Quotes of the Day:
"What are the facts? Again and again and again - what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what "the stars foretell," avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable "verdict of history" - what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into the unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!"
- Robert A. Heinlein - Time Enough For Love
"Disinformation operations, in essence, erode the very foundation of open societies ¬– not only for the victim but also for the perpetrator. When vast, secretive bureaucracies engage in systemic deception, at large scale and over a long time, they will optimize their own organizational culture for this purpose, and undermine the legitimacy of public administration at home. A society’s approach to active measures is a litmus test for its republican institutions. For liberal democracies in particular, disinformation represents a double threat: being at the receiving end of active measures will undermine democratic institutions – and giving in to the temptation to design and deploy them will have the same result. It is impossible to excel at disinformation and democracy at the same time. The stronger and the more robust a democratic body politic, the more resistant to disinformation it will be - the more reluctant to deploy and optimize disinformation. Weakened democracies, in turn, succumb more easily to the temptations of active measures.
- Thomas Rid, Active Measures - The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare
"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it ... This is the condition of children and barbarians, in whom instinct has learned nothing from experience."
- George Santayana
1. Biden Administration Foreign Policy Tracker: Early August
2. Deceptions and lies: What really happened in Afghanistan
3. Sasha Baker tapped for lead policy role at Pentagon
4. Mara Karlin confirmed to lead Pentagon strategy
5. Tucker Carlson’s Spying Allegations Being Investigated by National Security Agency Watchdog
6. Duckworth Calls for Closer Ties to Taiwan, More U.S. Vaccine Diplomacy
7. Renowned epidemiologist says the world 'is closer to the beginning than the end' of the pandemic
8. China boosts Olympic gold medal count by lumping in Hong Kong, Taiwan
9. No, the unvaccinated aren't selfish or ignorant. Here's why I'm not vaxxed | Opinion
10. Chinese hackers disguised themselves as Iran to target Israel
11. Report: China Is Hacking Russia, Too
12. Climate Change Is Already Disrupting the Military. It Will Get Worse, Officials Say
13. Wagner: Scale of Russian mercenary mission in Libya exposed
14. NSA Awards Secret Up-to-$10B Contract to Amazon
15. The Words the AP Didn’t Want to Use
16. Cybersecurity Firm Mandiant Uncovers Chinese Espionage Group UNC215’s Activity in Israel
17. A Reluctant Embrace: China’s New Relationship with the Taliban
18. Another $158 billion for Xi Jinping
19. Why America Loses Wars
20. Did archaeologists find the Trojan Horse?
21. How to Avert A Disaster in Afghanistan
22. Opinion | An undeclared war is breaking out in cyberspace. The Biden administration is fighting back.
1. Biden Administration Foreign Policy Tracker: Early August
The first of two FDD Biden administration foreign policy tracker assessments for the month of August.
August 10, 2021 | FDD Tracker: July 29 – August 10, 2021
Biden Administration Foreign Policy Tracker: Early August
David Adesnik
Trend Overview
Edited by David Adesnik
Welcome back to the Biden Administration Foreign Policy Tracker. Two times per month, we ask FDD’s experts and scholars to assess the administration’s foreign policy. They provide trendlines of very positive, positive, neutral, negative, or very negative for the areas they watch. In Afghanistan, the Taliban captured six provincial capitals in a span of just four days, underscoring how the administration’s complete withdrawal of U.S. troops has worsened the conflict as well as the country’s humanitarian crisis. Even though, as vice president, Joe Biden saw how the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq led to the rise of the Islamic State as well as tremendous suffering for the Iraqi people, he appears not to have prepared for similar risks in Afghanistan. Tensions also rose in the Persian Gulf, where an Iranian drone attacked an Israeli-operated oil tanker, resulting in the death of two European crewmen. Meanwhile, the Islamic Republic of Iran inaugurated a new president, Ebrahim Raisi, responsible for executing thousands of political prisoners. Check back in two weeks to see how the Biden administration has responded to events that call into question its hopes that diplomatic outreach could elicit more cooperative behavior from U.S. adversaries.
Trending Positive
Trending Neutral
Trending Negative
Trending Very Negative
2. Deceptions and lies: What really happened in Afghanistan
I imagine this book will be full of scathing critiques based on this excerpt.
Deceptions and lies: What really happened in Afghanistan
Today at 7:30 a.m. EDT
The suicide bomber arrived at Bagram air base in a Toyota Corolla late in the morning on Feb. 27, 2007. He maneuvered past the Afghan police at the first checkpoint and continued a quarter-mile down the road toward the main gate. There, the bomber approached a second checkpoint, this one staffed by U.S. soldiers. Amid mud puddles and a jumble of pedestrians and vehicle traffic, he triggered his vest of explosives.
The blast killed 20 Afghan laborers who came to the base that day looking for work. It also claimed the lives of two Americans and a South Korean assigned to the international military coalition: Army Pfc. Daniel Zizumbo, a 27-year-old from Chicago; Geraldine Marquez, an American contractor for Lockheed Martin who had just celebrated her 31st birthday; and Staff Sgt. Yoon Jang-ho, the first South Korean soldier to die in a foreign conflict since the Vietnam War.
Unharmed by the explosion was a VIP guest at Bagram who had been trying to keep a low profile: Vice President Dick Cheney.
Cheney had slipped into the war zone the day before on an unannounced trip to the region. Arriving on Air Force Two from Islamabad, Pakistan, he intended to spend only a few hours in Afghanistan to see President Hamid Karzai. But bad weather prevented him from reaching Kabul, so he spent the night at Bagram, an installation with personnel numbering 9,000 about 30 miles from the capital.
Within hours of the bombing, the Taliban called journalists to claim responsibility and to say Cheney was the target. U.S. military officials scoffed and accused the insurgents of spreading lies. The vice president, they said, was a mile away at the other end of the base and never in danger. They insisted the Taliban could not have planned an attack against Cheney on such short notice, especially given that his travel plans had changed at the last minute.
“The Taliban’s claims that they were going after the vice president were absurd,” Army Col. Tom Collins, a spokesman for U.S. and NATO forces, told reporters.
But the U.S. military officials were the ones hiding the truth.
In an Army oral-history interview, then-Capt. Shawn Dalrymple, a company commander with the 82nd Airborne Division who was responsible for security at Bagram, confirmed that word had leaked out about Cheney’s presence. The suicide bomber, he added, saw a convoy of vehicles coming out of the front gate and blew himself up because he mistakenly thought Cheney was a passenger.
The bomber wasn’t far off the mark. The vice president was supposed to depart for Kabul in a different convoy about 30 minutes later, according to Dalrymple, who had worked with the Secret Service to plan Cheney’s movements.
“The insurgents knew this. It was all over the news no matter how much it was tried to keep secret,” Dalrymple said. “They caught a convoy going out the gate with an up-armored sport-utility vehicle and thought it was him. . . . That opened up a lot of eyes into the fact that Bagram was not a safe place. There was a direct link with the insurgencies.”
The 2007 episode marked an escalation in the war on two fronts. By targeting the vice president at the heavily fortified base at Bagram, the Taliban demonstrated an ability to inflict high-profile, mass-casualty attacks far from the insurgents’ strongholds in southern and eastern Afghanistan.
And by lying about how close the insurgents had come to harming Cheney, the U.S. military sank deeper into a pattern of deceiving the public about many facets of the war, from discrete events to the big picture. What began as selective, self-serving disclosures after the 2001 invasion gradually hardened into willful distortions and, eventually, flat-out fabrications.
This account is adapted from “The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War,” a Washington Post book that will be published Aug. 31 by Simon & Schuster. A narrative history of what went wrong in Afghanistan, the book is based on interviews with more than 1,000 people who played direct roles in the war, as well as thousands of pages of documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
The interviews and documents, many of them previously unpublished, show how the administrations of Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump hid the truth for two decades: They were slowly losing a war that Americans once overwhelmingly supported. Instead, political and military leaders chose to bury their mistakes and let the war drift, culminating in President Biden’s decision this year to withdraw from Afghanistan, with the Taliban more powerful than at any point since the 2001 invasion.
For the Bush administration and its NATO and Afghan allies, the months preceding Cheney’s 2007 visit to Afghanistan had been an awful stretch. The number of suicide attacks had increased almost fivefold in 2006, and the number of roadside bombs doubled compared with the year before. The Taliban’s cross-border sanctuaries in Pakistan were fueling the problem.
Before his arrival at Bagram, Cheney met in Islamabad with Pakistan’s president, Pervez Musharraf, to urge him to crack down. The Pakistani strongman offered no help, saying his government had already “done the maximum.”
Their public statements notwithstanding, U.S. military officials had been so worried the Taliban might target Cheney during the short dash between Bagram and Kabul that they originally set up a ruse.
The plan was to depart Bagram from a rarely used gate. Members of Cheney’s traveling party would ride as decoys in the SUVs normally reserved for senior officials. The vice president would ride with Dalrymple, the young Army captain, in a lumbering military vehicle equipped with a machine gun. “You’d never expect him to ride in the gun truck,” Dalrymple recalled.
That plan was scrapped after the suicide attack. Military officials decided it was too dangerous for Cheney to travel by road. He waited for the weather to clear and instead flew to Kabul to meet with Karzai. Cheney finally left Afghanistan that afternoon on a C-17 military aircraft without further incident.
At the same time that the U.S. military was struggling with the Taliban’s resurgence, it was faring even worse with its much larger war in Iraq, where 150,000 U.S. troops were bogged down — about six times as many as the number deployed in Afghanistan. Given the calamity in Iraq, the Bush administration badly wanted to avoid the perception it was losing in Afghanistan as well.
Consequently, as the new year got underway, American commanders in Afghanistan expressed new levels of optimism in public that were so unwarranted and baseless that their statements amounted to a disinformation campaign.
“We are prevailing,” Army Maj. Gen. Robert Durbin, the commander in charge of training the Afghan security forces, told reporters on Jan. 9, 2007. He added that the Afghan army and police “continue to show great progress each day.”
Army Maj. Gen. Benjamin Freakley, commander of the 10th Mountain Division, gave an even sunnier assessment a few weeks later. “We’re winning,” he said during a Jan. 27 news conference. Despite the surge in bombings the year before, he declared that U.S. and Afghan forces had made “great progress” and “defeated the Taliban and the terrorists that oppose this nation at every turn.”
As for the insurgents, Freakley said the rebels “achieved none of their objectives” and were “quickly running out of time.” He dismissed the increase in suicide attacks as a sign of the Taliban’s “desperation.”
Three days later, Karl Eikenberry, a three-star Army general, visited Berlin to shore up European public support for NATO forces. He said the allies were “postured well for success” in 2007 and suggested the Taliban was panicking.
“Our assessment is that they actually look at time working against them,” Eikenberry added.
But the generals’ chorus of happy talk defied a year-long stream of intelligence assessments that the insurgency had gained strength.
In February 2006, Ronald Neumann, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, told officials in Washington in a classified diplomatic cable that a confident Taliban leader had warned, “You have all the clocks but we have all the time.”
In private, the flood of suicide attacks and roadside bombs — insurgent tactics imported from Iraq — stoked fear among U.S. officials in Afghanistan of a potential “Tet Offensive in Kandahar,” an unnamed Bush administration official told government interviewers, referring to the bloody 1968 military campaign by North Vietnamese forces that undermined public support for the Vietnam War.
“The turning point came at the end of 2005, beginning of 2006 when we finally woke up to the fact that there was an insurgency that could actually make us fail,” the official said. “Everything was turning the wrong way at the end of 2005.”
Neumann arrived in Kabul as the top U.S. diplomat in July 2005. The son of a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, he had spent a pleasant summer there as a young newlywed in 1967, traveling cross-country, camping and riding horses and yaks during a time of peace.
When he returned 38 years later, Afghanistan had been continuously at war for a quarter century. Right away, he told his superiors in Washington it was obvious the violence was about to escalate further.
“By the fall of 2005, I had reported, in combination with General Eikenberry, that we were going to face a vastly increased insurgency in the next year, in 2006, and that it was going to get much bloodier, much worse,” Neumann said in a diplomatic oral-history interview.
At first, many officials in Washington found it hard to believe the Taliban could present a strategic danger. Even some military leaders in the field underestimated the Taliban and thought that, while it might control pockets of rural territory, it posed no threat to the government in Kabul. “We thought the Taliban’s capability was greatly reduced,” then-Brig. Gen. Bernard Champoux, deputy commander of a U.S. military task force from 2004 to 2005, said in an Army oral-history interview.
Paul Toolan, a Special Forces captain who served in Helmand province in 2005, said senior U.S. officials mistakenly viewed the war as a peacekeeping and reconstruction mission. He tried to explain to anyone who would listen that the fighting had intensified and the Taliban had bolstered its firepower.
“If we don’t do this right, we’re going to allow these guys to keep us languishing here for a lot of years,” Toolan cautioned in an Army oral-history interview.
But the Bush administration suppressed the internal warnings and put a shine on the war. In a December 2005 interview with CNN, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said things were going so well that the Pentagon would soon bring home roughly 10 percent of its forces in Afghanistan.
“It’s a direct result of the progress that’s being made in the country,” Rumsfeld declared.
Two months later, however, Rumsfeld’s office and other officials in Washington received another classified warning from their ambassador in Kabul.
In a gloomy Feb. 21, 2006, cable, Neumann predicted that “violence will rise through the next several months,” with more suicide bombings in Kabul and other major cities.
He blamed the Taliban’s sanctuaries in Pakistan and warned that, if left unaddressed, they could “lead to the reemergence of the same strategic threat to the United States that prompted our . . . intervention over 4 years ago” — in other words, another 9/11.
In the dispatch, Neumann expressed fear that popular support would wane if expectations weren’t managed. “I thought it was important to try to prepare the American public for that so that they wouldn’t be surprised and see everything as a reverse,” he said in his oral-history interview.
But the public heard no such straight talk. In a visit to Afghanistan shortly after the ambassador sent his cable, Bush did not mention the rising violence or the resurgent Taliban. Instead, he touted improvements such as the establishment of democracy, a free press and schools for girls.
“We’re impressed by the progress your country is making,” Bush told Karzai at a March 1 news conference.
Two weeks later, in a briefing with reporters from Bagram, Freakley denied that the Taliban and al-Qaeda were getting stronger. The violence was spiking, the general said, because the weather was getting warmer and his forces were going on the offensive.
“We’re taking the fight to the enemy,” the 10th Mountain Division commander said. “If you see an increase in violence here in the coming weeks and months, it’s probably driven by offensive operations that the Afghan National Army, Afghan National Police and coalition forces are taking.”
He added, “I’ll tell you that progress in Afghanistan is steady and you can really see it.”
In a Pentagon press briefing in May, Durbin, the commander in charge of training, presented a rosy report on the state of the Afghan security forces. He said they had been “effective at disrupting and destroying” their enemies and that the Afghan army had made “remarkable” progress in recruiting.
Durbin closed by inviting journalists to visit Afghanistan and judge for themselves how the Afghan security forces were performing. “I think if you do, you’ll be as impressed as I am with their progress,” he said.
Days later, someone did come see for himself. Retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey was a hero of the Persian Gulf War. It had been a decade since he had been on active duty, but the U.S. military asked him to visit Afghanistan and Pakistan and conduct an independent assessment. The mission was not publicized.
McCaffrey interviewed about 50 high-ranking officials over the course of a week. In his nine-page report, he lauded U.S. commanders and highlighted several successes, but he didn’t sugarcoat his verdict: The Taliban was nowhere near defeated, and the war was “deteriorating.”
He judged the Taliban as well-trained, “very aggressive and smart in their tactics,” as well as armed with “excellent weapons.” Far from panicking or feeling the pressure of time, the insurgents would “soon adopt a strategy of ‘waiting us out,’ ” he added.
In contrast, McCaffrey said that the Afghan army was “miserably under-resourced” and that its soldiers had little ammunition and shoddier weapons than the Taliban. He blasted the Afghan police as worthless: “They are in a disastrous condition: badly equipped, corrupt, incompetent, poorly led and trained, riddled by drug use.”
Even under a best-case scenario, McCaffrey predicted, it would be 14 more years — until 2020 — before the Afghan security forces could operate without U.S. help.
The report was passed up the chain of command to Rumsfeld and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “We will encounter some very unpleasant surprises in the coming twenty-four months,” McCaffrey warned. “The Afghan national leadership are collectively terrified that we will tip-toe out of Afghanistan in the coming years — leaving NATO holding the bag — and the whole thing will again collapse into mayhem.”
If McCaffrey’s conclusions weren’t sobering enough, Rumsfeld soon received another harsh dose of reality.
On Aug. 17, 2006, Marin Strmecki, a trusted civilian adviser to the defense secretary, delivered a 40-page classified report titled “Afghanistan at a Crossroads.” Strmecki had made a separate fact-finding trip to the war zone after McCaffrey and arrived at many of the same conclusions.
But he cast stronger doubt on the reliability and viability of Washington’s allies in Kabul. The Afghan government, he said, was crooked and feckless and had left a power vacuum in many parts of the country for the Taliban to exploit.
“It is not that the enemy is so strong but that the Afghan government is so weak,” Strmecki reported.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Embassy in Kabul grappled with a fresh wave of internal pessimism. Neumann, the ambassador, sent another dour classified cable to Washington on Aug. 29. “We are not winning in Afghanistan,” it declared.
Two weeks after the ambassador’s warning, Eikenberry sat down for an interview with ABC News on the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and offered the flip version for public consumption.
“We are winning,” the general insisted, adding, “but I also say we have not yet won.” Asked whether the United States could lose, Eikenberry responded, “Losing is not an option in Afghanistan.”
If the generals had listened to their soldiers in the field, however, they might have shied away from such hubris.
Staff Sgt. John Bickford, a 26-year-old soldier from Lake Placid, N.Y., spent much of 2006 in Paktika province in eastern Afghanistan. He was stationed with other 10th Mountain Division soldiers at Firebase Tillman, named after Pat Tillman, the National Football League player who enlisted in the Army after 9/11 and was later killed by friendly fire.
Bickford said the fighting was “about 10 times worse” than his first deployment to eastern Afghanistan three years earlier. His unit clashed with insurgents four or five times a week. The enemy massed as many as 200 fighters to try to overrun U.S. observation posts.
“We said that we defeated the Taliban, but they were always in Pakistan and regrouping and planning and now they’re back stronger than they have ever been,” he said in an Army oral-history interview. “Anytime that they did an assault or an ambush it was well-organized, and they knew what they were doing.”
In August 2006, Bickford was leading a patrol in an armored Humvee when insurgents ambushed his convoy with rocket-propelled grenades. Shrapnel tore up Bickford’s right thigh, calf, ankle and foot. His team fended off the assault, but his days as an infantryman were over.
Bickford spent three months recovering at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. During his convalescence, he reflected on the rising threat posed by insurgents.
“These are very smart people, and they’re the enemy but they deserve tons of respect and they should never, never, never be underestimated,” he said.
3. Sasha Baker tapped for lead policy role at Pentagon
Again the NSC staff is the bull pen or on deck circle for key positions.
Excerpt:
Baker is the third senior director in this administration’s National Security Council to be nominated for a major position. Biden has nominated Mallory Stewart for a State Department arms control post and Barbara Leaf to be assistant secretary of state for near-eastern affairs.
Sasha Baker tapped for lead policy role at Pentagon
WASHINGTON ― President Joe Biden will announce White House national security official Sasha Baker as his pick for deputy undersecretary of defense for policy, Defense News has learned.
Baker, the National Security Council’s senior director for strategic planning, previously served as an adviser to progressive Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and the lawmaker’s 2020 presidential campaign. Progressives on Tuesday hailed the expected move, describing Baker as a leading progressive national security thinker.
During the Obama administration, Baker served as deputy chief of staff to Defense Secretary Ash Carter, who spoke of her in glowing terms.
“Sasha was involved in every single important deliberation in the secretary’s office, so all of our counterterror operations, cyber operations, the entire counter-[Islamic State] campaign,” Carter told Defense News. “She was critical to all our outreach to the tech sector.”
Before the Biden and Trump administration’s focus on bringing forward-leaning technologies to the Pentagon, Carter established the Defense Innovation Board. He credited Baker with bringing in the board’s first chairman, former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt, as well as other tech “superstars.”
The Pentagon’s policy shop is expected to play a key role as the Biden administration grapples with a deteriorating Afghanistan and shifting force posture in the Middle East. Baker, who was involved in drafting the Biden administration’s first national defense policy document, would also have a lead role implementing it, if confirmed.
“She was very involved in everything we did in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria ― and the force structure and operational decisions ... so she knows very well all the issues involved in positioning forces in that theater, and that’s an important priority,” Carter said.
Baker rose from House staffer to budget analyst in the Office of Management and Budget’s homeland and national security divisions during the Obama administration. She was credited with later shaping Warren’s national security agenda, which took aim at rising defense budgets and the revolving door between the Pentagon and the defense industry.
When Baker was tapped for the National Security Council in January, Warren endorsed Baker as an “excellent choice.”
“Sasha Baker has been by my side in Iraq, Afghanistan, China, and the DMZ. She understands that our national security can’t solely be run by the Pentagon for the wealthy and well-connected,” Warren said, using an abbreviation for the Korean Peninsula’s Demilitarized Zone.
The nomination comes after Biden’s pick for defense policy chief saw some of the toughest scrutiny of any of his national security nominees so far. In April, the Senate confirmed Colin Kahl to be the undersecretary of defense for policy despite unified opposition from Senate Republicans who took issue with his history of tweets attacking Republican lawmakers and support for the controversial Iran nuclear deal.
Baker is the third senior director in this administration’s National Security Council to be nominated for a major position. Biden has nominated Mallory Stewart for a State Department arms control post and Barbara Leaf to be assistant secretary of state for near-eastern affairs.
4. Mara Karlin confirmed to lead Pentagon strategy
Excerpt:
On Monday, the Senate also confirmed Caral Spangler ― who cleared the Senate Armed Services Committee with Karlin and others in a July 27 voice vote ―to be Army comptroller and assistant secretary of the Army for financial management. Gil Cisneros, the pick for undersecretary for personnel and readiness, is the last of that group awaiting floor consideration.
Mara Karlin confirmed to lead Pentagon strategy
WASHINGTON ― The Senate on Monday confirmed veteran defense official Mara Karlin to lead Pentagon strategy hours after Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., announced he’d lifted a procedural hold on the nomination over China policy concerns.
Hawley’s hold delayed Karlin’s bid to be assistant secretary of defense for strategy, plans and capabilities. But he said he released it after receiving Karlin’s assurances that she favors centering the Pentagon’s force planning process on China and that she believes in employing a strategy of “deterrence-by-denial” ― as opposed to deterrence by punishment alone ― to counter China and its aggression toward Taiwan.
Those assurances came in an Aug. 6 letter from Karlin to Hawley that he released Monday.
The retired Navy officer and businessman has cited China and climate change as the predominant threats facing the force.
By: Geoff Ziezulewicz
Karlin is expected to lead the development of the next national defense strategy, a guiding document for the Defense Department’s future. The 2018 National Defense Strategy put strategic competition with Russia and China front and center and above countering terror.
Karlin has served in national security roles for five U.S. secretaries of defense, most recently as the the acting assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs. She served on the Biden-Harris transition team and, before that, as director of strategic studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.
On Monday, the Senate also confirmed Caral Spangler ― who cleared the Senate Armed Services Committee with Karlin and others in a July 27 voice vote ―to be Army comptroller and assistant secretary of the Army for financial management. Gil Cisneros, the pick for undersecretary for personnel and readiness, is the last of that group awaiting floor consideration.
5. Tucker Carlson’s Spying Allegations Being Investigated by National Security Agency Watchdog
It is good that the IG is conducting an investigation. If we are doing this then it needs to be exposed and people held accountable. And if we are not doing this then we need to restore the confidence of the American people that is damaged due to these allegations.
Tucker Carlson’s Spying Allegations Being Investigated by National Security Agency Watchdog
The Fox News host says the spy agency had improperly targeted his communications
Tucker Carlson speaking in Esztergom, Hungary, last week.
PHOTO: JANOS KUMMER/GETTY IMAGES
By Dustin Volz
Updated Aug. 10, 2021 5:38 pm ET
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WASHINGTON—The National Security Agency’s internal watchdog is conducting a review of recent allegations made by Fox News host Tucker Carlson that the spy agency had improperly targeted his communications for surveillance, the agency and an official said.
The announcement of the review by the NSA’s inspector general doesn’t mention Mr. Carlson by name, but instead refers to a member of the U.S. news media. A person familiar with the matter said the review concerns Mr. Carlson.
The review will examine NSA’s compliance with laws and policies governing intelligence collection, analysis and dissemination, including procedures surrounding the unmasking of the redacted identities of U.S. citizens or residents caught up in surveillance of foreign nationals, NSA Inspector General Robert Storch said.
An NSA spokesman said the agency “remains fully committed to the rigorous and independent oversight provided by the NSA Inspector General’s office” and added that the watchdog played a “critical role” overseeing its activities and ensuring accountability.
“We are gratified to learn the NSA’s egregious surveillance of Tucker Carlson will now be independently investigated,” a Fox News spokeswoman said.
Mr. Carlson, the host of a popular daily conservative opinion show on Fox News, alleged in June that a “whistleblower within the U.S. government” had informed his show that the NSA was spying on him, and that the whistleblower had access to some of his texts and emails about a forthcoming story he was working on. Mr. Carlson didn’t provide evidence to substantiate his claims.
Following a report by Axios that he had been seeking an interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the spring, Mr. Carlson acknowledged on his show that he had contacted “a couple of people” he thought could help facilitate such an interview and said it was his right as a journalist to talk to newsworthy public figures. It isn’t clear whether that bid for an interview led to Mr. Carlson’s communications being collected by the NSA.
The allegation of improper NSA surveillance prompted a rare statement from the NSA rejecting the claims. “This allegation is untrue,” an NSA spokesman said at the time. “Tucker Carlson has never been an intelligence target of the Agency.”
Mr. Carlson has previously said on his show that NSA’s denial was limited because it only said he wasn’t the target of intelligence, which other surveillance law experts have also noted.
Fox News parent Fox Corp. and Wall Street Journal parent News Corp share common ownership.
The claim by Mr. Carlson was dismissed as implausible by surveillance law experts including former intelligence officials, but the accusation generated enough concern to prompt at least one NSA briefing for congressional staff, according to people familiar with the matter.
Last week, Sen. Marco Rubio, the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, sent a letter to Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines requesting a formal inquiry into Mr. Carlson’s allegations and whether his identity had been unmasked in an intelligence report.
“Additionally, I request that you publicly release to the greatest extent practicable, and in a manner that does not endanger intelligence sources or methods, all documents, materials, and communications supporting the conclusions of this inquiry,” Mr. Rubio said in his letter. He added that the NSA’s prior public communications on the allegations had “only created more questions” and was damaging public trust in the intelligence community.
Unmasking refers to a common practice in intelligence collection in which the identity of a U.S. citizen, lawful resident or corporate entity, ordinarily redacted in intelligence reports, is revealed upon request from senior administration officials. The officials, who would have appropriate security clearance, need to justify the request. The unmasking would typically enable a greater understanding of the intelligence, officials said.
Former intelligence officials have said it is possible that Mr. Carlson’s messages sent in pursuit of an interview with Mr. Putin could have been incidentally included in surveillance that targeted foreign officials, who are routinely subject to NSA surveillance. Another scenario is that two or more foreigners were discussing Mr. Carlson’s interview request amongst themselves and the NSA intercepted that conversation. In either scenario, Mr. Carlson’s identity would have been concealed and a U.S. official would have needed to request and justify its unmasking.
—Vivian Salama contributed to this article.
Copyright ©2021 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Appeared in the August 11, 2021, print edition as 'NSA Watchdog Probes Carlson Spying Claims.'
6. Duckworth Calls for Closer Ties to Taiwan, More U.S. Vaccine Diplomacy
Excerpts:
“Just being a presence in the region is needed” when the Chinese are using its fishing fleet to assert extra-territorial claims, she said.
“The PRC [People’s Republic of China] is doing everything to disrupt the democracy” that is Taiwan, down to threatening countries with economic retaliation if they shipped vaccines to the island that China regards as a renegade province. The senator termed China’s actions a “blockade” of Taiwan.
Duckworth added most Americans don’t know that Taiwan shipped to the United States personal protective equipment and ventilators at the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in this country.
“Vaccine diplomacy [by the United States] is very welcome,” not only in Taiwan, which will receive 4 million doses.
Duckworth Calls for Closer Ties to Taiwan, More U.S. Vaccine Diplomacy - USNI News
Soldiers from a M110A2 self-propelled artillery squad from the Republic of China (Taiwan) Army. CNA Photo
The Taiwan Strait is a key route of trade and is as important as the Malacca Strait, between the Malay Peninsula and the Indonesian island of Sumatra, for the free flow of commerce in the Indo-Pacific, a key member of the Senate Armed Services Committee said on Tuesday.
Sen. Tammy Duckworth, (D-Ill.) said Indo-Pacific nations view the U.S. Navy’s strait transits through the Taiwan Strait and through disputed territory in the South China Sea as welcomed.
“Just being a presence in the region is needed” when the Chinese are using its fishing fleet to assert extra-territorial claims, she said.
“The PRC [People’s Republic of China] is doing everything to disrupt the democracy” that is Taiwan, down to threatening countries with economic retaliation if they shipped vaccines to the island that China regards as a renegade province. The senator termed China’s actions a “blockade” of Taiwan.
Duckworth added most Americans don’t know that Taiwan shipped to the United States personal protective equipment and ventilators at the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in this country.
“Vaccine diplomacy [by the United States] is very welcome,” not only in Taiwan, which will receive 4 million doses.
“The people of Taiwan needed to know the U.S. would not abandon them,” and other nations needed to know that there were “no strings attached” to the American shipments of vaccines to them, “unlike China.”
She called for a “partnership for peace” between Taiwan and American states’ National Guard components as a critical means to ensure “we’re not starting from scratch” if China ever attempts to invade the island.
A “habitual relationship” like Illinois has with Poland in training for natural disaster response to securing territory would benefit the U.S. relationship with Taiwan.
Duckworth, an Iraq war veteran and retired member of the National Guard, added that the “partnership for peace program” has “paid dividends for us for little cost.”
The program was started in 1993 following the collapse of the Soviet Union and was designed to train former Warsaw Pact nations in how a military operates in a democratic republic.
As for placing American ground-based weapons in Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand and other nations close to China, Duckworth said, “we have to engage with them” in those kinds of discussions to deter Beijing in the future. But engagement goes beyond military training and basing, she said. “We certainly need more trade agreements” in the Indo-Pacific to counter Beijing’s use of economic muscle to get its way diplomatically and in threatening military force if it doesn’t.
Duckworth said she believes the current Authorization for the Use of Military Force, passed in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, “is no longer valid.” In calling for a new law, one that could cover Africa – “the new nexus of terrorism” – she said members of Congress should “take a deep breath, have that discussion” and then vote.
As for the withdrawal from Afghanistan, Duckworth said the Afghan government “haven’t stepped up” after 20 years of American security, economic and diplomatic assistance in stopping the Taliban.
She said the question really is “what do the American people want” in Afghanistan now?
Related
7. Renowned epidemiologist says the world 'is closer to the beginning than the end' of the pandemic
I guess having a name like Dr. Brilliant is better than being a boy named Sue. But he must have taken some abuse growing up and in his school days. "So Larry, do you think just because your name is brilliant that you are smarter than the other kinds?"
Renowned epidemiologist says the world 'is closer to the beginning than the end' of the pandemic and warns Indian 'Delta' variant is 'maybe the most contagious virus' ever
- Dr Larry Brilliant, part of the WHO team to eradicate smallpox, said the pandemic is not close to over because only 15% of the world has been vaccinated
- He added the Delta variant is the most contagious virus he's ever seen because it has a short incubation period and one person spreads it to eight others
- Brilliant said the UK had seen cases fall because the surge is an 'inverted V-shaped curve' with cases both going up and coming down quickly
- Some have predicted that the U.S., which is averaging 100,000 new cases per day, will follow the same trajectory and is just three to four weeks behind the UK
PUBLISHED: 18:19 EDT, 9 August 2021 | UPDATED: 21:29 EDT, 9 August 2021
Daily Mail · by Mary Kekatos Acting U.S. Health Editor For Dailymail.Com · August 9, 2021
A renowned epidemiologist says the coronavirus pandemic is far from over due to not enough vaccines being available for every country.
Dr Larry Brilliant, who was a medical officer in the World Health Organization's (WHO) smallpox eradication program, says not enough people around the globe have been vaccinated against COVID-19.
He told CNBC's Street Signs that only 15 percent of people in the world have been immunized with some countries not even inoculating five percent of residents.
Brilliant also addressed the spread of the Indian 'Delta' variant and sad it was the most infectious he had ever seen in his career.
'I think we're closer to the beginning than we are to the end [of the pandemic], and that's not because the [Delta] variant that we're looking at right now is going to last that long,' Brilliant told CNBC.
'Unless we vaccinate everyone in 200-plus countries, there will still be new variants.'
Dr Larry Brilliant, part of the WHO team to eradicate smallpox, told CNBC (pictured) that the pandemic is not close to over because only 15% of people in the world have been vaccinated
Brilliant said the Delta variant (B.1.617.2) is the most contagious virus he's ever seen because it has a short incubation period and one person spreads it to eight others. It currently makes up 90% of case in the U.S. (above)
The world has been struggling to contain the Delta variant since it was first discovered in September 2020 in the Maharashtra state, which is the second most-populous state in India and where Mumbai is located.
Indian health authorities labeled the variant a 'double mutant' because it carries two mutations: L452R and E484Q.
Both of the mutations occur on key parts of the virus that allows it to enter and infect human cells.
In the U.S., the Delta variant - including its subtypes - currently makes up more than 90 percent of all news cases.
'This new variant, the Delta variant, it's different,' Brilliant told CNBC.
'When you and I have spoken before, we didn't deal with a virus that had a three-and-a-half-day incubation period and every case led to eight more with exponential growth.
'This is maybe the most contagious virus that we've ever seen in living memory.'
However, Brilliant said that all three approved vaccines in the U.S. - Pfizer-BIoNTech, Modern and Johnson & Johnson - are helping prevent cases of serious illness and death for those infected with Delta.
The doctor also spoke about how surges in the UK and India, fueled by the Delta variant, have each dropped off.
In the UK, the seven-day rolling average of new cases per day has fallen from 47,000 on July 21 to 27,200 on Sunday, according to Our World in Data.
Meanwhile, in India, the daily average has plateaued around 40,000 cases per day after peaking at 391,000 on May 9.
Some have predicted that the U.S., which is averaging 100,000 new cases per day, will follow the same trajectory and is just three to four weeks behind the UK.
Brilliant said that the Delta variant likely infects people so quickly that it runs out of people to spread to after a few weeks.
'Our models...also predict a inverted V-shaped epidemic curve, going up very quickly and coming down very quickly,' he told CNBC.
'This disease is so infectious and is so rapid to infect everybody that, even including that some vaccinated people are also infected, it basically runs out of candidates [to infect] very quickly.
'That may mean that this is a six-month phenomenon in a country, rather than a two-year phenomenon. But I do caution people that this is the Delta variant and we have not run out of Greek letters so there may be more to come.'
Daily Mail · by Mary Kekatos Acting U.S. Health Editor For Dailymail.Com · August 9, 2021
8. China boosts Olympic gold medal count by lumping in Hong Kong, Taiwan
Chinese propaganda can "fix" anything. If we added Puerto Rico it would only give us one more gold.
China boosts Olympic gold medal count by lumping in Hong Kong, Taiwan
The Olympics may be over, but Chinese state media is still going for the gold.
One of the communist country’s official outlets found a way to boost its nation’s second-place medal haul ahead of the leading United States, by including the medals won by Taiwan and Hong Kong in the tally, according to reports.
China Central Television listed the nation as having 42 gold medals under their inflated and inaccurate count, three ahead of the 39 that the US took home, and four more than China alone really took home, the Free Beacon reported.
The graphic circulated on Weibo, a local social media platform, according to the outlet.
The US also beat China in the other medal counts by winning 41 silvers to 32, 33 bronzes to 18, and an overall tally of 113 to 88.
In addition to the news outlet, some Chinese social media users also clumped Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau on Weibo to give the enlarged “China” 42 golds, 37 silvers and 27 bronzes for a total count of 110, the Taiwan News reported.
China’s inaccurate Olympic medal count circulated on Weibo.
“Congratulations to the Chinese delegation for ranking first in gold medals and the total number of points,” they wrote.
Last week, China Daily correspondent Chen Weihua posted of photo on Twitter of a tally showing the US ahead in the overall medal count — but behind China in gold.
“U.S. media always finds a way to put [the United States] on top,” he wrote, the Free Beacon reported.
The official and accurate Olympic medal count.
The International Olympic Committee requires Taiwan, which the Chinese Communist Party claims is part of China, to compete as “Chinese Taipei.” Announcers referred to the country as “Chinese Taipei” to appease Beijing.
9. No, the unvaccinated aren't selfish or ignorant. Here's why I'm not vaxxed | Opinion
A very powerful and persuasive argument. However, I am glad my family has been vaccinated. We will get boosters when te time comes and I hope everyone does get the vaccine.
Excerpts:
Let me start by saying that I agree that the COVID-19 vaccine is an important tool in reducing the severity of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths due to COVID-19. In general, I am supportive of the availability and accessibility of safe, potentially life saving medications and preventative measures for anyone at risk of any serious illness. The more options when it comes to preventing and treating COVID-19, the better! But this does not mean that all options should necessarily be utilized by all people en masse, and this is how I arrived at my current decision to opt out of the vaccine.
...
The bottom line for me, and perhaps others who are similarly ambivalent about the COVID-19 vaccine, is that trustworthy information and guidance is key. And those of us opting out of the vaccine are not doing so out of ignorance or selfishness. We have simply been paying attention to the mixed messages, the hypocrisy, the changing standards, and the censoring of counter-evidence. And we have not been convinced that this is something we need to do, for our own good or that of our communities or country.
The COVID-19 vaccine remains one effective tool among many in the fight against COVID-19. Clear, transparent information about what the vaccine does, what its risks and limitations are, and what other options exist especially for prevention and early outpatient treatment are what is needed to restore trust.
The mandates, bribes, social pressure, censorship, and ever changing policies that don't present clear scientific rationale need to stop. But at least the doctor/patient relationship should be prioritized in the meantime, so that we as individuals can make informed decisions for ourselves, enabling us all to emerge sooner rather than later from this seemingly never ending health crisis.
No, the unvaccinated aren't selfish or ignorant. Here's why I'm not vaxxed | Opinion
I'm not vaccinated against COVID-19. The decision wasn't a drastic one; I thought of it as a personal decision that every person should make in consultation with a trusted health professional, which is what I did. It didn't occur to me that this decision merited justification to others. But that was before the current climate of social and political pressure, before the Delta surge, and before unvaccinated people like me started getting blamed for vaccine-resistant variants. Now I feel that explaining my decision has become necessary.
In explaining my decision, my hope is not to convince people to change their minds about whether to vaccinate but rather to help others understand why some may choose differently.
Let me start by saying that I agree that the COVID-19 vaccine is an important tool in reducing the severity of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths due to COVID-19. In general, I am supportive of the availability and accessibility of safe, potentially life saving medications and preventative measures for anyone at risk of any serious illness. The more options when it comes to preventing and treating COVID-19, the better! But this does not mean that all options should necessarily be utilized by all people en masse, and this is how I arrived at my current decision to opt out of the vaccine.
The reported adverse events and risks of the authorized COVID-19 vaccines are rare, and most people don't seem to have any serious adverse reactions. But though rare, the risks are still real. Cardiac issues, blood clotting, stroke, and autoimmune disorders are all acknowledged adverse events that can occur as a result of the COVID-19 vaccine.
A colleague of my parents reportedly died from complications of the Moderna vaccine, a friend suffered from deep vein thrombosis, and a teenage nephew of another friend now has chronic cardiac issues. These are three examples from my immediate network of family and friends, and I know many others with their own stories. And while it's true that these are anecdotes and do not represent the majority, they are powerful nonetheless.
Public health messaging has consistently portrayed the vaccines are safe and effective, and therefore everyone eligible should get vaccinated. But companies like Moderna and Pfizer are protected from lawsuits related to their COVID-19 vaccines until 2024.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK - AUGUST 09: People gather at City Hall to protest vaccine mandates on August 09, 2021 in New York City. NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio announced last week that as of August 16th proof of coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccination will be required to attend indoor restaurants, gyms, and entertainment venues with enforcement of the mandate to begin on September 13th. Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
The personal risk/benefit analysis still plays a role and preventing serious illness is definitely important, but getting the vaccine to protect others (and calling unvaccinated adults selfish) no longer seems to be relevant if the vaccinated can spread it, too. In fact, some experts have advised only individuals at high risk of serious illness from COVID-19 to get vaccinated, in order to prevent the evolution of even more vaccine resistant variants.
Why censor the adverse effects? Why not publicize them so we can make informed decisions?
Still, I didn't arrive at my decision on my own. I am lucky to have a relationship with a health professional who I feel comfortable asking questions without fear of judgment. I trust her guidance, having built a history with her and knowing that she has my best interests in mind. In fact, had she unequivocally recommended the vaccine specifically for me to the best of her clinical judgment, I would have gotten vaccinated that day. Unequivocal recommendation, however, was not the message I received in my case as a young, otherwise healthy individual, who was also pregnant. Another doctor I consulted with also generally recommends vaccination, but added that in my case, the concerns are understandable and waiting made sense. He connected me with an obstetrics clinic that has experience treating COVID-19 in pregnancy in the event I should require it, since the location where I normally receive medical care does not offer treatment unless hospitalization is required.
The bottom line for me, and perhaps others who are similarly ambivalent about the COVID-19 vaccine, is that trustworthy information and guidance is key. And those of us opting out of the vaccine are not doing so out of ignorance or selfishness. We have simply been paying attention to the mixed messages, the hypocrisy, the changing standards, and the censoring of counter-evidence. And we have not been convinced that this is something we need to do, for our own good or that of our communities or country.
The COVID-19 vaccine remains one effective tool among many in the fight against COVID-19. Clear, transparent information about what the vaccine does, what its risks and limitations are, and what other options exist especially for prevention and early outpatient treatment are what is needed to restore trust.
The mandates, bribes, social pressure, censorship, and ever changing policies that don't present clear scientific rationale need to stop. But at least the doctor/patient relationship should be prioritized in the meantime, so that we as individuals can make informed decisions for ourselves, enabling us all to emerge sooner rather than later from this seemingly never ending health crisis.
Suri Kinzbrunner previously worked as a teacher and preschool director and is currently homeschooling her 7 children. She studied cognitive neuroscience as an undergraduate at the George Washington University in Washington D.C. and worked briefly in this field before becoming a parent. She is especially passionate about issues related to parenting and education.
The views in this article are the writer's own.
10. Chinese hackers disguised themselves as Iran to target Israel
Misdirection and misattribution. Or cyber smoke and mirrors. Perhaps it makes sense if China wants to have a relationship with Israel.
But it is interesting China is posing Iran and in the 2018 Olympics Russia tried to misattribute its hack to north Korea. I am trying to think how we could exploit this and do our own misattribution to try to create mistrust and chaos among the revisionist and rogue powers. Then again maybe they all expect that they will be using each other and it is just a fact of life in the cyber domain. And any chaos we might contribute to will probably end up supporting the objectives of our adversaries.
Excerpt:
New research from the American cybersecurity firm FireEye, working with the Israeli military, exposes the failed deception and describes the techniques the hackers used to try putting the blame elsewhere.
Chinese hackers disguised themselves as Iran to target Israel
But they left a few clues that gave them away.
When hackers broke into computers across Israel’s government and tech companies, investigators looked for clues to find out who was responsible. The first evidence pointed directly at Iran, Israel’s most contentious geopolitical rival. The hackers deployed tools normally associated with Iranians, and wrote in the Farsi language, for example.
But after further examination of the evidence—and information gathered from other cyberespionage cases across the Middle East—analysts realized it was not Iranian operation, but in fact conducted by Chinese operatives posing as a team of hackers from Tehran.
The hackers successfully targeted the Israeli government, technology companies, and telecommunication firms—and by deploying false flags, it appears that they hoped to mislead analysts into believing the attackers were from Israel’s regional nemesis.
New research from the American cybersecurity firm FireEye, working with the Israeli military, exposes the failed deception and describes the techniques the hackers used to try putting the blame elsewhere.
Related Story
Chinese-speaking hackers are targeting Uyghur Muslims with fake United Nations reports and phony support organizations, according to a new report.
Many of their tactics were fairly blunt attempts to suggest they were Iranian spies at work, according to the research paper, such as using file paths containing the word “Iran.” But the attackers also took pains to protect their true identities by minimizing the forensic evidence they left on compromised computers, and hiding the infrastructure they used to break into Israeli machines.
But their ploy to point the finger at Iran failed. The hackers, who FireEye refers to as UNC215, made several key technical mistakes which blew their cover and strongly linked them back to their previous work. This included using similar files, infrastructure, and tactics across multiple operations across the Middle East.
“There are pieces that will distinguish the operator or their sponsor,” says John Hultquist, vice president of threat intelligence at FireEye. “They will bleed through multiple operations regardless of deception.”
On top of multiple technical giveaways, another important clue is the kind of information or victims that the hackers targeted. UNC215 repeatedly attacks the same kinds of targets in the Middle East and Asia, all of which are directly related to China’s political and financial interests. The group's targets overlap with other Chinese hacking groups, which do not always coincide with the interests of known Iranian hackers.
“You can create significant deception but ultimately you have to target what interests you,” Hultquist says. “That will provide information on who you are because of where your interests are.”
The only obvious countermove to this problem is to try putting investigators off the trail by going after targets that aren’t really of interest. But that causes its own issues—raising the volume of activity vastly increases the chances of getting caught—which raises a Catch-22 dilemma for the hackers.
The fingerprints left by the attackers were enough to eventually convince Israeli and American investigators that the Chinese group, not Iran, was responsible. The same hacking group has prior form, having used similar deceptive tactics before. In fact, it may even have hacked the Iranian government itself in 2019, adding an extra layer to the deception.
It is the first example of a large-scale Chinese hack against Israel, and comes in the wake of a set of multi-billion dollar Chinese investments into the Israeli tech industry. They were made as part of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative, an economic strategy meant to rapidly expand Chinese influence and reach clear across Eurasia to the Atlantic Ocean. The United States warned against the investments on the grounds that they would be a security threat. The Chinese Embassy in Washington D.C. did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Misdirection and misattribution
UNC215's attack on Israel was not particularly sophisticated or successful, but it shows how important attribution—and misattribution—can be in cyberespionage campaigns. Not only does it provide a potential scapegoat for the attack, but it also provides diplomatic cover for the attackers: When confronted with evidence of espionage, Chinese officials regularly attempt to undermine such accusations by arguing that it is difficult or even sometimes impossible to trace hackers.
And the attempt to misdirect investigators raises an even bigger question: How often do false flag attempts fool investigators and victims? Not that often, says Hultquist.
“It’s still fairly rare to see this,” he says. “The thing about these deception efforts is if you look at the incident through a narrow aperture, it can be very effective.”
"It's very hard to keep the deception going over multiple operations."
John Hultquist, FireEye
An individual attack may be successfully misattributed, but over the course of many attacks it becomes harder and harder to maintain the charade. That’s the case for the Chinese hackers targeting Israel throughout 2019 and 2020.
“But once you start tying it to other incidents, the deception loses its effectiveness,” Hultquist explains. “It’s very hard to keep the deception going over multiple operations.”
The best known attempt at misattribution in cyberspace was a Russian cyberattack against the 2018 Winter Olympics opening ceremony in South Korea. Dubbed Olympic Destroyer, the Russians attempted to leave clues pointing to North Korean and Chinese hackers—with contradictory evidence seemingly designed to prevent investigators from ever being able to come to any clear conclusion.
“Olympic Destroyer is an amazing example of false flags and attribution nightmare,” Costin Raiu, director of the Global Research and Analysis Team at Kaspersky Lab, tweeted at the time.
Eventually researchers and governments did definitively pin the blame for that incident on the Russian government, and last year the United States indicted six Russian intelligence officers for the attack.
Those North Korean hackers who were initially suspected in the Olympic Destroyer hack have themselves dropped false flags during their own operations. But they were also ultimately caught and identified by both private sector researchers and the United States government who indicted three North Korean hackers earlier this year.
“There’s always been a misperception that attribution is more impossible than it is,” says Hultiquist. “We always thought false flags would enter the conversation and ruin our entire argument that attribution is possible. But we’re not there yet. These are still detectable attempts to disrupt attribution. We are still catching this. They haven’t crossed the line yet.”
11. Report: China Is Hacking Russia, Too
Everyone is a target for China.
Report: China Is Hacking Russia, Too
Moscow may be just “waking up” to the fact that their new partner sees them as a target.
Much has been made about the emerging relationship between China and Russia, two countries that the National Defense Strategy recognizes as near-peer competitors to the United States. They’re already collaborating on research, both are run by autocratic regimes, and neither has much affinity for the United States. But the marriage may not be as steady as Russia, especially, would like others to believe. A new report out of Russia accuses the Chinese government of hacking Russian state targets.
Last week, the Group-IB security consulting group published a blog post describing attacks in 2019 against Russian federal executive authorities. The attacks continued into 2020.
The malware used in the attack, Webdav-O, bears an uncanny resemblance to code that certain Chinese hacker groups use, according to Group-IB, which was founded in Russia but now has offices in other countries.
“Group-IB specialists established that Webdav-O has a set of commands similar to a popular Trojan called BlueTraveller (aka RemShell), which was developed in China and has been linked to the hacker group called TaskMasters,” the report said.
A second Chinese attacker group, TA428, also hit Russian executive authorities in 2020.
“Group-IB experts believe that either both Chinese hacker groups (TA428 and TaskMasters) attacked Russian federal executive authorities in 2020 or that there is one united Chinese hacker group made up of different units,” the group writes.
That matters because Western military leaders have become increasingly concerned about growing ties between the two regimes. A NATO communiqué from June noted that China “is also cooperating militarily with Russia, including through participation in Russian exercises in the Euro-Atlantic area.”
China and Russia are also cooperating on space initiatives to challenge the United States and a wide variety of technology pursuits. But many experts describe the budding relationship as a mostly cosmetic alliance, one that benefits Moscow far more than Beijing. As China grows in power, Russia could become more eager to claim their relationship with China is healthy and growing, especially around technology.
“Chinese-Russian defense cooperation has generated significantly greater gains for China than it has for Russia. Over time, Moscow is poised to grow more dependent on Beijing as long as its standoff with NATO continues,” Eugene Rummer and Richard Sokolsky wrote in a Carnegie Endowment op-ed in June.
Another Russia watcher, Sam Bendett, said officials in Moscow had deliberately downplayed knowledge of Chinese hacks.
“Since Sino-Russian high tech cooperation is elevated to the highest levels, with leaders of both countries publicly promoting such bilateral activity, any discussion of potential Chinese hacking against Russia was a ‘third rail.’ There were few, if any, public admissions of confirmation that such anti-Russian activities are taking place,” said Bendett, a CNA adviser and an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. “So if these allegations are true and the Chinese hackers were indeed state-backed, it shows the difficulty of trying to preserve Sino-Russian high-tech cooperation as above the hacking that is supposed to be done by Russia’s ‘traditional’ cyber adversaries that are constantly singled out by Moscow, i.e., U.S. and NATO.”
When asked for his opinion on the report, Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder and former chief technology officer of cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, said that Russia is “waking up to the fact that China has been hacking the world out of them for well over a decade.”
12. Climate Change Is Already Disrupting the Military. It Will Get Worse, Officials Say
Facts are facts and data is data. What does the future hold?
Climate Change Is Already Disrupting the Military. It Will Get Worse, Officials Say
Even as wildfires drain National Guard resources, the Pentagon is racing to develop computer models that can better guide decisions about sustainability efforts.
The Pentagon is in the midst of a massive, multi-year effort to better adapt to climate change and reduce greenhouse emissions. But the changing climate is already imposing costs on the military and even challenging how well it can prepare to fight other nation states.
“In terms of current operations, we have National Guardsmen, we have active-duty soldiers, we have active-duty airmen right now participating in firefighting support efforts. So these are...folks who are not doing a primary job. So right now we are experiencing climate change and effects. Right now, we know that these are going to only increase over time,” Richard Kidd, the deputy assistant defense secretary for environment and energy resilience, said in an interview.
That’s just one of the most obvious examples of climate impact on the military. Humanitarian assistance and support for civil authority are also Defense Department missions, as outlined in the National Defense Strategy, and climate change is growing those missions’ size and scope, Kidd said.
“We have already seen anecdotal evidence for increased demand for domestic support. If you track the number of days the National Guard was needed to provide support for civil authorities, last year was the highest year on record,” he said.
Part of that was the response to massive protests across the country. But this year, with far fewer protests, “We are on track to exceed that amount. This is National Guardsmen called up to fight forest fires,” he said. “Likewise, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers response for hurricanes and droughts in support of the national response through FEMA,” will also increase, he said.
Supporting firefighters and other people dealing with natural disasters is satisfying work for a lot of troops, Kidd said. But, he added, “There’s an opportunity cost: if equipment and personnel are being used for that, they aren’t doing other things. They aren’t doing the sort of warfighter training that they need to do.”
Eventually, dealing with the effects of climate change will become a key area of military involvement, he said. “We absolutely predict that that demand set will only increase, and yes, we can do that.”
More and more security experts agree.
In June, the International Military Council on Climate and Security released its second report on the impacts of climate change on issues such as governance and civil unrest across the globe. They surveyed experts from a variety of institutions—including the Planetary Security Initiative at the Netherlands Institute of International Relations, the Hague Centre for Strategic Studies, and the French Institute for International and Strategic Affairs—asking them how they expect various risk areas like biodiversity, water availability, and instability within nations to evolve over the next decade. The experts held a dim view.
“Respondents expect a majority of risks will pose high to catastrophic levels of risk to security. Ten and 20 years from now, respondents expect very high levels of risk along nearly every type of climate security phenomena,” the report said.
The experts concluded that the global governance system isn’t prepared for many of the risks. So, in part because of that lack of preparedness, more and more of the international response to climate-change-related issues will fall to men and women in uniform.
“Militaries will be increasingly overstretched as climate change intensifies. As the pace and intensity of extreme weather events increases, countries are increasing their reliance on military forces as first responders,” they wrote. “While direct climate change effects regularly threaten military infrastructure and threaten to reduce readiness, the most pressing security threats will come from climate change-induced disruptions to social systems.”
In 2019, the Pentagon launched a broad review of the effects of climate change on the military. This review put no price tag on current or future costs—in part because they depend on just how much the Defense Department can reduce its own emissions.
“In terms of greenhouse gas emissions, if we were a country, we would be the 55th largest emitter of greenhouse gases by country status,” Kidd said.
“The department absolutely recognizes we have to be part of the solution.”
Reducing emissions at the department’s hundreds of installations, which produce about one-third of its greenhouse gases, may seem to be the easy part, since buildings and infrastructure are simpler to model and modify. But that’s also the problem: Mistakes are literally cemented. Simple wrong choices can cost millions and the “wrongness” of any choice usually becomes clear only over time.
“Six inches or a foot of a seawall equates to millions of dollars in construction costs,” said Chris Massey, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers mathematician.
But it’s hard to predict just how much seas will rise and storms will intensify over the next decades.
Decreasing the U.S. military’s operational carbon footprint is a different sort of game, one of understanding as perfectly as possible how any decision may result in a better or worse outcome, or lives lost. Here, too, a better understanding of the associated risks in trading in a fuel-hungry technology for something greener will be the key.
This is where new technologies like virtual twinning come into play. High-resolution modeling techniques will make it possible to better understand the effects of climate change and find ways to reduce the department’s carbon footprint.
Understanding how to better predict the weather has been a Defense Department dream since the end of World War II. But the technologies on hand today have made realizing that dream a real possibility.
Predicting the weather
For the U.S. military, the idea of using computers to better model the climate is older than computers themselves. Just after World War II, the U.S. military briefly entertained the idea that it might be possible to precisely predict the weather, and thus control it, through the use of vast electric calculators. As bizarre as the notion sounds, two of the best minds in the country firmly believed it and managed to convince the U.S. Navy to fund their research. In October 1945, mathematician John Von Neumann—credited with some of the most important computational discoveries in history—and Vladimir Zworykin—the father of the television—marched into the office of Adm. Lewis Strauss and pitched their idea: a machine that could perform calculations quickly enough to account for all the variables in weather and climate, and eventually predict rain or snow as plainly as time. Strauss provided them with $200,000 to construct their machine, which helped pave the way for random access memory, or RAM, and the future of modern computation as we know it. What it did not do is accurately predict the weather.
While Von Neumann and Zworkin grossly underestimated the number of calculations a machine would need to make in order to perfectly predict weather, they were on to something. More computation allowed for much more precise modeling of weather conditions, which the U.S. military of 2021 is using now to rethink how and where they build installations.
In July, the Army announced that it had entered into a new cooperative research and development agreement with Microsoft to test how the Army’s coastal storm modeling system, CSTORM-M, works in Microsoft’s Azure cloud environment. The hope is that the movement to a massive enterprise-level cloud will allow them to run new, never-before-deployed simulations of the coastal sea rise and also to allow researchers to use the model results to look at coastlines in more detail.
“To do that we need high-fidelity models,” Massey said. “They are computationally efficient, but at the same time expensive. They require a lot of CPU hours to get that level of accuracy. When it comes to construction cost, accuracy matters.”
C-STORM-M takes about 10,000 historical records of past storms and models them to understand what might happen with future storm sturges and other climate-related weather events. Moving the operation to an enterprise cloud will allow researchers to run the model over and over again much faster, and that should improve the model’s accuracy. It’s the difference between 100 practice hours and 1,000 or more. It will also allow them to bring in other forms of data and further improve understanding of potential probabilities.
“If for some reason that’s limited, and instead of running a thousand simulations you can only run twenty, well then the uncertain parts in your answers in the whole probability space are much larger. That equates to large dollars when it comes time to actually construct something,” Massey said.
Bruno Sánchez-Andrade Nuño, the principal scientist at Microsoft’s AI for Earth Program, says running the model at higher frequency in the new environment will also improve how well the Army can apply the model in different locations. Incorporating new data layers related to satellite images, infrastructure, etc.. will allow the military to much better understand not only what areas will be underwater or hit by heavy hurricane winds, but also model resiliency. For example, how the shutdown of a particular road might affect traffic, or how long it will take for the base to get back on its feet after a major event.
In essence, running a high-resolution climate model in an enterprise cloud environment thousands of times is a sort of prediction machine, but instead of perfectly predicting the weather, it offers a sense of what the weather will cost and what problems it will bring, Nuño said.
“More than a ‘what if’ forecasting tool, [the output] would be an assessment of risks under certain circumstances,” he said. “Any asset, any service, any population is going to be threatened by those storm surges, and so it’s extremely important to understand those risks and then use that,” to inform building decisions.
The computations, Massey said, “are giving you the answers to see how high do you need to build? How high does that levy need to be? ...Those construction costs, if you are off or you haven’t done enough modeling to really satisfy your accuracy requirements, then that could result in you needing to add six inches or more of uncertainty or engineering safety margins on top of what you’ve already done.”
The Navy is doing similar modeling work for its facilities in Hawaii, as well as its shipyard in Portsmouth, Virginia, through a process called digital twinning. In essence, they create a very high-fidelity digital mockup of the new base, building, or piece of infrastructure you are trying to build—a virtual twin—then hammer it over and over again with disasters: high winds, too much rain, too little rain.
“We actually do modeling through digital twins where we can actually look at the probability of an event occurring and the costs associated with mitigating that, and that would actually drive some of the construction work,” said Rear Adm. John Korka, commander of Naval Facilities Engineering Systems Command, during the recent Sea Air Space event in Maryland.
In April, the Defense Department announced it would make its Climate Assessment Tool, or DCAT, available across the department. The tool allows planners to “look at the effects of climate change on our installations over two time periods, two greenhouse gas emissions scenarios in eight areas, drought, temperature, riverine, sea level rise, these type of activities,” Kidd said.
All of that climate prepping is putting the Defense Department in the lead as a developer and purchaser of microgrid technology, which could help bring down the cost and spur innovation.
“We want to build installation resilience. How do we do that? Basically on-site microgrid and on-site power generation,” said Kidd. He pointed to reports showing that the Defense Department could make up one-third of the market for microgrid and large-scale power storage due to new resilience requirements stemming from climate change.
New buildings will also be outfitted with new sensors to feed more data into future modeling, through the smart installations initiative, which should help the Defense Department much better understand how it’s using—and in some cases wasting—power.
Reducing operational emissions
But installations only account for a third of the Pentagon’s greenhouse gas footprint. The majority comes from operations, where going with greener alternatives can carry. It’s also an area where the Defense Department has led for decades, mostly due to practical concerns about fuel availability.
The Defense Department will play close attention to how to achieve the same level of capability at lower fuel use, Kidd said.
“We’re not going to talk about curtailing operations. We’re going to talk about: How do we maximize the impact for the energy that we use, which is in terms of efficiency, but it’s also about artificial intelligence, aircraft planning? So can we be even more precise, even more exact? Can we cover the same set of targets with fewer assets through better use of intelligence and for those assets?” he said.
Other technologies, like solar thin film, have also reached a maturity level that will allow either new, more efficient vehicles or integration into existing ones.
“There’s a variety of technologies out there, very-thin-film photovoltaics that can be put on the wings of aircraft, principally unmanned aircraft, to give them very extensive range, adding a hybrid drive to many of our vehicles, battery storage, energy capacitors. We have a range of investments and opportunities in the operational energy space that will drive up capability and drive down fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions,” Kidd said.
The Defense Department, he said, is also part of a new Biden administration initiative with the commercial air industry to convert waste streams into new types of fuel. And the Pentagon has long been experimenting with new genetically or molecularly engineered fuel types.
The goal is to get to a net-zero carbon footprint by the middle of the century. But many things on the battlefield still can’t be easily converted. “Add all that up...and we’ll probably still be burning liquid fuel in 2050,” Kidd said.
That means that the Pentagon will have to find some way to offset the fuel, which Kidd said could mean using Defense Department land differently.
“We have a tremendous amount of land. We can change the way we use that land, trap more carbon in the soils or vegetation, to serve as a sequester offset for the fuels we are still burning,” he said.
Still, there’s no way to model for absolutely every eventuality, especially in the context of possible conflict. That means military leaders will continue to be cautious in terms of technologies they try out or deploy, especially if it comes at the expense of a capability they know works. So convincing military leaders that new solutions work better than what exists today will be difficult.
“I feel comfortable that we can adapt, but I don’t know the magnitude we can adapt to,” Korka said. “We talk about the modeling, again, you’re making a decision based on the probability of occurrence, and that’s what you’re putting in. But what if you get it wrong? And what if you get it wrong with something that’s mission-critical?”
13. Wagner: Scale of Russian mercenary mission in Libya exposed
Excerpts:
The tablet was left behind by an unknown Wagner fighter after the group's fighters retreated from areas south of Tripoli in spring 2020.
Its contents include maps in Russian of the frontline, giving confirmation of Wagner's significant presence and an unprecedented insight into the group's operations.
There is drone footage and codenames of Wagner fighters, at least one of whom the BBC believes it has identified. The tablet is now in a secure location.
Wagner: Scale of Russian mercenary mission in Libya exposed
By Ilya Barabanov & Nader Ibrahim
BBC News Russian & BBC News Arabic
Published
4 hours ago
A new BBC investigation has revealed the scale of operations by a shadowy Russian mercenary group in Libya's civil war, which includes links to war crimes and the Russian military.
A Samsung tablet left by a fighter for the Wagner group exposes its key role - as well as traceable fighter codenames.
And the BBC has a "shopping list" for state-of-the-art military equipment which expert witnesses say could only have come from Russian army supplies.
Russia denies any links to Wagner.
The group was first identified in 2014 when it was backing pro-Russian separatists in the conflict in eastern Ukraine. Since then, it has been involved in regions including Syria, Mozambique, Sudan, and the Central African Republic.
Wagner's fighters appeared in Libya in April 2019 when they joined the forces of a rebel general, Khalifa Haftar, after he launched an attack on the UN-backed government in the capital, Tripoli. The conflict ended in a ceasefire in October 2020.
The group is notoriously secretive, but the BBC has managed to gain rare access to two former fighters. They revealed what type of person was joining Wagner - and its lack of any code of conduct.
There is little doubt that they kill prisoners - something one ex-fighter freely admits. "No-one wants an extra mouth to feed."
This supports other parts of the TV documentary - Haftar's Russian Mercenaries: Inside the Wagner Group - by BBC News Arabic and BBC News Russian. Its other revelations include evidence of suspected war crimes, including the intentional killing of civilians.
One Libyan villager describes how he played dead as his relatives were killed. His testimony helped the BBC team identify a suspected killer.
Describing another possible war crime, a Libyan government soldier also recalls how a comrade, his friend, surrendered to Wagner fighters but was shot twice in the stomach. The soldier has not seen him since, nor three other friends taken away at the same time.
image captionA Libyan villager shows images of a relative who was killed. The villager says he survived himself by playing dead
The Samsung computer tablet also provides evidence of the mercenaries' involvement in the mining and booby-trapping of civilian areas.
Placing landmines without marking them is a war crime.
The revealing Samsung tablet
The tablet was left behind by an unknown Wagner fighter after the group's fighters retreated from areas south of Tripoli in spring 2020.
Its contents include maps in Russian of the frontline, giving confirmation of Wagner's significant presence and an unprecedented insight into the group's operations.
There is drone footage and codenames of Wagner fighters, at least one of whom the BBC believes it has identified. The tablet is now in a secure location.
image captionMilitary maps in Russian on the Samsung tablet
The 'shopping list'
A comprehensive list of weapons and military equipment is included in a 10-page document dated 19 January 2020, given to the BBC by a Libyan intelligence source and probably recovered from a Wagner location.
The document indicates who may be funding and backing the operation. It lists materiel needed for the "completion of military objectives" - including four tanks, hundreds of Kalashnikov rifles and a state-of-the-art radar system.
A military analyst told the BBC that some of the weapons technology would only be available from the Russian military. Another expert, a specialist on the Wagner group, said the list pointed to the involvement of Dmitry Utkin.
He is the ex-Russian military intelligence man believed to have founded Wagner and given it its name (his own former call-sign). The BBC tried to contact Dmitry Utkin but has received no reply.
The US Treasury sanctioned Evro Polis in 2018, calling it a Russian company contracted to "protect" Syrian oil fields that were "owned or controlled" by Mr Prigozhin.
Investigations by Western journalists have linked Mr Prigozhin to Wagner. He has always denied any link to Evro Polis or Wagner.
A spokesperson told the BBC that Yevgeny Prigozhin has nothing to do with Evro Polis or Wagner. Mr Prigozhin commented that he had not heard anything on the violation of human rights in Libya by Russians: "I am sure that this is an absolute lie."
Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs told the BBC it is doing "its utmost to promote a ceasefire and a political settlement to the crisis in Libya."
The ministry added that details about Wagner in Libya are mostly based on "rigged data" and were aimed at "discrediting Russia's policy" in Libya.
What is Wagner? Its ex-fighters speak
Officially, it does not exist - but up to 10,000 people are believed to have taken at least one contract with Wagner since it emerged fighting alongside pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine in 2014.
About 1,000 Wagner men are estimated to have fought with Gen Khalifa Haftar in Libya from 2019 to 2020.
The BBC in Russia asked one of the ex-fighters to describe Wagner. He replied: "It is a structure, aimed at promoting the interests of the state beyond our country's borders."
As for its fighters, he said they were either "professionals of war", people looking for a job, or romantics looking to serve their country.
The other ex-fighter told the BBC there were no clear rules of conduct. If a captured prisoner had no knowledge to pass on, or could not work as a "slave", then "the result is obvious".
Andrey Chuprygin, an expert working with the Russia International Council, said the stance of the Russian government was - "let them join this thing, and we'll see what the result is. If it works out well, we can use it to our advantage. If it turns out badly, then we had nothing to do with it".
Libya - a decade of turmoil
Downfall of Gaddafi in 2011: Col Muammar Gaddafi's more than four decades of rule end in an Arab Spring uprising. He tries to flee but is captured and killed
The country splinters: After 2014, major competing factions emerge in the east and west
Ceasefire in October 2020: Then in early 2021 a new unity government is chosen and sworn in, to take the nation to elections in December. Foreign fighters and mercenaries were supposed to have left, but thousands remain
14. NSA Awards Secret Up-to-$10B Contract to Amazon
Not so secret anymore.
NSA Awards Secret Up-to-$10B Contract to Amazon
A Microsoft protest of the decision has revealed some details about the U.S. intelligence community's second multi-billion dollar cloud award of the year.
The National Security Agency has awarded a secret cloud computing contract worth up to $10 billion to Amazon Web Services, Nextgov has learned.
The contract is already being challenged. Tech giant Microsoft filed a bid protest on July 21 with the Government Accountability Office two weeks after being notified by the NSA that it had selected AWS for the contract.
The contract’s code name is “WildandStormy,” according to protest filings, and it represents the second multibillion-dollar cloud contract the U.S. intelligence community—made up of 17 agencies, including the NSA—has awarded in the past year.
In November, the CIA awarded its C2E contract, potentially worth tens of billions of dollars, to five companies—AWS, Microsoft, Google, Oracle and IBM—that will compete for specific task orders for certain intelligence needs.
Details on the NSA’s newly awarded cloud contract are sparse, but the acquisition appears to be part of the NSA’s attempt to modernize its primary classified data repository, the Intelligence Community GovCloud.
For the better part of a decade, the NSA has moved its data, including signals intelligence and other foreign surveillance and intelligence information it ingests from multiple repositories around the globe, into this internally operated data lake analysts from the NSA and other IC agencies can run queries and perform analytics against.
In 2020, intelligence officials signaled an intent to bring in a commercial cloud provider to meet demands caused by exponential data growth and massive processing and analytics requirements that are challenging the NSA’s ability to scale. The effort, called the Hybrid Compute Initiative, would effectively move the NSA’s crown jewel intelligence data from its own servers to servers operated by a commercial cloud provider.
Another win for Amazon
Amazon Web Services is parent company Amazon’s most profitable business unit, and while industry analysts consider it the market leader in cloud computing, it is also the dominant cloud provider among federal agencies, the Defense Department, and the intelligence community. AWS first inked a $600 million cloud contract with the CIA called C2S in 2013, through which it provided cloud services to the CIA and sister intelligence agencies, including the NSA. Last year, AWS secured at least a portion of the CIA’s multibillion-follow-on C2E contract. Microsoft twice won the Pentagon’s multibillion-dollar Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract over AWS, but Defense officials cancelled that contract in July after years of litigation.
“[The NSA’s award] just reiterates that Amazon is still the cloud provider to beat across the federal government,” said Chris Cornillie, an analyst at Bloomberg Government. “Microsoft has come a long way and made it a two way horse race in government, but Amazon was forming relationships and gathering security certifications a decade ago and Microsoft is still playing catch-up.”
AWS referred questions to the NSA.
"NSA recently awarded a contract for cloud computing services to support the Agency. The unsuccessful offeror has filed a protest with the Government Accountability Office. The Agency will respond to the protest in accordance with appropriate federal regulations," an NSA spokesperson told Nextgov.
In a statement to Nextgov, Microsoft confirmed its protest.
"Based on the decision we are filing an administrative protest via the Government Accountability Office. We are exercising our legal rights and will do so carefully and responsibly," a Microsoft spokesperson told Nextgov.
The Government Accountability Office is expected to issue a decision on Microsoft’s protest by Oct. 29.
15. The Words the AP Didn’t Want to Use
A perspective on journalism most of us do not read and certainly do not consider.
Excerpts:
Do you think it’s possible to work from the place of being a patriot and still say it’s really important to look directly at these bad things that the United States has done around the world?
Katz: My story in America is like a lot of people’s. I’m primarily the great-grandson of immigrants who fled the pogroms of Russia to come to the United States and find safety and liberty and a chance of prosperity. We were the huddled masses. My great-grandfather, Aron Katz, didn’t know his birthday, so he made it the Fourth of July. To a great extent, I maintain that sense of America as a land of liberty. But living as I did in Haiti—being on the other end of American power and seeing the way that it was affecting people—the history is undeniable. The question is, “What do you do with that?”
The Words the AP Didn’t Want to Use
The reporter Jonathan Katz explains how he wrestled with the sins of U.S. interventions abroad—and what to call them.
Lately, the news has regularly demonstrated how the United States has fallen short of its ideals. The New York Times’ 1619 Project stirred controversy for reframing American history around the country’s early dependence on slavery, rather than its declaration of founding principles. The United States’ withdrawal from Afghanistan confirmed to the world that the U.S. failed in its mission to rebuild that country as a democracy. And the recent assassination of Haiti’s president, Jovenel Moïse, was a reminder that many of America’s historical foreign interventions also failed to live up the nation’s professed principles, as with the 1915 U.S. military invasion after the assassination of another Haitian president, Vilbrun Guillaume Sam.
These issues are particularly difficult for hard-news journalists to navigate. What some readers see as plain-language descriptions of history and context, others perceive as evidence of bias. Jonathan Katz, a former Associated Press reporter in Haiti, has had to figure out that balance for himself. His time in Haiti during the devastating 2010 earthquake and its aftermath left him convinced that America bore some responsibility for the poor quality of life in the Caribbean country. Katz went on to write a book on the international community’s failure to respond to the 2010 disaster and another, forthcoming book on America’s interference in countries around the world during the early 20th century. But despite the evidence he can produce to justify using terms like occupation and colonialism, he’s found that some editors still shy away from those descriptions.
I talked with Katz about what it means to grapple with America’s past. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Emma Green: As a country, we seem to be going through this moment where we’re reckoning with how we should understand and tell stories about the chapters in our history where the American project was used to justify abuse or enslavement or exploitation of less powerful people.
You were a reporter in Haiti during one of the low points in its history—a time of total devastation. And one of the things that really comes through in your writing is you’ve concluded that America’s involvement in Haiti shaped how bad things got.
How did you get to the point where you felt confident saying, as a statement of fact, that America’s involvement in Haiti was a form of colonialism?
Jonathan Katz: It wasn’t instantaneous. Even before I became a reporter, I knew that the United States had sometimes been a malign actor in the world. That wasn’t particularly news to me. But I would always approach accusations with skepticism. I still do, anytime anybody’s immediate answer to anything is, “Oh, the United States did that. It must’ve been the CIA.” Show me the receipts. But as a reporter, I have gone pretty deep into the evidence of a lot of different moments of American history and Haitian history. Sometimes those receipts were actually even reported at the time.
It was a radicalizing experience living in Haiti. It’s a stark place in terms of understanding how the world works.
Green: As a journalist, and specifically as a journalist who worked in Haiti for the Associated Press—the most “Just the facts, ma’am” wire service that exists—did you feel like you were allowed to use language that correctly labeled America’s involvement there, specifically words like colonialism?
Katz: Working for AP raised the bar on the amount of evidence I needed to produce to make any sort of claim. I think it ended up ultimately making my work stronger, and it makes me more confident in some of the perspectives that I came to.
I first moved to Haiti in 2007. I had spent two years before that in the Dominican Republic. And two years before I moved to the Dominican Republic was the coup against Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the former president of Haiti.
The AP style was not to call it a coup. I believe the word was rebellion. I remember that being a really big deal.
Green: When you say “big deal,” what do you mean? Like: It was very clear that it was a coup, and you felt like you were having to be Orwellian?
Katz: I would just get a lot of, like, flack. I would get emails from people angry at me for having not referred to it as a coup. But by the time I moved there, even though it had only been three years, I just thought, Look, this is the style. It was really as I was looking back, as I was writing my first book and poring through these old clips, that I thought, This was a coup. That’s an appropriate word.
My principal job as an AP correspondent was to deal with what was happening around me in real time. And that was a full-time job. So to a certain extent, it makes sense that it was only when I started writing books and really started digging back into the history that I was able to get more precision.
Green: You wrote recently about an incident where you got an assignment for a national outlet—you don’t name it. You were supposed to be writing about the recent assassination of the Haitian president, Jovenel Moïse. You used the word occupation to refer to the role that the U.S. Marines played in Haiti from 1915 to 1934. And your editor questioned you on that word.
As a caveat, I should say: I think there are a lot of well-educated Americans who don’t know much about the history of the U.S. presence in the Caribbean. And it’s an editor’s role to add nuance and push back and ask dumb questions.
Still, that story struck me because it seemed like you were encountering a reflexive resistance to telling the story straight. The assumption is that if you’re using this kind of loaded word, one that gets tossed around in academic circles, you’re not telling it straight. You’re bringing an accusatory, ideological lens to bear on history. Why do you think that reflexive desire to shy away from naming things exists at national outlets?
Katz: That period of time was officially called “the U.S. occupation of Haiti.” There are letters from occupation officials referring to themselves and saying, “On behalf of the American occupation, thank you for the fruit basket.” Stuff like that. That back-and-forth with this editor reflects a tendency to try to downplay the most egregious parts of America’s past. To a certain extent, we’re seeing that in domestic conversations as well with the 1619 Project and America’s history of racism.
This is how an empire has to operate. If you keep in mind all of these individual moments and string them together into a narrative, the conclusions that one can draw aren’t very friendly to self-identity and national identity—to the imperial project. I don’t think that there’s necessarily a room where the powers that be are sitting, making a decision, and saying, “Let us suppress these memories.” It’s a much more individual process. As an AP correspondent, I was part of that process. Nobody wrote me and said, “Thou shall not call the coup against Jean-Bertrand Aristide by that name.” You don’t want to look ideological. You don’t want to look crazy.
As you said, most people in the United States, even well-educated people, don’t know about America’s history of empire in the Caribbean or Latin America or Asia or the rest of the world. The question to really ask is, “Why?” When people think about our history, they tend to think it goes: American colonial past, American Revolution, Civil War … and then there’s this blank space, and then World War II. Why is there this blank space? I honestly think that one major reason is that in this period, the United States was doing some really horrible things. And it is much easier just to ignore that period entirely than to confront that history.
With that editor, it was not just a back-and-forth over a single word. It was really the whole thrust. I was saying that, on balance, the United States has been a malign actor in Haiti, especially over the course of the 20th and the early 21st centuries. That idea was dead on arrival.
Green: One of the fundamental tensions in the debate around the 1619 Project, or in this fight with your editor, seems to be “Are you a patriot, or are you not? Are you someone who loves America, or are you not?” When a word like empire gets tossed around, the assumption is, “Oh, that guy is calling America an empire. He must hate America, because obviously America was founded to be the anti-empire.”
Do you think it’s possible to work from the place of being a patriot and still say it’s really important to look directly at these bad things that the United States has done around the world?
Katz: My story in America is like a lot of people’s. I’m primarily the great-grandson of immigrants who fled the pogroms of Russia to come to the United States and find safety and liberty and a chance of prosperity. We were the huddled masses. My great-grandfather, Aron Katz, didn’t know his birthday, so he made it the Fourth of July. To a great extent, I maintain that sense of America as a land of liberty. But living as I did in Haiti—being on the other end of American power and seeing the way that it was affecting people—the history is undeniable. The question is, “What do you do with that?”
16. Cybersecurity Firm Mandiant Uncovers Chinese Espionage Group UNC215’s Activity in Israel
Excerpts:
According to Mandiant, UNC215 has compromised organizations in the government, technology, telecommunications, defense, finance, entertainment, and healthcare sectors. The group targets data and organizations of great interest to Beijing’s financial, diplomatic, and strategic objectives.
“The activity demonstrates China’s consistent strategic interest in the Middle East. This cyber-espionage activity is happening against the backdrop of China’s multi-billion-dollar investments related to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and its interest in Israel’s robust technology sector,” read Mandiant’s report.
Cybersecurity Firm Mandiant Uncovers Chinese Espionage Group UNC215’s Activity in Israel
Japan is turning to Israeli cybersecurity experts in advance of the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo. Photo: Twitter
CTech – Analysis by cybersecurity firm Mandiant has shown multiple, concurrent operations against Israeli government institutions, IT providers, and telecommunications entities by the Chinese cyberespionage group UNC215, beginning in January 2019.
In addition to data from Mandiant Incident Response and FireEye telemetry, Mandiant worked with Israeli defense agencies to review data from additional compromises of Israeli entities.
In early 2019, Mandiant began identifying and responding to intrusions in the Middle East by UNC215. These intrusions exploited a Microsoft SharePoint vulnerability to install webshells and FOCUSFJORD payloads at targets in the Middle East and Central Asia.
During this time, UNC215 used new tactics, techniques, and procedures to hinder attribution and detection, maintain operational security, employ false flags, and leverage trusted relationships for lateral movement. Mandiant said it believes this adversary is still active in the region.
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A detailed look into how UNC215 operates revealed that the operators conduct credential harvesting and extensive internal network reconnaissance post-intrusion. After identifying key systems within the target network, such as domain controllers and Exchange servers, UNC215 moved laterally and deployed their signature malware FOCUSFJORD. UNC215 often uses FOCUSFJORD for the initial stages of an intrusion, and then later deploys HYPERBRO, which has more information collection capabilities, such as screen capture and keylogging. While UNC215 heavily relies on the custom tools FOCUSFJORD and HYPERBRO, Chinese espionage groups often have resource-sharing relationships with other groups.
UNC215 made several attempts to foil network defenders, such as cleaning up evidence of their intrusion after gaining access to a system, exploiting trusted third parties, making technical modifications to their tools to limit outbound network traffic, and planting false flags, such as using Farsi strings to mislead analysts and suggest an attribution to Iran.
While UNC215 prioritizes evading detection within a compromised network, Mandiant identified several examples of code, C&C infrastructure, and certificate reuse indicating that UNC215 operators are less concerned about defenders’ ability to track and detect UNC215 activity.
According to Mandiant, UNC215 has compromised organizations in the government, technology, telecommunications, defense, finance, entertainment, and healthcare sectors. The group targets data and organizations of great interest to Beijing’s financial, diplomatic, and strategic objectives.
“The activity demonstrates China’s consistent strategic interest in the Middle East. This cyber-espionage activity is happening against the backdrop of China’s multi-billion-dollar investments related to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and its interest in Israel’s robust technology sector,” read Mandiant’s report.
17. A Reluctant Embrace: China’s New Relationship with the Taliban
Excerpt:
In anticipation of prolonged conflict in Afghanistan, Beijing is trying to strike a balance in its diplomacy toward the Afghan government and the Taliban. Chinese officials’ recent recognition of the Taliban as a legitimate political force is significant. However, the prospects for that relationship remain uncertain as the Taliban’s future policies are unclear. China has the capacity to play a bigger role in the country economically, but a willingness to do so will only emerge when there are signs of sustainable stability. China has been weaving a net of bilateral, trilateral (China, Pakistan, and Afghanistan), and multilateral engagements to encourage that stability. If stability does not emerge in the foreseeable future, China most likely will avoid deep economic involvement in Afghanistan and will work with both the Afghan government and the Taliban to protect its interests on the ground.
A Reluctant Embrace: China’s New Relationship with the Taliban - War on the Rocks
As the United States withdraws from Afghanistan and leaves a security vacuum there, is China moving in by cozying up to the Taliban? On July 28, Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi held a high-profile official meeting with a delegation of nine Afghan Taliban representatives, including the group’s co-founder and deputy leader Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar. This was not the first visit by Taliban members to China, but the meeting was unprecedented in its publicity, the seniority of the Chinese attendees, and the political messages conveyed. Most notably, Wang used the meeting to publicly recognize the Taliban as a legitimate political force in Afghanistan, a step that has major significance for the country’s future development.
Even so, close examination of the meeting’s details and the Chinese government’s record of engagement with the Taliban reveals that the future path of the relationship is far from certain. Not only is the endgame of the armed conflict in Afghanistan undetermined. There are also questions about how moderate the Taliban will ever be, which has a tremendous impact on Chinese officials’ perception of, and policy toward, the organization. Additionally, despite the narrative that Afghanistan could play an important role in the Belt and Road Initiative as well as in regional economic integration, economics is not yet an incentive for China to lunge into the war-plagued country. China has been burned badly in its previous investments in Afghanistan and will tread carefully in the future. In an effort to further its political and economic interests, the Chinese government has reluctantly embraced the Taliban, but it has also hedged by continuing to engage diplomatically with the Afghan government.
China’s Public Recognition of the Taliban as a Legitimate Political Force
In 1993, four years after the Soviet Union had withdrawn its last troops from Afghanistan and one year after the Afghan communist regime had collapsed, China evacuated its embassy there amid the violent struggle then taking place. After the Taliban seized power in 1996, the Chinese government never established an official relationship with that regime. The Taliban’s fundamentalist nature, their association with and harboring of al-Qaeda, and their questionable relationship with Uighur militants all led Chinese officials to view them negatively.
Even as China has maintained its official recognition of the Afghan government, in recent years, Chinese officials have developed a relationship with the Taliban in response to the deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan and shifts in the balance of power on the ground. In 2015, China hosted secret talks between representatives of the Taliban and Afghan government in Urumqi, the capital city of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. In July 2016, a Taliban delegation — led by Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanekzai, then the group’s senior representative in Qatar — visited Beijing. During the trip, the Taliban representatives reportedly sought China’s understanding and support for their positions in Afghan domestic politics. China’s engagement efforts intensified in 2019, as peace talks between the United States and the Taliban gained speed. In June of that year, Baradar, who had become head of the Taliban’s political office in Qatar and is viewed as a moderate figure by Chinese officials, visited China for official meetings on the Afghan peace process and counter-terrorism issues. After the negotiations between the Taliban and the United States in Doha faltered in September 2019, China tried to fill the void by inviting Baradar again to participate in a two-day, intra-Afghan conference in Beijing. It was originally scheduled for Oct. 29 and 30 of that year. It was postponed at least twice, in October and November, before China and ultimately the world plunged into the COVID-19 crisis. The meeting never took place.
China’s keen and active engagement with the Taliban reveals Beijing’s deepening perception of the group’s critical role in Afghanistan after the U.S. troop withdrawal. During his meeting with Baradar last month, Wang publicly described the Taliban as “a crucial military and political force in Afghanistan that is expected to play an important role in the peace, reconciliation, and reconstruction process of the country.” This was the first time that any Chinese official publicly recognized the Taliban as a legitimate political force in Afghanistan, a significant gesture that will boost the group’s domestic and international standing. As Chinese officials battle a reputation for cozying up to the Afghan Taliban — designated a terrorist organization by Canada, Russia, and others — it is important for them to justify the rationale for their engagement.
Wang did not forget to diss Washington in the meeting with the Taliban: He emphasized “the failed U.S. policy on Afghanistan” and encouraged the Afghan people to stabilize and develop their country without foreign interference. Although the United States was not the focus of the meeting, Chinese officials did draw a contrast between what they consider America’s selective approach to Afghan politics and China’s “benevolent” role by virtue of its self-proclaimed noninterference principle and amical approach to all political forces in Afghanistan.
The third aspect of Wang’s message focused on the demand that the Taliban “sever all ties with all terrorist organizations, including the East Turkestan Islamic Movement,” a Muslim separatist group founded by militant Uighurs. Although many have questioned the existence of the organization, and the Trump administration removed it from the U.S. Terrorist Exclusion List last November, the presence of Uighur militants in Afghanistan and their political aspirations are real. This issue has been a priority for Chinese officials in their dealings with all political forces in Afghanistan. In fact, without the Taliban’s public promise in July not to harbor any group hostile to China, it is questionable whether Chinese officials would have issued such a high-profile recognition of the Taliban as a legitimate political force at all.
China’s Balancing Diplomacy
While the Taliban delegation’s recent visit to Beijing has garnered much publicity, less attention was paid to what happened just prior to it. Twelve days before, General Secretary Xi Jinping had a phone conversation with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani. Xi emphasized “China’s firm support of the Afghan government to maintain the nation’s sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity.” The call highlighted that not only does China still recognize Ghani’s government as the legitimate representative of Afghanistan, but that Beijing also has pledged its support to Ghani in relation to the peace process and much-needed COVID-19 relief, at least for the time being.
There are different views in China over the likely outcome of the conflict between the Taliban and the Afghan government. Although many analysts assess that the Taliban will eventually prevail, some prominent Chinese experts have argued that the group’s victory is “only one of the possibilities” and that its territorial advances have been exaggerated. Even if many signs point to potential victory by the Taliban, the nature and timing of that event remain to be seen. For the Chinese government, uncertainty about the future of Afghan politics underscores the need for a balanced approach that maintains ties with both sides, as perfectly illustrated by Xi’s phone call with Ghani and Wang’s meeting with the Taliban.
As long as the civil war in Afghanistan persists, the Chinese government will continue to pursue this diplomatic balancing act as the best way to promote its interests. Indeed, China needs both the Afghan government and the Taliban to help protect the security of Chinese assets and nationals on the ground, as well as to combat organizations such as the East Turkestan Islamic Movement. In the event the Taliban and Afghan government end up in a prolonged stalemate, China also desires to play the role of a mediator — even if outsiders see it more as a facilitator — which requires China not to pick a side.
A China-Taliban Romance?
The meeting between Wang and the Taliban delegation was not all cozy. And China’s budding relationship with the group comes with conditions. Wang told his visitors — in a style reminiscent of a lecture — that they need to “build a positive image and pursue an inclusive policy.” The implied message is that if the Taliban enact draconian measures again, this will inevitably affect China’s stance toward them. Indeed, some Chinese experts have called for the Taliban to make more changes in their policies in order to modernize and pursue a moderate direction. The Taliban’s ability and willingness to do so will determine the depth and breadth of China’s future engagement with them.
Chinese officials have felt a growing need to curry favor with the Taliban as the security situation in Afghanistan and the surrounding region has deteriorated. On June 19, the Chinese Foreign Ministry issued a rare warning calling for all Chinese nationals and entities in Afghanistan to “evacuate as soon as possible” in anticipation of intensified fighting in the country. Two days after the Wang-Taliban meeting, the Foreign Ministry issued the same warning once again. In neighboring Pakistan, three high-profile attacks against Chinese nationals have been launched in the last four months: the April 22 bombing of a hotel in Quetta where the Chinese ambassador was staying, a bus explosion in Kohistan that killed nine Chinese engineers in mid-July, and the shooting in Karachi of a car carrying Chinese engineers on the same day the Taliban delegation met with Wang. The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the Quetta attack and analysts also suspected that it is culpable in the other attacks. Some Chinese experts have warned that the security vacuum created by the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan could lead to an intensification of violence against Chinese nationals in the region. Hence, Chinese officials will likely see a need to rely on the Afghan Taliban not to target China, as well as to help influence or rein in those who might.
The relationship is born of necessity rather than preference. Many Chinese officials and analysts have doubts about how modernized the Afghan Taliban will ever be. Although some in China assess that the Taliban have become more pragmatic, there is no guarantee for what their policy will look like, especially regarding relations with radical Islamic organizations in the region. In addition, even if the core of the Taliban adopts a neutral, or even friendly, policy toward China, whether it could rein in all of the group’s radical factions remains a major question. Chinese officials don’t see many choices other than working with the Afghan Taliban, but the relationship will be complex, and its course will be determined by numerous factors in the months and years ahead.
Economics Not Yet an Incentive
The Taliban have openly welcomed Chinese investment in the reconstruction of Afghanistan and have indicated they would guarantee the safety of investors and workers from China. However, China is unlikely to lunge into Afghanistan with major investment in the foreseeable future. There has consistently been a disconnect between Chinese rhetoric regarding Afghanistan’s economic potential and the actual scale of Chinese commercial projects in the country. In 2019, the Chinese ambassador to Afghanistan emphasized the important role Afghanistan could play in China’s Belt and Road Initiative as well as in Chinese-Pakistani-Afghan regional economic integration. Nevertheless, that rosy picture is not supported by the actual data. For the first six months of 2021, total Chinese foreign direct investment in Afghanistan was only $2.4 million, and the value of new service contracts signed was merely $130,000. That suggests that the number of Chinese companies and workers in Afghanistan is declining significantly. For the whole of 2020, total Chinese foreign direct investment in Afghanistan was $4.4 million, less than 3 percent of that type of Chinese investment in Pakistan, which was $110 million for the same year.
China has been burned badly in its investments in Afghanistan. Its two major projects to date — the Amu Darya basin oil project by China’s largest state-owned oil company, China National Petroleum Corporation, and the Aynak copper mine by state-owned China Metallurgical Group Corporation and the Jiangxi Copper Company Limited — have both been ill fated. The challenges have included archeological excavation that halted the progress of the Aynak copper mine, security threats, and renegotiation of terms as well as the challenges of resettling local residents. Among these, political instability and security threats have been the top concerns. As long as the security environment remains unstable, China is unlikely to launch major economic projects in Afghanistan. The American troop presence there was not the factor hindering Chinese economic activities. In fact, Chinese companies had benefited from the stability that U.S. troops provided. Therefore, the U.S. withdrawal is unlikely to encourage major Chinese investment.
Walking a Tightrope
In anticipation of prolonged conflict in Afghanistan, Beijing is trying to strike a balance in its diplomacy toward the Afghan government and the Taliban. Chinese officials’ recent recognition of the Taliban as a legitimate political force is significant. However, the prospects for that relationship remain uncertain as the Taliban’s future policies are unclear. China has the capacity to play a bigger role in the country economically, but a willingness to do so will only emerge when there are signs of sustainable stability. China has been weaving a net of bilateral, trilateral (China, Pakistan, and Afghanistan), and multilateral engagements to encourage that stability. If stability does not emerge in the foreseeable future, China most likely will avoid deep economic involvement in Afghanistan and will work with both the Afghan government and the Taliban to protect its interests on the ground.
Yun Sun is the director of the China program at the Stimson Center.
18. Another $158 billion for Xi Jinping
From one of the best experts on China's economy. He provides us a very good lesson on trade deficits.
Another $158 billion for Xi Jinping
August 9, 2021
Remember when our trade deficit with China mattered? Half-year figures for Sino-American goods trade were published Friday, but you’re in good company if you missed it. It’s hard for the bilateral trade deficit to affect the US economy. It’s therefore even harder for tariffs on Chinese goods to do so, despite parts of business insisting they’re awful and parts of labor insisting they’re vital. The bilateral deficit does matter, but not the way most people think.
Our goods trade deficit with China rose 21 percent from the first half of 2020 to the first half of 2021, past $158 billion. Heading back before the pandemic, it’s five percent smaller than the first half of 2019. For the year, the 2021 goods trade deficit is on course to roughly match 2014, which candidate Donald Trump attacked in 2015 as costing millions of jobs, echoing long-standing claims by organized labor.
In June 2014, unemployment was 6.1 percent, versus 5.9 percent this June. That seems to fit? But the 2020 bilateral deficit was lowest since 2011, yet unemployment ended the year higher than at any time since 2013. The bilateral deficit also plunged during the financial crisis. Meanwhile, the 2018 Sino-American deficit was the biggest on record. Over that year, unemployment fell from an already low 4.1 percent to 3.9 percent.
In fact, a stronger US economy causes bigger trade deficits with the People’s Republic of China. Employment rises and we buy more, including from the PRC. It’s extremely difficult for tariffs to protect or create jobs because (in the US) it’s jobs that drive imports, not the other way around. Trade doesn’t matter that much, example one.
The other side of the tariff debate is also wrong. American tariffs on Chinese goods were first raised in 2018, with the most substantial increases implemented over 2019. That and ongoing harm from the pandemic led to . . . an $11 billion increase in US imports from the PRC in the first half of this year compared to 2019. Tariffs aren’t doing much.
Critics can complain that imports could be higher. But another $50 billion, say, would mean little to our economy. Imports from the PRC are just profitable, not irreplaceable. And American GDP in 2021 should exceed $22 trillion. Net US wealth at the end of 2020 was $116 trillion. Trade doesn’t matter that much, example two.
Protectionists get the problem wrong: Trade doesn’t cost jobs. President Trump got the solution wrong; his tariffs have done little. Business also has tariffs wrong. They mostly affect profitability and stock prices of a few companies, which shouldn’t factor into national policy.
Worse than these, though, is the business community’s solution. Recent calls to lower tariffs while negotiating difficult issues such as state subsidies are farcical. The PRC has fallen short of simple trade commitments and remains a cyber predator. Business groups oppose even minor retaliation such as existing tariffs, yet pretend still more talks can change fundamental Chinese behavior. Such groups lost their China credibility years ago.
While tariffs and the economic impact of trade are overhyped, the bilateral deficit plays another role. It supplies Beijing with an enormous quantity of foreign currency. The PRC’s current foreign exchange holdings, in official reserves and at state banks, are about $4.3 trillion. During China’s WTO membership, from 2002 through 2020, the cumulative bilateral goods and services deficit is $4.97 trillion. It’s our money.
Americans benefit from those imports. The PRC’s gains from exports to the US have been greater, including a stable balance of payments and hundreds of billions, at least, in surplus dollars to use globally. There are partial substitutes for imports from China, including production here. Only the US can provide Beijing so much hard currency. Don’t like the Belt and Road Initiative or China’s other international activities? They’d be much less extensive without us.
Economists say American trade deficits don’t matter and, in most ways, they’re right. But China is our top rival and, under Xi Jinping, verges on an enemy. We’re going to pay them another $1 trillion before the 2024 election. That shouldn’t just pass by without notice.
19. Why America Loses Wars
An interesting history lesson from George Friedman. This should be discussed and debated in PME institutions and civilian graduate schools(and among all policy makers and strategists).
Excerpt:
After World War II, America’s main adversary was the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was a moral nightmare. Soviet power was daunting, and a global moral challenge faced the United States. Realpolitik and a moral struggle combined, and the U.S. and Soviet Union fought to transform nations into partisans of the moral project of either liberal democracy or Marxism-Leninism. Over time, this lapsed into massive cynicism on both sides, but at the core, the moral and grand strategies blended, and the real struggle was for the hearts and minds of the populace, shaped by covert and overt war.
...
World War II was a moral exercise. It brought the U.S. era upon the world. The moral dimension of that war became a necessary dimension of future wars, which became more frequent as the U.S. became a global power. The moral dimension was easily visible: devise not only a clear strategy for waging war but also a measure of when the war was failing. And above all, know when the strategy isn’t working and avoid being trapped by falling back on the moral to avoid making hard decisions.
The world has grown used to U.S. military intervention. It condemns it and is then comforted by its condemnations. But losing wars after years of struggle – or staying in wars you are losing for moral reasons or to hide the reality – makes no sense. The U.S. has to control where and how it goes to war. Its notion of victory includes the moral transformation of ancient people who do not think they are immoral. A moral principle on terrain well known, and weapons suited for it, works. A moral principle on unfamiliar terrain and inappropriate weapons is less effective.
Why America Loses Wars | Geopolitical Futures
August 10, 2021
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The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is moving to its inevitable conclusion. The Taliban, the radical Islamists the U.S. was fighting, are taking back control of the country, one city at a time. Put differently, the United States has lost the war it fought for the past 20 years. There are those who want to continue to fight, but I doubt that another 20 years will bring victory considering that the definition of success is vague and wildly ambitious. The goal was to transform an ancient and complex society from what it was to into what we wanted it to be. Defeating a country comprising warring factions and imposing peace and a new culture was beyond Washington’s reach.
This is not the first war the U.S. has lost since World War II, and given the overwhelming military power of the United States, it must be explained. To explain it, we must begin with World War II, in which the United States was confronted with a conflict initiated by Japan and Germany. The United States responded by defining war as eliminating the enemy’s military and shattering the enemies’ society by destroying their industrial plants and cities. Victory required the enemy’s defeat and a social and moral transformation of the defeated.
World War II taught the United States a number of lessons. The first was that the decision on timing was made by U.S. enemies. Pearl Harbor and Hitlers’ declaration of war made the decision on Washington’s behalf at a time that suited them. It took away the advantage of initiative, beyond nibbling at the edges of the war. Second, Washington learned that in fighting an enemy you must use overwhelming force and that it was essential to shatter not only the military but also the morale of the nation as a whole. The U.S. would do that by applying overwhelming force on the enemy’s military and society.
Victory transformed the U.S. Its power was vast and intersected much of the world. The U.S. had failed to see this prior to World War II. It now was obsessed with it. It created a vast military-industrial complex, seeing it as the critical element of national security. So it had greater friction than before, and more power than before. But it had taken another lesson from World War II. Defeating the enemy’s military was not enough. As with Germany and Japan, war could only end with a moral and cultural capitulation by the enemy nation and a transformation to liberal democracy.
After World War II, America’s main adversary was the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was a moral nightmare. Soviet power was daunting, and a global moral challenge faced the United States. Realpolitik and a moral struggle combined, and the U.S. and Soviet Union fought to transform nations into partisans of the moral project of either liberal democracy or Marxism-Leninism. Over time, this lapsed into massive cynicism on both sides, but at the core, the moral and grand strategies blended, and the real struggle was for the hearts and minds of the populace, shaped by covert and overt war.
Korea was the first war of moral absolutism but was shaped by very conventional war. It was in Vietnam that the new strategy was tested. Vietnam had been occupied by the French, who were defeated in their war against the communists. It ended with the division of the country between communists and anti-communists who posed as liberal democrats to salve the American soul but were simply ambitious men dedicated to holding power, using anti-communism to draw the Americans into protecting them. As a war, it was divided between endless combat on the ground and an air campaign designed to break North Vietnamese morale, much as the U.S. had broken the Germans and Japanese. But the war went beyond that. The goal was to create a government that morally rejected communism and embraced liberal democracy. So long as the communists continued to fight, the U.S. would lose. Its military capability did not reduce the communist north and their southern fighters to the state of the Wehrmacht in 1945. The regime the U.S. tried to invent and protect had no moral interest in liberal democracy.
The problem in Vietnam was the incongruity of its strategic and moral aspects. The strategy called for the defeat of the enemy army and a transformation of Vietnamese society. Somewhere in there was the automatic opposition to the spread of communism, but absent from that was an evaluation of whether this was the right place to fight world communism and whether we had the military force to compel moral change. Communism was spreading elsewhere, so why choose Vietnam as the place to fight?
The U.S. had a military reason to fight the Japanese in the Pacific. But in Vietnam, the military reason, the political reason, the moral principles constantly churned. U.S. strategy was to attrite the North Vietnamese military, cause their public to grow war-weary and impose U.S. will. The U.S. took the attrition and generated its own war-weariness after seven years of fighting. The U.S. lost Vietnam, but from its perspective, the world went on. For all the death and destruction, the war didn’t change much. It was the wrong war fought in the wrong place with the wrong strategy and goals. The lesson of World War II is to control how and where war is waged. In Vietnam, the enemy decided where the war began. By opposing any communist intrusion anywhere, the U.S. allowed the enemy to choose the time and place for Washington to roll out its prepackaged strategy.
Islamic extremism was a moral challenge to America, but before that, it was also a useful ally against the Soviets. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, the U.S. supported and praised the resistance. The U.S. figured Soviet enemies in Afghanistan shared at least empathy with the United States. Each served the interests of the other, and the Soviets were defeated. Then came 9/11, which was the extremist declaration of war against the U.S. The U.S. ideal of controlling war initiation was lost, in the same way it was lost in Vietnam. Something had to be done. As in Vietnam, the U.S. was sucked in almost unknowingly. It needed to destroy al-Qaida. Having hurt but not destroyed it, it felt compelled to stay engaged. To stay engaged, a degree of offensive warfare had to be undertaken until it became necessary to create a new regime that shared liberal democratic values. In other words, another ancient society would be transformed but without World War II levels of devastation. The strategic and moral collided. Strategically, Afghanistan was vast, and no amount of force could control more than a fraction of the country. Morally, the Afghans had their own political order that didn’t value liberal democracy any more than it valued Marxism.
The wars against the Soviet Union and against the Taliban had a common theme. The U.S. was offended by their moral values and formulated a national strategy based on it. At some point, the national strategy overreached as the moral ambition exceeded strategic possibilities. Not wanting to admit failure, the war went on to exhaustion.
World War II was a moral exercise. It brought the U.S. era upon the world. The moral dimension of that war became a necessary dimension of future wars, which became more frequent as the U.S. became a global power. The moral dimension was easily visible: devise not only a clear strategy for waging war but also a measure of when the war was failing. And above all, know when the strategy isn’t working and avoid being trapped by falling back on the moral to avoid making hard decisions.
The world has grown used to U.S. military intervention. It condemns it and is then comforted by its condemnations. But losing wars after years of struggle – or staying in wars you are losing for moral reasons or to hide the reality – makes no sense. The U.S. has to control where and how it goes to war. Its notion of victory includes the moral transformation of ancient people who do not think they are immoral. A moral principle on terrain well known, and weapons suited for it, works. A moral principle on unfamiliar terrain and inappropriate weapons is less effective.
George Friedman is an internationally recognized geopolitical forecaster and strategist on international affairs and the founder and chairman of Geopolitical Futures.
Dr. Friedman is also a New York Times bestselling author. His most recent book, THE STORM BEFORE THE CALM: America’s Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond, published February 25, 2020 describes how “the United States periodically reaches a point of crisis in which it appears to be at war with itself, yet after an extended period it reinvents itself, in a form both faithful to its founding and radically different from what it had been.” The decade 2020-2030 is such a period which will bring dramatic upheaval and reshaping of American government, foreign policy, economics, and culture.
His most popular book, The Next 100 Years, is kept alive by the prescience of its predictions. Other best-selling books include Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe, The Next Decade, America’s Secret War, The Future of War and The Intelligence Edge. His books have been translated into more than 20 languages.
Dr. Friedman has briefed numerous military and government organizations in the United States and overseas and appears regularly as an expert on international affairs, foreign policy and intelligence in major media. For almost 20 years before resigning in May 2015, Dr. Friedman was CEO and then chairman of Stratfor, a company he founded in 1996. Friedman received his bachelor’s degree from the City College of the City University of New York and holds a doctorate in government from Cornell University.
20. Did archaeologists find the Trojan Horse?
Fascinating.
Morris and Wilson believe with a "high level of confidence" that the structure is linked to the iconic horse. They say that tests have only confirmed their theory.
“This matches the dates cited for the Trojan War, by many ancient historians like Eratosthenes or Proclus. The assembly of the work also matches the description made by many sources. I don’t want to sound overconfident, but I’m pretty certain that we found the real thing!”
Did archaeologists find the Trojan Horse?
Turkish archaeologists excavating the site of the city of Troy on the hills of Hisarlik have discovered a large wooden structure that they believe are the remains of the famous Trojan Horse.
Depiction of the story of the Trojan horse in the art of Gandhara. British Museum.
(photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
Archaeologists who claimed they had unearthed remnants of the legendary Trojan Horse in Turkey have now found significant evidence that further supports their claim, according to an article by the Greek Reporter.
Turkish archaeologists excavating the site of the city of Troy on the hills of Hisarlik have discovered a large wooden structure that they believe are the remains of the Trojan Horse. These excavations include dozens of fir planks and beams up to 15 meters (49 feet) long, assembled in a strange form.
The wooden structure was found inside the walls of the ancient city of Troy.
Morris and Wilson believe with a "high level of confidence" that the structure is linked to the iconic horse. They say that tests have only confirmed their theory.
“This matches the dates cited for the Trojan War, by many ancient historians like Eratosthenes or Proclus. The assembly of the work also matches the description made by many sources. I don’t want to sound overconfident, but I’m pretty certain that we found the real thing!”
The Trojan Horse is associated with the Trojan War, written about by Homer in his epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Iliad closes right before the war ends, so it does not feature the legendary horse.
The Trojan Horse was used to seize Troy and win the war. The story was prominently featured in the Aeneid by Virgil. Historians have suggested that the horse was an analogy for a war machine or natural disaster.
Archaeologists also discovered a damaged bronze plate with the inscription, “For their return home, the Greeks dedicate this offering to Athena.” Quintus Smyrnaeus refers to this plate in his epis poem "Posthomerica."
21. How to Avert A Disaster in Afghanistan
Another possible future? What does history say about divided countries? Sounds like someof the rationale for have the Soviets take the surrender of the Japanese north of the 38th parallel and the US taking the surrender south of the 38th ("At a minimum, it could help keep U.S. allies alive and provide relatively secure parts of the country").
Excerpts:
But all is not yet lost. At least, it might not be. Neither U.S. Central Command nor CIA experts truly know. After all, the CIA thought Syrian president Bashar al-Assad would not last more than a few months once the Arab Spring got going; a decade later, he is still president. This is not to criticize the CIA so much as to note the inherent uncertainties in political-military risk assessment.
There is another possible future for Afghanistan, and while not pretty, it is strategically far preferable for the United States: a military stalemate, in which the Taliban holds some of the country and the government while friendly militias hold another big chunk. Perhaps, with luck, this kind of standoff could over time produce the possibility of negotiations on power-sharing. At a minimum, it could help keep U.S. allies alive and provide relatively secure parts of the country from which friendly intelligence assets can be based, making it easier to prevent the emergence of violent extremist sanctuaries in Afghanistan in the future.
How to Avert A Disaster in Afghanistan
There is another possible future for Afghanistan, and while not pretty, it is strategically far preferable for the United States: a military stalemate, in which the Taliban holds some of the country and the government while friendly militias hold another big chunk.
Dozens of Afghanistan’s four hundred or so districts have fallen to the Taliban since spring. Six of the country’s thirty-four provincial capitals have fallen in the last week. The United States and NATO partners are now virtually gone from the country, except for a few hundred Turkish and U.S. troops guarding the airport as well as key embassies in the capital city, Kabul. Like Rome and Saigon before it, will Kabul soon fall? Will the Taliban take general control of the country—just as, with the exception of pockets of the nation’s north, it did in the late 1990s? The Central Intelligence Agency seems to think so; a recently leaked report from Langley apparently argues that the government of President Ashraf Ghani may collapse in the course of this year.
Alas, President Joe Biden’s regrettable decision to remove the remaining three thousand or so U.S. combat forces from Afghanistan, and to pull them out fast this year, has put the country’s future in doubt. To be sure, things were bad before. But they are much worse now. Whether or not a Taliban-run Afghanistan would ever become a sanctuary again for Al Qaeda or related terrorists, we would have to work very hard to ensure that was not the case—meaning Biden may wind up having to spend more time and resources on Afghanistan after our departure than was the case before. Millions of Afghans, including women and minorities and intellectuals and reformers and U.S. friends, now face greater peril than ever.
But all is not yet lost. At least, it might not be. Neither U.S. Central Command nor CIA experts truly know. After all, the CIA thought Syrian president Bashar al-Assad would not last more than a few months once the Arab Spring got going; a decade later, he is still president. This is not to criticize the CIA so much as to note the inherent uncertainties in political-military risk assessment.
There is another possible future for Afghanistan, and while not pretty, it is strategically far preferable for the United States: a military stalemate, in which the Taliban holds some of the country and the government while friendly militias hold another big chunk. Perhaps, with luck, this kind of standoff could over time produce the possibility of negotiations on power-sharing. At a minimum, it could help keep U.S. allies alive and provide relatively secure parts of the country from which friendly intelligence assets can be based, making it easier to prevent the emergence of violent extremist sanctuaries in Afghanistan in the future.
To see how this kind of effective partition of the country could emerge, it is useful to paint a rough image of Afghanistan. Most of the country’s forty million inhabitants live in rural areas. But the cities are key, with Kabul roughly at the geographic center, and then four big regional cities along the country’s perimeter, connected by the “ring road:” Mazar-e-Sharif in the north, Jalalabad in the east, Kandahar in the south, Herat in the west. None of these major cities have fallen to the Taliban, though Kandahar (the inspirational home of the Taliban movement, and former home of Osama bin Laden) is now being contested. Kabul and these major regional centers together hold about ten million people; several million more people live in smaller cities like Kunduz, which has in fact fallen, as have certain stretches of territory that the ring road traverses.
A logical strategy for the Afghan government, supported by international partners, needs to focus on these priorities. Ghani may not wish to publicly declare which smaller cities would be conceded to the Taliban for the foreseeable future. Still, the government does need to form a campaign plan about when and where to fight. The essence of the strategy should probably include these elements:
Protect Kabul and the four major regional centers, even if Kandahar might fall. Recognize, too, that car bomb attacks, like the one last week in Kabul near the defense minister’s house, and other “spectacular” attacks cannot be completely prevented.
Develop a clear sense of which parts of its military are most effective, starting with the special forces and perhaps the Army’s main formations like the 201st and 203rd Corps, which are both focused on the country’s east. Do not use these precious forces to retake land that cannot realistically be held (like most of the towns in Helmand province in the south, some mountainous zones in the east, and much of the country’s rural areas). Use these military officers to defend key cities and to conduct selective counterattacks.
Develop a plan with the United States and NATO to fund the army, policy, and some of those anti-Taliban militias that can help hold territory in certain parts of the country where the militias are stronger than the army—provided that the militias observe certain basic standards of human rights and restraint.
Find places in the region where western contractors can work with Afghans to maintain the country’s budding air force—needed to move special forces quickly on the battlefield and to attack Taliban concentrations.
Request that the United States embed U.S. special forces with certain Afghan army units (as in the fall of 2001, when they helped call in airstrikes against Taliban positions while working with the so-called Northern Alliance).
Request that the United States be willing to use its offensive airpower based in the broader region to help defend against Taliban attacks against the key cities, especially any concentrated attacks that might resemble a Taliban “Tet offensive.”
Develop a last-resort plan to relocate, humanely and safely, those Pashtun populations in the country’s north and west that provide cover, recruits, and support for the Taliban and that cannot otherwise be vetted or vouched for. The Pashtun, Afghanistan’s largest (but not majority) ethnic group, provides almost all Taliban supporters and sympathizers. Most Pashtun do not support the Taliban, but almost all Taliban are Pashtun. To create a dependable base of operations above the Hindu Kush mountains, this kind of step may ultimately need to be considered.
Clearly, the situation in Afghanistan is bad. In fact, the country is in a state of war unmitigated by any realistic hope of a successful peace process anytime soon, and it is a war that will continue to get worse before it gets better. But that is where things are, and these are the realistic choices.
Image: Reuters
22. Opinion | An undeclared war is breaking out in cyberspace. The Biden administration is fighting back.
Perhaps one of the most important forms of modern war.
Opinion | An undeclared war is breaking out in cyberspace. The Biden administration is fighting back.
The Washington Post · by Opinion by David IgnatiusColumnist Today at 6:59 p.m. EDT · August 10, 2021
If you go to the website of the National Security Agency and scroll down half a page, you’ll come to a link for what the NSA calls its “Cybersecurity Collaboration Center” for sharing ideas with tech companies about stopping malware attacks.
That openness is a clear indication of how bad the cyber threat has become. The Biden administration has decided that the danger of cyberattacks from Russia, China and other nations is so serious that it is mobilizing all parts of the government, including an organization once so secretive it was known as “No Such Agency.”
This is personal for President Biden and his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan. They believed the Trump administration had adopted a “laissez-faire” attitude toward what was becoming an undeclared war in cyberspace. Colleagues say Sullivan began focusing on the issue in late November, during the transition. “He’s as involved in this as anything in his portfolio,” says one senior administration official.
But the United States at least appears to be fighting back. Over the past seven months, Biden has taken a series of actions, often with little fanfare, to mobilize a response across the government and private sector. It’s led by NSA veteran Anne Neuberger, who served there for 10 years, most recently as director of cybersecurity, before Sullivan recruited her to the White House as a deputy national security adviser.
The countermeasures sound bureaucratic, but they have teeth. A May executive order mandated better commercial security standards within six months and created a Cyber Incident Review Board to assess malware attacks the way the National Transportation Safety Board investigates air crashes. The White House is responding to breaches with a “Unified Coordination Group” that includes private companies as well as government agencies. The NSA is issuing a string of public advisories explaining how to reduce vulnerabilities, such as securing wireless devices in public places.
Russian actions are hard to judge, but the Kremlin appears to have responded favorably. Two weeks after the summit, Alexander Bortnikov, the head of Russia’s FSB security agency, said in Moscow: “We will work together [on locating hackers] and hope for reciprocity.”
The NSA and other intelligence agencies have also given a public hint of U.S. retaliatory capabilities. Two weeks after Colonial Pipeline paid a ransom of 75 bitcoin to a Russian hacking group called DarkSide, the Justice Department announced it had seized about 64 bitcoin, worth about $2.3 million, from a hidden cryptocurrency wallet.
“The private key for the Subject Address is in the possession of the FBI,” said an affidavit revealed June 7. That’s the law enforcement equivalent of hacker slang boasting: “We pwned you.”
“The recovery of the Bitcoin ransom has been an excellent move that should have happened far earlier and far more often and should be repeated,” argued Jean-Louis Gergorin, a French cybersecurity expert. He also said he was “convinced” that the FSB’s Bortnikov has curbed some Russian ransomware attacks as part of “some kind of [mutual restraint] implicit mutual restraint agreement between Russia and the United States."
China’s recent cyberattacks have been as brazen as Russia’s. Microsoft revealed in March that the security of its widely used Exchange software had been breached, compromising tens of thousands of networks worldwide. In July, the Biden administration revealed that this devastating hack was organized by China’s Ministry of State Security, working through a network of criminal contract hackers. Joining this startling attribution of Chinese “irresponsible behavior” were the European Union, Britain and NATO.
As the Exchange hack illustrated, a low-level cyberwar is being fought on terrain that is largely private. Part of the Biden administration’s response has been to work more closely with technology companies to respond better to attacks — and prevent new ones. After the Exchange breach, the White House connected with Microsoft President Brad Smith, and the company quickly developed a patch for vulnerable software.
And the invisible gremlins at the National Security Agency? They joined other intelligence agencies in publishing 31 detailed pages explaining the tactics, techniques and procedures the Chinese were using to get inside private networks. “The Fort,” as NSA headquarters at Fort Meade is known, doesn’t seem to be a closed bunker anymore.
The Washington Post · by Opinion by David IgnatiusColumnist Today at 6:59 p.m. EDT · August 10, 2021
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
