Article of the Weekend
Conspiracies All the Way Down (James B. Meigs, City Journal, 40 min.)
I realized journalism was changing. The evenhanded search for truth—rarely achieved in practice—was fading even as a journalistic aspiration. Now every set of facts must serve a political purpose. If it wasn’t helpful to the Left, it must be helpful to the Right. Where journalists once obsessed over the accuracy of facts, now they worried more about their utility. If some piece of information helps the wrong sorts of people, perhaps it’s best left unpublished. Last year, we saw this logic carried to a new extreme, when virtually all major media outlets refused to cover the revelations contained in Hunter Biden’s laptop, or to explore evidence that Covid-19 might have escaped from a Wuhan, China lab.
Trump took political demagoguery to new extremes, but he certainly didn’t invent it. Asking followers to accept wild, unsupported assertions can be politically useful. And politicians no longer pay much of a price for going overboard. Campaigning as Obama’s vice presidential nominee in 2008, Biden told a largely black audience that Republicans were “going to put you all back in chains.” Hillary Clinton and other Democrats endlessly asserted that Trump’s 2016 election victory was “illegitimate.” Their followers listened. Even four years later, 62 percent of Democrats told pollsters they believe the 2016 election was fraudulent. That number is a mirror image of the 61 percent of Republicans who think the 2020 election was rigged.
I’m working on a piece about Afghanistan this week that I plan to publish in several parts starting next weekend. It seems I’m in the minority in thinking there was no clean way to pull troops, and the exit was bound to be this ugly, no matter when or how. I also think parts of Biden’s August 31st speech were refreshingly candid.
That being said:
Too Much Money to Lose: The US War Machine Will Create a New Conflict (Omar Al-Ubaydli, Alarabiya News, 8 min.)
Unfortunately, war results in a small number of well-organized people making billions of dollars, whereas the benefits of peace are distributed very widely across the population and are barely perceptible for most.
The result is an American population that is frequently left scratching its head as to why its armed forces are getting involved in military conflicts that the public doesn’t care about or even actively despises. Moreover, by ensuring that the media get their seat on the gravy train, the big war machine can help convince the ordinary man and woman on the street too.
While I applaud Biden for his political backbone in following through despite counter-pressure from every direction, none of this absolves him from engaging in deception and cover any more than his critics are absolved by scapegoating him. If the following scandals had come from Trump, the nightly news would be covering them relentlessly:
Double Standards
Before Afghan Collapse, Biden Pressed Ghani to ‘Change Perception’ (Aram Roston and Nandita Bose, Reuters, 10 min.)
“I need not tell you the perception around the world and in parts of Afghanistan, I believe, is that things are not going well in terms of the fight against the Taliban,” Biden said. “And there is a need, whether it is true or not, there is a need to project a different picture.”
In a follow-up call later that day that did not include the U.S. president, Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, General Mark Milley and U.S. Central Command commander General Frank McKenzie spoke to Ghani. Reuters also obtained a transcript of that call.
In this call, too, an area of focus was the global perception of events on the ground in Afghanistan. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Ghani “the perception in the United States, in Europe and the media sort of thing is a narrative of Taliban momentum, and a narrative of Taliban victory. And we need to collectively demonstrate and try to turn that perception, that narrative around.”
Biden Administration Erased Afghan Weapons Reports From Federal Websites (Adam Andrzejewski, Forbes, 6 min.)
According to an admission obtained from the State Department, Biden officials recently directed federal agencies to scrub their websites of official reports detailing the $82.9 billion in military equipment and training provided to the Afghan security forces since 2001.
The State Department admitted to removing the reports but justified the move as a way to protect Afghan allies.
It’s worth noting that the Biden administration already put these partners at risk when officials provided lists of Afghan nationals to the Taliban in a misguided attempt to clear them for evacuation.
Again, to reiterate, these reports do not include recipient information, and the Taliban already likely controls the war chest in question.
This directive doesn’t seem to be designed to protect our Afghan allies—or, if it is, it’s been poorly executed. One U.S. entity that we will not name has failed to remove a report detailing the Afghan forces by rank. That report, one could argue, could be used as a tally sheet for retribution, but it’s still publicly available.
Biden Waived Congressional Mandate for Report on Afghanistan Withdrawal Risks (Adam Kredo and Alana Goodman, The Washington Free Beacon, 6 min.)
Under the federal statute, the administration was barred from reducing troops in Afghanistan below 2,000 without first briefing Congress about the expected impact on U.S. counterterrorism operations and the risk to American personnel.
The Biden administration spent months assuring Congress that the U.S.-trained Afghan forces would be able to forestall a Taliban takeover when American troops left the country on a pre-determined deadline. That assessment was proven wrong days after the withdrawal, when the Taliban overran the Afghan National Army and seized control of Kabul, forcing a chaotic evacuation of U.S. personnel and allies.
Biden said he would waive the requirement because he "determined that a waiver of the limitation under subsection 1215(a) is important to the national security interests of the United States" in a June 8 letter to Congress.
In secret texts, U.S. military officials lamented leaving Americans behind in Kabul (Susan Katz Keating and John Solomon, Just the News, 12 min.)
"We are fucking abandoning American citizens," an Army colonel assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division wrote Sunday in frustration in a series of encrypted messages that detailed the failed effort to extricate a group of American citizens, hours before the last U.S. soldiers departed Afghanistan.
The text messages and emails were provided to Just the News by Michael Yon, a former Special Forces soldier and war correspondent who was among the private citizens working with private networks and the military to rescue stranded Americans.
After the Americans scattered to safe houses to avoid being captured, Yon wrote a stinging email to an Army major whose team had tried to coordinate the rescue before abandoning it.
"You guys left American citizens at the gate of the Kabul airport," Yon wrote Tuesday to the commander. "Three empty jets paid for by volunteers were waiting for them. You and I talked on the phone. I told you where they were. Gave you their passport images. And my email and phone number. And you left them behind."
"I think it's irresponsible to say Americans are stranded," White House press secretary Jen Pskai said in an Aug. 23 press briefing. "They are not. We are committed to bringing Americans who want to come home, home."
Long Form Content
‘I Helped Destroy People’ (Janet Reitman, The New York Times, 1 hr 40 min.)
“It becomes a vicious circle,” [former FBI special agent Terry] Albury says, “because the longer that you look at a kid, the bigger the file gets, even if they’ve done nothing. And then six months later, somebody calls the F.B.I. and says, ‘I’ve seen some suspicious activity in this neighborhood,’ and an agent can see that we have thick files on all of these kids. But the question is, OK, so you have thick files on these kids, but the files have shown that these kids are guilty of nothing. So what does that actually achieve? It achieves ‘intelligence,”’ he says. “And that is a nebulous, wonderful-sounding word that everyone likes to throw around, but based on my experience, the entire purpose of these assessments was to create a database of American Muslims.”
In reality, there was no evidence of rogue Al Qaeda sleeper cells hiding in suburbia, as was acknowledged in a 2005 internal F.B.I. report. The United States had not faced imminent attack, as Mueller warned repeatedly during the early years after Sept. 11. Paradoxically, genuine terrorist incidents like the Fort Hood massacre or the Boston Marathon bombing were committed by individuals who had been on the F.B.I.’s radar and had fallen off. There was no existential threat from Islam, as Albury was taught as a surveillance trainee, just an endless list of people who were being targeted because they were Muslim. It had taken him a decade to reach this conclusion.
The problem with targeting people is that, even if their behavior appears casual at first, upon scrutiny some things won’t add up. Everyone has quirks, oddities, secrets. The mind uses these to piece together stories confirming its darkest suspicions. Normal behavior starts to look more like sophisticated cover. One becomes obsessed with exposing nefarious plots that never quite seem to get off the ground. It hardly even matters who is under surveillance. Connecting the right dots will show someone the picture they want to see. It will even book them a trip to Guantánamo.
Nothing But Pitch Black Darkness (Fatima Bhutto, Foreign Policy, 35 min.)
Enhanced Interrogation techniques (EITs) were a colossal failure, except perhaps for Mitchell and Jessen, the two contract psychologists who put the EIT program together. In four years, their company raked in $81 million from the U.S. government alone. At Cobalt, [Ahmed] Rabbani would be put through at least 30 different types of torture. The guards beat him relentlessly. They put him in tomb-like structures, in cold cells—an approved EIT favored by the Gestapo—threatened to sodomize and kill him, and hung him naked in strappado for hours and hours. There was “nothing but pitch-black darkness,” Rabbani said, “loud music, the smell of alcohol and blood, pain from hunger, beating and thirst.”
He wasn’t allowed to wear shoes the entire time he was kept in the Dark Prison, and because the CIA censors the last numeral in all their documents, it’s believed that Rabbani was held at the torture site for 540 to 549 days.
In all the time that Rabbani spent in the Dark Prison, he was never allowed to change his clothes, wearing the same things he had been given in Pakistan before his compatriots handed him over the Americans. He wasn’t allowed to wash them either, and the fabric soon ripped from the slightest touch, stiff with dirt. There was no mattress in his cell, just two blankets that he slept on. Prisoners were given one meal a day and a second meal every four days.
He lost 60 pounds of body weight. There was no toilet, just a bucket with no lid that was changed once a day. The cell always stank of feces and urine, no matter if the prisoners used one of their two allotted bottles of water a day to try and clean their surroundings. Rabbani was allowed to shower for three minutes under cold water only once every two months. Eventually, he got lice; death was the only thing he hoped for.
To date, after 19 years in U.S. custody, Rabbani has never been charged with a crime, never had disclosure, and never been given a proper habeas corpus hearing.
UN Peacekeepers Fathered Dozens Of Children In Haiti. The Women They Exploited Are Trying To Get Child Support. (Karla Zabludovsky, BuzzFeed News, 35 min.)
UN peacekeepers fathered dozens of children while they were stationed in Haiti between 2004 and 2017, often with women they were providing money and food to — behavior UN policy “strongly discouraged” because of the “inherently unequal power dynamics.” Initially deployed in response to a coup attempt and the ousting of former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, their force grew following the catastrophic 2010 earthquake. But none stayed long, and when their rotations ended, they abandoned their babies, leaving behind a generation of children born into a nation struggling to rebuild, with limited access to food, schooling, and healthcare.
For some of the women in Haiti still seeking support from the peacekeepers who swept in a decade ago, the possibility of a new influx of them triggered resentment. All but one of their claims for child support from UN peacekeepers have stalled in Haiti’s courts. Lawyers representing the women said the UN and the peacekeepers’ home nations are withholding some of the documents needed to move forward, and that judges are reluctant to rule against an international institution or countries that are supplying Haiti with critical resources, including funding, training, and jobs that offer a path out of the country — or a handsome salary.
The problem of peacekeepers sexually abusing or exploiting local women is not unique to Haiti — there have been 1,143 allegations since 2007, across at least a dozen countries, according to the database. But Haiti, one of the world’s poorest countries, has endured multiple scandals, including a sex ring in which more than 130 peacekeepers from Sri Lanka exploited nine Haitian children, according to an investigation by the Associated Press.
And it’s not just the UN: In 2011, senior staff at Oxfam GB failed to act on reports of its aid workers sexually abusing Haitian girls as young as 12. Several American missionaries have been jailed for sexually abusing children in Haiti.
International donations for reconstruction efforts began evaporating with no explanation: With the half a billion dollars the American Red Cross raised, it built only six homes, according to an investigation by ProPublica. A highly touted $300 million industrial park inaugurated by the Clintons and Sean Penn under-delivered, creating few jobs and drawing fewer tenants. Meanwhile, the Haitian government embezzled much of a $2 billion loan from Venezuela meant to be invested in education, health and social initiatives, and infrastructure, embroiling one administration after another in graft scandals.
USPS Has Cheated Mail Carriers For Years (Alexia Fernández Campbell, The Center for Public Integrity, 30 min.)
From 2010 to 2019, at least 250 managers in 60 post offices were caught changing mail carriers’ time cards to show them working fewer hours, resulting in unpaid wages, according to a batch of arbitration award summaries obtained by Public Integrity for cases filed by one of the three major postal unions.
Supervisors found to be cheating were rarely disciplined — often receiving only a warning or more training. In four cities, arbitration documents show, post office managers continued to alter time cards after promising union leaders they would stop.
Since 2005, meanwhile, the Postal Service has been cited by the federal government 1,150 times for underpaying letter carriers and other employees, including one case that involved 164 violations, according to Labor Department data obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. The agency determined that those workers lost about $659,000 in pay. But it allowed the Postal Service to pay back less than half after negotiations with the agency — a common practice at the Labor Department. About 19% of the cases did not indicate whether the Postal Service paid back employees.
In the arbitration hearing, a Postal Service representative did not explain why managers changed carriers’ time cards. He said the behavior was not widespread.
Nancy Hutt, the arbitrator, disagreed. After reviewing time cards for 240 mail carriers in San Jose, Hutt said she grew alarmed. The data “reflects a widespread practice by management of willfully and repetitively deleting and altering time records of Letter Carriers,” she wrote in her decision.
Wi Spa Follow Up
Slate Journalist 'Annoyed' He Has to Correct Story That Falsely Claimed Wi Spa Incident Was a Hoax (Angelo Isidorou, The Post Millennial, 5 min.)
Slate journalist Evan Urquhart called the controversial incident a "hoax" in his July 9 article."That there was likely no trans woman there to begin with only underscores how thin a pretext is needed to prompt these sorts of outbursts from the far right," he wrote. Urquhart claimed that the now-charged sex offender never existed and that the outrage was merely a smokescreen for transphobia.
The Post Millennial's editor-at-large Andy Ngo broke the news with the New York Post. "Never allow the self-credentialed 'fact checkers' tell you what is determined & settled. These writers were tasked with investigating & not only did they fail, they told the rest of us to not dig further," Ngo stated on Twitter.
"It is with great annoyance that I must report I'm talking with my editor about an update to my piece on the transphobic Wi Spa riots, to reflect the fact that the New York Post reporting charges have been brought against someone alleged to have been there," said Urquhart on from his Twitter account, which is currently locked.