Israel using electricity to blackmail Gaza

A Palestinian man holds up a sign that says “We want electricity” at a rally in Jabaliya in northern Gaza against the chronic power shortages imposed on the territory, January 2017.Mohammed AsadAPA images

Ali Abunimah- 9 January 2018

Israel has restored supplies of electricity it sells to the Gaza Strip which it cut in June, exacerbating a humanitarian crisis.

But it is openly blackmailing residents of the besieged territory, which still receives far less electricity than it needs, including to run life-saving medical services and sanitation.

Israel says Gaza won’t get more power without progress on the release of Israelis detained in Gaza – a use of basic humanitarian needs as bargaining chips in gross violation of international law.

On Monday, Israel began supplying 120 megawatts to Gaza, which means that Gaza’s two million residents may now receive up to six hours of electricity per day, followed by an outage of 12 hours.

This came after the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority led by Mahmoud Abbas asked Israel to restore the supply amid a faltering reconciliation deal with rival Hamas, which has ruled in Gaza over the last decade.

Five of The Electronic Intifada’s contributors in different parts of Gaza said they had noticed slight to modest improvements in the situation since Monday.

Rami Almeghari, who lives in central Gaza’s Maghazi refugee camp, said that the connection time had risen to six to eight hours, compared with two to four previously.

Hamza Abu Eltarabesh, who lives in western Gaza City, observed, “The change is very slight. In fact we didn’t feel it.”

Punitive cuts

Any increase marks an improvement only by the dire standards of Gaza.

“Even under ‘ordinary’ conditions, for years the amount of electricity available to Gaza residents has only met about half of actual demand,” according to Gisha, an Israeli human rights group that monitors the siege of Gaza.

Gisha notes that Gaza’s sole power plant relies on fuel purchased from either Israel or Egypt and that additional electricity supplied over lines from Egypt “has been sporadic due to unstable security conditions in the region.”

That “ordinary” situation got considerably worse last year, after Abbas and Israel implemented a series of punitive measures aimed at forcing Hamas to give up power in Gaza.

In mid-April Gaza’s power plant stopped functioning after emergency fuel supplies funded by Turkey and Qatar ran out and a dispute over charges between the PA and Hamas meant that no more fuel was being purchased.

Within weeks, the Red Cross warned that Gaza’s health system was on the brink of “systemic collapse.”

In June, Israel tightened the noose by sharply cutting the electricity it supplies to Gaza at the request of Abbas’ authority from 120 megawatts to just 70.

Health “catastrophe”

By July, Gaza’s electricity supply plunged to an all-time low – just 90 megawatts of the estimated 400-500 it needs daily – and a month later hospitals were warning of “catastrophe.”

Hospitals postponed surgeries because they could not keep the power on long enough to run life support equipment.

Rights groups said that even if the cuts had been requested by the PA, Israel, as the occupying power, could not wash its hands of the situation.

“Israel controls the borders, the airspace, the waters of Gaza, so Israel has an obligation that goes beyond merely responding to a request from Palestinian authorities,” Human Rights Watch’s Omar Shakir stated.

Sixteen human rights organizations wrote to Israel’s attorney general denouncing the cuts as a clear violation of international humanitarian law.

Blackmail

Given the silence and complicity of the so-called international community when Israel implemented the cuts in June, it is no surprise now that Israel – assured of impunity – continues to violate its legal responsibilities.

COGAT – the bureaucratic enforcement arm of Israel’s military occupation, which tries to brand itself as a “humanitarian” body – is attempting to blackmail the civilian population in Gaza over further electricity supplies.

In a statement Monday, COGAT said Israel had agreed to restore the 120 megawatts it was supplying before June, which the PA would have to pay for, but that “humanitarian issues are not one sided.”
COGAT said that Israel would not consider selling an additional 100 megawatts “before humanitarian issues such as the return of the bodies of Hadar Goldin and Oron Shaul and the return of additional Israeli citizens held in Gaza are discussed.”

Israel’s attempt to use electricity as a negotiating chip for Israelis detained in Gaza is a blatant violation of its legal obligations as an occupying power.

The Fourth Geneva Convention requires Israel to use “the fullest extent of the means available to it” to ensure supplies of food and medical services, and to maintain public health and hygiene in the occupied territory. These are services for which an adequate supply of electricity is absolutely essential.
Such blackmail could violate the Fourth Geneva Convention’s prohibition on collective punishment and the prohibition in international law on siege warfare against a civilian population.

The International Committee of the Red Cross already stated in 2010 that Israel’s blockade of Gaza that began a decade ago “constitutes a collective punishment imposed in clear violation of Israel’s obligations under international humanitarian law” and that the “whole of Gaza’s civilian population is being punished for acts for which they bear no responsibility.”

Sheer hypocrisy

The family of Hadar Goldin, an Israeli occupation soldier who went missing during Israel’s 2014 invasion of Gaza, slammed the Israeli government for increasing the electricity supply to Gaza at all.

The family remains determined that two million people – half of them children – should be made to suffer until they learn news of their son’s fate.

Following Goldin’s disappearance, the Israeli army went on a three-day killing spree in Gaza that left 225 Palestinians dead and thousands of homes damaged or destroyed.

COGAT even supplied a quote from Leah Goldin, the missing soldier’s mother, stating that “every mother wants to visit her son’s grave and the inability to return Hadar Goldin for his burial is considered a crime in Islam.”

Neither she nor Israeli occupation officials at COGAT noted the irony – not to say the sheer hypocrisy of such a statement – given that Israel systematically withholds the bodies of Palestinians killed by its forces, often in suspected extrajudicial executions, a policy that human rights defenders denounce as a “severe violation of international law.”

Israel has withheld some bodies for decades, burying them in its so-called “cemetery of numbers” where families cannot visit to mourn their loved ones.

In November, Israel seized the bodies of five fighters from the resistance group Islamic Jihad killed in the detonation of a tunnel along the Gaza-Israel boundary.

According to human rights defenders, Israel is illegally using the bodies as bargaining chips.
While Palestinians in Gaza will welcome any easing of the electricity siege, the situation remains dire despite Monday’s increase in supply.

As 2018 started, the World Health Organization said that Gaza’s health system remained “on the edge of collapse.”

More than 2,000 Afghans killed in Syria fighting for Bashar al-Assad: Official

Iran, said to have deployed the Afghans, denies sending professional troops to Syria, only military advisers and volunteer brigades

Iran rarely provides figures on the numbers fighting and killed in its operations in Syria and Iraq (AFP)

Saturday 6 January 2018

More than 2,000 Afghans deployed by Iran have been killed fighting in Syria on the side of President Bashar al-Assad's government, an official in the volunteer force told Iranian media.

The Fatemiyoun Brigade of Afghan "volunteer" recruits has been fighting in Syria for five years, said Zohair Mojahed, a cultural official in the brigade.

"This brigade has given more than 2,000 martyrs and 8,000 wounded for Islam," he said in an interview with the reformist Shargh newspaper published Saturday.

Iran rarely provides figures on the numbers fighting and killed in its operations in Syria and Iraq.

The last toll was provided by the veterans organisation in March, which said 2,100 volunteers had died without specifying how many were foreign recruits.

Iran denies sending professional troops to fight in the region, saying it has provided only military advisers and organised brigades made up of volunteers from Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The Fatemiyoun is reportedly the biggest military unit deployed by Iran in Iraq and Syria, made up of recruits from Afghanistan's Shia minority.

Iran has backed Afghan forces in the past against the Taliban in their own country, as well as mobilising them against Saddam Hussein's forces in the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88.

Some 3,000 Afghans died fighting Iraq in the 1980s, Mojahed said.

Tehran offers Iranian citizenship to the families of those foreign fighters "martyred" in the conflicts of Syria and Iraq.

Iranian media has reported on the funerals of volunteer "martyrs" and aired television features about their presence in Syria.

Last year, Human Rights Watch reported that Afghan children as young as 14 are being recruited to fight in the war in Syria by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

The rights group says that the IRGC has recruited Afghan immigrant children living in Iran to fight inside Syria.

Many of the children who were recruited had fought in the Fatemiyoun division, an exclusively Afghan armed group supported by Iran that fights alongside Syrian government forces in Syria's civil war.

The report comes as Syrian government and Russian warplanes pound rebel-held territory inside Idlib, in northwest Syria. 

In 2015, the Guardian reported that Iranian authorities have lured some of the estimated three million Afghan refugees living in their country to fight in Syria by offering a regular salary and permanent residence in Iran.

The Shia Afghan recruits have been told by Iran that they are fighting to defend religious shrines in the Syrian capital Damascus.

The Fatemiyoun brigade was set up in Iran after the Syrian civil war erupted in 2011. It was reported to be the second-biggest foreign force fighting for President Assad, behind the Lebanese militia Hezbollah, the Guardian reported.

Daily recruitment of Afghan refugees is taking place in the Iranian cities of Mashhad and Qom, which the Guardian said has the highest population of Afghans.

Afghans under the age of 18 are being accepted to go and fight if their parents grant them permission. At least one 16-year-old has been killed this year in Syria’s brutal civil war.

At least 200 Fatemiyoun militants have been killed in Syria, Iranian media reported in 2015.

Middle East in 2018: What Will Happen

The polarized politics of the Middle East further erodes the possibility of resolving the conflict. In 2002, the Saudis proposed a peace plan: If Israel made peace with the Palestinians, the Arab states would normalize relations with it.

by James L. Gelvin-Jan 8, 2018

( January 8, 2018, Boston, Sri Lanka Guardian) It’s always dangerous to make predictions about the Middle East.

After all, few experts foresaw Anwar al-Sadat’s trip to Jerusalem in 1977, which led to the first peace treaty between Israel and an Arab state, nor did they predict the Iranian Revolution of 1978-79 or the Arab uprisings of 2010-11. Having taught and written about the Middle East for three decades, however, I feel confident in making the following forecast for the region in 2018.

1. The Syrian conflict will drag on without resolution.

In Syria, the government will continue to reconquer territory, but will not be able to expand its control across the entire country.

There are four reasons for this.

First, regime opponents who have borne the brunt of the regime’s brutality for the past seven years know better than to throw themselves on its mercy now. In the past, they have treated government offers of amnesty with scorn. They will continue to do so.

Second, the government is too weak. Most of the territorial gains the government made during the past two years were accomplished by subcontractors – Hezbollah, Iranian units, Iranian-trained and controlled militias and private militias – not by the depleted government forces.

Third, the overwhelming majority of opposition groups operate within the confines of a single province. This indicates that they are local forces under the control of a local power broker. Having experienced the lighter hand of the government for the past six years, they are unlikely to willingly surrender their hard-won autonomy.

Finally, the Syrian civil war has been a proxy war with the West and Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies supporting the opposition. While that aid will certainly decline as a result of donor fatigue and logistical problems, it will probably not end. As a result, the opposition will not surrender from sheer exhaustion.

The former Arab League and United Nations peace envoy to Syria, Lakhdar Brahimi, will be proved correct. Several years ago, he predicted the Syrian civil war would end with the “Somalization” of Syria.

Like Somalia, Syria will have an internationally recognized government and permanent representation at the United Nations. It will continue to issue and stamp passports and, if it so chooses, will send a team to the Olympics. However, like the government of Somalia, the government of Syria will reign, not rule, over the entirety of its internationally recognized borders.

2. Saudi Arabia’s ‘reforms’ will fizzle.

Saudi Arabia will continue to make reforms under the direction of Crown Prince Muhammed bin Salman, but those reforms will be purely cosmetic.

Although the crown prince has been portrayed as a reformer, it is important to remember that Bashar al-Assad, the president of Syria, once played that role as well.

The crown prince will continue to try to consolidate power in his branch of the ruling family. So far, he has imprisoned other princes and economic elites on charges of corruption, while spending US$300 million on a house in France.

He has also taken power away from another pillar of the Saudi ruling group – the religious establishment. In fact, the so-called “loosening” of restrictions in Saudi Arabia – allowing women to drive, opening entertainment centers, stripping the religious police of the power to make arrests and promoting a “more moderate” Islam – are all aspects of his campaign to divest the religious establishment of its power and centralize power in the hands of his immediate family.

Only by releasing prisoners of conscience from Saudi jails and ending the barbaric war in Yemen might the crown prince demonstrate he is a true reformer.

The crown prince’s push to liberalize the Saudi economy will also fail. Two years ago he announced his “Vision 2030.” It includes a list of off-the-shelf neo-liberal recommendations intended to turn Saudi Arabia into a market economy within 14 years.

The implementation of Vision 2030 would mean ending a governmental tradition of buying the loyalty of Saudi citizens through subsidies and employment. It would mean ensuring a free flow of information in a country that, in 2017, Reporters Without Borders ranked 168th of 180 countries in terms of press freedom.

It would mean dramatically increasing female workforce participation from 22 percent to a stated goal of 30 percent – still well below the global norm of 49 percent – and adding 2.5 million private sector jobs. Finally, it means changing attitudes toward work in a country in which 11 million guest workers literally do all the heavy lifting.

All in 12 years.

3. The caliphate will be gone, but not the Islamic State.

If 2014 was the year in which IS seemed unstoppable, 2015 was the year the IS caliphate began to slide into oblivion.

At its height, IS controlled 40 percent of Iraq. At the beginning of 2017, that number slipped to 10 percent, and IS lost 70 percent of its territory in Syria. The caliphate also lost all the major towns it had taken. The caliphate is finished.

But what about IS, the movement? Some IS fighters have already given up. They have tried to melt into local populations or return home, although they have met resistance from populations out for vengeance and fearful foreign governments.

For the rest, there are two likely scenarios. First, since a significant number of IS fighters from Iraq, along with their leaders, joined IS because they harbored grievances against the Shiite-dominated government in Iraq, it is entirely possible that they will continue to wage an insurgency against that government. This is just what the Taliban in Afghanistan did after the Americans overthrew their government.

Second, it is even more likely that former fighters and freelancers will continue their attacks globally, with or without organizational backing. The world is not lacking in gullible and disturbed individuals.

Nevertheless, because IS will lack a base from which to disseminate its sophisticated propaganda, and because the appeal of high-risk but ineffectual ideologies wane over time, so too will IS’ appeal.

4. Trump’s ‘ultimate deal?’ Gone for now.

When the U.S. recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, it put another nail – quite possibly the final nail – into the coffin of the Oslo agreements, which set the parameters for negotiating a two-state solution.

In spite of the protestations from the Trump administration, an Israeli government secure in the embrace of the United States lacks incentive to concede anything. The United States has been down this road before, multiple times, and to no avail.

In addition, the polarized politics of the Middle East further erodes the possibility of resolving the conflict. In 2002, the Saudis proposed a peace plan: If Israel made peace with the Palestinians, the Arab states would normalize relations with it.

Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States and Israel are now in de facto alliance against Iran. The Palestinian issue has dropped by the wayside and another incentive for Israel to make peace has disappeared.

5. Yemen will sink further into the abyss.

Down the road, the most important underreported crisis in the Middle East is the war in Yemen, which Saudi Arabia, with American support, is waging against an indigenous uprising. There is no end in sight.

The Saudis claim the Houthis – rebellious members of the dominant clan of Shiites who live mainly in the north of that country – are Iranian proxies. They have thus entered the war on the side of a government that took power after a rigged “national dialogue” and an election won by the only candidate – a Saudi-supported candidate – allowed to run. The Houthi rebellion in fact began in 2004, long before the Saudis noticed Iranian conspiracies throughout the region.

The Saudis have engaged in a massive bombing campaign of civilian areas and have blockaded the ports of a country that is dependent on imports for 90 percent of its food Yemen is the poorest Arab country. As a result of the Saudi campaign, which not only has killed 12,000 Yemenis but has kept a civil war going, 50,000 children faced starvation at the end of 2017. Between April and August 2017, 20,000 Yemenis died of cholera.

The United States supports the Saudi war effort. Yet, like Saudi Arabia, it accuses Iran of being the greatest purveyor of terrorism in the region.

James L. Gelvin, Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History, University of California, Los Angeles

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. 

What’s a Nuclear Hotline Good For Anyway?

North and South Korea have revived their dormant direct line. That’s good news for the rest of the world.

A South Korean government official checks the direct communications hotline to talk with the North Korean side at the border village of Panmunjom on Jan. 3, in Panmunjom, South Korea. (South Korean Unification Ministry via Getty Images)

BY JEREMI SURI-

JANUARY 9, 2018, 11:19 AM
Despite the proliferation of global communications, North Korea’s leaders have long pursued Tokugawa-like isolation from foreign influences. One of the few sanctioned exceptions is the crisis “hotline” that allows daily telephone conversations between North and South Korean military figures within the demilitarized border town of Panmunjom. Although the representatives from the two states talk from buildings only a few hundred feet apart, when the connection opened in 1971 it bridged oceans of violent separation. The hotline is the only channel for direct daily contact, and both sides used it regularly until early 2016, when North Korea stopped picking up.

That changed on Jan. 3, 2018, when Pyongyang’s representatives returned to the line, in conjunction with direct negotiations that started five days later between high-level officials of both states. But how significant exactly is the reopening of the hotline on the Korean Peninsula? Will the hotline reduce the risk of war, which has flared dangerously with repeated North Korean nuclear missile tests and flamboyant personal threats from both North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and U.S. President Donald Trump in the last year?

The history of previous nuclear hotlines offers important perspective. Their uses have been infrequent and often quite trivial, but their existence has discouraged rash behavior and encouraged confidence that crises can be managed short of war. Hotlines have facilitated signaling between adversarial states, and they have reduced the likelihood of dangerous miscalculations. They are valuable tools for diplomacy, especially in regions — like the Korean Peninsula — locked in conflict.

The Cuban missile crisis inspired the creation of the first nuclear hotline. During the two weeks in October 1962 when the United States and the Soviet Union approached the precipice of thermonuclear war, U.S. President John F. Kennedy and Soviet First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev struggled to control events. Khrushchev famously warned Kennedy: “If we succeeded in finding a way out of a dangerous situation this time, next time we might not safely untie the tightly made knot.”

The absence of direct communications between the two leaders tightened the knot as they struggled to understand each other’s motives and actions.

 Technological limitations, security concerns, and hostile Cold War attitudes made a point-to-point telephone line from the White House to the Kremlin impossible at that time. Instead, Kennedy and Khrushchev had to rely on intermediaries, including their ambassadors, who were underinformed and distrusted. They created special “back channels” to open new lines of negotiation, but these were often unreliable. Most significant unplanned events during the crisis, including the shoot-down of an American U-2 aircraft over Cuba, threatened to trigger major miscalculations and escalation.
Leaders had long relied on diplomats, spies, and other intermediaries for their communications with adversaries. The difference in 1962 was that the speed and depth of potential destruction in a thermonuclear world reduced the time for deliberation and increased the dangers of miscalculation. Kennedy and Khrushchev felt that they needed to talk with more urgency and sobriety than their predecessors.

They began by exchanging letters after the moment of acute crisis had passed. Then, in March 1963, the United States proposed “the establishment of direct and more secure communications” between American and Soviet leaders. On June 20, the two governments signed a memorandum of understanding in Geneva — the first arms control agreement of the Cold War — to create “a direct communications link” and “take the necessary steps to ensure continuous functioning of the link and prompt delivery to its head of government of any communications received by means of the link from the head of government of the other party.”

Implementation came quickly, reflecting the eagerness of leaders in both capitals. On July 13, 1963, the first Soviet-American hotline became operational. It consisted of two pairs of Teletype machines, linked by dedicated telegraph wires routed through Europe and under the Atlantic Ocean. The receivers sat in the Pentagon and the Soviet Communist Party Headquarters, where they were continuously manned to receive messages and send them immediately to the White House and Kremlin. The communication between leaders was still textual and indirect, but the time required was reduced from days and hours to minutes, and the possibilities for distortion were minimized. In 1967, the White House added a terminal, connected to the Pentagon receivers, and over the next four decades the technology was updated to include satellite communications, facsimile equipment, and eventually, in 2008, email.

The superpowers communicated through the hotline during numerous crises, beginning with the assassination of President Kennedy in November 1963, when Washington assured Moscow of political stability within the United States. The first extended exchange occurred during the 1967 Six-Day War, when American and Soviet leaders reassured one another that they would not intervene directly and would mutually sue for peace in the region. Similar communications during the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971, the Yom Kippur War of 1973, and the Cyprus crisis of 1974 clarified the lines of deterrence in conflicts that could have expanded beyond their regions. Communications during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and the Polish Solidarity crisis of 1981 were less successful in defusing conflict between Washington and Moscow, but the exchange of messages limited possible miscalculations as Cold War tensions increased.

A direct voice link between the White House and Kremlin was possible by the 1990s, and it has largely replaced the textual hotline, although the latter still exists. American presidents now call allies and adversaries frequently, particularly during crises.

American presidents now call allies and adversaries frequently, particularly during crises.

 In the last decade, they have begun to use cell connections in addition to landlines. Mobile technology, coupled with secure long-distance capabilities, facilitates reliable voice communications as never before. For leaders in Washington, the notion of a hotline has become more diffuse — there are many “hotlines.”

They remain essential for clarifying motives and actions during terrorist attacks, civil wars, and invasions — as well as a growing list of economic, health, and climactic crises. They also ensure confidential dialogue, free from the public posturing that makes crisis de-escalation difficult. Leaders must trust the sincerity of one another’s words for these connections to be meaningful, but their very existence deepens trust among those who use them.

Despite a decade of deteriorating relations between Russia and the United States, the leaders of the two countries continue to speak directly in moments of high tension, as Kennedy and Khrushchev could not during the Cuban missile crisis. Meanwhile, other countries have developed their own hotline technologies, modeled on the Soviet-American Cold War link. France and the United Kingdom built direct connections to Moscow in the late 1960s. In 1998, China established hotlines with Russia and the United States, followed by similar links with South Korea, India, and Vietnam after 2008. These links have received far less attention than the initial Soviet-American connection, but they are considered essential for clarifying intentions and maintaining stability in the many rivalries surrounding the Chinese mainland.

Two hotlines that have helped manage explosive rivalries, often on the edge of war, run between India and Pakistan and between the two Koreas. Modeled on the Soviet-American link, and encouraged by Washington, the India-Pakistan link provides secure communications between the two nations’ foreign secretaries “to prevent misunderstandings and reduce risks relevant to nuclear issues.” The India-Pakistan hotline has operated since 2004, and it has facilitated numerous moments of crisis de-escalation, assuring both sides that war is not imminent. The United States has facilitated the maintenance of this connection.

The same is true for the two Koreas, where the Red Cross (with American assistance), installed the first system in the early 1970s to assist with delivering aid and defusing recurring crises. The Korean hotline has kept the two governments talking, even in moments of acute conflict. It provides voice connections for military leaders on both sides, who otherwise have no method for exchanging messages directly.

The return of North Korea to its voice link with South Korea will not ensure peace, nor will it prevent disaster. Strategic hotlines have proliferated since the Cuban missile crisis to help manage conflicts involving adversaries with limited communications and extensive nuclear capabilities. So far, the hotlines have contributed to stability, confidence, and sometimes coordination. Despite peculiar efforts at isolation by a few nations, hotlines are integral to nuclear diplomacy in our contemporary world.

Trump vs. Trump, again: Judge cites presidential tweets as he blocks DACA phaseout

A federal judge blocked the Trump administration's phaseout of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals on Jan. 9. The White House called it "outrageous." (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)


By Derek Hawkins January 10 at 7:11 AM

It’s not just the “Fake News Media” that parses President Trump’s tweets in microscopic detail and uses them against him. Federal judges do it too.

The White House yet again learned that the hard way when, on Tuesday, U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco blocked the administration’s attempt to phase out Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the Obama-era program that protects young undocumented immigrants from deportation.

Alsup was tasked with, among other things, determining whether it would serve the public interest to leave DACA in place while litigation over the decision to scrap the program proceeds.

On this point, he had an easy answer: Trump himself had expressed support for DACA on Twitter in September, just days after Department of Homeland Security officials rescinded it.

“Does anybody really want to throw out good, educated and accomplished young people who have jobs, some serving in the military? Really!” the president wrote in a Sept. 14 tweet. Another read:

“Congress now has 6 months to legalize DACA (something the Obama Administration was unable to do). If they can’t, I will revisit this issue!”

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

Does anybody really want to throw out good, educated and accomplished young people who have jobs, some serving in the military? Really!.....

5:28 AM - Sep 14, 2017

•  42,10742,107 Replies
 
•  18,14618,146 Retweets
 
•  81,96781,967 likes

Those lines seemed to capture the program’s benefits in a nutshell, Alsup wrote in a 49-page order.
“We seem to be in the unusual position wherein the ultimate authority over the agency, the Chief Executive, publicly favors the very program the agency has ended,” the judge wrote. “For the reasons DACA was instituted and for the reasons tweeted by President Trump, this order finds that the public interest will be served by DACA’s continuation.”

Trump’s Twitter habits have dogged the administration in court since his early days in the White House. In litigation over Trump’s executive actions, no ruling seems to be complete without a section explaining how Trump’s tweets and public statements undercut the administration’s legal arguments.

[Federal judge says DACA can’t end while lawsuit is pending]

The problem has come up in cases challenging Trump’s travel bans, transgender military ban and sanctuary cities ban. Some judges have gone so far as to include images of @realDonaldTrump’s activity, an unusual sight in a federal court ruling. It goes without saying that the president doesn’t seem bothered by any of it.

This is new territory for federal judges, according to Niels Frenzen, an immigration law professor at the University of Southern California.

“We’ve never had a president tweeting like this,” Frenzen said. “You have these extreme public statements that are shedding light on the motivation of the president in regard to why he is directing Cabinet secretaries to engage in these actions. The courts are saying these are fair game.”

The administration’s impulsiveness has also been its enemy in court. In this case and others before it, judges have said the administration, in its rush, had failed to take the steps required by law to justify its executive actions.

Homeland Security officials rescinded DACA last fall, saying it suffered from “constitutional defects” that were similar to problems federal judges had pointed out in rulings blocking a related Obama-era program, Deferred Action for Parents of Americans.

Based on those decisions, the Trump administration reasoned that DACA was illegal from the get-go and that President Barack Obama exceeded his authority when he rolled it out in 2012. Therefore, the argument went, allowing it to continue put the administration at risk of getting sued.

These former congressional interns share why the battle in Congress over the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program is so personal. (Melissa Macaya, Patrick Martin/The Washington Post)

Alsup called that conclusion “flawed,” “post hoc” and “capricious.” The Obama administration hadn’t overreached, he wrote in Tuesday’s order. In fact, he wrote, the Trump administration’s position wasn’t even based on a policy change but a “mistake of law.”

“The main, if not exclusive, rationale for ending DACA was its supposed illegality. But determining illegality is a quintessential role of the courts,” Alsup wrote.

In other words, it’s not up to the administration to decide whether one of its predecessor’s policies is illegal. That’s the U.S. Supreme Court’s job, and the high court hasn’t ruled on DACA’s legality.
If the Supreme Court were to rule on DACA and find that it was constitutionally sound, “then a policy supported as high up as our chief executive has been the victim of a colossal blunder,” the judge wrote, again referencing the president’s tweets.

In issuing the preliminary injunction, Alsup found that the plaintiffs — a collection of DACA recipients, universities and states — would suffer irreparable harm if the administration moved forward with plans to terminate the program in March before the case is resolved.

Frenzen, of USC, stressed that the plaintiffs weren’t challenging the president’s authority over the program but the motivations behind the decision to end it. The administration could have avoided some of its headaches if it had worked out a rationale for the move that was supported by evidence and offered it up for public comment, as required by federal administrative la
“They could have said, ‘We intend to dismantle the program for the following reasons and this is how we’re going to go about doing it.’ That would give opportunities for civil rights attorneys, congressional representatives, experts and others to weigh in, in public comments,” Frenzen said. “If you had done your homework and complied with the law, you’d be in a very different place.”

If nothing else, Alsup wrote in his ruling, the plaintiffs were entitled to “learn of all flaws, if any more there be, lurking” behind the DACA decision. He noted that the plaintiffs had suggested the administration had terminated the program so it could be used as a bargaining chip to demand funding for a border wall. And again, he cited the president’s Twitter feed as evidence.
“A presidential tweet after our hearing gives credence to this claim,” Alsup wrote.

The tweet in question, posted by Trump on Dec. 29, read: “The Democrats have been told, and fully understand, that there can be no DACA without the desperately needed WALL at the Southern Border and an END to the horrible Chain Migration & ridiculous Lottery System of Immigration etc.” Alsup granted a request by the plaintiffs to take “judicial notice” of the tweet.

Alsup’s order notwithstanding, Trump appeared to double down on the proposal Tuesday night, stubborn as ever. “Our country needs the security of the Wall on the Southern Border,” he tweeted, “which must be part of any DACA approval.”

Russian bid to influence Brexit vote detailed in new US Senate report

UK political system vulnerable to anti-democratic meddling via social media and ‘possibly illicit’ campaign funding, report says

 Patrick Leahy, a Democrat from Vermont, with examples of Russian-created Facebook pages at a Senate hearing. Photograph: Getty Images

Patrick WintourDiplomatic editor-Wed 10 Jan ‘18 15.15 GMT

Russia’s attempts to influence British democracy and the potential vulnerability of parts of the UK political system to anti-democratic meddling during the EU referendum have been detailed in a report prepared by the US Senate.

The report by Democrats on the Senate foreign relations committee, titled Putin’s asymmetric assault on democracy in Russia and Europe: implications for US national security, pinpoints the way in which UK campaign finance laws do not require disclosure of political donations if they are from “the beneficial owners of non-British companies that are incorporated in the EU and carry out business in the UK”.

This opacity, the report suggests, “may have enabled Russian-related money to be directed with insufficient scrutiny to various UK political actors”.

“Investigative journalists have also raised questions about the sources of sudden and possibly illicit wealth that may have been directed to support the Brexit‘Leave’ campaign.” The UK Electoral Commission has already launched an investigation into the issue.

The senators point out that Ukip and its then-leader, Nigel Farage, did not just fan anti-EU sentiment but also “criticised European sanctions on Russia, and provided flattering assessments of Russian President Putin”.

The report adds that although officially the Russian government asserted its neutrality on Brexit, its English-language media outlets RT and Sputnik covered the referendum campaign extensively and offered ‘’systematically one-sided coverage’’.

 The report points out that the then-Ukip leader Nigel Farage ‘provided flattering assessments’ of Vladimir Putin. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

The senators also challenge the adequacy of the investigations by Facebook and Twitter into the allegations of widespread social media interference by the Russians during the referendum. They reference University of Edinburgh research showing more than 400 Russian-run Twitter accounts that had been active in the US election had also been actively posting about Brexit.

In addition, the senators noted that research conducted by a joint team of experts from the University of California at Berkeley and Swansea University reportedly identified 150,000 Twitter accounts with various Russian ties that disseminated messages about Brexit.

The report also points to the vast flow of Russian money into the UK, including the London property market. It records how the Metropolitan police noted that a total value of £180m in properties in the UK had been put under investigation as possibly purchased with corrupt proceeds by secretive offshore companies.

Overall the report breaks little new ground in terms of fresh evidence but says the picture remains incomplete. “The allegations that have emerged of Russian interference prior to the Brexit referendum are all the more stunning given the innate resilience within British society to the Kremlin’s anti-democratic agenda,” the senators wrote.

The report, which chronicles Russian disinformation efforts in 19 countries, calls on Donald Trump to assert leadership on Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, saying: “Never before in American history has so clear a threat to national security been so clearly ignored by a US president.”