National Security – R&R – Reachout and Rebuild

Pandemic: How did Trump’s America Screw up?

David Posnett — Wed, 02 Sep 2020 21:33:55 +0000

http://www.ipsnews.net/2020/05/america-leads-world-covid-19-deaths/

The United States has just 4% of the world’s population but over 25% of its confirmed COVID‑19 cases and deaths. With arguably the most advanced healthcare research and top hospitals and doctors, it seems difficult to fathom. What the hell went wrong?

Two friends (neither of them are Trump apologists) could not convincingly list the major ways in which this country and its leader, Trump, screwed up. So I asked others:

One friend came up with this list of 14 points regarding Trump’s failures:

He didn’t follow the procedures laid out in the pandemic plan the Obama administration left for him.
He had too many exceptions to the China travel ban.
He didn’t implement a European travel ban and that was where most of the NY cases that spread across the country came from.
He didn’t invoke the war powers act to manufacture PPE or ventilators or tests, which forced states to bid against each other and foreign governments, drove up prices and resulted in unnecessary shortages.
He has prioritized financial aid to large companies over aid to states and localities.
He stockpiled supplies at the federal level, bidding against states, without a cogent plan for distributing them to the states as needed and reportedly sending them to whomever spoke to or flattered him or Kushner.
He didn’t mandate masks and repeatedly said and demonstrated that they aren’t important, instead holding rallies, and time and again appearing in televised press conferences with others in a manner that flouts social distancing and mask wearing.
He didn’t allow scientists to speak at his televised daily briefings and instead spread misinformation about the severity of the pandemic and “how well” we’re doing.
He minimized the importance of and sought to reduce testing and tracking.
He implicitly and explicitly threatened scientists who tried to level with the public by expressing or implying by leak or tweet the vulnerability of their positions to his whims (Fauci) or by exiling them to travel for information sessions (Birx) which has most likely restricted the flow of accurate information to the public.
He recommended hydroxychloroquine and suggested treatment by light and cleansers such Clorox.
He pressured the FDA to authorize the use of convalescent blood plasma, skipping trials and full analysis of data.
He recommended schools and the economy open universally instead of setting federal standards for the number of cases or other criteria required to do so. (And I believe he has threatened to reduce or eliminate federal aid to school districts that don’t fully offer in-person school regardless of their numbers.)
He calls it the China flu, endangering Asian Americans.

Here is another list largely based on an excellent article by Ed Yong in the Atlantic.

Summary. The richest country in the world still lacks sufficient testing to accurately count its sick citizens and to initiate effective contact tracing. Chronic underfunding of public health neutered the nation’s ability to prevent the pathogen’s spread.
We should have seen this coming. In recent decades, epidemics of SARS, MERS, Ebola, H1N1 flu, Zika, and monkeypox showed the havoc that new and reemergent pathogens could wreak. Health experts, business leaders, and even middle schoolers ran simulated exercises to game out the spread of new diseases. Back in 2018 Ed Young warned us in the Atlantic about the fragility of the nation’s health-care system and our poor state of preparation for a pandemic. COVID‑19 is merely a harbinger of worse plagues to come. The U.S. cannot prepare for these inevitable crises if it returns to normal, as many of us ache to do.
Isolationism. Under President Donald Trump, the U.S. has withdrawn from several international partnerships and antagonized its allies. It has a seat on the WHO’s executive board, but left that position empty, only filling it this May, when the pandemic was in full swing. Since 2017, Trump has pulled more than 30 staffers out of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s office in China, who could have warned about the spreading coronavirus. Last July, he defunded an American epidemiologist embedded within China’s CDC. America First was America oblivious.
Trump’s dismissal of expertise and evidence. He filled his administration with inexperienced newcomers, while depicting career civil servants as part of a “deep state.” In 2018, he dismantled an office that had been assembled specifically to prepare for nascent pandemics. American intelligence agencies warned about the coronavirus threat in January, but Trump habitually disregards intelligence briefings. The secretary of health and human services, Alex Azar, offered similar counsel, and was ignored.
Early missteps. “By early February, we should have triggered a series of actions, precisely zero of which were taken.” Trump could have spent those crucial early weeks mass-producing tests to detect the virus, asking companies to manufacture protective equipment and ventilators. Instead, he focused on the border. Travel bans are woefully inefficient at restricting either travel or viruses. They prompt people to seek indirect routes via third-party countries, or to deliberately hide their symptoms. They are often porous: Trump’s included numerous exceptions,
Misleading the public. Genetic evidence shows that the specific viruses that triggered the first big outbreaks, in Washington State, didn’t land until mid-February. The country could have used the time between January and mid-February to prepare. Instead, Trump, assured Americans that “the coronavirus is very much under control,” and “like a miracle, it will disappear.” On February 26, Trump asserted that cases were “going to be down to close to zero.” Over the next two months, at least 1 million Americans were infected.
Testing debacle. The CDC developed and distributed its own diagnostic tests in late January. These proved useless because of a faulty chemical component. Tests were in such short supply, and the criteria for getting them were so laughably stringent, that by the end of February, tens of thousands of Americans had likely been infected but only hundreds had been tested. Private labs were strangled by FDA bureaucracy. It’s hard to overstate how thoroughly the testing debacle incapacitated the U.S. People with debilitating symptoms couldn’t find out what was wrong with them. Health officials couldn’t cut off chains of transmission by identifying people who were sick and asking them to isolate themselves.
Superspreader events at indoor gatherings. The odds of catching the virus from an infected person are roughly 19 times higher indoors than in open air. Among crowds clustered in prolonged proximity, the coronavirus ran rampant in the conference rooms of a Boston hotel, the cabins of the Diamond Princess cruise ship, and a church hall in Washington State where a choir practiced for just a few hours. The hardest hit were prisons and nursing homes: as of mid-June, nursing homes accounted for 40 percent of coronavirus deaths. That includes both residents and staff. Before the pandemic, three in four nursing homes were understaffed, and four in five had recently been cited for failures in infection control. A Seattle nursing home was one of the first COVID‑19 hot spots, but similar facilities weren’t provided with tests and personal protective equipment. Rather than girding these facilities against the pandemic, the Department of Health and Human Services paused nursing-home inspections in March, passing the buck to the states.
No priority for the public healthcare system. “Especially in the beginning, we catered our entire [COVID‑19] response to the 20 percent of people who required hospitalization, rather than preventing transmission in the community.” The latter is the job of the public-health system, which prevents sickness in populations instead of merely treating it in individuals. That system pairs uneasily with a national temperament that views health as a matter of personal responsibility rather than a collective good. “As public health did its job, it became a target” of budget cuts, says Lori Freeman, the CEO of the National Association of County and City Health Officials. Today, the U.S. spends just 2.5 percent of its gigantic health-care budget on public health. Underfunded health departments are also struggling to deal with opioid addiction, climbing obesity rates, contaminated water, and easily preventable diseases. Since the last recession, in 2009, chronically strapped local health departments have lost 55,000 jobs—a quarter of their workforce.
Pandemic preparedness. The US profit-driven healthcare system has scant incentive to invest in spare beds, stockpiled supplies, peacetime drills, and layered contingency plans—the essence of pandemic preparedness. America’s hospitals have been pruned and stretched by market forces to run close to full capacity, with little ability to adapt in a crisis.
Face masks and PPE fiasco. About half of the world’s face masks, are made in China, some of them in Hubei province. When that region became the pandemic epicenter, the mask supply shriveled just as global demand spiked. The Trump administration turned to the Strategic National Stockpile, only to find that the 100 million respirators and masks that had been dispersed during the 2009 flu pandemic were never replaced. Just 13 million respirators were left. In April, four in five frontline nurses said they didn’t have enough protective equipment. Some solicited donations from the public, or navigated back-alley deals and internet scams. In April, four in five frontline nurses said they didn’t have enough protective equipment. Some solicited donations from the public, or navigated a morass of back-alley deals and internet scams. The federal government could have mitigated those problems by buying supplies at economies of scale and distributing them according to need. Instead, in March, Trump told America’s governors to “try getting it yourselves.” As usual, health care was a matter of capitalism and connections. In New York, rich hospitals bought their way out of their protective-equipment shortfall, while neighbors in poorer, more diverse parts of the city rationed their supplies.
Delayed action led to more deaths. Trump finally declared a national emergency on March 13, and before governors and mayors subsequently issued formal stay-at-home orders, or closed schools, shops, and restaurants. A study showed that the U.S. could have averted 36,000 COVID‑19 deaths if leaders had enacted social-distancing measures just a week earlier.
Delayed action led to economic disaster. The indiscriminate lockdown was necessary only because America’s leaders wasted months of prep time. Deploying this blunt policy instrument came at enormous cost. Unemployment rose to 14.7 percent, the highest level since record-keeping began, in 1948. More than 26 million people lost their jobs, a catastrophe in a country that ties health care to employment.
The social safety net. The dismantling of America’s social safety net left Black people with less income and higher unemployment. They make up a disproportionate share of the low-paid “essential workers” who were expected to staff grocery stores and warehouses, clean buildings, and deliver mail while the pandemic raged around them. Earning hourly wages without paid sick leave, they couldn’t afford to miss shifts even when symptomatic. They faced risky commutes on crowded public transportation.
Distribution of information. Distribution of accurate information is an important defense against an epidemic’s spread. The largely unregulated, social-media-based communications infrastructure almost ensures that misinformation will proliferate fast. In fact, an infodemic of falsehoods spread alongside the actual virus. For example, in March, a small and severely flawed French study suggested that the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine could treat COVID‑19. Published in a minor journal, it likely would have been ignored a decade ago. But in 2020, it wended its way to Donald Trump via a chain of credulity that included Fox News, Elon Musk, and Dr. Oz. Trump spent months touting the drug as a miracle cure despite mounting evidence to the contrary, causing shortages for people who actually needed it to treat lupus and rheumatoid arthritis.
Lack of leadership in a pandemic. During a pandemic, leaders must rally the public, tell the truth, and speak clearly and consistently. Instead, Trump repeatedly contradicted public-health experts, his scientific advisers, and himself. He said that “nobody ever thought a thing like [the pandemic] could happen” and also that he “felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.” No one should be shocked that a liar who has made almost 20,000 false or misleading claims during his presidency would lie about whether the U.S. had the pandemic under control; that a racist who gave birth to birtherism would do little to stop a virus that was disproportionately killing Black people; that a xenophobe who presided over the creation of new immigrant-detention centers would order meatpacking plants with a substantial immigrant workforce to remain open; that a cruel man devoid of empathy would fail to calm fearful citizens; that a narcissist who cannot stand to be upstaged would refuse to tap the deep well of experts at his disposal; that a scion of nepotism would hand control of a shadow coronavirus task force to his unqualified son-in-law; that an armchair polymath would claim to have a “natural ability” at medicine and display it by wondering out loud about the curative potential of injecting disinfectant; that an egotist incapable of admitting failure would try to distract from his greatest one by blaming China, defunding the WHO, and promoting miracle drugs; or that a president who has been shielded by his party from any shred of accountability would say, when asked about the lack of testing, “I don’t take any responsibility at all.” A pandemic demands the coordinated efforts of dozens of agencies. “In the best circumstances, it’s hard to make the bureaucracy move quickly,” per Ron Klain. “It moves if the president stands on a table and says, ‘Move quickly.’ But it really doesn’t move if he’s sitting at his desk saying it’s not a big deal.”
Trump has corrupted the CDC. On February 25, the agency’s respiratory-disease chief, Nancy Messonnier, shocked people by raising the possibility of school closures and saying that “disruption to everyday life might be severe.” Trump was reportedly enraged. In response, he seems to have benched the entire agency. The CDC led the way in every recent domestic disease outbreak and has been the inspiration and template for public-health agencies around the world. But during the three months when some 2 million Americans contracted COVID‑19 and the death toll topped 100,000, the agency didn’t hold a single press conference. Its detailed guidelines on reopening the country were shelved for a month while the White House released its own uselessly vague plan.
Trump never rallied the country. Despite declaring himself a “wartime president,” he merely presided over a culture war, turning public health into yet another politicized cage match. Abetted by supporters in the conservative media, he framed measures that protect against the virus, from masks to social distancing, as liberal and anti-American. Armed anti-lockdown protesters demonstrated at government buildings while Trump egged them on, urging them to “LIBERATE” Minnesota, Michigan, and Virginia. Several public-health officials left their jobs over harassment and threats.

A Mom Speaks Out: Wake up America, we are at War!

David Posnett — Wed, 21 Feb 2018 22:50:15 +0000

Speaking at Tuesday’s Feb 20 Rally on gun violence and international security: Mara Gerstein

Thank you for being here. I’m Mara. I’m a mom, a lifelong New Yorker, and a constituent of Lee Zeldin. And I’m here to tell my representative, and everyone who will listen, that as of this week, I am a single issue voter.

I only vote for people who will take basic steps to protect me and my family from preventable threats – both foreign and domestic. I am here to tell Rep Zeldin that if he cannot fight for the most basic measures to keep our children safe from gun violence. If he cannot fight for our country to defend itself from information and cyber warfare, then he is worse than useless to any of us.

Trump and Rep Zeldin and so many men like them run on “law and order”, borders, “security”, building up our military, “keeping us safe”. And here we are: 100 of us dying daily from gun violence, another day, another school shooting. Another 15, 20, 50 young lives lost. There is not a parent in this country who wasn’t afraid to send their children to school this week. There wasn’t a kid over the age of 5 in America who didn’t sit in their
classrooms this week afraid that maybe they were next. What is this? Why do we have to live like this? When the majority of Americans are desperate for sensible gun safety laws, why is Lee Zeldin actively working hard to make gun laws more lax?

At what point does this failure to address gun violence become a dereliction of his basic duty to protect us? At what point? A long time ago!

We have a couple of brilliant people who will talk more about our so-called “moderate” congressman’s voting record on gun safety so we can all understand why the NRA loves Zeldin so much. But I want to talk about one specific bill, voted on and passed by the House of Representatives in December. H.R. 38/ Senate Bill 446, the so called “concealed carry reciprocity” bill. It means that states with the weakest requirements for allowing people to carry concealed, loaded guns in their communities will set the national standard. So whereas now states are free to decide what gun laws will keep their communities safe, and can then enter into agreements with other states to honor out of state gun laws. Concealed Carry would mean that all states would be forced to accept the lowest gun safety standards in the country. And no one is talking about it.

It is time that we understand – and make sure everyone we know understands – what HR 38 / Senate Bill 446 – Concealed Carry will mean for New York.

NY awards concealed carry permission only to citizens with justifiable need who are not a danger to themselves or others, and can demonstrate a high level of knowledge of firearm use and safety. Our laws recognize and protect us from the potential threat of dangerous and violent people carrying concealed guns. This is one reason why NY has such a low incidence of gun deaths and injuries per capita. If the NRA – with the tens of millions of dollars they have spent to do so — succeeds in getting the Senate to pass Zeldin’s Concealed Carry Bill it would put domestic abusers and people convicted of violent crimes with hidden weapons on the streets of our towns — Patchogue, Bellport, Montauk, Smithtown, etc. I want Zeldin to tell me how this will make it more safe for me and my child to walk those streets, to go to school, to go to work. Tell me how!

And when you tell me, I will tell you this. You are lying to our faces. More guns, more concealed weapons, and looser gun laws will not make us safer. Until you stop serving the NRA over your constituents, until you stop selling our children’s lives to gun manufacturers, we are all single issue voters. And I ask all of you to tell everyone you know, about what HR 38 / Senate Bill 446 – Concealed Carry will do to NY and why it is
keeping you up at night. Here’s what else is keeping me up at night! We learned this week that there is incontrovertible evidence that the US is under attack from a foreign adversary. What most defense experts are calling the worst attack on our country since 9/11.

We know that Russia penetrated the systems of our major political parties, tampered with our voting machines, discouraged voting with fake information and media campaigns built on lies, that they rounded up support for Trump and are sowing disinformation and confusion about the harm he is inflicting upon us every day. We know that Russia helped sway public opinion to push Al Franken out of office. That they are acting to control social discourse after the Parkland shooting last week. America
needs to wake up. We are at war.

And the president said nothing. He attacks the FBI and goes golfing. He spends NO TIME thinking about how to protect us from the very real threat that Russia will decide in 2018, who runs our government. Russia, is clearly exercising control over the people they have handpicked for the job. Why are Trump and Zeldin doing nothing? Why won’t Trump institute sanctions (H.R. 3364) that were passed by a huge margin 419-3 in the House?

Why is that ok with Zeldin? Is it because the GOP & Zeldin know that they can only stay in power with Russia’s help? Well I’m sorry. That’s too bad. If you can only keep your jobs with Russian help, you’re out. This is OUR country. Not Russia’s.

The people in Washington running the Republican party are dirty. They give tax cuts to the rich and spend millions of dollars to fly first class, and in the same breath take away veterans healthcare, children’s healthcare, food for the poor. They are dirty and corrupt from the inside out. Lying to the FBI, money laundering, tax evasion, defrauding consumers, bank fraud, exploiting their office for personal gain.

Before we even get to collusion with a foreign adversary, if even half of the things these people are accused of are true, Republican leadership in Washington should be in jail. And if they were black they would be.

Every day in this country feels more and more like a national version of the godfather. Here’s what we know. 130 white house staff didn’t have security clearance as of Nov of 2017. The people with the highest levels of security access in the country, have been deemed by our FBI to be unfit for that access. Unfit means that – for whatever reason – be it domestic abuse or foreign debts or lying repeatedly on disclosure forms – our top law enforcement has said that giving these people access puts our lives in danger.

This is not hyberbole. Our government is burning. It is being run by people who are beholden, literally, financially and probably more, to a foreign adversary, and special interests, like the NRA, that is controlled by companies who sell guns and, it turns out, has its own ties to Russia.

What has happened, and is happening, in our government is so insane that we can’t admit it. Because no one knows what to do in the face of this all being true.

What does Donald Trump do? He goes golfing. And what does Lee Zeldin do? He defends him. And worse. Zeldin is actively working to derail the Russia investigation and to attack people who have devoted their lives to protecting our country. A proud member of Devin Nunes #CoverUpCaucus, Zeldin is doing far worse than nothing. Just this morning on Twitter, Zeldin continues his constant and desperate scramble to undermine the efforts of those who are trying to understand what happened and protect us from attack.

And all of these people – Trump, Zeldin, Devin Nunes – every person who holds elected office – has taken an oath to “protect and defend our constitution.” And they won’t even try. A basic dereliction of duty to perform their basic oath of office.

So we are all single issue voters! If Zeldin cannot take basic steps to protect us from threats – both foreign and domestic – he is worse than useless, he is doing us great harm. He is endangering our children, our rule of law, our constitution, and our basic rights as Americans. Zeldin, we are all single issue voters. If you cannot put basic gun safety measures in place, you need to step aside. If you fail to recognize and respond to Russia’s attacks, you need to step aside. You need to step aside and make room for someone who will do their job to protect us and to protect our constitution.

“They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen”

David Posnett — Thu, 10 Aug 2017 07:08:03 +0000

In regard to the N Korea story…

Submitted to this blog by my friend Rajeev Pillay:

For want of any better options, one has to assume that even Kim Jong Un is rational.

That being the case, one can assume that he has a feeling of isolation and victimisation. Nuclear weaponry levels the field in any eventual negotiation. One has to therefore assume that there is no stopping him. He will accelerate his nuclear program – not slow it down or terminate it. He knows that to do so would be suicidal.

What should the US do? Would security guarantees for Kim’s regime (quite the opposite of Trump’s approach) persuade him to back off? Perhaps.

Next alternative is to allow him to develop his missile program and put in place a series of checks and balances and protocols to control their actual use – ideally with independent verification.

The final option is to take out his missile bases. One has to assume that his nuclear weapons are stored separately from his missiles (because of course he is rational, remember). As a consequence, taking out the missile batteries may not result in an apocalypse.

The problem is that the US has very little intelligence capacity on the ground to take this risky approach, so it is entirely likely that Kim would be able to get a couple of missiles off too. That is probably sufficient to eliminate Guam if not parts of Alaska.

No easy solutions, I’m afraid. Can we live with a nuclear N. Korea? We might have to at this point!

Conservative ‘news’ outlets didn’t like Comey’s testimony—so they created a fake version instead

David Posnett — Thu, 15 Jun 2017 14:28:15 +0000

By Hunter

Wednesday Jun 14, 2017 · 9:31 PM EDT

Sean Hannity

The New York Times has a good look at how one particular conspiracy theory, a completely false notion that ex-FBI director James Comey said Trump did not ask he halt the Flynn investigation in his mid-May Senate testimony despite Comey in fact asserting no such thing, ricocheted around the usual conservative sites in a transparent hoax. It started with troll Jack Posobiec, who simply made it up. Breitbart and Alex Jones jumped on it and soon it made it to Rush Limbaugh and, of course, Fox News’ Sean Hannity.

It was an absolute fraud, and one that could easily have been proven a fraud by anyone who bothered to check—and it’s difficult to believe that the entire staff of Breitbart and Sean Hannity’s show were so uninformed as to the explosive nature of Comey’s testimony that they could have plausibly believed it in the first place. Comey’s testimony about Trump pressuring him to drop the investigation was the top news story of the day; peddling a tweet from a known hoaxer that claims the exact opposite can’t be described as “falling for” a hoax. It counts as being an accessory to it. Sean Hannity and his ilk were spreading the false version on purpose.

In an email, Mr. Posobiec described his work as “reality journalism — part investigative, part activist, part commentary.” A day before his tweet, the White House had allowed him into an Oval Office photo op with the president, and he tried to ask a question about Seth Rich, the murdered Democratic National Committee staff member.

The reason for peddling the hoaxes is simple: Many or most of their followers will believe them. They won’t check. So it doesn’t matter whether the news they present is entirely fabricated. They will get the desired effect—angry conservatives obligingly believing the conservative president has been vindicated—and suffer no consequences no matter how quickly their claims are proven false in other venues. It helps when you have an administration eager to help the effort. It helps more to have already pre-segregated news markets such that conservative fans aren’t likely to ever find out you’ve lied to them.

“The ability to mitigate such disinformation campaigns was far easier in the 1990s,” said Chris Lehane, who worked as an aide in the Clinton White House. Back then, he added, “for the most part the existing distribution channels were not as segmented across ideological lines that, in effect, create parallel realities that run along ideological grounds.”

It’s a conservative propaganda effort. It’s the dissemination of provably false information up and down the conservative “news” chain, from the lowest dregs to the Fox News cameras, facilitated by a conservative movement so contemptuous of mere objective reality that they don’t just tolerate, but demand they be given more pleasing versions.

The Times doesn’t touch on just how frighteningly dangerous the embrace of such tactics is. It is the cornerstone of authoritarian, fundamentalist, and fascist governments. When the government and their compliant media figures simply alter the news to best benefit the party, that’s the end of things. Democracy cannot exist in such places, and there is no informed consent of the governed if the governed are simply given whatever false information will render them most compliant.

Trump Says Qatar Funds Terror. Here’s His Record Of Trying To Get It To Fund Him.

David Posnett — Wed, 14 Jun 2017 02:09:56 +0000

Hell hath no fury like Mr. Trump scorned

The president is allying himself with those blockading the tiny country, but he’s made attempts to secure Qatari investments in the past.

Clayton Swisher HuffPost

JONATHAN ERNST / REUTERS

Qatar’s Emir Sheikh Tamim Bin Hamad Al-Thani meets with U.S. President Donald Trump in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, May 21, 2017.

Donald Trump, his daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner all repeatedly sought financing for various investments in recent years from leading figures in Qatar, according to sources with direct knowledge of the meetings.

Those previously unreported overtures have taken on new relevance as a diplomatic crisis aggravated by President Trump has left the small Gulf nation blockaded and isolated by its rivals, with tensions in the Middle East reaching historic highs.

President Trump on Friday characterized Qatar as “historically” a “funder of terrorism at a high level,” an accusation that came just an hour after his Secretary of State Rex Tillerson appealed for “no further escalation” in the Gulf Cooperation Council squabble, urging dialogue to quickly resolve the crisis, which pits Qatar against Saudi Arabia, Egypt, UAE, and Bahrain. Tillerson noted the Qatari emir “made progress in halting financial support and expelling terrorist elements from his country,” comments echoed by the U.S. ambassador to Qatar, Dana Smith, who tweeted “Qatar is a strong partner in combating terrorist financing.”

That partnership is not merely rhetorical. Qatar is home to Al-Udeid air base, the regional Central Command headquarters from which American bombers depart on daily missions against ISIS and al Qaeda. Reacting to the GCC dispute, the Defense Department praised Qatar’s commitment to fighting ISIS as its secretary, James Mattis, expressed his confidence that the turmoil would not interrupt Qatar’s contribution to those efforts.

Given the weave of interests and close cooperation between the U.S. and Qatar, many are seeking ways to interpret Trump’s abrupt turn against Qatar in the dispute. Some think the answer lies not in the realm of policy but in the history of Trump’s business deals with the various actors in the dispute.

The Trump Organization (now under the stewardship of son Donald Jr.) is reportedly in talks with Emirati tycoons to receive several billion dollars of investment in addition to owning two golf courses in Dubai. The New York Times reports that Trump has previously had as many as eight business entities registered in Jeddah alone. In 2015, Trump spoke about his admiration for the Saudis and attributed it to his business dealings with them:

Saudi Arabia — and I get along great with all of them. They buy apartments from me. They spend $40 million, $50 million. Am I supposed to dislike them? I like them very much.

Therein lies the source of much consternation among Qataris. Several people interviewed for this piece expressed concern that Trump’s bias against their country might stem from a series of failed business overtures that he (along with his son-in-law Jared Kushner) made seven years ago, which are only now being reported. They did not go as swimmingly as the deals made with the Saudis and Emiratis.

In 2010, as markets were still reeling from the 2008 global economic crisis, Qatar was flush with cash and countless business executives and foreign governments came calling. Some came to get liquidity; others searching for silver linings amidst the global chaos. Trump was in the latter category, then as CEO of the Trump Organization but also as host and star of the hit domestic American reality TV show, “The Apprentice.”

Traveling with his daughter Ivanka, Trump visited Doha in 2010 for separate meetings with Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) executive board member Dr. Hussain Al-Abdullah and as well as Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani (commonly abbreviated as “HBJ”), who was then serving as foreign minister and prime minister. Neither responded to requests for comment on this article.

At the time, the pair constituted the brain trust of Qatar’s financial and investment sector. QIA is the world’s second largest sovereign wealth fund (presently estimated at having $338 billion in assets under management). Then as now, Sheikh HBJ had renown for being kingmaker of not just political deals but financial ones too. Using his business and political savvy, he has sealed deals ranging from Britain’s Harrods to Germany’s Deutsch Bank to America’s Miramax Hollywood studios.

A source close to the 2010 talks with Trump say he made the Doha stopover (along with stops in Dubai and Abu Dhabi) to raise money for a distressed real estate fund he was assembling. Trump opened the discussion with QIA by bragging about the success of Trump International and the many deals he had personally put together. Trump had hardly got through his own biography when Dr. Al-Abdullah, QIA’s senior executive, interrupted to say words to the effect of: We know who you are and what you have done. Tell us what you can do for us right now.

That single, curt interruption apparently left Trump stunned. He had expected his hosts to be impressed, if not grateful, that a person of Trump’s stature would visit the Qatari capital. Apparently distracted by the lack of decorum, Trump barely continued with his pitch. The meeting abruptly ended, according to one account, with Trump exiting the room visibly angered.

According to another, the meeting ended pleasantly and the decision not to invest in Trump was simply about Trump’s lack of track record in doing real estate funds. The same source also said any coldness to Trump was more a function of Dr. Al-Abdullah’s becoming numb to the same repetitive proposals—QIA routinely received such pitches. In the Qataris view, if not Trump’s, all that distinguished his proposal from so many others was his own celebrity status.

A subsequent meeting that day between Trump and Sheikh HBJ ended with pleasantries but with the top Qatari businessman keeping hold of his wallet. Trump was unable to move any Qatari funds to the Trump Organization, and within months after leaving, observers noted that even Trump himself quit the distressed real estate fund idea, having failed to get a single backer anywhere.

The Trump family interactions with Qatar expanded as Ivanka Trump returned to Doha within several months with her husband Jared Kushner, a wealthy real estate and media investor in his own right. Jared had a new pitch to make, this time on a different real estate deal.

Ironically, some of Jared’s introductions within Qatar were facilitated by a national of the country that is a key player in the present crisis: Saudi Arabia. Through a personal friendship with Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan’s son Khalid, (who knew Jared and who remained in the U.S. after his father’s legendary tenure as ambassador ended in 2005) Jared gained entry to a younger cadre of successful Qatari businessmen during his trip.

Jared and wife Ivanka overnighted at the Doha Four Seasons, and observers with direct knowledge of the visit say the atmosphere between them and their host was perceptibly better, if not warm. Jared had his own mission in mind to present to his Qatari hosts. He was desperate to secure funds to recapitalize his 666 Fifth Avenue property which, then as now, was severely underwater. But in high-level meetings in Doha, neither QIA nor Sheikh HBJ showed interest in Jared’s building. This was the same issue with follow-up meetings between Ivanka and Qatari investors held in New York in 2011. According to The New York Times:

The Kushner Companies bought the building in January 2007, closing the deal on Jared Kushner’s birthday and paying the highest price ever for a New York office building. “This is a great acquisition for our company,” Jared Kushner said at the time. According to the Kushners, they put $500 million into the purchase.

The luxury high-rise has been plagued by massive debt ever since—insiders say the Kushner family overpaid—which offers one explanation for why they have turned to foreign sources to help bail it out. Discussions to buy a stake in 666 Fifth Avenue between Jared and Sheikh HBJ—who left government in 2013 to pursue his own vast business interests—are said by a source with knowledge of the talks to have continued right up until the election of 2016.

But the hunt for capital continued after Jared ended his pursuit of Qatari investors last year. In March 2017, Bloomberg reported that Kushner Companies was close to securing “unusually favorable terms” in talks with the Angbang Insurance Company, despite its ties to the “highest echelons of China’s Communist Party.” On the same day, Trump attacked Qatar as a financier of terrorism, lawyers from his Justice Department offered an advisory opinion arguing that as president he could accept payments from foreign governments after all, which would presumably include countries like Qatar and China.

Today, with Trump allying himself and the United States with those blockading their tiny country, Qataris can’t help but wonder: is this all about Trump’s hurt feelings over business deals that didn’t pan out?

For years America preached that the Arab countries should fight corruption and have financial transparency. Yet neither the American public much less most foreign countries dealing with Trump have any true understanding about the nature and volume of Trump family investments abroad whether in Saudi Arabia the UAE or elsewhere.

For example, journalistic exposure of Jared’s family history of investing in illegal West Bank settlements provide Palestinians and the international community insights to his obvious personal conflicts, even if in Trump’s eyes that still makes him a suitable mediator of the Arab-Israeli conflict. So too with Qatar, it is necessary for Trump and his family to declare all their Mideast interests and holdings. This will enable others to form a view as to whether Trump’s recent weighing in on the side of Saudi Arabia and the UAE is a genuine attempt to perform the statesman role, or merely payback for business deals that never happened.

Many Qataris suspect that they know the answer and are distressed by it. Could anyone have imagined that five or ten years ago, when businessmen turned down a New York mogul and reality TV host auditioning for its investment, that they were jeopardizing the security of their country? Not to mention America’s security interests in the Middle East.

Clayton Swisher is an investigative journalist and author of two books on the Arab-Israeli conflict. He can be reached via Twitter @claytonswisher. The views represented in this article are the author’s alone.

Trump backs permanent snooping powers he once criticized as abusive

David Posnett — Tue, 13 Jun 2017 14:37:11 +0000

We Have Good Reasons to Be Concerned About the Impact of Section 702 on the Criminal Justice System

Posted on Just Security

By Sarah St.Vincent
Wednesday, June 7, 2017

In a recent analysis for Just Security, I explored some concerns about how warrantless surveillance under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (“FISA”) may be undermining the U.S. criminal justice system. While many of those concerns would apply to the government’s potential reliance on warrantless Section 702 data as part of any criminal probe, I expressed a worry that such data might conceivably be making its way into investigations of relatively low-level suspected offenses (for example, suspected drug-related violations).

Partly in reply to Dean Asha Rangappa’s letter to the editor, I would like to expand on a few of the problematic practices I had mentioned—all of which should be at the forefront of legislators’ minds during the upcoming debate about whether Section 702 should be renewed before its scheduled sunset at the end of this year. These include “incidental”collection, warrantless querying of Section 702 data by the FBI, and parallel construction.

“Incidental” collection: A “subset” can still be a large pool of private information—including on U.S. persons

Under the law, the executive branch must “target” non-U.S. persons outside the United States when it carries out warrantless monitoring of Internet or telephone communications under Section 702. These targets need not be suspected of any wrongdoing: as long as “a significant purpose” of the surveillance is to obtain “foreign intelligence information,” a term FISA defines broadly, any non-U.S. person outside the country’s borders is fair game. In 2016, the government had an estimated 106,469 such targets—a number that had steadily increased for several years. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (“FISC”) amicus, Amy Jeffress, who served as an impartial adviser, has confirmed that “not all Section 702 targets are international terrorists,” and the executive branch has yet to explain who else might be singled out. Then-chair of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (“PCLOB”) David Medine told Congress in 2016 that a Section 702 target could be “anyone with foreign intelligence value,” including, for example, “a completely innocent businessman.”

While this monitoring has considerable human rights implications for the foreigners who are targeted, it is likely that the dragnet is also capturing large numbers of U.S. persons’ communications. The government likes to describe this seizure of Americans’ private correspondence under Section 702 as “incidental.” However, as PCLOB has pointed out, “[s]uch ‘incidental’ collection … is not accidental, nor is it inadvertent.” FISA requires that Section 702 surveillance be “reasonably designed” to minimize such collection, but it happens anyway. The President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies even suggested in 2013 that the executive branch may have an incentive “to use section 702 in an effort to gather evidence against United States persons in a way that would circumvent the underlying values of both FISA and the Fourth Amendment.”

This pool of warrantless Section 702 information on U.S. persons is probably sizeable. Medine testified explicitly that “the government is collecting large quantities of Americans’ communications” under the law. In her FISC amicus brief, Jeffress referred to “a potentially very large … scope of incidental collection of communications between lawful targets and U.S. persons that are not the type of communications Section 702 was designed to collect”—including communications with “no foreign intelligence value.” These statements indicate that while it is probably literally true that U.S.-person information is a “subset” of the data gathered under Section 702, this subset may be substantial and may include such troublingly private content as—in Medine’s words—“family photographs, love letters, personal financial matters, discussions of physical and mental health, and political and religious exchanges.”

Therefore, I do not share Dean Rangappa’s confidence that warrantless Section 702 data is unlikely to include information on “[w]holly domestic” U.S. crimes—let alone crimes (such as drug-related offenses) that the government may regard as having some kind of foreign nexus, however remote. The fact is that when a government grabs untold reams of private communications belonging to thousands or millions of people, there is simply no knowing what kind of information might be in there, available to be searched.

Once the National Security Agency (“NSA”) has obtained data through Section 702, including on U.S. persons, it may distribute or report on that data in several ways that may ultimately have implications for criminal cases—including by sharing data it “reasonably believe[s] to contain evidence of a crime” with the FBI or other law enforcement bodies. While it has not been publicly confirmed that such knowing NSA sharing of Section 702 data believed to contain evidence of a crime is feeding into non-terrorism prosecutions, in my view the risk is real.

FBI querying: “Fishing” in the pool is probably not so unusual

The current Section 702 regime allows the FBI to obtain unknown amounts of raw Section 702 data without a warrant. PCLOB has said it does not obtain all such data, but the actual amount remains unclear; the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s statementthree years ago that the data constitutes “a small percentage of NSA’s total Section 702 collection” did little to illuminate this.

The Bureau then has the power to carry out warrantless searches—or “queries”—of these communications, a practice that has prompted strong expressions of concern from independent evaluators. Medine testified that the FBI “routinely looks into 702 databases, and not just in investigations, but even in assessments where the FBI has absolutely no suspicion of wrongdoing … they’re just sort of entitled to poke around and see if something is going on.” Jeffress, too, flagged that the FISC has described these FBI queries as “routine and encouraged,” that the Bureau may conduct them even at the pre-investigation “assessment” stage, and that “there is no requirement that the matter be a serious one, nor that it have any relation to national security.”

It is difficult to reconcile the claim that it is “extremely unlikely” that FBI agents would “fish” in Section 702 data for evidence of crimes with Medine’s and Jeffress’ statements, which suggest the Bureau has the power to do just that. As Dean Rangappa emphasizes, FBI procedures require that “[t]o the extent reasonably feasible,” queries of raw Section 702 data must be designed to “find and extract foreign intelligence information or evidence of a crime.” That latter phrase, however, essentially captures the problem: Agents may carry out warrantless searches of warrantlessly seized communications in order to find something the government could use to put someone in jail.

A recent FISC opinion indicates that the executive branch has reported only one instance to the Court in which the FBI, using a query that was not designed to find “foreign intelligence information,” found Section 702 information on an American. As highly unsympathetic as that case is (it involved an e-mail containing a description of child abuse), the fact that the government did use Section 702 to find such information without a warrant should give us all pause. Footnote 53 in the opinion also gives rise to concern that the FBI’s self-reporting processes for such cases may not be fully reliable—and one wonders how expansive queries that are seeking “foreign intelligence information,” which would not even result in such reporting, may be.

The FBI’s adoption of internal procedures that, in some ways, regulate access to this pool of warrantlessly collected data (for example, by requiring agents to have authorization before they can view Section 702 data they have found) does not take these concerns off the table. First, as Chief Justice Roberts observed in Riley v. California, law enforcement’s development of internal rules to assuage concerns about warrantless searches is “[p]robably a good idea, but the Founders did not fight a revolution to gain the right to government agency protocols.” In other words, even the best and strictest FBI procedures cannot undo any constitutional or other violations inherent in these programs.

Second, the FISC expressed a stark concern in its recent opinion about the FBI’s “apparent disregard” of rules the FISC had approved, and recorded at least three serious episodes in which the Bureau improperly provided access to raw Section 702 data to its own employees or to groups of private contractors. The Court also raised fears that “the FBI may be engaging in similar disclosures of raw Section 702 information that have not been reported.”

Parallel construction means the use of this data in criminal investigations may never come to light

If the NSA, FBI, or other entities are employing warrantless Section 702 data in non-terrorism criminal investigations, this practice might never come to light. Historical documents suggest that the government may have devoted a significant amount of time over the years to pondering the question of how to use intelligence information in investigations without disclosing this fact at trial. Among other things, a declassified document from 1983 shows the executive branch seeming to embrace the idea of deliberately “build[ing] a firebreak” in evidentiary trails by encouraging law enforcement to develop independent evidence in a way that would prevent defendants from discovering that information originally came from intelligence activities. Thirty years later, Reuters reported that the DEA was engaging in just such an activity, known as “parallel construction,” to avoid disclosing its use of tips from intelligence.

The government’s decidedly belated notice of Section 702 surveillance in at least a few known criminal cases provide reason to be concerned about the use of parallel construction to conceal such monitoring; it is also worrying that even defense attorneys who fight determinedly to find out if Section 702 or other intelligence monitoring was employed in their clients’ cases may face stiff resistance. (For civil rights defenders, it is worth reading the hearing transcript and related motion in an unusual 2013 Texas drug case to see some of the challenges confronting such attorneys.) It also seems possible, as at least one declassified record as well as the Reuters article suggest, that the prosecution could simply drop cases if defendants appeared likely to succeed in forcing the disclosure of Section 702 surveillance.

* * *

Particularly since the discussion above draws on some materials that had not yet been released at the time of our original exchange, I hope Dean Rangappa will take this as an invitation to a continuing dialogue.

This analysis of how Section 702 data may be quietly making its way into criminal investigations is one aspect of a larger story: I am just as concerned about information the U.S. has warrantlessly obtained under Executive Order 12333 or intelligence-sharing agreements with foreign governments and hope to write further on those topics in the future. However, Section 702 presents an immediate opportunity to restore civil liberties in this area—something Congress should not pass up.

Image: Getty/Chip Somodevilla

Tags: Congress, FBI, FISA, FISC, NSA, Section 702

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sarah St.Vincent is a researcher and advocate on national security, surveillance, and domestic law enforcement for the US Program at Human Rights Watch. You can follow her on Twitter (@SarahStV_HRW)