On Redacting a Wide, Wondrous World

By Mort Rosenblum, Reader Supported News

29 May 20

UCSON – A whiff of spice can take me back to a sundown in Sana’a, sprawled on carpet cushions, chewing khat with zonked-out Yemeni pals under bright stars atop a six-story skyscraper made of mud. A haunting chorus of muezzins wailed their call to prayer as they had for a thousand years.

We ate fahsi served on ornate brass platters: lamb cutlets stewed with chickpeas in cardamom, coriander and cumin (that is just the c’s), laced with fiery pili-pili. Honey-pistachio pastries came with cups of green coffee I won’t attempt to describe.

I left Tucson in the 1960s to roam the world in pursuit of news but also on a quest to find tucked-away treasures — to watch, listen, breathe in aromas and linger late at night to learn how the other 95 percent lived. Far and away, Sana’a was the jackpot. 

That magical city, which legend dates back to Noah’s son Shem, nestled in a valley 7,500-feet-high among dramatic peaks. Narrow lanes dotted with donkey plop wound among the carved doorways, stained glass and alabaster façades of high-rise mud mansions. From above, it was an Arabian Nights fantasy in gingerbread.

In a warren of souks, alive with noise and color, we talked politics over hubble-bubble pipes. North Yemen was open to all comers. China built roads; Taiwan looked after F5 jets from America. North Korea did the stadiums; South Korea did the sewers. South Yemen was a Soviet vassal, but Moscow also sent financial and military aid up north. 

Today, Sana’a is largely rubble, partly because of Raytheon Corporation bombs built in Tucson. Yemen, now unified but at war with itself, is the world’s worst humanitarian disaster. Half of its 30 million people are starving, and Covid-19 spreads. Perhaps 200,000 combatants and civilians have been killed, perhaps many more. No one knows.

I am partial to old mud walls and tile, lost long ago to Tucson when developers tore out its old Mexican heart. But so much else in the world has been destroyed or closed off by conflict. Today, a world map with no-go areas inked over would look like the Mueller report redacted by William Barr. 

As Yemen makes dead clear, Donald Trump’s foreign policy is wreaking new levels of irreparable havoc in an interconnected world. And it exposes his single-minded pursuit of profit and his own personal interests.

Saudi Arabia waded into the civil war in 2015 with relentless airstrikes in the north on rebelling Shiites – Houthis. The kingdom blockaded food and medical supplies in what human rights observers call a deliberate, indiscriminate siege campaign.

Barack Obama authorized logistical support to counter Houthi shelling into Saudi Arabia, but he began to scale back as civilian casualties increased. Trump, in contrast, doubled down. Jared Kushner courted Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman and worked out a 10-year arms sales package approaching a half trillion dollars. 

Fury mounted in 2018 when the prince’s goons lured Jamal Khashoggi to the Saudi embassy in Istanbul. They silenced his critical columns in The Washington Post by dismembering him with a bone saw. Trump shrugged that off with a few token words.  

Senator Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, joined Bernie Sanders in a bill to block arms sales to Saudi Arabia, invoking the War Powers Resolution to keep the American military out of foreign conflicts.

“We have been providing the bombs that the Saudi-led coalition is using, we have been refueling their planes before they drop those bombs, and we have been assisting with intelligence,” Sanders said. “In too many cases our weapons are being used to kill civilians.” In August, he noted, an American-made bomb hit a school bus, killing dozens of young boys and wounding many more.

The bill passed early in 2019, 54-46, but not enough senators could override Trump’s veto. A New York Times investigation recently revealed the damning details. 

In May 2017, Lee put Saudi arms sales on hold in the Armed Services Committee. Raytheon countered with its chief lobbyist: Mark Esper, now secretary of defense. Peter Navarro, the trade adviser, wrote a memo titled, “Trump Mideast arms sales deal in extreme jeopardy, job losses imminent.” Sales soon resumed. 

On the Fox business channel, Trump laid out his approach: “I want Boeing and I want Lockheed and I want Raytheon to take those orders and to hire lots of people to make that incredible equipment.”

Day after day, Americans watch their president intone dire threats with jutting jaw and glowering brow, a striking echo of Mussolini. At home, his self-serving policies are plain to see. But few realize how much destruction and suffering he causes abroad.

Nothing in foreign policy can be seen in isolation. In America, “breaking news” deals with the moment. But human memories are long, and the past matters. NATO and the UN need cooperation to stifle conflict; Trump doesn’t do cooperation. America First equates to America Only.

Trump inherited crises that required defusing tension, strengthening European alliances, and finding common ground with adversaries. The Middle East, especially, needed evenhanded diplomacy. His approach was the exact opposite.

In his view, the massive assault on the Islam State’s caliphate was the end of terrorism, an American victory to bedazzle his base. In fact, Iraqis and Kurds did most of the in-close dying, and American non-policy creates far more terrorists than it suppresses. 

Until Desert Storm took back Kuwait in 1990, Middle East geopolitics amounted to backgammon, with subtle moves and shifting strategies. George H.W. Bush chose not to push on to Baghdad, mindful of a power vacuum after Saddam Hussein.

But the Gulf War infuriated Osama bin Laden, who said a half million infidel U.S. troops, females included, on bases in Saudi Arabia defiled Islam’s holiest sites. He formed Al Qaeda, which first attacked U.S. embassies in Africa.  

After 9/11, George W. Bush pursued him in Afghanistan, then decided to finish off Saddam. That blasted the backgammon board all to hell. American torture embittered Sunnis, who created ISIS. When their caliphate was overrun, many fled to West Africa, linking up with other Islamic zealots who fled south when Libya fell.

Like pungent spices evoke Yemen, clunking wooden bells take me back to Timbuktu, knees gripping a camel hump with blue-turbaned Tuaregs headed into the dunes. That fabled center of Islamic learning on the Niger River dwarfed anything I had imagined. 

I’d visit markets ablaze in color and then leave my shoes by carved wood doorways for tea with hospitable imams. Back at the French-run Sofitel, I’d swim while tourists sunbathed in bikinis. Dinner came with red wine unfazed by a journey from Burgundy.

Today, a wide stretch of West Africa is redacted off the map. Even armed convoys are wary of Timbuktu. Terrorists from Libya joined rebelling Tuaregs to occupy the city. Islamist fundamentalists destroyed much of it. French forces drove them out, but France has lost 41 men in Mali since 2013. Another 200 U.N. peacekeepers were killed.

Trump, uninterested in places with nothing to offer, wants to cut aid and U.S. military presence in Africa, where climate change he refuses to confront already forces millions to flee their homes. 

Stepping back, the global order is changing. Trump’s version of the pandemic — it is all China’s fault — provokes scorn abroad. He mocked it for months as another Democratic hoax. Until mid-March, he praised Xi Jinping’s openness and prompt action.

China hid the threat briefly until courageous doctors sounded alarms. By mid-January, the Chinese published vital data about the deadly coronavirus, but Trump ignored his experts’ briefings. Had Obama left “a mess” (he didn’t), that was three years ago.

With grim irony as Covid-19 spreads in America, Trump supporters who want to keep out foreigners are, at least for now, themselves turned away at borders.

Trump refused WHO tests that contained the virus elsewhere. He withheld funding and shunned a video summit to plot a common strategy. Xi stepped in with a $2 billion grant, equal to four years of America’s dues. 

Xi seized the moment to assert China’s growing global role. For starters, Beijing would end Hong Kong’s autonomy far sooner than agreed in the 1997 handover with Britain that pledged “one country, two systems” until 2047. 

China contained Covid-19 with drastic surveillance, message control, and lockdowns that are anathema to any free society. Trump is doing his part, inspiring dictators to muzzle their media with two words: fake news. He applauds Narendra Modi as he veers the world’s biggest democracy toward Hindu hegemony. 

After Trump saw he could not wish away the virus, he focused on twisting truth to elude blame. Meantime, crises deepen all over the map. Israel and Palestine face showdown. Kim Jong-un is building a bigger bomb. And all the rest.

Keeping the peace in today’s world is no job for a greed-obsessed, clueless amateur backed by private interests and corporations, each with their own to-do lists. A new president can fix some damage. But no one can bring back that sunset in Sana’a.  

Mort Rosenblum has reported from seven continents as Associated Press special correspondent, edited the International Herald Tribune in Paris, and written 14 books on subjects ranging from global geopolitics to chocolate. He now runs MortReport.org.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

Trump's Plan: Break the Internet to Suppress the Vote

By Spencer Ackerman and Asawin Suebsaeng, The Daily Beast

29 May 20

Trump will never leave Twitter. He loves it too much. Now he’s trying to browbeat it into helping him win re-election.

he internet, and Twitter in particular, is central to President Donald Trump’s power. His tweets move everything from Pentagon policy on Syria and transgender service to how Republican lawmakers vote on surveillance law. Their frequent falsity is beside the point. It’s the influence that matters. 

Now Trump is trying to push a lasting structural change upon the internet, one that internet-freedom advocates fear will entrench a disincentive for any social media company to block disinformation on their platform. And it comes after Twitter, an open sewer for disinformation, took a very meager step to stop Trump from suppressing the vote in November.

In signing an executive order on Thursday, Trump called for “new regulations” with respect to the provision of the 1996 Communications Decency Act permitting internet companies to remove or restrict content they host “that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable.” The provision, Section 230, establishes that social-media and other internet content hosts are platforms, not publishers, and therefore not legally liable for what users say, do, or experience online.

Trump’s proposal declared that “a provider should properly lose the limited liability shield” of Section 230 if it’s found to “silence viewpoints that they dislike.” As a means for determining that, it called for “all executive departments and agencies” to review how they were applying the provision and for a rule-making petition to be filed to the Federal Communications Commission within 60 days. Trump’s order also instructed loyalist Attorney General Bill Barr to propose legislation “useful to promote the policy objectives of this order” and advised heads of various government agencies to review the advertising dollars that they were spending on social media platforms. 

Collectively, the order suggests social media companies may face penalties—real or potential—for attempting to police misinformation on their platforms. Either, according to longtime observers, is likely to be enough to prompt those companies to revert to their resting state: opening the sluice-gate of misinformation.

For the president’s critics, it all amounts to a jarring sequence: To stay in power, Trump has taken a step toward erasing the already blurred line between what is and isn’t true online. 

“Donald Trump is so committed to preventing Americans from voting that he spent weeks lying about vote by mail, and now he is trying to twist Section 230 and the First Amendment to force Twitter to spread these lies,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), the provision’s co-author. 

For years, President Trump has viewed his relationship with social-media giants—particularly Twitter, his favorite online medium—as both adversarial and mutually beneficial. Much in the same way that the president has routinely assailed the credibility and perceived disloyalty of Fox News, but won’t actually ditch the network, he takes a similar attitude toward a major online platform like Twitter, according to two people close to him. He often will complain. But he is extremely unlikely to take the ultimate step and personally abandon his own Twitter account. 

Trump sees Twitter as one of his best communications assets. Though he insisted on Thursday that there was “nothing” more he “rather do than get rid of my whole Twitter account,” he claimed he simply could not do so because it was his medium for going around the press corps. He credits the platform, in part, for how he was able to dominate the national conversation during his successful 2016 presidential run. He “does not want to give up something he thinks helps him win,” one of those sources said. That commitment hasn’t stopped him from threatening the company to score political points or because he feels personally aggrieved.

Indeed, Thursday’s executive order has been conceptually in the works for many months. According to two individuals familiar with the process, the Trump White House convened multiple meetings in the summer of 2019, inviting officials from the Justice Department, the FCC, the FTC, and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration to the White House to discuss crafting an executive order that similarly would have targeted social media giants’ legal liability. 

Those efforts were largely managed by White House domestic-policy aide James Sherk, a former labor economics analyst at the Heritage Foundation, who had the unenviable task of organizing a protracted drafting process demanded by an irked Trump. The intra-administration sessions caused predictable headaches, with officials unsure of how to reconcile the legal technicalities of the directive with Trump’s demands and fits.

“We didn’t know if this was busy-work to satisfy one of the president’s mood swings, or if we were actually getting something done,” said one former senior Trump administration official.

In one of the early meetings that summer, the White House proposed language to agency officials that read as if the president was, for instance, ordering the FCC to redefine the liability shield of Section 230, the sources recounted. White House officials had to be reminded by agency envoys that Trump wasn’t allowed to do that (though he can ask the NTIA to petition the FCC to conduct an independent review on the matter), and that such language would be quickly, and likely successfully, challenged. Still, many of the agency officials played along, for fear of upsetting the White House.

“Nobody in the room wanted to kill this,” one of the sources familiar with the discussions said. “[But] very few, if any, wanted anything to do with it.”

Thursday’s action is a culmination of that pent up frustration along with years’ worth of right-wing objections that social media “shadowbans” right-wing content. That objection was dismissed by a federal appeals court on Wednesday, which found that conservatives suing Twitter and Facebook could not demonstrate that account deactivation for terms-of-service violations amounted to political suppression.  

But the specific issue prompting Trump to act was not any generic grievance. It was his false assertion that voting by mail—an expansion of which is under consideration because of the novel coronavirus that has killed 100,000 Americans in three months—will lead to systematic voter fraud. 

Twitter told CNN that the president’s tweets promoted “potentially misleading information about voting processes.” And, indeed, there’s no evidence of meaningful voter-fraud related to mail-in balloting. In fact, five states, including Republican-run Utah, already vote entirely by mail. 

“To be absolutely clear, absentee and mail voting in America is secure and election officials are confident in the security measures they have in place. It is critical this year that election officials ensure every American citizen has the option to vote absentee if they want to, and have safe polling place options,” said Wendy Weiser, the vice president for democracy at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. “This is critical for public health and critical for the health of our democracy. The president’s actions are making it harder for public officials to take the steps that they need to ensure a safe, secure, and healthy election this November.”

Twitter’s solution, however, was not to take down the erroneous tweets or ban Trump’s account for a terms-of-service violation. Rather, it appended a hypertext alert below the tweet urging users to “get the facts about mail-in ballots.” 

To Trump, this was “Big Tech... doing everything in their very considerable power to CENSOR in advance of the 2020 election,” as he (naturally) tweeted Wednesday night. And he insisted that rectifying it by executive order would be tantamount to “a Big Day for Social Media and FAIRNESS!”

It’s a familiar distortion for those who dealt with the aftermath of Russia’s disinformation campaign on social media during the 2016 election. One of them, Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) pushed for internet companies to provide greater transparency around political ads on their platforms. Warner’s measure sought to bolster the integrity of hosted content while sidestepping suggestions that the companies ought to determine what on their platforms is and isn’t true. He expressed alarm at the “baseless” claim Trump made about censorship and its implications for voter suppression.

“While many of us have raised concerns for several years now about the opaque and inconsistent content moderation practices of large platforms and the ways that Section 230 has been unjustly invoked to protect platforms that facilitate fraud, widespread consumer harms, and civil rights violations, it’s strange to see the president mimic some of those legitimate concerns in support of a baseless claim that he and fellow conservatives are being disadvantaged or censored online,” Warner told The Daily Beast in advance of the executive order’s release. 

“The president has openly boasted about his prominence on social media, even while routinely violating the policies of each platform,” Warner continued. “This latest effort to cow platforms into allowing Trump, dark money groups, and right-wing militias to exploit their tools to sow disinformation, engage in targeted harassment, and suppress voter participation is a sad distraction from the legitimate efforts to establish common sense regulations for dominant social media platforms.” 

The irony is that Twitter’s tentative step toward confronting deceit on its platform is a departure from social-media firms’ economic logic, in which what matters is the mass collection and commodification of user data, not hosting truthful discourse. That logic explains why Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg criticized Twitter for playing the “arbiter of truth.” That position was also captured in a recently leaked memo from Facebook executive Andy Bosworth that compared ensuring veracity on Facebook to the temptations of JRR Tolkein’s One Ring, a dark power that corrupts the ringbearer. 

"That 'dark power' notion is a rationalization meant to deflect attention from the economic imperatives central to the tech firms’ business model," said Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and a professor emerita at Harvard Business School. 

“Their algorithms are tuned to maximize behavioral data intake into their supply chains for computation into behavioral predictions. They are compelled to extract data at scale and scope… that means volumes of as many kinds of data as possible. In this economic logic, there is no room for judging data content. The corporations are radically indifferent to whether data are true or false—it’s all the same to their revenue flows.” Zuboff explained. 

Section 230 was written before that economic logic took hold, when the model of the internet was a bulletin board rather than the “bloodstream” of contemporary life, Zuboff continued. And however content-agnostic social media companies portray their algorithms to be, those algorithms do push content on to users, as NBC’s Ben Collins has documented with the spread on Facebook of the QAnon conspiracy theory. 

“Mr. Trump wants to confront the power of these companies and how they operate, but instead of fighting for truth, he’s fighting for the right to lie, to inject poison into the body politic,” Zuboff said. “The tech companies and the government are in a larger existential battle right now, like two Death Stars battling each other. Both want to operate outside the rule of law and democratic norms.”