TBR News December 6, 2016

The Voice of the White House  

Washington, D.C.  December 6, 2016:”We have been digging into an interesting story about an Italian who was a member of Mussolini’s secret police, participated and later led razzias against Italian Jews, took a leading part in the massacre in Rome’s catacombs,  was later attached to the staff of Globocnik, the Senior SS commander in Trieste and was involved in the theft of millions of dollars worth of gold and jewels looted from Globocnik’s Jewish concentration camp victims. This person later escaped into Germany, in the American zone, and then worked for James Critchfield’s CIA intelligence unit stationed at Pullach, outside of Munich. When the CIA allowed him to emigrage to the US, he changed his name, got a new passport and took with him some of the loot. He set himself up with CIA assistance, outside of Washington. There will be more on this one later.”

Trump’s looming showdown with the ‘secret government’

December 1, 2016

by Michael D. Glennon

Boston Globe

Many incoming presidents learn quickly that the managers of the military, intelligence, and law enforcement departments of our government are largely self-governing, virtually immune from democratic accountability and the checks and balances described in civics books.

They make up a second government: The one we elect provides public frontage, but the concealed, unelected one actually defines and manages the nation’s security.

Two years ago that’s what I told the Globe when I was asked why programs such as mass surveillance, drone strikes, whistle-blower prosecutions, and unchecked war-making remained virtually unchanged from the Bush administration to the Obama administration.

The questions we face now are: Will double government have the same ability to check the power of the Trump administration? And can Americans expect President Trump to maintain the national security policies of his predecessors?

I expect not — on both counts.

The one essential condition for double government to function effectively is that the elected and concealed institutions present a united front. Harmony between the two institutions, at least in the eyes of the public, is vital. Trump, unlike his predecessors, has openly broken with the security directorate. Moreover, most of the program he’s espoused entails ramping up rather than scaling back security, which the bureaucracy has historically embraced.

All modern presidents have had an abiding incentive to remain in sync with the security managers, as have Congress and the courts, for a simple reason. No president, senator, or judge has wanted to confront the “if only” argument: “If only you had heeded the advice of the security experts, this devastating attack would not have occurred.” Better safe than sorry; safe means deferring to the security experts.

In addition to providing political cover, the appearance of public rapport invests double government with stability. Open feuding would unveil the power of the back-stage directorate, discrediting both institutions and causing the whole structure to “fall to earth.” That was the prediction of Walter Bagehot, the 19th-century English constitutional theorist who originated the concept of double government.

Trump, however, is unenthralled by experts — he wouldn’t be moving into the White House otherwise — so he has been indifferent to the effects of an open rupture with the security directorate. Either he doesn’t appreciate the need for legitimizing public harmony, or he’s decided to take on the whole bifurcated system and replace it with the single, unitary executive that the Constitution originally envisioned.

Trump’s response to former NSA and CIA director Michael Hayden may have been predictive. Hayden said that, if given an order to kill families of suspected terrorists, “the American armed forces would refuse to act.” “They won’t refuse,” Trump replied. “They’re not going to refuse me. Believe me — if I say do it, they’re gonna do it.”

Hayden later dug in his heels. If Trump wants to resume waterboarding, Trump can “get his own damn bucket,” Hayden said. He called Trump a “useful fool” of the Russian government, “manipulated by Moscow, secretly held in contempt.” But the breach between Trump and Hayden is the least of it. A gaping public rift has now developed between Trump and the national security establishment. An open letter from 122 Republican national security experts called Trump “fundamentally dishonest” and “utterly unfitted to the office.” Numerous current and former security officials have vowed they will never work for Trump or will openly defy presidential orders.

Trump, true to form, has counterattacked, disparaging the experts’ expertise. When the intelligence community concluded that Russia had hacked the Democratic National Committee and then disseminated purloined e-mails, Trump dismissed their assessment as unreliable. “Our country has no idea,” he said. “I don’t think anybody knows it was Russia that broke into the DNC.” The military is unable to defeat ISIS, Trump proclaimed, because the “generals have been reduced to rubble.” “They have been reduced to a point where it’s embarrassing to our country,” he said, indicating he might fire a few. Retired Marine general John Allen summed things up: If Trump were elected, Allen said, “I think we would be facing a civil military crisis, the like of which we’ve not seen in this country before.”

Contrast this unprecedented discord with the image of harmony projected by earlier presidents. Barack Obama resisted the managers’ push for a large-scale troop buildup in Afghanistan — but facing continuing pressure, he then introduced the negotiated compromise as his own. Seeming to be taken by surprise at the Edward Snowden revelations, Obama later embraced NSA mass surveillance as his own program. The 2014 Senate torture report said that President George W. Bush was not briefed on waterboarding when it began — which was confirmed by the CIA’s General Counsel — but Bush said that, no, he had personally approved it. President Bill Clinton proposed ending the ban on gays in the military — and then presented “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” as his own policy. After the Bay of Pigs disaster, President John F. Kennedy privately cursed the CIA for enticing him into it and said he wanted to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds” — only to allow, in a public press conference, that he was the responsible decision-maker.

Why the incentive to maintain public harmony? In short, to sustain legitimacy. Presidents must appear to be the decider to maintain public deference. If the curtain were pulled back and the security managers were revealed to exercise extravagant power, presidential credibility would collapse.

And so would that of the managers: With no electoral connection, their legitimacy derives from that of the president. Were a president to appear as presider rather than decider, compliance with presidential directives would be undermined. Legitimacy, in a system of double government, depends upon mutual cooperation to mask the two layers.

But wittingly or unwittingly, Trump has not bought into the duality. And given his popular base of support, he’ll have little incentive to do so.

Unlike Obama and earlier presidents, Trump has made a public show of disdaining experts. Trump presents himself as his own expert (“I know more about ISIS than the generals do, believe me”) with no need to pour over background briefings or policy papers written by bean-counters from the swamp he’s been elected to drain. Trump not only has little to lose by crossing swords with Washington’s security glitterati — he fortifies support from those who put him into office by publicly taking on the Beltway power elite.

It’s possible, of course, that Trump could back off, become “presidential,” and join the long list of predecessors who made public peace with the security directorate. If Trump chooses that course, the substance of his security policies will differ little from Obama’s.

But it’s also possible that, loyal to his base and true to his seeming instincts, President Trump will remain as confrontational toward the security managers as he was as a candidate. What would a prolonged assault on the authority of expert insiders mean for Trump’s security policies?

It depends on whether security managers see the particular measure as raising or lowering the level of protection.

Trump would get considerable support for measures they see as beefing up security. The security managers are in the business of selling protection. They operate in an incentive structure where threat inflation and overprotection are rewarded, not penalized. When a president wants more rather than less protection, they are delighted to provide it.

With toothless congressional overseers and spineless judges manning the watchtowers, the likely upshot is therefore bureaucratic deference to more drone strikes and cyberattacks, tighter mass surveillance, weakened cellphone encryption, stepped up FBI investigations, and, yes, a resumption of torture. Following release of the Senate torture report, CIA Director John Brennan was asked whether the CIA could ever resume those practices. In a rare moment of candor, he replied: “I defer to the policy makers in future times.” Numerous officials who ran the CIA’s torture program still work for the agency. Not one has been prosecuted.

Any efforts by Trump to scale back protection would encounter opposition. Into this category fall the nuclear nonproliferation regime, sanctions against Russia, and the NATO, Japan, and South Korea security alliances. Security programs are “sticky down” — much harder to cut back than to maintain or expand. Efforts by Trump to ratchet down measures that the security managers have long nurtured would thus meet not only the usual bureaucratic slows but also resignations and occasional outright defiance.

Would such tactics bring Trump to heel?

Not likely. Resignation in protest is a time-honored way of registering dissent within the bounds of the system. Elliot Richardson and William Ruckelshaus resigned rather than follow President Nixon’s order to fire the Watergate special prosecutor, Archibald Cox. However, very few resignations have occurred in response to perceived governmental wrongdoing, particularly within the military. The cost in professional ostracism, economic hardship, and upended family life is too high for most to endure. And the payoff is typically slim. Willing replacements normally are plentiful, eager to get promoted, pick up and carry out orders where the dissenter left off. Richardson, Ruckelshaus, and Cox were distinguished, courageous public servants. Cox still got fired.

Similarly, direct disobedience could be dramatic — but it’s hard to see how it could work. Their functional autonomy notwithstanding, top military, intelligence, and law enforcement officials do serve at the pleasure of the president. An official who disobeyed a direct order from the president would be fired and replaced with someone who would obey.

Most importantly, in confronting bureaucratic insubordination, Trump would have a strong hand to play. Whether he realizes it or not, he would be launching a de facto assault on double government — with undertones of constitutional revivalism. Unlike Congress, the courts, and the presidency, the national security bureaucracy is not, after all, part of the constitutional system of checks and balances. Federal departments and agencies were never intended to check the elected officials who created them. Quite the opposite: Power was always believed to be delegated to the bureaucracy, not by it.

Trump’s public face-off with the security directorate is, in sum, a game-changer. Bagehot did not explain what happens when open discord causes double government to fall to earth. We may be about to find out.

NATO officers from Turkey have turned into stateless asylum-seekers

The Erdogan regime is targeting its own NATO personnel, accusing high-ranking Turkish officers of being coup plotters, ordering them to return home. An exclusive report by DW’s Teri Schultz.

December 6, 2016

DW

Dozens of high-ranking Turkish military officers formerly posted at NATO headquarters in Brussels and SHAPE military headquarters in Mons are among more than 125,000 people President Recep Tayyip Erdogan alleges helped launch a failed coup against him in July.  Erdogan calls them “terrorist soldiers.”

Several of these officers agreed to speak with Deutsche Welle under cover of anonymity.

They want to know if any visiting dignitary is going to ask Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu for details on what’s happening to them, how he’ll reassure them the alliance that it can get along just fine without some of its best-trained specialists.

They are mostly Western-educated, some with PhDs and multiple master’s degrees from American universities and institutions, with many NATO exercises under their belts.  All say they had nothing to do with the attempted overthrow of the Erdogan government, that they denounced it immediately and continued working as loyal military representatives of the Turkish government. Yet one by one, their names showed up on one of almost 20 lists of suspects that have been circulated by Ankara to Turkey’s missions abroad, usually late on Fridays.

In cover letters attached to those lists, the officers say, they were given instructions to turn in their NATO passes and diplomatic passports, told they are eligible now only for an identity document that goes one way — back to Ankara. And most were ordered to do that within three days of being notified; some even sooner.  No charges were given, simply lists of names, ranks and services and the information that they had been suspended or fired.

In the beginning, one officer says, he and others were planning to obey the orders. “Our first reaction was to go back and defend ourselves as we were innocent of any anti-government activity,” he told DW. “We said goodbye to our colleagues at NATO,” presuming that, after lifelong stellar careers in the military, they could go clear their names quickly and return to their posts at NATO.

“Then we heard that 17 of our colleagues who did return had been arrested,” he said. “So we thought it would be better to wait.”

Families warned to stay in Belgium

One Brussels-based officer was not on any list, so when he was summoned to a meeting in Ankara, he decided to go.  A refusal, he feared, would make him look suspicious. That was six weeks ago.

Since then his wife has not seen him or talked to him.  Speaking sadly as her youngest children play nearby, she explained how she frantically tried to get information from the Turkish military representative at NATO when her husband didn’t return and she couldn’t reach him by phone. Finally she got word of what happened through the wife of someone who saw him arrested after a meeting at government offices in Ankara, but there’s been no official explanation to this day.

Her husband’s salary was cut off when he disappeared; she has no way to support their three children long-term. Her father-in-law in Turkey was finally able to visit her husband in prison. His message to her: Stay in Belgium.

But even that has its risks. The officers say President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has threatened that those who do not obey orders to return home will be hunted down.  Most haven’t received salaries since September, so they are living off savings, selling cars and other belongings.  They have moved into smaller apartments, both because they need to save money and so that the government won’t know their addresses. Some have requested political asylum in Belgium; counterparts have done the same at Ramstein Air Base in Germany.

One officer wrote about this in a goodbye letter to his NATO colleagues that he called the “silent scream of a Turkish officer.” He shared the letter with DW.

“Like my other Turkish colleagues, my dismissal does not mean only losing my job. I have almost lost all my military IDs, passport, social rights, health coverage, bank accounts, retirement pension, working rights etc… And more sadly, I am left by myself without any past and unfortunately without any future. But now, I think that we – the Turkish people – have lost the values of respect for human dignity, liberty, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights. My individual losses are nothing compared with my country’s losses.”

Losses are also being felt by non-Turkish NATO military officers who worked with the purged staff.  One told DW that the quality of the personnel being sent as replacements by the Turkish government is not up to NATO standards. That individual, who declined to be named, said he felt very uncomfortable with Turkey’s apparent flouting its treaty obligations of following the rule of law and respecting basic human rights.

NATO cautious in dealing with Turkey

But evidently Turkey is too important an ally to rock the boat very hard. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, who’s now been asked repeatedly about the situation, says only that these concerns have been “raised” with the Turkish government, not whether he’s been sufficiently reassured by the answers.

The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer, was not impressed on a fact-finding trip last week, calling out the regime for the ferocity of its crackdown on people from all walks of life. Melzer said there has been an “environment conducive to torture” created in the prisons where thousands of purged citizens are being held.

But in Brussels Monday, U.S. Ambassador Doug Lute explained that “rather than dictating standards” to the Turkish government, NATO and the US have decided to “express confidence” in it. “We have a common set of values; they’re in the preamble to the Washington Treaty,” Lute reminded.  “We expect all 28 allies will abide by those standards because not only do they have a treaty obligation to others, it’s in their own self-interest.”

One Turkish officer said sadly that with attitudes like this, he feels sold out, both by his own government and by NATO. Another added the reminder that an alliance is only as strong as its weakest member, and they feel that the country with the second-largest army is now that weakest link.

Greek court rules against extraditing Turkish soldiers

A Greek court has ruled against extraditing three soldiers who fled Turkey after July’s coup attempt. Turkey’s government alleges the men were involved in the failed effort to overthrow President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

December 5, 2016

DW

A court has refused to extradite three of eight Turkish servicemen who fled to Greece after the failed July 15 military coup. They all deny playing a role in the attempt to dislodge President Recep Tayyip Erdogan from power.

“I am very pleased with the ruling,” Stavroula Tomara, the soldiers’ lawyer, told the news agency Reuters. “They shouldn’t have been extradited. The court was objective.”

Five other Turkish soldiers face extradition from Greece. The eight officers fled to Greece in a military helicopter on July 16 and landed in the northern city of Alexandroupoli.

In September, a first-instance board rejected the claims made by five of the officers. They have appealed that decision.

Greek officials have kept the soldiers in protective custody pending decisions on their asylum applications. On Monday, the court ruled that officials must recognize the soldiers as asylum applicants pending a final ruling on their claims.

The remaining officers continue to wait for decisions on their requests. The court could rule on the extraditions of the other five soldiers in the coming days.

Turkey’s troubling crackdown

Following the coup, President Erdogan and his allies have carried out a purge of Turkey’s military and civil service. The government can still appeal its extradition request, and any final decision rests with Greece’s justice minister.

The officers said they would not receive a fair trial in Turkey, where the authorities have detained thousands of people following the coup, including top generals. Tomara, their lawyer, said the “humiliating” treatment and “torture” meted out to other coup suspects in Turkey had made an impression on the Greek court.

Last month, NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said several Turkish officers serving in the alliance’s command positions had requested asylum in member states. Several other Turkish nationals, including civil servants and businesspeople, have sought refuge in Greece following the coup attempt.

The extradition fight has exposed the sometimes-strained relations between Greece and Turkey, neighbors and NATO allies at odds over issues from the island of Cyprus to air rights over the Aegean Sea. Greece also depends on Turkey to hold up its end of a heavily criticized refugee swap negotiated with the European Union in the spring.

 

Turkey: Curfews and crackdown force hundreds of thousands of Kurds from their homes

December 6, 2016

Amnesty International

Tens of thousands of residents of the UNESCO world heritage site of Sur are among an estimated half a million people forced out of their homes as a result of a brutal crackdown by Turkish authorities over the past year which may amount to collective punishment, said Amnesty International in a new report.

As the suppression of opposition Kurdish voices by the Turkish government intensifies, the report Displaced and dispossessed: Sur residents’ right to return home, reveals the desperate plight of families forced out of the historical centre of Diyarbakir as a result of intensive security operations towards the end of last year and an ongoing round-the-clock curfew. Homes in the once-bustling district have been destroyed by shelling, demolished and expropriated to pave the way for a redevelopment project that very few former residents are likely to benefit from.

“A year after a round-the-clock curfew was imposed in Sur, thousands of people remain displaced from their homes, struggling to make ends meet and facing an uncertain future in an increasingly repressive atmosphere,” said John Dalhuisen, Amnesty International’s Europe Director.

“Whilst the crackdown on civil society in south-eastern Turkey has been widely reported, there has been little coverage of the forced displacement which has devastated the lives of ordinary people under the pretext of security.”

Following the breakdown of a ceasefire in July 2015, clashes broke out between people affiliated to the armed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and Turkish security forces. In response to declarations of “self-governance”, the building of barricades and digging of trenches in Sur, the central district of Diyarbakır, and other towns across the south-east, authorities began imposing 24-hour curfews and carrying out heavily militarised security operations.

On 11 December 2015, an indefinite 24 hour curfew was declared in six of Sur’s 15 neighbourhoods preventing people from leaving their homes even to buy essential food or medical supplies. Police reportedly used loudspeakers to order people to leave. Water and electricity were cut for extended periods, while homes were rocked by army shells and peppered with bullets.

One woman who attempted to stay in her home told Amnesty International: “I was in the house with two children, we didn’t drink water for one week. One day a [tear] gas capsule was fired into the house. We didn’t have electricity for 20 days. I wanted to leave but I had nowhere to go.”

The clashes in Sur ended in March 2016, but the curfew has remained in large parts of the district. Following the forced evictions almost all properties have been expropriated by Turkish authorities with many buildings also demolished. Although return has been made almost impossible by the curfew and the destruction, some residents have ventured back only to find their homes ransacked and possessions looted or destroyed.

One man returned to his home eight months after being displaced to find all of its walls had collapsed. He told Amnesty International: “I can’t even cry any more. I have cried so much over losing my house.”

Police forced another man to leave his home, together with his father and brother, before detaining them. He told Amnesty International, “They forced us to leave with guns to our heads.” All three of them were initially charged with terrorism offences but the charges have subsequently been dropped. When he returned to his home he found that his possessions had been burnt.

A woman told Amnesty International that she was harassed by the police when she visited her home six months after being forced to leave, and is not planning to go back. “We found all our belongings broken and piled up in in the courtyard,” she said. Her family were offered 3,000TL (around 800 Euro) compensation for the loss of their possessions, a fraction of what they were worth. Her daughter-in law said: “We were going to appeal but they said that this is all we would get, so we signed.”

Displaced residents have been unable to find adequate alternative housing that is affordable and have struggled to access essential services. Many lost their jobs when they were displaced and children have had their education severely disrupted or have dropped out of school altogether. Grossly inadequate compensation and a failure by authorities to provide sufficient – or in some cases any – rent assistance has pushed already impoverished families into greater hardship.

To compound the situation, the targeting of Kurdish opposition voices following the coup attempt has meant that NGOs providing vital support for poor and displaced people have now been shut down.

Residents reject government claims that the ongoing curfew and house demolitions are being done in the interest of security given that the clashes finished over eight months ago. Instead they see them as part of a calculated plan to redevelop their neighbourhoods and resettle them elsewhere. An urban regeneration project first aired in 2012 has been resurrected, but details remain scant and residents have not been consulted. This follows a pattern of such projects in Turkey which have forcibly evicted residents who are never able to return home.

“On the bitter anniversary of the curfew in Sur, much of the population of this world heritage site have been forced to look on as their own heritage has been bulldozed,” said John Dalhuisen.

“Shockingly, the desperate situation facing the displaced residents of Sur is mirrored in dozens of other districts across south-east Turkey. The government must act urgently to lift the curfew, ensure affected communities are fully compensated and either helped to return to what remains of their homes or, at the very least, to their neighbourhoods.”

Background

Sur is the central district of Diyarbakir, the largest city in the predominantly Kurdish south-east of Turkey. Its ancient fortified walls and adjacent Hevsel Gardens were designated a UNESCO world heritage site in 2015.

Many of the people in Sur came there after being forced to evacuate from rural villages during the conflict in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Forced relocations by Turkey’s security forces at that time resulted in Diyarbakır’s population more than doubling in size.

Under the state of emergency introduced following the July coup-attempt, the human rights situation in the south-east of Turkey has deteriorated. A series of executive decrees has all but eliminated opposition Kurdish voices, shutting down media and NGOs. Elected mayors, including those for Sur and Diyarbakir, were replaced with government appointed trustees.

In November, hundreds of NGOs across Turkey were closed on the unspecified grounds of “links to terrorist organizations or threats to national security. Among the NGOs that were closed were the main ones providing assistance to families displaced from Sur.

The figure of at least half-a-million people displaced in the south-east is an estimate based on the size of the populations in areas placed under long-term curfews, reported proportions of residents forced to flee and the level of destruction to homes and infrastructure in these areas.

Turkey is a party to a number of international and regional human rights treaties which requires it to respect people’s rights to freedom of movement, adequate housing and other economic and social rights, as well as provide effective remedies for victims of human rights violations.

After 8 Years of Expanding Presidential War Powers, Obama Insists They Are Limited

December 6 2016

by Alex Emmons

The Intercept

Anticipating that Donald Trump might try to fulfill his promises to “bomb the shit” out of terror groups and do a “hell of a lot worse than waterboarding,” President Obama released a report on Monday summarizing his administration’s views of the legal barriers and policies limiting the president’s military power.

The 61-page report calls for trying terrorism suspects in civilian court and explains at length why no future president could legally torture detainees. It lays out the administration’s self-imposed limits on military operations — and declares that a 2001 resolution Congress passed in the wake of 9/11 is not a blank check to go to kill alleged terrorists wherever they are.

“It clearly reads like an explanation, a textbook that’s left for the next person,” said Naureen Shah, director of the Security With Human Rights Program at Amnesty International. “Here are all the things you cannot do.”

But in trying to defend Obama’s legacy, the report paints a picture of an administration far more restrained than it was in practice.

The report comes just weeks before Trump will inherit bombing campaigns in seven countries, a legally unaccountable drone program, and an open prison at Guantanamo Bay.

The new report is the latest in a series of public steps Obama has recently taken to give the appearance of reining his war powers. Over the summer, for instance, the White House released its internal guidelines for drone strikes outside of war zones and issued a new executive order calling for more transparency on casualties going forward.

But both documents could be revoked by a stroke of the next president’s pen – a fact that CIA Director John Brennan admitted at an event in July.

Obama dramatically escalated the use of drones to kill alleged terrorists far away from recognized warzones. In an October interview with New York Magazine, Obama noted that his executive reforms to the drone program were motivated by concern he would hand off a killing program with no oversight or controls. “You end up with a president who can carry on perpetual wars all over the world, and a lot of them covert, without any accountability or democratic debate,” said Obama.

But more quietly, Obama has continued to expand the power of the president to wage covert war. The Washington Post reported last month that Obama was elevating Joint Special Operations Command – the government’s high-level team for global killing missions – into a “ new multiagency intelligence and action force,” with expanded power to launch attacks on terrorist groups around the world.

As for its discussion of the drone program, Monday’s report repackages many of the Obama administration’s favorite propaganda lines for the next president: The report refers to assassinations with the hazy phrase “targeted lethal force”; It adamantly maintains that the U.S. has a preference for capturing terrorists over killing them, while it has routinely demonstrated the opposite; and the report celebrates the clandestine killing program for its “transparency,” despite the fact that the president did not publicly discuss the program until 2013. In addition, most of the documents made public from the program were released due to leaks, Congressional pressure, and lawsuits.

The report also adopts the administration’s practice of whitewashing civilian death tolls, arguing that the administration’s record on civilian casualties exceeds “the safeguards that apply as a matter of law in the course of an armed conflict.” Earlier in the summer, the administration released a ludicrously conservative estimate of the number of civilians killed by U.S. drones in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. The administration claimed that they had killed between 64 and 116 civilians, while independent estimates say the number could be as high as nine times that.

In outlining standards “for the use of lethal force,” the report advocates a “near certainty” standard that the target is present, and that innocent people not be injured or killed. In doing so, the Obama administration is advocating a policy that they have appeared to repeatedly violate – including when U.S. drones struck a Yemeni wedding party in December 2013, and in January 2015, when the CIA killed two aid workers held hostage in Pakistan.

The report outlines additional legal safeguards the Obama administration claims it applied before it killed American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki – the only American citizen who it says was hit by a “specific, targeted strike.” The report does not mention the other seven U.S. citizens who were killed by drones.

The report boasts that American citizens have due process rights under the Fourth and Fifth Amendment no matter where they are, and cautions the Trump administration to take Constitutional rights into consideration when “assessing whether it is lawful to target the individual.”

But the Obama administration has consistently fought to undermine those Constitutional protections. For instance, it has argued that citizens cannot go to court to challenge their place on a government kill list, and courts have no role to play in oversight after a strike has taken place.

A large portion of the report is devoted to justifying how far the war on terror has expanded, and how a 2001 resolution passed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks could be stretched to cover wars 15 years later in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya, along with drone bombings and other operations in Yemen and Somalia. The report does not mention Pakistan, where the U.S. has also waged a secret drone war since 2004.

Presidents Bush and Obama have cited the resolution to justify military action from Libya to the Philippines, and critics have argued that it provides a president with blank check authority to go after insurgent groups with loose affiliations to the September 11 attacks.

But the report argues that the resolution is not an authorization to wage unlimited war against insurgent groups. The report says that in order to be considered an “associated force” of al Qaeda, an insurgent group must not only be “an organized, armed group that has entered the fight alongside al-Qa’ida or the Taliban,” it must also be “a co-belligerent… in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners.”

But the recent move to designate the Somali insurgent group al-Shabaab as an “associated force” of al Qaeda illustrates how slippery the standard is.

The report offers the administration’s first on-the-record explanation of why it added al-Shabaab to its list, despite the fact that Al-Shabaab has never demonstrated a capability to attack the U.S. homeland. According to the report, they were nonetheless designated because they “pledged loyalty to al Qaeda,” and have conducted attacks against “U.S. persons and interests in East Africa.”

But the fact that the administration’s decision was unilateral and unaccountable – and made without any public demonstration of the evidence to support it – serves as a tutorial for future abuse.

Taking a firmer note, the report argues forcefully that torture is illegal and cites U.S. laws, treaties, executive orders, and regulations that make it so.

But it does not offer an explanation for why the Obama administration failed to prosecute CIA torture in the Bush administration – a failure that rights groups frequently blame for the continued public support for torture.

Human rights advocates praised the report for its opposition to torture and lawlessness in war, but argued that its framework would allow some violations to slip through the cracks.

“Another way to put it is that it is trying to make sure the floodgates are closed while leaving some doors unlocked,” said Shah. “And that’s what’s frightening.”

The White House issued a companion memo instructing the next administration to build on the framework of the report, and revise and reissue it for future years. But that memo, like many of the order and directives in the report, could simply be discarded on a whim by the Trump administration.

A New Wave of Popular Fury Could Hit Europe in 2017

December 5, 2016

by Alissa J. Rudindec

New York Times

PARIS — For Europe, 2016 has brought a series of political shocks: near-record numbers of immigrants arriving from the Middle East and Africa; a vote by Britain to leave the European Union and renewed threats by Russia to meddle on the continent.

But 2017 could be even bumpier. There will be at least three elections in Europe next year: in Germany, France and the Netherlands for sure, and now perhaps in Italy, too. Just about everywhere, political establishments are being blamed for tepid growth, for too few jobs and for favoring global financial markets over the common citizen.

The latest indicator of popular discontent was Italy’s referendum on Sunday, when voters rejected constitutional changes proposed by Prime Minister Matteo Renzi. That result was a stinging blow to Mr. Renzi, who said he would resign.

Coming after Britain’s vote this year to leave the European Union, the Italian outcome was taken as yet another rebuke to decades of efforts to forge a closer union of the bloc’s 28 countries. And it raised new doubts about whether that union would hold in the years ahead.

“This is a crisis that strikes at the absolute core of the European Union in a way even ‘Brexit’ does not,” said Mujtaba Rahman, the managing director for Europe at the Eurasia Group, a risk consultancy.

“The U.K. was always one foot in and one foot out,” he said. “Italy is a founding member state, fully integrated into the union’s political and economic structure. This is existential for the E.U.”

The Italian electorate rejected a constitutional overhaul that, among other changes, would have increased the power of the prime minister by reducing the number of senators and decreasing their power. The political impact of the rejection lies less in any direct effect on policies than in the opening it provides for the populist Five Star movement, which campaigned against the constitutional changes. It also brought the resignation of Mr. Renzi, a strong supporter of the European Union who was working hard to stabilize some of Italy’s shakiest banks.

The popular anger has turned what are normally routine elections into what François Heisbourg, a former French defense official and the chairman of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, described as moments of “volatility and inscrutability.”

That is especially so with yes-or-no referendums — first in Britain, now in Italy — where a populist rejection of the political establishment can, by extension, also be a chance to send a message to the unelected officials in Brussels who work closely with European government leaders.

In that context, Mr. Heisbourg said, the anti-European Union sentiment “is just a handle for the sense of a loss of control, a loss of agency” that people feel.

“In Britain, one of the campaign slogans for Brexit was ‘Vote Leave, Take Control,’” he noted. “The idea was the E.U. was preventing Britons from doing that. The E.U. is the piñata for populism.”

The motivation for voters in Britain and Italy was much the same as that for American voters who backed Donald J. Trump: to drive home to the elite that the status quo was unacceptable.

Compounding the frustration on both continents, and especially in Europe, are the lingering effects of the global recession of 2008, from which many European countries never fully recovered.

“The social contract that we, the West, signed up to — Europe, the United States — no longer adds up,” for people, said Xenia Wickett, who oversees the United States and the Americas program for the research institution Chatham House.

“The population is aging, we have far more older people relying on the younger ones for support, productivity is slowing, we haven’t been investing in our infrastructure and education,” Ms. Wickett said. “You have the disenfranchised saying, ‘That doesn’t work for us.’”

In France, for example, economic growth barely reached 1 percent last year. Youth unemployment there still hovers near 25 percent. (In Italy, Spain and Greece, it is even higher.) Older and less educated workers feel overwhelmed by an economy that seems to have left them behind.

“The Rust Belt isn’t just in America — there’s a Rust Belt in the north of France,” said Alexandra de Hoop Scheffer, the director of the Paris office of the German Marshall Fund. “They feel they are the dispossessed, dispossessed of their country’s sovereignty and of their economy.”

Far from easing those anxieties, membership in the European Union is blamed for exacerbating them. And the austerity regime that Brussels officials and international lenders have demanded, especially across southern Europe, has fueled anger still more.

The Italian vote will probably widen the gulf between the northern eurozone countries, led by Germany, and those in the south, said Pawel Tokarski, a senior researcher at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin.

Many in Germany and other northern countries, he said, will take the vote as a sign of unwillingness in Italy to overhaul its economy the way Brussels wants.

“Definitely, this vote is going to strengthen the anti-E.U. voices,” Mr. Tokarski said.

Those voices have been building for more than 25 years, as the union expanded, the Brussels bureaucracy grew and many people began to feel that the union’s regulations and requirements were more trouble than they were worth.

Tensions were apparent as early as 1992, when the Maastricht treaty, which was meant to bring Europe closer together, barely won approval in Denmark and France.

Today, anti-European Union positions are part of the platform of almost every populist party, including Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France; Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom in the Netherlands; and the Five Star Movement in Italy, led by Beppe Grillo.

The political demise of Mr. Renzi, the Italian prime minister, and his reform agenda removes an unabashedly pro-European leader who had hoped to ignite economic growth by ending an era of crippling budget austerity. Instead, he may be remembered for creating an opening for politicians who are openly hostile to Europe and the euro.

“The way Washington is perceived by many American people is the way many French or Germans or Italians perceive Brussels,” Ms. de Hoop Scheffer said. “They perceive Brussels as almost an illegitimate entity.”

The old center-right and center-left parties that divided power in a number of countries and kept Europe stable for decades are being swept aside by new and unpredictable forces nearly across the board. Politicians who play on nationalism and worries about economic disenfranchisement are on the rise. Animosity toward the European Union is of a piece with this feeling.

“Right versus left doesn’t exist any more,” Mr. Wilders, who is regularly rated as the most popular politician in the Netherlands, said in an interview.

Many voters on both sides of the Atlantic seem fed up with the old political names and faces, like Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush in the United States.

In France, the list includes the former president Nicolas Sarkozy and another center-right figure, Alain Juppé, who are both out of the 2017 presidential race, as well as the current Socialist president, François Hollande, who decided not to seek a second term because his approval ratings were so poor.

With so many major elections on the way and so few of the big questions settled, Europe seems destined to continue to be subject to political tremors — and vulnerable to stronger forces that risk fracturing the European Union altogether.

“What we want is to bring back the values, the identity, the culture and the money, and put forward again national interests,” Mr. Wilders said.

Whether such changes are possible is hard to know, but Europe’s populists would clearly like to project an air of inevitability.

“I’m telling you, the genie will not go back into the bottle,” Mr. Wilders said. “The process will continue, and will change Europe forever.”

Peter S. Goodman contributed reporting from London, Alison Smale from Vienna and Milan Schreuer from Paris.

 Day of Reckoning for Renzi

Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi failed to get the result he wanted in a critical referendum on Sunday. With the announcement of his intention to resign, Italy and Europe face storms ahead.

December 5, 2016

by Hans-Jürgen Schlamp

Spiegel

Rome-“I lost,” a visibly moved Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi said around a half-hour after midnight during a news conference at Rome’s Palazzo Chigi. “And the post that gets eliminated is mine.” On Monday afternoon, Renzi is expected to convene his cabinet, thank them for their work and submit his resignation to Italian President Sergio Mattarella.

It was a clear response in the wake of a clear defeat. Around 60 percent of Italian voters rejected Renzi’s proposal to reform of the country’s parliamentary system in a referendum on Sunday. Turnout proved extraordinarily high, with around 70 percent of eligible voters casting ballots, rendering any possible excuses moot. The result is clear. And because Renzi had early on tied the result of the vote to his own future as Italy’s leader, there was likewise a second clear message sent by the electorate: “Ciao Renzi!”

That message was sent by voters from opposite ends of the political spectrum. The right, the far right and the far left all saw the reform referendum as an opportunity to push its initiator, the unpopular Social Democrat Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, out of office.

Left vs. Left 

One of those who campaigned against the referendum was Rossana Rossanda, 92, an icon of the Italian left. During the 1950s and 1960s, she was part of the leadership of the Communist Party. She was expelled from the party in the 1970s for failure to support key party positions and, together with others who had run afoul of the party, formed Italy’s most important left-wing newspaper, Il Manifesto. Like many on the Italian left, the leftist icon Rossana voted against the referendum and against Renzi.

Rossana said the “pack” she had joined forces with was abhorrent to her. It included groups like the right-wing nationalist, xenophobic Lega Nord; the anger-fueled euro-skeptic, anti-everything party led by former comedian Beppe Grillo; and the remnants of those who in the past supported former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. Ultimately, though, Renzi is “just as bad” as them, she says.

Indeed, many members of Matteo Renzi’s own Democratic Party voted against him for the same reason, including heavy-hitters like former Prime Minister Massimo D’Alema or Pier Luigi Bersani, who served as the party’s chairman for years.

A Revolt of the Abandoned and Forgotten

Above all, though, the high voter turnout and the clear anti-government line underscores just how extremely disatisfied Italians are with state leadership, state authorities and their lives in general. And not without reason. Years of crisis in the country have largely devoured the once strong middle class. As in so many other countries, globalization has created a small class of wealthy winners and a large class of losers. Social harmony in these countries, as in Italy, is based on the belief that children will have better opportunities than their parents did. But with half of the country’s young no longer able to find jobs, that dream has now died.

When young Italians gather in bars or on city squares, anger with the state quickly comes to the fore. The vote against Renzi is the rebellion of those who feel abandoned and forgotten. It’s a vote, as Renzi said at many of his appearances, “against the political caste” — just that Italians, particularly young ones, have long since come to see him as being a representative of that very caste. Not much is left of the man who once called himself “Il Rottamatore,” the “scrapper” or “demolition man” who vowed to drive out vested interests and ossified political cliques. For now, the discontented and the new scrappers have now driven him out.

Italy’s Future? Not Funny at All

It’s difficult to make any clear predictions about what the outcome of the referendum will mean. One thing, though, is clear: Italy’s banks are likely to slide deeper into crisis (for an in-depth look at the issues facing Italy, click here ). And with the uncertain situation likely to lead to an unwillingness to invest in the country, it seems likely that the economy as a whole will follow. Prime Minister Renzi may be stepping down, but the Social Democrats, together with their current coalition partner, the New Center Right party of former Berlusconi protégé Angelino Alfano, still have a majority in parliament and will seek to remain in power.

Italian President Mattarella could accept Renzi’s resignation, but he could also theoretically reject it. It’s possible that a transitional or technocrat-led government could be installed until the next parliamentary elections are held in 2018. But it’s also possible that snap elections could be held next year.

Should that come to pass, the right-wing populist Lega Nord leader Matteo Salvini and the always outraged ex-comedian Grillo could very well be the front-runners against each other for victory. And that would be a challenge for both Italy and Europe. Because no matter who wins, it is likely they will have to run in opposition to Europe. Any other message is unlikely to lead to election victory in today’s Italy.

Russia says will treat as terrorists rebels who refuse to leave Aleppo

December 5, 2016

Reuters

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Monday he was confident Moscow and Washington can reach a deal in talks this week on the withdrawal of all rebels from the eastern part of the Syrian city of Aleppo.

He told a news conference once the deal was reached, rebels who stay in the besieged eastern part of the city will be treated as terrorists and Russia will support the operation of the Syrian army against them.

“Those armed groups who refuse to leave eastern Aleppo will be considered to be terrorists,” Lavrov said. “We will treat them as such, as terrorists, as extremists and will support a Syrian army operation against those criminal squads.”

Russia and the United States will start talks on the withdrawal in Geneva on Tuesday evening or Wednesday morning, and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has sent his proposals on routes and timing of the withdrawal, Lavrov said.

“We believe that when the Americans proposed their initiative for militants to leave eastern Aleppo, they realized what steps they and their allies, who have an influence on militants stuck in eastern Aleppo, would have to take.”

He added that a United Nations resolution on a ceasefire would be counterproductive because a ceasefire would allow rebels to regroup.

(Reporting by Maria Kiselyova,; writing by Maria Tsvetkova; Editing by Christian Lowe)

Syrian troops close in on Aleppo’s Old City, poised for war’s biggest victory

December 6, 2016

by Angus McDowall , John Davison and Stephanie Nebehay

Reuters

BEIRUT/GENEVA-Syria’s army and allies closed in on areas near Aleppo’s Old City on Tuesday, looking closer than ever to achieving their most important victory of the five-year civil war by driving rebels out of their last urban stronghold.

Rebels said on Tuesday they would never abandon Aleppo, after reports that U.S. and Russian diplomats were preparing to discuss the surrender and evacuation of insurgents from territory they have held for years.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said talks with the United States on a rebel withdrawal would begin in Geneva as soon as Tuesday evening or Wednesday morning. But sources familiar with the plans later told Reuters no talks would take place this week in the Swiss city.

The rebels, who controlled large parts of eastern Aleppo for nearly five years, have lost around two thirds of their territory in the city over the past two weeks.

The government now appears closer to victory in the city than at any point since 2012, the year after rebels took up arms to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad in a war that has killed hundreds of thousands of people, made more than half of Syrians homeless and created the world’s worst refugee crisis.

The Syrian Foreign Ministry said it would now accept no truce in Aleppo, should any outside parties try to negotiate one. Russia and China vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution on Monday calling for a weeklong ceasefire. Moscow said rebels used such pauses in the past to reinforce.

Tens of thousands of civilians are still trapped in rebel-held districts of Aleppo, reduced to a few kilometers across. The United Nations, whose staff are restricted to government-controlled areas of the city, on Tuesday described “a very disastrous situation in eastern Aleppo”.

“There has been heavy shelling on us, there are massacres (of civilians), there’s no electricity and little internet access,” said Abu Youssef, a resident of one of the areas still held by the fighters.

Damascus and Moscow have been calling on rebels to withdraw from the city, disarm and accept safe passage out, a procedure that has been carried out in other areas where rebels abandoned besieged territory in recent months. Moscow wants negotiations with Washington to facilitate such an evacuation.

But despite Lavrov’s announcement of a meeting in Geneva, a U.S. official said firm plans for talks had never been set, though Washington was still working to reopen negotiations.

“We’re not going to negotiate this publicly,” the official said on condition of anonymity.

Rebels have told U.S. officials they will not withdraw, and said there had been no more formal contact with Washington on the topic since last week.

“The Americans asked if we wanted to leave or to stay … we said this is our city, and we will defend it,” Zakaria Malahifji, a Turkey-based official for the Fastaqim rebel group, told Reuters on Tuesday.

The Cold War-era superpowers have backed opposing sides in the war, but Russia has intervened far more openly and decisively, joining Iran as well as Iraqi and Lebanese Shi’ite groups to back Assad.

Some of the groups fighting in eastern Aleppo have received support in a U.S.-backed military aid program to rebels deemed moderate by the West. However, this has been minimal compared to massive Russian air support to aid Assad’s government, which has turned the tide of the war in his favor over the past year.

The army said it had taken over areas to the east of the Old City including al-Shaar, Marja and Karm al-Qaterji, bringing them closer to cutting off another pocket of rebel control.

The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said al-Shaar and some other areas had been taken, but did not immediately confirm the takeover of all the areas announced by the army. A Turkey-based rebel official denied al-Shaar had been taken but said fighting continued in the neighborhood.

Outside of Aleppo, the government and its allies are also putting severe pressure on remaining rebel redoubts. The Observatory said a heavy Syrian and Russian aerial bombardment in the last three days in the mostly rebel-held Idlib province to the southwest had killed more than 100 people.

WINTER IS COMING

The rebels’ loss of the eastern half of Aleppo, Syria’s largest city before the war, would be the biggest victory of the conflict so far for Assad, securing his grip on all Syria’s main cities.

It would also be a success for President Vladimir Putin who intervened to save Moscow’s ally in September 2015 with air strikes, and for Shi’ite Iran, whose elite Islamic Republic Guard Corps has suffered casualties fighting for Assad.

U.N. official Jens Laerke said: “Winter is approaching, it’s already getting very, very cold so that has come up as a priority need … Food is running out, the little food that is available is being sold at extremely inflated prices.”

While rebels have said they will not leave, one opposition official, who declined to be identified, conceded they may have no alternative for the sake of civilians who have been under siege for five months and faced relentless government assaults.

Insurgents, meanwhile, have fought back ferociously inside Aleppo. Some of the fighting took place on Monday within a kilometer of the ancient citadel, a large fortress built on a mound, and around the historic Old City.

With narrow alleyways, big mansions and covered markets, the ancient city of Aleppo became a UNESCO heritage site in 1986. Many historic buildings have been destroyed in the fighting.

Apart from their support for rebels fighting against Assad, Western countries are also taking part in a U.S.-led air campaign against Islamic State, the Sunni Muslim militant group which broke away from other anti-Assad groups to proclaim a caliphate in territory in Syria and neighboring Iraq.

Moscow says helping Assad is the best way to defeat Islamic State. Western countries say the group gains strength from the fury unleashed by Assad’s military crackdown on his enemies.

France, a staunch backer of the anti-Assad opposition, will convene foreign ministers of like-minded countries in Paris on Saturday to try to come up with some form of strategy in the wake of the Aleppo onslaught, although few diplomats expect anything concrete to be achieved.

Western countries say that even if government forces take Aleppo, they will still not be able to end the conflict, as long as millions of Syrians see the government as a brutal enemy.

“Aleppo falls, but the war goes on,” said one U.S. official.

(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva, John Irish in Paris, John Davison and in Beirut and Jonathan Landay, Yeganeh Torbati and Arshad Mohammed in Washington; writing by Peter Millership; editing by Peter Graff)

 Trump on Boeing’s Air Force One contract: ‘Cancel order!’

December 6, 2016

by Amy Tennery and Andrea Shalal

Reuters

NEW YORK/WASHINGTON-U.S. President-elect Donald Trump urged the government on Tuesday to cancel an order with Boeing Co to develop a revamped Air Force One – one of the most prominent symbols of the U.S. presidency – saying costs were out of control.His bombshell was the latest example of how Trump is using his podium, often via brief Twitter messages, to rattle companies and foreign countries as he seeks to shake up business as usual in Washington. Trump, who takes office on Jan. 20, took aim at what he called cost overruns even though the plane is only in development stages.

“Boeing is building a brand new 747 Air Force One for future presidents, but costs are out of control, more than $4 billion. Cancel order!” Trump said on Twitter. It was not immediately clear what prompted the timing of his complaint.

Trump, who stressed during his election campaign that he would use his skills as a businessman to make good deals that benefit American taxpayers, then made a surprise appearance in the lobby of Trump Tower in New York, where he amplified his comments.

“The plane is totally out of control. I think it’s ridiculous. I think Boeing is doing a little bit of a number. We want Boeing to make a lot of money but not that much money,” he told reporters.

Boeing has not yet begun building the two replacements for the current Air Force One planes, which are scheduled to be in service by the 2024 fiscal year, and it was not clear what Trump’s source of information was for the cost.

The budgeted costs for the Air Force One replacement program are $2.87 billion for the fiscal years 2015 through 2021, according to budget documents.

A March 2016 report from the Government Accountability Office, a watchdog agency, estimated the total cost of the two 747’s, which have to be extensively modified so they can function as an airborne White House, was estimated at $3.2 billion.

Boeing has not yet been awarded the money to build the proposed replacements, and is currently working on engineering and designing the aircraft.

“We are currently under contract for $170 million to help determine the capabilities of these complex military aircraft that serve the unique requirements of the President of the United States,” the company said in a statement.

“We look forward to working with the U.S. Air Force on subsequent phases of the program allowing us to deliver the best planes for the president at the best value for the American taxpayer.”

Some of the statistics cited by Trump about the plane did not appear to reflect arrangements between Boeing and the Department of Defense, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said. Speaking to reporters, he added that Americans would expect that future presidents should benefit from upgrades to Air Force One.