief of staff … that’s probably another level of disrespect,” Ejercito said, adding that Beijing should recall the envoy.
Chinese Ambassador to the Philippines Huang Xilian (centre) welcomes the arrival of a Chinese naval training ship for a goodwill visit at Manila’s port in June. Photo: AP
Some Filipinos have called for the Chinese embassy and all consulates in the Philippines to be shut, while others suggested Manila should stop recognising the one-China principle, which states that Taiwan is part of China.
Bilateral tensions are understandably high, given the multiple skirmishes between their vessels in the South China Sea in recent months.
Over the weekend, videos released by the Philippine Coast Guard showed Chinese ships blasting water cannons at Filipino boats during two separate resupply missions. There was also a collision between Philippine and Chinese vessels at the Second Thomas Shoal.
The incidents prompted Manila to summon Huang, while lawmakers have called for the envoy to be expelled.
Even so, surely there is a better and more diplomatic way for Huang to convey his country’s position and concerns on the issue, rather than to resort to finger-pointing?
This is not the first time Huang has come under scrutiny for his behaviour. In April, he created an uproar when he suggested that thousands of overseas Filipino workers in Taiwan would be in danger if the Philippines does not oppose Taiwan independence.
Huang is also one among his many counterparts to have come under the radar for questionable diplomatic conduct.
In June, Chinese ambassador to South Korea Xing Haiming sparked controversy after warning his host country against making a “wrong bet” when it came to the Sino-US rivalry.
In May, Toronto-based diplomat Zhao Wei was expelled by Canada after being accused of involvement in a campaign to intimidate a Canadian opposition legislator critical of Beijing.
South Korea’s Finance Minister Choo Kyung-ho (left) with Chinese Ambassador to South Korea Xing Haiming during their meeting in Seoul, South Korea, in May. Photo: EPA-EFE/Yonhap
A month earlier, Beijing’s ambassador to France sparked outrage when he questioned the sovereignty of all ex-Soviet states. Lu Shaye said countries that emerged after the fall of the Soviet Union did not have “effective status under international law because there is not an international agreement confirming their status as sovereign nations”.
Last October, Chinese diplomatic staff in England were caught on video violently handling a Hong Kong-born man holding a peaceful protest on the grounds of the Chinese consulate in Manchester. Then consul-general Zheng Xiyuan not only admitted assaulting a protester but also argued it was his “duty” and any diplomat would have done the same.
In 2019, Lithuania’s foreign minister summoned Chinese ambassador Shen Zhifei over his embassy’s involvement in a counter-protest against supporters of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement. Lithuania said China’s officials in Vilnius had “crossed the line” by directing pro-Beijing hecklers and disrupting an expression of solidarity.
Chinese ambassador to Lithuania Shen Zhifei in 2019. Photo: Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in the Republic of Lithuania
Much has been said about “wolf warrior” diplomacy, which has led Beijing to assert itself more aggressively.
But with the geopolitical shift towards one that views China with greater suspicion and which places its moves under greater scrutiny, a shift away from such a form of diplomacy is unlikely to occur.
Indeed, an assertive and coercive form of diplomacy appears to be the new normal, as errant Chinese diplomats have clearly not been told off or reined in.
Apart from the recall of consul-general Zheng and his colleagues – ostensibly to avoid police questioning – few have paid the price for their behaviour in recent years.
In the case of the larger, especially Western, countries, these diplomats appeared to have scored political points, especially in the eyes of Chinese netizens.
But for smaller countries such as the Philippines, Chinese diplomats ought to bear in mind that their threatening behaviour will come across to many as a more powerful country “bullying” one who is less so.
It will also undo years of hard work undertaken by the Chinese leadership in pursuing the country’s neighbourhood diplomacy, which emphasises cooperation, partnership and friendship.
Maria Siow is a senior correspondent at the Post’s Asia desk.
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Maria Siow
Maria Siow is a long-time China-based correspondent and analyst with keen interest in East Asia. Maria has a masters degree in international relations.
8. China is flooding Taiwan with fake news/disinformation ahead of a major election. Here’s how it’s fighting back
Interesting responses.
Excerpts:
This is where apps like Auntie Meiyu can help.
Unlike other fact-checking applications, which generally provide an interface for users to manually insert and verify text or a website link, the chatbot can be enabled in group chats or direct messages on Line and has the ability to automatically scan messages and warn of any potentially misleading content.
“A lot of people tell us that it really helps a lot, because sometimes they wouldn’t dare to directly tell their parents or relatives that this kind of information is wrong,” said Cecile Chen, who runs the chatbot under Gogolook, a Taiwanese tech company specializing in call-filtering services. She also emphasized that the chatbot has an apolitical background.
Hsieh, from Taoyuan city, said her elderly relatives now feel embarrassed whenever Auntie Meiyu warns that their messages contain misleading information. As a result, she said, they have learned not to forward every message they get before considering its truthfulness.
“For my elderly relatives… if they can pause and suspect whether a piece of information they received is really accurate, I think this is already great progress for them,” Hsieh said.
As for Chen, the fact-checking journalist, his work goes beyond simply verifying the authenticity of what people see online.
“If we can provide people with accurate information and statistics, the public can learn that while we can disagree on different issues, we must base our opinions on solid evidence,” he said.
China is flooding Taiwan with fake news/disinformation ahead of a major election. Here’s how it’s fighting back | CNN
CNN · by Eric Cheung · December 16, 2023
Taiwan faces flood of disinformation from China ahead of election
03:38 - Source: CNN
Taipei, Taiwan CNN —
At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, Taiwanese citizen Nancy Hsieh received a message from her relatives online: To stop the virus from entering your lungs, all you need to do is drink lots of water with salt and vinegar.
But she knew immediately this was false information.
Right beneath the original message on Line, Taiwan’s most popular messaging app, a chatbot replied that the claim was not supported by science, with a link to an article that fact-checked this erroneous information.
The chatbot, Auntie Meiyu, is one of multiple Taiwanese fact-checking applications that have increasingly gained prominence, as the island democracy of 23.5 million people steps up its readiness to combat the rising flow of false information from circulating within society.
Besides unscientific methods of treating Covid, Hsieh recalled “Auntie” debunked other rumors such as a fake speech attributed to an official from the Ministry of Economic Affairs, misrepresentation of polling results, and fraudulent food safety reports.
Experts say fact-checking mechanisms like this are becoming more important, especially as Taiwan is set to choose a new president in a highly consequential election next month.
The vote comes at a moment of high tensions as Beijing ramps up military, political and economic pressure on the island that China’s ruling Communist Party claims as its own territory, despite having never controlled it.
Like many places in the world, Taiwan often sees an uptick in disinformation during elections. But it is also uniquely targeted outside of voting season because of the precarious geopolitical space it lives in.
According to a report by Stockholm University’s Varieties of Democracy Project, published in March this year, Taiwan for the 10th consecutive year received the greatest amount of disinformation from outside its borders, highlighting the need for effective fact-checking mechanisms on the island.
A supporter of Taiwan's opposition KMT waves a giant national flag in Taipei on November 24, 2023
Annabelle Chih/Getty Images
A growing security risk
Disinformation is something Taiwan’s security agencies are particularly alert to.
At a recent closed-door security briefing attended by CNN, Taiwan’s intelligence community warned that China has been working to influence Taiwan’s upcoming election through a series of disinformation, military and economic operations, with the goal of boosting the chances of opposition candidates who favor improving ties with Beijing.
According to Taiwanese intelligence, Wang Huning, the fourth-ranking leader in th Chinese Communist Party, recently convened a meeting to coordinate efforts to influence the election, while reducing the likelihood that external parties could find evidence of such interference.
“They hope that the party they dislike will lose the election,” a senior Taiwanese security official, referring to the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which views Taiwan as a de facto sovereign nation and has prioritized elevating Taipei’s ties with Western powers since taking office in 2016.
The candidate for DPP, Vice President Lai Ching-te, is currently leading in the polls, and is openly loathed by Chinese officials.
Lai is ahead of two other candidates – Hou Yu-ih from the Kuomintang party and Ko Wen-je from the Taiwan People’s Party – who are seen as favoring closer relations with Beijing.
Among the different strategies deployed by Beijing, Taiwan believes China’s cognitive warfare operations – which included spreading disinformation in Taiwan and magnifying talking points that favor China-friendly candidates – are the most sophisticated, multiple officials said at a closed-door briefing on security affairs attended by CNN.
Besides operating content farms and fake accounts on social media, the officials alleged that China’s information operations are multifaceted.
Other tactics used by Beijing included working with private companies to impersonate genuine news websites, handpicking soundbites that fit Beijing’s narratives from Taiwanese television programs and repackaging them into short social media videos, and illicitly funding small news organizations in Taiwan that mostly report on local livelihood issues but also occasionally post content that cast doubts toward candidates unfavorable to Beijing.
One piece of disinformation highlighted by officials was a recent rumor that Hsiao Bi-khim – the DPP’s vice-presidential candidate and until recently Taiwan’s top representative in Washington — is a US citizen.
Fact-checking reports, including from the Taiwan FactCheck Center – one of the most prominent news verification groups on the island – indicated that while Hsiao used to hold US citizenship, she had renounced it in 2002.
Besides spreading rumors, Beijing has also been exerting pressure on Taiwanese businesses with investments in mainland China to toe the partyline, and luring Taiwanese politicians with discounted trips to mainland cities in an attempt to generate support for candidates lobbying for closer ties to Beijing, the officials claimed.
CNN has reached out to China’s Taiwan Affairs Office for comment.
Local TV news broadcasts local elections amid tensions with China on November 26, 2022 in Taipei, Taiwan.
Annabelle Chih/Getty Images
False flag warnings
China’s attempts to sway Taiwanese voters haven’t always been successful.
Ahead of Taiwan’s first direct presidential election in 1996, Beijing fired missiles toward the island to intimidate voters not to support a candidate championing Taiwan’s separate identity from China. That move backfired spectacularly and the candidate, Lee Teng-hui, swept to a landslide victory.
Outgoing Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, who is from the DPP and cannot run again because of term limits, was frequently the target of angry warnings from Chinese officials. But Taiwanese voters handed her two consecutive terms in 2016 and 2020.
News literacy experts say China’s cognitive warfare operations against Taiwan have long been happening beyond election seasons.
Puma Shen, an associate professor at National Taipei University who specializes in researching disinformation, said researchers can often establish a link between a disinformation campaign and the Chinese authorities by analyzing IP addresses of the accounts that propagate the rumors and whether they are automated.
“China’s public opinion war is often aimed at influencing independent and young voters,” said Shen, who is running to become a legislator with the DPP.
But Taiwanese security officials cautioned that China’s disinformation operations could go beyond undermining trust in the government.
According to a Taiwanese security document obtained and reviewed exclusively by CNN, authorities are investigating an incident in the summer, during which they believed China may be training for a “false flag” operation – one that could be used to justify a future military attack against Taiwan.
The incident took place in July, when a Beijing-friendly Taiwanese newspaper falsely claimed that Washington had ordered Taipei to develop biological weapons that could be used against China’s People’s Liberation Army.
According to the security document, the rumor initially appeared in fabricated “meeting minutes” that claimed to show discussions between senior Taiwanese officials regarding the fictitious project, which was subsequently passed on to a local reporter.
Both Washington and Taipei have refuted the claim that Taiwan was developing biological weapons, and there is no evidence the discussions took place. The Taipei District Prosecutor’s Office subsequently launched an investigation into the journalist over allegations of forgery.
A Taiwanese security official told CNN authorities had high confidence that Beijing was behind the fabricated document, because it contained some terminologies commonly used by the Chinese Communist Party that are unfamiliar to Taiwan.
As the false report generated outrage in mainland China, the Chinese military simultaneously sent more than 100 warplanes into Taiwan’s self-declared air defense identification zone over the next three days – a significantly higher number of incursions than usual.
“We believe this goes beyond just spreading disinformation,” the security official said. “Beijing seems to be practicing how it could use disinformation [to create] an excuse for military action… and target Taiwan [militarily] using a justification that the United States was about to start a war against China.”
The official added that the unusual combination of a disinformation campaign and heightened military activity has raised alarm among Taiwan’s intelligence community that Beijing could be training for a “false flag” operation – and to use the outrage it would generate as justification for a potential future military attack on Taiwan.
China’s Taiwan Affairs Office did not respond to a request from CNN for comment on the fabricated document allegations.
A campaign billboard featuring Foxconn Technology Group founder Terry Gou on a bus in Taipei, Taiwan, on Wednesday, November 1, 2023.
Lam Yik Fei/Bloomberg/Getty Images
News literacy
The growing threat of disinformation – and its potential implications on Taiwan’s democracy – has highlighted the need for effective fact-checking mechanisms in Taiwan to help citizens debunk false information in everyday life.
Chen Pei-huang, a senior journalist at the Taiwan FactCheck Center, said while their newsroom hires about a dozen reporters, they are outnumbered by the vast amount of false rumors circulating online.
“For us, besides simply fact-checking a piece of information, we think it is important to promote media literacy… because if most people have the ability to question the authenticity of a piece of information, then it will be harder for rumors to circulate.”
This is where apps like Auntie Meiyu can help.
Unlike other fact-checking applications, which generally provide an interface for users to manually insert and verify text or a website link, the chatbot can be enabled in group chats or direct messages on Line and has the ability to automatically scan messages and warn of any potentially misleading content.
“A lot of people tell us that it really helps a lot, because sometimes they wouldn’t dare to directly tell their parents or relatives that this kind of information is wrong,” said Cecile Chen, who runs the chatbot under Gogolook, a Taiwanese tech company specializing in call-filtering services. She also emphasized that the chatbot has an apolitical background.
Hsieh, from Taoyuan city, said her elderly relatives now feel embarrassed whenever Auntie Meiyu warns that their messages contain misleading information. As a result, she said, they have learned not to forward every message they get before considering its truthfulness.
“For my elderly relatives… if they can pause and suspect whether a piece of information they received is really accurate, I think this is already great progress for them,” Hsieh said.
As for Chen, the fact-checking journalist, his work goes beyond simply verifying the authenticity of what people see online.
“If we can provide people with accurate information and statistics, the public can learn that while we can disagree on different issues, we must base our opinions on solid evidence,” he said.
CNN · by Eric Cheung · December 16, 2023
9. State Dept.’s Fight Against Disinformation Comes Under Attack
This article illustrates why the US has not and probably cannot be effective in the information environment:
Our government is afraid to conduct aggressive operations to counter disinformation and even more afraid to conduct proactive influence operations because of fear of criticism.
And our government would rather try to deny adversary information dissemination through poorly thought out attempts to stop their information dissemination rather than rely on a superior Amrican message.
Our public and media would rather criticize our government's activities in the information environment rather than support it countering our adversaries operations or support the US conduct of proactive influence operations.
We also no longer have confidence in the broad American narrative that successfully supported the ideological fight of the Cold War.
And lastly, it remains easier to get permission to put a hellfire missile on the forehead of a terrorist than to get permission to put an idea between anyone's ears.
State Dept.’s Fight Against Disinformation Comes Under Attack
By Steven Lee Myers
Dec. 14, 2023
The New York Times · by Steven Lee Myers · December 14, 2023
The Global Engagement Center has become the focus of Republican-led criticism that the U.S. government coerces social media platforms into removing offensive content.
James P. Rubin, the coordinator of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, disputed the allegations that his organization censored Americans’ comments online.Credit...Tayfun Salci/Zuma Press Wire
Dec. 14, 2023
A Republican-led campaign against researchers who study disinformation online has zeroed in on the most prominent American government agency dedicated to countering propaganda and other information operations from terrorists and hostile nations.
The agency, the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, is facing a torrent of accusations in court and in Congress that it has helped the social media giants — including Facebook, YouTube and X — to censor Americans in violation of the First Amendment.
The attorney general of Texas, Ken Paxton, and two conservative digital news outlets last week became the latest plaintiffs to sue the department and its top officials, including Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken. The lawsuit said the center’s work was “one of the most egregious government operations to censor the American press in the history of the nation.”
The center faces a more existential threat in Congress. House Republicans blocked a proposal this month to reauthorize the center, which began in 2011 to counter the propaganda of terrorist groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. A small agency, with a regular staff of 125 people, many of them contractors, and a budget of $61 million, the center coordinates efforts across the government to track and expose propaganda and disinformation from Russia, China and other adversaries. With its mandate set to expire at the end of next year, the center is now operating under a shroud of uncertainty, even though its supporters say there is no evidence to back the charges against it.
If the Republicans hold firm, as a core bloc in the House appear determined to do, the center would disband amid two major regional wars and a wave of elections in 2024, including the U.S. presidential campaign.
James P. Rubin, the center’s coordinator since early this year, disputed the allegations that his organization censored Americans’ comments online. The center’s legal mandate, he said, was to “focus on how foreign adversaries, primarily China and Russia, use information operations and malign interference to manipulate world opinion.”
“What we do not do is examine or analyze the U.S. information space,” he said.
The center’s fate has become enmeshed in a much broader political and legal campaign over free speech and disinformation that has gained enough traction to reach the Supreme Court.
A lawsuit filed last year by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana accused numerous government agencies of cajoling or coercing social media platforms into removing content that spread what officials called false or misleading information about the Covid-19 pandemic, the presidential election of 2020 and other issues.
A federal court ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor in July, temporarily barring government officials from contacting officials with the companies except in matters of law enforcement or national security. An appeals court largely upheld the ruling in September but limited its reach, excluding several agencies from the lower court’s injunction against contacts, the Global Engagement Center among them.
“There is no indication that State Department officials flagged specific content for censorship, suggested policy changes to the platforms or engaged in any similar actions that would reasonably bring their conduct within the scope of the First Amendment’s prohibitions,” wrote a three-judge panel for the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans.
The Global Engagement Center, which is part of the State Department, is facing a torrent of accusations in court and in Congress that it has helped the social media giants to censor Americans.Credit...J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press
The Supreme Court is expected to weigh in next spring on the Missouri case, a decision that could have big ramifications for the government and free speech in the internet era. The campaign against researchers who study the spread of disinformation has already had a chilling effect on universities, think tanks and private companies, which have found themselves smothered by subpoenas and legal costs.
The efforts have been fueled by disclosures of communications between government officials and social media companies. Elon Musk who released a selection of messages after he purchased Twitter, since rebranded as X, called the Global Engagement Center “the worst offender in US government censorship & media manipulation.”
“They are a threat to democracy,” wrote Mr. Musk, who has restored numerous accounts that Twitter had suspended for violating the platform’s guidelines for disinformation, hate speech and other content. (Over the weekend, he allowed the return of Alex Jones, a far-right conspiracy theorist who spent years falsely claiming the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012 was a hoax.)
The Global Engagement Center has faced criticism before — not over censorship, but for having little effect at a time when global propaganda and disinformation has become more pernicious than ever with the rise of social media.
A report by the State Department’s inspector general last year said the center suffered from a sclerotic bureaucracy that limited its ability to manage contractors and failed to create a strategic planning process that could measure its effectiveness. The department accepted the findings and promised to address them, the report said.
Mr. Rubin, who was appointed at the end of last year, has sought to bolster the center’s core mission: challenging disinformation from foreign adversaries intent on undermining American democracy and influence around the world.
In September, the center released a sweeping report that accused China’s Communist Party of using “deceptive and coercive methods” to try to control the global information environment. A month later it released two reports on Russia’s covert influence efforts in South America, including one intended to pre-empt an operation before it got off the ground.
The Global Engagement Center began in 2011 to counter the propaganda of terrorist groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.Credit...Jon Elswick/Associated Press
The center has had regular interactions with the social media companies, but, the appeals court ruled, there is no evidence that its officials coerced or otherwise influenced the platforms. Federal regulations prohibit any agency from engaging in propaganda at home.
“We are not in the business of deciding what is true or not true,” Mr. Rubin said, adding that the center’s role was to identify “the hidden hand” of foreign propaganda.
Since the Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in January, however, the Global Engagement Center has faced numerous subpoenas from a subcommittee investigating the “weaponization of government,” as well as depositions in lawsuits and requests for records under the Freedom of Information Act.
At public hearings, House Republicans have repeatedly threatened not to renew the center’s expiring mandate and have grilled department officials about Americans whose accounts have been suspended. “The onus on you is to change my mind,” Representative Brian Mast, a Republican from Florida, told Daniel Kimmage, the center’s principal deputy coordinator, at a hearing in October.
The Democrats in both houses of Congress and the Republicans in the Senate reached an agreement to extend the center’s mandate as part of the defense authorization act — one of the few pieces of legislation that might actually pass this year — but House Republicans succeeded in stripping the provision out of the broader legislation.
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit filed last week in Texas argued that the department had in effect sidestepped its legal constraints by providing grants to organizations that routinely identify sources of disinformation in public reports and private interactions with social media platforms. The organizations include the Global Disinformation Index, a nonprofit based in London; and NewsGuard, a company in New York.
The two news organizations that joined Texas in filing the suit — The Federalist and The Daily Wire — were both listed by the Global Disinformation Index in a December 2022 report as having a high risk for publishing disinformation. (The New York Times was among those rated as having a minimum risk. The Times’s website, the report said, “was not always free of bias, but it generally avoided targeting language and adversarial narratives.”)
The center’s grant to the group — $100,000 in total — went to a project focused on disinformation in Southeast Asia. But the lawsuit claimed that its support injured the outlets “by starving them of advertising revenue and reducing the circulation of their reporting and speech — all as a direct result of defendants’ unlawful censorship scheme.”
Josh Herr, The Daily Wire’s general counsel, said the outlet might never know “the full extent of the business lost.”
“But this lawsuit is not about quantifying those losses,” he said. “We are not seeking damages. What we are seeking is to protect our rights, and all publishers’ rights, under the First Amendment.”
Nina Jankowicz, a researcher who briefly served as the head of a disinformation advisory board at the Department of Homeland Security last year before controversy scuttled her appointment and the board itself, said the argument that the State Department was responsible for the impact of research it did not finance was absurd.
Ms. Jankowicz said that the campaign to cast efforts to fight disinformation as a form of censorship had proved politically effective even when evidence did not support the claims.
“I think any American, when you hear, ‘Oh, the administration, the White House, is setting up something to censor Americans, even if that has no shred of evidence behind it, your ears are going to prick up,” she said. “And it’s really hard to disprove all that.”
Steven Lee Myers covers misinformation for The Times. He has worked in Washington, Moscow, Baghdad and Beijing, where he contributed to the articles that won the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2021. He is also the author of “The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin.” More about Steven Lee Myers
A version of this article appears in print on , Section B, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Deception Watchdogs Take Fire
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The New York Times · by Steven Lee Myers · December 14, 2023
10. Wrath of God II: To win, Israel must assassinate Hamas leaders everywhere
Recall the history of Israeli operations following the Munich massacre of 1972.
Excerpts:
For a country disproportionately dependent on international goodwill, the US President’s remarks left Israelis feeling increasingly isolated.
In short, Israel is winning on the battlefields of Gaza but losing the long game against Hamas.
This is because Hamas has mastered the art of asymmetrical warfare against Israel. And groups that use unconventional tactics and strategies – such as hijackings, suicide bombings, and deliberate attacks on civilians – against a much larger force also have a quite different concept of victory. To fulfil its genocidal intentions, Hamas does not need to win on the battlefield anytime soon, it need only survive to fight another day.
...
To do so, Israel will have to engage in some asymmetrical warfare of its own. Since its founding, the country has compiled an extensive list of worldwide assassinations, including Nazi-affiliated scientists, Palestinian terrorists, and key figures in Iran’s nuclear program.
The targeted assassinations escalated dramatically following the 1972 Munich Massacre when 11 Israeli athletes and coaches were murdered at the Summer Olympics. Operation Wrath of God was authorized by Prime Minister Golda Meir and conducted by the Mossad. The goal was to track down and assassinate the individuals responsible for the massacre, as well as other Palestinian terrorists involved in the ongoing conflict with Israel.
...
Operation Wrath of God’s success inspired other nations and intelligence agencies to conduct their own targeted assassinations in the global fight against terrorism.
To create a psychology of total defeat among Gaza’s terrorists and their supporters, Israel must focus its time and energy on taking out Hamas’s top leaders – many of whom are residing comfortably in Qatar, Turkey, and Lebanon. In Gaza, Hamas fighters as well as many other residents of the Strip view the likes of Ismail Haniyeh, Khaled Mashal, Saleh al-Aaruri, and Osama Hamdan as rock stars, symbols of the struggle to establish an Islamic state in place of Israel.
Israel’s rogues gallery of detractors will recoil at such an expansion of the war beyond Gaza’s borders. While they are entitled to their outrage, they may want to consider that had Washington reacted proportionally to the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, the United States would have limited its response to sinking a couple of Japanese battleships. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were brutal, but they also freed millions of people from a vicious Japanese occupation.
For the right cause, such as a country’s survival, engaging in unconventional warfare is not just an option but an obligation.
Wrath of God II: To win, Israel must assassinate Hamas leaders everywhere
jwire.com.au · by Gidon Ben-Zvi · December 17, 2023
Browse > Home / Featured Articles / Wrath of God II: To win, Israel must assassinate Hamas leaders everywhere – J-Wire
December 17, 2023 by Gidon Ben-Zvi
Israel’s military achievements against Hamas are impressive. As part of its campaign to destroy the terrorist group, Israel has reportedly struck over 22,000 targets in the Gaza Strip and has killed some 7,000 fighters since the war broke out.
Gidon Ben-Zvii
Since Israel’s land campaign began, the IDF has discovered over eight hundred tunnels, many of which were located near or inside educational institutions, kindergartens, mosques, and playgrounds. The Israel Defence Forces destroyed approximately five hundred of these shafts. Some of the underground tunnels had linked Gaza to Israeli border communities. On October 7, heavily armed Hamas terrorists used such subterranean pathways to infiltrate Israel on their way to murdering 1,200 people, wounding thousands, and kidnapping over two hundred men, women, and children.
But while the Israeli military is striking a mighty blow against the rulers of Gaza, the tide seems to be turning in Hamas’s favour.
Rockets continue to be launched from Gaza at Israeli population centres. The amount of rocket fire has decreased, but it is impossible to know how depleted Hamas’s stockpiles are. The terrorists may be biding their time until they launch another massive salvo, possibly during the next inevitable ceasefire – when Israel would be at its most vulnerable.
Another grim truth is that while the IDF has killed thousands of Hamas fighters, the majority of the group’s estimated 30,000-strong military wing – not to mention its many civilian supporters in Gaza – remains intact.
Two other developments this week are conspiring against Israel. The United Nations General Assembly overwhelmingly passed a nonbinding resolution demanding an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza and the immediate, unconditional release of all hostages.
Meanwhile, President Joe Biden lashed out at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli government over their opposition to a two-state solution. Biden also issued a dire warning: Israel was losing international support due to its “indiscriminate bombing” in Gaza.
For a country disproportionately dependent on international goodwill, the US President’s remarks left Israelis feeling increasingly isolated.
In short, Israel is winning on the battlefields of Gaza but losing the long game against Hamas.
This is because Hamas has mastered the art of asymmetrical warfare against Israel. And groups that use unconventional tactics and strategies – such as hijackings, suicide bombings, and deliberate attacks on civilians – against a much larger force also have a quite different concept of victory. To fulfil its genocidal intentions, Hamas does not need to win on the battlefield anytime soon, it need only survive to fight another day.
As such, the only way to prevent another October 7 massacre from occurring is for Israel to beat Hamas so decisively that the Gaza-based terrorists would be convinced that they can never defeat Israel – no matter how long they try.
To do so, Israel will have to engage in some asymmetrical warfare of its own. Since its founding, the country has compiled an extensive list of worldwide assassinations, including Nazi-affiliated scientists, Palestinian terrorists, and key figures in Iran’s nuclear program.
The targeted assassinations escalated dramatically following the 1972 Munich Massacre when 11 Israeli athletes and coaches were murdered at the Summer Olympics. Operation Wrath of God was authorized by Prime Minister Golda Meir and conducted by the Mossad. The goal was to track down and assassinate the individuals responsible for the massacre, as well as other Palestinian terrorists involved in the ongoing conflict with Israel.
As a result, at least eleven members of Black September and the PLO were located and killed for their involvement in the planning and execution of the terror attack.
Operation Wrath of God’s success inspired other nations and intelligence agencies to conduct their own targeted assassinations in the global fight against terrorism.
To create a psychology of total defeat among Gaza’s terrorists and their supporters, Israel must focus its time and energy on taking out Hamas’s top leaders – many of whom are residing comfortably in Qatar, Turkey, and Lebanon. In Gaza, Hamas fighters as well as many other residents of the Strip view the likes of Ismail Haniyeh, Khaled Mashal, Saleh al-Aaruri, and Osama Hamdan as rock stars, symbols of the struggle to establish an Islamic state in place of Israel.
Israel’s rogues gallery of detractors will recoil at such an expansion of the war beyond Gaza’s borders. While they are entitled to their outrage, they may want to consider that had Washington reacted proportionally to the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, the United States would have limited its response to sinking a couple of Japanese battleships. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were brutal, but they also freed millions of people from a vicious Japanese occupation.
For the right cause, such as a country’s survival, engaging in unconventional warfare is not just an option but an obligation.
11. SBU, AFU behind joint attack on Morozovsk air base in Rostov region - sources
SBU, AFU behind joint attack on Morozovsk air base in Rostov region - sources
ukrinform.net
An overnight attack on the Morozovsk air base in Russia's Rostov region was a joint special operation carried out by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) and the Armed Forces of Ukraine (SFU), well-informed sources told Ukrinform.
According to the sources, the airfield was an important target, as it hosts the 559th fighter aviation regiment of the Russian Aerospace Force.
The sources said that there were up to 20 Su-34 aircraft, three radars and other equipment at the airfield at the time of the attack.
"The airfield was attacked with drones. Although the Russian Federation has already traditionally managed to claim that all UAVs were shot down, in reality the Service, together with the AFU, caused significant damage to the enemy's equipment," the sources said.
Russia claimed earlier that 33 Ukrainian drones attacked three Russian regions on the night of December 16 to 17.
Photo from social media
ukrinform.net
12. Ukrainian special ops commandos are freelancing top-secret sabotage missions, poisonings, and assassinations in Russia, says military source
Ukrainian special ops commandos are freelancing top-secret sabotage missions, poisonings, and assassinations in Russia, says military source
Business Insider · by Lindsay Dodgson
Military & Defense
Lindsay Dodgson
2023-12-17T16:13:12Z
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A military operation at sunset.
guvendemi/Getty Images
- Ukrainian commandos are freelancing sabotage missions in Russia, a source told The Times of London.
- They are trained to carry out sabotage missions, poisonings, assassinations, and diversions.
- They dress in civilian clothes, carry fake documents, and use only their steps to orient themselves.
Ukrainian special ops commandos are freelancing sabotage missions in Russia, a military source told The Times of London.
The officer, named only as Mykola, told The Times operatives are being trained to carry out sabotage, poisonings, assassinations, and diversions behind enemy lines.
They dress in civilian clothes, carry fake documents, and use only their steps to orient themselves, he said.
The missions are so secret even Mykola's superiors don't know about them, he said. The need for top-secret assignments is partly due to dwindling funds making their way to Ukraine from the EU and the US, according to The Times.
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"It's off the books," Mykola told The Times at his classified training camp's base. "The government is too slow and bureaucratic. We need to train people fast and get them ready. There are no government specialized training camps for the kind of operations needed to fight this war."
Ukraine is also struggling to keep up with the sheer amount of Russian soldiers and Russia's drone army, which outweighs them by 7 to 1. Mykola acknowledged this, believing these missions give Ukraine an edge.
"We can only compete in surgical techniques," he said. "Technology and our entrepreneurial mindset will defeat Russian meat and steel."
Mykola also explained the optimum conditions for a cross-border mission into Russia, such as low cloud that hides the moon and stars.
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"They will dress in civilian clothes, carry fake papers, no phones, use a compass, a map and count their steps to orient themselves," he explained.
Most of the missions are "too low-key" to explain, Mykola added, "mainly because the Kremlin is keen to keep quiet about the humiliation of Ukrainian special ops commandos roaming around Russian countryside."
But he did admit that "men like him" were responsible for the drone attacks on the Kremlin in May 2023.
"We also have Russians inside Russia who help us, people who see how senseless this war is and hate the criminal regime," he said.
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Mykola also criticized missions of other military operatives in the Ukrainian army, such as a daring jet ski raid on Crimea, which was caught on video, calling it "a complete waste of time and resources."
"We call the people who carried it out Spielberg brigades," he said. "They went, they saw, they filmed.
"As usual Kyrylo was more interested in sending people out to make promotional films than serious operations."
Meanwhile, the Kyiv Post reported that anti-Putin dissidents fighting for Ukraine in the Liberty of Russia Legion had launched a new incursion into Russian territory on Sunday. According to sources in the Ukrainian intelligence community, there was renewed fighting in the Belgorod region.
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"Russia is unable to control security within its borders. Putin's security forces cannot ensure the safety of their citizens," the source said to Kyiv Post.
The Legion was last active in the summer, but little has been heard of the outfit since.
Business Insider · by Lindsay Dodgson
13. The mystery of the missing binder: How a collection of raw Russian intelligence disappeared under Trump
Political attack or a real issue?
The mystery of the missing binder: How a collection of raw Russian intelligence disappeared under Trump
CNN
December 15, 2023
Washington (CNN) — A binder containing highly classified information related to Russian election interference went missing at the end of Donald Trump’s presidency, raising alarms among intelligence officials that some of the most closely guarded national security secrets from the US and its allies could be exposed, sources familiar with the matter told CNN.
Its disappearance, which has not been previously reported, was so concerning that intelligence officials briefed Senate Intelligence Committee leaders last year about the missing materials and the government’s efforts to retrieve them, the sources said.
In the two-plus years since Trump left office, the missing intelligence does not appear to have been found.
The binder contained raw intelligence the US and its NATO allies collected on Russians and Russian agents, including sources and methods that informed the US government’s assessment that Russian President Vladimir Putin sought to help Trump win the 2016 election, sources tell CNN.
The intelligence was so sensitive that lawmakers and congressional aides with top secret security clearances were able to review the material only at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, where their work scrutinizing it was itself kept in a locked safe.
CIA Headquarters at Langley, Virginia (David Burnett/Newsmakers/Getty Images)
The binder was last seen at the White House during Trump’s final days in office. The former president had ordered it brought there so he could declassify a host of documents related to the FBI’s Russia investigation. Under the care of then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, the binder was scoured by Republican aides working to redact the most sensitive information so it could be declassified and released publicly.
The Russian intelligence was just a small part of the collection of documents in the binder, described as being 10 inches thick and containing reams of information about the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia. But the raw intelligence on Russia was among its most sensitive classified materials, and top Trump administration officials repeatedly tried to block the former president from releasing the documents.
The day before leaving office, Trump issued an order declassifying most of the binder’s contents, setting off a flurry of activity in the final 48 hours of his presidency. Multiple copies of the redacted binder were created inside the White House, with plans to distribute them across Washington to Republicans in Congress and right-wing journalists.
Instead, copies initially sent out were frantically retrieved at the direction of White House lawyers demanding additional redactions.
Just minutes before Joe Biden was inaugurated, Meadows rushed to the Justice Department to hand-deliver a redacted copy for a last review. Years later, the Justice Department has yet to release all of the documents, despite Trump’s declassification order. Additional copies with varying levels of redactions ended up at the National Archives.
But an unredacted version of the binder containing the classified raw intelligence went missing amid the chaotic final hours of the Trump White House. The circumstances surrounding its disappearance remain shrouded in mystery.
US officials repeatedly declined to discuss any government efforts to locate the binder or confirm that any intelligence was missing.
The binder was not among the classified items found in last year’s search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, according to a US official familiar with the matter, who said the FBI was not looking specifically for intelligence related to Russia when it obtained a search warrant for the former president’s residence last year.
Mark Meadows on January 20, 2021 (Alex Edelman/AFP/Getty Images)
There’s also no reference to the binder or the missing Russian intelligence in the June indictment of Trump over the mishandling of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.
One theory has emerged about the binder’s whereabouts.
Cassidy Hutchinson, one of Meadows’ top aides, testified to Congress and wrote in her memoir that she believes Meadows took home an unredacted version of the binder. She said it had been kept in Meadows’ safe and that she saw him leave with it from the White House.
“I am almost positive it went home with Mr. Meadows,” Hutchinson told the January 6 committee in closed-door testimony, according to transcripts released last year.
A lawyer for Meadows, however, strongly denies that Meadows mishandled any classified information at the White House, saying any suggestion Meadows was responsible for classified information going missing was “flat wrong.”
“Mr. Meadows was keenly aware of and adhered to requirements for the proper handling of classified material, any such material that he handled or was in his possession has been treated accordingly and any suggestion that he is responsible for any missing binder or other classified information is flat wrong,” Meadows attorney George Terwilliger said in a statement to CNN. “Anyone and any entity suggesting that he is responsible for anything missing does not have facts and should exercise great care before making false allegations.”
In the years since Trump left office, his allies have pursued the redacted binder so they can release it publicly, suing the Justice Department and the National Archives earlier this year. And Trump’s lawyers are now seeking access to the classified intelligence from the 2016 election assessment as they prepare for his defense against charges stemming from efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
This account of the classified binder’s journey to the White House, how its trail went cold once Trump left office, and the lingering questions it raises is based on interviews with more than a dozen sources familiar with the matter, all of whom requested anonymity to discuss the sensitive issue.
The CIA, the FBI, the National Archives and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment for this story. A spokeswoman for the Senate Intelligence Committee declined comment. A lawyer for Hutchinson also declined comment. A spokesman for Trump did not respond to a request for comment.
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‘A safe within a safe’ at the CIA
The missing binder is at the heart of one of the most contentious fights waged behind the scenes by then-President Trump. Despite fierce opposition from his own national security officials, Trump spent years trying to declassify material that he said would prove his claims the FBI’s Russia probe into his campaign was a hoax.
The binder’s origins trace back to 2018, when Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee, led by Chairman Devin Nunes, compiled a classified report alleging the Obama administration skewed intelligence in its assessment that Putin had worked to help Trump in the 2016 election.
The GOP report, which criticized the intelligence community’s “tradecraft,” scrutinized the highly classified intelligence from 2016 that informed the assessment Putin and Russia sought to assist Trump’s campaign. House Republicans cut a deal with the CIA in which the committee brought in a safe for its documents that was then placed inside a CIA vault – a setup that prompted some officials to characterize it as a “turducken” or a “safe within a safe.”
Republican and Democratic sources disagreed on the substance of the report. GOP sources familiar with its details said the report argued the intelligence community assessment was skewed by senior Obama administration officials to exclude intelligence suggesting that Russia actually wanted Hillary Clinton to win in 2016, while overemphasizing the significance of intelligence indicating that Russia preferred Trump.
Democratic sources, however, say the Republican allegations were overblown. One source said the intelligence referenced in the report actually proved the opposite of what Republicans were claiming – saying it showed that Russia was meddling in US elections and seeking to personally manipulate Trump and help him win.
The Democratic view was corroborated in 2020 by the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee, which concluded that the 2016 assessment was a “sound intelligence product” and that analysts were under no political pressure to reach specific conclusions, undercutting Nunes’ allegations.
Nunes, who left Congress to become CEO of Trump's media company, provided a statement in response to questions mocking CNN for focusing on "secret Trump binders.”
National security leaders resist
Nunes’ 2018 report became one of many documents connected to the Russia investigation that Trump and his allies wanted to make public.
But Trump’s national security leaders, particularly CIA Director Gina Haspel, vehemently resisted public release of the report and other Russia documents, fearing the exposure of sources and methods. The disagreement followed Haspel throughout her tenure in the Trump administration.
Trump privately made clear that he wanted to get his hands on the GOP report. During one exchange in October 2020, Trump suggested he should personally visit CIA headquarters and demand access to it, according to a source familiar with the conversation.
In the leadup to the 2020 election, two Trump intelligence leaders, acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell and his successor, John Ratcliffe, declassified some documents and intelligence related to Russia and the FBI. But the House GOP report remained classified.
Trump considered firing Haspel after the election as he pushed to release more information about the Russia investigation. At least one Trump adviser floated replacing Haspel with Kash Patel, an aide to Nunes in 2018 when the GOP report was drafted. In 2019, Patel went to work for Trump on the National Security Council before becoming chief of staff to the acting defense secretary in Trump’s final months.
In December 2020, then-Attorney General William Barr worked with Ratcliffe to dissuade Trump from declassifying at least a subset of the intelligence related to Russia, arguing that it would damage national security, sources familiar with the matter said. Other current and former officials say Barr and aides in his office also pushed the FBI and the intelligence agencies to satisfy Trump’s demands and make public more of the information, pressure that continued after Barr left office.
At one point after the election, Haspel, FBI Director Christopher Wray and NSA Director Gen. Paul Nakasone trekked to Capitol Hill on short notice to speak to congressional intelligence leaders about their deep concerns of Trump possibly releasing the material, sources said.
Secrets arrive at the White House
On December 19, four days after Barr announced his resignation, Nunes met with Meadows at the White House to discuss how to declassify documents related to the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign and Russia, Hutchinson testified to Congress.
Eleven days later, sources say that a copy of the GOP report was brought to the White House as one part of the massive binder of documents on Russia and the FBI investigation. Hutchinson told the January 6 committee she signed for the documents when they arrived at the White House.
Over the next few days, Meadows discussed the documents with then-White House Counsel Pat Cipollone and also met with Republican staffers from the House Intelligence Committee to review them, according to Hutchinson.
In his book about his time as Trump’s chief of staff, Meadows wrote that Trump demanded the documents be brought to the White House. “I personally went through every page, to make sure that the President's declassification would not inadvertently disclose sources and methods,” he wrote.
Along with the GOP report scrutinizing the intelligence on Russia, the binder’s contents included the FBI’s problematic foreign intelligence surveillance warrants on a Trump campaign adviser from 2017; interview notes with Christopher Steele, author of the infamous dossier on Trump and Russia; FBI reports from a confidential human source related to the Russia investigation; and internal FBI and DOJ text messages and emails, among other documents.
The version of the binder Hutchinson signed for was kept in Meadows’ office safe, she testified, except when it was being worked on by congressional staffers.
“He wanted to keep that one close-hold. He didn't want that one to be widely known about,” Hutchinson told the January 6 committee. “I just know Mr. Meadows. He wouldn't have had that one copied unless he did it on his own, but I don't think he knows how to use a copy machine.”
In her book, Hutchinson recalled a moment when Meadows asked her to retrieve the binder and complained when she told him it was in the safe. “I told you not to let it out of your sight. It should have been in your desk drawer,” Meadows told her.
“My desk drawer, Mark, is not where classified documents belong. It was in the safe. You have nothing to worry about,” Hutchinson writes that she responded.
Once the committee aides completed their proposed redactions, additional copies were made at the White House so the binder could be declassified and released.
A botched rollout
Meanwhile, at the FBI, top officials scrambled to protect the most sensitive details and limit the damage of what they felt were insufficient redactions.
“Any further declassification would reveal sensitive intelligence collection techniques, damage foreign partner relations, jeopardize United States Intelligence Community equities, potentially violate court orders limiting the dissemination of FISA information … (and) endanger confidential human sources,” a top FBI official wrote to White House officials, according to a source who read portions of the letter to CNN.
On January 19, 2021, Trump issued a declassification order for a “binder of materials related to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation.”
The White House had planned to distribute the declassified documents around Washington, including to Trump-allied conservative journalist John Solomon. But Trump’s order did not lead to its release – and earlier this year Solomon sued the Justice Department and National Archives for access to the documents.
His court filings provide colorful details of the last-minute scramble.
Solomon claims that on the night of January 19, Meadows invited him to the White House to review several hundred pages of the declassified binder. One of Solomon’s staffers was even allowed to leave the White House with the declassified records in a paper bag.
“Mr. Solomon’s staff began setting up a scanning operation for the complete set of documents to be released the next morning,” Solomon’s attorneys wrote in a court filing last month. “But as they set up the equipment, they received a call from the White House asking that the documents — still under embargo — be returned because the White House wished to make some additional redactions to unclassified information under the Privacy Act.”
Hutchinson writes in her book that Cipollone told her after 10:30 p.m. on January 19 to have Meadows retrieve the binders that had been given to Solomon and a right-wing columnist. “The Crossfire Hurricane binders are a complete disaster. They’re still full of classified information,” Hutchinson writes that Cipollone told her. “Those binders need to come back to the White House. Like, now.”
The documents were returned the next morning, on January 20, after they were picked up by a Secret Service agent in a Whole Foods grocery bag, according to Hutchinson.
‘How quickly can we get this to DOJ?’
On the morning of January 20, the final day of the Trump presidency, Meadows rushed to the Justice Department to turn over a copy of the binder Trump ordered declassified for a final review.
Hutchinson told the committee that sometime between 11 a.m. and 11:30 a.m. that morning, Meadows emerged from the White House in a hurry to deliver a copy of the binder to the Justice Department.
Hutchinson recalled Meadows asking his security detail, “How quickly can we get this to DOJ?”
Meadows also delivered a memo instructing the Justice Department to conduct its own privacy review of the bulk of the documents Trump had declassified before they were released.
“I am returning the bulk of the binder of declassified documents to the Department of Justice (including all that appear to have a potential to raise privacy concerns) with the instruction that the Department must expeditiously conduct a Privacy Act review under the standards that the Department of Justice would normally apply, redact material appropriately, and release the remaining material with redactions applied,” Meadows wrote in the memo.
Solomon’s lawyers contend in a legal filing that Meadows “promised Mr. Solomon that he would receive the revised binder. However, this never occurred.”
As for the unredacted version of the binder, Hutchinson writes in her book that she saw Meadows get into his limo the night of January 19 with the “original Crossfire Hurricane binder tucked under his arm.”
“What the hell is Mark doing with the unredacted Crossfire Hurricane binder?” Hutchinson recalled asking herself as Meadows drove away.
When she looked in Meadows’ safe for the last time before she left the White House, Hutchinson said it was gone.
“I don't think that would have been something that he would have destroyed,” Hutchinson told the January 6 committee. “It was not returned anywhere, and it never left our office to go internally anywhere. It stayed in our safe, in the office safe most of the time.”
Terwilliger, an attorney for Meadows, disputes Hutchinson’s account, saying Meadows did not mishandle any classified documents at the White House.
The hunt continues
Even after Trump left office, the hunt for the binder continued on multiple fronts.
Roughly a year after Trump left office, Senate Intelligence Committee leaders were briefed by intelligence officials about the disappearance of the raw Russian intelligence contained in the unredacted version of the binder and the government’s efforts to retrieve it, sources told CNN.
At the same time, Trump’s allies sought to regain access to the declassified version of the binder that Meadows had taken to the Justice Department.
In June 2022, Trump named Solomon and Patel as his representatives to the National Archives, who were authorized to view the former president’s records. Solomon’s lawsuit included email correspondence showing how Solomon and Patel tried to get access to the binder as soon as they were named as Trump’s representatives.
“There is a binder of documents from the Russia investigation that the President declassified with an order in his last few days in office. It's about 10 inches thick,” Solomon wrote in June 2022 to Gary Stern, the Archives’ general counsel. “We'd like to make a set of copies -- digital or paper format -- of every document that was declassified by his order and included in the binder.”
The National Archives, Washington, DC (Education Images/Universal Images Group/Getty Images)
In February and March, the FBI released under the Freedom of Information Act several hundred pages of heavily redacted internal records from its Russia investigation, following lawsuits from conservative groups seeking documents from the probe.
The Justice Department said in a June filing seeking to dismiss Solomon’s lawsuit that the FBI’s document release had fulfilled Meadows’ request for a Privacy Act review, noting that it had “resulted in the posting of most of the binder” on the FBI’s FOIA website.
Solomon responded claiming the documents that the FBI released were only “a small part of the binder’s contents with substantial additional redactions.”
Last July, Meadows said in an interview with Solomon that he turned over the documents to the Justice Department out of an “abundance of caution.”
“We gave them those declassified documents -- I want to stress they were declassified documents -- to do a final redaction for some of that personal information, with the instruction that they were to go ahead and disseminate those,” Meadows said. “We expected fully that they would do that, at the most a few days -- but here we are a few years later.”
Update: This story has been updated to provide a more detailed description of conservative journalist John Solomon.
CNN
14. The jungle between Colombia and Panama becomes a highway for migrants from around the world
The jungle between Colombia and Panama becomes a highway for migrants from around the world
AP · December 17, 2023
MEXICO CITY (AP) — Once nearly impenetrable for migrants heading north from Latin America, the jungle between Colombia and Panama this year became a speedy but still treacherous highway for hundreds of thousands of people from around the world.
Driven by economic crises, government repression and violence, migrants from China to Haiti decided to risk three days of deep mud, rushing rivers and bandits. Enterprising locals offered guides and porters, set up campsites and sold supplies to migrants, using color-coded wristbands to track who had paid for what.
Enabled by social media and Colombian organized crime, more than 506,000 migrants — nearly two-thirds Venezuelans — had crossed the Darien jungle by mid-December, double the 248,000 who set a record the previous year. Before last year, the record was barely 30,000 in 2016.
Dana Graber Ladek, the Mexico chief for the United Nation’s International Organization for Migration, said migration flows through the region this year were “historic numbers that we have never seen.”
A wooden migrant boat lies grounded on a reef alongside mangroves, at Harry Harris Park in Tavernier, Fla., Jan. 19, 2023. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell, File)
A migrant gestures to Texas National Guards standing behind razor wire on the bank of the Rio Grande river, seen from Matamoros, Mexico, May 11, 2023. (AP Photo/Fernando Llano, File)
It wasn’t only in Latin America.
The number of migrants crossing the Mediterranean or the Atlantic on small boats to reach Europe this year has surged. More than 250,000 irregular arrivals were registered in 2023, according to the European Commission.
A significant increase from recent years, the number remains well below levels seen in the 2015 refugee crisis, when more than 1 million people landed in Europe, most fleeing wars in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere. Still, the rise has fed anti-migrant sentiment and laid the groundwork for tougher legislation.
Earlier this month, the British government announced tough new immigration rules aimed at reducing the number of people able to move to the U.K. each year by hundreds of thousands. Authorized immigration to the U.K. set a record in 2022 with nearly 750,000.
A week later, French opposition lawmakers rejected an immigration bill from President Emmanuel Macron without even debating it. It had been intended to make it easier for France to expel foreigners considered undesirable. Far-right politicians alleged the bill would have increased the number of migrants coming to the country, while migrant advocates said it threatened the rights of asylum-seekers.
In Washington, the debate has shifted from efforts early in the year to open new legal pathways largely toward measures to keep migrants out as Republicans try to take advantage of the Biden administration’s push for more aid to Ukraine to tighten the U.S. southern border.
The U.S. started the year opening limited spaces to Venezuelans — as well as Cubans, Nicaraguans and Haitians — in January to enter legally for two years with a sponsor, while expelling those who didn’t qualify to Mexico. Their numbers dropped somewhat for a time before climbing again with renewed vigor.
Clothing and garbage litter the trail where migrants have been trekking across the Darien Gap from Colombia to Panama in hopes of eventually reaching the United States, May 10, 2023. (AP Photo/Ivan Valencia, File)
Venezuelan Alexander Mercado had only been back in his country for a month after losing his job in Peru before he and his partner decided to set off for the United States with their infant son.
Venezuela’s minimum wage was the equivalent of about $4 a month then, while 2.2 pounds (a kilogram) of beef was about $5, said Angelis Flores, his 28-year-old wife.
“Imagine how someone with a salary of $4 a month survives,” she said.
Mercado, 27, and Flores were already on their way when in September the U.S. announced it was granting temporary legal status to more than 470,000 Venezuelans already in the country. Weeks later, the Biden administration said it was resuming deportation flights to the South American nation.
Mercado and Flores hiked the well-trod trail through the jungle, managing to push through in three days. Flores and their son, in particular, got very sick. She believes they were infected by the contaminated water they drank along the way.
“There was a body in the middle of river and the ‘zamuros’, those black birds, were eating it and picking it apart … all of that was running in the river,” she said.
For Mercado and Flores, the journey accelerated once they left the jungle. In October, Panama and Costa Rica announced a deal to speed migrants across their countries. Panama bused migrants to a center in Costa Rica where they were held until they could buy a bus ticket to Nicaragua.
Nicaragua also seemed to opt for speeding migrants through its territory. Mercado said they crossed on buses in a day.
Migrants fill the top of a northbound freight train in Irapuato, Mexico, Sept. 23, 2023. (AP Photo/Marco Ugarte, File)
After discovering that Nicaragua had lax visa requirements, Cubans and Haitians poured into Nicaragua on charter flights, purchasing roundtrip tickets they never intended. Citizens of African nations made circuitous series of connecting flights through Africa, Europe and Latin America to arrive in Managua to start travelling overland toward the United States, avoiding the Darien.
In Honduras, Mercado and Flores were given a pass from authorities allowing them five days to transit the country.
Adam Isacson, an analyst tracking migration at the Washington Office on Latin America, said that Panama, Costa Rica and Honduras grant migrants legal status while they’re transiting the countries, which have limited resources, and by letting migrants pass legally the countries make them less vulnerable to extortion from authorities and smugglers.
Then there are Guatemala and Mexico, which Isacson called the “we’re-going-to-make-a-show-of-blocking-you countries” attempting to score points with the U.S. government.
For many that has meant spending money to hire smugglers to cross Guatemala and Mexico, or exposing themselves to repeated extortion attempts.
Migrants cross the Rio Grande river on an inflatable mattress to the U.S., from Matamoros, Mexico, May 9, 2023. (AP Photo/Fernando Llano, File)
Mercado didn’t hire a smuggler and paid the price. It was “very difficult to get through Guatemala,” he said. “The police kept taking money.”
But that was just a taste of what was to come.
Standing outside a Mexico City shelter with their son on a recent afternoon, Flores recounted all of the countries they had traversed.
“But they don’t rob you as much, extort you as much, send you back like when you arrive here to Mexico,” she said. “Here the real nightmare starts, because as soon as you enter they start taking a lot of your money.”
Mexico’s immigration system was thrown into chaos on March 27, when migrants held in a detention center in the border city Juarez, across from El Paso, Texas, set mattresses on fire inside their cell in apparent protest. The highly flammable foam mattresses filled the cell with thick smoke in an instant. Guards did not open the cell and 40 migrants died.
The immigration agency’s director was among several officials charged with crimes ranging from negligence to homicide. The agency closed 33 of its smaller detention centers while it conducted a review.
Unable to detain many migrants, Mexico instead circulated them around the country, using brief, repeat detentions, each an opportunity for extortion, said Gretchen Kuhner, director of IMUMI, a nongovernmental legal services organization. Advocates called it the “politica de desgaste” or wearing down policy.
Mercado and Flores made it all the way to Matamoros, across the border from Brownsville, Texas, where they were detained, held for a night in an immigration facility in the border city of Reynosa and then flown the next morning 650 miles (1046 kilometers) south to Villahermosa.
There they were released, but without their cell phones, shoelaces and money. Mercado had to wait for his brother to send $100 so they could start trying to make their way back to Mexico City through an indirect route that required them to travel by truck, motorbike and even horse.
In late November, they had just made it back to Mexico City again. This time Mercado was unequivocal: They would not leave Mexico City until the U.S. government gave them an appointment to request asylum at a border port of entry.
“It is really hard to make it back here again,” he said. “If they manage to send me back again I don’t know what I would do.”
__
AP writers María Verza in Mexico City, Juan Zamorano in Panama City and Renata Brito in Barcelona contributed to this report.
AP · December 17, 2023
15. Federal Reserve on cusp of what some thought impossible: Defeating inflation without steep recession
Please don't jinx us with an article like this and interrupt the drop in inflation or cause a recession.
Federal Reserve on cusp of what some thought impossible: Defeating inflation without steep recession
AP · by CHRISTOPHER RUGABER · December 16, 2023
WASHINGTON (AP) — It was the most painful inflation Americans had experienced since 1981, when “The Dukes of Hazzard” and “The Jeffersons” were topping the TV charts. Yet the Federal Reserve now seems on the verge of defeating it — and without the surge in unemployment and the deep recession that many economists had predicted would accompany it.
Inflation has been falling more or less steadily since peaking in June of last year at 9.1%. And when the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge for November is reported next week, it’s likely to show that in the past six months, annual inflation actually dipped just below the Fed’s target of 2%, economists at UBS estimate.
The cost of goods — such as used cars, furniture and appliances — has fallen for six straight months. Compared with a year ago, goods prices are unchanged, held down by improved global supply chains.
Housing and rental costs, a major driver of inflation, are growing more slowly. Wage growth has cooled, too, though it still tops inflation. Milder wage growth tends to ease pressure on restaurants, hotels and other employers to increase their prices to cover their labor costs.
“I think it’s really good to see the progress that we’re making,” Chair Jerome Powell said at a news conference Wednesday after the Fed’s latest policy meeting. “If you look at the ... six-month measures, you see very low numbers.”
On Friday, the Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan agency, estimated that inflation will drop to 2.1% by the end of next year.
There will likely be bumps on the road toward getting inflation fully under control, officials have said. Powell insisted that “no one is declaring victory.” And he reiterated that the central bank wants to see further evidence of falling inflation before it would feel confident that it is sustainably headed back to the 2% target.
Yet many economists, normally a cautious lot, are now willing to declare that inflation is nearly back under control after two-plus years in which it imposed hardships on millions of American households.
“It appears that inflation has returned to 2%,” said Tim Duy, chief economist at SGH Macroeconomics. “The Fed looks like it has won that battle.”
Prices spikes are also moderating overseas, with both the Bank of England and European Central Bank keeping their benchmark interest rates unchanged this week. Though inflation is still at 4.6% in the United Kingdom, it has fallen to 2.4% in the 20 countries that use the euro currency.
With inflation cooling, Powell said the 19 officials on the Fed’s policy setting committee had discussed the prospects for rate cuts at this week’s meeting. The officials also projected that the Fed will cut its key interest rate three times next year.
That stance marked a drastic shift from the rate-hiking campaign the Fed began in March 2022. Beginning then, the central bank raised its benchmark rate 11 times, from near zero to roughly 5.4%, its highest level in 22 years, to try to slow borrowing, spending and inflation. The result was much higher costs for mortgages, auto loans, business borrowing and other forms of credit.
Powell’s suddenly more optimistic words, and the Fed’s rate-cut projections, sent stock market indexes soaring this week. Wall Street traders now foresee a roughly 80% likelihood that the first rate cut will occur when the Fed meets in March, and they are forecasting a total of six cuts in 2024.
On Friday, John Williams, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and a top lieutenant of Powell’s, sought to pour some cold water on those expectations. Speaking on CNBC, Williams said it was “premature to be even thinking” about whether to cut rates in March. But he also mentioned that his forecast was for inflation to move down “sustainably” to 2%.
The week’s events represented a departure from just two weeks ago, when Powell had said it was “premature” to say whether the Fed had raised its key rate high enough to fully conquer high inflation. On Wednesday, he suggested that the Fed was almost certainly done with rate increases.
Recent data appeared to have helped shift Powell’s thinking. On Wednesday, a measure of wholesale prices came in lower than economists had expected. Some of those figures are used to compile the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge, which, as a result, is expected to show much lower inflation numbers next week.
Powell said some Fed officials had even updated their economic projections on Wednesday, not long before they were issued, in light of the lower-than-expected wholesale price report.
“The speed at which inflation has fallen has been like an earthquake at the Fed,” Duy wrote in a note to clients Wednesday.
And yet in the meantime, the economy keeps growing, defying widespread fears from a year ago that 2023 would bring a recession, a consequence of the much higher borrowing rates the Fed engineered. A report on retail sales Thursday showed that consumers grew their spending last month, likely encouraged by increased discounting that will also lower inflation. Such trends are supporting the growing belief that the economy will achieve an elusive “soft landing,” in which inflation is defeated without an accompanying recession.
“We think the Fed cannot believe its luck: We are back to ‘immaculate disinflation,’ ” Krishna Guha, an economic analyst at investment bank Evercore ISI, wrote in a client note.
Economists credit the Fed’s rapid rate hikes for contributing to inflation’s decline. In addition, a recovery in global supply chains and a jump in the number of Americans — and recent immigrants — searching for jobs have helped cool the pace of wage growth.
Jon Steinsson, an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said that by aggressively raising their key interest rate in about 15 months — the fastest such pace in four decades — Fed officials kept Americans’ inflation expectations largely in check. Expectations can become self-fulfilling: If people expect higher inflation, they often take actions, such as demanding higher wages, that can send prices higher still.
“They played a crucial role,” Steinsson said.
Still, a continued decline in inflation isn’t guaranteed. One wild card is rental prices. Real-time measures of new apartment leases show those costs rising much more slowly than they did a year ago. It takes time for that data to flow into the government’s figures. In fact, excluding what the government calls “shelter” costs — rents, the cost of homeownership and hotel prices — inflation rose just 1.4% last month from a year earlier.
But Kathy Bostjancic, an economist at Nationwide, said she worries that a shortage of available homes could raise housing costs in the coming years, potentially keeping inflation elevated.
The Fed’s rate hikes, Bostjancic said, could actually prolong the shortage. Today’s higher mortgage rates may limit home construction while also discouraging current homeowners from selling. Both trends would keep a lid on the supply of homes and keep prices elevated.
Yet Fed officials appear confident in their forecasts that inflation is steadily slowing. In September, 14 of 19 Fed policymakers had said there were risks that inflation could rise faster than they expected. This month, only eight said so.
“Their projections have mostly gone down, and they think the probability that there will be some flare-up of inflation is lower,” said Preston Mui, senior economist at Employ America, an advocacy group.
CHRISTOPHER RUGABER
Chris Rugaber covers the economy and the Federal Reserve
twittermailto
AP · by CHRISTOPHER RUGABER · December 16, 2023
16. What elite universities — and their critics — get wrong about campus antisemitism
Excerpts:
Many of the critics wanted a simple “yes” to Stefanik’s question. But the university presidents could not have given that and still upheld their commitments to free speech.
“Without getting greater detail as to what the abstract call for genocide would be and what sort of pattern of conduct or behavior it might be a part of, the college presidents were put in a situation in which they could not answer that question with one word,” said Nico Perrino, executive vice president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, an organization that advocates for free speech.
But they also didn’t communicate what they needed to at a moment of heightened tensions. Their first mistake was failing to challenge the assumption inherent in Stefanik’s question: that their students have already unambiguously called for genocide. Vox spoke with multiple scholars at their schools (and others) who have studied antisemitism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; all cast doubt on the idea that students have made any genocidal statements. And though there have been a number of instances in which controversial statements have been used on campuses, accounts of explicit calls for genocide have yet to emerge. Knowing that their words would be broadcast across the world, the university presidents might have also done more to empathize with the concerns of Jewish students amid a very real global outpouring of antisemitism.
“They would have been able to get to a lot of the issues that are complex and do involve context. The problem is, you can’t start with that,” said Frederick Lawrence, the former president of Brandeis University and a lecturer at Georgetown Law. “You have to start with a statement that you will protect your students and your staff and your faculty and all the people on your campus.”
Their failure to do so ignited calls for their ousting in US media coverage for days, sometimes overshadowing even the actual ongoing war in Gaza as the death toll there climbed above 18,600 this week.
“I think Magill’s resignation and Gay’s troubles, even if partly self-inflicted, will greatly embolden donors and outside activists who seek to suppress all pro-Palestinian speech on campuses, not only that which occasionally crosses the line into antisemitism,” said Matt Berkman, an assistant professor of Jewish studies at Oberlin College.
...
Perrino argued that if anything will prevent genocide, it is the protection of individual rights including free speech.
“The erosion of individual rights is necessary to allow the sort of horrors that the people who are calling for more speech codes fear. So it’s very short-sighted to erode civil liberties,” he said.
That’s especially the case when the humanitarian situation in Gaza is becoming more dire every day — a subject that has been given short shrift while Americans have focused on debating how they should be allowed to talk about it.
What elite universities — and their critics — get wrong about campus antisemitism
A simple question about genocide at a congressional hearing obscured a complicated debate about antisemitism and free speech.
By Nicole Narea@nicolenarea Dec 15, 2023, 8:00am EST
Vox · by Nicole Narea · December 15, 2023
Claudine Gay, president of Harvard University; Liz Magill, president of the University of Pennsylvania; Pamela Nadell, professor of history and Jewish studies at American University; and Sally Kornbluth, president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, testify before the House Education and Workforce Committee at the Rayburn House Office Building on December 5, 2023, in Washington, DC.
Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
Nicole Narea covers politics and society for Vox. She first joined Vox in 2019, and her work has also appeared in Politico, Washington Monthly, and the New Republic.
The firestorm over antisemitism on college campuses may be dying down from its hottest point last week, when congressional questioning of three elite university presidents over their institutions’ responses to antisemitism went viral and resulted in one of them losing her job.
But the discord has turned into a lingering debate over free speech on campuses, one that has left experts and scholars worried about its potential chilling effect on dialogue, debate, and education at institutions of higher learning.
The debate reached a frenzy after the congressional hearing last week that saw lawmakers grilling the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania, most notably Rep. Elise Stefanik’s (R-NY) line of questioning on whether calls for the “genocide of Jews” would violate their campus codes of conduct. Though all three had repeatedly assured lawmakers that they hold students accountable for conduct that violates their policies on bullying, harassment, and intimidation during their nearly five-hour testimony, their answers to Stefanik’s question were essentially the same: It depends.
That answer was widely deemed unacceptable by many Republicans, some Democrats (including the White House), prominent alumni, and deep-pocketed university donors, one of whom pulled a $100 million donation to Penn in the intense fallout. Former University of Pennsylvania president Elizabeth Magill, after losing the support of the university board, consequently announced her resignation. Harvard president Claudine Gay faced calls for her removal, but the university board stood behind her on Tuesday and will allow her to remain in her position. Though some politicians had also called for MIT president Sally Kornbluth’s ouster, she was supported by her board from the outset.
Many of the critics wanted a simple “yes” to Stefanik’s question. But the university presidents could not have given that and still upheld their commitments to free speech.
“Without getting greater detail as to what the abstract call for genocide would be and what sort of pattern of conduct or behavior it might be a part of, the college presidents were put in a situation in which they could not answer that question with one word,” said Nico Perrino, executive vice president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, an organization that advocates for free speech.
But they also didn’t communicate what they needed to at a moment of heightened tensions. Their first mistake was failing to challenge the assumption inherent in Stefanik’s question: that their students have already unambiguously called for genocide. Vox spoke with multiple scholars at their schools (and others) who have studied antisemitism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; all cast doubt on the idea that students have made any genocidal statements. And though there have been a number of instances in which controversial statements have been used on campuses, accounts of explicit calls for genocide have yet to emerge. Knowing that their words would be broadcast across the world, the university presidents might have also done more to empathize with the concerns of Jewish students amid a very real global outpouring of antisemitism.
“They would have been able to get to a lot of the issues that are complex and do involve context. The problem is, you can’t start with that,” said Frederick Lawrence, the former president of Brandeis University and a lecturer at Georgetown Law. “You have to start with a statement that you will protect your students and your staff and your faculty and all the people on your campus.”
Their failure to do so ignited calls for their ousting in US media coverage for days, sometimes overshadowing even the actual ongoing war in Gaza as the death toll there climbed above 18,600 this week.
“I think Magill’s resignation and Gay’s troubles, even if partly self-inflicted, will greatly embolden donors and outside activists who seek to suppress all pro-Palestinian speech on campuses, not only that which occasionally crosses the line into antisemitism,” said Matt Berkman, an assistant professor of Jewish studies at Oberlin College.
What’s happening on college campuses and what went down at the hearing
That Stefanik may have been misleading in her characterization of students’ statements shouldn’t obscure the fact that incidents of antisemitism are on the rise on college campuses and across the country. The Anti-Defamation League, a mainstream Jewish pro-Israel group and also one of the US’s leading anti-extremism organizations, reported that there have been 400 antisemitic incidents on college campuses in the two months following October 7, compared to just 33 incidents reported over the same period a year ago. The Department of Education consequently launched an investigation into seven schools last month, including Harvard and Penn.
The ADL told Vox that the incidents it recorded included 98 incidents of harassment, nine incidents of assault, and 49 incidents of vandalism. For instance, two Ohio State students were reportedly called a derogatory term, asked if they were Jewish, and assaulted when leaving an off-campus bar in November. A Cornell University student is facing federal charges for allegedly threatening violence against Jewish students in an online forum on campus. And Penn recently reported to the FBI several “vile, disturbing antisemitic emails” threatening violence against the university’s Jewish community.
The university presidents acknowledged in their testimony last week that these kinds of incidents are on the rise, including on their own campuses, and that many of their Jewish students are feeling unsafe as a result. Kornbluth, who is herself Jewish, said that “should trouble every one of us deeply.” They outlined their plans to prevent further such incidents, including creating new task forces and student advisory groups with that mission in mind, increasing campus security, and emphasizing education and community-building around how to fight hate of any kind.
“Antisemitism, an old, viral, and pernicious evil, has been steadily rising in our society, and these world events have dramatically accelerated that surge,” Magill said. “This is unacceptable.”
Those incidents are clear-cut examples of antisemitism. But during the hearing, Stefanik focused on much more contested examples. She repeatedly pressed the university presidents to agree with her that chants commonly invoked at pro-Palestinian rallies calling for Palestinian liberation “from the river to the sea” and “intifada” are “advocating for the murder of Jews.” She eventually asked the question that would trip up the university presidents, “Calling for the genocide of Jews, does that constitute bullying or harassment?” in an apparent reference to those chants.
Many pro-Israel activists have argued that these chants are indeed direct appeals to the genocide of Jews and the destruction of Israel. But there’s lots of debate about both phrases. Many in the pro-Palestinian camp, for example, including Palestinian-American Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), say they merely express a desire for Palestinian statehood and dignity.
This all leads to bigger questions about the bounds of antisemitism. The ADL’s report cites 244 rallies on college campuses that included “antisemitic rhetoric, expressions of support for terrorism against the state of Israel and/or anti-Zionism.” But as the ADL makes clear, the organization explicitly equates antisemitism and anti-Zionism. While there can be obvious overlap between the two, critics — including leading liberal and left-leaning Jewish organizations — say it’s misleading to equate any form of opposition to Zionism, a diverse pro-Israel political movement, with hatred of Jews. Doing so, critics say, can also mean shielding Israel from justified criticism and even undermining ADL’s wider anti-extremism work. And as a group of Jewish Democrats in the House recently pointed out, it also can flatten “the complexity of Judaism itself.”
Joel Beinin, a professor of Middle East history at Stanford University who has been critical of some Israeli policies, told Vox that “intifada” is Arabic for “shaking off” and has come to mean “uprising.” Past Palestinian intifadas have indeed become violent over time, but the word “doesn’t literally or in usage have anything to do with ‘genocide for Jews’ or anything like that,” he said.
“From the river to the sea,” like many protest chants, has had many iterations and meanings over the course of the Palestinian national struggle. Some groups who have called for the violent destruction of Israel, like Hamas, have used the phrase. But experts previously told Vox’s Ellen Ioanes, in the US and other countries where there have been pro-Palestinian protests and calls for ceasefire, the phrase can mean something entirely different. There it might often be a joyous call “for the dignity and full civil rights of Palestinians in their homeland.” It “does not literally mean ‘genocide for Jews,’” Beinin said, noting that the original platform of Israel’s ruling Likud party also demands that “Between the sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”
“So anyone who thinks it means genocide for Jews if Palestinians say it has to acknowledge that it means genocide for the Palestinians when Likudniks (and those further right) say it,” he said.
All of this is to say that references to “intifada” and “from the river to the sea” are far from clear calls to enact genocide against Jews, as Stefanik argued in the hearing. As one Harvard professor who asked not to be identified given the current campus climate told me, “There have been no clear calls for the genocide of Jews at Harvard and I doubt there have been at MIT or the University of Pennsylvania either.” Ultimately, that meant Stefanik’s viral question was just a “red herring,” the professor said, and the university presidents should have acknowledged as much.
To the extent that pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian students misunderstand each other on this issue, it is up to universities to “help bridge these gaps by creating supportive environments where students can clarify their meanings and intentions with civility, rather than assuming the absolute worst about one another,” Berkman said.
“If they did this, I think you’d find that the overwhelming majority of pro-Palestinian students are not calling for genocide, even if they do call for political outcomes that most supporters of Israel would reject as unacceptable,” he added. “That sort of clarification would in turn help address the anxieties that some Jewish students feel when they encounter pro-Palestinian activism on campus.”
However, the university presidents were not just unwilling to challenge Stefanik’s characterization of pro-Palestinian rhetoric as genocidal, but Gay and Magill seemed to support it during the hearing. Gay said that she had heard “thoughtless, reckless, and hateful language” such as “from the river to the sea” and “intifada” on Harvard’s campus and found it “personally abhorrent.” Magill said that calls for global intifada were “very disturbing” and were “at a minimum, hateful speech.”
At the same time, all three presidents refused to say that students should be punished for invoking those phrases across the board — only when it rises to the level of harassment, discrimination, or incitement to violence.
“I have little doubt that if student activists actually were issuing unequivocal calls for the genocide of Jews on university campuses, they would be swiftly disciplined by their administrations — and rightly so,” Berkman said. “This should have been an easy question for Magill, Kornbluth, and Gay to answer, but because they felt they couldn’t contest the description of pro-Palestinian rhetoric as inherently genocidal, despite knowing that description to be untrue, they ended up looking foolish.”
The political motivations at play in the controversy
Internal discord at elite institutions and bipartisan doubt about the sanctity of higher education was the outcome that Stefanik and her Republican colleagues wanted — but not because they’re any great defenders of Jews.
Stefanik has echoed the antisemitic “great replacement” theory that Jews have pushed immigration and multiculturalism as a means of amassing political power over white Americans: In a 2021 campaign ad, she railed against what she characterized as Democrats’ plan to “overthrow our current electorate” by allowing undocumented immigrants to enter the country, leading to accusations of antisemitism.
She also continues to uncritically support former President Donald Trump, who has associated with known antisemites including Nick Fuentes and Kanye West. And she and the rest of her party rely on evangelical voters, some of whom await what they believe is the prophesized day when nonbelievers in Jesus, including Jews, will be killed in a violent war to end all wars. So while some Democrats found themselves cheering her performance in the hearing despite disagreeing with her on practically every other issue, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) reminded them of the absurdity of doing so.
“The Republican Party is filled with people who are entangled with antisemitism like that and yet somehow she gets on [her] high horse and lectures a Jewish college president from MIT,” he said during a recent interview on MSNBC.
Stefanik went into the hearing looking for a “gotcha” moment. As she later boasted to the New York Times, she had designed her line of questioning in “such a way that the answer is an easy yes” and all three university presidents “blew it” in what she predicted would become the “most viewed congressional testimony in history.” While it’s not clear if that has come to pass, videos of the hearing have gotten tens to hundreds of thousands of views.
Stefanik has a complicated history with Harvard in particular. When the Harvard Institute of Politics ousted Stefanik, a Harvard alumnus herself, for supporting Trump’s claims of a stolen 2020 election, she called it a decision to “cower and cave to the woke Left.” Politically, she had every reason to make the university presidents look bad. They represent the same institutions whose perceived liberal excesses her party railed against for years. Her questions were part of Republicans’ long-running war on higher education that has included ending affirmative action in college admissions, thwarting Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan, and cracking down on the teaching of “critical race theory,” as well as proposals to dismantle the Department of Education, end the academic tenure system, and eliminate universities’ diversity, equity, and inclusion offices.
Other GOP lawmakers made the connection explicit during the hearing. Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) used her question time to rail against Harvard coursework and seminars focusing on racism and social justice, which she said fosters a culture in which “you have faculty and students who hate Jews, hate Israel, and are comfortable apologizing for terror.”
Republicans see political opportunity there. As GOP pollster Robert Cahaly recently told me, the party may be able to paint the pro-Palestinian views of young people as the “price for having the next generation taught a bunch of nonsense.” Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) lamented during his question time in the hearing, “I think this [hearing] is so sadly and shamefully revealing that there’s no diversity, inclusion of intellectual thought,” meaning the teaching of conservative ideology on college campuses. “And the result of that is antisemitism.”
It’s an idea that has proved resonant with their base. Only 19 percent of Republicans said in a July Gallup Poll that they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education.
Republicans have also sought to use the issue of antisemitism — both on campus and in the country more broadly — to turn the tables on Democrats, who have sought to highlight the extremism of the MAGA movement under Trump. After right-wing white supremacists chanted “Jews will not replace us” at a rally in Charlottesville in 2017, Democrats accused Republicans of failing to reckon with extremism and antisemitism in their own ranks. Now, Republicans feel that they have the opportunity to say the same of Democrats, while simultaneously working to weaponize real Jewish fear and make themselves look like the party most willing to keep Jewish people safe, on college campuses and everywhere else. Last week’s hearing proved an opportunity to flex that strategy.
What this means for college campuses and broader discourse on the war
So, where does all of this leave universities and the acrimonious discourse over the war in Gaza playing out on their campuses?
Lawrence, the former Brandeis president, worries that the backlash to the university presidents’ testimony could further erode trust in higher education, which was already at an all-time low among all Americans. “What I fear is that this enrages more people about higher education. They feel higher education is out of touch on issues that they care about. That would be a terrible outcome,” he said.
It could also cause universities to roll back their commitments to free speech, which they see as essential to how they approach education. “I think that there is a concern at any particular moment of heightened fear that that could be an overreaction,” Lawrence said.
In dealing with the current environment, he says that universities should approach incendiary speech on their campuses as falling into three buckets, the first being a small number of “genuine, bona fide threats of violence and threatening behavior” that would warrant punishment or even referrals to the criminal system, such as the recent incident in which a Cornell student was charged.
The second is speech that is protected by the First Amendment but that is sufficiently problematic that the university should make a very clear statement about why it is contrary to the values of the university. For example, Yale president Peter Salovey recently stated that “Chants or messages that express hatred, celebrate the killing of civilians, or contain calls for genocide of any group are utterly against our ideals and certainly are not characteristic of our broader community.” Those kind of statements “do have an impact on the campus community,” Lawrence said.
The third, which Lawrence said is the “largest by far of all the forms of expression,” is the kind of speech that, whether smart or based on naivete or ignorance, should always be met with education. “So a school like the University of Pennsylvania, for example — which has outstanding faculty in international relations and social psychology and a whole set of related fields — ought to be putting on programs throughout campus, open sessions, town hall meetings, webinars, all the different ways in which we educate students.”
But even in this framework, universities may have to permit students to engage in speech that many would find abhorrent — potentially including, as the university presidents sought to acknowledge in their testimony, abstract calls for genocide, Perrino, the free speech advocate from FIRE, argued. “There may be some circumstances where an abstract call for genocide is part of a pattern of behavior that meets the legal standards for peer-on-peer discriminatory harassment,” Perrino said, noting that such speech is not protected by the First Amendment and would warrant that a university take action against it. But there are other situations, he argued, where a call for genocide might constitute protected speech.
He cited one 2018 case in which a Drexel University professor was investigated for tweeting, “All I Want for Christmas is White Genocide.” On its face, that was a call for genocide. “But context does matter. He was making a joke about white nationalists’ theory of white replacement theory. He was a white guy. The tweet wasn’t targeted at anyone. It was simply satire,” Perrino said.
That’s why free speech advocates like Perrino have advocated against universities implementing speech codes, which he says would be “wielded by those in power arbitrarily and in a political way” — including potentially against those they were originally designed to protect.
“If the allegation is that all these college administrators are enabling antisemitism, do you really want to give those same college administrators the power to wield a broad speech code?” he asked.
However, that hasn’t stopped the board of Penn’s Wharton business school from proposing changes to the university code of conduct that go beyond existing university policies and include prohibitions on “language that threatens the physical safety of community members” and “hate speech, whether veiled or explicit, that incites violence.” Supporters of the changes have argued for a fundamental recalibration of private universities’ approach to free speech: Penn law and philosophy professor Claire Finkelstein, for instance, wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post arguing that universities should “rethink the role that open expression and academic freedom play in the educational mission” in order to protect their students. But critics of such speech codes — such as Jonathan Friedman, the director of free expression and education programs at the free speech advocacy organization PEN America — warn that the “vague” provisions proposed by the Wharton board threaten to “ban wide swaths of speech.”
Perrino argued that if anything will prevent genocide, it is the protection of individual rights including free speech.
“The erosion of individual rights is necessary to allow the sort of horrors that the people who are calling for more speech codes fear. So it’s very short-sighted to erode civil liberties,” he said.
That’s especially the case when the humanitarian situation in Gaza is becoming more dire every day — a subject that has been given short shrift while Americans have focused on debating how they should be allowed to talk about it.
Vox · by Nicole Narea · December 15, 2023
17. A top-secret Chinese spy satellite just launched on a supersized rocket
A top-secret Chinese spy satellite just launched on a supersized rocket
This satellite may carry a large telescope to continuously monitor the Indo-Pacific.
STEPHEN CLARK - 12/15/2023, 8:20 PM
Ars Technica · by Stephen Clark · December 16, 2023
Enlarge / A Long March 5 rocket, the largest launcher in China's inventory, deployed a classified Chinese military satellite into orbit Friday.
CASC
China's largest rocket apparently wasn't big enough to launch the country's newest spy satellite, so engineers gave the rocket an upgrade.
The Long March 5 launcher flew with a payload fairing some 20 feet (6.2 meters) taller than its usual nose cone when it took off on Friday with a Chinese military spy satellite. This made the Long March 5, with a height of some 200 feet, the tallest rocket China has ever flown.
Adding to the intrigue, the Chinese government claimed the spacecraft aboard the Long March 5 rocket, named Yaogan-41, is a high-altitude optical remote sensing satellite. These types of surveillance satellites usually fly much closer to Earth to obtain the sharpest images possible of an adversary's military forces and strategically important sites.
This could mean a few things. First, assuming China's official description is accurate, the satellite could be heading for a perch in geosynchronous orbit, a position that would afford any Earth-facing sensors continuous views of a third of the world's surface. In this orbit, the spacecraft would circle Earth once every 24 hours, synchronizing its movement with the planet's rotation.
Because this mission launched on China's most powerful rocket, with the longer payload fairing added on, the Yaogan-41 spacecraft is presumably quite big. The US military's space tracking network found the Yaogan-41 satellite in an elliptical, or oval-shaped, soon after Friday's launch. Yaogan-41's trajectory takes it between an altitude of about 121 miles (195 kilometers) and 22,254 miles (35,815 kilometers), according to publicly available tracking data.
This is a standard orbit for spacecraft heading into geosynchronous orbit. It's likely in the coming weeks that the Yaogan-41 satellite will maneuver into this more circular orbit, where it would maintain an altitude of 22,236 miles (35,786 kilometers) and perhaps nudge itself into an orbit closer to the equator.
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Staring down from space
In an official statement, China's state-run Xinhua news agency claimed Yaogan-41 will be used for civilian purposes, such as land surveys and agricultural monitoring. In reality, China uses the Yaogan name as a blanket identifier for most of its military satellites.
US military officials will closely watch to see where Yaogan-41 ends up. If it settles into geosynchronous orbit over the Indian or Pacific Oceans, as analysts expect, Yaogan-41 would have a constant view of China, Taiwan, and neighboring countries.
From such a high altitude, Yaogan-41's optical imager won't have the sharp vision of a satellite closer to Earth. But it's easy to imagine the benefits of all-day coverage, even at lower resolution, without China's military needing to wait hours for a follow-up pass over a potential target from another satellite in low-Earth orbit.
In August, China launched a synthetic aperture radar surveillance satellite into a geosynchronous-type orbit using a medium-lift Long March 7 rocket. This spacecraft can achieve 20-meter (66-foot) resolution at Earth's surface with its radar instrument, which is capable of day-and-night all-weather imaging.
Optical payloads, like the one on Yaogan-41, are restricted to daytime observations over cloud-free regions. China launched a smaller optical remote sensing satellite into geosynchronous orbit in 2015, ostensibly for civilian purposes.
Although Chinese officials did not disclose the exact capabilities of Yaogan-41, it would almost certainly have the sensitivity to continually track US Navy ships and allied vessels across a wide swath of the Indo-Pacific. Aside from its use of the larger payload fairing, the Long March 5 rocket used to launch Yaogan-41 can haul approximately 31,000 pounds (14 metric tons) of payload mass into the orbit it reached on Friday's launch.
This suggests China could have equipped Yaogan-41 with a large telescope to stare down from space. Notably, China acknowledged Yaogan-41's purpose as an optical imaging satellite. China's government doesn't always do that. Perhaps this is a signal to US officials.
Enlarge / China's Long March 5 rocket lifted off with the Yaogan-41 spy satellite at 8:41 am EST (13:41 UTC) Friday.
The Pentagon now sees the United States in strategic competition with China, particularly after US intelligence officials reported that Chinese President Xi Jinping had instructed his military to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. There are doubts among US and Taiwanese officials that China will attempt a takeover of Taiwan as soon as four years from now, but US Space Force officials say they are focused on preparing for a fight.
Such a conflict would inevitably extend into space, with Chinese and US forces reliant on satellite functions for communication, navigation, reconnaissance, and command and control.
“We must be ready for a kind of war we have no modern experience with,” Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall said in September. After decades of emphasizing defense against terrorism, Kendall said the US is now in a competition among "great powers."
“The threat of attack from violent extremist organizations still exists, and we will address those threats as they occur. But China is by far our pacing challenge,” Kendall said. “China has been reoptimizing its forces for great power competition and to prevail against the US in the Western Pacific for over 20 years. China has been building a military capability specifically designed to achieve their national goals, and to do so if opposed by the United States."
Chief Master Sgt. Ron Lerch, the senior enlisted leader of the Space Force's intelligence directorate, briefed attendees of the Space Force Association's first annual Spacepower Conference on China's growing space capabilities this week in Orlando, Florida.
Lerch said China has launched an "eye-watering” number of spy satellites. One of his charts indicated China has 198 satellites for Earth-imaging to gather intelligence and provide military reconnaissance data, compared to just 11 for Russia. Most of these satellites have launched in the last few years as China has ramped up its launch rate, so there's a lot of new data flowing from space to intelligence processing centers in China.
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“With that much kit on orbit, one of the popular questions I get asked is, are the Chinese, especially the PLA (People's Liberation Army), are they sort of drowning in data?" Lerch said. The answer to that question, he said, is no.
China has two new military services: A Rocket Force that Pentagon officials claimed is focused on developing ways to attack airfields and aircraft carriers, and a Strategic Support Force to achieve "information dominance in the space and cyber domains," Kendall said in September. Lerch said this support service offers a robust labor force for the Chinese military to process and disseminate intelligence from the country's spy satellite fleet.
In his presentation Tuesday, Lerch highlighted the cost-effectiveness of the Long March 5 rocket, the type of launcher used for Friday's launch with Yaogan-41. Although the rocket is an expendable design, Lerch said the marginal cost to launch a kilogram of payload mass on a Long March 5 is $3,000.
"The Long March 9, which they are hoping to leverage reusable technology towards the turn of the decade, when that’s operational, they’re hoping to shave that in half to about $1,500 per kilogram," Lerch said. "The Chinese are going that route ... and they’re going to get there with different types of fuel and also through reusability.”
Friday's Long March 5 flight with Yaogan-41 was the country's 61st orbital launch of the year. It came one day after China launched a top-secret military spaceplane on a smaller Long March 2F rocket.
“The Chinese, they’ve put a lot of satellites into orbit, they’re putting a lot of things up," Lerch said. "But the reality is how durable, how sustainable are those systems? We don’t know yet. The jury is still out on that.”
Ars Technica · by Stephen Clark · December 16, 2023
18. China's risky maneuvers around the US military are part of a long-running plan to use 'the enemy to train the troops'
The training OPFOR is the actual OPFOR. Rather than train as you fight, China is going to fight as it trains.
China's risky maneuvers around the US military are part of a long-running plan to use 'the enemy to train the troops'
Business Insider · by Christopher Woody
Military & Defense
Christopher Woody
2023-12-15T13:18:16Z
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A Chinese jet conducting "a coercive and risky" intercept of a US aircraft over the South China Sea in June 2022.
US Defense Department
US officials are alarmed by a sharp increase in unsafe interactions with Chinese jets and ships.
- Close encounters raise the risk of an accident that could escalate to conflict, the officials say.
- For China, aggressive intercepts send a political message and have benefits for its own forces.
US officials are sounding the alarm about close calls with Chinese jets and warships, which they say are crowding and harassing US forces in the Western Pacific.
The US says those encounters are meant to force it and its allies to operate farther from China. For the Chinese pilots carrying them out, they are also part of a years-long effort to increase the complexity and value of their training through real-world interactions with a more experienced rival.
The US military said in October that it had documented more than 180 cases of "coercive and risky operational behavior" by Chinese forces since late 2021, including "reckless" maneuvers, approaching too rapidly or too close, or discharging chaff or flares close to US aircraft.
Those 180 incidents were more than had occurred in the previous decade and appeared to be part of "a centralized, concerted campaign to perform these risky behaviors in order to coerce a change" in the activity of the US and its allies, the Pentagon said in its most recent report on the Chinese military, released in November.
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A Chinese fighter jet crew during "a coercive and risky" intercept of a US aircraft over the East China Sea in June 2022.
US Defense Department
"This is coercive behavior. In certain instances this is quite dangerous behavior that could lead to crisis or inadvertent conflict," Ely Ratner, the assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific security affairs, told reporters at a Defense Writers Group event this month.
Tensions between the US and China have risen in recent years, but Chinese thinking about the training value of encounters with rival forces dates back nearly a decade. A term for such an approach, "using the enemy to train the troops," has appeared in Chinese military sources since 2014, and official statements in early 2022 indicated that it had become part of military doctrine, according to Ryan Martinson and Conor Kennedy, researchers at the US Naval War College's China Maritime Studies Institute.
That approach was applied to China's undersea force and then the rest of its navy in the 2010s in response to what Beijing saw as provocative activity by the US military, especially patrols around the so-called first island chain, which includes Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines, Martinson and Kennedy wrote for the Jamestown Foundation in 2022.
For China, "using the enemy to train the troops" has the benefits of being realistic and of testing its forces' ability to use their equipment in an encounter with a live opponent, allowing them to make observations about the strengths and weaknesses of both sides, Martinson and Kennedy wrote. Chinese officials also believe it aids their troops' "fighting spirit" and counteracts the "peace disease," a reference to their lack of combat experience since 1979.
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Chinese leader Xi Jinping watches a training session at China's Army Infantry College in May 2019.
Xinhua/Li Gang
The US has released extensive imagery of Chinese jets in close proximity to US aircraft to illustrate what it says is risky behavior, but the training value "comes from everything that leads up to the Chinese aircraft being so close to the US aircraft," Michael Dahm, a senior resident fellow at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, told Business Insider.
During those intercepts, China's military is trying to determine the range at which US aircraft detect the Chinese jets, at what range they react to the approach, and how they do so, added Dahm, a retired US Navy intelligence officer whose career included a tour as an assistant naval attaché in Beijing.
"When the Chinese fighter aircraft are given vectors by their airborne or ground controllers, at what range could the Chinese fighter radar detect a US reconnaissance aircraft or a stealth aircraft like the F-35? What indications or electronic signals did the Chinese aircraft pick up on their approach?" Dahm said.
"The end result is a US airman looking out the window and seeing a J-15 or a J-16 too close to their wing, and that is concerning," Dahm added. "But everything that led up to that moment represents the real training value for the PLA Air Force."
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A Chinese fighter jet flies in front of a US plane during "a coercive and risky" aircraft over the South China Sea in January 2022.
US Defense Department
Gen. Mark Kelly, who oversees the training of US Air Force combat units as head of Air Combat Command, has also highlighted the increase of encounters with Chinese aircraft and the training motive behind that behavior.
"Five years ago we were not having our fighters interact with Chinese fighters on a routine basis in exercises," Kelly told reporters at the Air and Space Forces Association conference in September.
Kelly said China, like its close partner Russia, is trying to mount "a direct challenge" to the US-led international order, and on an operational level, "they want batting practice against the best in the world" and "they feel pretty confident they can compete in this arena."
Chinese leaders know that "using the enemy to train the troops" has risks — including of what a Chinese navy surface warfare officer called "inadvertent armed clash" — and some Chinese officials have outlined ways to apply it while avoiding "friction and conflict," Martinson and Kennedy wrote last year.
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Biden and Xi after their meeting in San Francisco in November.
Xinhua News Agency
But the political motive behind the more confrontational approach means China is unlikely to change course.
Experts say conducting provocative actions at a time when Beijing has cut off most military-to-military communication with the US is an effort to raise the stakes and force Washington to back down from it activity in the Western Pacific, which US officials say is lawful but which China views as part of what Chinese leader Xi Jinping has described as part of "all-round containment, encirclement, and suppression against us."
During a meeting in California in November, Xi and President Joe Biden agreed to resume those communications, and Ratner said this month that the two sides were working on the schedule and sequencing of future talks.
Biden and Xi "signaled a willingness on both sides to renew military-to-military engagements," and the Pentagon is "in the process of discussing" with China "the combination of what will be meetings, calls, dialogues, and engagements over the next 12 months," Ratner said.
Business Insider · by Christopher Woody
19. Addressing Military Recruitment Challenges Through Data Sharing
Excerpts:
The Solution
To solve this problem, a group of thirty-one states and territories have signed on to a letter asking that the Department of Defense convene a working group tasked with defining the outcome measures, drafting a sample memorandum of understanding, and crafting data-sharing protocols. The end goal would be a sample MOU template allowing any state to partner with the department to gather enlistment and service data on the high school graduates in their state.
This process would solve the standardization and data collection problems outlined above. We suggest defining military success as actual enlistment in any branch of the military within two years of high school graduation and persistence for at least one year of service. Regardless of the specific measures chosen, this process would allow Department of Defense leaders to set one national standard. We anticipate states would quickly adopt those definitions and incorporate them into how they evaluate high school success.
States are a trusted partner in this work. They—with support from the federal government—have invested heavily in their longitudinal data systems over the last few decades. Those robust, secure data systems are capable of linking K-12 student data with information on other sectors including early childhood, postsecondary, and the workforce.
Allowing state education agencies to connect their data with military enlistment information would be a momentous development. It would open the door for states to consider the military as a successful post–high school outcome, which would lead a greater share of the 3.7 million students who graduate from high school each year to consider the military as a viable career option. Ultimately, solving this data sharing problem would strengthen our armed forces and improve our national security.
Addressing Military Recruitment Challenges Through Data Sharing - Modern War Institute
mwi.westpoint.edu · by Jake Steel, Chad Aldeman · December 15, 2023
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Editor’s note: Earlier this year, we announced an essay contest, organized in association with the US Army’s Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), focused on addressing the US military’s recruiting crisis. After receiving an unprecedented number of submissions, the essays were narrowed down to a small group of finalists, from which leaders at TRADOC selected the top three.
This essay, from Jake Steel and Chad Aldeman, was chosen as the contest’s second-place entry.
The US military is in the midst of a severe and ongoing recruitment crisis. Adequately addressing it will require a mixture of solutions. Among them, however, we make the case for better data linkages. Namely, we propose the Department of Defense work with state departments of education to better understand the current pipeline of recruits.
This solution would solve problems in both sectors. From the military side, the three largest US military branches are collectively projected to fall twenty-six thousand recruits short of their enlistment goals this year. Recruiting challenges are a persistent problem, with a high percentage of prime-age Americans being unfit for service due to academic or physical fitness gaps.
From the education side, policymakers have long talked about the importance of making sure the 3.7 million students who graduate high school each year are “college and career ready.” While serving our country in uniform should be part of this mix and viewed as a successful outcome for recent high school graduates, the lack of good data on who actually enlists and persists means that military service is getting sidelined in favor of more immediately measurable metrics.
There is, therefore, a strong case for the Department of Defense to create a standardized data sharing protocol that would allow it to share military service data with state education agencies. Although there are data challenges that would need to be worked out, we believe these are eminently manageable. And, once solved, they would allow state departments of education to give credit to high schools that successfully prepare students for military service.
The Problem
In K-12 education, policymakers have long talked about their desire to ensure that all high school graduates are ready for college and career success. The not-so-hidden secret, unfortunately, is that the college pathway is easier to define and measure. Are high school graduates enrolling in college, earning credits, and persisting? These are discrete, measurable things, and many states produce high school feedback reports that give K-12 school leaders information about how their students are doing in higher education. To supplement the state-level data, a national nonprofit called the National Student Clearinghouse has data on 99 percent of postsecondary students nationwide, and it allows any school district in the country to find out, for a nominal fee, how many of their students enroll and persist through higher education.
As a result, states have access to robust data on college outcomes. For example, many states gather data on the postsecondary success rate of each of their high schools. This rate is typically defined by the attainment of a list of measurable outcomes within two years of high school graduation: enrolling in postsecondary education, procuring a postsecondary certificate, or securing a postsecondary degree.
In contrast, there’s less agreement among K-12 policymakers nationally on what constitutes success on the career side. States are tracking a wide variety of career readiness metrics and indicators including proxy measures like completing a sequence of courses in career and technical fields or earning industry certifications. However, there is a gap between the sequence of courses or credentials a student might attain to prepare for a career and actually securing gainful employment. Some state leaders have attempted to put military service into this mix, but a lack of easily accessible, accurate information prevents them from doing so.
Recent developments show how the lack of good data is holding back the effort to include military service in state definitions of successful career pathways. Upon the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in 2015, states were required to submit to the federal government their plans for designing school accountability systems. At the high school level, those systems must include achievement in math and reading; graduation rates; and at least one other indicator of school quality that is valid, reliable, and comparable statewide.
In their formally approved accountability systems, ten states said they were planning to use military service as one of their indicators of student success. Unfortunately, those intentions ran into two main implementation challenges.
One, without a way to track the outcomes they really wanted to measure—actual enlistments—states had to fall back to using ASVAB scores (the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery) as a proxy measure to gauge a student’s intent and capability to serve. States are also using the ASVAB scores in nonstandardized ways. In South Carolina students must earn a score of 31 or higher on the ASVAB to count as career ready, whereas Delaware set its threshold at 50. This lack of cross-state standardization is fine within the context of an individual state’s education sector, but the military branches do not apply one standard for recruits from Delaware and a different one for those who come from South Carolina.
Two, states that want to count military service have been forced to rely on self-reported data. While they would like to give credit to schools that prepare students for the military, without a systematic way to gather that data, these states have essentially put the burden of proof on individual schools and districts. North Dakota, for example, has a clear list of what a student must do for a school leader (usually a principal or counselor) to count the student as “military ready.” The student must score 31 or higher on the ASVAB, not have any suspensions or expulsions on his or her record, and successfully complete the state’s required physical education courses. Alabama only gives credit to students who actually enlist in the military. However, for a student to count as military ready, the district is responsible for gathering an enrollment letter on official letterhead from a military recruiter.
Similar data challenges have left other states scrambling to fill in the gaps. Two states that declared their intentions to measure military readiness for all schools as part of their ESSA plans have since fallen back to making it optional. New Mexico allows ASVAB test scores to count, but only as an optional, supplemental measure for nontraditional high schools. It’s also optional in Wyoming, which instructs districts that are interested in gathering their own data to “request a spreadsheet of their students’ AFQT [Armed Forces Qualification Test] scores by contacting an Education Services Specialist (ESS) at the Department of Defense” and provides phone numbers for districts to follow up independently.
That leaves four states—Montana, Tennessee, Texas, and Vermont—which intended to use military readiness when they wrote their ESSA plans but have since backed away from that goal. Texas has the clearest statement of why. In its latest school accountability manual, it explains that “due to discrepancies between annual enlistment counts for Texas military enlistees aged 17-19 released by the United States Department of Defense and TSDS [Texas Student Data System] PEIMS [Public Education Information Management System] military enlistment data for 2017 and 2018 annual graduates, military enlistment data is excluded from accountability calculations until such data can be obtained directly from the United States Armed Forces.”
In other words, state departments of education have signaled their desire to count military enlistment as a successful outcome for high school students, but they’ve been unable to do so systematically. This isn’t merely a wonky data issue. School and district leaders are sensitive to how they are evaluated, and right now they are choosing to nudge or encourage students to follow other pathways because military service doesn’t count. Solving this problem depends on the Department of Defense setting up a mechanism to securely share data with state departments of education.
The Solution
To solve this problem, a group of thirty-one states and territories have signed on to a letter asking that the Department of Defense convene a working group tasked with defining the outcome measures, drafting a sample memorandum of understanding, and crafting data-sharing protocols. The end goal would be a sample MOU template allowing any state to partner with the department to gather enlistment and service data on the high school graduates in their state.
This process would solve the standardization and data collection problems outlined above. We suggest defining military success as actual enlistment in any branch of the military within two years of high school graduation and persistence for at least one year of service. Regardless of the specific measures chosen, this process would allow Department of Defense leaders to set one national standard. We anticipate states would quickly adopt those definitions and incorporate them into how they evaluate high school success.
States are a trusted partner in this work. They—with support from the federal government—have invested heavily in their longitudinal data systems over the last few decades. Those robust, secure data systems are capable of linking K-12 student data with information on other sectors including early childhood, postsecondary, and the workforce.
Allowing state education agencies to connect their data with military enlistment information would be a momentous development. It would open the door for states to consider the military as a successful post–high school outcome, which would lead a greater share of the 3.7 million students who graduate from high school each year to consider the military as a viable career option. Ultimately, solving this data sharing problem would strengthen our armed forces and improve our national security.
Jake Steel has worked on education policy at the state and federal level, including in the US Department of Education during the Trump Administration.
Chad Aldeman is a nationally recognized expert on school accountability systems and served in the US Department of Education during the Obama Administration.
The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: Cpl. Lydia Gordon, US Marine Corps
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mwi.westpoint.edu · by Jake Steel, Chad Aldeman · December 15, 2023
20. MOLLE vs. ALICE: Which pack reigns supreme?MOLLE vs. ALICE: Which pack reigns supreme?
In 1st SFG in the 1980s we also had the Lowe ruck for winter operations. I remember jumping that fully packed (and overpacked) behemoth into Korea in 1989.
MOLLE vs. ALICE: Which pack reigns supreme?
Both have their purpose. But which is the best?
BY JOSHUA SKOVLUND | PUBLISHED DEC 15, 2023 4:44 PM EST
taskandpurpose.com · by Joshua Skovlund · December 15, 2023
Packs are as essential for the military as bullets and chow. But for decades, two rucks have weighed down more military backs than any others. That’s the O.G. All-Purpose Lightweight Individual Carrying Equipment (ALICE) pack and the Modular Lightweight Load Carrying Equipment (MOLLE) pack.
You’ve likely had an uncle who cherished his ALICE pack, taking it out on the trail or on a hunting trip long after his service in the U.S. military ended. But change is as inevitable as a high tide rolling in, and in the packs world, high tide is the MOLLE pack.
Almost everyone has seen the MOLLE pack in action if they paid attention during Operation Enduring Freedom. It’s standard issue throughout the military. But, ask just about any Ranger, and they will tell you the ALICE pack reigns supreme.
What is the best pack comes down to personal preference, but there are noticeable differences between the two. Sgt. 1st Class Adam Klakowicz, a Green Beret for the better part of his 20 years in the Army, has used both packs over his lengthy career. He’s partial to the Mystery Ranch assault packs, but he helps break down the significant differences between the standard issue packs of the military.
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The ALICE pack
Old reliable is what some call it, while others know it as the O.G. rucksack. Anyone who’s taken one on a long ruck will gripe about the weird aches and pains that accompany a 100 lb ALICE pack on your back for an unknown distance ruck march.
The ALICE pack has an external metal frame, a large internal compartment, and a few pouches on the outside. It generally comes in set sizes of medium or large. But, Rangers were issued a special XL version, which can hold a lot more ammo and everything else needed for a long combat movement.
But, its hardiness speaks for itself as it remains popular even among elite combat units. It’s the gold standard for airborne operations, as the frame will handle the impact of the jump. The MOLLE pack’s plastic frame may not withstand the weight and impact and could break.
Klakowicz says that when he jumped into Robin Sage in the final stages of Special Forces training, his team used ALICE packs averaging 100 lbs or more. A fellow candidate’s ALICE pack frame hit too hard, which caused a big dent in the frame.
“One of us held it while he just stomped it and gave it a good kick, which bent it back into place, and it was fine for the rest of the exercise,” Klakowicz said. “That’s the only plus. A bend in the frame with that size of a rucksack probably would have cracked the frame on a MOLLE.”
The most significant fail point on the pack is the rivets. They can pop after wear and tear breaks. However, they are easy to repair. You can run 550 cord through the holes of the broken rivet or hold it together with duct tape.
A new ALICE pack requires some modifications to make it as silent as possible to cover or stop the squeaks and creaks built into the pack. You can use glue, tape, or 550 cord. If you don’t, the enemy will hear you coming from a mile away. Anyone who’s spent time under an ALICE pack can hear the creaking of the rivets when thinking about the pack.
The ALICE pack replaced the M-1956 Individual Load-Carrying Equipment (ILCE) and M-1967 Modernized Load-Carrying Equipment in 1973. However, change is inevitable in the military, especially upgrades in gear — but beware, not all ‘upgrades’ are alike.
The MOLLE Pack
The MOLLE pack was intended to replace the ALICE in 1997 but didn’t take hold until the early 2000s with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. This modular pack has an internal plastic frame and different segmented compartments. The MOLLE pack can be lengthened or shortened, whereas the ALICE pack arrives in one of three sizes.
But a MOLLE’s polymer molded internal frame is one of a few complaints. Though its tough, the frames have been known to break during airborne jumps and other high-stress use If so, the pack’s structure becomes a nightmare for your back and shoulders.
The MOLLE is better padded than the ALICE pack and is designed to evenly distribute weight across shoulders, whereas the ALICE pack puts all the weight on the hips. “The shoulder straps on the ALICE pack will sometimes dig into you.
That MOLLE ruck has the shoulder straps that fit the contour of your body,” Klakowicz said. They’re better padded, and it goes all the way over your shoulder and underneath your armpits and kind of hugs your body.”
The MOLLE pack is lighter than its predecessor, and the webbing allows maximal modification with various pouches, allowing easy access to grenade or ammo pouches. It also has about 200 cubic inches or more capacity compared to the ALICE pack.
Though its padding is far above the ALICE pack’s shoulder straps and kidney pad, it affects airflow between your back and the pack. That’s more of a creature comfort than anything, but it may be a deal breaker if you love the airflow the ALICE pack provides.
What pack is on top?
Klakowicz says he prefers some of the civilian-designed packs used within the special operations ranks. But training schools across the military often issue one pack or the other, so it’s wise to train with the ruck you will be using.
“As far as government-issued equipment, it depends on where I was going. I could fit more shit in the MOLLE ruck. So, if I had to do something in the winter or the mountains, I would definitely use a MOLLE ruck. I’ll take the ALICE pack if I had to do something in the jungle.”
Personal preference will dictate what you like about each pack and why it can be better than the other, but the significant difference is where you carry the weight. ALICE packs will put the full weight on your hips, but you can undo your waist belt to transfer the weight back and forth to your shoulders and hips. The MOLLE pack plays the weight on your shoulders, and you can add a waist belt to it as well. The MOLLE pack is lighter and can pack more, but if you don’t need that, the ALICE pack is a hard-to-break pack that you can pack just about as much in.
For the inexperienced, the ALICE pack might be frustrating to pack. There are virtually no internal compartments, so you must exercise due diligence while packing so the weight is evenly spread across your shoulders. If done incorrectly, you will feel the weight digging the shoulder strap or kidney pad into you.
The MOLLE ruck is easier to pack, with zippered compartments to separate gear and better balance it. The webbing on the pack maximizes flexibility in packing your ruck while keeping it balanced. It’s out-of-the-box quiet, so you don’t have to silence any rivets. But given a strong blow or impact, the frame of a MOLLE has the potential to snap instead of bend like the ALICE pack.
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taskandpurpose.com · by Joshua Skovlund · December 15, 2023
De Oppresso Liber,
David Maxwell
Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy
Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation
Editor, Small Wars Journal
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Phone: 202-573-8647
email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
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