|
FOCUS | The Border Fetish: The US Frontier as a Zone of Profit and Sacrifice |
 |
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=26693"><span class="small">Todd Miller, TomDispatch</span></a>
|
|
Thursday, 26 April 2018 11:23 |
|
Miller writes: "At first, I thought I had inadvertently entered an active war zone. I was on a lonely two-lane road in southern New Mexico heading for El Paso, Texas. Off to the side of the road, hardly concealed behind some desert shrubs, I suddenly noticed what seemed to be a tank."
U.S. troops near the U.S.-Mexican border. (photo: Getty)
The Border Fetish: The US Frontier as a Zone of Profit and Sacrifice
By Todd Miller, TomDispatch
26 April 18
Recently, President Trump declared war on undocumented immigrants heading for the southern border -- you know, all those marauding “rapists” and their pals -- and, as seems appropriate in any “war,” he promptly ordered the mobilization of the National Guard. Troops from its ranks were to be dispatched border-wards permanently, or at least until his Great Wall could be funded and built by someone or other. (“We are going to be guarding our border with our military. That’s a big step,” he said proudly, in announcing the move.) Up to 4,000 National Guard troops are officially to take on the task, except that so far only a scattered 900 or so from the states of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona have actually made it to the border -- with another 400 promised by California Governor Jerry Brown, as long as they fulfill none of the anti-immigrant duties that Trump has in mind for them. Are you with me so far? Add to this the fact that the troops going into battle will be doing so unarmed and with no authority to act directly in any way in relation to immigrants of any sort. (As the memo that Secretary of Defense James Mattis signed put it, the National Guard troops will not “perform law enforcement duties or interact with migrants or other persons detained by U.S. personnel.”)
Think of this as Syria in the Southwest. In response to presidential tweets and boasts, the U.S. military is searching for a way to visually fulfill his promises -- oh, those missiles sent into Syria, more than twice as many as the last time! -- while actually doing as little as humanly possible to achieve his goals. Mission accomplished! In fact, those National Guard troops could essentially hit the border and twiddle their thumbs, while the endless advanced systems of high-tech surveillance implanted in our ever more fortified and militarized borderlands do most of the work for them. TomDispatch regular Todd Miller, author most recently of Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security, has been following all of this for years now and today offers a sense of how ordinary -- despite all the hype -- Trump’s military moves have actually been in the context of recent American border politics. It’s a grim tale without an end in sight. Fortunately, Miller is on the job.
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
The Border Fetish
The U.S. Frontier as a Zone of Profit and Sacrifice
 t first, I thought I had inadvertently entered an active war zone. I was on a lonely two-lane road in southern New Mexico heading for El Paso, Texas. Off to the side of the road, hardly concealed behind some desert shrubs, I suddenly noticed what seemed to be a tank. For a second, I thought I might be seeing an apparition. When I stopped to take a picture, a soldier wearing a camouflage helmet emerged from the top of the Stryker, a 19-ton, eight-wheeled combat vehicle that was regularly used in military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. He looked my way and I offered a pathetic wave. To my relief, he waved back, then settled behind what seemed to be a large surveillance display mounted atop the vehicle. With high-tech binoculars, he began to monitor the mountainous desert that stretched toward Mexico, 20 miles away, as if the enemy might appear at any moment.
That was in 2012 and, though I had already been reporting on the militarization of the U.S.-Mexican border for years, I had never seen anything like it. Barack Obama was still president and it would be another six years before Donald Trump announced with much fanfare that he was essentially going to declare war at the border and send in the National Guard. (“We really haven’t done that before,” Trump told the media on April 3rd, “or certainly not very much before.”)
Operation Nimbus II, as the 2012 mission was called, involved 500 soldiers from Fort Bliss and Fort Hood and was a typical Joint Task Force North (JTF-N) operation. Those troops were officially there to provide the U.S. Border Patrol with “intelligence and surveillance.” Since JTF-N was tasked with supporting the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on the border, its motto was “protecting the Homeland.” However, it was also deeply involved in training soldiers for overseas military operations in ongoing American wars in the Greater Middle East.
Only weeks before, 40 Alaskan-based Army airborne engineers had parachuted into nearby Fort Huachuca as if they were part of an invasion force landing in Southern Arizona. That border operation (despite the dramatic arrival, all they did was begin constructing a road) “mirrors the type of mission the 40 soldiers might conduct if they were deployed to Afghanistan,” JTF-N “project organizers” told the Nogales International. As JTF-N spokesman Armando Carrasco put it, "This will prepare them for future deployments, especially in the areas of current contingency operations."
So seeing combat vehicles on the border shouldn’t have surprised me, even then. A “war” against immigrants had been declared long before Trump signed the memo to deploy 2,000-4,000 National Guard troops to the border. Indeed, there has been a continuous military presence there since 1989 and the Pentagon has played a crucial role in the historic expansion of the U.S. border security apparatus ever since.
When, however, Trump began to pound out tweets on Easter Sunday on his way to church, Americans did get a vivid glimpse of a border “battlefield” more than 30 years in the making, whose intensity could be ramped up on the merest whim. The president described the border as “getting more dangerous” because 1,000 Central Americans, including significant numbers of children, in flight from violence in their home countries were in a “caravan” in Mexico slowly heading north on a Holy Week pilgrimage. Many of them were intending to ask for asylum at the border, as they feared for their lives back home.
Fox & Friends labeled that caravan a “small migrant army” and so set the battlefield scenario perfectly for the show’s number one fan. The end result -- those state National Guards caravaning south -- might have been as ludicrous a response to the situation as a tank in an empty desert pointed at Mexico, but it did catch a certain reality. The border has indeed become a place where the world’s most powerful military faces off against people who represent blowback from various Washington policies and are in flight from persecution, political violence, economic hardship, and increasing ecological distress. (Central America is becoming a climate-change hot spot.) Yet these twenty-first century border “battlefields” remain hidden from the public and largely beyond discussion.
The Fetish of the Border
As I moved away from the Stryker that day, I wondered what that soldier was seeing through his high-tech binoculars. It’s a question that remains no less pertinent six years later as yet more National Guard troops head for the border. Even today, such forces aren’t likely to ever see a caravan of 1,000 refugees, only -- possibly -- tiny groups of crossers moving through the U.S. borderlands to look for work, reunite with family, or escape potentially grave harm. Such people, however, usually travel under the cover of night.
Even less likely: anyone carrying drugs into the United States. According to the Drug Enforcement Agency, the majority of illicit narcotics that cross the border into the world’s largest market (valued at approximately $100 billion per year) arrive through legal ports of entry. Least likely of all: a person designated as a “terrorist” by the U.S. government, even though that’s became the priority mission of Joint Task Force North and Customs and Border Protection. A flood of money has, in these years, poured into border budgets for just such a counterterrorism mission, yet no such person, not a single one, has been reported crossing the southern border since 1984. (And even that incident seems dubious.)
Indeed, the most likely thing to glimpse along that divide is evidence of the countless billions of dollars that have been spent there over the last 30 years to build the most gigantic border enforcement apparatus in U.S. history. You would be quite likely, for instance, to see armed U.S. Border Patrol agents in their green-striped vehicles. (After all Customs and Border Protection, or CBP, the Border Patrol’s parent outfit, is now the largest federal law enforcement agency.) You might also catch glimpses of high-tech surveillance apparatuses like aerostats, the tethered surveillance balloons brought back from American battle zones in Afghanistan that now hover over and monitor the borderlands with long-range cameras and radar.
Those binoculars wouldn’t be able to see as far as the small town of Columbus, New Mexico -- the very town that Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa so famously raided in 1916 -- but if they could, you might also see portions of an actual border wall, built with bipartisan support after the Secure Fence Act of 2006 passed, with votes from Democrats like Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Chuck Schumer. Those 650 miles of walls and barriers cost an average of $3.9 million per mile to build and additional millions to maintain, money that went into the coffers of the military-industrial complex.
In 2011, for example, CBP granted the former Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root (a company known for its profiteering in Iraq) a three-year, $24.4 million contract for border wall maintenance. And you can multiply that so many times over since, year after year, bigger and bigger budgets have gone into border and immigration enforcement (and so into the pockets of such corporations) with little or no discussion. In 2018, the combined budgets of CBP and Immigration and Customs Enforcement amount to $24.3 billion, a more than 15-fold increase since the early 1990s, and a $4.7 billion jump from 2017.
So, in those desert borderlands, that soldier was really looking at a market, a profit zone. He was also viewing (and himself part of) what sociologist Timothy Dunn, author of the pioneering book The Militarization of the U.S-Mexico Border, 1978-1992, calls the “fetishization of the border.” That Stryker -- the “Cadillac of combat vehicles” made by General Dynamics -- fit the bill perfectly. The slick armored beast, which can travel at speeds up to 60 miles per hour, could track down just about anything, except the real forces that lay behind why people continually arrive at the border.
Low Intensity Doctrine and the Hidden Battlefields
In 2006, George W. Bush’s administration sent 6,000 National Guard troops to the border during Operation Jump Start, the largest military deployment there of the modern era. Those troops, however, were meant as no more than a placeholder for a post-9/11 enforcement apparatus still to be organized. Before then, as Timothy Dunn told me in an interview, there had normally been only 300 to 500 soldiers in border operations at any given time, whose justification then was the war against drugs.
That Bush deployment was, as Dunn put it, “the first to have them out there in high-profile, explicitly for immigration enforcement.” Still, what those soldiers could do remained largely limited to reinforcing and supporting the U.S. Border Patrol, as has been the case ever since. As a start, the U.S. military operates under grave restrictions when it comes to either making arrests or performing searches and seizures on U.S. soil. (There are, however, loopholes when it comes to this, which means that National Guard units under state control should be watched carefully during the Trump deployments.) What those troops can do is perform aerial and ground reconnaissance, staff observation posts, and install electronic ground sensors. They can supply engineering support, help construct roads and barriers, and provide intelligence -- in all, Dunn reports, 33 activities, including mobile teams to train the Border Patrol in various increasingly militarized tactics.
However, the Border Patrol, already a paramilitary organization, can take care of the arrests, searches, and seizures itself. It is, in fact, the perfect example of how the Pentagon’s low-intensity-conflict doctrine has operated along the border since the 1980s. That doctrine promotes coordination between the military and law enforcement with the goal of controlling potentially disruptive civilian populations. On the border, this mostly means undocumented people. This, in turn, means that the military does ever more police-like work and the Border Patrol is becoming ever more militarized.
When Bush launched Operation Jump Start, Washington was already undertaking the largest hiring surge in Border Patrol history, planning to add 6,000 new agents to the ranks in two years, part of an overall expansion that has never ended. It has, in fact, only gained momentum again in the Trump era. The Border Patrol has increased from a force of 4,000 in the early 1990s to 21,000 today. The Bush-era recruitment program particularly targeted overseas military bases. The Border Patrol, as one analyst put it, already operated like “a standing army on American soil” and that was how it was sold to future war vets who would soon join up. To this day, veterans are still told that they will be sent to “the front lines” to defend the homeland.
The Border Patrol not only recruits from the military and receives military training, but uses military equipment and technology prodigiously. The monoliths of the military-industrial complex -- companies like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Elbit Systems -- have long been tailoring their technologies to homeland security operations. They are now deeply involved in the increasingly lucrative border market. As one vendor told me many years ago, “we are bringing the battlefield to the border.”
Much like the military, the Border Patrol uses radar, high-tech surveillance, complex biometric data bases, and Predator B drones that fly surveillance missions across the Southwest, at the border with Canada, and in the Caribbean. Such forces operate in 100-mile jurisdictions beyond U.S. international boundaries (including the coasts), places where they essentially have extra-constitutional powers. As one CBP officer told me, “We are exempt from the fourth amendment.” Border zones, in other words, have become zones of exception and the DHS is the only department the federal government permits to ethnically profile people in such areas, a highly racialized form of law enforcement.
By deploying heavily armed Border Patrol officers, building walls, and using surveillance technologies in urban areas that traditionally had been crossing spots for the undocumented, such migrants are now forced to traverse dangerous and desolate areas of the southwestern deserts. It’s a strategy that anthropologist Jason De Leon has described as creating “a remote deathscape where American necropolitics are pecked onto the bones of those we deem excludable.”
Instances of overt violence on the border, the sort that might be associated with increased militarization, sometimes make the news, as in multiple incidents in which Border Patrol officers, deputized police, or even military troops have shot and killed people. Most border crossers, however, are now funneled away from the television cameras and reporters to those distant desertscapes where hidden “battles” with the elements remain unseen and so are no longer a political problem. According to Dunn, this is the low-intensity-conflict doctrine at work.
Along the U.S. border with Mexico, 7,000 corpses have been found since the early 1990s and a reasonable estimate of the actual death toll is triple that number. Thousands of families still search for loved ones they fear lost in what journalist Margaret Regan has termed the Southwest “killing fields.” Recently, while I was giving a talk at a New York state college, a young man approached me, having realized that I was from Arizona. He told me that he’d last seen his mother in the desert near Nogales and asked if I had any idea how he might search for her, his eyes brimming with tears.
Globally, since 2014 the International Organization on Migration has recorded 25,000 migrant deaths -- a figure, the group writes, that “is a significant indicator of the human toll of unsafe migration, yet fails to capture the true number of people who have died or gone missing during migration.” On such hidden battlefields, the toll from the fetishization of the world’s borderlands remains unknown -- and virtually ignored.
Securing the Unsustainable
At a global level, the forecast for the displacement of people is only expected to rise. According to projections, when it comes to climate change alone, by 2050 there could be between 150 million and 750 million people on the move due to sea level rise, droughts, floods, super storms, and other ecological hazards. Former Vice President Al Gore’s former security adviser, Leon Fuerth, wrote that if global warming exceeded the two degree Celsius mark, “border problems” would overwhelm U.S. capabilities “beyond the possibility of control, except by drastic measures and perhaps not even then.”
At the same time, estimates suggest that, by 2030, if present trends continue, the richest one percent of people on this planet may control 64% of global wealth. In other words, what we may have is an unsustainable world managed with an iron fist. In that case, an endless process of border militarization and fortification is likely to be used to control the blowback. If the booming border and surveillance markets are any indication, the future will be as dystopic as a Stryker in the beautiful desert highlands of New Mexico -- a world of mass displacements that leave the super-rich hunkered down behind their surveillance fortresses.
Pouring billions of dollars into border zones to solve political, social, economic, and ecological problems is hardly a phenomenon limited to the United States. The border fetish has indeed gone global. Border walls now commonly zigzag between the global north and south and are being built up ever more as a rhetoric -- caught perfectly by the Trump administration -- focusing on criminals, terrorists, and drugs only ratchets up, while the huge forces that actually fuel displacements and migrations remain obscured. Borders have become another way of making sure that nothing gets in the way of the sanctity of business as usual in a world that desperately needs something new.
Todd Miller, a TomDispatch regular, has written on border and immigration issues for the New York Times, Al Jazeera America, and the NACLA Report on the Americas. His latest book is Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security. You can follow him on Twitter @memomiller and view more of his work at toddmillerwriter.com.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, as well as John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, John Feffer's dystopian novel Splinterlands, Nick Turse's Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt's Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
 |
|
We Don't Need No Education |
|
|
Thursday, 26 April 2018 08:41 |
|
Krugman writes: "Matt Bevin, the conservative Republican governor of Kentucky, lost it a few days ago. Thousands of his state's teachers had walked off their jobs, forcing many schools to close for a day, to protest his opposition to increased education funding."
Thousands of teachers rallied for education funding at the state Capitol in Frankfort, Ky., two weeks ago. (photo: Alex Slitz/AP)
We Don't Need No Education
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
26 April 18
 att Bevin, the conservative Republican governor of Kentucky, lost it a few days ago. Thousands of his state’s teachers had walked off their jobs, forcing many schools to close for a day, to protest his opposition to increased education funding. And Bevin lashed out with a bizarre accusation: “I guarantee you somewhere in Kentucky today a child was sexually assaulted that was left at home because there was nobody there to watch them.”
He later apologized. But his hysterical outburst had deep roots: At the state and local levels, the conservative obsession with tax cuts has forced the G.O.P. into what amounts to a war on education, and in particular a war on schoolteachers. That war is the reason we’ve been seeing teacher strikes in multiple states. And people like Bevin are having a hard time coming to grips with the reality they’ve created.
To understand how they got to this point, you need to know what government in America does with your tax dollars.
READ MORE
|
|
|
Did Macron Just Charm Trump Into Compromising on Iran? |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=32128"><span class="small">Robin Wright, The New Yorker</span></a>
|
|
Thursday, 26 April 2018 08:39 |
|
Wright writes: "French President Emmanuel Macron masterfully works Donald Trump, perhaps better than any U.S. ally. By the end of the day Tuesday, it looked like he might - just might - prevent an angry showdown between the United States and Iran."
By the afternoon, after talks with Macron, Trump was almost conciliatory. He even hinted that the United States and its European allies could have "an agreement among ourselves very quickly." (photo: Chris Klepons/Getty)
Did Macron Just Charm Trump Into Compromising on Iran?
By Robin Wright, The New Yorker
26 April 18
 rench President Emmanuel Macron masterfully works Donald Trump, perhaps better than any U.S. ally. By the end of the day Tuesday, it looked like he might—just might—prevent an angry showdown between the United States and Iran.Trump began the day by virtually declaring war on the Islamic Republic if the nuclear deal unravels and Tehran resumes uranium enrichment, a fuel process for both peaceful nuclear energy and bombs. “They’re not going to be restarting anything,” the President pronounced angrily, during an Oval Office photo opportunity with Macron. ”If they restart it, they’re gonna have big problems, bigger than they’ve ever had before. And you can mark it down.” He called the historic accord, finalized in 2015, between Iran and the world’s six major powers, “insane. It’s ridiculous. It should never have been made.”
But, in the afternoon, after talks with Macron, Trump was almost conciliatory. He even hinted, at a joint press conference with Macron, that the United States and its European allies could have “an agreement among ourselves very quickly. I think we’re fairly close to understanding each other.”
The French leader is trying to coax Trump into accepting an expanded compromise that would prevent him from pulling the U.S. out of the nuclear accord—a decision is due by May 12th—and address the White House’s concerns about Iran’s broader behavior. It would build on what exists to “fix it”—the language Trump uses—rather than revise it or renegotiate it from scratch. Macron said that the “four pillars” of such a compromise would focus on Tehran’s missile program and its meddling in the rest of the Middle East, notably in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen.
“The Iran deal is an important issue,” Macron said, during the morning photo opportunity. “But we have to take it as a part of the broader picture, which is security in the over-all region. And we have the Syrian situation. We have a common relation in Iraq. We have the stability to preserve for our allies in the region, and what we want to do is contain the Iranian presence in the region.” The Iran deal, he added, is just “part of this broader picture.”
For Trump, the appeal of Macron’s compromise is that it produces a formal consensus among Western powers about several Middle East hot spots in which Iran is involved. It’s a burden-sharing formula at a time when Iran represents the deepest policy division between the United States and Europe. Senior European diplomats have expressed concern that a formal split on the Iran deal would undermine the transatlantic alliance, which has been the foundation of relations since the Second World War. Trump sees Iran’s hand—and its military—behind virtually all major problems in the world’s most volatile region, as he made clear again on Tuesday. “It just seems that no matter where you go, especially in the Middle East, Iran is behind it,” he said in his morning appearance with Macron. “You look at the ballistic missiles that they’re going and testing. What kind of a deal is it where you’re allowed to test missiles all over the place? What kind of a deal is it when you don’t talk about Yemen, and you don’t talk about all of the other problems we have with respect to Iran, especially look at what they’re doing in Iraq.”
The compromise has its limits, however, according to European envoys. It involves an agreement between only the four Western signatories—not China and Russia, which were equal parties to the nuclear deal. It spells out how the West interprets the accord but does not formally change any of its language. For the White House, the most sensitive issue is the so-called sunset clauses—or the time when various restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program are lifted. They span from a few years to twenty-five years, although the deal, in multiple places, says Iran can never develop a nuclear bomb. One of the compromises—still being negotiated—toughens that language.
The compromise formula faces two major hurdles: first, the Europeans are asking Washington not only to stick to the deal, brokered by the Obama Administration—they also want a pledge from the Trump Administration to fulfill the U.S. commitments under it. Iran has repeatedly charged that the United States is impeding foreign investment in Iran that was promised under the deal.
In a full-court press, the three European powers that signed the accord—Britain, France, and Germany—are all weighing in with Trump this week to prevent him from abandoning the agreement. The German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, is due here on Friday. The British Prime Minister, Theresa May, is expected to have a telephone conversation with Trump this week as well. “The key is what they get back from the United States,” a European envoy told me. “Trying to talk to the Americans about sanctions relief for Iran has often been a one-way conversation.” But Trump suggested possible movement after his discussion with Macron on Tuesday afternoon. “I think we really had some substantive talks on Iran,” he said. “And we’re looking forward to doing something.”
Macron struck a positive note, too. “It’s not a mystery. We did not have the same starting positions, stances, and neither you nor I have a habit of changing our stances or going with the wind,” the French leader said. “That being said, I can say that we’ve had a very frank discussion.”
The second hurdle is getting Iran to accept documents that supplement the deal, which already covers a hundred and fifty-nine pages. In interviews over the weekend, the Iranian Foreign Minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, told me that Tehran is in no mood to accommodate further demands, as the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency has repeatedly verified Tehran’s compliance while the United States has violated its obligations.
As part of the expanded compromise, Macron is also using his state visit to urge Trump to keep American forces in Syria—partly to stem Iran’s ability to widen its influence. More than two thousand U.S. troops are deployed in Syria to help defeat around two thousand residual ISIS fighters. The Islamic State holds two pockets of territory in the Euphrates River Valley and along the Syrian border with Iraq. “Together, in the long run, we can find a solution to the Syrian situation,” Macron said at the press conference.
Earlier this month, Trump declared “Mission accomplished” regarding the U.S. deployment in Syria and asked his generals to extricate American troops within four to six months. Trump seemed to have at least listened to Macron’s appeal. “We want to come home,” the President said. “We’ll be coming home. But we want to leave a strong and lasting footprint.”
For a man who has few friends among foreign leaders—and often ignores the advice they offer—Trump may have met a moderating influence in Macron. The President, as he has on other policy issues, may change his mind in the weeks ahead. The central question, of course, is whether he can stomach the idea of any diplomacy with Iran.
|
|
The Comey Memos and Trump's Leaker Purge |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=47190"><span class="small">James Risen, The Intercept</span></a>
|
|
Wednesday, 25 April 2018 14:15 |
|
Risen writes: "The memos were leaked almost immediately. Republicans in Congress apparently wanted them out in order to attack Comey. While they don't make Comey look particularly good, they generally make Trump look worse."
Former FBI director James Comey with Donald Trump. (photo: Getty)
The Comey Memos and Trump's Leaker Purge
By James Risen, The Intercept
25 April 18
 y now, it is well known that Donald Trump wants to jail reporters in order to force them to reveal their sources. “They spend a couple of days in jail, make a new friend, and they are ready to talk,” Trump told former FBI Director James Comey, according to a memo Comey wrote after a conversation between the two men in February 2017.
The Justice Department turned over this memo, along with others Comey wrote about his meetings with Trump before he was fired last year, to congressional leaders last week. The memos were leaked almost immediately. Republicans in Congress apparently wanted them out in order to attack Comey. While they don’t make Comey look particularly good, they generally make Trump look worse.
Just as the Comey memos were being published, former Forbes reporter Jonathan Greenberg supplied further proof that Trump has been obsessed with how he is portrayed in the press for as long as anyone can remember. Greenberg dug up a 1984 audiotape in which Trump pretended to be someone else in order to try to convince Forbes to include Trump on its roster of the wealthiest Americans. Greenberg says that Trump called him claiming to be an aide named John Barron, hyping the value of Trump’s assets in order to get him on the Forbes 400 list. (The Washington Post has separately reported that in his dealings with the press in the 1980s, Trump often pretended to be a purported Trump spokesperson named John Barron, a man who didn’t exist.)
Trump is clearly addicted to attention and fixates on every detail of his public image. As a corollary, he wants to punish journalists who cast him in a negative light or reveal things that he would rather not be widely known.
But there is a vast difference between the leaks that Trump usually decries on Twitter – such as an aide or confidant chattering to a reporter about the embarrassing details of Trump’s own behavior – and the kind of leaks that lead to criminal prosecutions. The latter has nothing to do with personnel moves at the White House; instead, they involve disclosures of classified information about national security programs and operations.
To be sure, the Comey memo shows that Trump is sometimes upset about leaks that probably do involve classified information – but only to the extent that the leaks also involve Trump or people close to him. Comey described Trump’s anger about the leaks of transcripts of his phone calls with the leaders of Mexico and Australia. Trump also groused to Comey about leaks relating to a call between former national security adviser Michael Flynn and “the Russians.” But Trump made it clear that he cared about the Flynn leak because he was sensitive to accusations of collusion between the Trump camp and Russia. Comey wrote that after complaining about the leak of the Flynn phone call, Trump immediately said that the call “was not wrong in any way (he made lots of calls) but that the leaks were terrible.”
So far, though, the only two people who have actually been charged with leaking since Trump became president have not been accused of revealing anything directly related to Trump himself. Reality Winner, a National Security Agency contractor, was arrested last year and charged under the Espionage Act for allegedly leaking an NSA document about Russian hacking of U.S. voting systems. Terry J. Albury, a former FBI agent was charged in March with two counts related to the unauthorized disclosure of national security information, according to documents filed by the Justice Department. Albury pleaded guilty last week to sharing the documents with the press, in what his lawyers described as “an act of conscience.”
Both Winner and Albury have been accused of providing classified information to The Intercept. In a statement when the charges against Albury were made public, Betsy Reed, The Intercept’s editor-in-chief, said: “We do not discuss anonymous sources. The use of the Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers seeking to shed light on matters of vital public concern is an outrage, and all journalists have the right under the First Amendment to report these stories.”
The Winner and Albury cases are the first fruits of Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s attempts to placate Trump by aggressively targeting leaks and prosecuting leakers. The Justice Department has said that it has many more leaks under investigation. But will these national security-related leak prosecutions satisfy Trump? They almost certainly won’t put a stop to leaks of unflattering information about Trump himself.
Many others in Washington’s political and government elite likely welcome these prosecutions, however. In the same memo that documents Trump’s desire to jail reporters, Comey, lately a darling of the press, described falling all over himself to support the president’s general view, noting: “I tried to interject several times to agree with him about the leaks being terrible, but was unsuccessful.”
According to the memo, Comey tried to educate Trump on the importance of keeping national security information secret. “I then explained why leaks purporting to be about FBI intelligence operations were also terrible and a serious violation of the law,” Comey wrote. “I explained that the FBI gathers intelligence in part to equip the President to make decisions, and if people run around telling the press what we do, that ability will be compromised. I said I was eager to find leakers and would like to nail one to the door as a message.”
When Trump mentioned jailing reporters, referring specifically to former New York Times journalist Judy Miller, Comey wrote: “I explained that I was a fan of pursuing leaks aggressively but that going after reporters was tricky, for legal reasons and because DOJ tends to approach it conservatively.” Comey then reiterated his point about leakers, saying he saw the “value of putting a head on a pike as a message.” When Trump again advocated jailing reporters and made his sick joke about what might happen to them in detention, Comey wrote that he laughed at the idea.
Jill Abramson, my friend and former editor at the Times, is rightly as outraged by Comey’s laughter as she is by Trump himself who, as she notes, “always manages to exceed our low expectations.” “This exchange chilled my blood,” she wrote in The Guardian, calling it “simply nauseating.”
The Comey-Trump exchange shows how fragile press freedom is in the United States today. These two men disagree about many things, but they share a desire to punish whistleblowers and the reporters who, in a democracy, seek to shed light on the hidden actions of government.
At times like this, it’s worth remembering where we started. “The people are the only censors of their governors,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1787, adding that the way to prevent abuses of power “is to give [the people] full information of their affairs thro’ the channel of the public papers, and to contrive that those papers should penetrate the whole mass of the people. … Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
|
|
