Story 1: Trump Preparing for Casus Belli and Negotiating With “Locked and Loaded” …Ready, Aim, “Fire and Fury” — Boom-Boom- Boom- Boom — Born To Be Wild — Thunder – Thunder – Thunder – Thunder- Thunderstruck — Videos
President Trump holds a Press Conference
Brand New President Trump Presser! This is Awesome! (8-10-17)
Europa Universalis IV – The Musical: Casus Belli
Casus belli – Seinfeld
Scott Adams tells you why “fire and fury” is smart persuasion \ 2017.08.09
Scott Adams tells you how Trump is “pacing” North Korea and treating them like serious foes
China To Trump Prepare For War
Trump Tells N. Korea What Will Happen If They Hit Guam | Trump Full Remarks On N. Korea – 8/10/17
Preemptive War Debate (Part 1)
Preemptive War Debate (Part 2)
Preemptive War Debate (Part 3)
Preemptive War Debate (Part 4)
John Lee Hooker – Boom Boom (from “The Blues Brothers”)
Thunder, thunder, thunder, thunder
I was caught
In the middle of a railroad track
I looked round
And I knew there was no turning back
My mind raced
And I thought what could I do
And I knew
There was no help, no help from you
Sound of the drums
Beating in my heart
The thunder of guns
Tore me apart
You’ve been
Thunderstruck
Rode down the highway
Broke the limit, we hit the town
Went through to Texas, yeah Texas, and we had some fun
We met some girls
Some dancers who gave a good time
Broke all the rules
Played all the fools
Yeah yeah they, they, they blew our minds
And I was shaking at the knees
Could I come again please
Yeah them ladies were too kind
You’ve been
Thunderstruck
I was shaking at the knees
AC-DC Thunderstruck / Jet Fighters
Battleship & ACDC – Thunderstruck
PRESIDENT TRUMP DECLARES THAT US IS “LOCK AND LOADED” IN RESPONSE TO ANY NORTH KOREAN PROVOCATION AGAINST GUAM OR ALLIES
In his latest broadside at North Korea, President Trump bluntly warned dictator Kim Jong Un on Friday that the U.S. military was “locked and loaded” in case the country should “act unwisely.”
“Military solutions are now fully in place, locked and loaded, should North Korea act unwisely. Hopefully Kim Jong Un will find another path!” Trump said on Twitter.
It was not clear exactly what sort of “military solutions” Trump was referring to or what precisely would constitute unwise action by the North Korean leader.
But North Korea said on Thursday it was putting together a plan to fire four missiles in the direction of the U.S. territory of Guam, a Pacific island that is home to large American military installations.
Trump’s warning came a day after Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told reporters in Silicon Valley that the U.S. effort to “get this under control” was “diplomatically led,” “gaining traction,” and “gaining diplomatic results.”
Mattis underlined that he wanted to “stay right there right now” and warned that the cost of conflict could be “catastrophic,” but also said that when it comes to the U.S. military, “we are ready.” [Yahoo News]
Even the Most Precise Strike on North Korea Could Prompt Retaliation
An American A-10 Warthog landed at Osan Air Base in Pyeongtaek, South Korea, on Thursday.CreditYonhap, via Associated Press
WASHINGTON — North Korea’s threat on Thursday to test-fire ballistic missiles soon near the American territory of Guam deepened the challenge confronting the Trump administration: how to defang Pyongyang’s missile programs without risking all-out war.
President Trump has made clear that his goal is to deny North Korea the capability to field a long-range nuclear-tipped missile that could strike the United States.
And though the Pentagon still hopes for a diplomatic solution, highly classified military options are at the ready, last seriously debated when the Clinton administration pondered pre-emptive action to try to thwart North Korea’s nuclear program.
Even a limited strike against a North Korean missile on its launching pad or the shooting down of a missile in midair would pose risks that the North’s leader, Kim Jong-un, might retaliate, setting off a spiral of escalation that could plunge the Korean Peninsula into war.
“In the event of a first strike against Kim, even a non-nuclear option, it is highly likely that Kim would retaliate at least conventionally against South Korea,” said James Stavridis, a retired four-star admiral who is now dean of Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. “This almost certainly would create an upward spiral of violence which would be extremely difficult to manage or to mitigate.”
The Trump administration’s first recourse has been diplomacy. Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson sought to head off North Korea’s missile program this week by suggesting that the United States could open talks with Pyongyang if North Korea would halt its missile tests.
GRAPHIC
What Can North Korea Reach With Its Missiles?
North Korea’s ballistic missile program has recently accelerated faster than expected.
On Thursday, however, North Korea raised the stakes by saying that it was considering a plan to test-fire four intermediate-range Hwasong-12 missiles in international waters near Guam, home to American air and naval bases as well as a Thaad antimissile system.
Mr. Trump hinted broadly later in the day that he has his own military options in mind. “Obviously we’re spending a lot of time looking at, in particular, North Korea,” he told reporters, “and we are preparing for many different alternative events.”
But few of the military options are straightforward, and some former Pentagon officials involved in war planning for North Korea pointed to the complexities.
A major consideration would be whether and when to evacuate American and other allied civilians, which is no small feat as Seoul, a city of about 10 million, is within range of North Korea’s rockets and artillery and the North Korean military is also armed with chemical and biological weapons.
“With all this talk, what I worry about is a serious miscalculation,” said James D. Thurman, a retired Army general who served as the top United States commander in South Korea from 2011 to 2013. “Before we start talking about all these military options, we have to decide what are we going to do with the U.S. citizens over there.”
He estimated that at least a quarter-million Americans would have to be moved.
If the United States was prepared to go beyond a limited strike, it could conduct a surprise attack on North Korea’s missile garrison and weapon storage areas, using American aircraft stationed in Guam, in Japan and on aircraft carriers as well as strategic bombers that would be refueled in flight.
American officials, however, do not have high confidence that the military could find and destroy North Korea’s entire arsenal of long-range missiles and nuclear warheads. It would be up to American missile defenses to knock out any that survived and that North Korea might use to attack the United States or its allies.
North Korea could also use its artillery, rockets and special operations forces to attack South Korea. To better defend against the threat, the United States could deploy more of its own artillery, counterbattery and reconnaissance aircraft to South Korea and send more air and naval forces to the region. But that would forfeit any element of surprise.
“I can’t underscore enough how unappealing all the military options are,” said Christine Wormuth, the Pentagon’s top policy official at the end of the Obama administration. “This wouldn’t end well. The U.S. would win, but it would be ugly.”
Diplomatic efforts are also deeply complicated. Unless China believes the United States is serious about using military options to head off North Korea’s emerging missile threat, it may be difficult to gain the cooperation from Beijing needed to fashion a political solution.
“I am 100 percent sure from a number of conversations that, as a last resort, he would use military force to deny them the capability to strike the homeland with a nuclear weapon,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, who met privately with Mr. Trump on the issue a month ago.
“He has convinced me,” Mr. Graham added. “Now it is up to him to convince the Chinese and North Koreans.”
To prevent nuclear attacks from elsewhere, namely Russia and China, the United States has relied on its potent nuclear arsenal. Some experts say the approach could also work with North Korea — a “least-bad option,” said Jeffrey A. Bader of the Brookings Institution.
But Mr. Trump has indicated that he does not want to rely on deterrence for a country he sees as bellicose and unpredictable.
Discouraging the enemy from massive escalation has worked even in the midst of war. During the 1991 Persian Gulf war, the administration of George Bush led an effort to push Iraqi forces out of Kuwait while dissuading Saddam Hussein from employing chemical weapons.
The Iraqis were warned shortly before the conflict by Secretary of State James A. Baker III that they would pay a heavy price if they used weapons of mass destruction. The Iraqi government interpreted that as meaning that the United States would rush to Baghdad to topple their government.
The United States could try a similar approach: attacking North Korea’s missiles while warning Mr. Kim that his government would be the next target if he dared to strike back. But few analysts are confident he would be restrained.
Those urging firmer action assert that a military buildup in and around South Korea could give economic sanctions and diplomacy more time to work while providing American negotiators with more leverage.
Mr. Graham asserted that diplomatic efforts would fail unless the United States made clear that North Korea’s deployment of an intercontinental missile would cross a “red line” and that military options were available if the talks faltered.
But General Thurman worried that the war of words was fueling tensions and adding to the risk of miscalculation.
“We are playing right into Kim Jong-un’s hands,” General Thurman said. “That is what he wants. He wants to be on the world scene.”
“I really would want to tamp down this rhetoric, maintain armistice conditions, keep the force ready and,” he said, “not get the herd spooked.”
During the election campaign there was a brief period of anxiety about Clinton or Trump taking possession of the nuclear code, with the power to eradicate our species at the push of a few buttons. But where has discussion, let alone mention, of nuclear weapons gone? An exception is the brief article by Robert Dodge in CounterPunch about the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists advancing the Doomsday Clock to 2 ½ minutes before the midnight of human extinction caused by nuclear war or climate change: “Nuclear weapons are not even on the radar of our congress. Their phones are not ringing off the hook about nuclear weapons.”
In a January 30th interview with Sonali Kolhatkar, George Lakoff discussed Trump’s trial balloon about nuclear weapons in which Trump said that if we have them, we should use them. Lakoff said that there was a very brief reaction and then it’s gone, signaling that the public doesn’t care. Doesn’t care or doesn’t know? Harvard professor Elaine Scarry has said that some of her students had never heard of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
It is a dangerous time to not know about nuclear weapons. Trump inherited from Obama the ongoing US/NATO/Israeli escalation and military encirclement against Iran, China, and Russia, and the $1tn program to modernize nuclear weapons. On January 28th the Ron Paul Institute reported that Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL) introduced a bill to Congress: “… it specifically authorizes the president to launch a pre-emptive war on Iran at any time of his choosing and without any further Congressional oversight or input, as the President determines necessary and appropriate in order to achieve the goal of preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.” (Emphasis added).
Among the challengers to Iran’s purported nuclear threat are Richard Falk (UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, expert on nuclear weapons and international law): “What has Iran done to justify this frantic war-mongering … the outright threats emanating from Israel and the U.S. that leaves ‘all options’ on the table”? Seymour Hersh investigated Israel’s nuclear weapons program in his book The Samson Option. About Iran, Hersh wrote of“the repeated inability of the best and the brightest of the Joint Special Operations Command to find definitive evidence of a nuclear-weapons production program in Iran….. with lots of belligerent talk but no definitive evidence of a nuclear-weapons program.” And perhaps most damning, the U.K. Guardian: “Leaked spy cables show Binyamin Netanyahu’s dramatic declaration to world leaders in 2012 that Iran was about a year away from making a nuclear bomb was contradicted by his own secret service, according to a top-secret Mossad document.” Robert Fisk in The Independent 2012: “The Israeli President warns us now that Iran is on the cusp of producing a nuclear weapon. Heaven preserve us. Yet we reporters do not mention that Shimon Peres, as Israeli Prime Minister, said exactly the same thing in 1996. That was 16 years ago. And we do not recall that the current Israeli PM, Benjamin Netanyahu, said in 1992 that Iran would have a nuclear bomb by 1999. That would be 13 years ago. Same old story. We’ve been here before – and it suits Israel that we never forget ‘Nuclear Iran.’”
Noam Chomsky reported that a nuclear Iran suited the U.S. pre-1979, before the Islamic revolution overthrew the brutal shah regime. “A secret agreement made between MIT and the Shah of Iran, … pretty much amounted to turning over the Nuclear Engineering Department to the Shah.” Cheney, Rumsfeld, Kissinger, and Wolfowitz “wanted Iran to develop nuclear facilities and they were allies at the time.” [1]
Demonizing Iran at this time deflects attention from real nuclear dangers. According to the 2016 report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the nine nuclear states together possess a total of approximately 15,395 nuclear weapons, with the United States and Russia accounting for more than 93%. The public likely does not know that shortly after the UN pledged to end the scourge of war, shortly after two atomic bombs killed minimally 140,000 Japanese people, that the U.S. embarked on developing far more lethal hydrogen bombs. The explosive force of the Hiroshima bomb was 15-16 kilotons, whereas today’s bombs are in the range of 100 Kt to 550Kt of TNT (6 to 34 times the Hiroshima force). “Even a small-scale nuclear war involving one hundred Hiroshima-type (15 Kt) nuclear bombs between two countries such as India and Pakistan, would have a devastating effect on Earth’s climate” and “it is unlikely there would be any survivors.” “At most, this would involve only 0.3% of the world’s nuclear explosive power” [2]
Nuclear weapons are deployed by intercontinental ballistic missiles, by submarine launched ballistic missiles, and by strategic bombers. Submarines carrying up to 24 missiles, with each carrying four to five warheads, possibly as many as 144 warheads per submarine, constantly patrol the oceans. In a striking example of apparent disregard for the people of this planet, a CNN newscast from August 2016 shows a smiling Michelle Obama “christening” a General Dynamic Virginia-class submarine manufactured in Connecticut, named after her, and designed to carry nuclear weapons. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, even though a Russian first-strike is not a credible risk, the United States still keeps its 450 silo-based nuclear weapons, and hundreds of submarine-based weapons, on hair-trigger alert and ready to launch within ten minutes toward their targets.
The five year UN Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review met in April, 2015, following four years of preparatory meetings. Given the volatile tension between the U.S. and Russia and China, there was an urgency to take nuclear weapons off high alert status. Instead, the focus of the month-long meeting was diverted to Iran’s nuclear weapons and to political opposition by the U.S., U.K., and Canada to establishing a nuclear weapons free zone in the Middle East in order to shield Israel’s nuclear program from international laws and oversight. In violation of the NPT, Germany has provided Israel with a fleet of advanced submarines equipped to fire long-range nuclear-tipped cruise missiles. Astonishingly, two of these submarines, which carry weapons of mass destruction, were given to Israel as Holocaust reparation! According to Netanyahu, the submarines carry nuclear weapons pointed at Iran. “The Obama administration’s pretense that it knows nothing about any nuclear weapons in Israel makes intelligent discussion about the dangers of nuclear weapons in the Middle East all but impossible.” India provides Israel with a launching site in the Indian Ocean.
During the Cold War, nuclear weapons strategy was based on deterrence, or mutually assured destruction (MAD). Deterrence necessitated the capacity to retaliate with nuclear weapons, so the strategy in itself required weapons proliferation. Shortly after 9/11, G.W. Bush withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM). Missile defence systems are designed to destroy incoming nuclear missiles shortly after they are launched. There is a belief within the military that the U.S. could destroy its enemy’s full nuclear arsenal and prevent retaliation. Nuclear strategy shifted from deterrence to pre-emptive first strike, with the belief that a nuclear war is winnableand acceptable.
Frustrated by the decades-long paralysis in regulating and eliminating these weapons, and fearful that there is even more likelihood of nuclear war than during the Cold War, the UN-formed Open Ended Working Group (OPEG), made up of all nations, is now focusing entirely and explicitly on eliminating nuclear weapons. The nuclear-armed nations, plus many liberal democracies like Canada, Italy, Germany, Spain and other NATO countries, have voted against the majority. Iran voted for.
The late Jonathan Schell dedicated his life to the abolition of nuclear weapons. He wrote that nuclear exterminism did not come from 20thcentury totalitarian regimes, but that “the most radical evil imaginable – the extinction of the human species— [was] first placed in the hands of a liberal republic”. A graver suspicion was that the United States and its allies did not build these weapons to face extraordinary danger, but because of “an intrinsic element of the dominant liberal civilization itself – an evil that first grew and still grows from within that civilization rather than being imposed from without.” [3] Entire societies, the human species itself, are merely a pawn. Schell writes that nuclear strategy is the “very epicenter of banality” and is manufactured in think tanks and academic institutions from the pseudoscience of game theory.
The anti-nuclear and antiwar movements have been relatively silent about Israel and about Obama’s nuclear program. One current political opening may be women’s timely activism on the ground, with the precedent of women having led the successful opposition to atmospheric nuclear weapons testing in 1961. Women, in their historical role of caring for the young and old, for growing food and carrying water, are the unseen victims of war and should have the power to veto.
Notes.
[1] Noam Chomsky and Laray Polk (2013). Nuclear war and Environmental Catastrophe. Seven Stories Press), p. 21-22.
[2] Dr. Dale Dewar and Florian Oelck (2014). From Hiroshima to Fukushima to You: A Primer on Radiation and Health. Between the Lines. P. 149-50. Also see Eric Schlosser (2013). Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety. Penguin.
[3] Jonathan Schell (2001). The Unfinished Twentieth Century: The Crisis of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Verso. P. 32-47.
Casus belli is a Latin expression meaning “an act or event that provokes or is used to justify war” (literally, “a case of war”).[1] A casus belli involves direct offenses or threats against the nation declaring the war, whereas a casus foederis involves offenses or threats against its ally—usually one bound by a mutual defense pact.[2][3] Either may be considered an act of war.
The term came into wide use in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries through the writings of Hugo Grotius (1653), Cornelius van Bynkershoek (1707), and Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui (1732), among others, and due to the rise of the political doctrine of jus ad bellum or “just war theory”.[4][5] The term is also used informally to refer to any “just cause” a nation may claim for entering into a conflict. It is used retrospectively to describe situations that arose before the term came into wide use, as well as being used to describe present-day situations—even those in which war has not been formally declared.
In formally articulating a casus belli, a government typically lays out its reasons for going to war, its intended means of prosecuting the war, and the steps that others might take to dissuade it from going to war. It attempts to demonstrate that it is going to war only as a last resort (ultima ratio) and that it has “just cause” for doing so. Modern international law recognizes only three lawful justifications for waging war: self-defense, defense of an ally required by the terms of a treaty, and approval by the United Nations.
Proschema (plural proschemata) is the equivalent Greek term, first popularized by Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War. The proschemata are the stated reasons for waging war, which may or may not be the same as the real reasons, which Thucydides called prophasis (πρóφασις). Thucydides argued that the three primary real reasons for waging war are reasonable fear, honor, and interest, while the stated reasons involve appeals to nationalism or fearmongering (as opposed to descriptions of reasonable, empirical causes for fear).
Reasons for use
Countries need a public justification for attacking another country, both to galvanize internal support for the war and to gain the support of potential allies.
In the post-World-War-II era, the UN Charter prohibits signatory countries from engaging in war except: 1) as a means of defending themselves—or an ally where treaty obligations require it—against aggression; 2) unless the UN as a body has given prior approval to the operation. The UN also reserves the right to ask member nations to intervene against non-signatory countries that embark on wars of aggression.[6]
Historical examples
This section outlines a number of the more famous and/or controversial cases of casus belli which have occurred in modern times.
American Civil War
While slavery was the long term cause of the American Civil War, the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter (April 12–14, 1861) served as casus belli[7] for igniting the deadliest war in American history.
Spanish–American War
In the eyes of the United States, the sinking of the USS Maine provided casus belli for the Spanish–American War. There have been several alternative explanations for the explosion, such as that proposed by Mr. Evans, a senior editor of Newsweek. In his book, he identifies a flaw in the design of the USS Maine whereby the boiler room stood right next to the gunpowder storage room and that a boiler malfunction may have heated the adjacent metal wall and caused the powder to explode.[citation needed]
Second Opium War
Europeans had access to Chinese ports as outlined in the Treaty of Nanking from the First Opium War. France uses the execution of Auguste Chapdelaine as a casus belli for the Second Opium War. On February 29th, 1856, Chapdelaine, a French missionary, was killed in the province of Guangxi, which was not open to foreigners. In response, British and French forces quickly take control of Guangzhou (Canton).
The Russian Empire started to mobilize its troops in defense of its ally Serbia, which resulted in the German Empire declaring war on Russia in support of its ally Austria-Hungary. Very quickly, after the involvement of France, the Ottoman Empire and the British Empire, five of the six great European powers became involved in the first European general war since the Napoleonic Wars.
In 1917, the German Empire sent the Zimmermann Telegram to Mexico, in which they tried to convince Mexico to join the war and fight against the United States, for which they would be rewarded Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, all former Mexican territories. This telegram was intercepted by the British, then relayed to the U.S., which led to President Woodrow Wilson then using it to convince Congress to join World War I alongside the Allies. The Mexican president at the time, Venustiano Carranza, had a military commission assess the feasibility, which concluded that this would not be feasible for multiple reasons.
World War II
In his autobiography Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler had in the 1920s advocated a policy of lebensraum (“living space”) for the German people, which in practical terms meant German territorial expansion into Eastern Europe.
In August 1939, to implement the first phase of this policy, Germany‘s Nazi government under Hitler’s leadership staged the Gleiwitz incident, which was used as a casus belli for the invasion of Poland the following September. Nazi forces used concentration camp prisoners posing as Poles on 31 August 1939, to attack the German radio station Sender Gleiwitz in Gleiwitz, Upper Silesia, Germany (since 1945: Gliwice, Poland) on the eve of World War II in Europe. Poland‘s allies, the UK and France, subsequently declared war on Germany in accord their alliance.
The Soviet Union also employed a manufactured casus belli against Finland during World War II on its part. In November 1939, shortly after the outbreak of hostilities between Germany, Britain and France, the Soviet Union staged the shelling of the Russian village of Mainila, which it blamed on the Finns. This manufactured incident was then used as a casus belli for the Winter War. In 1998, Russian President Boris Yeltsin admitted that the invasion had in fact constituted a Soviet war of aggression.
Six-Day War
A casus belli played a prominent role during the Six-Day War of 1967. The Israeli government had a short list of casūs belli, acts that it would consider provocations justifying armed retaliation. The most important was a blockade of the Straits of Tiran leading into Eilat, Israel’s only port to the Red Sea, through which Israel received much of its oil. After several border incidents between Israel and Egypt‘s allies Syria and Jordan, Egypt expelled UNEFpeacekeepers from the Sinai Peninsula, established a military presence at Sharm el-Sheikh, and announced a blockade of the straits, prompting Israel to cite its casus belli in opening hostilities against Egypt.
Vietnam War
Many historians have suggested that the Gulf of Tonkin Incident was a manufactured pretext for the Vietnam War. North Vietnamese Naval officials have publicly stated that the USS Maddox was never fired on by North Vietnamese naval forces.[8][9] In the documentary film “The Fog of War“, then-US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara concedes the attack did not happen, though he says that he and President Johnson believed it did so at the time.[10]
The first Gulf of Tonkin Incident (the 2nd of August) should not be confused with the second Gulf of Tonkin Incident (the 4th of August). The North Vietnamese claimed that on August 2, US destroyer USS Maddox was hit by one torpedo and that one of the American aircraft had been shot down in North Vietnamese territorial waters. The PAVN Museum in Hanoi displays “Part of a torpedo boat… which successfully chased away the USS Maddox August, [sic] 2nd 1964″.
The casus belli for the Vietnam War was the second incident. On August 4, USS Maddox was launched to the North Vietnamese coast to “show the flag” after the first incident. The US authorities claimed that two Vietnamese boats tried to attack USS Maddox and were sunk. The government of North Vietnam denied the second incident completely. Deniability played favorably into the propaganda efforts of North Vietnam throughout the war, and for some years to follow.
1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon
The casus belli cited by Israel for its June 1982 invasion of Lebanon was the attempted assassination of the Israeli Ambassador in London, which the Israeli government blamed on the Palestinian Liberation Organization.[11] A possible invasion plan had been prepared in advance by Israel.[12]
Cited by the George W. Bush administration was Saddam Hussein‘s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program. The administration claimed that Iraq had not conformed with its obligation to disarm under past UN Resolutions, and that Saddam Hussein was actively attempting to acquire a nuclear weapons capability as well as enhance an existing arsenal of chemical and biological weapons. Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed a plenary session of the United Nations Security Council on February 5, 2003 citing these reasons as justification for military action.[15]
Jump up^Childress, James F. (1978). “Just-War Theories: The Bases, Interrelations, Priorities, and Functions of Their Criteria”. Theological Studies. 39: 427–45.
Jump up^Sachar, Howard M.: A History of Israel from the Rise of Zionism to Our Time, Alfred A. Knopf 1996, ISBN0-679-76563-8, page 904.
Jump up^“As early as January 1982, therefore, with Begin‘s approval, Sharon paid a secret visit to Beirut…. By the following month… operational plans for the offensive were well advanced. Israeli liaison officers repeatedly visited Beirut to coordinate strategy with the Phalange. In the end, the Lebanon expedition would be the most thoroughly prepared campaign in Israel’s history.” – Sachar, A History of Israel, p. 903.
Story 1: Big Brother/Sister Alive and Well In Corporate America — An Inconvenient Truth — Google Group Think Diversity Coercion Cult — Firing James Damore Proves Points of Memo — Discrimination in Hiring and Promoting People Based on Gender, Race, Class and Ideology Instead of Achievement, Experience and Merit Leads To Class Action Lawsuits By Women — Make Google Prove The Truth Is A Falsehood — Google Will Settle The Lawsuits Quickly or Pay A Very Large Price — Public Relations Disaster Developing — Conservatives, Classical Liberals, Libertarians Individualists and Rationalists Need Not Apply — Switching From Google Search Engine To Microsoft Bing Search Engine — Videos
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CNN’s Brooke Baldwin Outright Lies About Google Memo; Mary Katharine Ham Pounces
Scott Adams tells you what he thinks about the Google ‘manifesto’ firing
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Ben Shapiro: Google’s ideological echo chamber (audio from 08-07-2017)
The Cult of Diversity at the BBC
Thomas Sowell – The Reality Of Multiculturalism
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Google Violates Labor Laws By Firing Memo Writing Employee
James Damore says his good-faith effort to discuss differences between men and women in tech couldn’t be tolerated in company’s ‘ideological echo chamber’
Former Google software engineer James Damore.PHOTO: PETER DUKE
By James Damore
Aug. 11, 2017 3:54 p.m. ET
I was fired by Google this past Monday for a document that I wrote and circulated internally raising questions about cultural taboos and how they cloud our thinking about gender diversity at the company and in the wider tech sector. I suggested that at least some of the male-female disparity in tech could be attributed to biological differences (and, yes, I said that bias against women was a factor too). Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai declared that portions of my statement violated the company’s code of conduct and “cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace.”
My 10-page document set out what I considered a reasoned, well-researched, good-faith argument, but as I wrote, the viewpoint I was putting forward is generally suppressed at Google because of the company’s “ideological echo chamber.” My firing neatly confirms that point. How did Google, the company that hires the smartest people in the world, become so ideologically driven and intolerant of scientific debate and reasoned argument?
We all have moral preferences and beliefs about how the world is and should be. Having these views challenged can be painful, so we tend to avoid people with differing values and to associate with those who share our values. This self-segregation has become much more potent in recent decades. We are more mobile and can sort ourselves into different communities; we wait longer to find and choose just the right mate; and we spend much of our time in a digital world personalized to fit our views.
Google is a particularly intense echo chamber because it is in the middle of Silicon Valley and is so life-encompassing as a place to work. With free food, internal meme boards and weekly companywide meetings, Google becomes a huge part of its employees’ lives. Some even live on campus. For many, including myself, working at Google is a major part of their identity, almost like a cult with its own leaders and saints, all believed to righteously uphold the sacred motto of “Don’t be evil.”
Echo chambers maintain themselves by creating a shared spirit and keeping discussion confined within certain limits. As Noam Chomsky once observed, “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.”
But echo chambers also have to guard against dissent and opposition. Whether it’s in our homes, online or in our workplaces, a consensus is maintained by shaming people into conformity or excommunicating them if they persist in violating taboos. Public shaming serves not only to display the virtue of those doing the shaming but also warns others that the same punishment awaits them if they don’t conform.
In my document, I committed heresy against the Google creed by stating that not all disparities between men and women that we see in the world are the result of discriminatory treatment. When I first circulated the document about a month ago to our diversity groups and individuals at Google, there was no outcry or charge of misogyny. I engaged in reasoned discussion with some of my peers on these issues, but mostly I was ignored.
Everything changed when the document went viral within the company and the wider tech world. Those most zealously committed to the diversity creed—that all differences in outcome are due to differential treatment and all people are inherently the same—could not let this public offense go unpunished. They sent angry emails to Google’s human-resources department and everyone up my management chain, demanding censorship, retaliation and atonement.
Upper management tried to placate this surge of outrage by shaming me and misrepresenting my document, but they couldn’t really do otherwise: The mob would have set upon anyone who openly agreed with me or even tolerated my views. When the whole episode finally became a giant media controversy, thanks to external leaks, Google had to solve the problem caused by my supposedly sexist, anti-diversity manifesto, and the whole company came under heated and sometimes threatening scrutiny.
It saddens me to leave Google and to see the company silence open and honest discussion. If Google continues to ignore the very real issues raised by its diversity policies and corporate culture, it will be walking blind into the future—unable to meet the needs of its remarkable employees and sure to disappoint its billions of users.
—Mr. Damore worked as a software engineer at Google’s Mountain View campus from 2013 until this past week.
Google has fired the employee who penned a controversial memo on women and tech
The author wrote, among other things, that females suffered from more “neuroticism.”
BY KARA SWISHER@KARASWISHER AUG 7, 2017, 8:46PM EDT
The search giant acts.
In a memo to employees, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the employee who penned a controversial memo that claimed that women had biological issues that prevented them from being as successful as men in tech had violated its Code of Conduct, and that the post had crossed “the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace.”
He added: “To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not OK.”
Pichai’s wording appears to indicate that the employee is likely be fired, which some inside and outside the company have been calling for. A Google spokesperson said the company would not confirm any firing of an individual employee, but in the past others have been let go for violating its Code of Conduct.
(Update: Sources told Recode that the employee has been fired, but Google said it would not comment on individual employees. The memo’s author also confirmed his firing from the company to Bloomberg.)
Once it does happen — and it should not be long — the move is sure to attract a firestorm of criticism on both sides, putting the search giant in the crosshairs of a wider debate about gender issues taking place in Silicon Valley and across the country.
The employee memo — which was up for days without action by Google — went viral within the search giant’s internal discussion boards this weekend, with some decrying it and others defending it. Sources said the company’s top execs have been struggling with how to deal with it and the fallout, trying to decide if its troubling content crossed a line.
Apparently it did. In a memo to employees titled “Our words matter,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that the employee — who has been named on Twitter, although his identity could not be verified — had violated its code of conduct. (I am not publishing his name, because he — and others who disagree with him — have been threatened with violence online.)
Had the employee not belittled women’s skills, I assume, he would not be let go, but he made claims that many consider problematic, although others maintain that his myriad of claims are worthy.
One thing is clear, the memo has become radioactive at Google.
Multiple sources said the memo has caused a massive debate to go on internally, which has devolved in ways not unlike those taking place across the country. “It has been really toxic,” said one person at Google. “It’s a microcosm of America.”
Still, this is a corporation with rules and managers who rule on those rules. So, what is also true is that most free speech is allowed when it comes to the government and within society, but not necessarily within companies. In fact, it is common for people to lose their jobs for making sexist and racist remarks.
That said, Pichai also noted that the memo did raise some important issues, such as the need for more willingness at Google to include more points of view at the company, including more conservative ones.
It’s really a no-win situation for him or anyone, as these issues engender really profound and often ugly disagreement to take place.
But, as Pichai noted, words matter:
“First, let me say that we strongly support the right of Googlers to express themselves, and much of what was in that memo is fair to debate, regardless of whether a vast majority of Googlers disagree with it. However, portions of the memo violate our Code of Conduct and cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace. Our job is to build great products for users that make a difference in their lives. To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not OK. It is contrary to our basic values and our Code of Conduct, which expects ‘each Googler to do their utmost to create a workplace culture that is free of harassment, intimidation, bias and unlawful discrimination.’”
On Sunday, Google’s head of diversity, Danielle Brown, said in a memo — her first to the company — that she would not link to the employee’s memo because “it’s not a viewpoint that I or this company endorses, promotes or encourages.”
Google does not have an easy line to walk, especially since the employee penned a piece he sent across the company that posited, among other things, that women were biologically not suited to do tech.
Titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber,” it begins promisingly enough (and is, for the most part, well-written):
“I value diversity and inclusion, am not denying that sexism exists, and don’t endorse using stereotypes. When addressing the gap in representation in the population, we need to look at population level differences in distributions. If we can’t have an honest discussion about this, then we can never truly solve the problem.”
But then, in what is pretty much the main premise, he went on in detail: “I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.”
What followed was a list of those differences, including a claim that women were more social and artistic and could not take the stress of high-pressure jobs. Hence, “neuroticism,” or higher anxiety and lower stress tolerance, which he claimed was backed up by studies.
Perhaps most disingenuously, the author also claimed that he had no voice, even after penning a 3,000-word memo that he was able to send companywide and also was read by millions more.
In other words, he got heard.
“Psychological safety is built on mutual respect and acceptance, but unfortunately our culture of shaming and misrepresentation is disrespectful and unaccepting of anyone outside its echo chamber,” he wrote.
Well, maybe so, but it also looks like it also will lead to more serious consequences for the employee.
Ironically, Google is now hosting a conference on girls in tech.
It is also in the midst of a lawsuit with the Labor Department, which has alleged that Google has a gender gap in pay. The company has denied this, and has declined to provide salary information to the government. But Google, like many tech companies, has released its diversity statistics — men make up almost 70 percent of the staff and a full 80 percent of the technical employees.
Here is the Pichai memo in total — if you want to also read between the lines:
From: Sundar
Subject: Our words matter
This has been a very difficult few days. I wanted to provide an update on the memo that was circulated over this past week.
First, let me say that we strongly support the right of Googlers to express themselves, and much of what was in that memo is fair to debate, regardless of whether a vast majority of Googlers disagree with it. However, portions of the memo violate our Code of Conduct and cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace. Our job is to build great products for users that make a difference in their lives. To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not OK. It is contrary to our basic values and our Code of Conduct, which expects “each Googler to do their utmost to create a workplace culture that is free of harassment, intimidation, bias and unlawful discrimination.”
The memo has clearly impacted our co-workers, some of whom are hurting and feel judged based on their gender. Our co-workers shouldn’t have to worry that each time they open their mouths to speak in a meeting, they have to prove that they are not like the memo states, being “agreeable” rather than “assertive,” showing a “lower stress tolerance,” or being “neurotic.”
At the same time, there are co-workers who are questioning whether they can safely express their views in the workplace (especially those with a minority viewpoint). They too feel under threat, and that is also not OK. People must feel free to express dissent. So to be clear again, many points raised in the memo — such as the portions criticizing Google’s trainings, questioning the role of ideology in the workplace, and debating whether programs for women and underserved groups are sufficiently open to all — are important topics. The author had a right to express their views on those topics — we encourage an environment in which people can do this and it remains our policy to not take action against anyone for prompting these discussions.
The past few days have been very difficult for many at the company, and we need to find a way to debate issues on which we might disagree — while doing so in line with our Code of Conduct. I’d encourage each of you to make an effort over the coming days to reach out to those who might have different perspectives from your own. I will be doing the same.
I have been on work related travel in Africa and Europe the past couple of weeks and had just started my family vacation here this week. I have decided to return tomorrow as clearly there’s a lot more to discuss as a group — including how we create a more inclusive environment for all.
So please join me, along with members of the leadership team at a town hall on Thursday. Check your calendar soon for details.
Google Fires Employee James Damore Behind Anti-Diversity Memo
The controversy surrounding the firing of former Google engineer James Damore over an internal diversity memo took another turn late Tuesday, as Damore officially filed a formal complaint with the National Labor Relations Board due to his dismissal from Google. It’s also the latest legal move for Damore, who publicly said he wants to take the search giant to court.
At the moment, Damore’s prospects for a case against Google appear to be uncertain. For Google, the company contends the memo clearly had disruptive and hostile effects within its offices. According to a post from Google CEO Sundar Pichai, the former software engineer’s memo had a negative response among Google’s staffers and, more significantly, portions of the document violated the company’scode of conduct for its employees.
While Google initially struggled to handle the early backlash to the diversity manifesto, the company’s progressive culture eventually guided its response. In past research, Jennifer Chatman, professor of management with the Haas School of Business at the University Of California, Berkeley, found that establishing political correctness norms improved creativity and novel thinking among groups of men and women by removing areas for potential uncertainty.
Chatman told International Business Times that Google’s dismissal of Damore reflected how much the company values maintaining its corporate culture and showed the degree of internal hostility caused by the diversity memo.
“You can have a culture in which people articulate values, but unless those values are actually upheld through supporting behaviors that are aligned with those values and sanctioning those that are not aligned, then you have what I would call a vacuous culture,” Chatman said. “What I think Google is doing is simply standing behind its stated values and that’s indicative of a strong culture. It’s not enough just to have the content, you actually have to enforce the cultural norms.”
Damore’s memo was critical of Google’s approach to diversity hiring and staffing.Photo: Getty
Last week, Damore’s 10-page internal memo blasting Google’s approach to diversity hiring was leaked and initially made public by Motherboard. While Damore initially defends his memo’s focus, writing that he values “diversity and inclusion,” the paper prominently contends that women are not represented at higher levels in the tech industry compared to men because of automatic biological differences.
“Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don’t have 50 percent representation of women in tech and leadership,” Damore writes. “Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business.”
Damore’s memo argues female workers generally tend to be more neurotic and move into less detail-focused fields of work due to how they prefer “people rather than things.” It also touches on the dominance of progressive points of view within Silicon Valley and Damore also said that conservative voices are underrepresented at companies like Google.
For female engineers, coders and other technical employees, the idea that a staffer would openly argue that they were at a disadvantage because of their gender and that other employees supported this viewpoint was likely untenable for Google. As Wired reported, the memo received its share of opposition and support within Google’s internal discussion threads. In his memo, Pichai also defended the right to debate and dissenting opinions within Google, but said the memo’s language crossed a line.
“To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not OK,” Pichai said.
In a blog post, former Google senior engineer Yonatan Zunger also points out the practical concerns of trying to continue to work with an employee with a toxic internal reputation:
And as for its impact on you: Do you understand that at this point, I could not in good conscience assign anyone to work with you? I certainly couldn’t assign any women to deal with this, a good number of the people you might have to work with may simply punch you in the face, and even if there were a group of like-minded individuals I could put you with, nobody would be able to collaborate with them. You have just created a textbook hostile workplace environment.
Legal experts have also dismissed common online opposition to the firing on free speech grounds. As a tech company, Google is a private business that’s not subject to First Amendment guidelines.
Plus, the diversity memo would have be a persistent headache for Google if it had chosen to keep Damore onboard as an employee. According to Richard Ford, professor of law at Stanford Law School, employers have a legal obligation to reject blatant instances of discriminatory behavior in the workplace and the Damore memo would’ve been a clear-cut and publicly documented example of this type of comment.
California law does offer some basic protections against alleged retaliation to political speech, but it typically focuses on organizing and activism done outside of the office. Damore’s potential case could argue that he was engaging in worker-related activism, but Ford told IBT that this would a difficult legal approach to pursue.
“Federal labor law prohibits employers from taking adverse action against employees who engaged in work related organizing advocacy (such as union organizing),” Ford said. “This is probably his best shot, but it is a big stretch: the law is designed to protect labor organizing — not general political expression or general criticism of the employer.”
A Google employee made waves when he wrote a 10-page letter ripping the cultist approach to diversity at the campus where he worked and now he has been sent packing by the Orwellian tech giant which has found him guilty of thought crime and independent thinking, both of which are verboten in corporate America.
James Damore was fired after his epic and courageous communique that called into question Google’s policies on forced diversity, biases and the biological unsuitability of women for certain managerial roles in the high-stress corporate environment.
The memo was strictly Mr. Damore’s personal opinion and he makes a lot of very good points that are taboo in today’s corporate fascist environment in which this humble author has personally toiled in.
Take my word that corporate America is an oppressive environment policed by overzealous human resources goon squads and since the election of Donald Trump as president, has become progressively more intolerant to those with conservative viewpoints. Some corporations are even hiring third parties to aggressively monitor off-work social media use by employees, a clear violation of free speech as well as an exercise in witch hunting.
It’s hard to overstate just how bad that it has gotten in the corporate world today. Office grudges can be turned into career killers based on nothing but accusations in which a white male is guilty until proven innocent which is nearly impossible before a kangaroo court of busybodies and social engineers whose biases are sanctioned at the highest levels.
Damore’s memo was rapidly spun into him being a misogynist and a bigot and drew hate and scorn from the left as well as the personal involvement of Google CEO Sundar Pichai resulting in his termination.
Internet giant Google has fired the male engineer at the center of an uproar in Silicon Valley over the past week after he authored an internal memo asserting there are biological causes behind gender inequality in the tech industry.
James Damore, the engineer who wrote the memo, confirmed his dismissal, saying in an email to Reuters on Monday that he had been fired for “perpetuating gender stereotypes”.
Damore said he was exploring all possible legal remedies, and that before being fired, he had submitted a charge to the U.S. National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) accusing Google upper management of trying to shame him into silence.
“It’s illegal to retaliate against an NLRB charge,” he wrote in the email.
Google, a unit of Alphabet Inc based in Mountain View, Calif., said it could not talk about individual employee cases.
Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai told employees in a note on Monday that portions of the anti-diversity memo “violate our Code of Conduct and cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace,” according to a copy of the note seen by Reuters.
Tech website Gizmodo published the memo in its entirety, read it HERE.
A few excerpts:
I value diversity and inclusion, am not denying that sexism exists, and don’t endorse using stereotypes. When addressing the gap in representation in the population, we need to look at population level differences in distributions. If we can’t have an honest discussion about this, then we can never truly solve the problem. Psychological safety is built on mutual respect and acceptance, but unfortunately our culture of shaming and misrepresentation is disrespectful and unaccepting of anyone outside its echo chamber. Despite what the public response seems to have been, I’ve gotten many personal messages from fellow Googlers expressing their gratitude for bringing up these very important issues which they agree with but would never have the courage to say or defend because of our shaming culture and the possibility of being fired. This needs to change.
AND
People generally have good intentions, but we all have biases which are invisible to us. Thankfully, open and honest discussion with those who disagree can highlight our blind spots and help us grow, which is why I wrote this document. Google has several biases and honest discussion about these biases is being silenced by the dominant ideology. What follows is by no means the complete story, but it’s a perspective that desperately needs to be told at Google.
Google’s biases
At Google, we talk so much about unconscious bias as it applies to race and gender, but we rarely discuss our moral biases. Political orientation is actually a result of deep moral preferences and thus biases. Considering that the overwhelming majority of the social sciences, media, and Google lean left, we should critically examine these prejudices.
Unfortunately, in today’s toxic corporate diversity culture such a memo is a suicide note.
Mr. Damore is already being smeared as an Alt-Right fanatic which is the newest catch-all term that the intolerant left uses to label anyone who disagrees with them by throwing them into a nebulous group that ranges from anyone who has ever been critical of Hillary Clinton or U.S. foreign policy towards Russia to full-blown white supremacists. Most of America never even heard the term until Clinton used it as the basis of one of her demagogic speeches on the campaign trail last year. Now Damore has become just another member of that basket of
Most of America never even heard the term until Clinton used it as the basis of one of her demagogic speeches on the campaign trail last year. Now Damore has become just another member of that basket of deplorables that holds those who do not adhere to the false religion of identity politics.
Forced diversity is to corporate America what eugenics was to the Nazis and it is only going to continue to proliferate unless there is an honest national discussion on how damaging that such practices truly are. Hopefully Damore’s letter can be the start of that conversation.
Silicon Valley Firms Are Even Whiter and More Male Than You Thought
Our exclusive data shows that Google, which just released diversity numbers, lags further behind than other major tech firms.
JOSH HARKINSON MAY. 29, 2014 12:15 PM
The gender and ethnicity of Google’s overall workforce Official Google Blog
After stalling for years, Google finally released data on the diversity of its workforce Wednesday, admitting that the company is “miles from where want to be.” Lazlo Bock, Google’s senior vice president of people operations, noted that “being totally clear about the extent of the problem is a really important part of the solution,” adding that the company is supporting code education among historically underrepresented groups.
But those efforts may not be enough. Exclusive data obtained from the Labor Department by Mother Jones shows that top Silicon Valley tech firms lag far behind the general population in diversity, and that while Google is average in its recruitment of women, it has even fewer African-American and Latino employees than other major tech firms.
Google is far from the only Silicon Valley firm that has been tight-lipped about its demographics. Though large companies are legally obligated to report race and gender stats to the federal government, tech firms such as Google, Apple, and Oracle long ago convinced the Labor Department to treat the data as a “trade secret” and withhold it from the public. Mike Swift of the San Jose Mercury News sued the department to get the numbers. In 2010, following a two-year legal battle, he ultimately settled for stats for a handful of the Valley’s largest companies.
Swift’s data went through 2005. To get an update, I filed a Freedom of Information Act request a few months ago asking the Labor Department for its latest race and gender data on the top 10 firms. In order of largest to smallest by market capitalization, it now consists of Apple, Google, Oracle, Cisco Systems, Intel, Gilead Sciences, eBay, Facebook, Hewlett-Packard, and VMware. When I reached out for comment, most of these companies didn’t get back to me. Google responded that it intended to make its stats public, as it now has. The chart up top shows stats for Google’s workforce overall. The nontech workforce is a lot more balanced. But when you look at just the tech jobs, things are far less diverse. For example, 83 percent of the tech jobs are held by men, and 94 percent of those workers are white or Asian.
Google’s tech workforce is far less diverse than its overall workforce. Google
The data I obtained shows that Silicon Valley’s race and gender disparities also are wider when limited to executives and top managers, and more dramatic when compared to the makeup of the state workforce. Google’s stats reflect the same: Its “leadership” is 79 percent male and 72 percent white, which would put it a bit ahead of its peers, except that the report is vague about which specific positions are being included. Here’s what things look like for the Valley’s Top 10 firms, based on our Labor Department data:
The data obtained by Mother Jones illustrates that “many companies pay lip service to diversity rather than making the real changes,” says Telle Whitney, president and CEO of the Anita Borg Institute, a Palo Alto-based nonprofit that promotes the recruitment and retention of women in technology.
Though the technology gender gap originates in college—only about 18 percent of computer science graduates are women—Whitney believes that the imbalance ultimately stems from the failure of Silicon Valley’s leaders to groom more women for top positions, which in turn discourages younger women from entering the field. “First it has to be a priority to have a diverse workforce,” she says. “And the priority has to come from the top.”
Not all of a tech firm’s employees work as coders or engineers. But among those people directly employed in technology positions at Bay Area tech firms, Asians have actually surpassed whites as the dominant racial group:
These numbers are driven, in part, by the heavy reliance of tech companies on the H-1B visa program, which allows US firms to import up to 65,000 foreign workers each year to fill jobs that require “specialized knowledge.” In 2012, more than 40 percent of the H-1B workers in the United States came from India, China, or South Korea. Many of them earn less money for comparable jobs than their American counterparts, which is perhaps one reason why major tech firms have lobbied furiously in Washington to increase the H-1B visa cap.
But Asian Americans are also represented at a high rate in Silicon Valley, and are overrepresented among high school students taking the AP computer science exam:
Prominent techies like to say that the Valley is a pure meritocracy, but the glaring disparities make that a dubious claim. “In polite company, I would say it’s a fallacy,” says Laura Weidman Powers, the executive director of Code2040, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that promotes racial diversity in tech hiring. “In impolite company, I would say it’s bullshit.”
Powers doesn’t think tech corporate leaders are discriminating deliberately; the factors working against black and Latino candidates are more subtle and structural. “Referrals are a huge source of inbound talent for these companies, even when you look at a company as large as a Google or a Facebook,” Powers notes. Given that most Americans run in the social networks of people who look like them, the system benefits the Valley’s dominant groups at the expense of those on the outside.
Code2040 tries to disrupt that dynamic by actively recruiting talented African American and Latino computer science graduates and plugging them into internships at tech companies. But the group still struggles to convince CEOs to make diversity a goal. “For the tech industry, this is newer,” she says. “There is a pretty pervasive mindset of ‘Oh, we’re colorblind. We just see talent.’”
The best case for increasing diversity in Silicon Valley may be financial. Powers’ group gets its name from the year 2040, when people of color are expected to make up the majority of the US population. She argues that tech firms need to hire more people who reflect and understand their customer base. “For any company that has a consumer-facing product” a few years from now, she says, “the communities that use that product will look different.”
Correction: A previous version of this post included a chart showing diversity at Silicon Valley’s top 10 companies in 1999 vs 2012. There was a misinterpretation about one of the datasets used for the chart, so we have since removed it. In addition, the article has been amended to address Google’s breakdown according to tech and nontech jobs, and “leadership” positions.
Diversity stats: 10 tech companies that have come clean
Tech companies often draw criticism for being exclusive and lacking diversity. Here are ten companies that have released diversity numbers to the public. See how they compare.
By Conner Forrest |August 28, 2014, 5:00 AM PST
Diversity is a hot topic among tech companies. More and more, companies are no longer making excuses, rather, they are taking actionable steps to be more diverse in terms of both gender and ethnicity. From corporate giants to early stage startups, many companies are working towards transparency in the workplace.
The following ten companies have released workforce diversity reports. Here’s how they compare.
Google
Google was one of the first big companies to release a report detailing its diversity. Global gender data indicates that Google employees are 70% male and 30% female. Google’s ethnicity data refers to US employees only, and indicates 61% white, 30% Asian, 4% identifying as two or more races, 3% Hispanic, 2% black, and 1% other. Google also has employee resource groups for employees, including groups for Googlers of specific races, veterans, women in engineering, and LGBT employees.
Apple
Apple’s diversity report indicates the same global gender ratio as Google, with 30% female and 70% male employees. When broken down into roles specified as “tech,” that ration changes to 80% male and 20% female. Apple’s US employees are 55% white, 15% Asian, 11% Hispanic, 7% Black, 2% as two or more races, 1% other, and 9% undeclared. CEO Tim Cook was recently noticed for his participation in San Francisco’s annual Gay Pride parade.
Facebook
Facebook released its diversity report in June 2014, showing a similar trend in numbers as companies that went before it. Facebook employees are 69% male and 31% female globally. However, jobs labeled as “non-tech” are 53% male and 47% female. Facebook also only released US ethnic data, which showed a workforce with more than half of the employees identifying as white. For tech jobs at Facebook, 41% of employees identified as Asian, with 3% identifying as Hispanic, and 1% identifying as black.
Twitter
Twitter released its diversity report on the heels of Facebook, in July 2014. Globally, Twitter has the same gender spread seen at the other big companies — 70% male and 30% female. While both genders are equally represented at 50% in “non-tech” jobs, the “tech” jobs at Twitter are 90% male and 10% female. Twitter’s data on employee ethnicity was also US-only, indicating 59% white, 29% Asian, 3% Hispanic, 2% black, 3% two or more races, 2% other, 1% native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, and less than 1% Native American. Twitter also has employee-led affinity groups for employees of color, LGBT employees, and female employees.
Yahoo
Yahoo made headlines when Marissa Mayer became CEO in the summer of 2012, becoming one of the first female CEOs of a highly-visible tech brand. Yahoo’s global workforce is 62% male, 37% female, and 1% un-disclosed. For “non-tech” jobs, Yahoo actually has more female employees than male. Yahoo’s data was released in June 2014, around the same time that many other tech companies were releasing their diversity numbers. At that time, Yahoo reported that its US workforce was 50% white, 39% Asian, 4% Hispanic, 2% black, 2% two or more races, and 2% other or not disclosed.
LinkedIn
At the time LinkedIn reported it’s diversity numbers on it blog, there were 5,400 employees globally. LinkedIn’s global workforce has one of the strongest female representations on this list, with 39% of employees identifying as female and 61% identifying as male. Although, jobs listed as “tech” are 83% male and 17% female. LinkedIn’s US ethnicity reports indicate that the majority of its employees are white at 53%, with the second highest ethic representation as Asian as 38%. However, for “tech” jobs, employees are 60% Asian, 34% white, 3% Hispanic, 1% black, 1% two or more races, and less than 1% other. According to its blog, LinkedIn is trying to better its diversity numbers by partnering with organizations such as the Anita Borg Institute, DevelopHer, and Out & Equal Workplace Advocates.
Pandora
Music-streaming service Pandora lists its diversity numbers on the careers section of its website. Pandora total employee ratio is 50.8% male and 49.2% female, with tech jobs more than 82% male. Leadership at Pandora is almost 85% male. Pandora’s overall workforce is 70.9% white, 12.3% Asian, 7.2% Hispanic, 5.7% two or more races, 3% black, and 1% Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander. Like others, the company has communities for different employees with Pandora Women for female employees, Pandora PRIDE for LGBT employees, and Pandora Mixtape for employees of color.
Pinterest
Pinterest was one of the bigger “startups” to share it numbers during the summer of 2014 when the Goliaths all started spilling the beans. According to the official Pinterest engineering blog, the company is 60% male and 40% female. Most of Pinterest’s gender ratio numbers show a male majority, but not in business operations. Pinterest’s business employees are 66% female and 34% male, although tech jobs are almost 80% male at Pinterest. Pinterest employees are 50% white, 42% Asian, 5% other, 2% Hispanic, and 1% black.
eBay
eBay’s employees around the world are 42% female and 58% male, with its “tech” jobs split at 76% male and 24% female. eBay’s “non-tech” jobs are only 1% off, in favor of male employees, from being even. US data shows eBay’s workforce at 61% white, 24% Asian, 7% black, 5% Hispanic, 1% multi-ethnic, and 1% other. For “tech” jobs at eBay, 55% of employees are Asian and 40% are white, with numbers for both black and Hispanic employees hovering to 2%. eBay had 33,000 employees at the time of its report on its blog, also mentioning that CEO John Donahoe launched the Women’s Initiative Network for eBay.
HP
In 2013, HP employed roughly 317,500 people worldwide, and tracked its diversity among gender and ethnicity sometimes all the way back to 2009. Worldwide, HP’s workforce was 32.5% female in 2013, with 25.6% of managers being female as well. In total, HP’s US workforce is 71.5% white, 14.22% Asian, 6.9% black, 6.06% Hispanic, 0.74% two or more races, 0.48% Native American, and 0.10% Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander. In 2013, HP announced Ascend, a sponsorship program for high-performing female employees, and a Women’s Innovation Council. According to the report, HP also partners with organizations such as Leadership Education for Asian Pacifics (LEAP) and the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering to increase cultural competency.
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Trump warns North Korea threats ‘will be met with fire and fury’
President Donald Trump warns that threats from North Korea “will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.”
North Korea has successfully created a miniaturized nuclear weapon that can fit in its missiles, according to NBC News and The Washington Post.
Jacob Pramuk
President Trump: North Korea will be met with ‘fire and fury’ 39 Mins Ago | 00:27
President Donald Trump on Tuesday warned North Korea about facing “fire and fury” if the isolated nation makes more threats to the United States.
“They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen. He has been very threatening … and I said they will be met with fire, fury and frankly power the likes of which this world has never seen before,” Trump told reporters during what he calls a “working vacation” at his New Jersey golf club.
The development raises the stakes for Trump and other world leaders, who already faced difficult and limited options in dealing with North Korea’s aggression.
The U.N. Security Council on Saturday unanimously put new sanctions on North Korea over its continued missile tests. The country has tested two intercontinental ballistic missiles that landed off the coast of Japan this year. Some analysis has said one of those missiles could potentially reach the mainland United States.
North Korea now making missile-ready nuclear weapons, U.S. analysts say
A confidential assessment by the Defense Intelligence Agency says that North Korea has already developed a miniaturized nuclear weapon that can fit on top of an ICBM. (The Washington Post)
North Korea has successfully produced a miniaturized nuclear warhead that can fit inside its missiles, crossing a key threshold on the path to becoming a full-fledged nuclear power, U.S. intelligence officials have concluded in a confidential assessment.The new analysis completed last month by the Defense Intelligence Agency comes on the heels of another intelligence assessment that sharply raises the official estimate for the total number of bombs in the communist country’s atomic arsenal. The U.S. calculated last month that up to 60 nuclear weapons are now controlled by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Some independent experts believe the number of bombs is much smaller.
The findings are likely to deepen concerns about an evolving North Korean military threat that appears to be advancing far more rapidly than many experts had predicted. U.S. officials last month concluded that Pyongyang is also outpacing expectations in its effort to build an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of striking cities on the American mainland.
While more than a decade has passed since North Korea’s first nuclear detonation, many analysts believed it would be years before the country’s weapons scientists could design a compact warhead that could be delivered by missile to distant targets. But the new assessment, a summary document dated July 28, concludes that this critical milestone has already been reached.
“The IC [intelligence community] assesses North Korea has produced nuclear weapons for ballistic missile delivery, to include delivery by ICBM-class missiles,” the assessment states, in an excerpt read to The Washington Post. The assessment’s broad conclusions were verified by two U.S. officials familiar with the document. It is not yet known whether the reclusive regime has successfully tested the smaller design, although North Korea officially last year claimed to have done so.
The DIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment.
An assessment this week by the Japanese Ministry of Defense also concludes there is evidence to suggest that North Korea has achieved miniaturization.
Kim Jong Un is becoming increasingly confident in the reliability of his nuclear arsenal, analysts have concluded, explaining perhaps the dictator’s willingness to engage in defiant behavior, including missile tests that have drawn criticism even from North Korea’s closest ally, China. On Saturday, both China and Russia joined other members of the U.N. Security Council in approving punishing new economic sanctions, including a ban on exports that supply up to a third of North Korea’s annual $3 billion earnings.
The nuclear progress further raises the stakes for President Trump, who has vowed that North Korea will never be allowed to threaten the United States with nuclear weapons. In an interview broadcast Saturday on MSNBC’s Hugh Hewitt Show, national security adviser H.R. McMaster said the prospect of a North Korea armed with nuclear-tipped ICBMs would be “intolerable, from the president’s perspective.”
“We have to provide all options . . . and that includes a military option,” he said. But McMaster said the administration would do everything short of war to “pressure Kim Jong Un and those around him, such that they conclude it is in their interest to denuclearize.” The options said to be under discussion ranged from new multilateral negotiations to reintroducing U.S. battlefield nuclear weapons to the Korean Peninsula, officials familiar with internal discussions said.
Determining the precise makeup of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal has long been a difficult challenge for intelligence professionals because of the regime’s culture of extreme secrecy and insularity. The country’s weapons scientists have conducted five nuclear tests since 2006, the latest being a 20- to 30-kiloton detonation on Sept. 9, 2016, that produced a blast estimated to be up to twice that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945.
But producing a compact nuclear warhead that can fit inside a missile is a technically demanding feat, one that many analysts believed was still beyond North Korea’s grasp. Last year, state-run media in Pyongyang displayed a spherical device that government spokesmen described as a miniaturized nuclear warhead, but whether it was a real bomb remained unclear. North Korean officials described the September detonation as a successful test of a small warhead designed to fit on a missile, though many experts were skeptical of the claim.
Kim has repeatedly proclaimed his intention to field a fleet of nuclear-tipped ICBMs as a guarantor of his regime’s survival. His regime took a major step toward that goal last month with the first successful tests of a missile with intercontinental range. Video analysis of the latest test revealed that the missile caught fire and apparently disintegrated as it plunged back toward Earth’s surface, suggesting North Korea’s engineers are not yet capable of building a reentry vehicle that can carry the warhead safely through the upper atmosphere. But U.S. analysts and many independent experts believe that this hurdle will be overcome by late next year.
“What initially looked like a slow-motion Cuban missile crisis is now looking more like the Manhattan Project, just barreling along,” said Robert Litwak, a nonproliferation expert at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and author of “Preventing North Korea’s Nuclear Breakout,” published by the center this year. “There’s a sense of urgency behind the program that is new to the Kim Jong Un era.”
While few discount North Korea’s progress, some prominent U.S. experts warned against the danger of overestimating the threat. Siegfried Hecker, director emeritus of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the last known U.S. official to personally inspect North Korea’s nuclear facilities, has calculated the size of North Korea’s arsenal at no more than 20 to 25 bombs. Hecker warned of potential risks that can come from making Kim into a bigger menace than he actually is.
“Overselling is particularly dangerous,” said Hecker, who visited North Korea seven times between 2004 and 2010 and met with key leaders of the country’s weapons programs. “Some like to depict Kim as being crazy — a madman — and that makes the public believe that the guy is undeterrable. He’s not crazy and he’s not suicidal. And he’s not even unpredictable.”
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“The real threat,” Hecker said, “is we’re going to stumble into a nuclear war on the Korean Peninsula.”
In the past, U.S. intelligence agencies have occasionally overestimated the North Korean threat. In the early 2000s, the George W. Bush administration assessed that Pyongyang was close to developing an ICBM that could strike the U.S. mainland — a prediction that missed the mark by more than a decade. More recently, however, analysts and policymakers have been taken repeatedly by surprise as North Korea achieved key milestones months or years ahead of schedule, noted Jeffrey Lewis, director of the Center for Nonproliferation Studies’ East Asia Nonproliferation Program. There was similar skepticism about China’s capabilities in the early 1960s, said Lewis, who has studied that country’s pathway to a successful nuclear test in 1964.
“There is no reason to think that the North Koreans aren’t making the same progress after so many successful nuclear explosions,” Lewis said. “The big question is why do we hold the North Koreans to a different standard than we held [Joseph] Stalin’s Soviet Union or Mao Zedong’s China? North Korea is testing underground, so we’re always going to lack a lot of details. But it seems to me a lot of people are insisting on impossible levels of proof because they simply don’t want to accept what should be pretty obvious.”
Fifield reported from Krabi, Thailand. Yuki Oda in Tokyo contributed to this report.
The right way to play the China card on North Korea
The successful test-fire of the intercontinental ballistic missile Hwasong-14 at an undisclosed location. (Korean Central News Agency/Agence France-Presse via Getty Images)
By Jake Sullivan and Victor ChaJuly 5
Jake Sullivan was national security adviser to Vice President Joe Biden and director of policy planning in the Obama administration. Victor Cha is former director for Asian affairs on the National Security Council and served as deputy head of the U.S. delegation for the six-party talks in the George W. Bush administration.
North Korea’s July 4 intercontinental ballistic missile test raises hard questions for the Trump administration: Is there any path forward that does not lead either to war or to living with a nuclear North Korea that can hit the continental United States? Can effective diplomacy prevent the “major, major conflict” that President Trump has talked about?
There is growing recognition that the old playbook won’t work. Reviving old agreements North Korea has already broken would be fruitless. The Chinese won’t deliver on meaningful pressure. And a military strike could lead to all-out war resulting in millions of casualties. We need to consider a new approach to diplomacy.
That means playing the China card, but not the way it has been played until now. It’s not enough to ask China to pressure Pyongyang to set up a U.S.-North Korea negotiation. China has to be a central part of the negotiation, too. China, rather than the United States, should be paying for North Korea to halt and roll back its nuclear and missile programs. Here’s the logic.
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The best option would be for China to agree to work with us and South Korea toward getting new leadership in North Korea that is less obsessed with weapons of mass destruction. But this is unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future for a litany of reasons: China’s historical ties to its little communist brother; its concerns about regime collapse; its uncertainty about alternative viable power centers to the Kim family; its mistrust of U.S. motives; and its strained relations with South Korea.
The next option would be for China to cut off, or at least severely curtail, its commerce with North Korea, which accounts for 85 to 90 percent of North Korea’s trade, to restrain Pyongyang. But as Trump has recognized in recent tweets, China is unlikely to go this far right now, for the same reasons.
So we are left with a less dramatic form of carrots-and-sticks diplomacy, backed by increasing pressure. But it can’t be a repeat of previous rounds.
In the past, China has largely left it to the United States to put inducements on the table. Together the nuclear agreements executed by the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations cost the United States a half-billion dollars for denuclearization via monthly energy-assistance payments to Pyongyang. (Japan and South Korea also paid their fair share; China paid only a small amount in the Bush agreement.) Meanwhile, China continued to enjoy its trade relationship with North Korea, extracting mineral resources at a fraction of world market prices.
Now China is back, pushing us to the bargaining table, as evidenced by its statement with Russia after Tuesday’s missile test calling for the United States to give up military exercises in exchange for a missile-testing freeze.
According to a confidential assessment by the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, North Korea will be able to field a reliable, nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missile as early as next year. (The Washington Post)
We should reject the freeze-for- freeze. But beyond that, we should tell China that it has to pay to play. The basic trade would be Chinese disbursements to Pyongyang, as well as security assurances, in return for constraints on North Korea’s program. China would be paying not just for North Korean coal, but for North Korean compliance.
In a Chinese freeze-and-rollback agreement, the International Atomic Energy Agency would monitor compliance. If North Korea cheated, China would not be receiving what it paid for. The logical thing would be for it to withhold economic benefits until compliance resumed.
Of course, China might continue to fund the regime anyway. Or North Korea could very well reject such a deal from the start. But these scenarios would leave us no worse off than we are now. And it might well put us in a stronger position. Because China didn’t get what it paid for, or got the cold shoulder from Pyongyang, it might become more receptive to working with us and our allies on other options.
Why would China agree to this plan, given that it has never been willing to put its economic leverage to real use before?
Beijing wants a diplomatic off-ramp to the current crisis. President Xi Jinping is still seeking a good relationship with Trump in this critical year of China’s 19th Party Congress. Furthermore, Chinese frustrations with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un have grown after his execution of family members and regime figures close to China. All this may give the Trump administration marginally more leverage than its predecessors had.
We also have an important stick. If China refuses to proceed along these lines, we would be better positioned to pursue widespread secondary sanctions against Chinese firms doing business with North Korea beyond the Treasury Department’s sanctioning of a Chinese bank last week. We would be left with little choice.
Of course, this idea is no silver bullet. It doesn’t answer the question of how to get verifiable, enforceable, durable constraints on North Korea. It won’t go very far if what North Korea really cares about is extracting something from the United States. But North Korea is the land of lousy options. We should be looking for a strategy that gives us not only a better chance of success but also some advantages if it fails.
Since the NPT entered into force in 1970, three states that were not parties to the Treaty have conducted nuclear tests, namely India, Pakistan, and North Korea. North Korea had been a party to the NPT but withdrew in 2003. Israel is also widely known to have nuclear weapons,[2][3][4][5][6] though it maintains a policy of deliberate ambiguity regarding this (has not acknowledged it), and is not known definitively to have conducted a nuclear test.[7] According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute‘s SIPRI Yearbook of 2014, Israel has approximately 80 nuclear warheads.[8]
According to Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Nuclear Notebook, the total number of nuclear weapons worldwide is estimated at 9,920 in 2017.[9]
South Africa developed nuclear weapons but then disassembled its arsenal before joining the NPT.[10] Nations that are known or thought to have nuclear weapons are sometimes referred to informally as the nuclear club.
The following is a list of states that have admitted the possession of nuclear weapons or are presumed to possess them, the approximate number of warheads under their control, and the year they tested their first weapon and their force configuration. This list is informally known in global politics as the “Nuclear Club”.[11] With the exception of Russia and the United States (which have subjected their nuclear forces to independent verification under various treaties) these figures are estimates, in some cases quite unreliable estimates. In particular, under the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty thousands of Russian and U.S. nuclear warheads are inactive in stockpiles awaiting processing. The fissile material contained in the warheads can then be recycled for use in nuclear reactors.
From a high of 68,000 active weapons in 1985, as of 2016 there are some 4,000 active nuclear warheads and 10,100 total nuclear warheads in the world.[1] Many of the decommissioned weapons were simply stored or partially dismantled, not destroyed.[12]
It is also noteworthy that since the dawn of the Atomic Age, the delivery methods of most states with nuclear weapons has evolved with some achieving a nuclear triad, while others have consolidated away from land and air deterrents to submarine-based forces.
These five states are known to have detonated a nuclear explosive before 1 January 1967 and are thus nuclear weapons states under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, they also happen to be the UN Security Council‘s permanent members with veto power on UNSC resolutions.
The United States developed the first nuclear weapons during World War II in cooperation with the United Kingdom and Canada as part of the Manhattan Project, out of the fear that Nazi Germany would develop them first. It tested the first nuclear weapon on July 16, 1945 (“Trinity“) at 5:30 am, and remains the only country to have used nuclear weapons in war, devastating the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was the first nation to develop the hydrogen bomb, testing an experimental prototype in 1952 (“Ivy Mike“) and a deployable weapon in 1954 (“Castle Bravo“). Throughout the Cold War it continued to modernize and enlarge its nuclear arsenal, but from 1992 on has been involved primarily in a program of Stockpile stewardship.[35][36][37][38] The U.S. nuclear arsenal contained 31,175 warheads at its Cold War height (in 1966).[39] During the Cold War, the United States built approximately 70,000 nuclear warheads, more than all other nuclear-weapon states combined.[40][41]
Russian Federation (formerly part of the Soviet Union)
The Soviet Union tested its first nuclear weapon (“RDS-1“) in 1949, in a crash project developed partially with espionage obtained during and after World War II (see: Soviet atomic bomb project). The Soviet Union was the second nation to have developed and tested a nuclear weapon. The direct motivation for Soviet weapons development was to achieve a balance of power during the Cold War. It tested its first megaton-range hydrogen bomb (“RDS-37“) in 1955. The Soviet Union also tested the most powerful explosive ever detonated by humans, (“Tsar Bomba“), with a theoretical yield of 100 megatons, intentionally reduced to 50 when detonated. After its dissolution in 1991, the Soviet weapons entered officially into the possession of the Russian Federation.[42] The Soviet nuclear arsenal contained some 45,000 warheads at its peak (in 1986); the Soviet Union built about 55,000 nuclear warheads since 1949.[41]
The United Kingdom tested its first nuclear weapon (“Hurricane“) in 1952. The UK had provided considerable impetus and initial research for the early conception of the atomic bomb, aided by the presence of refugee scientists working in British laboratories who had fled the continent. It collaborated closely with the United States and Canada during the Manhattan Project, but had to develop its own method for manufacturing and detonating a bomb as U.S. secrecy grew after 1945. The United Kingdom was the third country in the world, after the United States and Soviet Union, to develop and test a nuclear weapon. Its programme was motivated to have an independent deterrent against the Soviet Union, while also maintaining its status as a great power. It tested its first hydrogen bomb in 1957 (Operation Grapple), making it the third country to do so after the United States and Soviet Union.[43][44] The UK maintained a fleet of V bomberstrategic bombers and ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs) equipped with nuclear weapons during the Cold War. It currently maintains a fleet of four ‘Vanguard’ classballistic missile submarines equipped with Trident II missiles. In 2016, the UK House of Commons voted to renew the British nuclear deterrent with the Dreadnought-class submarine, without setting a date for the commencement of service of a replacement to the current system.
France tested its first nuclear weapon in 1960 (“Gerboise Bleue“), based mostly on its own research. It was motivated by the Suez Crisis diplomatic tension vis-à-vis both the Soviet Union and the Free World allies United States and United Kingdom. It was also relevant to retain great power status, alongside the United Kingdom, during the post-colonial Cold War (see: Force de frappe). France tested its first hydrogen bomb in 1968 (“Opération Canopus“). After the Cold War, France has disarmed 175 warheads with the reduction and modernization of its arsenal that has now evolved to a dual system based on submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) and medium-range air-to-surface missiles (Rafale fighter-bombers). However new nuclear weapons are in development[citation needed] and reformed nuclear squadrons were trained during Enduring Freedom operations in Afghanistan.[citation needed] France signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1992.[45] In January 2006, President Jacques Chirac stated a terrorist act or the use of weapons of mass destruction against France would result in a nuclear counterattack.[46] In February 2015, President Francois Hollande stressed the need for a nuclear deterrent in “a dangerous world”. He also detailed the French deterrent as “less than 300″ nuclear warheads, three sets of 16 submarine-launched ballistic missiles and 54 medium-range air-to-surface missiles” and urged other states to show similar transparency.[47]
China tested its first nuclear weapon device (“596“) in 1964 at the Lop Nur test site. The weapon was developed as a deterrent against both the United States and the Soviet Union. Two years later, China had a fission bomb capable of being put onto a nuclear missile. It tested its first hydrogen bomb (“Test No. 6“) in 1967, a mere 32 months after testing its first nuclear weapon (the shortest fission-to-fusion development known in history).[48] The country is currently thought to have had a stockpile of around 240 warheads, though because of the limited information available, estimates range from 100 to 400.[49][50][51] China is the only NPT nuclear-weapon state to give an unqualified negative security assurance due to its “no first use” policy.[52][53] China signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1992.[45] On February 25, 2015 U.S. Vice Admiral Joseph Mulloy stated to the House Armed Services Committee‘s seapower subcommittee that the U.S. does not believe the PLAN currently deploys SLBMs on their submarine fleet.[54]
Other states declaring possession of nuclear weapons
Large stockpile with global range (dark blue), smaller stockpile with global range (medium blue), small stockpile with regional range (light blue)
India is not a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. India tested what it called a “peaceful nuclear explosive” in 1974 (which became known as “Smiling Buddha“). The test was the first test developed after the creation of the NPT, and created new questions about how civilian nuclear technology could be diverted secretly to weapons purposes (dual-use technology). India’s secret development caused great concern and anger particularly from nations, such as Canada, that had supplied its nuclear reactors for peaceful and power generating needs.[citation needed]
Indian officials rejected the NPT in the 1960s on the grounds that it created a world of nuclear “haves” and “have-nots”, arguing that it unnecessarily restricted “peaceful activity” (including “peaceful nuclear explosives”), and that India would not accede to international control of their nuclear facilities unless all other countries engaged in unilateral disarmament of their own nuclear weapons. The Indian position has also asserted that the NPT is in many ways a neo-colonial regime designed to deny security to post-colonial powers.[55] Even after its 1974 test, India maintained that its nuclear capability was primarily “peaceful”, but between 1988 and 1990 it apparently weaponized two dozen nuclear weapons for delivery by air.[56] In 1998 India tested weaponized nuclear warheads (“Operation Shakti“), including a thermonuclear device.[57]
In July 2005, U.S. President George W. Bush and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announced plans to conclude an Indo-US civilian nuclear agreement.[58] This came to fruition through a series of steps that included India’s announced plan to separate its civil and military nuclear programs in March 2006,[59] the passage of the India–United States Civil Nuclear Agreement by the U.S. Congress in December 2006, the conclusion of a U.S.–India nuclear cooperation agreement in July 2007,[60] approval by the IAEA of an India-specific safeguards agreement,[61] agreement by the Nuclear Suppliers Group to a waiver of export restrictions for India,[62] approval by the U.S. Congress[63] and culminating in the signature of U.S.–India agreement for civil nuclear cooperation[64] in October 2008. The U.S. State Department said it made it “very clear that we will not recognize India as a nuclear-weapon state”.[65] The United States is bound by the Hyde Act with India and may cease all cooperation with India if India detonates a nuclear explosive device. The US had further said it is not its intention to assist India in the design, construction or operation of sensitive nuclear technologies through the transfer of dual-use items.[66] In establishing an exemption for India, the Nuclear Suppliers Group reserved the right to consult on any future issues which might trouble it.[67] As of early 2013, India was estimated to have had a stockpile of around 90–110 warheads.[1]
Pakistan also is not a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Pakistan covertly developed nuclear weapons over decades, beginning in the late 1970s. Pakistan first delved into nuclear power after the establishment of its first nuclear power plant near Karachi with equipment and materials supplied mainly by western nations in the early 1970s. Pakistani President Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto promised in 1971 that if India could build nuclear weapons then Pakistan would too, according to him: “We will develop Nuclear stockpiles, even if we have to eat grass.”
It is believed that Pakistan has possessed nuclear weapons since the mid-1980s.[68] The United States continued to certify that Pakistan did not possess such weapons until 1990, when sanctions were imposed under the Pressler Amendment, requiring a cutoff of U.S. economic and military assistance to Pakistan.[69] In 1998, Pakistan conducted its first six nuclear tests at the Ras Koh Hills in response to the five tests conducted by India a few weeks before.
In 2004, the Pakistani metallurgist Abdul Qadeer Khan, a key figure in Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program, confessed to heading an international black market ring involved in selling nuclear weapons technology. In particular, Khan had been selling gas centrifugetechnology to North Korea, Iran, and Libya. Khan denied complicity by the Pakistani government or Army, but this has been called into question by journalists and IAEA officials, and was later contradicted by statements from Khan himself.[70]
As of early 2013, Pakistan was estimated to have had a stockpile of around 100–120 warheads,[1] and in November 2014 it was projected that by 2020 Pakistan would have enough fissile material for 200 warheads.[71]
North Korea was a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, but announced a withdrawal on January 10, 2003, after the United States accused it of having a secret uranium enrichment program and cut off energy assistance under the 1994 Agreed Framework. In February 2005, North Korea claimed to possess functional nuclear weapons, though their lack of a test at the time led many experts to doubt the claim. However, in October 2006, North Korea stated that due to growing intimidation by the United States, it would conduct a nuclear test to confirm its nuclear status. North Korea reported a successful nuclear test on October 9, 2006 (see 2006 North Korean nuclear test). Most U.S. intelligence officials believe that North Korea did, in fact, test a nuclear device due to radioactive isotopes detected by U.S. aircraft; however, most agree that the test was probably only partially successful.[72] The yield may have been less than a kiloton, which is much smaller than the first successful tests of other powers; boosted fission weapons may have an unboosted yield in this range, which is sufficient to start deuterium-tritium fusion in the boost gas at the center; the fast neutrons from fusion then ensure a full fission yield. North Korea conducted a second, higher yield test on 25 May 2009 (see 2009 North Korean nuclear test) and a third test with still higher yield on 12 February 2013 (see 2013 North Korean nuclear test). North Korea claimed to have conducted its first H-bomb test on 5 January 2016, though measurements of seismic disturbances indicate that the detonation was not consistent with a hydrogen bomb.[73]
Israel is widely known to have been the sixth country in the world to develop nuclear weapons, but has not acknowledged its nuclear forces. It had “rudimentary, but deliverable,” nuclear weapons available as early as 1967.[74] Israel is not a party to the NPT. Israel engages in strategic ambiguity, saying it would not be the first country to “introduce” nuclear weapons into the region, but refusing to otherwise confirm or deny a nuclear weapons program or arsenal. This policy of “nuclear opacity” has been interpreted as an attempt to get the benefits of deterrence with a minimum political cost.[74][75] In 1968, the Israeli Ambassador to the United States, Yitzhak Rabin, affirmed to the United States State Department that Israel would “not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East.” Upon further questioning about what “introduce” meant in this context, however, he said that “he would not consider a weapon that had not been tested as a weapon,” and affirmed that he did not believe that “an unadvertised, untested nuclear device” was really “a nuclear weapon.” He also agreed, however, that an “advertised but untested” device would be considered “introduction.” This has been interpreted to mean that official Israeli policy was that the country could possess a nuclear weapon without technically “introducing” it, so long as it did not test it, and as long as it was “unadvertised”.[76][77]
In 1986, a former Dimona technician, Mordechai Vanunu, disclosed extensive information about the nuclear program to the British press, including photographs of the secret areas of the nuclear site, some of which depicted nuclear weapons cores and designs. Vanunu gave detailed descriptions of lithium-6 separation required for the production of tritium, an essential ingredient of fusion-boosted fission bombs, as well as information about the rate of plutonium production. Vanunu’s evidence was vetted by experienced technical experts before publication, and is considered to be among the strongest evidence for the advanced state of the Israeli nuclear weapons program.[75][78]Theodore Taylor, a former U.S. nuclear device design expert and physicist leading the field[79] especially in small and efficient nuclear weapons, reviewed the 1986 Vanunu leaks and photographs in detail. Taylor concluded that Israel’s thermonuclear weapon designs appeared to be “less complex than those of other nations,” and at the time of the 1986 leaks “not capable of producing yields in the megaton or higher range.” Nevertheless, “they may produce at least several times the yield of fission weapons with the same quantity of plutonium or highly enriched uranium.” In other words, Israel could “boost” the yield of its nuclear fission weapons. According to Taylor, the uncertainties involved in the process of boosting required more than theoretical analysis for full confidence in the weapons’ performance. Taylor therefore concluded that Israel had “unequivocally” tested a miniaturized nuclear device. The Institute for Defense Analyses(IDA) concluded after reviewing the evidence given by Vanunu that as of 1987, “the Israelis are roughly where the U.S. was in the fission weapon field in about 1955 to 1960.” and would require supercomputers or parallel computing clusters to refine their hydrogen bomb designs for improved yields without testing, though noting in 1987 they were already then developing the computer code base required.[80] Israel was first permitted to import US built supercomputers beginning in November 1995.[80]
In a paper by the USAF Counterproliferation Center researcher Lieutenant Colonel Warner D. Farr wrote that much lateral proliferation happened between pre-nuclear France and Israel stating “the French nuclear test in 1960 made two nuclear powers not one—such was the depth of collaboration” and “the Israelis had unrestricted access to French nuclear test explosion data.” minimizing the need for early Israeli testing.[81] West Germany army magazine, Wehrtechnik (“military technology”), claimed that western intelligence documented that Israel had conducted an underground test in the Negev in 1963.[82] There is also speculation that Israel may have tested a nuclear weapon along with South Africa in 1979, but this has not been confirmed, and interpretation of the Vela Incident is controversial. The stated purpose of the Negev Nuclear Research Center near Dimona is to advance basic nuclear science and applied research on nuclear energy.[83]
Under NATOnuclear weapons sharing, the United States has provided nuclear weapons for Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey to deploy and store.[90] This involves pilots and other staff of the “non-nuclear” NATO states practicing, handling, and delivering the U.S. nuclear bombs, and adapting non-U.S. warplanes to deliver U.S. nuclear bombs. However, since all U.S. nuclear weapons are protected with Permissive Action Links, the host states cannot easily arm the bombs without authorization codes from the U.S. Department of Defense.[91] Former Italian President Francesco Cossiga acknowledged the presence of U.S. nuclear weapons in Italy.[92] U.S. nuclear weapons were also deployed in Canada as well as Greece from 1963 to 1984. However, Canada withdrew three of the four nuclear-capable weapons systems by 1972. The single system retained, the AIR-2 Genie, had a yield 1.5 kilotons, was designed to strike enemy aircraft as opposed to ground targets, and might not have qualified as a weapon of mass destruction given its limited yield.[93]
Members of the Non-Aligned Movement have called on all countries to “refrain from nuclear sharing for military purposes under any kind of security arrangements.”[94] The Institute of Strategic Studies Islamabad (ISSI) has criticized the arrangement for allegedly violating Articles I and II of the NPT, arguing that “these Articles do not permit the NWS to delegate the control of their nuclear weapons directly or indirectly to others.”[95] NATO has argued that the weapons’ sharing is compliant with the NPT because “the U.S. nuclear weapons based in Europe are in the sole possession and under constant and complete custody and control of the United States.”[96]
States formerly possessing nuclear weapons
Nuclear weapons have been present in many nations, often as staging grounds under control of other powers. However, in only one instance has a nation given up nuclear weapons after being in full control of them. The fall of the Soviet Union left several former Soviet republics in physical possession of nuclear weapons, though not operational control which was dependent on Russian-controlled electronic Permissive Action Links and the Russian command and control system.[97][98]
Alleged Spare bomb casings from South Africa’s nuclear weapon programme. Their purpose is disputed.[99]
South Africa produced six nuclear weapons in the 1980s, but dismantled them in the early 1990s.
In 1979, there was a detection of a putative covert nuclear test in the Indian Ocean, called the Vela incident. It has long been speculated that it was a test by Israel, in collaboration with and support of South Africa, though this has never been confirmed. South Africa could not have constructed such a nuclear bomb until November 1979, two months after the “double flash” incident. South Africa signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1991.[100][101]
Belarus had 81 single warhead missiles stationed on its territory after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. They were all transferred to Russia by 1996. In May 1992, Belarus acceded to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.[102]
Kazakhstan inherited 1,400 nuclear weapons from the Soviet Union, and transferred them all to Russia by 1995. Kazakhstan has since acceded to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.[103]
Ukraine has acceded to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Ukraine inherited about 5,000 nuclear weapons when it became independent from the Soviet Union in 1991, making its nuclear arsenal the third-largest in the world.[104] By 1996, Ukraine had agreed to dispose of all nuclear weapons within its territory, with the condition that its borders were respected, as part of the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances. The warheads were disassembled in Russia.[105] Despite Russia’s subsequent and internationally disputed annexation of Crimea in 2014, Ukraine reaffirmed its 1994 decision to accede to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as a non-nuclear-weapon state.[106]
Jump up^All numbers are estimates from the Federation of American Scientists. The latest update was in April 2017. If differences between active and total stockpile are known, they are given as two figures separated by a forward slash. If specifics are not available (n.a.), only one figure is given. Stockpile number may not contain all intact warheads if a substantial amount of warheads are scheduled for but have not yet gone through dismantlement; not all “active” warheads are deployed at any given time. When a range of weapons is given (e.g., 0–10), it generally indicates that the estimate is being made on the amount of fissile material that has likely been produced, and the amount of fissile material needed per warhead depends on estimates of a country’s proficiency at nuclear weapon design.
Jump up^From the 1960s until the 1990s, the United Kingdom’s Royal Air Force maintained the independent capability to deliver nuclear weapons via its V bomber fleet.
Jump up^France formerly possessed a nuclear triad until 1996 and the retirement of its land-based arsenal.
References
Story 2: President Trump’s Golden Opportunity To Negotiate With Communist China — Trump Ultimatum: Destroy North Korea’s Nuclear and Missile Capabilities Or Face A Total Trade and Investment Ban With The United States — China Enabled North Korea Now It Must Disable Their Nuclear and Missile Forces No Later Than 1 January 2018 — Videos
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Trump considers trade actions against China
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Here’s Who Could Lose the Most in a U.S.-China Trade War
An embargo (from the Spanishembargo, meaning hindrance, obstruction, etc. in a general sense, a trading ban in trade terminology and literally “distraint” in juridic parlance) is the partial or complete prohibition of commerce and trade with a particular country or a group of countries.[1] Embargoes are considered strong diplomatic measures imposed in an effort, by the imposing country, to elicit a given national-interest result from the country on which it is imposed. Embargoes are similar to economic sanctions and are generally considered legal barriers to trade, not to be confused with blockades, which are often considered to be acts of war.[2]
Embargoes can mean limiting or banning export or import, creating quotas for quantity, imposing special tolls, taxes, banning freight or transport vehicles, freezing or seizing freights, assets, bank accounts, limiting the transport of particular technologies or products (high-tech) for example CoCom during the cold-war.[3]
In response to embargoes, an independent economy or autarky often develops in an area subjected to heavy embargo. Effectiveness of embargoes is thus in proportion to the extent and degree of international participation.
Business
Companies must be aware of embargoes that apply to the intended export destination.[4] Embargo check is difficult for both importers and exporters to follow. Before exporting or importing to other countries, firstly, they must be aware of embargoes. Subsequently, they need to make sure that they are not dealing with embargoed countries by checking those related regulations, and finally they probably need a license in order to ensure a smooth export or import business. Sometimes the situation becomes even more complicated with the changing of politics of a country. Embargoes keep changing. In the past, many companies relied on spreadsheets and manual process to keep track of compliance issues related to incoming and outgoing shipments, which takes risks of these days help companies to be fully compliant on such regulations even if they are changing on a regular basis. If an embargo situation exists, the software blocks the transaction for further processing.
Examples
An undersupplied U.S. gasoline station, closed during the oil embargo in 1973
The Embargo of 1807 was a series of laws passed by the U.S. Congress 1806–1808, during the second term of President Thomas Jefferson.[5] Britain and France were engaged in a major war; the U.S. wanted to remain neutral and trade with both sides, but neither side wanted the other to have the American supplies.[6] The American national-interest goal was to use the new laws to avoid war and force that country to respect American rights.[7]
One of the most comprehensive attempts at an embargo happened during the Napoleonic Wars. In an attempt to cripple the United Kingdom economically, the Continental System – which forbade European nations from trading with the UK – was created. In practice it was not completely enforceable and was as harmful if not more so to the nations involved than to the British.[8]
The United States imposed an embargo on Cuba on February 7, 1962.[9] Referred to by Cuba as “el bloqueo” (the blockade),[10] the US embargo on Cuba remains one of the longest-standing embargoes.[11] The embargo was embraced by few of the United States’ allies and apparently has done little to affect Cuban policies over the years.[12] Nonetheless, while taking some steps to allow limited economic exchanges with Cuba, President Barack Obamareaffirmed the policy, stating that without improved human rights and freedoms by Cuba’s current government, the embargo remains “in the national interest of the United States.”[13]
In effort to punish South Africa for its policies of apartheid, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a voluntary international oil embargo against South Africa on November 20, 1987; that embargo had the support of 130 countries.[16]
Iran (by US and US international allies), notably bar nuclear, missile and many military exports to Iran and target investments in: oil, gas and petrochemicals, exports of refined petroleum products, banks, insurance, financial institutions, and shipping.[18] Enacted 1979, increased through the following years and reached its tightest point in 2010.[19]
Indonesia (by Australia), live cattle because of cruel slaughter methods in Indonesia.[21]
Gaza Strip by Israel since 2001, under arms blockade since 2007 due to the large number of illicit arms traffic used to wage war, (occupied officially from 1967 to 2005).
EU, US, Australia, Canada and Norway (by Russia) since August 2014, beef, pork, fruit and vegetable produce, poultry, fish, cheese, milk and dairy.[23] On August 13, 2015, the embargo was expanded to Albania, Montenegro, Switzerland, Japan, Iceland, and Liechtenstein.[24]
By Carroll Kilpatrick
Washington Post Staff Writer
June 11, 1971
President Nixon opened another door to the resumption of more normal relations with China yesterday with an order permitting trade in a long list of nonstrategic items.
At the same time, the President cleared the way for larger farm exports to the Soviet bloc by terminating a requirement imposed by President Kennedy that half of grain and flour shipments to Communist countries be carried in American ships.
The President’s action lifts a 21-year-old embargo against trade with China permitting selected exports to China and the import of goods from China on the same basis goods from other Communist countries are admitted.
Following a series of other steps taken in recent months to improve relations with the Chinese, the President’s announcement is considered a prelude to an ending later this year of U.S. opposition to the seating of Peking in the United Nations, provided that Taiwan is not expelled.
Under the new order, U.S. exporters will be free to sell to China most farm, fish and forestry products, fertilizers, coal, selected chemicals and metals, passenger cards, agricultural, industrial and office equipment and certain electronic and communications equipment.
The President’s order does not remove the prohibition against the shipment of locomotives to China, one of the key items the Peking government is said to want, and of aircraft.
Defense department officials opposed lifting the ban on most heavy transportation equipment with the argument it could be used in helping Communist troops in Vietnam.
The President accepted the argument, but officials said that the list of goods still on the strategic list would be under constant review and that changes would be made from time to time.
An exporter may apply to the Commerce Department for a license to ship a locomotive or any other item on the strategic list, and the White House held out some hope that exceptions may be made from time to time.
“Items not on the open general list may be considered for specific licensing consistent with the requirements of U.S. national security,” the White House statement said.
The big surprise of the President’s announcement was his termination of the requirement that half of the shipment of grain and flour to Communist nations be carried in American ships.
AFL-CIO President George Meany promptly criticized the President’s decision, calling it a “breach of faith and an unwarranted blow at the livelihoods of American seafaring men.”
Secretary of Agriculture Clifford M. Hardin cautioned that farmers should not expect big increases in grain exports immediately.
“We hope it will eventually result in meaningful trade for farm exports along with products from American industry,” Hardin said. “We do not anticipate significant trade developments with either China or the Soviet Union in the immediate future.”
But Hardin hailed the President’s action as a “constructive step” that will ultimately benefit American farmers.
U.S.-China trade was roughly $200 million annually in 1950 when President Truman imposed an embargo after China entered the Korean War on the North Korean side.
China’s total world trade now totals about $2 billion in exports and the same in imports with about $1.5 billion from non-Communist countries, the bulk of it from Japan.
White House press secretary Ronald Ziegler said that the President looks upon these new measures “as a significant step in improved communications with a land of 800 million people after a 20-year freeze in our relations.”
“The President will later consider the possibility of further steps in an effort to reestablish a broader relationship with a country and people having an important role for future peace in Asia.”
The list of strategic goods which may be freely shipped to Mainland China does not include such items as petroleum products, navigation and tele-communication equipment and machinery for wielding large pipes in addition to locomotives.
These goods may be shipped to the Soviet Union, however. They constitute the main difference between the list of goods available for export to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and those still requiring an export license as far as China is concerned.
Some experts have argued that Peking will not be responsive to the new possibilities of trade with the United States since the list is more favorable to the Soviet Union.
Administration officials were sensitive to this criticism and discounted the differences between the two lists as insignificant.
The President’s announcement said that he was taking “the first broad steps in termination of U.S. controls on a large list of non-strategic U.S. exports to the People’s Republic of China.”
In the future, products listed as non-strategic may be freely sold to China under open general export licenses without the need to obtain Department of Commerce permission for each specific transaction,” the statement said.
On April 14, Mr. Nixon announced a five-point program designed to “create broader opportunities for contacts between the Chinese and American peoples.” These included a promise to expedite the issuance of visas to permit Chinese visitors to the United States, a relaxation of currency controls to permit Peking’s use of American dollars and the removal of restrictions prohibiting American oil companies from providing fuel to Chinese merchant ships.
On April 19, in an interview at a meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the President said the question of trade with the Chinese is “up to them.”
“If the want to trade … we are ready,” he said. “If they want to have Chinese come to the United States, we are ready. We are also ready for Americans to go there, Americans in all walks of life.
“But it take two, of course. We have taken several steps. They have taken one inviting the American table tennis team to Peking. We are prepared to take other steps in the trade field and also with regard to the exchange field, but each step must be taken one step at a time.
Breaking News — Story 1: Special Counsel Robert Mueller III Impanels Grand Jury for Russian Investigation and Alleged Russia/Trump Collusion Conspiracy Theory — Videos —
TRUMP BREAKING NEWS 8/3/17 WSJ: MUELLER IMPANELS GRAND JURY IN RUSSIA PROBE
Report: Mueller empowers grand jury in Russia investigation
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Senators Take Action to Protect Robert Mueller’s Trump Investigation
Mary Clare Jalonick / AP
10:54 AM ET
(WASHINGTON) — Two members of the Senate Judiciary Committee are moving to protect Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s job, putting forth new legislation that aims to ensure the integrity of current and future independent investigations.
Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Democratic Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware plan to introduce the legislation Thursday. The bill would allow any special counsel for the Department of Justice to challenge his or her removal in court, with a review by a three-judge panel within 14 days of the challenge.
The bill would apply retroactively to May 17, 2017 — the day Mueller was appointed by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to investigate allegations of Russian meddling in the 2016 election and possible ties between Russia and Donald Trump’s campaign.
“It is critical that special counsels have the independence and resources they need to lead investigations,” Tillis said in a statement. “A back-end judicial review process to prevent unmerited removals of special counsels not only helps to ensure their investigatory independence, but also reaffirms our nation’s system of check and balances.”
Mueller was appointed as special counsel following Trump’s abrupt firing of FBI Director James Comey. Mueller, who was Comey’s predecessor as FBI director, has assembled a team of prosecutors and lawyers with experience in financial fraud, national security and organized crime to investigate contacts between Moscow and the Trump campaign.
Trump has been critical of Mueller since his appointment, and the president’s legal team is looking into potential conflicts surrounding the team Mueller has hired, including the backgrounds of members and political contributions by some members of his team to Hillary Clinton. He has also publicly warned Mueller that he would be out of bounds if he dug into the Trump family’s finances.
Mueller has strong support on Capitol Hill. Senators in both parties have expressed concerns that Trump may try to fire Mueller and have warned him not to do so.
“Ensuring that the special counsel cannot be removed improperly is critical to the integrity of his investigation,” Coons said.
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, another member of the judiciary panel, said last week that he was working on a similar bill that would prevent the firing of a special counsel without judicial review. Graham said then that firing Mueller “would precipitate a firestorm that would be unprecedented in proportions.”
Democratic Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey is also working on Graham’s legislation, according to Booker’s office. Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, has yet to signal support for either measure.
The Tillis and Coons bill would allow review after the special counsel had been dismissed. If the panel found there was no good cause for the counsel’s removal, the person would be immediately reinstated. The legislation would also codify existing Justice Department regulations that a special counsel can only be removed for misconduct, dereliction of duty, incapacity, conflict of interest or other good cause, such as a violation of departmental policies.
In addition, only the attorney general or the most senior Justice Department official in charge of the matter could fire the special counsel.
In the case of the current investigation, Rosenstein is charged with Mueller’s fate because Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from all matters having to do with the Trump-Russia investigation.
Exclusive: top FBI officials could testify against Trump
The acting head of the bureau told top officials to prepare.
Updated by Murray Waas Aug 3, 2017, 9:40am EDT
Shortly after the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller in May, acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe told several of the highest-ranking managers of the bureau they should consider themselves possible witnesses in any investigation into whether President Donald Trump engaged in obstruction of justice, according to two senior federal law enforcement officials.
McCabe has told colleagues that he too is a potential witness in the probe of whether Trump broke the law by trying to thwart the FBI’s Russia investigation and the investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government to defeat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.
Two senior federal law enforcement officials have told me that the new revelations illustrate why they believe the potential case against Trump is stronger than outsiders have thought.
“What you are going to have is the potential for a powerful obstruction case,” a senior law enforcement official said. “You are going to have the [former] FBI director testify, and then the acting director, the chief of staff to the FBI director, the FBI’s general counsel, and then others, one right after another. This has never been the word of Trump against what [James Comey] has had to say. This is more like the Federal Bureau of Investigation versus Donald Trump.”
Trump and his supporters have long argued that it would be difficult, if not impossible, for the special counsel to bring an obstruction case against Trump. The case would rely on the word of one man versus another, that of the president of the United States versus the FBI director he fired. But this was never the case.
Including Comey, as many as 10, and possibly more, of the nation’s most senior law enforcement officials are likely to be questioned as part of the investigation into whether Trump committed obstruction of justice, according to two government investigators with firsthand knowledge of the matter. Comey’s notes on his conversations could also be used as evidence, according to many reports.
The White House declined to comment. First contacted by email by on July 27, White House spokesperson Kelly Love responded late Wednesday saying, “This would be a question for outside counsel.” Love did not name which of the president’s many lawyers to contact. Marc E. Kasowitz, an attorney for the president, did not respond to a phone message Wednesday evening. The FBI also declined to comment.
FBI agents are experienced witnesses who routinely testify in high-pressure cases. Plus, the FBI itself is a rare public institution that is widely respected and trusted by the American public. The witness list and breadth of possible evidence, including notes Comey and several other senior FBI officials made at the time, could add up to a much stronger obstruction of justice case than Trump ever could have imagined.
Among those who McCabe and other law enforcement officials have privately believed are potential witnesses are six of the highest-ranking officials of the agency: They include McCabe himself; Jim Rybicki, Comey’s chief of staff; James Baker, the general counsel of the FBI; David Bowdich, who as the FBI’s associate director is the agency’s third-highest official; and Carl Ghattas, the head of the FBI’s national security division and a legal adviser to McCabe. McCabe was deputy director of the FBI until May, when he became acting director after President Trump fired Comey.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and a third senior Justice Department official are believed by law enforcement officials to be crucial fact witnesses in the obstruction probe. Their testimony is likely to support Comey and harm Trump, according to investigators and outside experts.
Mueller’s case is looking stronger than Trump surrogates say
In May, Mueller was appointed special counsel to investigate whether Trump colluded with the Russian government to help defeat Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election. A related area of inquiry for the special counsel is whether Trump obstructed justice when he allegedly asked Comey to shut down his inquiry of Trump’s former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.
Trump made sure he and Comey were alone when he allegedly pressured the then-FBI director to curtail the FBI’s Russia investigation. At a private White House dinner on January 27, Trump allegedly pressed Comey to pledge his personal loyalty. The dinner came right after the president learned Flynn was under criminal investigation.
Later, on February 14, Trump allegedly leaned on Comey privately in an Oval Office meeting to shut down the FBI’s investigation of Flynn. Comey did not drop the investigation or take other steps Trump requested that the then-director of the FBI felt were improper. Trump then fired Comey on May 9.
Mueller is investigating whether Trump’s pressure on Comey to shut down his investigation — combined with other efforts to thwart the investigation, including firing Comey — are an obstruction of justice. As such, Comey is the central witness against Trump in any such obstruction investigation. That Trump was ordinarily alone with Comey when these various incidents occurred has led Trump and his surrogates to argue that it would be difficult for any obstruction of justice case to be brought because it would be based solely on Comey’s word.
“We have to keep in mind that is one person’s record of what happened,” Republican National Committee Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel said on Fox News in one typical comment repeated by White House surrogates. “The only two people who know what happened in these meeting are the president and James Comey.”
But even though Trump took great pains to try to be alone with Comey when they spoke, Comey regularly spoke to the six high-ranking FBI managers, often right after a distressing conversation with Trump about the Russia probe.
Comey spoke to these FBI officials almost always within 24 to 48 hours after such a contact took place, according to two senior federal law enforcement officials. A person familiar with the matter told me they know for certain there were at least eight such conversations — and likely more than a dozen — that Comey had with these high-ranking FBI managers, sometimes one on one, sometimes in groups of several officials. More than one such meeting was longer than an hour.
And in at least one previously unreported instance — that of a phone conversation between the president and Comey, during which Trump pressed Comey to say that Trump wasn’t personally under investigation — Rybicki, Comey’s chief of staff, was present for the entirety of the phone call.
Trump had unexpectedly called Comey while Comey was in a meeting with Rybicki. As Trump and the then-FBI director spoke, Rybicki stayed put and listened to the entirety of Comey’s side of the conversation, according to Comey’s testimony to Congress and a senior federal law enforcement official.
In addition, Comey often emailed Rybicki accounts of his troublesome discussions with Trump about the Russia investigation — if not immediately after, sometimes the same day, according to a senior federal law enforcement official.
Baker, the FBI general counsel, took methodical notes during his discussions with Comey and others in the FBI hierarchy about Trump’s efforts to thwart the FBI’s investigation, according to these same sources.
Law enforcement officials are likely to be questioned
I interviewed current and former law enforcement officials, including some who, though not directly involved in the investigation, have held key positions working for independent counsels or special prosecutors investigating earlier presidents. They told me they agree with McCabe’s assertions that the senior FBI managers are almost certainly to be questioned for any investigation of President Trump for obstruction of justice.
Sam Buell, a Duke University law professor who has previously served as a federal prosecutor in New York, Boston, Washington, DC, and Houston, similarly told me that Mueller will almost certainly interview all six senior FBI officials that Comey confided in, as well as Sessions and Rosenstein: “In any high-stakes matter, you are going to want to talk to anyone in the vicinity of a conversation. It doesn’t mean that they end up as trial witness. But at an investigative stage, you are going to talk to all of these people. You want their stories locked in. You want to know if what they have to say would help you or hurt you.”
John Keker, who during the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations prosecuted retired Lt. Oliver North for the Iran-Contra special prosecutor, explained to me: “Think of any crime. The defense might make the case that the accuser made it up. The questions for the witness are: ‘Did you just make this up?’ ‘Are you just saying this now?’ ‘Why didn’t you say something before?’ ‘Whom did you say something to? Did you write it down?’
“But if they told people when it happens, it makes their story more plausible. It helps their credibility. In this case, the people Comey told were multiple senior FBI officials.”
Other evidence is there too
In addition to the actual testimony of Comey and nine other senior federal law enforcement officials against the president, there is other related corroboratory evidence created as a result of those conversations. And this could bolster any potential obstruction of justice case against Trump.
There are Comey’s now-famous notes, which are careful, meticulous accounts of his meetings with the president. They are powerful not only for their detail but even for the atmospherics that tell a compelling story, according to people who have read portions of them.
Explaining why he took these notes, Comey told Congress: “I knew that there might come a day when I would need a record of what had happened, not just to defend myself but also to defend the FBI and our integrity as an institution and the independence of our investigative function. … [I]t was a combination of circumstances, subject matter, and the particular person.”
FBI agents and managers are inveterate note takers. It is part of the culture of the FBI. Several of the senior FBI managers Comey consulted with are also attorneys, who have similar traditions of memorializing important matters by taking careful and contemporaneous notes.
“That’s the culture of the FBI — you habitually document everything you do,” Lauren C. Anderson, a former senior FBI official who worked for the bureau for 29 years, told the New York Times, explaining why Comey made notes of his crucial conversations with the president. Her comments also would appear to explain why other senior FBI managers might have made similar sets of notes about their conversations with Comey.
Although it is unclear which FBI managers took notes and which did not, at least one person familiar with the matter said that James Baker, the FBI’s general counsel, made detailed notes of virtually every conversation with Comey or others about the Russia probe.
Those notes by Baker are crucial to investigators because Baker was a lively participant in discussions about whether to inform the Justice Department of the president’s pressure on Comey to end the Flynn investigation. During discussions about whether Comey or the Justice Department should give in to Trump’s request to say the investigation had not focused on him, Baker was the primary and strongest proponent that they not do so.
The potential testimony by Comey, McCabe, and so many other FBI witnesses could prove damning to Trump for other reasons. FBI agents and their managers are more than just highly credible witnesses. In the course of a typical FBI agent’s career, he or she works closely with federal prosecutors in making cases based on the testimony of witnesses first interviewed by the agent, and often testifies as a witness in cases, some dozens of times in the course of a career.
While most major governmental institutions have, according to most polls and surveys, faced some of their lowest ratings ever, the American public still retains strong confidence in its FBI. A November 2015 Pew Research national survey found that 68 percent of all Americans viewed the FBI favorably. Only four other federal agencies ranked higher: the US Postal Service, the National Park Service, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and NASA.
Even Trump allies could hurt Trump
Comey testified to Congress that he shared with senior managers of the FBI the president’s efforts to thwart the bureau’s Russia investigation. But he did not inform the Justice Department of those efforts prior to Trump firing him. A major reason he didn’t do so, Comey said, was because the FBI’s leaders told him, “Look, it’s your word against the president’s. There’s no way to corroborate this.”
But Comey testified that during a private meeting with Sessions about another matter — “the president’s concerns about leaks” — he took the opportunity “to implore the attorney general to prevent any future direct communication between the president and me.” Comey told Sessions that leaving him alone with Trump “was inappropriate and should never happen again.” Comey said that Sessions “did not reply at all, his body language suggesting he was helpless or unwilling to do anything.”
Comey also testified that he expressed similar concerns to Rosenstein: “I explained my serious concern about the way in which the president is interacting, especially with the FBI.”
In his own testimony to Congress, Sessions sharply disputed Comey’s claim that he said or did nothing when Comey raised these concerns, saying he told Comey “that the FBI and Department of Justice needed to follow department policies regarding appropriate contact with the White House.”
But more importantly, while taking issue with that one aspect of the story, Sessions largely corroborated Comey’s account under oath — about how uncomfortable the then-FBI director felt with the president’s interactions with the FBI. Sessions is a Trump loyalist, the first US senator to endorse Trump, and the Trump administration’s attorney general — this only enhances his credibility as a witness whose testimony would harm Trump. (Of course, that relationship is now severely strained.) That Sessions recommended Comey’s firing as FBI director also, ironically, enhances his credibility as a corroboratory witness of Comey’s and against the president.
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Immigration battle brewing in the GOP
By Jordain Carney – 08/03/17 06:00 AM EDT
Republicans are barreling toward a fight over immigration policy that could expose deep divisions in the party.
A renewed push by GOP Sens. Tom Cotton (Ark.) and David Perdue (Ga.) to crack down on legal immigration is threatening to pit President Trump, who endorsed their legislation, against GOP senators who want broader reforms.
The bill, which got a White House rollout on Wednesday, would fundamentally overhaul the immigration system. It would curtail the number of legal immigrants admitted into the country, cutting the total roughly in half.
The legislation, supporters say, would help enshrine a shift in Republican Party politics that was prominent in Trump’s campaign rhetoric, where he frequently warned that immigrants were taking American jobs.”As a candidate I campaigned on creating a merit-based immigration system that protects American workers and tax payers,” Trump said at the White House while standing next to Cotton and Perdue.
The measure faces a difficult path to 60 votes in the Senate, which would require the support of at least eight Democrats, not to mention every GOP senator — a scenario that appears highly unlikely.
Pressed Wednesday about how the bill could pass Congress, White House aide Stephen Miller said the legislation represented a “major promise” to Americans.
“This is what President Trump campaigned on. He talked about it throughout the campaign, throughout the transition, and since coming into office,” said Miller, who was formerly a staffer for then-Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), one of the Senate’s most vocal immigration hawks who is now attorney general.
But many in the GOP are opposed to reshaping the party’s immigration policies in Trump’s image
Critics of Trump’s approach fear opposition to immigration reform will damage the party’s long-term electoral chances, given the nation’s growing Latino and Asian populations. Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton won 65 percent of the Latino and Asian vote in the 2016 presidential election, according to exit polling.
There are already early signs of pushback from multiple factions within the Senate GOP conference to the legal immigration limits, including members who are worried about the impact on businesses.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, said there could be an “awful lot” in the bill that he could support but warned against limiting his state’s labor pool.
“Dairy farmers need migrant labors. … So we really need to take a look at the reality of the situation,” Johnson, who has close ties to the business community, told reporters. “I don’t want to limit what our economy needs.”
Cotton, responding to some of his colleague’s criticism, noted the legislation wouldn’t touch the guest worker program, which allows immigrants to temporarily come into the country.
Meanwhile, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), part of the “Gang of Eight” that helped craft the 2013 immigration bill, ripped the Cotton–Perdue proposal within hours of its White House rollout.
“If this proposal were to become law, it would be devastating to our state’s economy, which relies on this immigrant workforce,” Graham said.
He added he is worried the legislation “incentivizes more illegal immigration,” saying “after dealing with this issue for more than a decade, I know that when you restrict legal labor to employers it incentivizes cheating.”
Illustrating the wider disagreement in the GOP about immigration policy, Graham has worked on two bills this year with Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) that would allow undocumented immigrants brought into country as children to remain here legally, at least temporarily.
GOP Sens. Jeff Flake (Ariz.), Dean Heller (Nev.) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) have signed on to at least one of Graham’s bills. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who is currently undergoing treatment for brain cancer, also signaled earlier this year that he was opposed to attempts to crack down on legal immigration.
The Cotton–Perdue bill seems likely to rekindle the long-running debate over which section of the party — those who want broader immigration reforms or the protectionist strain that rose to new prominence with Trump — has the public’s support.
The legislation would curb the number of green cards, which give immigrants permanent residence, issued each year and establishes a “merit-based” points system for individuals who want to come into the country.
Cotton and Perdue will have to walk a political tightrope to get their bill enacted. They will be under pressure from moderate GOP senators and Democrats to make fundamental revisions to their bill, but any move to make it more lenient toward or address undocumented immigration could erode conservative support.
Perdue said for the moment he is focused on trying to garner support for the legislation.
“We have had conversations with them. We’ve met with [Senate Judiciary Committee] Chairman [Chuck] Grassley. … We know we’re going to work it through committee and go regular order, obviously. What we’re trying to do right now is garner support inside the Senate,” he said, when asked if he has talked to GOP leadership.
The bill could face its first test in the Senate Judiciary Committee, where Republicans have a two-seat advantage. Graham and Flake are both members of the committee and signaled concern about an earlier version of the legislation rolled out in February.
Meanwhile, Sen. John Cornyn (Texas), the No. 2 Senate Republican, is working on a border security bill that is expected to include some immigration components. That legislation is expected to unveiled on Thursday.
Asked if his legislation could be wrapped in with border security, Perdue said he wants the bill to move on its own.
“What we’ve done in the past with these immigration issues is we keep adding on and adding on and adding on. I think this one stands on its own merit,” he said.
Republican lawmakers have shown little appetite for another big debate on immigration.
But once Trump makes a decision on the 750,000 immigrants who are protected from deportation by former President Barack Obama‘s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, they might not be able to avoid one.
Johnson warned against trying to package the legislation into a broader immigration bill.
“I don’t think we do a very good job at it. … If you demand comprehensive, you pretty well limit what you can accomplish,” he said.
Moderate GOP senators and Democrats will also be under pressure from conservative outside groups, not to mention the White House, to support the Cotton–Perdue bill.
Perdue noted that while it was early, he was hopeful that he would be able to win some Democratic backing for the bill.
“We’re trying to now get coordinated and start moving out to develop Republican and Democratic support,” he said. “I just think that we’ve got an opportunity to get some bipartisan support.”
There are 10 Senate Democrats running for reelection in states Trump won in 2016, and those members could face pressure to support tougher immigration laws.
“Ultimately members of Congress will have a choice to make … and whatever happens as a result of that would be somewhat predictable,” Miller said.
But Democratic senators are showing no immediate signs of being willing to support the bill. The earlier version of the legislation, introduced in February, garnered zero cosponsors.
“Instead of focusing on xenophobic half measures, the Trump administration should support comprehensive immigration reform and help create a pathway to citizenship for the millions of immigrants who are our family members, neighbors, co-workers and friends,” said Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.).
“Still shocking to see senior WH staff misunderstand American values,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) said on Twitter. “I just realized I should be more specific. I’m talking about Miller.”
The RAISE (Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment) Act is a bill introduced in the United States Senate in 2017. Co-sponsored by Republican senators Tom Cotton and David Perdue, the bill seeks to reduce levels of legal immigration to the United States by 50% by halving the number of green cards issued. The bill would also impose a cap of 50,000 refugee admissions a year and would end the visa diversity lottery. The bill received the support of President Donald Trump, who promoted a revised version of the bill in August 2017, but was opposed by Democrats, immigrant rights groups, and some Republicans.
On August 2, 2017, Cotton introduced a revised version of the bill, designated S. 1720; this bill was also referred to the Senate Committee on the Judiciary.[4] President Donald Trump, along with Cotton and Perdue, announced it at the White House.[5] Within the Trump White House, Trump advisers Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon promoted and helped shape the bill.[6] The odds of the bill being enacted are seen as remote.[3][7][6] The bill has not attracted any additional co-sponsors, and Republican leaders in Congress have no plans to vote on immigration in 2017.[8]
Provisions and analysis
The bill would cut the legal immigration by half, reducing the number of green cards from more than 1 million to about 500,000.[3] The bill would also remove pathways for siblings and adult children of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents to apply for permanent lawful residency status in the U.S., limiting the family path to spouses and minor children.[7] The bill would also impose a cap of 50,000 refugee admissions a year and would end the visa diversity lottery.[3]
In promoting the legislation, Trump administration officials contend that the bill would increase economic growth and increase wages.[9][10][11] This contention was challenged by economists,[10] who “overwhelmingly predict” that cuts in immigration would have a negative impact on GDP growth.[11] In April 2017, a group of more than 1,400 economists, with views ranging across the political spectrum, sent an open letter to Trump noting the “near universal agreement” on “the broad economic benefit that immigrants to this country bring” and urging him not to seek immigration cuts.[11]Cato Institute immigration policy analyst Alex Nowrasteh said that the legislation “would do nothing to boost skilled immigration and it will only increase the proportion of employment-based green cards by cutting other green cards. Saying otherwise is grossly deceptive marketing.”[3]
The “only evidence that the administration has cited as justifying its proposals” is the work of economist George Borjas,[12] who has defended the bill, arguing that it “makes sense” and that “low-skill immigration, which would likely suffer the largest cuts in the proposed bill, imposes costs on taxpayers and it imposes costs on low-skill workers already here.”[13] Other economists have sharply contested Borjas’s conclusions; economist Giovanni Peri stated that “The average American worker is more likely to lose than to gain from immigration restrictions” and “most studies put the negative impact on low-skilled wages closer to zero,”[12] and Michael Clemens argues that Borjas’s position is based on a study with critical flaws.[14][15]
Support and opposition
The bill and Trump’s support for it was hailed by groups favoring restrictive immigration policies, such as NumbersUSA[3] and the Federation for American Immigration Reform.[16] The bill was also seen as likely to appeal to anti-immigration Republican base voters.[17]
The bill is opposed by Democrats as well as some Republicans.[7]Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez said that “Trump wants to tear apart communities and punish immigrant families that are making valuable contributions to our economy.”[7] Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut called the bill “nothing but a series of nativist talking points and regurgitated campaign rhetoric that completely fails to move our nation forward toward real reform.”[3] Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said the proposal would be “devastating” to South Carolina’s economy.[18] The Congressional Hispanic Caucus and immigrant rights groups both condemned the legislation.[3]
The National Immigration Law Center called the bill “cruel and un-American” and issued a statement saying that it would “devastate families, eliminating the traditional and long-accepted means by which family members such as grandparents, mothers, fathers and siblings are able to reunite with their families who have emigrated to the United States.”[16] The technology industry immigration-policy advocacy group FWD.us said the bill, if enacted, “would severely harm the economy and actually depress wages for Americans.”[16] The Association of Public and Land-grant Universities and NAFSA: Association of International Educators also oppose the bill, describing it as flawed and a step backward.[16] The Anti-Defamation League also opposed the legislation, calling it “cruel, anti-family and un-American.”[19]
Peter Baker, Trump Supports Plan to Cut Legal Immigration by Half, New York Times (August 2, 2017): “In throwing his weight behind a bill, Mr. Trump added one more long-odds priority to a legislative agenda already packed with them.”
Breaking News — Story 1: President Trump For National Unity Furiously Signs Flawed Russia, Iran, and North Korea Sanctions Bill — Videos —
President Trump signs Russian sanctions bill Fox News Video
President Trump signs new Russia sanctions, questions whether bill interferes with foreign policy
BREAKING NEWS 8/2/17 PRESIDENT TRUMP SIGNS NEW RUSSIA SANCTIONS BILL
January 3, 2017: Sen. Tom Cotton joined Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News
Trump Signs Sanctions Bill – Another Deep State Victory
Real Bipartisanship: Republicans And Democrats Unite For New Cold War
Germany growing sick of US sanctions on Russia
Russians See Sanctions Regime as a Blessing in Disguise
Trump signs Russia sanctions bill but blasts Congress
In a pair of statements, the president said parts of the law violate the Constitution.
President Donald Trump on Wednesday signed a bipartisan bill placing new sanctions on Russia — but in a statement, he claimed multiple aspects of the legislation violate the Constitution.
The sanctions, aimed at punishing Russia for its interference in the 2016 election, limit the president’s power to lift the sanctions without congressional approval and were initially resisted by the administration.
In one of two statements released almost simultaneously Wednesday morning by the White House, Trump said he supports the law’s efforts to crack down on the actions of Iran, North Korea and Russia. But the White House protested what it sees as congressional encroachment on the president’s power in foreign affairs.
“In its haste to pass this legislation, the Congress included a number of clearly unconstitutional provisions,” Trump said in one statement. “My Administration particularly expects the Congress to refrain from using this flawed bill to hinder our important work with European allies to resolve the conflict in Ukraine, and from using it to hinder our efforts to address any unintended consequences it may have for American businesses, our friends, or our allies.”
The president’s second statement included a stepped-up defense of his own administration’s foreign policy and input on the legislation. Trump said that “despite its problems,” he had signed the bill “for the sake of national unity.” The statement characterized the governments of Iran and North Korea as “rogue regimes,” a label he did not apply to the Russian government.
Even as he continues to label Russian interference in the election a “hoax,” the statement went further in acknowledging the intrusion than Trump has in the past.
“I also support making clear that America will not tolerate interference in our democratic process, and that we will side with our allies and friends against Russian subversion and destabilization,” the statement said.
Still, Trump was quick to push back on what he views as congressional overreach.
“The bill remains seriously flawed — particularly because it encroaches on the executive branch’s authority to negotiate. Congress could not even negotiate a health care bill after seven years of talking,” Trump said, in reference to congressional Republicans’ latest failure to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act.
“I built a truly great company worth many billions of dollars. That is a big part of the reason I was elected,” the president continued. “As President, I can make far better deals with foreign countries than Congress.”
The statements drew mixed reaction on Capitol Hill.
Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Bob Corker, a leading architect of the sanctions bill, told reporters he was not concerned about Trump’s statement, though he said he had not yet seen it.
“Both countries talk privately in ways that are very different from how they talk publicly,” the Tennessee Republican said of U.S.-Russia relations. “But this was a necessary step that we took, and I’m glad we took it.”
In addition to allowing lawmakers to handcuff Trump on any future changes to Russia sanctions, the legislation converts some existing sanctions from executive orders into law, making them more difficult to roll back, and imposes new sanctions focused on Moscow’s reported cyber-meddling in the November election. The legislation’s Iran and North Korea sanctions were broadly popular in both parties and with the Trump administration.
Although White House officials asserted that some of the preferred changes to the legislation were included before its final passage last week, the administration had long underscored its opposition to provisions that will impede Trump’s ability to warm relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“The action by the Congress to put these sanctions in place and the way that they did, neither the president nor I are very happy about that,” Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told reporters Tuesday. “We were clear that we didn’t think it was going to be helpful to our efforts.”
Still, Tillerson added, “we can’t let it take us off track of trying to restore the relationship” with Russia.
Even as Trump criticized the measure, he added that “I nevertheless expect to honor the bill’s waiting periods to ensure that Congress will have a full opportunity to avail itself of the bill’s review procedures.”
That apparent concession by Trump did not assuage Democratic concerns about his signing statement. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California warned in a statement that Trump’s interpretation of the sanctions bill “raises serious questions about whether his administration intends to follow the law, or whether he will continue to enable and reward Vladimir Putin’s aggression.”
And some Republicans who played a key role in the sanctions package raised their own alarms.
“Look, whether it was President Bush, President Obama, or President Trump, I’ve never been a fan of signing statements,” said Sen. Cory Gardner of Colorado. “I think they’re a way for any president to usurp the role of the legislative branch. And that’s why I’ve always been concerned, regardless of who issued them, on any matter.”
The bill enjoyed wide bipartisan support. The House passed the sanctions by a vote of 419-3, and the Senate cleared it 98-2 — making any presidential veto futile and sure to be overridden.
With multiple investigations into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia, a veto also would have been politically disastrous.
After weeks of waffling, the White House confirmed over the weekend that Trump would sign the bill.
The White House still sought to characterize the bill as a win, with press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders saying in a statement on Friday that Trump “negotiated regarding critical elements of it” and decided to sign it “based on its responsiveness to his negotiations.”
The statement Wednesday also contained a warning — not to Russia, but to Congress.
“The Framers of our Constitution put foreign affairs in the hands of the President,” Trump said. “This bill will prove the wisdom of that choice.”
Furious Trump signs Russian sanctions into law – then issues tirade against ‘unconstitutional’ bill and boasts his billions show why Congress shouldn’t stop him making deals with Putin
President Donald Trump signed legislation imposing new sanctions on Russia, North Korea, and Iran
The White House did not organize a ceremony of any kind for it
Trump said in a statement he signed the bill for the sake of ‘national unity’
The White House lobbied to water down restrictions in the bill
It passed Congress overwhelmingly with veto-proof majorities
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said he and the president were not ‘very happy’ about the sanctions bill
By Geoff Earle, Deputy U.s. Political Editor For Dailymail.com
PUBLISHED: 11:02 EDT, 2 August 2017 | UPDATED: 13:55 EDT, 2 August 2017
President Donald Trump signed legislation Wednesday that slaps sanctions on Russia and limits his own ability to create waivers – but at the same time issued a furious statement calling it ‘flawed’.
He signed the bill, which Secretary of State Rex Tillerson publicly said he wasn’t happy about, in private.
Then the White House sent out statement by the president revealing the depths of his unhappiness and boasting that his billions showed he was far better at deal-making than Congress.
Trump said despite some changes, ‘the bill remains seriously flawed – particularly because it encroaches on the executive branch’s authority to negotiate.’
He called parts of it ‘unconstitutional’ and signaled fresh tensions with Republicans by criticizing their failure to repeal and replace Obamacare.
President Donald Trump has signed legislation that slaps sanctions on Russia and limits his own ability to create waivers
‘Congress could not even negotiate a healthcare bill after seven years of talking. By limiting the Executive’s flexibility, this bill makes it harder for the United States to strike good deals for the American people, and will drive China, Russia, and North Korea much closer together.
‘The Framers of our Constitution put foreign affairs in the hands of the President. This bill will prove the wisdom of that choice,’ Trump said in a statement.
‘Yet despite its problems, I am signing this bill for the sake of national unity. It represents the will of the American people to see Russia take steps to improve relations with the United States. We hope there will be cooperation between our two countries on major global issues so that these sanctions will no longer be necessary.’
In a message to Congress in response to the bill, Trump singled out provisions his lawyers considers in conflict with Supreme Court case law – and asserts his own latitude to carry out the law as he sees fit.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said Trump wasn’t happy with the bill
‘My Administration will give careful and respectful consideration to the preferences expressed by the Congress in these various provisions,’ the president said in one point – in language certain to irk lawmakers who consider the law much more than a preference.
‘My administration … expects the Congress to refrain from using this flawed bill to hinder our important work with European allies to resolve the conflict in Ukraine, and from using it to hinder our efforts to address any unintended consequences it may have for American businesses, our friends, or our allies,’ he said.
The president also complained about what he said were ‘clearly unconstitutional provisions’ in the legislation relating to presidential powers to shape foreign policy.
White House counselor Kellyanne Conway confirmed the signing on Fox News.
The bill passed Congress by overwhelming margins sufficient to override a presidential veto. The White House lobbied to water down restrictions in the bill.
The bill contains language meant to prevent the president from lifting them without approval from Congress – provisions that got drafted amid concerns Trump would lift or limit sanctions amid his frequent praise for Russian President Vladimir Putin and desire to improve ties between the two powers.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told reporters he shared misgivings with the president, as they try to improve relations with Russia.
‘Neither the president nor I are very happy about that,’ Tillerson said. ‘We were clear that we didn’t think that was going to be helpful to our efforts, but that’s the decision they made.’
The FBI and congressional intelligence panels are probing Trump campaign connections to Russians during the election.
SIGN OF THE TIMES: Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks during a news conference after the G20 summit in Hamburg, northern Germany, July 8, 2017
Then-candidate Donald Trump holds up a signed pledge during a press availability at Trump Tower in Manhattan, New York September 3, 2015
Justice Department lawyers and security officials were reviewing Russia sanctions legislation Tuesday
Trump during the campaign repeatedly called for better relations with Russia. The U.S. intelligence community concluded that the Russian government backed a campaign to interfere in the presidential election.
Despite communications with Russian President Vladimir Putin capped off by two one-on-one meetings in Europe, Trump has struggled to meet his goal.
Putin said last weekend that Russia would expel more than 700 U.S. diplomats from Russia in retaliation for the sanctions legislation.
I’M WORTH BILLIONS – I CAN MAKE BETTER DEALS THAN CONGRESS
Today, I signed into law the ‘Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act,’ which enacts new sanctions on Iran, North Korea, and Russia. I favor tough measures to punish and deter bad behavior by the rogue regimes in Tehran and Pyongyang. I also support making clear that America will not tolerate interference in our democratic process, and that we will side with our allies and friends against Russian subversion and destabilization.
That is why, since taking office, I have enacted tough new sanctions on Iran and North Korea, and shored up existing sanctions on Russia.
Since this bill was first introduced, I have expressed my concerns to Congress about the many ways it improperly encroaches on Executive power, disadvantages American companies, and hurts the interests of our European allies.
My Administration has attempted to work with Congress to make this bill better. We have made progress and improved the language to give the Treasury Department greater flexibility in granting routine licenses to American businesses, people, and companies. The improved language also reflects feedback from our European allies – who have been steadfast partners on Russia sanctions – regarding the energy sanctions provided for in the legislation. The new language also ensures our agencies can delay sanctions on the intelligence and defense sectors, because those sanctions could negatively affect American companies and those of our allies.
Still, the bill remains seriously flawed – particularly because it encroaches on the executive branch’s authority to negotiate. Congress could not even negotiate a healthcare bill after seven years of talking. By limiting the Executive’s flexibility, this bill makes it harder for the United States to strike good deals for the American people, and will drive China, Russia, and North Korea much closer together. The Framers of our Constitution put foreign affairs in the hands of the President. This bill will prove the wisdom of that choice.
Yet despite its problems, I am signing this bill for the sake of national unity. It represents the will of the American people to see Russia take steps to improve relations with the United States. We hope there will be cooperation between our two countries on major global issues so that these sanctions will no longer be necessary.
Further, the bill sends a clear message to Iran and North Korea that the American people will not tolerate their dangerous and destabilizing behavior. America will continue to work closely with our friends and allies to check those countries’ malignant activities.
I built a truly great company worth many billions of dollars. That is a big part of the reason I was elected. As President, I can make far better deals with foreign countries than Congress.
In his statement about the bill, Trump highlighted a series of concerns about the legislation. Had he vetoed it, Congress could have easily overridden him.
‘Since this bill was first introduced, I have expressed my concerns to Congress about the many ways it improperly encroaches on Executive power, disadvantages American companies, and hurts the interests of our European allies,’ Trump complained.
‘My Administration has attempted to work with Congress to make this bill better. We have made progress and improved the language to give the Treasury Department greater flexibility in granting routine licenses to American businesses, people, and companies. The improved language also reflects feedback from our European allies – who have been steadfast partners on Russia sanctions – regarding the energy sanctions provided for in the legislation. The new language also ensures our agencies can delay sanctions on the intelligence and defense sectors, because those sanctions could negatively affect American companies and those of our allies.’
Russia hawk Sen. John McCain of Arizona responded in a statement: ‘I welcome President Trump’s decision to sign legislation imposing new sanctions on Russia, Iran, and North Korea. The enactment of this legislation, which enjoyed overwhelming bipartisan support in both houses of Congress, sends a strong message to friend and foe alike that the United States will hold nations accountable for aggressive and destabilizing behavior that threatens our national interests and those of our allies and partners.’
McCain also called out Trump’s signing statement. ‘The concerns expressed in the President’s signing statement are hardly surprising, though misplaced. The Framers of our Constitution made the Congress and the President coequal branches of government. This bill has already proven the wisdom of that choice,’ he wrote.
“While the American people surely hope for better relations with Russia, what this legislation truly represents is their insistence that Vladimir Putin and his regime must pay a real price for attacking our democracy, violating human rights, occupying Crimea, and destabilizing Ukraine.’
After Russia’s Retaliation, Embassy Workers Brace for a ‘Shock to the System’
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia met with President Trump for the first time during the Group of 20 summit meeting in Hamburg, Germany, this month.CreditStephen Crowley/The New York Times
MOSCOW — The last time the Kremlin forced a sweeping reduction of local staff at the American Embassy in Moscow, a young diplomat named Steven Pifer found himself working four days a week on arms control, as usual. But on the fifth day, he navigated the capital in a big truck to move furniture or haul mammoth grocery loads.
The entire staff of the embassy, except the ambassador, was assigned one day each week to grunt work called All Purpose Duty, Mr. Pifer recalled in an interview on Monday, when they shed their dark suits and polished loafers to mow the lawns, fix the plumbing, cook in the cafeteria and even clean the toilets.
That was a last hurrah for the Cold War in 1986, and although the embassy now functions on a far more complex scale, many current and former diplomats expect a similar effort in the wake of President Vladimir V. Putin’s announcement on Sunday that the United States diplomatic mission in Russia must shed 755 employees by Sept. 1.
“The attitude in the embassy was if they think that they will shut us down, we will show them,” said Mr. Pifer, who went on to become an American ambassador to Ukraine and is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “I think the embassy will adapt this time, too.”
Russia demanded that the United States reduce its diplomatic staff to equal the 455 Russian diplomats working in the United States, including at the mission to the United Nations. That means cutting about 60 percent of a work force estimated at 1,200 to 1,300 people, the vast majority of whom are Russians.
“That is a huge shock to the system,” said James F. Collins, the American ambassador to Russia from 1997 to 2001. “The American government will have to make the decision about who stays and who leaves.”
Given the continuing deterioration in relations between the two countries, core functions like political and military analysis will be preserved, along with espionage, experts said, while programs that involve cooperation on everything from trade to culture to science are likely to be reduced or eliminated.
Besides the State Department, a dizzying array of American government agencies have employees at the embassy, including the Departments of Agriculture and Commerce as well as NASA and the Library of Congress.
The other area expected to take a heavy hit will be public services, like issuing visas to Russian travelers to the United States, which is likely to slow to a glacial pace.
The Russian staff can be broken down into two broad categories: specialists who help individual departments in the embassy like public relations, and basic service workers employed as security guards, drivers, janitors, electricians and a host of other maintenance functions.
As of 2013, the latest year for which public records are available, there were 1,279 staff members working in the American Embassy in Moscow and in consulates in St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg and Vladivostok, according to a report by the Inspector General’s Office. Of those, 934 were not Americans, including 652 basic service workers. The numbers are believed to have stayed roughly the same.
Russian staff members working in various departments like the political or economic section often provide the embassy’s institutional memory, because they stay on the job for years while American diplomats rotate every two or three years. (If the Russian employees stay for at least 15 years, they are eligible for special immigration visas to the United States and their salaries are high by Russian standards.)
It is the Russians who tend to notice nuances in domestic news coverage or in Mr. Putin’s speeches, or who direct diplomats toward public events or responsible journalists. The Russian employees provide continuity, an American diplomat who recently left Moscow said, speaking anonymously because he was not authorized to speak publicly.
Gen. Bruce McClintock, the American Defense attaché from 2014 to 2016 and now a RAND Corporation analyst, said Russian employees were often more effective in organizing meetings with government officials, while experienced translators ensured that the positions of both sides were clear in often complex discussions.
Russia had already chipped away at embassy programs, anyway, he noted. In 2013, it shuttered USAID, for example, and in 2014, in response to the West’s cutting off military cooperation after the Ukraine crisis, it closed the Defense Threat Reduction Agency.
Although the work continued, it was much harder to coordinate because its 10 employees had departed, said General McClintock.
Russian nationals are not given the security clearances needed to work in the more clandestine branches of the embassy. Indeed, in the chancellery itself, no Russians worked above the fourth floor in the roughly 10-story building, former Russian employees said.
The American Embassy, which held a staff meeting on Monday to confirm the news to its employees, refused to comment on the events, while in Washington the State Department would say only that it was studying the Russian government’s request.
The general hostility toward the United States means Moscow was already considered a hardship post for American diplomats, and the new measures will lower morale further, diplomats said.
Russian employees are confused and do not yet understand how the changes will be carried out, a former Russian employee now working outside the country said, adding with dark humor that Stalin used to say there were no irreplaceable people.
Russian employees who worked for specialized departments feel especially vulnerable because they carry a certain stigma in Russia’s current nationalistic mood. Michael McFaul, a Stanford University professor who was the American ambassador from 2012 to 2014, remembered trying to help find work for 70 Russians who were let go when the Kremlin closed the USAID office.
It was especially hard because “many Russian companies would not consider hiring these ‘tainted’ people,” he said in an email.
In recent years, local employees have come under increasing pressure from the Russian security service, the F.S.B., according to current and former employees. Russians escorting delegations of American musicians around the country were harassed, for example, or some in Moscow returned home from work to find agents sitting in their living rooms, demanding that they inform on their employers, they said.
Mr. Pifer said American diplomats who lived through the 1986 clampdown learned all kinds of things about Soviet life that they would not have otherwise.
One of his colleagues, who had to navigate customs, wrote a slightly tongue-in-cheek diplomatic cable titled “The 29 Steps Needed to Clear a Container of Furniture,” detailing every stamp issued on every piece of paper. The cable was a huge hit back in Washington, he said.
In previous spats with the United States or the West in general, Mr. Putin often chose measures that hurt Russians the most, not least because Russia’s limited economic reach globally means it does not have many options.
Angered over sanctions imposed by Congress under the Magnitsky Act in 2012, he banned Americans from adopting Russian children. When the West imposed economic and military sanctions after the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, he barred a broad array of food imports, forcing up prices and limiting the options for Russian consumers.
This time, hundreds of Russians will lose their jobs and Russian travelers hoping to visit the United States are likely to wait months for visas. Some 50 Russians were employed in the consular section that processes visas, according to the inspector general’s report.
“I don’t think Mr. Putin is terribly worried about this,” Mr. Collins said, noting the presidential election looming in March. “As he is running for election, it is comfortable for him to show that he can stand up to the Americans and to protect Russian interests and that is what he is doing.”
Outside the embassy on Monday, many of those emerging from the visa section suggested the Russian measures could only make a bad situation worse. Anecdotal evidence suggested that on both sides, what used to take weeks had already slowed to months.
Shavkat Butaev, 50, who works for a company that helps Russians get visas, said rejections were way up, too. “It was never like this before. Fifty, 60 people get rejected every day,” he said.
Oleg Smirnov, an 18-year-old student studying in the United States to become a psychiatrist, said that he had hoped President Trump would improve relations and that he was worried about possible fallout on immigration policy.
“These mutual sanctions look like a game played with water guns,” he said
Story 2: Trump Announces New Immigration Policy — Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment (RAISE) Act — Videos
Trump announces new immigration policy
Published on Aug 2, 2017
President Trump announced the Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment (RAISE) Act on Aug. 2, which aims to cut immigration by half from the current level of more than 1 million green cards granted per year.
Pres Trump and Sens Cotton and Perdue Introduce “The Raise Act”. Excellent!
August 2, 2017: Sen. Cotton and Sen. Perdue Answer Questions about the RAISE Act at the White House
Jim Acosta vs Stephen Miller – Immigration – White House Press Briefing 8/2/17
Senator Tom Cotton, Immigration Reform, and the RAISE Act
Senators David Perdue and Tom Cotton RAISE Act Press Conference
Immigration by the Numbers — Off the Charts
Sen.Barbara Jordan Legal Immigration Recommendations
2015 Barbara Jordan TV ad
How Many Illegal Aliens Are in the US? – Walsh – 1
How Many Illegal Aliens Are in the US? – Walsh – 2
Milton Friedman – Illegal Immigration – PT 1
Milton Friedman – Illegal Immigration – PT 2
Why Free Markets Work: Milton Friedman on Political Economy (1996)
Obama’s Amnesty & How Illegal Immigration Affects Us
The Impact of Immigration on Jobs and Income
Trump, GOP senators unveil measure to cut legal immigration
BY JORDAN FABIAN AND JORDAIN CARNEY – 08/02/17 11:41 AM EDT
Trump, GOP senators unveil measure to cut legal immigration
President Trump on Wednesday teamed up with two conservative Republican senators to roll out new legislation aimed at dramatically curbing legal immigration to the United States, a key Trump campaign promise.
Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and David Perdue (R-Ga.) have been working with White House officials to revise and expand a bill released earlier this year that would halve the number of people who receive legal permanent residence over a decade.
The senators joined Trump at a White House ceremony to announce the measure.
The president told reporters in the Roosevelt Room that the measure “would represent the most significant reform to our immigration system in a half a century.”
They say the legislation would move the United States to a “merit-based” immigration system and away from the current model, which is largely based on family ties.
The measure reflects Trump’s rhetoric during the 2016 campaign, when he argued that the spike in legal immigration over the past several decades has taken job opportunities away from American citizens and threatened national security.
“As a candidate, I campaigned on creating a merit-based immigration system that protects U.S. workers and taxpayers and that’s why we are here today,” he said, adding the measure would “reduce poverty, increase wages and save taxpayers billions and billions of dollars.”
Trump met with Cotton and Perdue in March to discuss the legislation, known as the Reforming American Immigration for a Strong Economy (RAISE) Act.
The bill would mark a dramatic change in U.S. immigration laws, and could open up a nasty internal fight among Republicans.
The legislation would eliminate immigration preferences currently given to extended family members and adult children of U.S. citizens seeking green cards, and it would cap the number of accepted refugees at 50,000 — half of the Obama administration’s target for 2017.
It would also end the State Department’s Diversity visa lottery, which the senators say is “plagued with fraud.” The program had been allotted 50,000 visas for the 2018 fiscal year.
About 1 million immigrants receive green cards per year.
Conservative outside groups immediately praised the legislation and called for the Senate to vote on the bill.
“The RAISE Act helps realize President Trump’s vision of making America great again by making immigration great again as well. It provides a pathway for a modern, smarter immigration system while protecting those Americans struggling to make ends meet,” said Dan Stein, president of Federation for American Immigration Reform.
Roy Beck, president of NumbersUSA, added that the Cotton-Perdue bill will “do more than any other action to fulfill” Trump’s campaign pledges on immigration.
The legislation faces an uphill battle in the Senate, however, where it’s expected to get pushback from Democrats as well as GOP senators who oppose strict limits on legal immigration and want a broader reform effort that would address the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S.
If Cotton and Perdue can get GOP leadership to bring the legislation up for a vote, supporters will need to cobble together 60 senators, including at least eight Democrats or independents, to agree to start debate on the legislation.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and a handful of Republicans — including GOP Sens. Jeff Flake (Ariz.), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) and Dean Heller (Nev.) — have been working on bills this year to allow undocumented immigrants who entered the country as children to, at least temporarily, remain in the country legally.
Hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants have been granted temporary reprieves from deportation under the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. But it does not confer legal status on immigrants.
Cotton and Perdue would need to win over their votes, as well as Sen. John McCain. The Arizona Republican, who is currently undergoing cancer treatment, was critical of their earlier bill.
The White House roll out could give the legislation a boost of momentum, but the earlier version of the Cotton-Perdue bill garnered zero cosponsors.
Critics of the measure say it would devastate families’ effort to reunite with their overseas relatives while providing few economic benefits.
“If this is an acknowledgement that our immigration system is broken, the Trump administration and these senators are right, but this is the wrong way to fix it,” said Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum. “Cutting legal immigration for the sake of cutting immigration would cause irreparable harm to the American worker and their family.”
“Congress should focus on stopping illegal immigration – not on restricting the legal immigration that grows our economy,” said John Feinblatt, president of the former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg-backed group New American Economy.
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) has officially introduced the Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment (RAISE) Act, S. 354, in the Senate. The bill would reduce legal immigration by up to 50% by ending future chain migration and the diversity visa lottery.
Roy Beck, President and Founder of NumbersUSA responded saying, “the RAISE Act has a number — S. 354 — and one that we will do all possible to ensure that lives on through history as one of the great achievements of this period of our country.”
The RAISE Act would:
End the Visa Lottery
Limit annual refugee admissions to 50,000
End chain migration
Reduce the worldwide level of family-sponsored immigrants from 480,000 to 88,000 by prioritizing nuclear family
Add a nonimmigrant visa for parents of adult U.S. citizens (W-Visa)
5-year renewable visa
No work authorization or ability to receive public benefits
The RAISE Act would reduce legal immigration to the United States by 50% in an effort to diminish its impact on vulnerable American workers. First, it eliminates the visa lottery and limits refugee admissions to 50,000 per year, removing the ability of the President to unilaterally adjust upward refugee admissions. Further, it eliminates chain migration by limiting family-sponsored immigration to the spouses and minor children of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents.
While U.S. citizens maintain the ability to sponsor nuclear family members without numerical limitation, the worldwide level of family-sponsored immigration is reduced from 480,000 to 88,000 to account for the elimination of the extended-family categories. Finally, a new nonimmigrant visa category is created for parents of adult U.S. citizens. Under this new category, sponsored alien parents would receive a renewable 5-year visa, but must be financially independent or supported financially by the adult son or daughter, as the visa does not authorize the alien to work or receive any form of public benefit.
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President Trump arriving with the first lady, Melania Trump, in Vienna, Ohio, for his rally on Tuesday. Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times
WASHINGTON — President Trump announced on Wednesday that the United States will no longer “accept or allow” transgender people in the United States military, saying American forces “must be focused on decisive and overwhelming victory” and could not afford to accommodate them.
Mr. Trump made the surprise declaration in a series of posts on Twitter, saying he had come to the decision after talking to generals and military experts, whom he did not name.
The sweeping policy decision was met with surprise at the Pentagon, outrage from advocacy groups and praise from social conservatives. It reverses the gradual transformation of the military under President Barack Obama, whose administration announced last year that transgender people could serve openly in the military. Mr. Obama’s defense secretary, Ashton B. Carter, also opened all combat roles to women and appointed the first openly gay Army secretary.
The shift was announced with such haste that the White House could not answer basic inquiries about how it would be implemented. Chief among those questions was what would happen to the thousands of openly transgender people currently serving on active duty.
“That’s something that the Department of Defense and the White House will have to work together as implementation takes place and is done so lawfully,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said.
The policy would affect only a small portion of the approximately 1.3 million active-duty members of the military. About 2,450 are transgender, according to a study last year by the RAND Corporation, though the estimated number of transgender service members has varied.
The study found that allowing transgender people to serve openly in the military would “have minimal impact on readiness and health care costs” for the Pentagon. It estimated that health care costs would rise $2.4 million to $8.4 million a year, representing an infinitesimal 0.04- to 0.13 percent increase in spending for active-duty service members. Citing research into other countries that allow transgender people to serve, the study projected “little or no impact on unit cohesion, operational effectiveness or readiness” in the United States.
Are You Affected by Trump’s Ban on Transgender Service Members?
The New York Times would like to hear from people who are affected by President Trump’s decision to ban transgender people from military service.
Officials at the Pentagon were caught off guard. They had been studying, per the orders of Mr. Mattis, how transgender troops in the military affect other service members, but not with a view toward removing transgender people from the military, several defense officials said.
In June, the administration delayed a decision on whether to allow transgender recruits to join the military. At the time, Mr. Mattis said an extra six months would give military leaders a chance to review its potential impact. Mr. Mattis’s decision to delay accepting transgender recruits for six months had been seen as a pause to “finesse” the issue, one official said, not a prelude to an outright ban.
What’s more, Mr. Mattis loathes wading into politically divisive social policy, the official said, noting that the defense secretary, who is on vacation this week, has taken pains to steer clear of Mr. Trump’s more partisan moves, and views the American military as a unifier of a divided country.
Gay and transgender rights groups and research organizations that have worked to craft policies around the military service of transgender individuals expressed outrage at the move.
“The president is creating a worse version of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’” said Aaron Belkin, the director of the Palm Center, referring to the Clinton-era policy in which gay and lesbian people could not openly serve in the military.
Mr. Belkin said that “discredited” policy had harmed readiness, and Mr. Trump’s new one would have similar effects.
“This is a shocking and ignorant attack on our military and on transgender troops who have been serving honorably and effectively for the past year,” he added.
Joshua Block, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s LGBT & HIV Project, called the move “an outrageous and desperate action,” and asked transgender military service members to get in touch with the organization, saying it was “examining all our options on how to fight this.”
“The thousands of transgender service members serving on the front lines for this country deserve better than a commander in chief who rejects their basic humanity,” Mr. Block said.
Mr. Trump’s abrupt decision will likely end up in court; a nonprofit group that represents gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people in the military immediately vowed to sue.
“We are committed to transgender service members,” the group, OutServe-SLDN, said in a statement. “We are going to fight for them as hard as they are fighting for the country. And we’re going to start by taking the fight to Donald Trump in the federal court.”
Matthew F. Thorn, executive director of OutServe, said Mr. Trump’s decision was a slap in the face of transgender service members.
“We have transgender individuals who serve in elite SEAL teams, who are working in a time of war to defend our country, and now you’re going to kick them out?” Mr. Thorn said in an interview.
The move drew praise from Tony Perkins, the president of the conservative Family Research Council, which had opposed the Pentagon spending bill over the dispute about paying for gender reassignment surgery. On Wednesday, Mr. Perkins said he would now support the legislation, effectively sending a message to conservative Republican lawmakers that they would not pay a price with their core supporters for voting for it.
“I applaud President Trump for keeping his promise to return to military priorities — and not continue the social experimentation of the Obama era that has crippled our nation’s military,” Mr. Perkins said in a statement. “The military can now focus its efforts on preparing to fight and win wars rather than being used to advance the Obama social agenda.”
Mr. Carter issued a statement objecting to the decision, both for its effect on the military and on those considering joining.
“To choose service members on other grounds than military qualifications is social policy and has no place in our military,” Mr. Carter said. “There are already transgender individuals who are serving capably and honorably. This action would also send the wrong signal to a younger generation thinking about military service.”
And Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, condemned Mr. Trump’s sudden announcement, saying it muddied policy and that anyone who is fit to serve should be allowed to do so.
“The president’s tweet this morning regarding transgender Americans in the military is yet another example of why major policy announcements should not be made via Twitter,” said Mr. McCain, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island and the ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, noted that Mr. Trump made his decision public on the anniversary of Harry Truman’s order desegregating the United States military. “President Trump is choosing to retreat in the march toward equality,” Mr. Reed said in a statement.
“This was a divisive political move that exposes the president’s lack of faith in the professionalism of our armed forces,” Mr. Reed said, calling on Mr. Trump to review the facts and reverse his decision. “In the land of the free and the home of the brave, every American who is brave enough to serve their country should be free to do so.”
Correction: July 26, 2017
An earlier version of this article misstated the president’s tweet, saying he would not “allow or accept” transgender people in the military. He tweeted he would not “accept or allow” transgender people in the military. The error was also sent in an alert.
Trump-supporting drag queen feels wrath of LGBTQ community
BY STEVE ROTHAUS JULY 26, 2017 4:24 PM
Moments after Donald Trump tweeted Wednesday morning that transgender men and women could no longer serve in the military, LGBTQ activists took to social media and denounced the president of the United States — and Miami drag queen Elaine Lancaster.
“And this is the president Elaine Lanfraudster so vocally supports and constantly defends on Twitter. Shameful!” Wire magazine publisher Rafa Carvajal posted on Facebook, angry about Lancaster’s longtime vocal support of Trump.
Earlier this month, James Davis — Lancaster’s real-life persona — joined a CNN panel and told viewers that his decades-long career had been “blackballed” for openly supporting the nation’s 45th president.
“I come from a community that touts that we are so inclusive, we are so embracing of what’s different, all we ask for is tolerance and equality,” Davis told the Miami Herald after the CNN interview. “I make a living as a female impersonator in the state of Florida. I have hosted all the major events — White Party for 19 years. When I came out as a supporter of Trump, I was blackballed instantly. They got online campaigns. I was thrown off the [White Party] committee. I couldn’t be the emcee anymore. I got death threats. I have lawsuits pending against people. Oh, it’s horrible.”
Wednesday afternoon, though, Davis’ support for Trump didn’t include the president’s tweet that “the United States Government will not accept or allow Transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S, military.”
“I really don’t know what to say,” Davis told the Herald on Wednesday. “I have to process it. I think he should expand freedoms and equality instead of restricting them. If transgender people want to serve in the military, they should be allowed to.
“I feel for people who are transgender and currently serving who may be asked to vacate their posts. But I would hope they would be given honorable discharges.”
Davis isn’t alone among queer conservatives who split with Trump on the transgender military issue. Wednesday morning, the national LGBT Log Cabin Republicans group — which in 2016 declined to endorse Trump, unlike the Miami chapter — criticized the commander-in-chief.
After President Donald Trump announced that transgender people could not serve in the U.S. military, LGBTQ activists denounced Miami drag queen Elaine Lancaster for her support of Trump.
“The president’s statement this morning does a disservice to transgender military personnel and reintroduces the same hurtful stereotypes conjured when openly gay men and women were barred from service during the military’s ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ era,” the group said in a statement. “As an organization that led the charge against that hateful policy, Log Cabin Republicans remains equally committed to standing up for transgender military personnel who put their lives on the line to keep us free.”
Many LGBTQ activists throughout Florida raged Wednesday, some blaming Davis (a registered independent) and other lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people who have supported Trump and the GOP.
“It’s very clear to anyone who God gave the brain of billy goat to that [Trump] doesn’t give a f–k about us. But yet they, the ‘Roaches for Raid,’ will go and march and stand up for this man who won’t be bothered by them. That just irks me,” said Dale Wilson, also known as South Florida DJ/performance artist Power Infiniti.
“Elaine wants to go and cry and paint herself as a victim when the entire SAGA (Sexuality And Gender Acceptance) community is suffering, little by little, by this president and his administration. Yet we should be concerned for her,” Wilson said. “She is not the only gay person who supported Trump. But she has made such an effort to paint herself as the token idiot for the village idiot. Of course, things come back to her because she’s the loudest mouth.”
The animosity toward Davis began brewing long before Wednesday.
“The community members should have rallied around said, ‘What can we do to calm this down. Instead they stayed out of the way and allowed this to fester and boil over,” Davis said. “I don’t have anybody who’s hiring me right now.”
Miami drag queen Elaine Lancaster poses with first lady Melania Trump at a 2009 ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ TV event in New York.
Photo provided by Elaine Lancaster
Elaine Lancaster is a former “Real Housewives of Miami” co-star who once presided over White Party, Miami Beach Gay Pride and countless other social events as one of South Florida’s most recognized drag performers. She has been photographed at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach and with first lady Melania Trump on the set of “Celebrity Apprentice.”
Davis, 53, says the hate is not directed at him simply because he likes the president.
“It’s not just because I support Trump, because many others do, too,” Davis continued. “It’s because they don’t like Elaine Lancaster. They’re jealous of her because of her success and perhaps she thinks a little too highly of herself.”
Even friends, like Jon Welsh, say Davis is at times a bit hard to take.
“She could do a lot more to be nicer to people, too,” said Welsh, a Care Resource employee who has worked with Davis at White Party, the organization’s HIV/AIDS fundraiser. “She’s no Princess Diana, honey.”
Still, Davis is hard-working and goodhearted, Welsh said.
“She might be a lot of things, but her work ethic — I admire that. Just suck it up. Just show up. And you’re smiling and you’re there to the very end,” Welsh said. “I don’t agree with all she says politically, but I admire her personally.”
Carvajal, though, says he’s “had enough.”
“Honestly, it’s completely disgusting. It’s been going on a long time and it’s time people put her in her place and know what she’s all about.”
On national television and online, Davis recently doubled down on his support for Trump — and his right to speak his mind. He said the controversy speaks to growing intolerance on both sides of the political spectrum.
“It took me a long time to fall in love with Miami. And I’m not going to go anywhere else. I’m not going to let a few nasty, unhappy, pathetic people who are so petty and are keyboard commandos to deter my love for a place I call home,” said Davis, who moved to Miami on July 15, 1997, the same day fashion designer Gianni Versace was slain outside his Ocean Drive mansion.
“Now, they say, ‘Oh, we can’t have Elaine she’s too controversial. And I know that from my phone not ringing,” Davis said. “Have I been called for one thing for Swim Week? No. Art Basel? I can’t announce anything on social media that’s coming up because they’ll call and get me fired. That’s not America. The oppressed is now the oppressor.”
Carvajal said he doesn’t feel sorry for Davis, even if his livelihood is endangered.
“It is not fair to discriminate against someone. But it is fair to choose who you support or don’t support based on their views. And you cannot have it both ways,” Carvajal said. “You cannot for years claim to be an LGBTQ leader and then openly and vocally support someone who wants to take away the rights of the LGBTQ community.”
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by Robert King | Jul 26, 2017, 3:52 PM
The Senate on Wednesday rejected an amendment to gut Obamacare without a replacement ready to go, a bill identical to a 2015 measure that passed Congress.
Senators voted 45-55 on the measure, with seven Republicans and all Democrats voting no. The Republicans voting no were Sens. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, Susan Collins of Maine, Dick Heller of Nevada, John McCain of Arizona, Rob Portman of Ohio, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. Only Collins voted against the measure in 2015..
The Senate vote is part of a larger debate on how to repeal and replace Obamacare. The bill was expected to fail, as many Republican senators were uncomfortable with voting on repeal without an immediate replacement.
The bill is identical to a 2015 measure that passed Congress that would gut Obamacare’s taxes and mandates but leave in place insurer regulations. The bill would have let Obamacare stay in place for two years while a replacement was crafted. Former President Barack Obama vetoed the legislation in 2015.
The Senate leadership took up the bill as part of a debate on repeal that was started in a narrow vote Tuesday.
A vote for a bill that would have repealed and replaced Obamacare immediately, the Better Care Reconciliation Act, also failed late Tuesday.
The goal of Republican Senate leaders appears to be to vote on a “skinny” repeal of only Obamacare’s individual and employer mandate and medical device tax. The “skinny repeal” would serve mainly as a vehicle to start a conference with the House to iron out a new health bill.
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enate Votes Down Broad Obamacare Repeal
The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, at the Capitol on Tuesday.CreditGabriella Demczuk for The New York Times
WASHINGTON — The Senate voted narrowly on Tuesday to begin debate on a bill to repeal major provisions of the Affordable Care Act, but hours later, Republican leaders suffered a setback when their most comprehensive plan to replace President Barack Obama’s health law fell far short of the votes it needed.
The Tuesday night tally needed to reach 60 votes to overcome a parliamentary objection. Instead, it fell 43-57. The fact that the comprehensive replacement plan came up well short of even 50 votes was an ominous sign for Republican leaders still seeking a formula to pass final health care legislation this week.
For Republicans, the failure ended the day on a sour note, hours after a more triumphant scene on the Senate floor. Lawmakers from both parties had risen to their feet in the afternoon and applauded when Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, showed up in the chamber despite his diagnosis of brain cancer. He cast a crucial vote in favor of opening what promises to be a freewheeling, hard-fought debate over the future of the Affordable Care Act.
The 51-50 vote to start debate, with Vice President Mike Pence breaking a tie, came only a week after the Republican effort to dismantle a pillar of former President Barack Obama’s legacy appeared all but doomed. It provided an initial win for President Trump, who pushed, cajoled and threatened senators in recent days to at least begin debating the repeal of the health care law.
But the victory could be fleeting: Senate Republicans still have no agreement on a repeal bill that they can ultimately pass to uproot the law that has provided health insurance to millions of Americans.
How Each Senator
Voted on Full Obamacare
Repeal-and-Replace
Republican leaders brought the first of several expected amendments to a vote Tuesday night.
The Senate is now moving ahead with debate, amendments and ultimately a final vote in the coming days on legislation that would have a profound effect on the American health care system — roughly one-sixth of the United States’ economy. But it is entirely possible that by week’s end, they will have passed nothing.
“Now we move forward towards truly great health care for the American people,” Mr. Trump said from the White House Rose Garden, where he was holding a news conference with the visiting prime minister of Lebanon. “This was a big step.”
Only two Republicans, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, voted against the procedural motion, though at least several other Republicans had been seen as possible holdouts. No Democrats voted in favor of the motion.
The Tuesday night vote was on a comprehensive amendment that included disparate proposals calculated to appeal to conservatives and moderates in the Republican caucus.
One proposal, offered by Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, would have allowed insurers to sell stripped-down health plans, without maternity care or other benefits required by the Affordable Care Act, if they also sold plans that included such benefits.
“You shouldn’t have to buy what the federal government mandates you must buy,” Mr. Cruz said. “You should choose what meets the needs for you and your family.”
Three major proposals are being discussed.
The amendment also included money to help pay out-of-pocket medical costs for low-income people, including those who buy private insurance after losing Medicaid coverage as a result of the Senate bill. This proposal was devised by Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio, and other senators from states that have expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act.
But nine Republicans, spanning the party’s ideological spectrum, voted against the package.
The debate to come will have broad implications for health care and households in every state, and emotions are high.
Before senators voted to start the debate in midafternoon, protesters in the Senate gallery chanted, “Kill the bill, don’t kill us!” and “Shame, shame, shame!”
Despite his vote to move ahead, Mr. McCain offered harsh words for the secretive process by which Senate Republican leaders came up with their bill to repeal and replace the health law, and he delivered a pessimistic take on its chances.
“Asking us to swallow our doubts and force it past a unified opposition — I don’t think that’s going to work in the end, and probably shouldn’t,” Mr. McCain said, adding that it “seems likely” that the current repeal effort would end in failure. Still, Mr. McCain voted with Republican leaders in favor of the comprehensive replacement plan on Tuesday night.
Arizona is one of the 31 states that expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, and Mr. McCain’s remarks could reflect concerns of other senators from states that expanded Medicaid, including the junior Republican senator from his state, Jeff Flake.
HEALTH CARE IN AMERICABy THE ASSOCIATED PRESS1:44John McCain to Senate: ‘We’re Getting Nothing Done’
Senator John McCain, who was recently diagnosed with brain cancer, spoke to the Senate after casting his vote to begin debating legislation to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS. Photo by Gabriella Demczuk for The New York Times. Watch in Times Video »“We are ground zero for the failure of the exchanges, but we are also an expansion state,” Mr. Flake said. “I think all of us are concerned that we don’t pull the rug out from people.”
Just before the Senate vote, the Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer of New York, made an impassioned plea to Republicans.
“We know that A.C.A. is not perfect,” Mr. Schumer said. “But we also know what you’ve proposed is much worse. We can work together to improve health care in this country. Turn back now before it’s too late and millions and millions and millions of Americans are hurt so badly in ways from which they will never, ever recover.”
Given the divisions within their caucus, Senate Republican leaders were considering a new approach to keeping their repeal quest alive: They could try to reach agreement on a slimmed-down bill that would repeal a few major provisions of the Affordable Care Act, like the penalties imposed on people who go without insurance and businesses that do not offer insurance to their employees. Republican leaders would not intend for such a bill to become law, but they believe that it could win approval in the Senate.
That “skinny” bill could then be a basis for negotiations with the House.
Republican leaders in Congress have struggled all year to fulfill their promise of repealing the 2010 health care law. By a vote of 217 to 213, the House approved a repeal bill in early May, but only after Republicans overcame their own difficulties in that chamber.
Mr. Trump kept up pressure on the Senate on Tuesday with Twitter posts. After the procedural vote, he applauded the Senate, but was cutting toward Ms. Collins and Ms. Murkowski: “We had two Republicans that went against us, which is very sad, I think. It’s very, very sad for them.”
The successful procedural vote was also a moment of redemption, at least temporarily, for Mr. McConnell, who just last week appeared to have failed in his effort to put together a health bill that could squeak through the narrowly divided Senate.
That said, it remained far from certain whether Republicans would be able to agree on a bill in the days to come — and what exactly the contents of that bill would be. Mr. McConnell promised an “open amendment process” in which members of both parties could propose changes.
“This is just the beginning,” Mr. McConnell said. “We’re not out here to spike the football.”
For weeks, Mr. McConnell has been promoting and revising a comprehensive bill that would repeal the health law while also replacing it, but he has struggled to nail down the support needed to pass that measure. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has yet to assess the most complete version of that legislation, which includes the proposals by Mr. Cruz and Mr. Portman.
Without that assessment, the measure needed 60 Senate votes, and it failed that test on Tuesday night.
The Senate is also expected to vote on a measure that would repeal the health law without putting in place any replacement, but that approach does not appear to have enough support to pass, either.
That proposal resembles a bill passed by the Senate in 2015 and vetoed by Mr. Obama in early 2016. But it would increase the number of people who are uninsured by 32 million in 2026, the budget office said.
Mr. Portman had anguished for weeks over provisions of Mr. McConnell’s repeal bill that would make deep cuts in projected Medicaid spending and roll back the expansion of the program under the Affordable Care Act.
Mr. Portman voted to move ahead with the debate on Tuesday after being assured that the Senate would vote on his plan to provide financial assistance to people moving from an expanded state Medicaid program to private health insurance.
States could have used the money, totaling $100 billion, to help low-income people pay deductibles and other out-of-pocket costs when they receive medical care.
Mr. Portman worked on the plan with the Trump administration and with several other Republican senators from states that have expanded Medicaid, including Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia and Dean Heller of Nevada.
Mr. Heller voted Tuesday to open the debate, but he made no commitment to vote for the repeal bill itself.
“If the final product isn’t improved for the state of Nevada, then I will not vote for it,” Mr. Heller said. “If it is improved, I will support it.”
Senate Passes Vote to Begin Debate on Obamacare Repeal
By Todd Beamon | Tuesday, 25 Jul 2017 03:06 PM
The Senate voted Tuesday to begin debate on the plan to repeal Obamacare outright and replace it within two years — after Vice President Mike Pence voted to break a 50-50 tie and an ailing Arizona Sen. John McCain returned to slam the chamber’s secretive process.
“On this vote, the yeas are 50 and the nays are 50,” Pence said. “The Senate being equally divided, the vice president votes in the affirmative and the motion is agreed to.”
Moderate Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska voted against the motion, which Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky proposed after two previous versions of a healthcare bill failed to attract enough votes.
Several senators switched their positions after saying as recently as last week that they would not support a complete Obamacare repeal without replacement.
They were Sens. Shelly Moore Capito of West Virginia, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Rob Portman of Ohio and Dean Heller of Nevada – considered the party’s most vulnerable incumbent going into next year’s congressional elections.
McCain, 80, who was diagnosed with brain cancer after undergoing surgery 11 days ago, returned to the Senate to vote for the procedural motion.
He was the first to speak on the floor during debate.
“I voted for the motion to proceed to allow debate to continue and amendments be offered,” McCain said. “I will not vote for this bill as it is today.
“It’s a shell of a bill right now. We all know that.”
He called for both parties to work together to bring forth legislation that would improve healthcare for all Americans.
“We keep trying to win without help from the other side of the aisle,” McCain said. “We are getting nothing done, my friends, we’re getting nothing done.
“All we’ve managed to do was make more popular a policy that wasn’t very popular,” he said, referring to Obamacare.
“The administration and congressional Democrats shouldn’t have forced through Congress without any opposition a program that brought forth social and economic change as massive as Obamacare.
“And we shouldn’t do the same with ours.
“If this process ends in failure, which seems likely, then let’s return to regular order,” McCain said.
“What a great honor, an extraordinary opportunity it is to serve in this body,” he concluded. “It’s a privilege to serve with all of you. I mean it.
“I hope to impress on you again that it is an honor to serve the American people in your company.”
McCain’s comments were greeted with a standing ovation.
President Donald Trump afterward thanked McCain for coming from Arizona to cast his vote to move the healthcare motion forward, calling him a “very brave man.”
“He made a tough trip to get here and vote,” Trump said at the start of a joint news conference with Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri in the White House Rose Garden. “We want to thank Sen. McCain and all of the Republicans.
“We passed it without one Democrat vote,” the president added. “And that’s a shame, but that’s the way it is. And it’s very unfortunate.
“But I want to congratulate the American people, because we’re going give you great healthcare.”
The Senate last voted to repeal Obamacare in 2015, but it was vetoed by then-President Barack Obama. The House has voted more than 50 times to end the healthcare program.
President Trump has vowed to sign any bill that repeals the Affordable Care Act.
Before the procedural vote, McConnell encouraged Republicans to take action to end Obamacare after promising to do so for seven years.
“We have a duty to act,” he said. “The president’s ready with his pen.
“The House has passed legislation. Today, it’s the Senate’s turn.
“That starts with a vote we’ll take momentarily. The critical first step in that process, the motion to proceed.
“It’s the vote that determines whether this debate can proceed at all,” McConnell said. “Whether we’ll even take it up.”
But Minority Leader Chuck Schumer pleaded with Republicans to reject the procedural vote and work with his party – saying that beginning debate on the repeal motion would eventually lead to the end of Obamacare.
“The best the majority leader’s been able to cook up is a vague plan to do whatever it takes to pass something — anything — to get the bill to a House and Senate conference on healthcare,” the New York Democrat said before McConnell spoke.
“My colleagues, plain and simple, it’s a ruse,” Schumer continued. “The likeliest result of a conference between the House and Senate is full repeal of the Affordable Care Act or something very close to it.”
He slammed Republicans for crafting the healthcare plan under “much cloak-and-dagger legislating” and for locking Democrats out of the process.
“Their plan all along was to keep their bill hidden for as long as possible, evade scrutiny, hide the truth from the American people, and then jam the bill through in the dead of night on a party line,” Schumer said.
McConnell emphasized that the motion opens the debate on repealing Obamacare – and that any legislation could be amended during the debate process.
“President Obama vetoed what we passed before,” he said. “President Trump will sign what Congress passes this time.
“All we have to do today is to have the courage to begin the debate with an open amendment process and let the voting take us where it will.”
Story 2: Bipartisan Congress Overwhelming Passes New Sanctions on Russia, Iran, and North Korea — Long Overdue — Trump Will Sign Bill in Near Future or Face Congressional Override of Veto — Videos
House overwhelmingly passes Russia sanctions bill
The Situation Room With Wolf Blitzer 07/25: NEW RUSSIA SANCTIONS PASS HOUSE WITH VETO-PROOF MARGIN
Bipartisan Russia sanctions clear tough hurdle MSNBC
Congress to vote on sanctions against Russia,
Senators confident they could override a Trump veto on bill upping Russian sanctions for el
Story 3: Trump Again Critical Of Attorney General Sessions Apparently For Not Prosecuting Leakers and Going After Clinton Foundation Crimes — What about Obama Administration’s Spying On Trump — An Abuse of Power Using Intelligence Community for Political Purposes — Will Trump Dump Sessions? If He Does Trump Will Start To Lose His Supporters in Talk Radio and Voter Base — Direct Deputy Attorney Rod Rosenstein To Fire Mueller — If He Won’t Fire Him — Fire Both Mueller and Rosenstein — Punish Your Enemies and Reward Your Friends President Trump! — “In Your Guts You Know He is Nuts” — Videos
Shapiro Nails It
Ben Shapiro Show 347 | Begun The Sessions War Has
Tucker Carlson criticized Trump for ‘Nuts’ Attacks on ‘Humiliated’ Ally Jeff Sessions
Hume: Trump has peculiar concept of attorney general’s job
Trump continues attack on AG Jeff Sessions in new tweets
ANTHONY SCARAMUCCI REACTS TO TRUMP CALLING OUT AG SESSIONS | ANTHONY SCARAMUCCI FULL INTERVIEW
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CNN’s Don Lemon laughs out loud at Trump’s claim he’s more presidential than anyone except Lincoln
Under attack from the president, Attorney General Sessions still advancing conservative agenda
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The Pronk Pops Show 944, August 10, 2017, Story 1: Trump Preparing for Casus Belli and Negotiating With “Locked and Loaded” …Ready, Aim, “Fire and Fury” — Boom-Boom- Boom- Boom — Born To Be Wild — Thunder – Thunder – Thunder – Thunder — Thunderstruck — Videos
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Story 1: Trump Preparing for Casus Belli and Negotiating With “Locked and Loaded” …Ready, Aim, “Fire and Fury” — Boom-Boom- Boom- Boom — Born To Be Wild — Thunder – Thunder – Thunder – Thunder- Thunderstruck — Videos
President Trump holds a Press Conference
Brand New President Trump Presser! This is Awesome! (8-10-17)
Europa Universalis IV – The Musical: Casus Belli
Casus belli – Seinfeld
Scott Adams tells you why “fire and fury” is smart persuasion \ 2017.08.09
Scott Adams tells you how Trump is “pacing” North Korea and treating them like serious foes
China To Trump Prepare For War
Trump Tells N. Korea What Will Happen If They Hit Guam | Trump Full Remarks On N. Korea – 8/10/17
Preemptive War Debate (Part 1)
Preemptive War Debate (Part 2)
Preemptive War Debate (Part 3)
Preemptive War Debate (Part 4)
John Lee Hooker – Boom Boom (from “The Blues Brothers”)
John Lee Hooker – Boom Boom [HQ]
Steppenwolf – Born To Be Wild (Easy Rider) (1969)
AC/DC – Thunderstruck (Official Video)
I was caught
In the middle of a railroad track
I looked round
And I knew there was no turning back
My mind raced
And I thought what could I do
And I knew
There was no help, no help from you
Sound of the drums
Beating in my heart
The thunder of guns
Tore me apart
You’ve been
Thunderstruck
Broke the limit, we hit the town
Went through to Texas, yeah Texas, and we had some fun
We met some girls
Some dancers who gave a good time
Broke all the rules
Played all the fools
Yeah yeah they, they, they blew our minds
And I was shaking at the knees
Could I come again please
Yeah them ladies were too kind
You’ve been
Thunderstruck
AC-DC Thunderstruck / Jet Fighters
Battleship & ACDC – Thunderstruck
PRESIDENT TRUMP DECLARES THAT US IS “LOCK AND LOADED” IN RESPONSE TO ANY NORTH KOREAN PROVOCATION AGAINST GUAM OR ALLIES
Here is President Trump’s response to North Korea’s recent threats made against Guam:
Even the Most Precise Strike on North Korea Could Prompt Retaliation
By MICHAEL R. GORDON and ERIC SCHMITT AUG. 10, 2017
WASHINGTON — North Korea’s threat on Thursday to test-fire ballistic missiles soon near the American territory of Guam deepened the challenge confronting the Trump administration: how to defang Pyongyang’s missile programs without risking all-out war.
President Trump has made clear that his goal is to deny North Korea the capability to field a long-range nuclear-tipped missile that could strike the United States.
And though the Pentagon still hopes for a diplomatic solution, highly classified military options are at the ready, last seriously debated when the Clinton administration pondered pre-emptive action to try to thwart North Korea’s nuclear program.
Even a limited strike against a North Korean missile on its launching pad or the shooting down of a missile in midair would pose risks that the North’s leader, Kim Jong-un, might retaliate, setting off a spiral of escalation that could plunge the Korean Peninsula into war.
“In the event of a first strike against Kim, even a non-nuclear option, it is highly likely that Kim would retaliate at least conventionally against South Korea,” said James Stavridis, a retired four-star admiral who is now dean of Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. “This almost certainly would create an upward spiral of violence which would be extremely difficult to manage or to mitigate.”
The Trump administration’s first recourse has been diplomacy. Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson sought to head off North Korea’s missile program this week by suggesting that the United States could open talks with Pyongyang if North Korea would halt its missile tests.
GRAPHIC
What Can North Korea Reach With Its Missiles?
North Korea’s ballistic missile program has recently accelerated faster than expected.
On Thursday, however, North Korea raised the stakes by saying that it was considering a plan to test-fire four intermediate-range Hwasong-12 missiles in international waters near Guam, home to American air and naval bases as well as a Thaad antimissile system.
Mr. Trump hinted broadly later in the day that he has his own military options in mind. “Obviously we’re spending a lot of time looking at, in particular, North Korea,” he told reporters, “and we are preparing for many different alternative events.”
But few of the military options are straightforward, and some former Pentagon officials involved in war planning for North Korea pointed to the complexities.
A major consideration would be whether and when to evacuate American and other allied civilians, which is no small feat as Seoul, a city of about 10 million, is within range of North Korea’s rockets and artillery and the North Korean military is also armed with chemical and biological weapons.
“With all this talk, what I worry about is a serious miscalculation,” said James D. Thurman, a retired Army general who served as the top United States commander in South Korea from 2011 to 2013. “Before we start talking about all these military options, we have to decide what are we going to do with the U.S. citizens over there.”
He estimated that at least a quarter-million Americans would have to be moved.
If the United States was prepared to go beyond a limited strike, it could conduct a surprise attack on North Korea’s missile garrison and weapon storage areas, using American aircraft stationed in Guam, in Japan and on aircraft carriers as well as strategic bombers that would be refueled in flight.
American officials, however, do not have high confidence that the military could find and destroy North Korea’s entire arsenal of long-range missiles and nuclear warheads. It would be up to American missile defenses to knock out any that survived and that North Korea might use to attack the United States or its allies.
North Korea could also use its artillery, rockets and special operations forces to attack South Korea. To better defend against the threat, the United States could deploy more of its own artillery, counterbattery and reconnaissance aircraft to South Korea and send more air and naval forces to the region. But that would forfeit any element of surprise.
“I can’t underscore enough how unappealing all the military options are,” said Christine Wormuth, the Pentagon’s top policy official at the end of the Obama administration. “This wouldn’t end well. The U.S. would win, but it would be ugly.”
Diplomatic efforts are also deeply complicated. Unless China believes the United States is serious about using military options to head off North Korea’s emerging missile threat, it may be difficult to gain the cooperation from Beijing needed to fashion a political solution.
“I am 100 percent sure from a number of conversations that, as a last resort, he would use military force to deny them the capability to strike the homeland with a nuclear weapon,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, who met privately with Mr. Trump on the issue a month ago.
“He has convinced me,” Mr. Graham added. “Now it is up to him to convince the Chinese and North Koreans.”
To prevent nuclear attacks from elsewhere, namely Russia and China, the United States has relied on its potent nuclear arsenal. Some experts say the approach could also work with North Korea — a “least-bad option,” said Jeffrey A. Bader of the Brookings Institution.
But Mr. Trump has indicated that he does not want to rely on deterrence for a country he sees as bellicose and unpredictable.
Discouraging the enemy from massive escalation has worked even in the midst of war. During the 1991 Persian Gulf war, the administration of George Bush led an effort to push Iraqi forces out of Kuwait while dissuading Saddam Hussein from employing chemical weapons.
The Iraqis were warned shortly before the conflict by Secretary of State James A. Baker III that they would pay a heavy price if they used weapons of mass destruction. The Iraqi government interpreted that as meaning that the United States would rush to Baghdad to topple their government.
The United States could try a similar approach: attacking North Korea’s missiles while warning Mr. Kim that his government would be the next target if he dared to strike back. But few analysts are confident he would be restrained.
Those urging firmer action assert that a military buildup in and around South Korea could give economic sanctions and diplomacy more time to work while providing American negotiators with more leverage.
Mr. Graham asserted that diplomatic efforts would fail unless the United States made clear that North Korea’s deployment of an intercontinental missile would cross a “red line” and that military options were available if the talks faltered.
But General Thurman worried that the war of words was fueling tensions and adding to the risk of miscalculation.
“We are playing right into Kim Jong-un’s hands,” General Thurman said. “That is what he wants. He wants to be on the world scene.”
“I really would want to tamp down this rhetoric, maintain armistice conditions, keep the force ready and,” he said, “not get the herd spooked.”
Unspoken Words: Nuclear War Provocations and Plans
by JUDITH DEUTSCH
During the election campaign there was a brief period of anxiety about Clinton or Trump taking possession of the nuclear code, with the power to eradicate our species at the push of a few buttons. But where has discussion, let alone mention, of nuclear weapons gone? An exception is the brief article by Robert Dodge in CounterPunch about the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists advancing the Doomsday Clock to 2 ½ minutes before the midnight of human extinction caused by nuclear war or climate change: “Nuclear weapons are not even on the radar of our congress. Their phones are not ringing off the hook about nuclear weapons.”
In a January 30th interview with Sonali Kolhatkar, George Lakoff discussed Trump’s trial balloon about nuclear weapons in which Trump said that if we have them, we should use them. Lakoff said that there was a very brief reaction and then it’s gone, signaling that the public doesn’t care. Doesn’t care or doesn’t know? Harvard professor Elaine Scarry has said that some of her students had never heard of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
It is a dangerous time to not know about nuclear weapons. Trump inherited from Obama the ongoing US/NATO/Israeli escalation and military encirclement against Iran, China, and Russia, and the $1tn program to modernize nuclear weapons. On January 28th the Ron Paul Institute reported that Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL) introduced a bill to Congress: “… it specifically authorizes the president to launch a pre-emptive war on Iran at any time of his choosing and without any further Congressional oversight or input, as the President determines necessary and appropriate in order to achieve the goal of preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.” (Emphasis added).
Among the challengers to Iran’s purported nuclear threat are Richard Falk (UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, expert on nuclear weapons and international law): “What has Iran done to justify this frantic war-mongering … the outright threats emanating from Israel and the U.S. that leaves ‘all options’ on the table”? Seymour Hersh investigated Israel’s nuclear weapons program in his book The Samson Option. About Iran, Hersh wrote of“the repeated inability of the best and the brightest of the Joint Special Operations Command to find definitive evidence of a nuclear-weapons production program in Iran….. with lots of belligerent talk but no definitive evidence of a nuclear-weapons program.” And perhaps most damning, the U.K. Guardian: “Leaked spy cables show Binyamin Netanyahu’s dramatic declaration to world leaders in 2012 that Iran was about a year away from making a nuclear bomb was contradicted by his own secret service, according to a top-secret Mossad document.” Robert Fisk in The Independent 2012: “The Israeli President warns us now that Iran is on the cusp of producing a nuclear weapon. Heaven preserve us. Yet we reporters do not mention that Shimon Peres, as Israeli Prime Minister, said exactly the same thing in 1996. That was 16 years ago. And we do not recall that the current Israeli PM, Benjamin Netanyahu, said in 1992 that Iran would have a nuclear bomb by 1999. That would be 13 years ago. Same old story. We’ve been here before – and it suits Israel that we never forget ‘Nuclear Iran.’”
Noam Chomsky reported that a nuclear Iran suited the U.S. pre-1979, before the Islamic revolution overthrew the brutal shah regime. “A secret agreement made between MIT and the Shah of Iran, … pretty much amounted to turning over the Nuclear Engineering Department to the Shah.” Cheney, Rumsfeld, Kissinger, and Wolfowitz “wanted Iran to develop nuclear facilities and they were allies at the time.” [1]
Demonizing Iran at this time deflects attention from real nuclear dangers. According to the 2016 report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the nine nuclear states together possess a total of approximately 15,395 nuclear weapons, with the United States and Russia accounting for more than 93%. The public likely does not know that shortly after the UN pledged to end the scourge of war, shortly after two atomic bombs killed minimally 140,000 Japanese people, that the U.S. embarked on developing far more lethal hydrogen bombs. The explosive force of the Hiroshima bomb was 15-16 kilotons, whereas today’s bombs are in the range of 100 Kt to 550Kt of TNT (6 to 34 times the Hiroshima force). “Even a small-scale nuclear war involving one hundred Hiroshima-type (15 Kt) nuclear bombs between two countries such as India and Pakistan, would have a devastating effect on Earth’s climate” and “it is unlikely there would be any survivors.” “At most, this would involve only 0.3% of the world’s nuclear explosive power” [2]
Nuclear weapons are deployed by intercontinental ballistic missiles, by submarine launched ballistic missiles, and by strategic bombers. Submarines carrying up to 24 missiles, with each carrying four to five warheads, possibly as many as 144 warheads per submarine, constantly patrol the oceans. In a striking example of apparent disregard for the people of this planet, a CNN newscast from August 2016 shows a smiling Michelle Obama “christening” a General Dynamic Virginia-class submarine manufactured in Connecticut, named after her, and designed to carry nuclear weapons. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, even though a Russian first-strike is not a credible risk, the United States still keeps its 450 silo-based nuclear weapons, and hundreds of submarine-based weapons, on hair-trigger alert and ready to launch within ten minutes toward their targets.
The five year UN Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review met in April, 2015, following four years of preparatory meetings. Given the volatile tension between the U.S. and Russia and China, there was an urgency to take nuclear weapons off high alert status. Instead, the focus of the month-long meeting was diverted to Iran’s nuclear weapons and to political opposition by the U.S., U.K., and Canada to establishing a nuclear weapons free zone in the Middle East in order to shield Israel’s nuclear program from international laws and oversight. In violation of the NPT, Germany has provided Israel with a fleet of advanced submarines equipped to fire long-range nuclear-tipped cruise missiles. Astonishingly, two of these submarines, which carry weapons of mass destruction, were given to Israel as Holocaust reparation! According to Netanyahu, the submarines carry nuclear weapons pointed at Iran. “The Obama administration’s pretense that it knows nothing about any nuclear weapons in Israel makes intelligent discussion about the dangers of nuclear weapons in the Middle East all but impossible.” India provides Israel with a launching site in the Indian Ocean.
During the Cold War, nuclear weapons strategy was based on deterrence, or mutually assured destruction (MAD). Deterrence necessitated the capacity to retaliate with nuclear weapons, so the strategy in itself required weapons proliferation. Shortly after 9/11, G.W. Bush withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM). Missile defence systems are designed to destroy incoming nuclear missiles shortly after they are launched. There is a belief within the military that the U.S. could destroy its enemy’s full nuclear arsenal and prevent retaliation. Nuclear strategy shifted from deterrence to pre-emptive first strike, with the belief that a nuclear war is winnableand acceptable.
Frustrated by the decades-long paralysis in regulating and eliminating these weapons, and fearful that there is even more likelihood of nuclear war than during the Cold War, the UN-formed Open Ended Working Group (OPEG), made up of all nations, is now focusing entirely and explicitly on eliminating nuclear weapons. The nuclear-armed nations, plus many liberal democracies like Canada, Italy, Germany, Spain and other NATO countries, have voted against the majority. Iran voted for.
The late Jonathan Schell dedicated his life to the abolition of nuclear weapons. He wrote that nuclear exterminism did not come from 20thcentury totalitarian regimes, but that “the most radical evil imaginable – the extinction of the human species— [was] first placed in the hands of a liberal republic”. A graver suspicion was that the United States and its allies did not build these weapons to face extraordinary danger, but because of “an intrinsic element of the dominant liberal civilization itself – an evil that first grew and still grows from within that civilization rather than being imposed from without.” [3] Entire societies, the human species itself, are merely a pawn. Schell writes that nuclear strategy is the “very epicenter of banality” and is manufactured in think tanks and academic institutions from the pseudoscience of game theory.
The anti-nuclear and antiwar movements have been relatively silent about Israel and about Obama’s nuclear program. One current political opening may be women’s timely activism on the ground, with the precedent of women having led the successful opposition to atmospheric nuclear weapons testing in 1961. Women, in their historical role of caring for the young and old, for growing food and carrying water, are the unseen victims of war and should have the power to veto.
Notes.
[1] Noam Chomsky and Laray Polk (2013). Nuclear war and Environmental Catastrophe. Seven Stories Press), p. 21-22.
[2] Dr. Dale Dewar and Florian Oelck (2014). From Hiroshima to Fukushima to You: A Primer on Radiation and Health. Between the Lines. P. 149-50. Also see Eric Schlosser (2013). Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety. Penguin.
[3] Jonathan Schell (2001). The Unfinished Twentieth Century: The Crisis of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Verso. P. 32-47.
Casus belli
Casus belli is a Latin expression meaning “an act or event that provokes or is used to justify war” (literally, “a case of war”).[1] A casus belli involves direct offenses or threats against the nation declaring the war, whereas a casus foederis involves offenses or threats against its ally—usually one bound by a mutual defense pact.[2][3] Either may be considered an act of war.
The term came into wide use in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries through the writings of Hugo Grotius (1653), Cornelius van Bynkershoek (1707), and Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui (1732), among others, and due to the rise of the political doctrine of jus ad bellum or “just war theory”.[4][5] The term is also used informally to refer to any “just cause” a nation may claim for entering into a conflict. It is used retrospectively to describe situations that arose before the term came into wide use, as well as being used to describe present-day situations—even those in which war has not been formally declared.
In formally articulating a casus belli, a government typically lays out its reasons for going to war, its intended means of prosecuting the war, and the steps that others might take to dissuade it from going to war. It attempts to demonstrate that it is going to war only as a last resort (ultima ratio) and that it has “just cause” for doing so. Modern international law recognizes only three lawful justifications for waging war: self-defense, defense of an ally required by the terms of a treaty, and approval by the United Nations.
Proschema (plural proschemata) is the equivalent Greek term, first popularized by Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War. The proschemata are the stated reasons for waging war, which may or may not be the same as the real reasons, which Thucydides called prophasis (πρóφασις). Thucydides argued that the three primary real reasons for waging war are reasonable fear, honor, and interest, while the stated reasons involve appeals to nationalism or fearmongering (as opposed to descriptions of reasonable, empirical causes for fear).
Reasons for use
Countries need a public justification for attacking another country, both to galvanize internal support for the war and to gain the support of potential allies.
In the post-World-War-II era, the UN Charter prohibits signatory countries from engaging in war except: 1) as a means of defending themselves—or an ally where treaty obligations require it—against aggression; 2) unless the UN as a body has given prior approval to the operation. The UN also reserves the right to ask member nations to intervene against non-signatory countries that embark on wars of aggression.[6]
Historical examples
This section outlines a number of the more famous and/or controversial cases of casus belli which have occurred in modern times.
American Civil War
While slavery was the long term cause of the American Civil War, the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter (April 12–14, 1861) served as casus belli[7] for igniting the deadliest war in American history.
Spanish–American War
In the eyes of the United States, the sinking of the USS Maine provided casus belli for the Spanish–American War. There have been several alternative explanations for the explosion, such as that proposed by Mr. Evans, a senior editor of Newsweek. In his book, he identifies a flaw in the design of the USS Maine whereby the boiler room stood right next to the gunpowder storage room and that a boiler malfunction may have heated the adjacent metal wall and caused the powder to explode.[citation needed]
Second Opium War
Europeans had access to Chinese ports as outlined in the Treaty of Nanking from the First Opium War. France uses the execution of Auguste Chapdelaine as a casus belli for the Second Opium War. On February 29th, 1856, Chapdelaine, a French missionary, was killed in the province of Guangxi, which was not open to foreigners. In response, British and French forces quickly take control of Guangzhou (Canton).
World War I
The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria provided the trigger that led to the outbreak of World War I. In June 1914, the refusal of two points of the July Ultimatum offered to Serbia was used by Austria-Hungary as a casus belli for declaring war on Serbia. The murder at Sarajevo in Bosnia by Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb nationalist, Austrian subject and member of Young Bosnia (a secret society), was the reason why this ultimatum was made.
The Russian Empire started to mobilize its troops in defense of its ally Serbia, which resulted in the German Empire declaring war on Russia in support of its ally Austria-Hungary. Very quickly, after the involvement of France, the Ottoman Empire and the British Empire, five of the six great European powers became involved in the first European general war since the Napoleonic Wars.
In 1917, the German Empire sent the Zimmermann Telegram to Mexico, in which they tried to convince Mexico to join the war and fight against the United States, for which they would be rewarded Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, all former Mexican territories. This telegram was intercepted by the British, then relayed to the U.S., which led to President Woodrow Wilson then using it to convince Congress to join World War I alongside the Allies. The Mexican president at the time, Venustiano Carranza, had a military commission assess the feasibility, which concluded that this would not be feasible for multiple reasons.
World War II
In his autobiography Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler had in the 1920s advocated a policy of lebensraum (“living space”) for the German people, which in practical terms meant German territorial expansion into Eastern Europe.
Alfred Naujocks, who organized and led the Gleiwitz incident on the orders of Heydrich.
In August 1939, to implement the first phase of this policy, Germany‘s Nazi government under Hitler’s leadership staged the Gleiwitz incident, which was used as a casus belli for the invasion of Poland the following September. Nazi forces used concentration camp prisoners posing as Poles on 31 August 1939, to attack the German radio station Sender Gleiwitz in Gleiwitz, Upper Silesia, Germany (since 1945: Gliwice, Poland) on the eve of World War II in Europe. Poland‘s allies, the UK and France, subsequently declared war on Germany in accord their alliance.
In 1941, acting once again in accordance with the policy of lebensraum, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, using the casus belli of pre-emptive war to justify the act of aggression.
The Soviet Union also employed a manufactured casus belli against Finland during World War II on its part. In November 1939, shortly after the outbreak of hostilities between Germany, Britain and France, the Soviet Union staged the shelling of the Russian village of Mainila, which it blamed on the Finns. This manufactured incident was then used as a casus belli for the Winter War. In 1998, Russian President Boris Yeltsin admitted that the invasion had in fact constituted a Soviet war of aggression.
Six-Day War
A casus belli played a prominent role during the Six-Day War of 1967. The Israeli government had a short list of casūs belli, acts that it would consider provocations justifying armed retaliation. The most important was a blockade of the Straits of Tiran leading into Eilat, Israel’s only port to the Red Sea, through which Israel received much of its oil. After several border incidents between Israel and Egypt‘s allies Syria and Jordan, Egypt expelled UNEFpeacekeepers from the Sinai Peninsula, established a military presence at Sharm el-Sheikh, and announced a blockade of the straits, prompting Israel to cite its casus belli in opening hostilities against Egypt.
Vietnam War
Many historians have suggested that the Gulf of Tonkin Incident was a manufactured pretext for the Vietnam War. North Vietnamese Naval officials have publicly stated that the USS Maddox was never fired on by North Vietnamese naval forces.[8][9] In the documentary film “The Fog of War“, then-US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara concedes the attack did not happen, though he says that he and President Johnson believed it did so at the time.[10]
The first Gulf of Tonkin Incident (the 2nd of August) should not be confused with the second Gulf of Tonkin Incident (the 4th of August). The North Vietnamese claimed that on August 2, US destroyer USS Maddox was hit by one torpedo and that one of the American aircraft had been shot down in North Vietnamese territorial waters. The PAVN Museum in Hanoi displays “Part of a torpedo boat… which successfully chased away the USS Maddox August, [sic] 2nd 1964″.
The casus belli for the Vietnam War was the second incident. On August 4, USS Maddox was launched to the North Vietnamese coast to “show the flag” after the first incident. The US authorities claimed that two Vietnamese boats tried to attack USS Maddox and were sunk. The government of North Vietnam denied the second incident completely. Deniability played favorably into the propaganda efforts of North Vietnam throughout the war, and for some years to follow.
1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon
The casus belli cited by Israel for its June 1982 invasion of Lebanon was the attempted assassination of the Israeli Ambassador in London, which the Israeli government blamed on the Palestinian Liberation Organization.[11] A possible invasion plan had been prepared in advance by Israel.[12]
War on Terror
The casus belli for the Bush administration‘s conceptual War on Terror, which resulted in the 2001 Afghanistan war, was the September 11 attacks in 2001 on the World Trade Center in New York City, The Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, and the intended attack on the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C.
2003 Invasion of Iraq
When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, it cited Iraq’s non-compliance with the terms of cease-fire agreement for the 1990-1991 Gulf War, as well as planning in the 1993 attempted assassination of former President George H. W. Bush and firing on coalition aircraft enforcing the no-fly zones as its stated casus belli.[13][14]
Cited by the George W. Bush administration was Saddam Hussein‘s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program. The administration claimed that Iraq had not conformed with its obligation to disarm under past UN Resolutions, and that Saddam Hussein was actively attempting to acquire a nuclear weapons capability as well as enhance an existing arsenal of chemical and biological weapons. Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed a plenary session of the United Nations Security Council on February 5, 2003 citing these reasons as justification for military action.[15]
See also
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casus_belli
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