Quotes of the Day:
“The oppressor would not be so strong if he did not have accomplices among the oppressed.”
-Simone De Beauvoir
"Not until we are lost do we begin to find ourselves."
- Henry David Thoreau
“As we shall see, combining with others often constitutes the most astute strategic move; for the same reason, preventing opponents from doing the same can be as valuable.”
- Lawrence Freedman, Strategy: A History
1. Joint Statement from Quad Leaders
2. Fact Sheet: Quad Leaders’ Summit
3. US default a greater risk than Evergrande meltdown
4. Justice Department Reaches Deal With Huawei Executive
5. Quad and AUKUS building a bulwark against China
6. Neo-Nazis are still on Facebook. And they’re making money
7. Maria Ressa urges world leaders: 'Act now' vs infodemic threatening democracies
8. Kidnapping, assassination and a London shoot-out: Inside the CIA's secret war plans against WikiLeaks
9. Report Calling for Troop and Retiree Pay Cuts Is Grossly Misleading
10. Opinion | Biden’s strategy to stabilize U.S.-China relations isn’t working
11. Fallout begins for far-right trolls who trusted Epik to keep their identities secret
12. How Afghanistan’s security forces lost the war
13. Second line of defence: Taiwan’s civilians train to resist invasion
14. Russia's Lavrov says Taliban recognition 'not on the table'
15. Tomorrow’s soldiers will have their reality augmented
16. How It Feels to Be Asian in Today’s America
1. Joint Statement from Quad Leaders
The PRC is not directly named in this statement. The only use of the word "China" is in the phrase East and South China Sea.
Joint Statement from Quad Leaders
SEPTEMBER 24, 2021
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We, the leaders of Australia, India, Japan, and the United States, convened today in person as “the Quad” for the first time. On this historic occasion we recommit to our partnership, and to a region that is a bedrock of our shared security and prosperity—a free and open Indo-Pacific, which is also inclusive and resilient. Just six months have passed since our last meeting. Since March, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused continued global suffering; the climate crisis has accelerated; and regional security has become ever-more complex, testing all of our countries individually and together. Our cooperation, however, remains unflinching.
The occasion of the Quad summit is an opportunity to refocus ourselves and the world on the Indo-Pacific and on our vision for what we hope to achieve. Together, we recommit to promoting the free, open, rules-based order, rooted in international law and undaunted by coercion, to bolster security and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific and beyond. We stand for the rule of law, freedom of navigation and overflight, peaceful resolution of disputes, democratic values, and territorial integrity of states. We commit to work together and with a range of partners. We reaffirm our strong support for ASEAN’s unity and centrality and for ASEAN’s Outlook on the Indo-Pacific, and we underscore our dedication towards working with ASEAN and its member states—the heart of the Indo-Pacific region—in practical and inclusive ways. We also welcome the September 2021 EU Strategy for Cooperation in the Indo-Pacific.
Since our first meeting, we have made considerable progress in tackling some of the world’s most pressing challenges: the COVID-19 pandemic, the climate crisis, and critical and emerging technologies.
Our partnership on COVID-19 response and relief marks an historic new focus for the Quad. We launched the Quad Vaccine Experts Group, comprised of top experts from our respective governments, charged with building strong ties and better aligning our plans to support Indo-Pacific health security and COVID-19 response. In doing so, we have shared assessments of the state of the pandemic and aligned our efforts to combat it, reinforced shared diplomatic principles for mitigating COVID-19 in the region, and actively improved coordination of our efforts to support safe, effective, quality-assured vaccine production and equitable access, in close collaborations with multilateral efforts including the COVAX Facility. In addition to doses financed through COVAX, Australia, India, Japan, and the United States have pledged to donate more than 1.2 billion doses globally of safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines. And to date, we have delivered nearly 79 million safe, effective, and quality-assured vaccine doses to countries in the Indo-Pacific as part of those commitments.
Thanks to the Quad Vaccine Partnership’s financing of increased manufacturing capacity at Biological E LTD, additional production in India will come on line later this year. In line with our March announcement, and recognizing the continuing global supply gap, we will ensure this expanded manufacturing is exported for the Indo-Pacific and the world, and we will coordinate with key multilateral initiatives, such as the COVAX Facility, to procure proven safe, effective and quality-assured COVID-19 vaccines for low- and middle-income countries. We also recognize the importance of open and secure supply chains for vaccine production.
We have accomplished much to date despite months of pandemic hardship throughout the region and world. The Quad leaders welcome Biological E LTD’s production, including through our Quad investments, of at least one billion safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines by the end of 2022. Today, we are proud to announce an initial step towards that supply that will immediately help the Indo-Pacific and the world to end the pandemic. The Quad also welcomes India’s announcement to resume exports of safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines, including to COVAX, beginning in October 2021. Japan will continue to help regional partners purchase vaccines through $3.3 billion of COVID-19 Crisis Response Emergency Support Loan. Australia will deliver $212 million in grant aid to purchase vaccines for Southeast Asia and the Pacific. In addition, Australia will allocate $219 million to support last-mile vaccine rollouts and lead in coordinating the Quad’s last-mile delivery efforts in those regions.
We will also strengthen our Science and Technology (S&T) cooperation in the areas of clinical trials and genomic surveillance so that we can accelerate our efforts to end this pandemic and build better health security. We are committed to align around shared global targets to help vaccinate the world, save lives now, and build back better, including by strengthening global health security financing and political leadership. Our countries will also conduct a joint pandemic-preparedness tabletop or exercise in 2022.
We have joined forces to tackle the climate crisis, which must be addressed with the urgency it demands. Quad countries will work together to keep the Paris-aligned temperature limits within reach and will pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. To this end, Quad countries intend to update or communicate ambitious NDCs by COP26 and welcome those who have already done so. Quad countries will also coordinate their diplomacy to raise global ambition, including reaching out to key stakeholders in the Indo-Pacific region. Our work is organized across three thematic areas: climate ambition, clean-energy innovation and deployment, and climate adaptation, resilience and preparedness, with the intent to pursue enhanced actions during the 2020s, contributing to the aim of achieving global net-zero emissions preferably by 2050, and taking into account national circumstances. We are pursuing nationally appropriate sectoral decarbonization efforts, including those aimed at decarbonizing shipping and port operations and the deployment of clean-hydrogen technology. We will cooperate to establish responsible and resilient clean-energy supply chains, and will strengthen the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure and climate information systems. Quad countries will work together for successful outcomes at the COP26 and G20 that uphold the level of climate ambition and innovation that this moment requires.
We have established cooperation on critical and emerging technologies, to ensure the way in which technology is designed, developed, governed, and used is shaped by our shared values and respect for universal human rights. In partnership with industry, we are advancing the deployment of secure, open, and transparent 5G and beyond-5G networks, and working with a range of partners to foster innovation and promote trustworthy vendors and approaches such as Open-RAN. Acknowledging the role of governments in fostering an enabling environment for 5G diversification, we will work together to facilitate public-private cooperation and demonstrate in 2022 the scalability and cybersecurity of open, standards-based technology. With respect to the development of technical standards, we will establish sector-specific contact groups to promote an open, inclusive, private-sector-led, multi-stakeholder, and consensus-based approach. We will also coordinate and cooperate in multilateral standardization organizations such as the International Telecommunication Union. We are mapping the supply chain of critical technologies and materials, including semiconductors, and affirm our positive commitment to resilient, diverse, and secure supply chains of critical technologies, recognizing the importance of government support measures and policies that are transparent and market-oriented. We are monitoring trends in the critical and emerging technologies of the future, beginning with biotechnology, and identifying related opportunities for cooperation. We are also launching today Quad Principles on Technology Design, Development, Governance, and Use that we hope will guide not only the region but the world towards responsible, open, high-standards innovation.
Going forward, we will not only deepen our cooperation in these critical areas, but we will broaden it to new ones. Building upon each of our regional infrastructure efforts, separately and together, we are launching a new Quad infrastructure partnership. As a Quad, we will meet regularly to coordinate our efforts, map the region’s infrastructure needs, and coordinate on regional needs and opportunities. We will cooperate to provide technical assistance, empowering regional partners with evaluative tools, and will promote sustainable infrastructure development. We support the G7’s infrastructure efforts, and look forward to cooperating with like-minded partners, including with the EU. We reconfirm the G20 Quality Infrastructure Investment Principles and will reenergize our efforts to provide high-standards infrastructure in the Indo-Pacific. We reaffirm our interest in continuing our engagement with the Blue Dot Network. We emphasize the importance of supporting open, fair, and transparent lending practices in line with international rules and standards for major creditor countries, including on debt sustainability and accountability, and call on all creditors to adhere to these rules and standards.
Today, we begin new cooperation in cyber space and pledge to work together to combat cyber threats, promote resilience, and secure our critical infrastructure. In space we will identify new collaboration opportunities and share satellite data for peaceful purposes such as monitoring climate change, disaster response and preparedness, sustainable uses of oceans and marine resources, and on responding to challenges in shared domains. We will also consult on rules, norms, guidelines and principles for ensuring the sustainable use of outer space.
We are proud to begin a new chapter of educational and people-to-people cooperation as we inaugurate the Quad Fellowship. Stewarded by Schmidt Futures, a philanthropic initiative, and with generous support from Accenture, Blackstone, Boeing, Google, Mastercard, and Western Digital this pilot fellowship program will provide 100 graduate fellowships to leading science, technology, engineering, and mathematics graduate students across our four countries. Through the Quad Fellowship, our next generation of STEM talent will be prepared to lead the Quad and other like-minded partners towards the innovations that will shape our shared future.
In South Asia, we will closely coordinate our diplomatic, economic, and human-rights policies towards Afghanistan and will deepen our counter-terrorism and humanitarian cooperation in the months ahead in accordance with UNSCR 2593. We reaffirm that Afghan territory should not be used to threaten or attack any country or to shelter or train terrorists, or to plan or to finance terrorist acts, and reiterate the importance of combating terrorism in Afghanistan. We denounce the use of terrorist proxies and emphasized the importance of denying any logistical, financial or military support to terrorist groups which could be used to launch or plan terror attacks, including cross-border attacks. We stand together in support of Afghan nationals, and call on the Taliban to provide safe passage to any person wishing to leave Afghanistan, and to ensure that the human rights of all Afghans, including women, children, and minorities are respected.
We also recognize that our shared futures will be written in the Indo-Pacific, and we will redouble our efforts to ensure that the Quad is a force for regional peace, stability, security, and prosperity. Towards that end, we will continue to champion adherence to international law, particularly as reflected in the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), to meet challenges to the maritime rules-based order, including in the East and South China Seas. We affirm our support to small island states, especially those in the Pacific, to enhance their economic and environmental resilience. We will continue our assistance with Pacific Island countries on responses to the health and economic impacts of COVID-19 and on quality, sustainable infrastructure, as well as partner to mitigate and adapt to the impacts of climate change, which poses especially serious challenges for the Pacific.
We reaffirm our commitment to the complete denuclearization of North Korea in accordance with United Nations Security Council resolutions, and also confirm the necessity of immediate resolution of the issue of Japanese abductees. We urge North Korea to abide by its UN obligations, refrain from provocations. We also call on North Korea to engage in substantive dialogue. We are committed to building democratic resilience in the Indo-Pacific and beyond. We continue to call for the end to violence in Myanmar, the release of all political detainees, including foreigners, engagement in constructive dialogue, and for the early restoration of democracy. We further call for the urgent implementation of the ASEAN Five Point Consensus. We will deepen our cooperation in multilateral institutions, including at the United Nations, where reinforcing our shared priorities enhances the resilience of the multilateral system itself. Individually and together, we will respond to the challenges of our time, ensuring that the region remains inclusive, open, and governed by universal rules and norms.
We will continue to build habits of cooperation; our leaders and foreign ministers will meet annually and our senior officials will meet regularly. Our working groups will continue their steady tempo to produce the cooperation necessary to build a stronger region.
At a time that tests us all, our commitment to realize a free and open Indo-Pacific is firm, and our vision for this partnership remains ambitious and far-reaching. With steadfast cooperation, we rise to meet this moment, together.
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2. Fact Sheet: Quad Leaders’ Summit
A comprehensive statement on the focus of the Quad. Again, China is not directly mentioned.
Fact Sheet: Quad Leaders’ Summit
SEPTEMBER 24, 2021
•
On September 24, President Biden hosted Prime Minister Scott Morrison of Australia, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, and Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga of Japan at the White House for the first-ever in-person Leaders’ Summit of the Quad. The leaders have put forth ambitious initiatives that deepen our ties and advance practical cooperation on 21st-century challenges: ending the COVID-19 pandemic, including by increasing production and access to safe and effective vaccines; promoting high-standards infrastructure; combatting the climate crisis; partnering on emerging technologies, space, and cybersecurity; and cultivating next-generation talent in all of our countries.
COVID and Global Health
Quad leaders recognize that the most immediate threat to lives and livelihoods in our four countries and the world is the COVID-19 pandemic. And so in March, Quad leaders launched the Quad Vaccine Partnership, to help enhance equitable access to safe and effective vaccines in the Indo-Pacific and the world. Since March, the Quad has taken bold actions to expand safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine manufacturing capacity, donated vaccines from our own supply, and worked together to assist the Indo-Pacific in responding to the pandemic. The Quad Vaccine Experts Group remains the heart of our cooperation, meeting regularly to brief on the latest pandemic trends and coordinate our collective COVID-19 response across the Indo-Pacific, including by piloting the Quad Partnership COVID-19 Dashboard. We welcome President Biden’s September 22 COVID-19 Summit, and acknowledge that our work continues. The Quad will:
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Help Vaccinate the World: As Quad countries, we have pledged to donate more than 1.2 billion vaccine doses globally, in addition to the doses we have financed through COVAX. To date we have collectively delivered nearly 79 million safe and effective vaccine doses to the Indo-Pacific region. Our Vaccine Partnership remains on track to expand manufacturing at Biological E Ltd. this fall, so that it can produce at least 1 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines by the end of 2022. As a first step towards that new capacity, the leaders will announce bold actions that will immediately help the Indo-Pacific in its quest to end the pandemic. We recognize the importance of open and secure supply chains for vaccine production. The Quad welcomed India’s announcement to resume exports of safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines, including to COVAX, beginning in October 2021. Through $3.3 billion in the COVID-19 Crisis Response Emergency Support Loan program, Japan will continue to help regional countries to procure safe, effective, and quality-assured vaccines. Australia will deliver $212 million in grant aid to purchase vaccines for Southeast Asia and the Pacific. In addition, Australia will allocate $219 million to support last-mile vaccine rollouts and lead in coordinating the Quad’s last-mile delivery efforts in those regions. Quad member countries will coordinate with the ASEAN Secretariat, the COVAX Facility, and other relevant organizations. We will continue to strengthen and support the life-saving work of international organizations and partnerships, including the WHO, COVAX, Gavi, CEPI, and UNICEF; and national governments. At the same time, the leaders are fully committed to strengthening vaccine confidence and trust. To that end, Quad countries will host an event at the 75th World Health Assembly (WHA) dedicated to combatting hesitancy.
- Save Lives Now: Together as the Quad, we are committed to taking further action in the Indo-Pacific to save lives now. Japan, through Japan Bank for International Cooperation, will work with India to enhance key investments of approximately $100 million in the healthcare sector related to COVID-19, including vaccine and treatment drugs. We will utilize the Quad Vaccine Experts Group and convene as needed to urgently consult in relation to our emergency assistance.
- Build Back Better Health Security: The Quad commits to better preparing our countries and the world for the next pandemic. We will continue to build coordination in our broader COVID-19 response and health-security efforts in the Indo-Pacific, and we will jointly build and conduct at least one pandemic preparedness tabletop or exercise in 2022. We will also further strengthen our science and technology cooperation in support of the 100-Day Mission—to have safe and effective vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics available within 100 days—now and into the future. This includes collaboration on current and future clinical trials, such as launching additional sites for the international Accelerating COVID-19 Therapeutic Interventions and Vaccines (ACTIV) trials, which can expedite investigation of promising new vaccines and therapeutics, while at the same time supporting countries in the region to improve their capacity to undertake scientifically sound clinical research. We will support the call for a “global pandemic radar” and will improve our viral genomic surveillance, including by working together to strengthen and expand the WHO Global Influenza Surveillance and Response System (GISRS).
Infrastructure
Building on the G7’s announcement of Build Back Better World (B3W)—an infrastructure partnership focused on digital connectivity, climate, health and health security, and gender equality infrastructure—the Quad will rally expertise, capacity, and influence to strengthen ongoing infrastructure initiatives in the region and identify new opportunities to meet the needs there. The Quad will:
- Launch the Quad Infrastructure Coordination Group: Building on existing leadership from Quad partners on high-standards infrastructure, a senior Quad infrastructure coordination group will meet regularly to share assessments of regional infrastructure needs and coordinate respective approaches to deliver transparent, high-standards infrastructure. The group will also coordinate technical assistance and capacity-building efforts, including with regional partners, to ensure our efforts are mutually reinforcing and complementary in meeting the significant infrastructure demand in the Indo-Pacific.
- Lead on High-Standards Infrastructure: Quad partners are leaders in building quality infrastructure in the Indo-Pacific region. Our complementary approaches leverage both public and private resources to achieve maximum impact. Since 2015, Quad partners have provided more than $48 billion in official finance for infrastructure in the region. This represents thousands of projects, including capacity-building, across more than 30 countries in support of rural development, health infrastructure, water supply and sanitation, renewable power generation (e.g., wind, solar, and hydro), telecommunications, road transportation, and more. Our infrastructure partnership will amplify these contributions and further catalyze private-sector investment in the region.
Climate
Quad countries share serious concern with the August Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s report findings on the latest climate science, which has significant implications for climate action. To address the climate crisis with the urgency it demands, Quad countries will focus their efforts on the themes of climate ambition, including working on 2030 targets for national emissions and renewable energy, clean-energy innovation and deployment, as well as adaptation, resilience, and preparedness. Quad countries commit to pursue enhanced actions in the 2020s to meet anticipated energy demand and decarbonize at pace and scale to keep our climate goals within reach in the Indo-Pacific. Additional efforts include working together on methane abatement in the natural-gas sector and on establishing responsible and resilient clean-energy supply chains. The Quad will:
- Form a Green-Shipping Network: Quad countries represent major maritime shipping hubs with some of the largest ports in the world. As a result, Quad countries are uniquely situated to deploy green-port infrastructure and clean-bunkering fuels at scale. Quad partners will organize their work by launching a Quad Shipping Taskforce and will invite leading ports, including Los Angeles, Mumbai Port Trust, Sydney (Botany), and Yokohama, to form a network dedicated to greening and decarbonizing the shipping value chain. The Quad Shipping Task Force will organize its work around several lines of efforts and aims to establish two to three Quad low-emission or zero-emission shipping corridors by 2030.
- Establish a Clean-Hydrogen Partnership: The Quad will announce a clean-hydrogen partnership to strengthen and reduce costs across all elements of the clean-hydrogen value chain, leveraging existing bilateral and multilateral hydrogen initiatives in other fora. This includes technology development and efficiently scaling up the production of clean hydrogen (hydrogen produced from renewable energy, fossil fuels with carbon capture and sequestration, and nuclear for those who choose to deploy it), identification and development of delivery infrastructure to safely and efficiently transport, store, and distribute clean hydrogen for end-use applications, and stimulating market demand to accelerate trade in clean hydrogen in the Indo-Pacific region.
- Enhance Climate Adaptation, Resilience, and Preparedness: Quad countries commit to increasing the Indo-Pacific region’s resilience to climate change by improving critical climate information-sharing and disaster-resilient infrastructure. The Quad countries will convene a Climate & Information Services Task Force and build a new technical facility through the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure that will provide technical assistance in small island developing states.
People-to-People Exchange and Education
The students of today will be the leaders, innovators, and pioneers of tomorrow. To build ties among the next generation of scientists and technologists, Quad partners are proud to announce the Quad Fellowship: a first-of-its-kind scholarship program, operated and administered by a philanthropic initiative and in consultation with a non-governmental task force comprised of leaders from each Quad country. This program will bring together exceptional American, Japanese, Australian, and Indian masters and doctoral students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics to study in the United States. This new fellowship will develop a network of science and technology experts committed to advancing innovation and collaboration in the private, public, and academic sectors, in their own nations and among Quad countries. The program will build a foundational understanding among Quad Scholars of one another’s societies and cultures through cohort-wide trips to each Quad country and robust programming with each country’s top scientists, technologists, and politicians. The Quad will:
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Launch the Quad Fellowship: The Fellowship will sponsor 100 students per year—25 from each Quad country—to pursue masters and doctoral degrees at leading STEM graduate universities in the United States. It will serve as one of the world’s leading graduate fellowships; but uniquely, the Quad Fellowship will focus on STEM and bring together the top minds of Australia, India, Japan, and the United States. Schmidt Futures, a philanthropic initiative, will operate and administer the fellowship program in consultation with a non-governmental taskforce, comprised of academic, foreign policy, and private sector leaders from each Quad country. Founding sponsors of the fellowship program include Accenture, Blackstone, Boeing, Google, Mastercard, and Western Digital, and the program welcomes additional sponsors interested in supporting the Fellowship.
Critical and Emerging Technologies
Quad leaders are committed to working together to foster an open, accessible, and secure technology ecosystem. Since establishing a new critical and emerging technologies working group in March, we have organized our work around four efforts: technical standards, 5G diversification and deployment, horizon-scanning, and technology supply chains. Today, the Quad leaders launch a statement of principles on technology, along with new efforts that together will advance critical and emerging technologies shaped by our shared democratic values and respect for universal human rights. The Quad will:
- Publish a Quad Statement of Principles: After months of collaboration, the Quad will launch a statement of principles on technology design, development, governance, and use that we hope will guide not only the region but the world towards responsible, open, high-standards innovation.
- Establish Technical Standards Contact Groups: The Quad will establish contact groups on Advanced Communications and Artificial Intelligence focusing on standards-development activities as well as foundational pre-standardization research.
- Launch a Semiconductor Supply Chain Initiative: Quad partners will launch a joint initiative to map capacity, identify vulnerabilities, and bolster supply-chain security for semiconductors and their vital components. This initiative will help ensure Quad partners support a diverse and competitive market that produces the secure critical technologies essential for digital economies globally.
- Support 5G Deployment and Diversification: To support the critical role of Quad governments in fostering and promoting a diverse, resilient, and secure telecommunications ecosystem, the Quad has launched a Track 1.5 industry dialogue on Open RAN deployment and adoption, coordinated by the Open RAN Policy Coalition. Quad partners will jointly facilitate enabling environments for 5G diversification, including with efforts related to testing and test facilities.
- Monitor Biotechnology Scanning: The Quad will monitor trends in critical and emerging technologies, starting with advanced biotechnologies, including synthetic biology, genome sequencing, and biomanufacturing. In the process, we will identify related opportunities for cooperation.
Cybersecurity
Building on longstanding collaboration among our four countries on cybersecurity, the Quad will launch new efforts to bolster critical-infrastructure resilience against cyber threats by bringing together the expertise of our nations to drive domestic and international best practices. The Quad will:
- Launch a Quad Senior Cyber Group: Leader-level experts will meet regularly to advance work between government and industry on driving continuous improvements in areas including adoption and implementation of shared cyber standards; development of secure software; building workforce and talent; and promoting the scalability and cybersecurity of secure and trustworthy digital infrastructure.
Space
Quad countries are among the world’s scientific leaders, including in space. Today, the Quad will begin space cooperation for the first time with a new working group. In particular, our partnership will exchange satellite data, focused on monitoring and adapting to climate change, disaster preparedness, and responding to challenges in shared domains. The Quad will:
- Share Satellite Data to Protect the Earth and its Waters: Our four countries will start discussions to exchange Earth observation satellite data and analysis on climate-change risks and the sustainable use of oceans and marine resources. Sharing this data will help Quad countries to better adapt to climate change and to build capacity in other Indo-Pacific states that are at grave climate risk, in coordination with the Quad Climate Working group.
- Enable Capacity-Building for Sustainable Development: The Quad countries will also enable capacity-building in space-related domains in other Indo-Pacific countries to manage risks and challenges. The Quad countries will work together to support, strengthen, and enhance space applications and technologies of mutual interest.
- Consult on Norms and Guidelines: We will also consult on norms, guidelines, principles, and rules for ensuring the long-term sustainability of the outer space environment.
3. US default a greater risk than Evergrande meltdown
I am really worried that due to the political divisions in our nation we could do irreparable damage to our economic instrument of power. If Congress lets us default on our loans there will be renewed pressure to replace the dollar as the world's reserve currency. If that happens our economic power will crumble which will have a domino effect undermining our diplomatic and military power. Some may think that we can default on our debt and it will hurt China. But in the long run it will be catastrophic for the US.
Excerpts:
Brinksmanship over the US debt ceiling is bringing back traumatic memories Beijing would prefer to keep buried. An earlier debt-limit skirmish in August 2011 cost America its AAA rating from Standard & Poor’s. That came as Republican lawmakers pushed the world’s biggest economy to the brink of default.
The fiasco left China, then the biggest holder of US Treasury debt, cold. At the time, the Chinese government condemned the “short-sighted” wrangling in Washington and urged lawmakers to act more responsibly.
A 2011 editorial by the official Xinhua news agency said Beijing had “every right now to demand the United States address its structural debt problems and ensure the safety of China’s dollar assets. International supervision over the issue of US dollars should be introduced and a new, stable and secured global reserve currency may also be an option to avert a catastrophe caused by any single country.”
That plea made then-premier Wen Jiabao seem borderline clairvoyant. Back in 2009, Wen issued a remarkably rare public plea to US officials to be more reliable stewards of Beijing’s vast dollar holdings – and to protect the value of the more than $1 trillion of Chinese state wealth sitting in Treasuries at the time.
As Wen said back then: “We have made a huge amount of loans to the United States. Of course, we are concerned about the safety of our assets. To be honest, I am a little bit worried.” He urged Washington “to honor its words, stay a credible nation and ensure the safety of Chinese assets.”
US default a greater risk than Evergrande meltdown
Debt crisis engulfing Chinese real estate giant is distracting market attention from the bigger financial threat emanating from the US
TOKYO – As distracting as the default drama looming over China Evergrande Group may be, the one percolating in Washington is by far the more existential of the two.
The contours of the pressure facing the world’s most indebted property developer are by now well known. With about US$305 billion of debt and $355 billion of assets amid , Evergrande stands as a microcosm of China’s biggest challenges.
Fresh waves of Covid-19 infection are colliding with efforts to get construction sites back up and running. And Evergrande has roughly 1,300 ongoing projects in second and third-tier mainland cities. The company’s travails affect 200,000 direct employees and nearly 4 million hired each year for development projects.
The real worry, though, is its knock-on effect as the major player in the most vital sector of the mainland economy.
Yet however much that is a risk for a key global economic engine, it remains, essentially, a domestic one. All odds are that the People’s Bank of China and President Xi Jinping’s myriad brigades of regulators will continue to avert the Lehman Brothers-like contagion markets fear.
For now, economists view Evergrande as the canary in the coal mine. The metaphorical coal mine is China’s property industry: The key engine for translating Beijing’s credit and debt accumulation into growth and jobs.
An Evergrande stumble would represent a breakdown in the Chinese model and serve as an omen of bank-debt troubles to come. That, in turn, would likely lead authorities to “new canaries in the current financial coal mine” that require attention at the highest levels, says professor Robert Hockett at Cornell University.
Analyst Udith Sikand at Gavekal Research says, “China’s authorities have a very clear motive, and the necessary means, to contain any threat of a systemic crisis in the country’s domestic financial system.”
Evergrande’s “troubles,” he adds, “are no Lehman moment, but they do pose a significant risk of international contagion across emerging markets, which investors would be rash to ignore.”
TThe China Evergrande Center in Hong Kong. Photo: AFP / Peter Parks
All bets are off, though, if Washington fails even more spectacularly.
Brinksmanship over the US debt ceiling is bringing back traumatic memories Beijing would prefer to keep buried. An earlier debt-limit skirmish in August 2011 cost America its AAA rating from Standard & Poor’s. That came as Republican lawmakers pushed the world’s biggest economy to the .
The fiasco left China, then the biggest holder of US Treasury debt, cold. At the time, the Chinese government condemned the “short-sighted” wrangling in Washington and urged lawmakers to act more responsibly.
A 2011 editorial by the official Xinhua news agency said Beijing had “every right now to demand the United States address its structural debt problems and ensure the safety of China’s dollar assets. International supervision over the issue of US dollars should be introduced and a new, stable and secured global reserve currency may also be an option to avert a catastrophe caused by any single country.”
That plea made then-premier Wen Jiabao seem borderline clairvoyant. Back in 2009, Wen issued a remarkably rare public plea to US officials to be more reliable stewards of Beijing’s vast dollar holdings – and to protect the value of the more than $1 trillion of Chinese state wealth sitting in Treasuries at the time.
As Wen said back then: “We have made a huge amount of loans to the United States. Of course, we are concerned about the safety of our assets. To be honest, I am a little bit worried.” He urged Washington “to honor its words, stay a credible nation and ensure the safety of Chinese assets.”
Former premier Wen Jiabao (C) looks at President Xi Jinping as he shakes hands with incoming premier Li Keqiang in 2013. Photo: AFP / Wang Zhao
Two years later, S&P rendered a dire judgment on that credibility, yanking away Washington’s AAA status. Now, a decade later, it’s time for Wen’s successor, Li Keqiang, to worry about Beijing’s $1 trillion-plus exposure, as Donald Trump’s party again holds America’s credit ratings hostage.
America’s debt Armageddon
Trump wasn’t in the political picture back in 2011. His 2017 to 2021 presidency, though, gave Xi and Li exponentially more reasons to worry about the safety of Chinese savings. Trump’s trade war came on top of his frequent tirades about China “killing” American workers with an undervalued exchange rate.
By the time he turned the keys over to Joe Biden in January, the US government was on course to a $30 trillion . That’s twice the size of China’s annual gross domestic product (GDP).
During his time in office, Trump’s inner circle mulled canceling portions of the debt the US owed Beijing. Trump also considered a dollar-to-yuan devaluation of the kind Vietnam or Argentina might suddenly announce.
Such considerations were hardly out of the blue. In May 2016, six months before he was elected, Trump, a serial bankruptcy offender as a businessman, floated the idea of reneging on US debt in a .
“I would borrow, knowing that if the economy crashed, you could make a deal,” Trump said. “And if the economy was good, it was good. So, therefore, you can’t lose.”
Yet China could indeed lose if the Republican Party over which Trump still holds great sway imperils America’s credit rating anew. Ditto for Japan, which has since topped China as the top holder of US government debt to Beijing’s $1.1 trillion.
Moody’s Analytics economist Mark Zandi speaks for many when he says, “It’s complete craziness to even contemplate the idea of not paying our debt on time. It would be financial Armageddon.”
Economist Beth Ann Bovino at S&P Global Ratings thinks failure to raise the debt limit could be “more catastrophic to the economy than the 2008 failure of Lehman Brothers” and would squander most of the economic gains in the 13 years since that dark period.
Such an outcome, Bovino says, would force the US government to shut down, erasing $6.5 billion of economic output per week. It also would unleash a “butterfly effect” that would upend the broader economy.
Former president Donald Trump considered defaulting on US debts. Photo: Handout.
“A disruption in government spending means no government paychecks to spend at the mall, lost business and revenue to , lost sales at retail shops, particularly those that circle now-closed national parks, and less tax revenue for Uncle Sam,” Bovino says. “That means less economic activity and fewer jobs.”
What’s more, the message all this sends would cause chaos in debt markets and slam the stock market, too.
“With markets somewhat jittery about a possible selective default of the US sovereign, worries of a shutdown threat only adds to their concerns,” Bovino notes. “The shutdown and the looming debt ceiling combined could significantly hurt business and consumer sentiment, as well as the overall economy.”
In recent days, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen reached out to the CEOs of Wall Street’s biggest financial firms to ask for their help in urging Republicans to step back from the default ledge.
Yellen’s pitch is for investment banking giants to lobby lawmakers to raise the debt ceiling. She also is pitching for a one-year suspension in the need for Congress to okay the paying of Washington’s bills.
Yellen’s calls reportedly went to ’s Jamie Dimon, Citigroup’s Jane Fraser, Wells Fargo’s Charlie Scharf, Bank of America’s Brian Moynihan and top Goldman Sachs executives.
Technically, the US government blew past the previous debt ceiling several months ago. Treasury Department officials employed a variety of cash-balance maneuvers to pay Washington’s bills month to month.
Now, the Treasury is reaching the limits of this strategy.
“So, people are rightly getting nervous,” says James chief international economist at ING Bank. He says investors would be remiss to ignore Yellen’s warning that any failure by Congress to act “would cause irreparable harm to the US economy and the livelihoods of all Americans.”
Knightley notes that “after more than a year of dreadful harm caused by Covid, we couldn’t agree more.”
US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen (C) is reportedly rallying Wall Street power players to convince Republicans to raise the debt ceiling, Photo: AFP / Jessica McGowan / Getty Images
Greenback’s crisis-opportunity
Even bigger questions hang over the global financial system.
The efforts by China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and other major economies to de-dollarize world trade is a work in progress, at best. The same goes for developing Asia, which spent the years since the region’s 1997-98 financial crisis pledging to wean economies off the dollar.
Try as export-driven economies may, and US Treasuries are still the linchpin of the global trading system. Yet the political shenanigans on display in Washington could change that and quickly.
The “empire is crumbling” and the dollar is “slowly losing its sheen,” says Peter Koenig at Renmin University of China. Slowly, but surely, he says, the dollar “is losing its weight in the international financial market.”
Technological change is accelerating the timeline, particularly as China outpaces the US in the race to bring a central bank-issued digital currency to market, says strategist Dante Alighieri Disparte at financial services firm Circle.
“With the explosive proliferation of cryptocurrencies, including China’s introduction of a digital renminbi, it is not surprising to hear panicked warnings about the looming decline of the dollar,” Disparte says.
It’s not the whole story, of course. If Biden’s Washington plays its cards right, Disparte notes, the dollar could end up being the “prime beneficiary of today’s market developments.”
Yet the dollar is at the mercy of politics and politics can be highly toxic. If the current squabbling in Washington devastates trust in the core asset of the global financial system, current obsessing over China Evergrande will become a mere side show.
4. Justice Department Reaches Deal With Huawei Executive
While on the surface this deal will be panned as giving into Chinese retaliation and hostage taking.
However, I think what Joshua Stanton has tweeted about this is very important. This deal has the potential to significantly damage Huawei and will have a more positive impact on national security than bringing Meng to the US to stand trial. Did we outmaneuver Huawei and China on the Go board?
Joshua Stanton
@freekorea_us
The trading of hostages with Xi Jinping looks bad, will vindicate his most thuggish instincts, & will come back on us. But Meng's admissions as Huawei's CFO did incalculable damage to its reputational, legal, & financial interests. She just cut a deal to roll over on Huawei.
Justice Department Reaches Deal With Huawei Executive
Chinese company’s finance chief secures exit from Canada and her U.S. extradition fight; two Canadians detained in China are released
WSJ · by Aruna Viswanatha, Dan Strumpf and Jacquie McNish
The U.S. Justice Department has reached a deal that will allow Huawei Technologies Co. finance chief Meng Wanzhou to return to her home in China nearly three years after she was detained in Canada on behalf of the U.S., people familiar with the matter said.
The agreement, which is expected to be entered in court later Friday, will require Ms. Meng to admit to some wrongdoing in exchange for prosecutors deferring and later dropping wire and bank fraud charges, the people said. She is scheduled to appear in federal court in Brooklyn Friday afternoon remotely from Canada.
Representatives for Huawei and the Justice Department declined to comment. Ms. Meng, who is 49 years old, is the daughter of Ren Zhengfei, the founder of Huawei, the world’s largest maker of telecommunications equipment and a leader in 5G technology.
The expected deal resolves one source of tension between the U.S. and China as relations between the two countries have deteriorated, particularly after the U.S., U.K. and Australia announced an effort this month to provide Australia with nuclear submarines to counter China’s influence in the Indo-Pacific region.
Caught in the middle of the two superpowers is Canada, which has seen its trade with China plunge and two of its citizens detained in China within days of Ms. Meng’s 2018 arrest. According to people familiar with the matter, a deal with Ms. Meng could lead to the release of businessman Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig, a Canadian diplomat on leave, who have been confined to separate Chinese facilities and prisons since December 2018.
Trump administration officials had discussed a similar deal with Ms. Meng’s lawyers late last year, but those efforts stalled as Ms. Meng insisted she had done nothing wrong and prosecutors required an acknowledgment that she had violated U.S. law, The Wall Street Journal has reported.
CHINA MARKET REPORT
As the Biden administration has staffed its ranks at the Justice Department, officials have revisited those discussions in recent weeks, the people said. The current round of negotiations had gained more momentum in light of Ms. Meng’s desire to be reunited with her husband and children, the people said.
Arrested nearly three years ago while transferring planes in Vancouver, Ms. Meng was indicted in 2018, alongside her employer, on charges of violating U.S. sanctions on Iran, by misleading banks in 2013 about the Chinese company’s ties to Iran. Ms. Meng, who has denied the charges, has since been confined to Vancouver, where she owns a home.
Last year, prosecutors obtained additional charges against Huawei and two of its U.S. subsidiaries, including racketeering conspiracy and conspiracy to steal trade secrets, adding pressure on the company as U.S. officials worked to persuade allies around the world to lock the telecommunications giant out of their next generation mobile networks because of national-security concerns.
Huawei isn’t expected to be a part of the deal regarding Ms. Meng, and will continue to fight the charges it faces, the people said.
Since her arrest, Ms. Meng has become a celebrated figure within Huawei, and securing her release has long been a priority for company leadership. Letters from Ms. Meng from Vancouver have been widely circulated to Huawei staff back in China, and slogans calling for her return have been emblazoned on coffee cups and other items at Huawei headquarters in Shenzhen.
A year ago, Huawei was the world’s largest maker of smartphones after cornering about one-fifth of the global handset market. The U.S. sanctions have cut the company off from crucial computing chips and software, and its second-quarter phone shipments plunged by more than 80% from a year earlier. On Friday, a senior company executive said U.S. sanctions would cost Huawei up to $40 billion in lost smartphone revenue this year.
The renewed talks to resolve Ms. Meng’s case picked up one month after a Vancouver judge wrapped up nearly two years of court hearings tied to a Justice Department request to have Ms. Meng extradited to the U.S.
The judge had been expected to issue her decision later this year. Extraditions to the U.S. are rarely barred in Canada and the judge had ruled against Ms. Meng on a handful of key legal arguments.
The court reversals have discouraged Ms. Meng, particularly during the past year, people familiar with the matter said. She spends most of her time in her large Vancouver home where she is supervised by court-appointed security guards, the people said. Most days she consults with her legal team about her case, practices English with an online tutor, paints and exercises, they said. Ms. Meng hasn’t seen her husband and children since they visited her in Vancouver in the spring.
Since she was arrested at Vancouver’s airport in December 2018, Ms. Meng has become the global face of trade and technology tensions between the U.S. and China. The Trump administration viewed Huawei as a national security threat and portrayed Ms. Meng’s alleged coverup of ties in Iran as part of a pattern of corporate wrongdoing.
Any deal to free Ms. Meng risks a backlash in Congress, where some Republicans have accused the Biden administration of being too lenient against Huawei compared with former President Donald Trump. On Thursday, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told the Journal that her department would continue efforts to block Huawei from getting advanced chips.
WSJ · by Aruna Viswanatha, Dan Strumpf and Jacquie McNish
5. Quad and AUKUS building a bulwark against China
Excerpts:
How the world will look after all those Chinese, Japanese and US initiatives is anybody’s guess. But the big test, and that would go way beyond civilian development projects, will come if and when China moves to invade Taiwan.
Even if it is seldom said, that is the main concern above anything else that China may try in the Indo-Pacific region, more than possible clashes in the disputed South China Sea.
If AUKUS and the Quad do nothing, they would appear toothless and, as Zhao said, their efforts to would be “doomed to fail.” But if the blocs do take action, it would eventually mean war in the Indo-Pacific region. Only time will tell what China’s next move will be towards its increasingly active adversaries and, especially, in regard to Taiwan.
Quad and AUKUS building a bulwark against China
Washington is building a credible alliance system to contain China's rise and ambitions but Beijing says the effort is 'doomed to fail'
In the wake of the formation of a new strategic alliance comprising the United States, Britain and Australia, President Joseph Biden hosted the first in-person meeting at the White House with three prime ministers: Australia’s Scott Morrison, Japan’s Yoshihide Suga and India’s Narendra Modi.
Biden said at the White House meeting with the Quad, or Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, that it was “completely separate” from AUKUS, or the Australia-United Kingdom-United States pact.
According to official statements, discussions at the Quad summit at the White House were also said to be mainly about vaccine exports to fight the Covid-19 pandemic, efforts to bolster supply chains for semiconductors, and boost “maritime domain awareness”, whatever that would mean.
But any independent strategic observer would be remiss in claiming that AUKUS and the Quad are not intertwined. Although neither the former nor the latter pact specifically and officially identifies China as the adversary, it is obvious Beijing is the target.
A joint statement issued after the meeting was also a bit more explicit on security matters. Quad members, it said, stand for “the rule of law, freedom of navigation and overflight, peaceful resolution of disputes, democratic values, climate change, and territorial integrity of states.”
Japan’s foreign press secretary Tomiyuki Yoshida even told reporters at the Quad summit that, “Prime Minister Suga welcomed the initiative of the establishment of the security partnership forged by the three [AUKUS] countries … which is taking an important role for the peace and stability of the Indo-Pacific region.”
The BBC reported that Yoshida also “raised concerns during the talks about Beijing’s assertiveness at sea, its trampling of Hong Kong’s special status and Chinese action towards Taiwan.” So what few wanted to say openly was, after all, spelled out by the Japanese.
The Chinese definitely got the message. A day before the White House summit, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian told the media in Beijing: “China always believes that any regional cooperation mechanism should not target a third party or harm its interests. Seeking exclusive closed cliques against a third country runs against the trend of the times and aspiration of countries in the region. It will find no support and is doomed to fail.”
Defending China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea, Zhao said: “China is a builder of world peace, contributor of global development and upholder of world order.” But that may not be what the other countries which are involved in the dispute —Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan, Malaysia, Brunei and even Indonesia if the Natuna Islands in the southernmost part of it is included — see it.
Chinese PLA Navy soldiers on a naval vessel in a file photo. Photo: Twitter
AUKUS is significant because it includes Britain. Britain’s departure from the European Union, or “Brexit”, has made it possible for London to collaborate more closely with the US on the international stage — and that may actually be one of the main reasons why it took that step.
It should also be taken into account that Diego Garcia, a major US military base in the Indian Ocean, is actually situated on British-owned land, the British Indian Ocean Territory, from where the native population of nearly a thousand people was forcibly relocated to Mauritius and the Seychelles when the US first leased the island and built its military installations there in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
The facilities on Diego Garcia were used to track the Soviet navy throughout the old Cold War. In more recent years, Diego Garcia has played an important role as a logistics base for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Apart from serving the US army, navy and air force, the highly secretive base, which is off-limits to civilians other than defense contractors, also has an emergency site for the NASA Space Shuttle, and equipment for sophisticated signals intelligence operations in the Indian Ocean.
More controversially, Diego Garcia has also been identified as a US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) so-called “black site”, where terror suspects were kept and allegedly tortured after the 9/11 terror attacks and the subsequent US invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001.
As for Australia, AUKUS will also make it one of few countries in the world to have nuclear-powered submarines, which will increase Australian mobility, range and stealth in the Indian and Pacific oceans.
Australia has two small territories in the Indian Ocean, Christmas Island with 135 square kilometers and a mixed Caucasian, Chinese and Malay population of only about 2,000 people, and the even smaller Cocos (Keeling) Islands, which measure 14 square kilometers and are home to fewer than 600 people, Caucasians on one of its two islands and ethnic Malays on the other.
Christmas Island, located 350 kilometers south of Indonesia’s main island of Java, and has been used to intern asylum seekers, mainly from Sri Lanka and the Middle East who attempted to enter mainland Australia by boat.
An aerial view of America’s leased Diego Garcia military base in the Indian Ocean. Photo: Facebook
The airport on Christmas Island may not be of much military use. The Cocos (Keeling) Islands, though, have an airport that was built during World War II and was then used in the war against Japan. It measures 2,441 meters and is far too big for civilian needs of such a small island.
The 2016 Australian Defense White Paper stated that the airfield will be upgraded to support the Royal Australian Air Force’s P8-A Poseidon maritime surveillance and response aircraft.
In 2020, Australian minister for defense industry, Melissa Price, announced that work would commence at a AUS$184 million (US$133.5 million) project to refurbish the islands’ airport. Talks have also been ongoing between Australia and India about cooperative use of the Cocos (Keeling) Islands and India’s Andaman and Nicobar Islands. That would likely include joint searches for Chinese naval ships and submarines in the Indian Ocean.
But despite all the strategic advantages that the countries concerned about the rise of China have, the main question remains: what can those largely informal alliances actually do to achieve what they have been set out to do, namely to deter China from increasing its presence in the Indo-Pacific region — unless, which is extremely unlikely, they are prepared to confront China militarily?
So far, apart from forging alliances and making statements, the focus appears to have been on soft power projections where China is at the back of the minds of the region’s strategic planners.
While China’s multi-trillion-dollar infrastructural Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) aims to support the construction of ports, railroads and highways globally, already in August 2016 then-Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe initiated a Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP) strategy where the emphasis was on the quality of projects similar to those of the BRI rather than on quantity, as the Chinese seem to measure the progress of their projects.
Japan was also the driving force behind the establishment of the Trilateral Infrastructure Initiative in 2018 with Australia and the US.
Among FOIP projects announced so far are the construction of bridges in Cambodia and Laos, improvements of ports in Vietnam and the Wattay airport in Laos’ capital Vientiane, road projects in northeastern India, and, at least until a military coup in February, ports, roads and railroads in Myanmar.
Earlier this year, Biden announced Washington’s own plan to rival China’s BRI: Build Back Better for the World. Backed by the G7 — Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Britain and the US — it is, according to a June 12 White House press release, “a values-driven, high-standard, and transparent infrastructure partnership led by major democracies to help narrow the $40+ trillion infrastructure need in the developing world, which has been exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic.”
Biden is promising to Build Back Better to compete with China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Photo: AFP / Olivier Douliery
How the world will look after all those Chinese, Japanese and US initiatives is anybody’s guess. But the big test, and that would go way beyond civilian development projects, will come if and when China moves to invade Taiwan.
Even if it is seldom said, that is the main concern above anything else that China may try in the Indo-Pacific region, more than possible clashes in the disputed South China Sea.
If AUKUS and the Quad do nothing, they would appear toothless and, as Zhao said, their efforts to would be “doomed to fail.” But if the blocs do take action, it would eventually mean war in the Indo-Pacific region. Only time will tell what China’s next move will be towards its increasingly active adversaries and, especially, in regard to Taiwan.
6. Neo-Nazis are still on Facebook. And they’re making money
Neo-Nazis are still on Facebook. And they’re making money
AP · by ERIKA KINETZ · September 25, 2021
BRUSSELS (AP) — It’s the premier martial arts group in Europe for right-wing extremists. German authorities have twice banned their signature tournament. But Kampf der Nibelungen, or Battle of the Nibelungs, still thrives on Facebook, where organizers maintain multiple pages, as well as on Instagram and YouTube, which they use to spread their ideology, draw in recruits and make money through ticket sales and branded merchandise.
The Battle of the Nibelungs — a reference to a classic heroic epic much loved by the Nazis — is one of dozens of far-right groups that continue to leverage mainstream social media for profit, despite Facebook’s and other platforms’ repeated pledges to purge themselves of extremism.
All told, there are at least 54 Facebook profiles belonging to 39 entities that the German government and civil society groups have flagged as extremist, according to research shared with The Associated Press by the Counter Extremism Project, a non-profit policy and advocacy group formed to combat extremism. The groups have nearly 268,000 subscribers and friends on Facebook alone.
CEP also found 39 related Instagram profiles, 16 Twitter profiles and 34 YouTube channels, which have gotten over 9.5 million views. Nearly 60% of the profiles were explicitly aimed at making money, displaying prominent links to online shops or photos promoting merchandise.
Click on the big blue “view shop” button on the Erik & Sons Facebook page and you can buy a T-shirt that says, “My favorite color is white,” for 20 euros ($23). Deutsches Warenhaus offers “Refugees not welcome” stickers for just 2.50 euros ($3) and Aryan Brotherhood tube scarves with skull faces for 5.88 euros ($7). The Facebook feed of OPOS Records promotes new music and merchandise, including “True Aggression,” “Pride & Dignity,” and “One Family” T-shirts. The brand, which stands for “One People One Struggle,” also links to its online shop from Twitter and Instagram.
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EDITOR’S NOTE: This story is part of a collaboration between The Associated Press and the PBS series FRONTLINE that examines challenges to the ideas and institutions of traditional U.S. and European democracy.
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The people and organizations in CEP’s dataset are a who’s who of Germany’s far-right music and combat sports scenes. “They are the ones who build the infrastructure where people meet, make money, enjoy music and recruit,” said Alexander Ritzmann, the lead researcher on the project. “It’s most likely not the guys I’ve highlighted who will commit violent crimes. They’re too smart. They build the narratives and foster the activities of this milieu where violence then appears.”
CEP said it focused on groups that want to overthrow liberal democratic institutions and norms such as freedom of the press, protection of minorities and universal human dignity, and believe that the white race is under siege and needs to be preserved, with violence if necessary. None has been banned, but almost all have been described in German intelligence reports as extremist, CEP said.
On Facebook the groups seem harmless. They avoid blatant violations of platform rules, such as using hate speech or posting swastikas, which is generally illegal in Germany.
By carefully toeing the line of propriety, these key architects of Germany’s far-right use the power of mainstream social media to promote festivals, fashion brands, music labels and mixed martial arts tournaments that can generate millions in sales and connect like-minded thinkers from around the world.
But simply cutting off such groups could have unintended, damaging consequences.
“We don’t want to head down a path where we are telling sites they should remove people based on who they are but not what they do on the site,” said David Greene, civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco.
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Giving platforms wide latitude to sanction organizations deemed undesirable could give repressive governments leverage to eliminate their critics. “That can have really serious human rights concerns,” he said. “The history of content moderation has shown us that it’s almost always to the disadvantage of marginalized and powerless people.”
German authorities banned the Battle of the Nibelungs event in 2019, on the grounds that it was not actually about sports, but instead was grooming fighters with combat skills for political struggle.
In 2020, as the coronavirus raged, organizers planned to stream the event online — using Instagram, among other places, to promote the webcast. A few weeks before the planned event, however, over a hundred black-clad police in balaclavas broke up a gathering at a motorcycle club in Magdeburg, where fights were being filmed for the broadcast, and hauled off the boxing ring, according to local media reports.
The Battle of the Nibelungs is a “central point of contact” for right-wing extremists, according to German government intelligence reports. The organization has been explicit about its political goals — namely to fight against the “rotting” liberal democratic order — and has drawn adherents from across Europe as well as the United States.
Members of a California white supremacist street fighting club called the Rise Above Movement, and its founder, Robert Rundo, have attended the Nibelungs tournament. In 2018 at least four Rise Above members were arrested on rioting charges for taking their combat training to the streets at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. A number of Battle of Nibelungs alums have landed in prison, including for manslaughter, assault and attacks on migrants.
National Socialism Today, which describes itself as a “magazine by nationalists for nationalists” has praised Battle of the Nibelungs and other groups for fostering a will to fight and motivating “activists to improve their readiness for combat.”
But there are no references to professionalized, anti-government violence on the group’s social media feeds. Instead, it’s positioned as a health-conscious lifestyle brand, which sells branded tea mugs and shoulder bags.
“Exploring nature. Enjoying home!” gushes one Facebook post above a photo of a musclebound guy on a mountaintop wearing Resistend-branded sportswear, one of the Nibelung tournament’s sponsors. All the men in the photos are pumped and white, and they are portrayed enjoying wholesome activities such as long runs and alpine treks.
Elsewhere on Facebook, Thorsten Heise – who has been convicted of incitement to hatred and called “one of the most prominent German neo-Nazis” by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution in the German state of Thuringia — also maintains multiple pages.
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Frank Kraemer, who the German government has described as a “right-wing extremist musician,” uses his Facebook page to direct people to his blog and his Sonnenkreuz online store, which sells white nationalist and coronavirus conspiracy books as well as sports nutrition products and “vaccine rebel” T-shirts for girls.
Battle of the Nibelungs declined to comment. Resistend, Heise and Kraemer didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Facebook told AP it employs 350 people whose primary job is to counter terrorism and organized hate, and that it is investigating the pages and accounts flagged in this reporting.
“We ban organizations and individuals that proclaim a violent mission, or are engaged in violence,” said a company spokesperson, who added that Facebook had banned more than 250 white supremacist organizations, including groups and individuals in Germany. The spokesperson said the company had removed over 6 million pieces of content tied to organized hate globally between April and June and is working to move even faster.
Google said it has no interest in giving visibility to hateful content on YouTube and was looking into the accounts identified in this reporting. The company said it worked with dozens of experts to update its policies on supremacist content in 2019, resulting in a five-fold spike in the number of channels and videos removed.
Twitter says it’s committed to ensuring that public conversation is “safe and healthy” on its platform and that it doesn’t tolerate violent extremist groups. “Threatening or promoting violent extremism is against our rules,” a spokesperson told AP, but did not comment on the specific accounts flagged in this reporting.
Robert Claus, who wrote a book on the extreme right martial arts scene, said that the sports brands in CEP’s data set are “all rooted in the militant far-right neo-Nazi scene in Germany and Europe.” One of the founders of the Battle of the Nibelungs, for example, is part of the violent Hammerskin network and another early supporter, the Russian neo-Nazi Denis Kapustin, also known as Denis Nikitin, has been barred from entering the European Union for ten years, he said.
Banning such groups from Facebook and other major platforms would potentially limit their access to new audiences, but it could also drive them deeper underground, making it more difficult to monitor their activities, he said.
“It’s dangerous because they can recruit people,” he said. “Prohibiting those accounts would interrupt their contact with their audience, but the key figures and their ideology won’t be gone.”
Thorsten Hindrichs, an expert in Germany’s far-right music scene who teaches at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, said there’s a danger that the apparently harmless appearance of Germany’s right-wing music heavyweights on Facebook and Twitter, which they mostly use to promote their brands, could help normalize the image of extremists.
Extreme right concerts in Germany were drawing around 2 million euros ($2.3 million) a year in revenue before the coronavirus pandemic, he estimated, not counting sales of CDs and branded merchandise. He said kicking extremist music groups off Facebook is unlikely to hit sales too hard, as there are other platforms they can turn to, like Telegram and Gab, to reach their followers. “Right-wing extremists aren’t stupid. They will always find ways to promote their stuff,” he said.
None of these groups’ activity on mainstream platforms is obviously illegal, though it may violate Facebook guidelines that bar “dangerous individuals and organizations” that advocate or engage in violence online or offline. Facebook says it doesn’t allow praise or support of Nazism, white supremacy, white nationalism or white separatism and bars people and groups that adhere to such “hate ideologies.”
Last week, Facebook removed almost 150 accounts and pages linked to the German anti-lockdown Querdenken movement, under a new “social harm” policy, which targets groups that spread misinformation or incite violence but didn’t fit into the platform’s existing categories of bad actors.
But how these evolving rules will be applied remains murky and contested.
“If you do something wrong on the platform, it’s easier for a platform to justify an account suspension than to just throw someone out because of their ideology. That would be more difficult with respect to human rights,” said Daniel Holznagel, a Berlin judge who used to work for the German federal government on hate speech issues and also contributed to CEP’s report. “It’s a foundation of our Western society and human rights that our legal regimes do not sanction an idea, an ideology, a thought.”
In the meantime, there’s news from the folks at the Battle of the Nibelungs. “Starting today you can also dress your smallest ones with us,” reads a June post on their Facebook feed. The new line of kids wear includes a shell-pink T-shirt for girls, priced at 13.90 euros ($16). A child pictured wearing the boy version, in black, already has boxing gloves on.
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Contact AP’s global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org or https://www.ap.org/tips/
AP · by ERIKA KINETZ · September 25, 2021
7. Maria Ressa urges world leaders: 'Act now' vs infodemic threatening democracies
Excerpts:
Ressa believes social media platforms like Facebook should be held more accountable for the proliferation of lies online, which have caused divisiveness and cultivated the worst of human behavior across the world.
“They are, by design, dividing us and radicalizing us. This isn’t a free speech issue. It is not the fault of the users. These platforms are not merely mirroring humanity; they’re making all of us our worst selves, creating emergent behavior that’s destroying our world,” she said.
“It’s not a coincidence that divisive leaders are the ones who do the best on social media,” Ressa added.
Maria Ressa urges world leaders: 'Act now' vs infodemic threatening democracies
'These platforms are not merely mirroring humanity; they’re making all of us our worst selves,' Rappler CEO Maria Ressa says at the first global Ministerial Summit for Information and Democracy held on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly
Rappler CEO and president Maria Ressa appealed to world leaders to "act now" against disinformation, a weapon populist regimes have been using to erode democracies.
Virtually addressing the summit from Manila, Ressa said populist digital authoritarians have used the infodemic – a portmanteau of "information" and “epidemic” – to perpetuate their power.
“All around the world, these populist digital authoritarians are using the scorched earth policy to get elected. Then they use the formal powers of their post, the tools of democracy, to cave institutions in from within. It’s time to end the whack-a-mole approach on the technology platforms to fix what they’ve broken,” Ressa said.
“Please, we need you to act now,” she added.
Ressa has endured constant political harassment and arrests under Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s government, and has posted bail 10 times to remain free.
Rappler itself is facing multiple government-backed cases, with Ressa arrested twice. She was convicted of cyber libel under a law that was not yet enforced when Rappler published the article in 2012. The verdict is under appeal.
Ressa believes social media platforms like Facebook should be held more accountable for the proliferation of lies online, which have caused divisiveness and cultivated the worst of human behavior across the world.
“They are, by design, dividing us and radicalizing us. This isn’t a free speech issue. It is not the fault of the users. These platforms are not merely mirroring humanity; they’re making all of us our worst selves, creating emergent behavior that’s destroying our world,” she said.
“It’s not a coincidence that divisive leaders are the ones who do the best on social media,” Ressa added.
Disinformation 'aggravating' pandemic
Diplomats at the summit also said the coronavirus pandemic has raised the stakes for governments and tech platforms to battle disinformation online.
Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne said there should be a balance between combatting the infodemic and ensuring people still have their right to free speech.
“So in countering the infodemic, our focus as democracies should be on countering the divisiveness and disorder it seeks to ferment. We need to bolster the spirit of operation and understanding in the international community, to limit the spread of false and harmful information, including social media channels,” said Payne.
Latvian Foreign Minister Edgars Rinkēvičs said disinformation is only "aggravating" the spread of the COVID-19, all thanks to rumors and conspiracies aimed to discredit lifesaving vaccines and other health policies.
“I think that considerable part of activities take place on social media and pandemics showed that online platforms need to take additional measures to combat misinformation while protecting and strengthening freedom of expression and data privacy online,” said Rinkēvičs.
Rinkēvičs also said governments must promote social media literacy in society, beginning in elementary schools and amping up information drives across all communication channels.
In March, the UNGA unanimously approved a Latvia-led resolution establishing the Global Media and Information Literacy Week, part of Latvia’s push to address disinformation challenges in the UN framework. – Rappler.com
Rappler multimedia journalist Mara Cepeda is a 2021 fellow of the Reham Al-Farra Memorial Journalism Fellowship. She will be virtually covering the 76th United Nations General Assembly, foreign policy, and diplomacy during the program.
8. Kidnapping, assassination and a London shoot-out: Inside the CIA's secret war plans against WikiLeaks
A very long read.
Kidnapping, assassination and a London shoot-out: Inside the CIA's secret war plans against WikiLeaks
Sun, September 26, 2021, 5:00 AM·39 min read
In 2017, as Julian Assange began his fifth year holed up in Ecuador’s embassy in London, the CIA plotted to kidnap the WikiLeaks founder, spurring heated debate among Trump administration officials over the legality and practicality of such an operation.
Some senior officials inside the CIA and the Trump administration even discussed killing Assange, going so far as to request “sketches” or “options” for how to assassinate him. Discussions over kidnapping or killing Assange occurred “at the highest levels” of the Trump administration, said a former senior counterintelligence official. “There seemed to be no boundaries.”
The conversations were part of an unprecedented CIA campaign directed against WikiLeaks and its founder. The agency’s multipronged plans also included extensive spying on WikiLeaks associates, sowing discord among the group’s members, and stealing their electronic devices.
While Assange had been on the radar of U.S. intelligence agencies for years, these plans for an all-out war against him were sparked by WikiLeaks’ ongoing publication of extraordinarily sensitive CIA hacking tools, known collectively as “Vault 7,” which the agency ultimately concluded represented “the largest data loss in CIA history.”
President Trump’s newly installed CIA director, Mike Pompeo, was seeking revenge on WikiLeaks and Assange, who had sought refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy since 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden on rape allegations he denied. Pompeo and other top agency leaders “were completely detached from reality because they were so embarrassed about Vault 7,” said a former Trump national security official. “They were seeing blood.”
Former CIA Director Mike Pompeo in 2017. (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The CIA’s fury at WikiLeaks led Pompeo to publicly describe the group in 2017 as a “non-state hostile intelligence service.” More than just a provocative talking point, the designation opened the door for agency operatives to take far more aggressive actions, treating the organization as it does adversary spy services, former intelligence officials told Yahoo News. Within months, U.S. spies were monitoring the communications and movements of numerous WikiLeaks personnel, including audio and visual surveillance of Assange himself, according to former officials.
This Yahoo News investigation, based on conversations with more than 30 former U.S. officials — eight of whom described details of the CIA’s proposals to abduct Assange — reveals for the first time one of the most contentious intelligence debates of the Trump presidency and exposes new details about the U.S. government’s war on WikiLeaks. It was a campaign spearheaded by Pompeo that bent important legal strictures, potentially jeopardized the Justice Department’s work toward prosecuting Assange, and risked a damaging episode in the United Kingdom, the United States’ closest ally.
The CIA declined to comment. Pompeo did not respond to requests for comment.
“As an American citizen, I find it absolutely outrageous that our government would be contemplating kidnapping or assassinating somebody without any judicial process simply because he had published truthful information,” Barry Pollack, Assange’s U.S. lawyer, told Yahoo News.
Assange is now housed in a London prison as the courts there decide on a U.S. request to extradite the WikiLeaks founder on charges of attempting to help former U.S. Army analyst Chelsea Manning break into a classified computer network and conspiring to obtain and publish classified documents in violation of the Espionage Act.
“My hope and expectation is that the U.K. courts will consider this information and it will further bolster its decision not to extradite to the U.S.,” Pollack added.
There is no indication that the most extreme measures targeting Assange were ever approved, in part because of objections from White House lawyers, but the agency’s WikiLeaks proposals so worried some administration officials that they quietly reached out to staffers and members of Congress on the House and Senate intelligence committees to alert them to what Pompeo was suggesting. “There were serious intel oversight concerns that were being raised through this escapade,” said a Trump national security official.
Some National Security Council officials worried that the CIA’s proposals to kidnap Assange would not only be illegal but also might jeopardize the prosecution of the WikiLeaks founder. Concerned the CIA’s plans would derail a potential criminal case, the Justice Department expedited the drafting of charges against Assange to ensure that they were in place if he were brought to the United States.
In late 2017, in the midst of the debate over kidnapping and other extreme measures, the agency’s plans were upended when U.S. officials picked up what they viewed as alarming reports that Russian intelligence operatives were preparing to sneak Assange out of the United Kingdom and spirit him away to Moscow.
The intelligence reporting about a possible breakout was viewed as credible at the highest levels of the U.S. government. At the time, Ecuadorian officials had begun efforts to grant Assange diplomatic status as part of a scheme to give him cover to leave the embassy and fly to Moscow to serve in the country’s Russian mission.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange appears at the window of the Ecuadorean Embassy in London on Feb. 5, 2016. (Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP)
In response, the CIA and the White House began preparing for a number of scenarios to foil Assange’s Russian departure plans, according to three former officials. Those included potential gun battles with Kremlin operatives on the streets of London, crashing a car into a Russian diplomatic vehicle transporting Assange and then grabbing him, and shooting out the tires of a Russian plane carrying Assange before it could take off for Moscow. (U.S. officials asked their British counterparts to do the shooting if gunfire was required, and the British agreed, according to a former senior administration official.)
“We had all sorts of reasons to believe he was contemplating getting the hell out of there,” said the former senior administration official, adding that one report said Assange might try to escape the embassy hidden in a laundry cart. “It was going to be like a prison break movie.”
The intrigue over a potential Assange escape set off a wild scramble among rival spy services in London. American, British and Russian agencies, among others, stationed undercover operatives around the Ecuadorian Embassy. In the Russians’ case, it was to facilitate a breakout. For the U.S. and allied services, it was to block such an escape. “It was beyond comical,” said the former senior official. “It got to the point where every human being in a three-block radius was working for one of the intelligence services — whether they were street sweepers or police officers or security guards.”
White House officials briefed Trump and warned him that the matter could provoke an international incident — or worse. “We told him, this is going to get ugly,” said the former official.
As the debate over WikiLeaks intensified, some in the White House worried that the campaign against the organization would end up “weakening America,” as one Trump national security official put it, by lowering barriers that prevent the government from targeting mainstream journalists and news organizations, said former officials.
The fear at the National Security Council, the former official said, could be summed up as, “Where does this stop?”
When WikiLeaks launched its website in December 2006, it was a nearly unprecedented model: Anyone anywhere could submit materials anonymously for publication. And they did, on topics ranging from secret fraternity rites to details of the U.S. government’s Guantánamo Bay detainee operations.
Yet Assange, the lanky Australian activist who led the organization, didn’t get much attention until 2010, when WikiLeaks released gun camera footage of a 2007 airstrike by U.S. Army helicopters in Baghdad that killed at least a dozen people, including two Reuters journalists, and wounded two young children. The Pentagon had refused to release the dramatic video, but someone had provided it to WikiLeaks.
WikiLeaks releases leaked 2007 footage of a U.S. Apache helicopter fatally shooting a group of men at a public square in eastern Baghdad. (U.S. Military via Wikileaks.org)
Later that year, WikiLeaks also published several caches of classified and sensitive U.S. government documents related to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as more than 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables. Assange was hailed in some circles as a hero and in others as a villain. For U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies, the question was how to deal with the group, which operated differently than typical news outlets. “The problem posed by WikiLeaks was, there wasn’t anything like it,” said a former intelligence official.
How to define WikiLeaks has long confounded everyone from government officials to press advocates. Some view it as an independent journalistic institution, while others have asserted it is a handmaiden to foreign spy services.
“They’re not a journalistic organization, they’re nowhere near it,” William Evanina, who retired as the U.S.’s top counterintelligence official in early 2021, told Yahoo News in an interview. Evanina declined to discuss specific U.S. proposals regarding Assange or WikiLeaks.
But the Obama administration, fearful of the consequences for press freedom — and chastened by the blowback from its own aggressive leak hunts — restricted investigations into Assange and WikiLeaks. “We were stagnated for years,” said Evanina. “There was a reticence in the Obama administration at a high level to allow agencies to engage in” certain kinds of intelligence collection against WikiLeaks, including signals and cyber operations, he said.
That began to change in 2013, when Edward Snowden, a National Security Agency contractor, fled to Hong Kong with a massive trove of classified materials, some of which revealed that the U.S. government was illegally spying on Americans. WikiLeaks helped arrange Snowden’s escape to Russia from Hong Kong. A WikiLeaks editor also accompanied Snowden to Russia, staying with him during his 39-day enforced stay at a Moscow airport and living with him for three months after Russia granted Snowden asylum.
In the wake of the Snowden revelations, the Obama administration allowed the intelligence community to prioritize collection on WikiLeaks, according to Evanina, now the CEO of the Evanina Group. Previously, if the FBI needed a search warrant to go into the group’s databases in the United States or wanted to use subpoena power or a national security letter to gain access to WikiLeaks-related financial records, “that wasn’t going to happen,” another former senior counterintelligence official said. “That changed after 2013.”
An image of Edward Snowden on a giant screen in Hong Kong on June 23, 2013. (Sam Tsang/South China Morning Post via Getty Images)
From that point onward, U.S. intelligence worked closely with friendly spy agencies to build a picture of WikiLeaks’ network of contacts “and tie it back to hostile state intelligence services,” Evanina said. The CIA assembled a group of analysts known unofficially as “the WikiLeaks team” in its Office of Transnational Issues, with a mission to examine the organization, according to a former agency official.
Still chafing at the limits in place, top intelligence officials lobbied the White House to redefine WikiLeaks — and some high-profile journalists — as “information brokers,” which would have opened up the use of more investigative tools against them, potentially paving the way for their prosecution, according to former officials. It “was a step in the direction of showing a court, if we got that far, that we were dealing with agents of a foreign power,” a former senior counterintelligence official said.
Among the journalists some U.S. officials wanted to designate as “information brokers” were Glenn Greenwald, then a columnist for the Guardian, and Laura Poitras, a documentary filmmaker, who had both been instrumental in publishing documents provided by Snowden.
“Is WikiLeaks a journalistic outlet? Are Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald truly journalists?” the former official said. “We tried to change the definition of them, and I preached this to the White House, and got rejected.”
The Obama administration’s policy was, “If there’s published works out there, doesn’t matter the venue, then we have to treat them as First-Amendment-protected individuals,” the former senior counterintelligence official said. “There were some exceptions to that rule, but they were very, very, very few and far between.” WikiLeaks, the administration decided, did not fit that exception.
In a statement to Yahoo News, Poitras said reported attempts to classify herself, Greenwald and Assange as “information brokers” rather than journalists are “bone-chilling and a threat to journalists worldwide.”
“That the CIA also conspired to seek the rendition and extrajudicial assassination of Julian Assange is a state-sponsored crime against the press,” she added.
“I am not the least bit surprised that the CIA, a longtime authoritarian and antidemocratic institution, plotted to find a way to criminalize journalism and spy on and commit other acts of aggression against journalists,” Greenwald told Yahoo News.
By 2015, WikiLeaks was the subject of an intense debate over whether the organization should be targeted by law enforcement or spy agencies. Some argued that the FBI should have sole responsibility for investigating WikiLeaks, with no role for the CIA or the NSA. The Justice Department, in particular, was “very protective” of its authorities over whether to charge Assange and whether to treat WikiLeaks “like a media outlet,” said Robert Litt, the intelligence community’s senior lawyer during the Obama administration.
Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras at a news conference in 2014. (Eduardo Munoz/Reuters)
Then, in the summer of 2016, at the height of the presidential election season, came a seismic episode in the U.S. government’s evolving approach to WikiLeaks, when the website began publishing Democratic Party emails. The U.S. intelligence community later concluded the Russian military intelligence agency known as the GRU had hacked the emails.
In response to the leak, the NSA began surveilling the Twitter accounts of the suspected Russian intelligence operatives who were disseminating the leaked Democratic Party emails, according to a former CIA official. This collection revealed direct messages between the operatives, who went by the moniker Guccifer 2.0, and WikiLeaks’ Twitter account. Assange at the time steadfastly denied that the Russian government was the source for the emails, which were also published by mainstream news organizations.
Even so, Assange’s communication with the suspected operatives settled the matter for some U.S. officials. The events of 2016 “really crystallized” U.S. intelligence officials’ belief that the WikiLeaks founder “was acting in collusion with people who were using him to hurt the interests of the United States,” said Litt.
After the publication of the Democratic Party emails, there was “zero debate” on the issue of whether the CIA would increase its spying on WikiLeaks, said a former intelligence official. But there was still “sensitivity on how we would collect on them,” the former official added.
The CIA now considered people affiliated with WikiLeaks valid targets for various types of spying, including close-in technical collection — such as bugs — sometimes enabled by in-person espionage, and “remote operations,” meaning, among other things, the hacking of WikiLeaks members’ devices from afar, according to former intelligence officials.
The Obama administration’s view of WikiLeaks underwent what Evanina described as a “sea change” shortly before Donald Trump, helped in part by WikiLeaks’ release of Democratic campaign emails, won a surprise victory over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.
As Trump’s national security team took their positions at the Justice Department and the CIA, officials wondered whether, despite his campaign trail declaration of “love” for WikiLeaks, Trump’s appointees would take a more hard-line view of the organization. They were not to be disappointed.
“There was a fundamental change on how [WikiLeaks was] viewed,” said a former senior counterintelligence official. When it came to prosecuting Assange — something the Obama administration had declined to do — the Trump White House had a different approach, said a former Justice Department official. “Nobody in that crew was going to be too broken up about the First Amendment issues.”
On April 13, 2017, wearing a U.S. flag pin on the left lapel of his dark gray suit, Pompeo strode to the podium at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington think tank, to deliver to a standing-room-only crowd his first public remarks as Trump’s CIA director.
Rather than use the platform to give an overview of global challenges or to lay out any bureaucratic changes he was planning to make at the agency, Pompeo devoted much of his speech to the threat posed by WikiLeaks.
“WikiLeaks walks like a hostile intelligence service and talks like a hostile intelligence service and has encouraged its followers to find jobs at the CIA in order to obtain intelligence,” he said.
“It’s time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is: a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia,” he continued.
Pompeo answers questions at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington in 2017. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP)
It had been barely five weeks since WikiLeaks had stunned the CIA when it announced it had obtained a massive tranche of files — which it dubbed “Vault 7” — from the CIA’s ultrasecret hacking division. Despite the CIA’s ramped up collection on WikiLeaks, the announcement came as a complete surprise to the agency, but as soon as the organization posted the first materials on its website, the CIA knew it was facing a catastrophe.
Vault 7 “hurt the agency to its core,” said a former CIA official. Agency officials “used to laugh about WikiLeaks,” mocking the State Department and the Pentagon for allowing so much material to escape their control.
Pompeo, apparently fearful of the president’s wrath, was initially reluctant to even brief the president on Vault 7, according to a former senior Trump administration official. “Don’t tell him, he doesn’t need to know,” Pompeo told one briefer, before being advised that the information was too critical and the president had to be informed, said the former official.
Irate senior FBI and NSA officials repeatedly demanded interagency meetings to determine the scope of the damage caused by Vault 7, according to another former national security official.
The NSA believed that, although the leak revealed only CIA hacking operations, it could also give countries like Russia or China clues about NSA targets and methods, said this former official.
Pompeo’s aggressive tone at CSIS reflected his “brash attitude,” said a former senior intelligence official. “He would want to push the limits as much as he could” during his tenure as CIA director, the former official said.
The Trump administration was sending more signals that it would no longer be bound by the Obama administration’s self-imposed restrictions regarding WikiLeaks. For some U.S. intelligence officials, this was a welcome change. “There was immense hostility to WikiLeaks in the beginning from the intelligence community,” said Litt.
Vault 7 prompted “a brand-new mindset with the administration for rethinking how to look at WikiLeaks as an adversarial actor,” Evanina said. “That was new, and it was refreshing for the intelligence community and the law enforcement community.” Updates on Assange were frequently included in Trump’s President’s Daily Brief, a top-secret document prepared by U.S. intelligence agencies that summarizes the day’s most critical national security issues, according to a former national security official.
The immediate question facing Pompeo and the CIA was how to hit back against WikiLeaks and Assange. Agency officials found the answer in a legal sleight of hand. Usually, for U.S. intelligence to secretly interfere with the activities of any foreign actor, the president must sign a document called a “finding” that authorizes such covert action, which must also be briefed to the House and Senate intelligence committees. In very sensitive cases, notification is limited to Congress’s so-called Gang of Eight — the four leaders of the House and Senate, plus the chairperson and ranking member of the two committees.
But there is an important carveout. Many of the same actions, if taken against another spy service, are considered “offensive counterintelligence” activities, which the CIA is allowed to conduct without getting a presidential finding or having to brief Congress, according to several former intelligence officials.
Often, the CIA makes these decisions internally, based on interpretations of so-called “common law” passed down in secret within the agency’s legal corps. “I don’t think people realize how much [the] CIA can do under offensive [counterintelligence] and how there is minimal oversight of it,” said a former official.
Assange discusses the publication of secret U.S. documents about the war in Afghanistan at a 2010 press conference in London. (Julian Simmonds/Shutterstock)
The difficulty in proving that WikiLeaks was operating at the direct behest of the Kremlin was a major factor behind the CIA’s move to designate the group as a hostile intelligence service, according to a former senior counterintelligence official. “There was a lot of legal debate on: Are they operating as a Russian agent?” said the former official. “It wasn’t clear they were, so the question was, can it be reframed on them being a hostile entity.”
Intelligence community lawyers decided that it could. When Pompeo declared WikiLeaks “a non-state hostile intelligence service,” he was neither speaking off the cuff nor repeating a phrase concocted by a CIA speechwriter. “That phrase was chosen advisedly and reflected the view of the administration,” a former Trump administration official said.
But Pompeo’s declaration surprised Litt, who had left his position as general counsel of the Office of the Director for National Intelligence less than three months previously. “Based on the information that I had seen, I thought he was out over his skis on that,” Litt said.
For many senior intelligence officials, however, Pompeo’s designation of WikiLeaks was a positive step. “We all agreed that WikiLeaks was a hostile intelligence organization and should be dealt with accordingly,” said a former senior CIA official.
Soon after the speech, Pompeo asked a small group of senior CIA officers to figure out “the art of the possible” when it came to WikiLeaks, said another former senior CIA official. “He said, ‘Nothing’s off limits, don’t self-censor yourself. I need operational ideas from you. I’ll worry about the lawyers in Washington.’” CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., sent messages directing CIA stations and bases worldwide to prioritize collection on WikiLeaks, according to the former senior agency official.
The CIA’s designation of WikiLeaks as a non-state hostile intelligence service enabled “the doubling down of efforts globally and domestically on collection” against the group, Evanina said. Those efforts included tracking the movements and communications of Assange and other top WikiLeaks figures by “tasking more on the tech side, recruiting more on the human side,” said another former senior counterintelligence official.
This was no easy task. WikiLeaks associates were “super-paranoid people,” and the CIA estimated that only a handful of individuals had access to the Vault 7 materials the agency wanted to retrieve, said a former intelligence official. Those individuals employed security measures that made obtaining the information difficult, including keeping it on encrypted drives that they either carried on their persons or locked in safes, according to former officials.
WikiLeaks claimed it had published only a fraction of the Vault 7 documents in its possession. So, what if U.S. intelligence found a tranche of those unpublished materials online? At the White House, officials began planning for that scenario. Could the United States launch a cyberattack on a server being used by WikiLeaks to house these documents?
Assange presents U.S. military documents on the Iraq War at press conference in London on Oct. 23, 2010. (Shutterstock)
Officials weren’t sure if the Defense Department had the authority to do so at the time, absent the president’s signature. Alternatively, they suggested, perhaps the CIA could carry out the same action under the agency’s offensive counterintelligence powers. After all, officials reasoned, the CIA would be erasing its own documents. However, U.S. spies never located a copy of the unpublished Vault 7 materials online, so the discussion was ultimately moot, according to a former national security official.
Nonetheless, the CIA had some successes. By mid-2017, U.S. spies had excellent intelligence on numerous WikiLeaks members and associates, not just on Assange, said former officials. This included what these individuals were saying and who they were saying it to, where they were traveling or going to be at a given date and time, and what platforms these individuals were communicating on, according to former officials.
U.S. spy agencies developed good intelligence on WikiLeaks associates’ “patterns of life,” particularly their travels within Europe, said a former national security official. U.S. intelligence was particularly keen on information documenting travel by WikiLeaks associates to Russia or countries in Russia’s orbit, according to the former official.
At the CIA, the new designation meant Assange and WikiLeaks would go from “a target of collection to a target of disruption,” said a former senior CIA official. Proposals began percolating upward within the CIA and the NSC to undertake various disruptive activities — the core of “offensive counterintelligence” — against WikiLeaks. These included paralyzing its digital infrastructure, disrupting its communications, provoking internal disputes within the organization by planting damaging information, and stealing WikiLeaks members’ electronic devices, according to three former officials.
Infiltrating the group, either with a real person or by inventing a cyber persona to gain the group’s confidence, was quickly dismissed as unlikely to succeed because the senior WikiLeaks figures were so security-conscious, according to former intelligence officials. Sowing discord within the group seemed an easier route to success, in part because “those guys hated each other and fought all the time,” a former intelligence official said.
But many of the other ideas were “not ready for prime time,” said the former intelligence official.
“Some dude affiliated with WikiLeaks was moving around the world, and they wanted to go steal his computer because they thought he might have” Vault 7 files, said the former official.
The official was unable to identify that individual. But some of these proposals may have been eventually approved. In December 2020, a German hacker closely affiliated with WikiLeaks who assisted with the Vault 7 publications claimed that there had been an attempt to break into his apartment, which he had secured with an elaborate locking system. The hacker, Andy Müller-Maguhn, also said he had been tailed by mysterious figures and that his encrypted telephone had been bugged.
Andy Müller-Maguhn speaks at the Cyber Security Summit in Bonn, Germany, in 2014. (Ollendorf/Itterman (Telekom))
Asked whether the CIA had broken into WikiLeaks’ associates’ homes and stolen or wiped their hard drives, a former intelligence official declined to go into detail but said that “some actions were taken.”
By the summer of 2017, the CIA’s proposals were setting off alarm bells at the National Security Council. “WikiLeaks was a complete obsession of Pompeo’s,” said a former Trump administration national security official. “After Vault 7, Pompeo and [Deputy CIA Director Gina] Haspel wanted vengeance on Assange.”
At meetings between senior Trump administration officials after WikiLeaks started publishing the Vault 7 materials, Pompeo began discussing kidnapping Assange, according to four former officials. While the notion of kidnapping Assange preceded Pompeo’s arrival at Langley, the new director championed the proposals, according to former officials.
Pompeo and others at the agency proposed abducting Assange from the embassy and surreptitiously bringing him back to the United States via a third country — a process known as rendition. The idea was to “break into the embassy, drag [Assange] out and bring him to where we want,” said a former intelligence official. A less extreme version of the proposal involved U.S. operatives snatching Assange from the embassy and turning him over to British authorities.
Such actions were sure to create a diplomatic and political firestorm, as they would have involved violating the sanctity of the Ecuadorian Embassy before kidnapping the citizen of a critical U.S. partner — Australia — in the capital of the United Kingdom, the United States’ closest ally. Trying to seize Assange from an embassy in the British capital struck some as “ridiculous,” said the former intelligence official. “This isn’t Pakistan or Egypt — we’re talking about London.”
British acquiescence was far from assured. Former officials differ on how much the U.K. government knew about the CIA’s rendition plans for Assange, but at some point, American officials did raise the issue with their British counterparts.
The Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange resided for seven years. (Will Oliver/EPA/Shutterstock)
“There was a discussion with the Brits about turning the other cheek or looking the other way when a team of guys went inside and did a rendition,” said a former senior counterintelligence official. “But the British said, ‘No way, you’re not doing that on our territory, that ain’t happening.’” The British Embassy in Washington did not return a request for comment.
In addition to diplomatic concerns about rendition, some NSC officials believed that abducting Assange would be clearly illegal. “You can’t throw people in a car and kidnap them,” said a former national security official.
In fact, said this former official, for some NSC personnel, “This was the key question: Was it possible to render Assange under [the CIA’s] offensive counterintelligence” authorities? In this former official’s thinking, those powers were meant to enable traditional spy-versus-spy activities, “not the same kind of crap we pulled in the war on terror.”
Some discussions even went beyond kidnapping. U.S. officials had also considered killing Assange, according to three former officials. One of those officials said he was briefed on a spring 2017 meeting in which the president asked whether the CIA could assassinate Assange and provide him “options” for how to do so.
“It was viewed as unhinged and ridiculous,” recalled this former senior CIA official of the suggestion.
It’s unclear how serious the proposals to kill Assange really were. “I was told they were just spitballing,” said a former senior counterintelligence official briefed on the discussions about “kinetic options” regarding the WikiLeaks founder. “It was just Trump being Trump."
Nonetheless, at roughly the same time, agency executives requested and received “sketches” of plans for killing Assange and other Europe-based WikiLeaks members who had access to Vault 7 materials, said a former intelligence official. There were discussions “on whether killing Assange was possible and whether it was legal,” the former official said.
Yahoo News could not confirm if these proposals made it to the White House. Some officials with knowledge of the rendition proposals said they had heard no discussions about assassinating Assange.
In a statement to Yahoo News, Trump denied that he ever considered having Assange assassinated. “It’s totally false, it never happened,” he said. Trump seemed to express some sympathy for Assange’s plight. “In fact, I think he’s been treated very badly,” he added.
Whatever Trump’s view of the matter at the time, his NSC lawyers were bulwarks against the CIA’s potentially illegal proposals, according to former officials. “While people think the Trump administration didn’t believe in the rule of law, they had good lawyers who were paying attention to it,” said a former senior intelligence official.
Then-President Donald Trump at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., in 2017. (Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)
The rendition talk deeply alarmed some senior administration officials. John Eisenberg, the top NSC lawyer, and Michael Ellis, his deputy, worried that “Pompeo is advocating things that are not likely to be legal,” including “rendition-type activity,” said a former national security official. Eisenberg wrote to CIA General Counsel Courtney Simmons Elwood expressing his concerns about the agency’s WikiLeaks-related proposals, according to another Trump national security official.
It’s unclear how much Elwood knew about the proposals. “When Pompeo took over, he cut the lawyers out of a lot of things,” said a former senior intelligence community attorney.
Pompeo’s ready access to the Oval Office, where he would meet with Trump alone, exacerbated the lawyers’ fears. Eisenberg fretted that the CIA director was leaving those meetings with authorities or approvals signed by the president that Eisenberg knew nothing about, according to former officials.
NSC officials also worried about the timing of the potential Assange kidnapping. Discussions about rendering Assange occurred before the Justice Department filed any criminal charges against him, even under seal — meaning that the CIA could have kidnapped Assange from the embassy without any legal basis to try him in the United States.
Eisenberg urged Justice Department officials to accelerate their drafting of charges against Assange, in case the CIA’s rendition plans moved forward, according to former officials. The White House told Attorney General Jeff Sessions that if prosecutors had grounds to indict Assange they should hurry up and do so, according to a former senior administration official.
Things got more complicated in May 2017, when the Swedes dropped their rape investigation into Assange, who had always denied the allegations. White House officials developed a backup plan: The British would hold Assange on a bail jumping charge, giving Justice Department prosecutors a 48-hour delay to rush through an indictment.
Eisenberg was concerned about the legal implications of rendering Assange without criminal charges in place, according to a former national security official. Absent an indictment, where would the agency bring him, said another former official who attended NSC meetings on the topic. “Were we going to go back to ‘black sites’?”
As U.S. officials debated the legality of kidnapping Assange, they came to believe that they were racing against the clock. Intelligence reports warned that Russia had its own plans to sneak the WikiLeaks leader out of the embassy and fly him to Moscow, according to Evanina, the top U.S. counterintelligence official from 2014 through early 2021.
The United States “had exquisite collection of his plans and intentions,” said Evanina. “We were very confident that we were able to mitigate any of those [escape] attempts.”
Officials became particularly concerned when suspected Russian operatives in diplomatic vehicles near the Ecuadorian Embassy were observed practicing a “starburst” maneuver, a common tactic for spy services, whereby multiple operatives suddenly scatter to escape surveillance, according to former officials. This may have been a practice run for an exfiltration, potentially coordinated with the Ecuadorians, to get Assange out of the embassy and whisk him out of the country, U.S. officials believed.
Assange greets supporters outside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London on May 19, 2017. (Frank Augstein/AP)
“The Ecuadorians would tip off the Russians that they were going to be releasing Assange on the street, and then the Russians would pick him up and spirit him back to Russia,” said a former national security official.
Officials developed multiple tactical plans to thwart any Kremlin attempt to spring Assange, some of which envisioned clashes with Russian operatives in the British capital. “There could be anything from a fistfight to a gunfight to cars running into each other,” said a former senior Trump administration official.
U.S. officials disagreed over how to interdict Assange if he attempted to escape. A proposal to initiate a car crash to halt Assange’s vehicle was not only a “borderline” or “extralegal” course of action — “something we’d do in Afghanistan, but not in the U.K.” — but was also particularly sensitive since Assange was likely going to be transported in a Russian diplomatic vehicle, said a former national security official.
If the Russians managed to get Assange onto a plane, U.S. or British operatives would prevent it from taking off by blocking it with a car on the runway, hovering a helicopter over it or shooting out its tires, according to a former senior Trump administration official. In the unlikely event that the Russians succeeded in getting airborne, officials planned to ask European countries to deny the plane overflight rights, the former official said.
Eventually, the United States and the U.K. developed a “joint plan” to prevent Assange from absconding and giving Vladimir Putin the sort of propaganda coup he had enjoyed when Snowden fled to Russia in 2013, Evanina said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said at a press conference in Moscow on July 1, 2013, that his country had never extradited anyone before. (Alexander Nemenov/AFP via Getty Images)
“It’s not just him getting to Moscow and taking secrets,” he said. “The second wind that Putin would get — he gets Snowden and now he gets Assange — it becomes a geopolitical win for him and his intelligence services.”
Evanina declined to comment on the plans to prevent Assange from escaping to Russia, but he suggested that the “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance between the United States, the U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand was critical. “We were very confident within the Five Eyes that we would be able to prevent him from going there,” he said.
But testimony in a Spanish criminal investigation strongly suggests that U.S. intelligence may also have had inside help keeping tabs on Assange’s plans.
By late 2015, Ecuador had hired a Spanish security company called UC Global to protect the country’s London embassy, where Assange had already spent several years running WikiLeaks from his living quarters. Unbeknownst to Ecuador, however, by mid-2017 UC Global was also working for U.S. intelligence, according to two former employees who testified in a Spanish criminal investigation first reported by the newspaper El País.
The Spanish firm was providing U.S. intelligence agencies with detailed reports of Assange’s activities and visitors as well as video and audio surveillance of Assange from secretly installed devices in the embassy, the employees testified. A former U.S. national security official confirmed that U.S. intelligence had access to video and audio feeds of Assange within the embassy but declined to specify how it acquired them.
By December 2017, the plan to get Assange to Russia appeared to be ready. UC Global had learned that Assange would “receive a diplomatic passport from Ecuadorian authorities, with the aim of leaving the embassy to transit to a third state,” a former employee said. On Dec. 15, Ecuador made Assange an official diplomat of that country and planned to assign him to its embassy in Moscow, according to documents obtained by the Associated Press.
Assange prepares to make a statement at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London on May 19, 2017. (Matt Dunham/AP)
Assange said he “was not aware” of the plan struck by the Ecuadorian foreign minister to assign him to Moscow, and refused to “accept that assignment,” said Fidel Narvaez, who was the first secretary at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in 2017 and 2018.
Narvaez told Yahoo News that he was directed by his superiors to try and get Assange accredited as a diplomat to the London embassy. “However, Ecuador did have a plan B,” said Narvaez, “and I understood it was to be Russia.”
Aitor Martínez, a Spanish lawyer for Assange who worked closely with Ecuador on getting Assange his diplomat status, also said the Ecuadorian foreign minister presented the Russia assignment to Assange as a fait accompli — and that Assange, when he heard about it, immediately rejected the idea.
On Dec. 21, the Justice Department secretly charged Assange, increasing the chances of legal extradition to the United States. That same day, UC Global recorded a meeting held between Assange and the head of Ecuador’s intelligence service to discuss Assange’s escape plan, according to El País. “Hours after the meeting” the U.S. ambassador relayed his knowledge of the plan to his Ecuadorian counterparts, reported El País.
Martínez says the plan — organized by the head of Ecuadorian intelligence — to sneak Assange out of the London embassy and onward, as a diplomat, to a third country was canceled after they learned the Americans were aware of it.
But U.S. intelligence officials believed Russia planned to exfiltrate Assange, reportedly on Christmas Eve. According to the former UC Global employee, the company’s boss discussed with his American contacts the possibility of leaving the embassy door open, as if by accident, “which would allow persons to enter from outside the embassy and kidnap the asylee.”
In testimony first reported in the Guardian, another idea also took shape. “Even the possibility of poisoning Mr. Assange was discussed,” the employee said his boss told him.
Even Assange appeared to fear assassination. Some Vault 7 material, which CIA officials believed to be even more damaging than the files WikiLeaks had published, had been distributed among Assange’s colleagues with instructions to publish it if one of them were killed, according to U.S. officials.
A primary question for U.S. officials was whether any CIA plan to kidnap or potentially kill Assange was legal. The discussions occurred under the aegis of the agency’s new “offensive counterintelligence” authorities, according to former officials. Some officials thought this was a highly aggressive, and likely legally transgressive, interpretation of these powers.
Without a presidential finding — the directive used to justify covert operations — assassinating Assange or other WikiLeaks members would be illegal, according to several former intelligence officials. In some situations, even a finding is not sufficient to make an action legal, said a former national security official. The CIA’s newfound offensive counterintelligence powers regarding WikiLeaks would not have stretched to assassination. “That kind of lethal action would be way outside of a legitimate intelligence or counterintelligence activity,” a former senior intelligence community lawyer said.
In the end, the assassination discussions went nowhere, said former officials.
The idea of killing Assange “didn’t get serious traction,” said a former senior CIA official. “It was, this is a crazy thing that wastes our time.”
Inside the White House, Pompeo’s impassioned arguments on WikiLeaks were making little headway. The director’s most aggressive proposals were “probably taken seriously” in Langley but not within the NSC, a former national security official said.
Even Sessions, Trump’s “very, very anti-Assange” attorney general, was opposed to CIA’s encroachment onto Justice Department territory, and believed that the WikiLeaks founder’s case was best handled through legal channels, said the former official.
Sessions’ concerns mirrored the tensions between the ramped-up intelligence collection and disruption efforts aimed at WikiLeaks, and the Justice Department’s goal of convicting Assange in open court, according to former officials. The more aggressive the CIA’s proposals became, the more other U.S. officials worried about what the discovery process might reveal if Assange were to face trial in the United States.
“I was part of every one of those conversations,” Evanina said. “As much as we had the greener light to go do things, everything we did or wanted to do had repercussions in other parts of the administration.” As a result, he said, sometimes administration officials would ask the intelligence community to either not do something or do it differently, so that “we don’t have to sacrifice our collection that’s going to be released publicly by the bureau to indict WikiLeaks.”
Eventually, those within the administration arguing for an approach based in the courts, rather than on espionage and covert action, won the policy debate. On April 11, 2019, after Ecuador’s new government revoked his asylum and evicted him, British police carried the WikiLeaks founder out of the embassy and arrested him for failing to surrender to the court over a warrant issued in 2012. The U.S. government unsealed its initial indictment of Assange the same day.
That indictment focused exclusively on allegations that in 2010, Assange offered to help Manning, the Army intelligence analyst, crack a password to break into a classified U.S. government network, an act that would have gone beyond journalism. But in a move that drew howls from press advocates, prosecutors later tacked on Espionage Act charges against Assange for publishing classified information — something that U.S. media outlets do regularly.
Assange’s legal odyssey appears to have only just begun. In January, a British judge ruled Assange could not be extradited to the United States, finding that he would be a suicide risk in a U.S. prison. Although Assange supporters hoped the Biden administration might drop the case, the United States, undeterred, appealed the decision. In July, a U.K. court formally permitted the U.S. appeal to proceed.
Assange, facing an extradition warrant in London, is seen arriving at Westminster Magistrates’ Court on April 11, 2019. (Rob Pinney/LNP/Shutterstock)
Pollack, Assange’s lawyer, told Yahoo News that if Assange is extradited to face trial, “the extreme nature of the type of government misconduct that you’re reporting would certainly be an issue and potentially grounds for dismissal.” He likened the measures used to target Assange to those deployed by the Nixon administration against Daniel Ellsberg for leaking the Pentagon Papers, noting the charges against Ellsberg were ultimately dismissed as well.
Meanwhile, WikiLeaks may be increasingly obsolete. The growing ability of groups and individuals — whistleblowers or dissidents, spies or criminals — to publish leaked materials online diminishes the group’s raison d’être. “We’re kind of post-WikiLeaks right now,” said a former senior counterintelligence official.
Yet spy services are increasingly using a WikiLeaks-like model of posting stolen materials online. In 2018, the Trump administration granted the CIA aggressive new secret authorities to undertake the same sort of hack-and-dump operations for which Russian intelligence has used WikiLeaks. Among other actions, the agency has used its new powers to covertly release information online about a Russian company that worked with Moscow’s spy apparatus.
For a former Trump national security official, the lessons of the CIA’s campaign against WikiLeaks are clear. “There was an inappropriate level of attention to Assange given the embarrassment, not the threat he posed in context,” said this official.
“We should never act out of a desire for revenge.”
Cover thumbnail photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP, Getty Images (2), CIA, WikiLeaks.
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Read more from Yahoo News:
9. Report Calling for Troop and Retiree Pay Cuts Is Grossly Misleading
Keep in mind MOAA is a lobbying organization. But I wonder if the points they are making need to be examined.
Report Calling for Troop and Retiree Pay Cuts Is Grossly Misleading
A recently published report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a nonpartisan think tank, has repackaged old, outdated stats to argue military personnel costs are too high and “unsustainable.”
The author’s suggestions include cutting annual pay raises, putting more money into skill-targeted bonuses, shifting more health costs to military beneficiaries, and considering further housing allowance reductions, among others.
The report may have a 2021 date on it, but it’s a bald-faced rehash of statistics from almost a decade ago, comparing personnel cost changes between 2000 and 2012. And its recommendations are the same wrongheaded suggestions MOAA has been fighting for decades by presenting Congress with more relevant figures and highlighting the true costs of service.
The figures used in the CSIS report were grossly misleading in 2012 and are even more so now.
A Bad Baseline
First, 2000 is hardly a reasonable baseline for any personnel cost comparison, because a compilation of repeated pay and compensation cutbacks had gutted retention and readiness at that point. Congress had capped military pay raises below private sector pay growth for almost two decades, leaving military raises a cumulative 14-plus percent below those of their civilian counterparts.
A 1986 retirement change had cut retired pay value almost 20% for subsequent entrants who served 20 years; those exiting service at the time cited this as a top reason for leaving. Housing allowances had been eroded to the point of having no relationship to housing costs. And military health coverage had been virtually eliminated for retirees, family members, and survivors over age 65.
In 2001 – the year after the baseline used in the report – compound effects of these cutbacks prompted the Joint Chiefs of Staff to urge Congress to upgrade military compensation and benefits, and to restore faith among current and future career servicemembers and families.
Congress responded by restoring general pay comparability through a series of annual pay raise plus-ups, repealing the blanket retirement cutback for post-1986 entrants, upgrading housing allowances to match housing expenses by locality, and authorizing TRICARE as a second payer to Medicare for older beneficiaries, among other needed changes.
Those actions proved vital to restoring retention and readiness through the next two decades of repeated wartime deployments.
So, to be clear as to rationale, Congress acted on readiness-based imperatives by increasing pay raises thus increasing personnel budgets over the 2000s – to restore compensation and benefits necessary for our nation’s all-volunteer force.
The Myth of ‘Unsustainable’ Costs
Second, budget analysts have been calling personnel costs “unsustainable” since the 1970s. Those arguments led Congress to make years of cutbacks in the 1970s, as well as in the 1980s and 1990s, as discussed above. In each case, the cuts proved shortsighted, causing retention and readiness problems that had to be redressed to be able to fight the next war.
But the “unsustainable” argument also crumbles under objective scrutiny. MOAA’s research shows the percentage of the defense budget made up of personnel and health care costs remains stable – 30% to 32%, or lower – and has remained so over many decades. In other words, they’ve been the exact opposite of “unsustainable.”
MOAA also researched personnel and health care costs reported by the largest, hardware-heavy corporations and found they comprised a larger budget share than the military’s:
- UPS: 61%
- FedEx: 43%
- Southwest Airlines: 31% of operating revenue (which includes profit, so net budget share is higher)
As for allegations of unsustainably high DoD health care costs, which comprise less than 7% of the defense budget, this appears a major bargain compared with the health care share of the federal budget (23%), the average state budget (22%), household discretionary spending (16%), and U.S. gross domestic product (16%).
Targeting the Post-War Budget
Finally, every post-war period has seen a rush to cut the defense budget. Unfortunately, personnel and compensation programs affecting those who sacrificed most in the war are a vulnerable target, because that’s where immediate budget savings can be found.
Although the war in Afghanistan ended just weeks ago, the above trend has been underway for years. Congress recently passed new, significant cuts to military retirement benefits for 2018 and subsequent entrants to fund new benefits for those who leave service short of a career. In addition, Congress enacted new health care fees for younger retirees and significant pharmacy copay hikes for the vast majority of retired beneficiaries. For active duty personnel, Congress imposed a 5% cut in housing allowances.
MOAA’s Bottom Line
- Decades of dire predictions about “unsustainable” or “unaffordable” personnel costs have proven consistently wrong.
- The only threats jeopardizing the all-volunteer force have come from budget-driven pay and benefit cuts – moves leaving the military compensation package inadequate to offset the extraordinary demands and sacrifices inherent in a multidecade career in uniform.
- In each of those circumstances, Congress found itself compelled to plus-up the personnel budget to redress that imbalance.
- If our nation persists in again going down the well-trodden route of successive, incremental cuts to military compensation, none of us should be surprised when crises of the past reemerge as the next war or next crisis only to find our uniformed services unready.
Fighting to preserve these earned benefits remains at the core of MOAA’s mission. Stay up to date with the latest on these efforts – including potential calls to action, which can bring the full weight of our 350,000-strong membership to bear on lawmakers – via MOAA’s Advocacy News page.
Note: Military Pay and Compensation falls under the purview of DoD but applies to all eight uniformed services, which include the Coast Guard, U.S. Public Health Service, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
MOAA Fights for You
Get involved and make sure your interests are addressed.
10. Opinion | Biden’s strategy to stabilize U.S.-China relations isn’t working
Excerpts:
Although the internal workings at the top of the Chinese Communist Party are opaque, it’s clear Xi is working with the security services to crack down on an ever-expanding list of targets, including the tech, education, entertainment, housing and financial sectors. Expecting a turn toward cooperation with Washington in that environment may simply be too optimistic.
“Despite Biden’s outreach, China continues to double down on its aggressive policies while hand-wringing and blaming the United States,” said Eisenman. “The regime has become more difficult to work with on every issue, more controlling, more manipulative, more recalcitrant. We may have come to the right policy, but two years too late.”
That doesn’t mean the United States should stop trying to engage China. In fact, where engagement is still possible without sacrificing national interests or values, it is crucial. But being clear-eyed about the current state of play means we must prepare for the worst case. The United States and its partners must increase their strategic deterrence, reduce their economic and technological dependence on China, and speed up their own plans to compete. The Biden team’s moves to strengthen alliance relationships in the region are a solid but insufficient step.
As many point out, a Cold War with China would be more complex and more dangerous than the U.S.-Soviet struggle of the 20th century, because of our deep interconnectedness and China’s immense economic power. But it takes two sides to avoid such an outcome. If Beijing insists on heading down that road, the only choice left for us is to make sure we prevail in the end.
Opinion | Biden’s strategy to stabilize U.S.-China relations isn’t working
The Washington Post · by Opinion by Josh RoginColumnist Today at 6:12 p.m. EDT · September 23, 2021
At the U.N. General Assembly this week, several world leaders — including President Biden — emphasized that the United States and China must avoid slipping into a Cold War-like conflict. But it is Beijing that is rejecting Biden’s carefully crafted proposal to build a relationship based on equal measures of cooperation, competition and confrontation. It’s time to consider the possibility that Xi Jinping isn’t buying what the Biden administration is selling.
Biden didn’t mention China by name during his Tuesday speech at the United Nations, but he did refer to his strategy for setting the troubled U.S.-China relationship on a sustainable course. He pledged the United States would “compete vigorously,” relying on its values and opposing any attempts by stronger countries to dominate weaker ones using military, economic, technological or disinformation tools.
“But we’re not seeking — I’ll say it again — we are not seeking a new Cold War or a world divided into rigid blocs,” he said.
U.N. Secretary General António Guterres also said this week that the United States and China needed to cooperate more on issues such as climate change and “avoid at all cost a Cold War.” Even Xi, who addressed the assembly virtually, called for cooperation and pressed for all sides to “reject the practice of forming small circles or zero-sum games.”
The problem is that China’s actions do not match Xi’s words. The Chinese government has responded to the Biden foreign policy team’s repeated outreach attempts with antagonism, while doubling down on its military expansion, economic aggression, domestic atrocities and wholesale disregard for the international community’s legitimate concerns about all of this behavior.
When Secretary of State Antony Blinken met Chinese leaders in Anchorage, they lectured him publicly. When Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman visited China to establish working-level ties, Chinese authorities criticized the United States in a news release before the meeting even ended. Beijing used former secretary of state John F. Kerry’s repeated trips to China to send a clear signal China won’t cooperate on climate change unless the Biden administration reverses every single Trump administration policy it finds objectionable.
These diplomatic failures led Biden to reach out personally to Xi in a phone call this month, according to a senior administration official. The Biden team believes that it may only be Xi who can make the decisions necessary to set the relationship on a more stable footing.
“I think this is kind of a training period,” the official said. “It’s going to take time to make clear, number one, to Beijing that this is our framework; we’re not moving off it. And we’re not going to end up in a place where we’re going to trade away progress on a transnational issue for something that’s not in the interest of, or consistent with, the values of the American people.”
In other words, the Biden team won’t give up on human rights in exchange for progress on climate change, for example. But a series of smaller concessions to Beijing have already been made. The Justice Department has dropped cases against Chinese researchers indicted for concealing their links to the Chinese military. Blinken has softened his tone on the Hong Kong protests. Biden’s promises to press China on allowing a real investigation into the origins of covid-19 appear to have been quietly shelved.
The Biden administration’s nuanced approach to dealing with Xi makes sense in theory, but Xi’s actions inside China show that his priority is consolidating power internally and externally, not repairing relations with Washington, said Joshua Eisenman, associate professor of politics at the University of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs.
Although the internal workings at the top of the Chinese Communist Party are opaque, it’s clear Xi is working with the security services to crack down on an ever-expanding list of targets, including the tech, education, entertainment, housing and financial sectors. Expecting a turn toward cooperation with Washington in that environment may simply be too optimistic.
“Despite Biden’s outreach, China continues to double down on its aggressive policies while hand-wringing and blaming the United States,” said Eisenman. “The regime has become more difficult to work with on every issue, more controlling, more manipulative, more recalcitrant. We may have come to the right policy, but two years too late.”
That doesn’t mean the United States should stop trying to engage China. In fact, where engagement is still possible without sacrificing national interests or values, it is crucial. But being clear-eyed about the current state of play means we must prepare for the worst case. The United States and its partners must increase their strategic deterrence, reduce their economic and technological dependence on China, and speed up their own plans to compete. The Biden team’s moves to strengthen alliance relationships in the region are a solid but insufficient step.
As many point out, a Cold War with China would be more complex and more dangerous than the U.S.-Soviet struggle of the 20th century, because of our deep interconnectedness and China’s immense economic power. But it takes two sides to avoid such an outcome. If Beijing insists on heading down that road, the only choice left for us is to make sure we prevail in the end.
The Washington Post · by Opinion by Josh RoginColumnist Today at 6:12 p.m. EDT · September 23, 2021
11. Fallout begins for far-right trolls who trusted Epik to keep their identities secret
Wow. Is this a game changer for defense against extremists?
Fallout begins for far-right trolls who trusted Epik to keep their identities secret
The colossal hack of Epik, an Internet-services company popular with the far right, has been called the “mother of all data lodes” for extremism researchers. Some of those named in the data have already lost their jobs.
In the real world, Joshua Alayon worked as a real estate agent in Pompano Beach, Fla., where he used the handle “SouthFloridasFavoriteRealtor” to urge buyers on Facebook to move to “the most beautiful State.”
But online, data revealed by the massive hack of Epik, an Internet-services company popular with the far right, signaled a darker side. Alayon’s name and personal details were found on invoices suggesting he had once paid for websites with names such as racisminc.com, whitesencyclopedia.com, christiansagainstisrael.com and theholocaustisfake.com.
The information was included in a giant trove of hundreds of thousands of transactions published this month by the hacking group Anonymous that exposed previously obscure details of far-right sites and launched a race among extremism researchers to identify the hidden promoters of online hate.
After Alayon’s name appeared in the breached data, his brokerage, Travers Miran Realty, dropped him as an agent, as first reported by the real estate news site Inman. The brokerage’s owner, Rick Rapp, told The Washington Post that he didn’t “want to be involved with anyone with thoughts or motives like that.”
Alayon told The Post that he does not own the ‘racisminc,’ Holocaust-denial or other Web addresses but declined to say if he had owned them in the past; the records were hacked earlier this year. But in a screenshot of his Epik account, which he sent to The Post, the information for four other domains he currently owns matches the private records that can be found in the Epik breach.
Asked why his name, email address and other personal information were listed in company invoices for the ‘racisminc’ and Holocaust-denial domains, Alayon said the data was “easily falsifiable,” that he was the possible victim of extortion and that The Post was “fake news.”
The breach of Epik’s internal records has cast a spotlight on a long-hidden corner of the Internet’s underworld, and researchers expect it could take months before they can process the full cache — the equivalent of tens of millions of pages. Many are digging for information on who owns and administers extremist domains about which little was previously known.
Epik, based outside Seattle, said in a data-breach notice filed with Maine’s attorney general this week that 110,000 people had been affected nationwide by having their financial account and credit card numbers, passwords and security codes exposed. An earlier data-breach letter from the company, filed to comply with Montana law, was signed by the “Epic Security Team,” misspelling the company’s name. An Epik spokesperson said it was a simple typo.
Heidi Beirich, a veteran researcher of hate and extremism, said she is used to spending weeks or months doing “the detective work” trying to decipher who is behind a single extremist domain. The Epik data set, she said, “is like somebody has just handed you all the detective work — the names, the people behind the accounts.”
“This is like the mother of all data lodes because Epik was at the center of so many of the extremist websites and organizations that people like me study. Epik was the place of last refuge for a lot of these sites,” said Beirich, co-founder of the nonprofit Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. “And as the data is analyzed and looked at more deeply, we’re going to see this ecosystem in a way that was simply not possible before.”
Beirich said the identities of administrators and web developers and “the money flow” — how the sites stay afloat — are the kinds of details that for years have challenged even the most veteran hate trackers. The Epik hack might help connect the dots, she added.
Epik’s founder, Robert Monster, who did not respond to requests for comment, said the company’s data was hijacked and urged people not to use it with “negative intent.”
An Epik spokesperson said in emailed statements to The Post this week that the company has handled hundreds of thousands of domains over the years and some are bound to be offensive. The company declined to attribute the statement to a named spokesperson.
The Epik spokeperson called the hack “an egregious violation against our users” and said the breached data included up to 38,000 credit card numbers.
The spokesperson said the company “offers its services to everyone” and that “domains affiliated with right-wing politics comprise less than 1 percent of users.” Epik said it is not aware of its users’ intents and “does not consider its role to be censors of free citizens."
“Our long-held policy of content neutrality has made our platform appealing to some in an increasingly polarized landscape,” the spokesperson said. “We do not endorse or condone any one particular ideology, and we feel uncomfortable with calls to censor those who use our services.”
Though domain registrars, such as Epik, encourage customers to use accurate information when buying a new website address, it is fairly easy to register a domain in somebody else’s name, and many registrars don’t demand independent proof or confirmation of identity.
Buyers wanting privacy commonly ask their registrar to conceal their information, including, in Epik’s case, through an add-on service called Anonymize.
Some basic details about a website domain’s owner are publicly available in what’s known as a “WHOIS” database. But the Epik breach revealed far more than that information. Materials from the hack reviewed by The Post include not just names and home addresses but full credit card numbers, unencrypted passwords and other highly sensitive data. Many website owners who trusted Epik to keep their identities hidden were exposed, but some who took additional precautions, such as paying in bitcoin and using fake names, remain anonymous.
The Post publicizes material obtained through hacking with caution, only after verifying its authenticity and ascertaining that there is news value in bringing such information to light.
Epik provides Web services to many prominent right-wing fixtures online, including the media group One America News, the video site Bitchute, the social media site Gab and the message board Patriots.win. Other domains show links to targeted harassment campaigns of journalists or activists, including by falsely linking them to allegations of heinous acts.
The company was used last month to register the domain for Strikebackforfreedom.com, a campaign that attorney Lin Wood, a supporter of former president Donald Trump, has said on Telegram was bought by his FightBack Foundation. The site says it is affiliated with Sidney Powell and other prominent purveyors of false conspiracy theories about election fraud and the coronavirus vaccine, and it urged people to “STOP doing business with the enemy,” such as companies mandating that employees get vaccinated.
A huge proportion of the 1.8 million domains shown in the breached data appear ordinary, with Web addresses for people interested in real estate, home improvement, vegan cooking, various types of spirituality — as well as the occasional domain devoted to pornography, gaming and cryptocurrency. Many do not appear to connect to active websites.
Hacked documents showing details from nearly a million Epik invoices over the last several years underscore the high-volume, low-dollar nature of the domain registry business. While there are dozens of domains worth hundreds or even thousands of dollars, most are worth far less: Only about 2 percent of the invoices since 2019 were for more than $10; nearly half were for less than a dollar.
Among the more expensive ones was the domain Patriots.win, now used for the pro-Trump site that sought to replicate a message board, known as TheDonald, after its domain owner shut it down following the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. A man listing an address in Louisville paid $413 for the Patriots.win domain in January, the invoice records show. He did not respond to requests for comment and his identity could not be independently confirmed.
Aubrey “Kirtaner” Cottle, a security researcher and co-founder of Anonymous, declined to share information about the hack’s origins but said it was fueled by hackers’ frustrations over Epik serving as a refuge for far-right extremists.
“Everyone is tired of hate,” Cottle said. “There hasn’t been enough pushback, and these far-right players, they play dirty. Nothing is out of bounds for them. And now … the tide is turning, and there’s a swell moving back in their direction.”
Shireen Mitchell, founder of Stop Online Violence Against Women, a group that has tracked online extremism since 2013, said the Epik hack is forcing a long overdue examination of Internet-service companies that haven’t drawn the same scrutiny or talk of regulation as social media giants.
While many researchers are using the data to look forward, including to push for consequences for the people behind the most toxic sites, Mitchell said she’s left asking questions about why Epik for so long helped give a platform to extremist content on the Web.
“We don’t even have a true measurement of it,” Mitchell said of the scope of online hate. “We don’t know how it started, how small it was, how it is amplified and how big it is. Which would also tell us how big it could get unless we do something about it.”
The role of Epik and other alternative Internet-services companies drew mainstream attention in the aftermath of the “Unite the Right” rally in 2017, when white supremacists who organized online converged on Charlottesville Until then, domain registrars and Web hosts had traditionally taken a hands-off approach to content unless it involved explicitly criminal activity, Beirich said, but the weekend’s deadly violence sparked calls for tech companies to more aggressively police what they kept online.
One year later, Epik’s founder — whose last name, Monster, is confirmed to be real in Washington state voting records and a 1991 court judgment in New York — further involved himself in the debate following a mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.
As the nation recoiled at the attack that left 11 dead, Monster was mulling a different problem: deplatforming. He was deeply concerned that a right-wing social media site, Gab, had been knocked offline because the Pittsburgh shooter had been active there, sharing and spreading anti-Semitic hate until moments before the attack.
In a blog post eight days after the shootings, Monster praised Gab as a “haven for free speech” and said its embattled founder, Andrew Torba, had acted “courageously.” Monster pledged that Epik would help Gab get back online, adding, “Let Freedom Ring.”
The move — similar to stands Epik would later take after other tragedies, including the live-streamed murders of 51 people in two New Zealand mosques in 2019 — elevated the little-known domain registry in suburban Seattle to the center of a roiling national debate over Big Tech and Internet freedom. It also made Epik a hero to many on the right and a target for many on the left.
The result of this can be seen plainly in the celebratory tone used by the hacker collective Anonymous when it announced the breach, as well as in the excitement of critics — both political opponents and extremism researchers — as they began attempting to reconstruct Epik’s business from the vast quantity of stolen data that includes 843,000 transactions over more than 10 years, plus nearly a million invoices. The data, which is hosted online for public download, totals more than 150 gigabytes.
The data includes internal memos describing apparent subpoenas from law-enforcement agencies for information about Epik-registered websites, including two domains, Thedonald.win and Maga.host, in the weeks after the Capitol riot on Jan. 6. The notes do not include details of the subpoenas’ targets, the investigating agencies or any alleged crimes.
One of the internal notes, which appeared to have been written by an Epik employee, mentions a grand jury subpoena, a request to preserve records for 90 days and a nondisclosure order — a court-approved document that law enforcement can secure to prohibit tech companies from telling customers what information they’d shared as part of an investigation. “DO NOT tell Registrant,” read the note, which did not include further details of the investigation.
Some activists online also pointed to data showing that Monster’s name and an Epik email address used for purchasable domains were included on Web addresses such as robmonsterenablesnazis.com and sexynazis.com. The Epik spokesperson said the company has used an automated system to add Monster’s name to domains marked for sale or deletion, even though he has never owned the individual domains.
Epik also has a corporate overlap with VanwaTech, a company that, according to online records, has provided Internet services to the neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer and 8kun, the central node for spreading conspiracy theories central to the QAnon ideology.
Epik bought BitMitigate, a cybersecurity service that was protecting the Daily Stormer from online attacks, from VanwaTech’s owner, Nick Lim, in 2019. Though Epik reportedly severed its relationship with the neo-Nazi site, Lim became chief technical officer of Epik for a time while maintaining his ownership of VanwaTech, based in Vancouver, Wash.
Lim told The Post he remains a partial owner of Epik, and in a Bloomberg profile of Lim, he called Monster “a kind of mentor.” But an Epik spokesperson said the company “does not currently have a relationship with VanwaTech or its owner.”
VanwaTech’s data was not part of the Epik breach, Lim said. Asked if he still considers Monster a mentor, Lim told The Post: “Everyone in my life is a mentor, whether that is what to do or not to do — you can always learn something from everyone. And not everything about everyone is good or bad. People can do both good and bad things, nobody is perfect.”
The domains listed in the Epik hack represent a broad spectrum of far-right extremism, including white supremacists, xenophobic groups and anti-government agitators. Some users appear to have relied on Epik to lead a double life, with several revelations so far involving people with innocuous day jobs who were purportedly purveyors of hate online.
Others, however, belong to high-profile extremist trolls who were “deplatformed” and found their way to Epik, where they continued to harass leftist activists, mainstream journalists and other targets.
Melissa Lewis, a self-described anti-fascist activist and writer in Portland, Ore., said her family spent months feeling “hunted” by far-right troll and convicted hacker Joseph “Joey” Camp, whose name was listed on domain registrations with Epik and who has claimed publicly to have done freelance work for Monster.
Lewis said Camp — whose targets have included not just far-left activists but also conservative favorite Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) — sent her harassing emails, posted her home address and disseminated photos of her online, resulting in Lewis being added to extremist hit lists. She said Camp also went after her father, an emergency room doctor, by posting the human resources number to his hospital and spinning tales about her dad “letting cops and patriots die” in the ER. Lewis said her father, too, began receiving death threats, prompting the hospital to take security precautions.
Lewis complained to Epik last year with a rundown of Camp’s alleged violations of the platform’s terms of service. The company responded largely by dismissing her, explaining that there wasn’t enough information to identify the harasser and suggesting that she was aligned with militant leftists who have marched “in the street for the past year burning down buildings and celebrating anarchy,” according to email exchanges reviewed by The Post.
All of this is why Lewis greeted news of the Epik breach with relief — and a measure of glee. The satisfaction, Lewis tweeted, was “better than any orgasm.”
An Epik spokesperson said the company condemns “persecution or targeted harassment” and that it investigates and takes appropriate action after reports of abuse.
The spokesperson said Monster hired Camp for “an unrelated matter in early 2020” and that Epik had no knowledge of Camp’s actions. But the spokesperson also said the company had reviewed reports of Lewis’s claims and “did not find a violation at that time.”
In a phone interview, Camp said he had no comment on whether he had domains registered on Epik and that such information was easily falsified. Camp also denied harassing Lewis or her father. After the call, which Camp recorded and posted online, he boasted of “lying to the Washington Post” and began harassing a Post reporter via text and social media.
Alice Crites and Aaron Schaffer contributed to this report.
12. How Afghanistan’s security forces lost the war
The Taliban were leading with influence not with kinetic operations (though their kinetic capabilities - and very brutal capabilities at that - provided the foundation for successful influence).
Excerpts:
A sophisticated Taliban campaign aimed at securing surrender deals lay at the heart of the Afghan military’s collapse, but layers of corruption, waste and logistical failures left the country’s security forces so underequipped and with such battered morale that it enabled the militants’ success.
Interviews with more than a dozen members of the Afghan special forces, army and police in three provinces from May to July illustrate that the collapse of security forces was not abrupt. Instead, it was a slow, painful breakdown that began months before the fall of Kabul.
How Afghanistan’s security forces lost the war
Yesterday at 2:36 p.m. EDT
Building Afghanistan’s national security forces was one of the most ambitious and expensive aspects of two decades of U.S.-led war.
It resulted in failure.
The United States spent billions of dollars training and equipping police, soldiers and special forces. Despite years of warnings from U.S. and Afghan officials, successive U.S. administrations pledged that the Afghan military was capable of defending the country. President Biden said the Afghan military was “as well-equipped as any army in the world” just a month before its collapse.
Today, not a single unit of the country’s security forces remains intact.
A sophisticated Taliban campaign aimed at securing surrender deals lay at the heart of the Afghan military’s collapse, but layers of corruption, waste and logistical failures left the country’s security forces so underequipped and with such battered morale that it enabled the militants’ success.
Interviews with more than a dozen members of the Afghan special forces, army and police in three provinces from May to July illustrate that the collapse of security forces was not abrupt. Instead, it was a slow, painful breakdown that began months before the fall of Kabul.
Early May, Kabul
Death stalked Afghanistan’s security forces in the spring. As the pace of the U.S. withdrawal increased, and the Taliban continued its relentless sweep through rural Afghanistan, casualties among government fighters surged.
The last time Niazi’s family spoke to him was during a hurried phone call. The Afghan National Army soldier, who goes by one name, was stationed at a remote outpost in Baghlan province.
“He told me he was fine,” said his mother, Bas Bigum. But she could sense from his voice that he feared for his life. “We know what happens when the Taliban surrounds a base.”
Niazi’s Afghan army unit was attacked inside its own base after being surrounded by Taliban fighters. The unit’s commander fled.
Niazi was injured in the subsequent battle, and he later died of his wounds at a Kabul hospital.
The family never received formal condolences from the country’s military, nor did the Defense Ministry help cover the funeral costs.
May, Kandahar province
As the war intensified, many of Afghanistan’s police on the front line were entering their sixth month without pay, a widespread problem that took a toll on government forces’ morale and made them vulnerable to Taliban offers.
At a small outpost south of Kandahar city, Noor Ahmad Zhargi was on guard duty. The Eid holiday marking the end of Ramadan was approaching and even if he was granted leave, he said he wouldn’t go home.
“I would be too ashamed to look at my children with empty hands,” he said.
When he joined Afghanistan’s police force, all he was given was a gun — no training or documentation.
“Next month, if the government doesn’t pay me, maybe I should just sell this to the Taliban,” he said holding the rifle. He said he had heard the Taliban was paying around $2,000 for Afghan government weapons like his, a price much higher than the market rate. He insisted he would never join the Taliban but dodged a question about whether he would surrender.
Two months later, Zhargi’s post had fallen to the Taliban, along with nearly every other district in Kandahar, except for the provincial capital. Other police in the city said they heard everyone at the post had surrendered, and many were taken by the militants. No one knew if they were still being held as prisoners or had been executed.
Afghanistan’s most highly trained fighters were assigned to defensive operations as the Taliban pushed closer to provincial capitals and as U.S. air support disappeared. Elite fighters were tasked with running dangerous resupply missions that made them susceptible to Taliban ambushes.
“This is not what we were trained to do,” said Lt. Abdul Hamid Barakzai of the Afghan commandos, referring to the drives between outposts where Taliban fighters often placed snipers or roadside bombs. He said the commandos were given the task because they were one of the few units with heavily armored vehicles.
As one team arrived at a small mazelike base to drop off bread and energy drinks, a Taliban sniper round ricocheted off the side of a heavily armored vehicle, sending shrapnel into the stomach of one of the soldiers. He quickly wrapped a scarf around the wound and brushed it off. “They shoot at us like this every day,” one of the other men said.
The Taliban snipers were also proving deadly. At one base, the guard on duty stepped outside to take a phone call and was shot and killed instantly. At another, a policeman returning from patrol was shot through the heart.
Security forces were also being targeted inside Kandahar city.
Shakila’s husband — a policeman — began receiving threatening letters from the Taliban two months before he was gunned down in the city’s central bazaar.
“I was always begging him, ‘You don’t need to continue this job. It’s too dangerous,’ ” she said. But her husband, Mohammad Sadiq Nabizada, couldn’t find other work.
July, Kunduz province
By July, the Afghan government had lost control of large swaths of the country and was relying on elite units — the best trained, equipped and generally most motivated — to lead the fight.
But without U.S. oversight, the troops were being mismanaged and overworked.
“We knew how to defeat the Taliban, but the leadership at the top didn’t listen,” said a captain in one of Afghanistan’s most elite units. He spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press.
As the United States withdrew its forces, Afghanistan special operators were largely moved under the command of the Defense Ministry. The shift robbed the units of a degree of independence that had insulated them from the corruption that handicapped other branches of the country’s security forces, the captain said.
He said he presented his supervisor with multiple plans to reorganize the country’s security forces and to push back the militants’ advances. But each time he was rebuffed.
“Instead, we were sent to conduct clearing operations with no support,” he said. “That is not how you win a war. We were letting the enemy choose the battle space; we should have been taking the fight to them.”
The captain admitted that the men in his unit were also struggling to operate without U.S. coordination and air support. There was never an effort to wean the units off American backing, and so many suddenly found themselves without tools they had relied on for years to conduct even simple operations, the captain said. His account was confirmed by two other Afghan special forces officers.
As one special forces unit in Kunduz prepared to go on leave, its commander confided that he feared many of his men wouldn’t return to their next rotation.
“My guys are tired,” he said of the four-month rotation of near-daily front-line combat. He also spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press. “And we are tired of this nonsense.” Defense Ministry bureaucracy was also beginning cripple operations. Well-planned missions would be changed or canceled at the last minute and support forces would not appear or would disregard orders.
“If I take 100 of my guys on my own, we can defend my village from the Taliban,” the captain said, “but with the Defense Ministry, we can’t do anything.” Weeks before Kabul fell, he said he was considering leaving his position to start up a militia in his hometown.
“There are plenty of men who want to fight,” he said. “It’s the leadership that is holding them back.”
Both the special forces commander in Kunduz and the captain fled Afghanistan on U.S. evacuation flights with their families. The captain said he still hopes to return to resist the Taliban.
July, Kandahar
By late July, the Taliban was closing in on nearly all the country’s provincial capitals. Afghan security forces that hadn’t been killed by the Taliban had deserted or repeatedly fled, steadily retreating from remote outposts into city centers.
Those who remained on the country’s front lines were some of the least capable.
“The Taliban are everywhere now, even inside the city,” said Obidullah Bilal, a wounded policeman in Kandahar’s central hospital. He was driving an unarmored police truck through eastern Kandahar to resupply a checkpoint when he was caught by a Taliban ambush.
“It’s because of our leadership that we are in this position,” he said, referring to the massive territorial losses the government had suffered in a matter of weeks. “Our leaders sell our checkpoints,” he said. “They’ve already sold our blood.”
One police commander said the only men from his unit willing to hold positions against the Taliban were drug addicts.
“It keeps them awake,” said Mirza Wali, a police commander attending the funeral for one of his men, Nik Mohammad, who had been killed by the Taliban ambush the night before.
Mohammad was estranged from his family because of his meth addiction, but his sister and mother, Taj Bibi, attended the funeral. They both sat in the shade of a truck a few meters from where Mohammad’s coffin was being covered with earth.
“The addicts are the only one who can stand being on the front line,” Wali said. “If they weren’t using drugs, they would go crazy.”
13. Second line of defence: Taiwan’s civilians train to resist invasion
I think we need to establish the US Special Forces Taiwan Resident Detachment that was in Taiwan from SAFASIA (Special Action Force Asia which was built around 1st Special Forces Group in Okinawa) from 1959 through 1974.
The Taiwan Resident Detachment could help Taiwan develop a comprehensive Resistance Operating Concept (ROC).
Excerpt:
“We have about 160,000 folks in uniform facing a military that now claims to be 2 million strong,” says Enoch Wu, a Taiwanese former banker and special forces soldier, and founder of Forward Alliance, which advocates for greater awareness of defence issues and national security.
This is an excerpt from a paper based on my remarks to a SOCPAC conference 18 months ago. Unconventional deterrence should be a line of effort in DOD's concept of integrated deterrence.
We need to develop civil-military resistance capabilities along some similar lines. This is especially true for Taiwan. As I see the terrain of Taiwan, I get the sense that if Taiwan were ever to be invaded it would be a black hole, meaning what goes in will never come out. Taiwanese conventional military capabilities are insufficient to defend against a PLA attack. However, a civil military resistance could create devastating conditions for the PLA. Taiwan SOF could move away from direct action commando type operations to a more UW focused posture. It could lead an effort to organize, train, and equip local civil defense forces. It could learn from the Poles and the Swiss and the development of their civil defense and stay behind forces. US SOF could advise Taiwan SOF in this work. The number one purpose is for local civil defense. But such a plan would also contribute to governance and most importantly influence. The civil military linkage would reinforce government legitimacy. From an influence perspective due to the large number of Chinese spies this could not be done in secret. However, it will be good for the PRC to observe this effort as it could deter Kim from attacking and if he does attack this capability can mean the end to many Chinese bloodlines as the one child policy will result in the massive loss of families’ only sons. A Taiwanese “Tom Clancy” could write a fictional account of the invasion of Taiwan and illustrate it as a “black hole” and it could tell the stories of the demise of Chinese soldiers who are the end of their parents’ bloodline. I used Taiwan as an example, but it could be applied to Thailand and Mongolia and other countries. If we show the PRC the populations of Asian countries cannot be pacified during a PLA occupation the PRC might come to the conclusion that the price tag for its political warfare strategy is simply too high. This is what Robert Jones at USSOCOM J5 has called Unconventional Deterrence.
Second line of defence: Taiwan’s civilians train to resist invasion
Workshops teach public first aid and prepare them to assist armed forces in event of attack by China
On a quiet workday morning last week, air raid sirens rang out across Taiwan. The eerie wailing horn would be the first warning to the island’s 23.5 million residents of an incoming attack by their neighbour across the Taiwan Strait, the People’s Republic of China.
On the streets of the capital, Taipei, people carried on with their day, just as they did when an earthquake drill on Friday told them to “stop, drop and hide” in mass text alerts, and just as they do when China sends dozens of air force planes screeching towards Taiwan.
Analysts say China is closer to being capable of invading Taiwan than it has been in decades, but is not there yet. The potential nature and timing of any conflict is hotly debated, as is the involvement of other countries in support of Taiwan. But after decades of Chinese military modernisation, and significant uptick in aggressive or intimidatory acts in the last 18 months, there are growing concerns about Taiwan’s ability to defend itself.
“We have about 160,000 folks in uniform facing a military that now claims to be 2 million strong,” says Enoch Wu, a Taiwanese former banker and special forces soldier, and founder of Forward Alliance, which advocates for greater awareness of defence issues and national security.
“They have a signifiant role in the mission, but behind that we need a layered depth of responders who can really make sure that our defences are as strong as possible, so we can prevent military action.”
Wu, a rising figure in the governing Democratic Progressive party, has developed a pilot of resilience training for civilians. Run by Forward Alliance, and supported by first responder groups and the US’s unofficial presence in Taiwan, the American Institute, two workshops have so far hosted about 120 civilians each.
Participants learn about situational awareness and personal safety, and hear from professional soldiers, first responders, and humanitarian workers about their experience on the battlefield or in crisis situations. After a basic first aid workshop – focused mostly on serious hemorrhagic injuries – it’s all put into practice in a mass casualty simulation.
Members of the public take part in resilience training in Taiwan. Photograph: Forward Alliance/American Institute in Taiwan
“There are [staged] injuries, aggressors, things are chaotic, you don’t know who is who, and it forces our teams to operate and deescalate the situation, keep people safe, and be helpful,” says Wu. “[They learn that] it’s the person next to you that’s going to matter most, and you are an actor and you have a choice and you can make a difference in these situations.”
Wu says the resilience workshops are not just about prepping for a military attack, listing Taiwan’s frequent earthquakes, industrial accidents, typhoons, and the recent deadly train crash in Hualien as far more likely reasons to need a crisis-trained society.
But it’s military conflict that people are most focused on. This month the US, Australia and the UK announced a new security partnership, Aukus, aimed at countering China, just days before Australian and US foreign ministers pledged to “strengthen ties” with their “critical partner”, Taiwan. The British prime minister, Boris Johnson, refused to rule out getting involved in a conflict over Taiwan.
Taiwan’s government, under the current president, Tsai Ing-wen, says it doesn’t seek conflict. It maintains that Taiwan is already a sovereign nation with no need to declare independence. But that position is irreconcilable with Beijing’s aims.
How to fend off a takeover
According to Admiral Lee Hsi-Ming, Taiwan’s former navy head and deputy defence minister, the first day of a hypothetical invasion attempt by China might involve cyber-attacks and long-range missiles hitting targets across the island including Taipei, paralysing Taiwan’s air force and navy, and destroying its control over the sea and air. It’s a dramatic scenario that Lee says Taiwan has little chance of preventing. But it’s only step one. “You can’t compete with a long-range missile attack, but if you want political control you must send ground troops.”
This is where Taiwan can fend off a complete takeover, says Lee, or – ideally – be so prepared for one that it serves as a deterrent. But were an invasion to happen, first responders would be overwhelmed, and Wu says a resilient population with key first aid and emergency skills could make the difference between life and death.
Tanks are deployed to carry out a shore defence operation as part of a military exercise in Taiwan. Photograph: Daniel Ceng Shou-Yi/Zuma/Rex/Shutterstock
“After our professional first responders we need a general population that is prepared at the basic level to be capable of helping themselves and each other and their communities and who won’t fall apart after first impact,” says Wu. “That’s critical in any emergency, especially in war.”
Wu has also called for massive improvements to Taiwan’s system of air raid shelters, which at the moment are primarily sites such as underground car parks with no added facilities or emergency supplies.
‘I wouldn’t know what to do’
Much of Taiwan’s population already has some basic training – military conscription ran for decades. But under plans to phase in fully voluntary armed forces, it has been reduced to a four months basic training course, which is often derided as a “summer camp”. Despite annual budget increases, the military at large has also been described as dysfunctional and “in crisis”. One 2018 graduate of the four-month course, surnamed Chen, tells the Guardian that despite the training, if war were to break out today, “I wouldn’t know what to do.”
Chen, who didn’t want to publish his full name, says rifle drills used outdated weapons, and he wasn’t taught any first aid. “Combat strategies and guerrilla warfare are what I’m interested in learning – if there was training in this, I would go learn it with my own money.”
Wu says, diplomatically, there are improvements to be made to the government’s training, but the resilience workshops are about “everybody else”.
First held in August 2020 and March 2021, the workshops were supposed to run monthly, until the pandemic got in the way. But Wu hopes that they will eventually roll out across Taiwan. “Without a resilient population, which has that will to persist and resist and fight on, folks on the frontline would be left out to dry.”
14. Russia's Lavrov says Taliban recognition 'not on the table'
Russia's Lavrov says Taliban recognition 'not on the table'
UNITED NATIONSUNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Saturday that international recognition of the Taliban was not currently under consideration.
Lavrov was speaking on the sidelines of the annual gathering of world leaders in New York for the U.N. General Assembly. His comments come after the Taliban nominated a U.N. envoy, setting up a showdown over Afghanistan's seat at the world body.
"The question of international recognition of the Taliban at the present juncture is not on the table," Lavrov told a news conference.
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Taliban Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi on Monday nominated the Islamist group's Doha-based spokesman Suhail Shaheen as Afghanistan's U.N. ambassador. The Taliban seized power in Afghanistan last month.
Ghulam Isaczai, the current U.N. ambassador who represents the Afghan government ousted by the Taliban, has also asked to renew his U.N. accreditation.
Russia is a member of a nine-member U.N credentials committee - along with China and the United States - which will deal with the competing claims on Afghanistan's U.N. seat later this year.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has said that the Taliban's desire for international recognition is the only leverage other countries have to press for inclusive government and respect for rights, particularly for women, in Afghanistan.
When the Taliban last ruled between 1996 and 2001 the ambassador of the Afghan government they toppled remained the U.N. representative after the credentials committee deferred its decision on rival claims to the seat.
(Reporting by Michelle Nichols; Editing by Bill Berkrot)
16. Tomorrow’s soldiers will have their reality augmented
Tomorrow’s soldiers will have their reality augmented
Relevant data will appear on their view of the battlefield
Sep 22nd 2021
SUCCESS OR FAILURE in war often hinges on how much soldiers know about the enemy and the areas in which it operates. Tactical intelligence of all sorts helps. Locations of culverts where bombs may lie hidden. Spots from which snipers have scored kills. Water sources likely to have been polluted by agricultural runoff after heavy rain. Identities of locals suspected of aiding insurgents. Armed forces compile such intelligence and store it on computers. But making full use of it in the heat of battle has never been easy. This is now poised to change, thanks to display technology known as augmented reality (AR).
AR is the art of superimposing computer graphics on a view of the real world. It is popular in applications ranging from video games to selling furniture. America’s army would like tactical intelligence pertinent to a soldier’s mission to pop up similarly on a transparent visor attached to his helmet, no hands required. And for this capability, it is spending big. In March it announced a deal with Microsoft to build such a system. This could, over the course of a decade, cost a staggering $21.9bn.
The army has dubbed the kit IVAS (Integrated Visual Augmentation System). David Marra, who runs Microsoft’s end of the project, describes it as a holographic computer. The displays produced, he says, appear “locked to the real world”, even as a wearer moves and shifts gaze.
IVAS pulls off this wizardry by crunching and synthesising several types of data. A GPS receiver locates the wearer within centimetres. Instruments fitted with accelerometers and gyroscopes provide information on how he is moving around. Cameras track eye movements. IVAS must also be aware of a soldier’s environment. This relies on lidar, an optical equivalent of radar. An array of sensors record the time it takes infrared laser pulses bounced off nearby objects to return. That allows those objects’ distances to be calculated. Machine-vision software that recognises those objects then keeps track of how they move. Mr Marra describes the process as a “continuous rendering of the xyz co-ordinates of everything”.
IVAS must calculate with extraordinary speed where on a headset’s visor to display graphics. A latency of just seven milliseconds risks causing vestibular ocular discomfort, a type of dizziness that has long plagued the development of realistic displays of augmented and virtual reality. In most circumstances, Mr Marra says, IVAS operates well within that limit.
Theatre of war
To build the system, Microsoft has modified an AR headset called HoloLens that it has so far sold mostly to businesses and research outfits. The militarised version of this has been “ruggedised” and souped up with a computing and battery “puck”, a bit bigger than a smartphone, that the user carries on his chest.
Tactical intelligence can be uploaded before an operation, with updates transmitted wirelessly as needed. AR text and graphics guide soldiers through unfamiliar terrain, highlight the whereabouts of friendly forces and mark the enemy’s known and suspected positions. The headsets will also employ facial-recognition technology to append information on possible persons of interest who come into view. As Susan Fung, the army’s deputy head of IVAS technology at Fort Belvoir, in Virginia, puts it, soldiers freed of the need to look down at a screen will be able to “focus on moving and engaging targets”.
IVAS will also exchange data with Azure, Microsoft’s computing cloud. This will permit additional features, such as language interpretation, to be included. Production of the headsets, which weigh about a kilogram, has begun. The first of an expected 120,000 or so units are to be deployed this year.
Others besides the army are also interested. America’s marine corps is a partner in the IVAS programme. Undisclosed allies are seeking to join. And modified HoloLenses may also see use on warships. Britain’s Royal Navy has paid $25.5m to BAE Systems, a local defence giant, to adapt them to show pictures currently displayed on screens on the bridge to officers elsewhere on a vessel.
The benefits of AR may be even greater inside tanks, from which crew typically peer at the world through periscopes. That, says Daniel Covzhun, chief technologist at Limpid Armor, an AR firm in Kiev, Ukraine, is like viewing the world “through a length of metal pipe”. Limpid’s system, dubbed LPMK, superimposes graphics on video images collected by cameras and infrared sensors mounted on an armoured vehicle, and will soon be able to do the same for images relayed by nearby flying drones.
A handful of armoured vehicles belonging to Ukraine’s army have already been fitted with test versions of LPMK. Before an operation, these are fed intelligence from a battle-management system. Commanders choose what they wish to be marked with icons, says Colonel Vadym Slyusar of the Central Scientific Research Institute of Armament and Military Equipment, in Kiev. Options include sewers and other underground infrastructure, preferred landing zones for medical-evacuation helicopters, culturally important buildings, and spots where attacks have been recorded or are feared. The systems start at about $50,000. Ukraine recently ordered more than 50 for delivery this autumn. The United Arab Emirates and an undisclosed Asian country have placed orders with Limpid, too.
AR can also expand the capabilities of optical gear already used by soldiers. In September 2019 the American army began to use a new AR feature added to its Enhanced Night Vision Goggle—Binoculars (ENVG-B), which are attached to a soldier’s helmet and flip down over his eyes when needed. The new feature, made by L3 Harris, a firm in Florida, highlights sources of heat and amplifies what light is available to render objects visible in the dark.
ENVG-B works out the portion of the world within its wearer’s field of view. It then superimposes icons on things like friendly and enemy troops, or the route to a rally point, drawing their co-ordinates from a wireless network called Nett Warrior. Soldiers especially like an AR mode called “rapid target acquisition”, says Lynn Bollengier, head of “integrated vision” at L3 Harris. This pulls data from an inertial-measurement unit in a soldier’s rifle to place crosshairs over whatever it is pointing at. That means a soldier can shoot from behind a corner without sticking his head out to put an eye to the rifle’s sight. America’s army and marine corps have bought more than 6,000 of the systems..
A sight to behold
This is heady stuff. Even so, enhancing combat operations with AR will remain, for some time, beyond all but the most technologically sophisticated armies. Marcel Baltzer, of the Fraunhofer Institute’s campus in Wachtberg, who co-chairs an AR-research team for Germany’s armed forces, believes that even the European armies most advanced in the art (which are, by his reckoning, those of Britain, Germany, Lithuania, the Netherlands and Norway) will need another decade. Using AR for training, and for the maintenance and design of military hardware, he adds, is easier and will become common sooner.
Ambition, at any rate, is not lacking. Mojo Vision, a new Californian firm that has received money from DARPA, an American government military-research agency, is developing an AR system embedded in contact lenses. Tiny batteries power sensors that track a wearer’s gaze and the movement of objects in view. An array of LEDs roughly the size of a grain of sand projects images received via a wireless link onto the wearer’s retina. The brightness of these is adjusted according to the ambient light. Steve Sinclair, Mojo’s head of marketing, expects a usable version of the system to be ready in a few years’ time.
Whether or not that proves feasible, the use of AR of any sort in combat will introduce risks. Designers must identify the point at which further visual augmentation will lead to confusing information overload—and what happens in training may not mirror the messiness of real battle. An imprecise data overlay could lead to a blunder. And if an AR system proves hackable, soldiers could be tricked by the enemy, with grim consequences.
A different sort of pitfall also looms. AR will make it easier for distant commanders to tell soldiers in battle what to do. The risk is that officers sitting far away from the fight will “feel like they’ve got puppets on the ground”, says Axel Dyèvre, of Avisa Partners, a consultancy based in Paris that has studied AR for France’s defence ministry. He calls the phenomenon a “squashing of chains of command” which robs troops of the degree of autonomy needed to fight effectively. AR for combat, then, offers perils as well as promise. ■
This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline "Through a shimmering looking glass"
16. How It Feels to Be Asian in Today’s America
How It Feels to Be Asian in Today’s America
What’s different now is that people see us. I told my husband: “I’ve been Asian all my life, but it’s only now that people notice.”
Sarah Rudolf, 46, Chinese American, St. Paul, Minn.
The idea of a shared Asian American identity has been fraught for about as long as it has existed.
How can one term encapsulate the experiences of people with very different ties to dozens of countries? What shared interests bind refugees struggling to make a home in a new land with people whose families have lived in the United States for generations?
During the coronavirus pandemic, though, fear and pain have acted as grim unifying forces. A surge of violence and harassment targeting Asian Americans has shown that America’s long history of treating people of Asian descent as foreigners whose belonging is contingent — on labor, on cultural assimilation, on perceived success — is far from a relic.
Still, when we asked people to tell us how it feels to be Asian American right now, many said that the past year and a half has been clarifying in other ways. The responses, which have been condensed and edited, came from Asian Americans across the country and from a variety of backgrounds.
We asked respondents what terms they use to identify themselves. In some cases, full names and ages have been withheld because of safety and privacy concerns.
Many said they felt newly visible — vulnerable, but also more keenly aware of how they’re seen. Some said they felt compelled to speak out against both anti-Asian discrimination and against other forms of racism in their communities.
Some said they yearned to gain access to an American dream without the burden of prejudice, that they wished simply to blend in. Others said they were embracing their Asian heritage after years of feeling like it made them somehow less American.
“Now, what’s embarrassing is that I ever felt that shame about my family’s roots,” Jenny Wu Donahue, 33, told us.
Together, the more than two dozen reflections shown here reveal a range of views and complicated emotions being felt in Asian American communities today. Share your experience in the
What’s different now is that people see us. I told my husband: “I’ve been Asian all my life, but it’s only now that people notice.”
Sarah Rudolf, 46, Chinese American, St. Paul, Minn.
Before this rise in hate, it was my parents calling me every other day to check in on me and if I’m doing OK. Now it’s me calling them.
Jamie, 28, Korean American, Laurel, Md.
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I signed my daughter up for a charter school recently. My husband was filling out the forms and he said we could only choose one ethnicity for my daughter. So he chose white and he didn’t choose Asian. I have misgivings about that. But we only had one choice. And I thought, well, she’s growing up in the U.S. I guess she is more white now than she is Asian.
Christine Nguyen, 46, Vietnamese American, San Jose, Calif.
I am a single Chinese working mother living with my only daughter in Central Indiana. Before the pandemic, we lived like many other friendly and kind neighbors in my community.
Now, I find myself remaining constantly alert. When I take a walk in my neighborhood, when I stroll down an aisle in the supermarket, whenever there are strangers around me, I am on guard.
I start to feel a little uncomfortable when the conversation turns to accusing the diplomatic relationship with China. I no longer feel free to talk about everything and anything with friends as I used to. I started to alienate myself, after so many years taking my community as an integral part of my life. I began to think I am different and maybe I should leave the table.
But this is still where home is. I will stay, and I hope I can eventually regain the sense of security I used to have.
Jane T., 42, Chinese, Indiana
My parents raised my two older sisters and me with a lot of fear, and I would very openly criticize what I believed to be racist sentiments from them. Fear of other races, fear of hate and violence directed at us, fear of us having mixed-race kids one day.
Now that I’m an adult witnessing and experiencing the racial bias and hate in this country, I see what my parents were warning me about from the very beginning. As much as I didn’t want it to be true, race very much matters in America.
Geraldine Lim, 33, first generation Chinese American, Oakland, Calif.
My family is Cambodian and we immigrated to the U.S. when I was just 3 days old — escaping the communist regime called the Khmer Rouge in the late ’70s/early ’80s. I am immensely lucky that my parents escaped a war torn country and resettled here in America.
I grew up in a western suburb of Chicago that was predominantly white and affluent. From an early age, it was apparent I was different from the other kids. We lived in the only Section 8 housing offered in that area. My childhood wasn’t exactly happy and easy. I grew up with Latino and African American neighbors that sometimes treated me more racist than Caucasian people I went to school with. I was regularly called derogatory names growing up and was bullied because I was Asian. I remember this very clearly and it has had an impact on me to this day. There were times when I felt really, really lonely growing up as an Asian kid.
Now I have a more heightened sense of awareness that I’m Asian and that there may be neighbors, people in the community, at the grocery store or at work who may not like me because they see me as an Asian guy and they connect that with the notion that the coronavirus originated from an Asian country — China. I’m not even Chinese and I’ve never even been to China; I’ve lived my whole life in America.
I’m a husband, and a father to two cute little girls. My wife, Katherine, is Caucasian. We are two working professionals in management positions just trying to raise our family. Working hard and trying to earn a living. And now I have to worry about being randomly, physically attacked because of my skin color. Sad is not the right word. It’s disbelief. It’s tremendously awful. It’s this heightened sense of potential violence toward me that I now have to live with and look out for.
Samuel Kong, 41, Cambodian American, Chicago
I rejected my Korean identity completely when I was young because I was embarrassed and ashamed to be Asian. It wasn’t until college that I became interested in the culture. I ended up living in Korea for a few years.
I now make my own kimchi and cook primarily Korean food, listen exclusively to Korean music. I study the Korean language every day. I am so proud now and it’s taken a long time to get there.
But the rise in anti-Asian sentiment made me feel ashamed yet again. If I were just white, life would be so much easier. I feel so resentful sometimes of my circumstance. Why couldn’t I just have stayed in Korea?
Kim Y., Korean American, New Jersey
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I think particularly being an Asian American woman, you find yourself in the position of being vulnerable a lot and being perceived as vulnerable. And even if you consider yourself a very strong person, your perception of vulnerability makes you an easy target for violence because people think they can take advantage of you.
Indu Radhakrishnan, 23, South Asian, Baltimore
At the beginning of the pandemic, as I was going through an airport en route to my flight, I was spit on by a stranger. I was in shock.
But what was more crushing wasn’t the saliva dripping down my face. It was looking around and realizing that the dozen people around me simply pretended like it never happened. No one cared or no one wanted to say anything. The silence was complicity in the act of hate. I went from being a “model minority” to being used as spitting target practice.
That moment made me realize that I needed to speak up. I went from trying to fit in and blend in my entire life to asking questions and trying to raise awareness to our communities, even if it meant having tough conversations and pointing out that everyday turns of phrase that some would call funny are what I and many Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders would call belittling and offensive.
Jeff Le, 38, Vietnamese American, Washington, D.C.
I grew up in Alabama and Mississippi, where most people still talk about race as a Black and white issue.
My father, himself the victim of many instances of anti-Asian discrimination, denies systemic racism exists and believes protesting (against what he sees as anecdotal episodes) would bring unwanted consequences, that it’s better to remain under the radar even if it means enduring occasional hatred. Ten years ago, I might have agreed with him.
Siew David Hii, 23, Chinese American, Raleigh, N.C.
I was raised in a predominantly white place and for the longest time, I believed I could assimilate myself into whiteness.
I knew other Asian Americans who went to language school and had communities of other Asian Americans. I rejected that as much as I could because I thought I was American first.
As I’ve become an adult, I realize that it doesn’t matter how I think of myself; some others will see me the exact same way as the people who embraced their heritage tighter. It’s literally about nothing aside from how we look.
Sam You, 34, Taiwanese American, Los Angeles
As a Pakistani American, I have found it more and more confusing to use the term Asian American to identify myself in recent months.
I was a young child when 9/11 happened, and I remember how scared I was of words like “terrorist” and “Osama” because my family had nailed it into me that using these words would get our whole family into big trouble. I dealt with that anxiety any time another terrorist attack was being covered on the news. I have seen parallels between that and the kind of disgusting anti-Asian sentiment other Asian Americans are feeling now.
While I sometimes see “Asian American” used as an umbrella term for all Asians, a lot of the recent violence and racist sentiments have been directed toward East Asians specifically and not so much toward South Asians. Since I feel that most South Asians look so physically distinct from other Asians, and since recent hate crimes seem to target people based on identifying East Asian physical characteristics, I have been conflicted about whether or not I even feel targeted by any of this.
I have simultaneously felt the need to speak up about racist anti-Asian sentiment I have felt in the past while also wanting to step back and let East Asian Americans discuss how this is all affecting them.
Waleed Khan, 23, Chicago
Being Asian means...
wondering if someone is going to say your name right.
continuing to wonder if things are about race or not.
starting to cleanse away my self-hate and shame and learning that white supremacy is the enemy, not myself.
resisting the model minority and creating our own narratives and stories.
being proud of your name, whatever it is.
finding peace in the past and building a different future.
knowing we don’t need to be white or white-adjacent in order to be human, unlike what the media has taught us. Who we are is human enough.
Yue Xiang, 27, Chinese American, Philadelphia
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I don’t really know who I am, or what I am, but I’m starting to embrace whatever it means to be Asian American, although I’ll tell you the truth: When I moved from Florida to California, I wasn’t Asian enough for the Asians, and to the Americans I’m never American enough.
Karen Ong, 37, Chinese American, Galveston, Texas
I’ve learned over time that Asian American voices shouldn’t be heard only when we are feeling like our lives are being threatened. We should be vocal long before and long after the news cameras turn away from us to focus on the next big headline.
Michael Thai, 38, Vietnamese American, San Diego
Despite the fact that my mother’s family has resided in this country for four generations, we are perpetually viewed as foreigners, making assimilation seem impossible. That is the reason that I personally find the “American” in “Asian American” to be so important, because I am, culturally, by birth and in every other way, 100 percent American.
Amy Tieh-mei Chang, 46, Chinese American, Alameda, Calif.
I have always viewed our status in this country as being one of second-class citizens. While, in the past, American-born people of Asian descent have said that they were grateful for their parents or ancestors having come to this country to give them a better life, I have long felt that this was a wrong decision on the part of my parents.
Seeking economic gain and being misguided by this country’s false promises of equality, they came here and now I and my descendants are basically stuck being second-class citizens in a country that we can never truly call our own because it seems to disown us. I also find it hard to feel any patriotism or even loyalty to this country as it is hard to love something that seems to hate you back.
Eugene, New York City
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I’d like to say that we’re not a monolith. Just because the virus started in China doesn’t mean that we’re all Chinese. There are many other countries in Asia. And just because we’re Asian doesn’t mean that we’re loyal to other governments and that we’re trying to play against you and that we’re on another team. On the contrary, we’re on the same team. We’re Americans. We see ourselves as Americans, and we hope that you do, too.
Elie Mala, 29, Thai American, New York City
When do we stay and fight for an equal and just piece of the American pie, and when do we choose a better life elsewhere, like our parents and grandparents did?
Our ancestors were pragmatic — they wanted to provide a better life for themselves and their children, and they did everything they could to make that happen, even if it meant leaving their homes and venturing into unfamiliar lands where they didn’t speak the language.
What if that better life is no longer in the U.S.? What if that better life is actually possible in many other places now, including the very lands our ancestors came from?
Jane W. Wang, Taiwanese American, Taipei, Taiwan
Asian American has become a term that is co-opted by states, corporations and other oppressive forces and no longer stands for the radical solidarity it once did. Sure, coalition building is useful — but I am interested in a coalition that doesn’t erase the oppression that occurs within and among “Asian” communities. As a Sikh American, I don’t want to be labeled as Asian American because other “Asian” communities express discriminatory anti-Sikh prejudice. I don’t want to have the same name as my oppressors.
Asian American no longer captures the nuances and layered oppressions faced by marginalized “Asian” communities, such as Hmong, Cambodian, Laotian, Dalit, Sri Lankan, Assamese, Sikh, Indian Muslim, Indian Christian and Uyghur communities, among others. I want to be seen. I want to define myself. I don’t want to be defined by a generic label that has lost its power of resistance.
Kanwalroop Kaur Singh, 29, Sikh American, San Jose, Calif.
I was adopted from China into a white family, and the rise in hate crimes and violence and racist rhetoric has brought up some difficult conversations with my parents.
My parents see me as their daughter, someone they love and are proud of. They don’t see me through the eyes of society: a young Asian woman who is often hit on for being exotic, or constantly asked where I am from. It’s hard to have these conversations with my white family, to get them to understand and to recognize that even as they try, they will never fully understand my experience.
Like most white people who are currently trying to understand what it means to be a person of color in America, their intentions are good but the burden to educate is on me.
Annie LaFleur, 25, Chinese, Portland, Ore.
Like many second-generation Asian Americans, I was the kid with the stinky lunch and the only one among friends whose parents had an accent. It was embarrassing. Now, what’s embarrassing is that I ever felt that shame about my family’s roots.
Jenny Wu Donahue, 33, Chinese American, New York City
As an American of Chinese descent, I feel like we are being given two options, neither of which truly solve our problem. The first comes from the older generation, those who tell us that our silence will be our survival. Then there’s the second option, from those my age, who feel like we have to show more than just our passports and polished American English as proof of our belonging. We aren’t even unified in our beliefs, and that’s our greatest weakness.
Chase, 24, Chinese American, New York City
My grandparents were interned during World War II. This had a profound impact on my family financially and emotionally. Due to the anti-Japanese postwar sentiment, my parents were encouraged to assimilate as much as possible into the dominant (white) culture. Growing up in the 1980s, I experienced some discrimination, yet it wasn’t until the last decade that I became more educated and engaged as an advocate for racial equity, including standing with my Black and brown friends to fight injustice.
Elaine Ikeda, 56, Japanese American, Redwood City, Calif.
I only think of myself as Asian American when I check off an identity box on a form. Otherwise, I’m a Sikh American, a Punjabi American and a South Asian American. The Asian community is not a monolith, and the term “Asian” to describe all of our various experiences and cultures is not helpful or accurate.
Jo Kaur, 38, Sikh American, Queens, N.Y.
I’m married to a Caucasian man and we used to think it’s possible for us to belong. Now we don’t. Now people look at me differently when I’m alone versus when I’m with him. I don’t feel as safe. I carry a passport that says “U.S. citizen” to prove to people that I belong. Though at times I wonder if it’s a reminder to myself that I do.
Anh W., 42, Vietnamese American, Eden Prairie, Minn.
Like all immigrants, I have an American dream. As a queer woman from a country marred by military dictatorships, censorships and blood coups, I saw the United States as a safe haven where diversity is celebrated.
That sense of security and optimism was shattered after my assault. It took me a month after my assault before I could confess to my father, who dreamed of being reunited with me after my medical training. A former monk known for his calm and gentle presence, my father cried for the first time in my life. He asked, “Are you hurt?” I hope to one day be able to tell him, “Yes, I was hurt, but I am also healing.”
Oranicha Jumreornvong, 26, Thai, New York City
Introduction by Jill Cowan. Illustrations by Sally Deng.
Produced by Ruru Kuo, Adriana Ramic, Deanna Donegan, Alice Fang, Rebecca Halleck and Antonio de Luca. Additional production by Fahima Haque, Brad Fisher, Aidan Gardiner and Clinton Cargill.
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.
