A US-based Hindu group is urging New York City (NYC) Council to support the idea of Diwali as permanent official holiday in the city schools as its Committee on Education is meeting on November 22 to discuss this issue.

A resolution “calling upon the New York City Department of Education to establish Diwali as an official holiday for New York City public school students” is on the November 22 agenda of the Committee, sponsored by Committee Chair Daniel Dromm.

Hindu statesman Rajan Zed, in a statement today, said that it was not fair with Hindu pupils and their families as they had to attend school on Diwali, the most popular Hindu festival.

NYC Department of Education school calendar 2016-2017 included the holiday closures on Rosh Hashanah (two days), Yom Kippur, Eid al-Adha and Eid al-Fitr. Good Friday (which falls during the Spring recess of April 10-18 when the schools are closed) is also paid holiday for employees (except for “prevailing wage rate employees”).

Zed, who is President of Universal Society of Hinduism, indicated that this unfairness did not send a good signal to the impressionable minds of schoolchildren who would be the leaders of tomorrow. Holidays of all major religions should be honored and no one should be penalized for practicing their religion. Moreover, it was important to meet the religious and spiritual needs of these students, Zed added

Rajan Zed stressed that since it was significant for Hindu families to celebrate Diwali day together at home with their children, we did not want our children to be deprived of any privileges at the school because of thus resulting absences on this day. Closing schools on Diwali would ensure that and it would be a step in the positive direction.

Zed noted that awareness about other religions thus created by such holidays like Diwali would make the NYC pupils well-nurtured, well-balanced, and enlightened citizens of tomorrow.

Rajan Zed further said that Hinduism is rich in festivals and religious festivals are very dear and sacred to Hindus. Diwali, the festival of lights, aims at dispelling the darkness and lighting up the lives and symbolizes the victory of good over evil. Besides Hindus, Sikhs and Jains and some Buddhists also celebrate Diwali, which falls on October 19 in 2017. Hinduism, oldest and third largest religion of the world, has about one billion adherents and moksh (liberation) is its ultimate goal. There are about three million Hindus in USA.

By Jill Richardson*

As Donald Trump plans his transition into the White House, some have called for “unity.” Let’s “come together,” they say. Let’s “give him a chance.”

I say no.

When a man abuses his wife, you don’t tell her to give him a chance. You don’t tell her to try to talk things out with him. Meet him halfway. Hear his side of it. Believe him when he says he loves her and he won’t hit her again.

Why? Because it won’t work.

The rules of normal social conduct don’t apply in such a case. Nor do they apply in this one. As I’ve said before, Trump exhibits textbook emotional abuse tactics.

If you give him a chance, he’ll walk all over you. If you go into any negotiation ready to meet him in the middle, he’ll demand it isn’t enough, that he must get his way entirely. And he’ll strong-arm you to get it.

We already have evidence that Trump does absolutely everything he can get away with.

He walked in on naked teenage beauty queens while they were changing, just because he could. Twelve women have accused him of sexual assault. He openly admits that he kisses and gropes them without consent.

He doesn’t pay contractors for their work. During the campaign, he even stiffed his own pollster. And his lawyers had to meet with him in pairs to prevent him from lying about their meetings.

This is a man who’ll do anything he can get away with. And he’s about as ready to change as a man who beats his wife would be.

So we can’t roll over and let him. We fight.

That’s what we must do now. We must make it absolutely as hard as possible for this man to wreck our democracy. And that’s not a partisan statement.

At this point, it’s not about whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican. It’s not about whether you prefer to repeal NAFTA or Obamacare, or about whether you think same-sex marriage should be legal.

It’s now about whether you think the democracy the United States has had for over 200 years should remain in existence. If the answer to that question is yes, then it’s time to fight. Because that’s what’s under threat.

The pain of this bitter election hurts. For the second time in recent years, the Electoral College is on track to install a president who received fewer votes from the American people than his opponent.

We’re all dealing with difficult emotions in different ways. I’m listening to audiobooks and knitting. Okay, and ugly crying. Others are protesting. And some are trying to handle their anger and fear by “thinking positive.”

It’s not the time for that. Not when thinking positive means denying reality.

It’s been only days since the election and Trump has already appointed Steve Bannon, a white supremacist and “alt-right” media kingpin, as a top adviser. If you wanted to give Trump a chance, there. He’s had one. He blew it.

The next four years are going to be hard. But now is the time to start mobilizing. The continuation of our very democracy depends on it.

*OtherWords columnist Jill Richardson is the author of Recipe for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It. Distributed by OtherWords.org.

Joining the EU is not the only option, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said, the Turkish Milliyet newspaper reported Nov. 20.

“Turkey is discussing the issue of joining the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO),” President Erdogan said.

EU leaders and Turkey have agreed a comprehensive plan that opens a safe and legal route to the EU for Syrian refugees while reducing irregular migration.

The plan finalizes the one-for-one principle that EU leaders and Turkey provisionally agreed on March 7: all new irregular migrants crossing from Turkey into Greek islands will be returned to Turkey; and for every Syrian returned to Turkey from Greek islands, another Syrian will be resettled from Turkey to the EU.

By Conn Hallinan*

“We have fallen into a self-defeating spiral of reaction and counterterror,” writes Mark Danner in his new book Spiral: Trapped in the Forever War. “Our policies, meant to extirpate our enemies, have strengthened and perpetuated them.”

Danner — an award winning journalist, professor, and member of the Council on Foreign Relations who has covered war and revolutions on three continents — begins Spiral with the aftermath of a 2003 ambush of U.S. troops outside of Fallujah, Iraq.

The insurgents had set off a roadside bomb, killing a paratrooper and wounding several others. “The Americans promptly dismounted and with their M-16s and M-4s began pouring lead into everything they could see,” including a passing truck, he writes. “By week’s end scores of family and close friends of those killed would join the insurgents, for honor demanded they kill Americans to wipe away family shame.”

The incident encapsulates the fundamental contradiction at the heart of George W. Bush’s — and with variations, Barack Obama’s — “war on terror”: The means used to fight it is the most effective recruiting device that organizations like Al Qaeda, the Taliban, the Shabab, and the Islamic State have.

Targeted assassinations by drones, the use of torture, extra-legal renditions, and the invasions of several Muslim countries have combined to yield an unmitigated disaster, destabilizing several states, killing hundreds of thousands of people, and generating millions of refugees.

Putting War Crimes on the Menu

Danner’s contention is hardly breaking news, nor is he the first journalist to point out that responding to the tactic of terrorism with military force generates yet more enemies and instability. But Spiral argues that what was once unusual has now become standard operating procedure, and the Obama administration bears some of the blame for this by its refusal to prosecute violations of international law.

Torture is a case in point.

In the aftermath of the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, the Bush administration introduced so-called “enhanced interrogation” techniques that were, in fact, torture under both U.S. and international law. Danner demonstrates that the White House, and a small cluster of advisers around Vice President Dick Cheney, knew they could be prosecuted under existing laws, so they carefully erected a “golden shield” of policy memos that would protect them from prosecution for war crimes.

In his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Obama announced that he had “prohibited torture.” But, as Danner points out, “torture violates international and domestic law and the notion that our president has the power to prohibit it follows insidiously from the pretense that his predecessor had the power to order it. Before the war on terror official torture was illegal and an anathema; today it is a policy choice.”

And president-elect Donald Trump has already announced that he intends to bring it back.

There is no doubt that enhanced interrogation was torture. The International Committee of the Red Cross found the techniques “amounted to torture and/or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.” How anyone could conclude anything else is hard to fathom. Besides the waterboarding — for which several Japanese soldiers were executed for using on Allied prisoners during World War II — interrogators used sleep deprivation, extreme confinement, and “walling.” Abu Zubaydah, who was waterboarded 83 times, describes having a towel wrapped around his neck that his questioners used “to swing me around and smash repeatedly against the wall of the [interrogation] room.”

According to a 2004 CIA memo, “An HVD [high value detainee] may be walled one time (one impact with the wall) to make a point, or twenty to thirty times consecutively when the interrogator requires a more significant response to a question.” There were, of course, some restraints. For instance, the Justice Department refused to approve a CIA proposal to bury people alive.

And, as Danner points out, none of these grotesque methods produced any important information. The claim that torture saved “thousands of lives” is simply a lie.

There was a certain Alice in Wonderland quality about the whole thing. Zubaydah was designated a “high official” in Al Qaeda, the number three or four man in the organization. In reality he wasn’t even a member, as the Justice Department finally admitted in 2009. However, because he was considered a higher up in the group, it was assumed he must know about future attacks. If he professed that he didn’t know anything, this was proof that he did, and so he had to be tortured more. “It is a closed circle, self-sufficient, impervious to disobedient facts,” says Danner.

The logic of the Red Queen.

Through the Looking Glass

The Obama administration has also conjured up some interpretations of language that seem straight out of Lewis Carroll.

In defending his use of drone strikes in a 2014 speech at West Point, the president said he only uses them “when we face a continuing, imminent threat.” But “imminent” means “likely to occur at any moment” and is the opposite of “continuing.” A leaked Justice Department memo addresses the incongruity by arguing, “Imminent does not require the U.S. to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future.”

Apparently the administration has now added “elongated” to “imminent,” so that “a president doesn’t have to deem the country under immediate threat to attack before acting on his or her own.” As Humpty Dumpty says to Alice in Through the Looking Glass, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean.”

Danner turns the phrase “American exceptionalism” on its head. The U.S. is not “exceptional” because of its democratic institutions and moral codes, but because it has exempted itself from international law. “Americans, believing themselves to stand proudly for the rule of law and human rights, have become for the rest of the world a symbol of something quite opposite: a society that imprisons people indefinitely without trial, kills thousands without due process, and leaves unpunished lawbreaking approved by its highest officials.”

The war has also undermined basic constitutional restrictions on the ability of intelligence agencies and law enforcement to vacuum up emails and cell phone calls, and has created an extra-legal court system to try insurgents whose oversight and appeal process in shrouded in secrecy.

Failure by Any Measure

The war on terror — the Obama administration has re-titled it a war on extremism — hasn’t been just an illegal and moral catastrophe. It’s a failure by any measure. From 2002 to 2014, the number of deaths from terrorism grew 4,000 percent, the number of jihadist groups increased by 58 percent, and the membership in those organizations more than doubled.

The war has also generated a massive counterterrorism bureaucracy that has every reason to amp up the politics of fear. And yet with all the alarm this has created, a total of 24 Americans were killed by terrorism in 2014, fewer than were done in by lighting.

Terrorism, says Danner, is “la politique du pire,” the “politics of the worst” or the use of provocation to get your enemy to overreact. “If you are weak, if you have no army of your own, borrow you enemy’s. Provoke your adversary to do your political work for you,” he says. “And in launching the war on terror, eventually occupying two Muslim countries and producing Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib celebrating images of repression and torture, the United States proved all too happy to oblige.”

Danner argues that idea you can defeat terrorism — which is really just a tactic used by the less powerful against the more powerful — with military force is an illusion. It can and does, however, make everything worse.

Even the Department of Defense knows this. In 2004, the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board found that:

• American direct intervention in the Muslim world has paradoxically elevated the stature and support for radical Islamists while diminishing support for the United States.
• Muslim do not “hate our freedoms.” They hate our policies, including one-sided support for Israel and for tyrannies in the Arab world.
• American talk of bringing democracy to Muslim countries is self-serving hypocrisy.
• The occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan hasn’t brought democracy to those countries, only chaos and destruction.

Increasingly the war on terrorism (or “extremism,” if you prefer) is a secret war fought by drones whose targets are never revealed, or by Special Operations Forces whose deployments and missions are wrapped in the silence of national security.

And as long as Obama calls for Americans “to look forward as opposed to looking backward,” the spiral will continue.

As Danner argues, “It is a sad but immutable fact that the refusal to look backward leaves us trapped in a world without accountability that [Obama’s] predecessor made. In making it possible, indeed likely, that the crimes will be repeated, the refusal to look backward traps us in the past.”

Foreign Policy In Focus columnist Conn Hallinan can be read at dispatchesfromtheedge.wordpress.com and middleempireseries.wordpress.com.

By Austin Hale and Frank G. Hoffman*

(FPRI) — China appears determined to assert itself throughout the Asia Pacific region and undercut United States’ alliances with potentially destabilizing effects on regional security.[1] Its increasingly aggressive actions in the Western Pacific, coupled with rising defense spending—an increase of 7.6 percent in 2016—have elevated the possibility of conflict between the United States and China.[2] Thus, U.S. analysts and defense scholars have been trying to identify the potential form a future conflict between the two powers may take. In the available literature, this potential conflict is characterized and operationalized as a competition between the U.S. AirSea Battle (ASB) operational concept—now referred to as the Joint Concept for Access and Maneuver in the Global Commons—and China’s Anti-access/Area-denial (A2/AD) capabilities.[3]

In their recent article, “Future Warfare in the Western Pacific,” in International Security, defense scholars Stephen Biddle and Ivan Oerlich argue that while advancements in reconnaissance, surveillance, and target acquisition (RSTA) have allowed China to field more advanced sensor, guidance, and communication technologies, the Chinese A2/AD approach is not a decisive, long-term threat to the United States or its allies in the region.[4] This conclusion would suggest that the U.S. Defense establishment need not concern itself with this challenge, undercutting its emphasis in recent Pentagon publications, such as the Quadrennial Defense Reviews and the Pentagon’s emerging Offset Strategies narrative.[5]

We contend that Chinese A2/AD capabilities are more asymmetric than Biddle and Oerlich presented and can be a decisive long-term threat to the interests of the U.S. and its allies in the region. Furthermore, a mature A2/AD system would allow China to project power throughout the region largely unchecked. Underestimating developments to extend and diversify Chinese intelligence and targeting assets could lead to erroneous conclusions and strategic failure.

Biddle and Oerlich base much of their argument on the belief that “it will be especially difficult for China . . . to extend A2/AD’s reach beyond about 400-600km from a friendly coast.”[6] The authors identify this restriction because they conclude that airborne radars, such as advanced Airborne Early Warning and Control (AEWC) systems, cannot safely deploy beyond the reach of land-based air defense systems. Thus, A2/AD must rely on active radar for targeting, which in turn is restricted by the Earth’s curvature and the physical horizon of 400-600km from the coast of the Mainland.[7] Furthermore, they conclude that “only radar can provide the broad-area, day-night, long-range detection essential for A2/AD.”[8] In support of this claim, the authors systematically assess the viability of alternatives to radar for A2/AD systems. Concerning ground-based over-the-horizon (OTH) radar, while admitting that it can detect targets beyond the physical horizon, the authors’ maintain that it cannot extend the range of A2/AD because it operates at frequencies unsuitable for target acquisition.

In regards to space-based assets, the authors posit that the vulnerability of satellites precludes them from providing the necessary RSTA capability to extend the reach of A2/AD. Satellites travel in predictable orbits making them easy targets for ground-based antisatellite (ASAT) weapons. Furthermore, defending a satellite is impractical due to the large cost associated with equipping satellites with defensive capabilities or with the fuel needed to complete evasive maneuvers. Given these inherent vulnerabilities, the authors conclude that either side’s satellites could easily be destroyed at the outbreak of conflict and therefore cannot be relied upon to direct A2/AD systems.[9]

They also note that passive alternatives to radar, such as signals intervention and passive visible or infrared light detection, are also unreliable due to their ineffectiveness in poor weather conditions.[10] While drones, aircraft, and satellites can listen passively for ship radio transmissions in order to triangulate their position, tactics such as low-probability-of-intercept techniques and strict electronic emissions control (EMCON) can be used to substantially decrease detection rates and ranges. Passive infrared sensors require perfect weather conditions to be effective and advancements in infrared shielding make identifying targets particularly difficult.[11]

Biddle and Oerlich also suggest that sea-based assets, such as submarines and mines, would not be able to extend A2/AD’s range. For submarines, this limit is due to the fact that in order to “operate in distant waters under hostile control, submarines must . . . use onboard sonars and operate near the targets they would engage.”[12] Consequently, submarines are forced into a defined area in which anti-submarine warfare (ASW) can be more effective. Mines, on the other hand, are fixed in place and have relatively short ranges. Therefore, to successfully extend A2/AD’s reach, they must be employed in extremely large numbers throughout large swaths of open ocean—a task unaffordable and impractical for any navy.[13]

Based on this assessment of the strengths and limitations of A2/AD, the authors conclude that “[Chinese] A2/AD is not a decisive long-term threat to most U.S. allies in the region,” so the United States need not incur the investment costs or risks associated with pursuing the strike-centric AirSea Battle concept.[14]

Counterarguments

However, should the U.S. heed Biddle and Oerlich’s advice, the net result will be a system of “competing spheres of influence in the Western Pacific; a Chinese sphere over its mainland; a U.S. sphere over most of its allies’ landmasses and including most of the regions disputed island chains; and zone of mutual exclusion in between in which neither side enjoys freedom of movement”—an outcome the authors claim is acceptable.[15] However, this outcome is neither acceptable nor likely! In fact, the authors seriously underestimate the potential of A2/AD and the danger it poses to the U.S and its allies.

First, China is not nearly as dependent upon space-based assets that might be easily taken out at the initiation of a conflict as the United States is. As of January 2015, the Chinese government and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) had a combined total of 115 operational satellites—37 for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) and remote sensing, 15 for navigation, 12 for communication, 28 for earth observation, and 23 for space sciences and technology development. At the same time, the U.S. government and military operated 287 satellites—45 for ISR, 36 for navigation, 122 for communication, 32 for earth observation, and 52 for space sciences and technology development.[16] These numbers clearly indicate the United States is more reliant on space-based assets than China. Thus, we conclude that even if the United States was willing and able to destroy China’s space-based assets, there is no reason to suspect that such an attack would severely limit China’s A2/AD capabilities.

Second, the authors’ do not credit the possibility that A2/AD systems—including advanced radar systems, such as High-Frequency (HF) radar and Airborne Early Warning and Control (AEWC) platforms (manned or unmanned)—could be deployed from disputed islands in the South and East China Seas and protected by land-based air defenses significantly extending the range of A2/AD’s warning and strike capabilities (see Table 1).[17] For example, HF radar, with ranges between 80-200 miles, could either target enemy assets directly if the selected weapons system is capable of localizing and pursuing a target, or it could provide cueing to AEWC assets to gather targeting information.[18]

Table 1: Chinese AEWC platforms[19]

Such a configuration would allow AEWC platforms to be deployed within the defensive reach of air defense systems, such as the HQ-9, extending AEWCs radar range to 600-900km of the controlled landmass.[21] In turn, these systems could be used by the PLA to cue the launch and trajectory of a DF-21 D medium-range ballistic missile, known as the “carrier killer,” preventing foreign militaries from intervening in the Western Pacific. A CJ-10 land-attack cruise missile, in theory, would allow China to strike U.S. or allied military assets from Singapore to the Philippines (see Figure 1).[22]

Figure 1: Potential range of HQ-9 SAM (200km), YJ-62 ASCM (400km), DF-21 MRBM (1,550km) and CJ-10 LACM (2,200km) when placed on disputed islands in the South China Sea (Fiery Cross Reef, Subi Reef, Mischief Reef and Scarborough Shoal), Woody Island, and along China’s coast.[23]

Third, Biddle and Oerlich do not recognize the role China’s maritime militia, dubbed China’s “little blue men,” could play in covering any gaps in China’s ISR coverage.[25] Maritime militia forces have allowed China to disrupt foreign survey operations and to extend and consolidate areas it views as Chinese territory with low escalatory risks.[26] While these actions can hardly be identified as military actions, during a conflict with the U.S., these forces could easily provide early warning, tactical intelligence, and targeting information to the PLA. China also maintains a massive, nationally owned fleet of commercial shipping vessels, fishing vessels, and non-military maritime resources that could easily be exploited as a highly distributed, maritime intelligence system.[27] The advent of multiple satellite-based precision navigation systems (GPS, BeiDou, GAGAN and GLONASS) could enable these forces to provide targeting information precise enough to support an attack by a weapon with its own localization seeker and maneuverability.[28]

Moreover, during peace-time, the maritime militia could extend the PLA’s eyes well out into the South China Sea and beyond, significantly increasing the range of China’s A2/AD systems in the region. While their survivability, and therefore their reliability, is certainly tenuous during a shooting war, the sheer size of the fishing fleet—nearly 200,000 marine fishing vessels and 2,460 distant-water (beyond China’s EEZ)—ensures that China could continually exploit this resource even while taking heavy casualties.[29]

Finally, Biddle and Oerlich do not acknowledge that the PLA could exploit networks that link their military resources better than we imagine today. According to China’s 2015 Defense White Paper, the PLA is committed to further force integration, stating that the armed forces will “establish an integrated joint operational system . . . construct a combat force structure for joint operations . . . enhance joint operational capabilities . . . establish an integrated joint operational system . . . and improve the CMC [Central Military Commission] command organ and theater-level command systems for joint operations.”[30] Further integration of PLA military resources could allow China to significantly expand its A2/AD capabilities. For instance, OTH radar could detect targets as far away as 3,000km and provide cueing to space-based assets or AEWC platforms to gather targeting information. In turn, these systems could cue the launch and guide the trajectory of CJ-10 or DF-21 D missiles to the selected target.

A Long-Term Threat

In the long-term, a fully mature Chinese A2/AD system could be a major threat to the United States and its allies in the region. Given the likelihood that China will place anti-access weapons systems and advance radar systems on disputed islands in the South China Sea, the potential exists for it to threaten U.S. assets from Singapore to the eastern shores of the Philippines. This more ambiguous, decentralized network is very distributed and resilient, but also more vulnerable. Underestimating the PLA’s A2/AD capabilities could lead the United States to suffer from strategic surprise should any conflict break out in the region. We do not need to obsess on the problem, but this operational challenge has strategic implications. Additionally, this is a larger challenge than just the Western Pacific, given that other regional powers also employ capabilities that could restrict operational freedom of maneuver in the North Atlantic, Baltic Sea, and Persian Gulf as well. Thus, it is important that the U.S. continues to develop the means necessary to counteract efforts to contest access in the global commons.

*About the authors:
Austin Hale is currently working as a research intern at the National Defense University’s Center for Strategic Research and is a student at George Washington University.

Frank G. Hoffman serves on FPRI’s Board of Advisors, and effective June 20, 2011, Mr. Hoffman is serving at the National Defense University as a Distinguished Research Fellow with the Institute for National Strategic Studies.

Source:
This article was published by FPRI.

[1] Bernard Cole, The Great Wall at Sea: China Enters the Twenty-first Century (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2014), 2d ed.; Toshi Yoshihara and James R. Holmes, Red Star over the Pacific: China’s Rise and the Challenge to US Maritime Strategy, (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2010); Patrick Cronin, et al, Cooperation from Strength: The United States, China and the South China Sea (Washington, DC: Center for a New American Century, 2012); Xu Hui and Cao Xianyu, “A Perspective on China’s Maritime Security Strategy,” in Routledge Handbook of Naval Strategy and Security, Joachim Krause and Sebastian Bruns, eds. (Oxon, UK: Routledge, 2016); and Phillip Saunders, Director, Center for the Study of Chinese Military Affairs, NDU, personal e-mail correspondence, October 15, 2016.

[2] Chris Buckley and Jane Perlez, “China Military Budget to Rise Less Than 8%, Slower Than Usual,” New York Times, March 4, 2016, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/05/world/asia/china-military-spending.html?_r=0.

[3] For an overview of the debate generated by AirSea Battle, see Aaron Friedberg, Beyond Air-Sea Battle, The Debate Over US Military Strategy in Asia (London: International Institute of Strategic Studies, 2014). For a summary of postulated PLA A2/AD operations, see Jan Van Tol, Mark Gunzinger, Andrew Krepinevich, and Jim Thomas, “AirSea Battle: A Point-of-Departure Operational Concept,” Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2010, 17-47.

[4] Stephen Biddle and Ivan Oerlich, “Future Warfare in the Western Pacific,” International Security, Vol. 41, No. 1 (Summer 2016), 13.

[5] Robert M. Gates, The Quadrennial Defense Review Report 2010 (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, February 2010); Chuck Hagel, The Quadrennial Defense Review (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, March 2014). On the Defense Department’s key innovation initiatives, see Robert Work, Prepared Remarks, “The Third Offset Strategy,” at the Ronald Reagan Defense Forum, Nov. 17, 2015, accessed at http://www.defense.gov/News/Speeches/Speech-View/Article/628246/reagan-defense-forum-the-third-offset-strategy.

[6] Biddle and Oerlich, “Future Warfare in the Western Pacific,” 13.

[7] Ibid., 13.

[8] Ibid., 23.

[9] Biddle and Oerlich, “Future Warfare in the Western Pacific,” 25–26.

[10] Ibid., 23.

[11] Ibid., 29-30.

[12] Ibid., 30-31.

[13] Ibid., 32.

[14] Ibid., 13, 41.

[15] Ibid., 43.

[16] Eric Heginbotham et al., The U.S.-China Military Scorecard: Forces, Geography, and the Evolving Balance of Power, 1996–2017 (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2015), 229–231, http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR392.html; USNI News, “New Possible Chinese Radar Installation on SCS Artificial Island Could Put US Stealth Aircraft at Risk,” Feb. 2, 2016, https://news.usni.org/2016/02/22/new-possible-chinese-radar-installation-on-south-china-sea-artificial-island-could-put-u-s-allied-stealth-aircraft-at-risk.

[17] Ankit Panda, “South China Sea: China’s Surveillance Drones Make it to Woody Island,” The Diplomat, June 1, 2016, http://thediplomat.com/2016/06/south-china-sea-chinas-surveillance-drones-make-it-to-woody-island/; Victor Robert Lee, “South China Sea: Satellite Imagery Shows China’s Buildup on Fiery Cross Reef,” The Diplomat, September 16, 2015, http://thediplomat.com/2015/09/south-china-sea-satellite-imagery-shows-chinas-buildup-on-fiery-cross-reef/.

[18] Bryan Clark, CSBA, personal e-mail correspondence, October 15, 2016.

[19] IHS Jane’s, “KJ-2000,” Jane’s Strategic Weapons Systems, accessed October 17, 2016, https://janes.ihs.com/Janes/Display/1344988;  IHS Jane’s, “Xian ASN-229A, Jane’s Strategic Weapons Systems, accessed October 17, 2016, https://janes.ihs.com/Janes/Display/1318933; and IHS Jane’s, “CAC Wing-Loong,” Jane’s Strategic Weapons Systems, accessed October 17, 2016, https://janes.ihs.com/Janes/Display/1318822.

[20] Timothy R. Heath, “Beijing Ups the Ante in South China Sea Dispute with HQ-9 Deployment,” Rand Corporation, March 28, 2016, accessed at http://www.rand.org/blog/2016/03/beijing-ups-the-ante-in-south-china-sea-dispute-with.html; Richard D. Fischer Jr., “Imagery suggests China has deployed YJ-62 anti-ship missiles to Woody Island,” IHS Jane’s Defence Weekly, March 23, 2016, http://www.janes.com/article/59003/imagery-suggests-china-has-deployed-yj-62-anti-ship-missiles-to-woody-island.

[21] Special thanks to Bryan Clark for bringing this possibility to our attention; IHS Jane’s, “HQ-9,” Jane’s Strategic Weapons Systems, accessed October 17, 2016, https://janes.ihs.com/Janes/Display/1501651.

[22] Victor Robert Lee, “South China Sea: Satellite Imagery Shows China’s Buildup on Fiery Cross Reef,” The Diplomat, September 16, 2015, http://thediplomat.com/2015/09/south-china-sea-satellite-imagery-shows-chinas-buildup-on-fiery-cross-reef/; Thomas Shugart, “China’s Artificial Islands are Bigger (and a Bigger Deal) Than You Think,” War on The Rocks, September 21, 2016, accessed at http://warontherocks.com/2016/09/chinas-artificial-islands-are-bigger-and-a-bigger-deal-than-you-think/; Jerry Hendrix, “Retreat from Range: The Rise and Fall of Carrier Aviation,” Washington, DC: Center for New American Security (June 2015), 51; Aaron Friedberg, A Contest for Supremacy: China, America, and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2011), 219; and Mark Gunzinger and Bryan Clark, “Winning the Salvo Competition: Rebalancing America’s Air and Missile Defenses,” Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment, 2016, 2-3.

[23] IHS Jane’s, “HQ-9/FT-2000,” Jane’s Strategic Weapons Systems, accessed October 17, 2016, https://janes.ihs.com/Janes/Display/1494658; Richard D. Fisher Jr., “Imagery suggest China has deployed YJ-62 anti-ship missiles to Woody Island,” Jane’s Defence Weekly, March 23, 2016, https://janes.ihs.com/Janes/Display/1765554; IHS Jane’s, “DF-21,” Jane’s Strategic Weapons Systems, accessed October 17, 2016, https://janes.ihs.com/Janes/Display/1316682; IHS Jane’s, “CJ-10 (DF-10/KD-20),” Jane’s Strategic Weapons Systems, accessed October 17, 2016 https://janes.ihs.com/Janes/Display/1748687; and CIA World Factbook, “Political Southeast Asia,” available at https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/graphics/ref_maps/political/pdf/southeast_asia.pdf.

[24] Hendrix, “Retreat from Range: The Rise and Fall of Carrier Aviation,” 3; Jan Van Tol, et al “AirSea Battle: A Point-of-Departure Operational Concept,” 19.

[25] Andrew S. Erickson, Connor M. Kennedy, “Beware of China’s “Little Blue Men” in the South China Sea,” The National Interest, September 15, 2015, http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/beware-chinas-little-blue-men-the-south-china-sea-13846.

[26] The Chinese maritime militia has been involved in numerous international maritime skirmishes including the 1974 conflict in the Parcel Islands, the harassment and sabotage of U.S. survey ships in 2002 and 2009 and the seizing of Scarborough Shoal in 2012. See Andrew S. Erickson and Connor M. Kennedy, “Countering China’s Third Sea Force: Unmask Maritime Militia before They’re Used Again,” The National Interest, July 6, 2016, http://nationalinterest.org/feature/countering-chinas-third-sea-force-unmask-maritime-militia-16860?page=show.

[27] For further examination of China’s merchant marine and its potential to provide support to military operations, please see: Dennis J. Blasko, “China’s Merchant Marine,” prepared for the “China as ‘Maritime Power’ Conference” at the CNA Conference Facility, July 28-29, 2015, accessed at https://www.cna.org/cna_files/pdf/China-Merchant-Marine.pdf.

[28] Bryan Clark, personal correspondence through email, October 15, 2016.

[29] Lyle Goldstein, “The South China Sea Showdown: 5 Dangerous Myths,” The National Interest, Sept. 29, 2015, http://nationalinterest.org/feature/the-south-china-sea-showdown-5-dangerous-myths-13970; Zhang Hongzhou, “China’s Fishing Industry: Current Status, Government Policies, and Future Prospects,” prepared for the “China as ‘Maritime Power’ Conference” at the CNA Conference Facility, July 28-29, 2015, https://www.cna.org/cna_files/pdf/China-Fishing-Industry.pdf.

[30] Special thanks to Dr. Joel Wuthnow, at NDU’S Center for the Study of Chinese Military Affairs for shedding light on China’s plans to improve “jointness” between its branches of the military; see also “China’s Military Strategy,” The State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China, Beijing, May 2015, http://eng.mod.gov.cn/Database/WhitePapers/index.htm; for more information on the PLA’s planned reforms, see: Phillip C. Saunders and Joel Wuthnow, “China’s Goldwater-Nichols? Assessing PLA Organizational Reforms,” Strategic Forum (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, April 2016), accessed at http://inss.ndu.edu/Portals/68/Documents/stratforum/SF-294.pdf.

By Andrew J. Bowen*

The appointment of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn is a clear sign that the president-elect is willing to break with the largely bipartisan internationalist foreign policy consensus that has underwritten American foreign policy since the end of World War II.

President-elect Donald Trump fundamentally is a departure from any of his Republican predecessors in both his outlook and tone. He’s neither the pure globally orientated real politick Richard Nixon nor the conservative internationalist Ronald Reagan.

Trump is Trump and his views of global affairs have been shaped by his own vantage point and experiences. Trump may meet with Kissinger, but it by no means is a sign that Washington is going back to the days of George H.W. Bush and James Baker.

A break from convention

Trump more so than any of his predecessors is driven by domestic priorities and isn’t enamored or caught up in the global winds and norms that still stirred and moved President Obama. While Obama was swept up in reacting to events such as the “Arab Spring,” a President Trump is more likely to put the breaks on foreign adventures abroad.

It would not be surprising if he appoints a strong secretary of state such as former Gov. Mitt Romney to lead the US’ global engagement.

Trump is not a hawk by nature but when it comes to protecting the homeland and ensuring America’s clear national interests abroad, a President Trump will be more forward leaning and pro-active than President Obama. His appointment of Lt. Gen. Flynn is an indication that as president his over-riding national security priorities are: Combatting terrorism, strengthening the US’ national security capabilities both at home and abroad, and ensuring the US has dependable partners abroad. This position arguably underwrites the US’ economic position.

A new team

While Flynn by no means fits the traditional mold of Henry Kissinger, his unconventional thinking fits well with the President-elect’s instincts and goals.

He’s not a conventional thinker and less likely to be constrained by the bureaucratic malaise and conventional thinking in Washington. This style may serve him well as a national security adviser focused less on being an inter-agency referee and micromanager but as a counsel to the president focused on accomplishing President-elect Trump’s key priorities.

Complemented by a strong cabinet including Attorney General Jeff Sessions and a strong secretary of state and defense, Flynn could excel in focusing on pro-actively addressing the critical challenges facing the President and managing critical partnerships while avoiding the pitfalls of President Obama and his National Security Adviser Susan Rice whose National Security Council is distinguished more for micro-management than sound strategic planning.

It’s not a deep surprise that Obama’s National Security Council produced stale and unconventional thinking that missed the rise of Daesh. An effective president has an able cabinet he can trust to delegate to.

Tested in the first 100 days

President-elect Trump’s approach will without a doubt be tested. Few US presidents are able to completely isolate themselves from the torrential winds of global events. President Trump could be tested by a number of challenges and surprises from Iran to China.

Will President Putin actually work with President Trump in the way he’s publicly envisioned it? What happens if that relationship encounters speed bumps?

Trump’s own instincts and his appointments point in the direction of his administration being able to manage these strong headwinds and not get swept up into a series of interventions and confrontations. But, equally, his team could get drawn into some events more than others.

Syria will be a particularly difficult scenario. One cannot underestimate how difficult it will be to actually reach a deal with Russia and President Assad, if one is perused. Tehran, among many others, could easily spoil such a deal.

Equally so, Washington’s own national security interests need to be preserved and a settlement in the short-term could end up backfiring in the long-term for the US if not negotiated adeptly.

Equally so, Washington giving President Assad a completely free pass could also be a pitfall and the new administration should push for a settlement that addresses governance reform.

*Andrew J. Bowen, Ph.D. is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

So the bad news, on Guantánamo, torture, Islamophobia and war, is that, as Charlie Savage explained in the New York Times this week, “As a presidential candidate, Donald J. Trump vowed to refill the cells of the Guantánamo Bay prison and said American terrorism suspects should be sent there for military prosecution. He called for targeting mosques for surveillance, escalating airstrikes aimed at terrorists and taking out their civilian family members, and bringing back waterboarding and a ‘hell of a lot worse’ — not only because ‘torture works,’ but because even ‘if it doesn’t work, they deserve it anyway.’”

As Savage also noted, “It is hard to know how much of this stark vision for throwing off constraints on the exercise of national security power was merely tough campaign talk,” but it is a disturbing position for Americans — and the rest of the world — to be in, particularly with respect to the noticeable differences between Trump and Barack Obama.

The outgoing president has some significant failures against his name, which will be discussed in detail below, but America’s first black president did not, of course, appoint a white supremacist to be his chief strategist and Senior Counselor, as Trump has done with Steve Bannon, the executive chairman of Breitbart News, an alarming far-right US website. Nor did he call for a “total and complete shutdown” of America’s borders to Muslims, as Trump did last December, and nor did he suggest that there should be a registry of all Muslims, as Trump did last November.

The video evidence of Trump calling for the registry of Muslims, by the way, completely undermines his team’s claims in recent days that the president-elect “never advocated” for a registry tracking individuals based on their religion. That claim was made in response to a statement by Kansas secretary of state Kris Kobach, “reportedly a key member of Trump’s transition team, that the president-elect’s advisers are already considering the Muslim registry,” as the Guardian described it.

On Guantánamo and torture, the situation is rather more complicated for Trump.

It was back in February, after President Obama reiterated his desire to close Guantánamo during a speech at the White House, which coincided with the delivery to Congress of a plan for closing the prison that had been prepared by the Pentagon, that Trump first made alarming threats about how his administration, far from closing Guantánamo, would “load it up with some bad dudes.”

Obama, in contrast, stated, “I’m absolutely committed to closing the detention facility at Guantánamo,” and ran through a list of compelling reasons why Guantánamo must be closed — a list he has delivered eloquently throughout his presidency. He said:

For many years, it’s been clear that the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay does not advance our national security — it undermines it. This is not just my opinion. This is the opinion of experts, this is the opinion of many in our military. It’s counterproductive to our fight against terrorists, because they use it as propaganda in their efforts to recruit. It drains military resources, with nearly $450 million spent last year alone to keep it running, and more than $200 million in additional costs needed to keep it open going forward for less than 100 detainees. Guantánamo harms our partnerships with allies and other countries whose cooperation we need against terrorism. When I talk to other world leaders, they bring up the fact that Guantánamo is not resolved.

Moreover, keeping this facility open is contrary to our values. It undermines our standing in the world. It is viewed as a stain on our broader record of upholding the highest standards of rule of law. As Americans, we pride ourselves on being a beacon to other nations, a model of the rule of law. But 15 years after 9/11 — 15 years after the worst terrorist attack in American history —we’re still having to defend the existence of a facility and a process where not a single verdict has been reached in those attacks — not a single one.

Nevertheless, as Obama also noted, “Congress has repeatedly imposed restrictions aimed at preventing us from closing this facility” in the form of legislation that has indeed made it difficult for the president to fulfill his promise — although, at Close Guantánamo we have also repeatedly reminded readers that he was able to bypass Congressional obstacles if he wished, but that he unwilling to spend political capital doing so.

“We’re gonna load it up with some bad dudes”

After Obama’s eloquent presentation in the White House, Donald Trump’s response, at a campaign rally in Sparks, Nevada, was to say, “This morning, I watched President Obama talking about Gitmo, right, Guantánamo Bay, which by the way, which by the way, we are keeping open. Which we are keeping open … and we’re gonna load it up with some bad dudes, believe me, we’re gonna load it up.”

However, as Ben Wittes, editor-in-chief of the national security blog Lawfare, and not a man known for his liberal opinions, told NPR, “You have to ask the question, [load it up] with whom?” As NPR described it, “Because the U.S. is not fighting ground wars and taking prisoners like it once did, Wittes wonders just how Trump expects to load up Guantánamo with ‘bad dudes.’”

Wittes stated, “Trump’s stated military strategy and ambition are so hard to figure out that it’s not at all clear to me what the captive population that would be subject to being moved to Guantánamo [is], who they would be or where they would come from.”

As Carol Rosenberg of the Miami Herald noted in an article published soon after Trump’s victory, entitled, “What will President Trump do with Guantánamo?”, Cully Stimson, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs under George W. Bush, who also runs the National Security Program at the Heritage Foundation and is a captain in the Navy Reserve Judge Advocate Corps, pointed out that the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, which was described by the Miami Herald as “essentially a declaration of war on Osama bin Laden and his Taliban hosts,” is the key piece of legislation that “allows the Pentagon to hold al-Qaida and its affiliates as war prisoners at Guantánamo.” Stimson explained how that’s “a narrow class of individuals,” and “he urged a ‘prudent, multi-step analysis’ on whether to pursue wider authority to put Islamic State captives there.”

In addition, the Center for Constitutional Rights’ legal director Baher Azmy said that any effort to try to send an Islamic State prisoner to Guantánamo would be challenged in federal court. “Legally, there is no reasonable way an ISIS detention could be justified under the law that justifies the current detentions. That turns on the AUMF, a connection to 9/11,” Azmy said, also noting, as the Miami Herald described it, that, “based on candidate Trump’s campaign rhetoric, [CCR] might find itself re-litigating already presumed settled questions.”

Azmy also stated that the first order of business, if Trump were to be insistent on sending any new prisoner to Guantánamo, “would be getting access to any new Guantánamo captive, making sure he is not kept incommunicado like the Bush administration did in the first years before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Guantánamo captives do get to challenge their detention in federal courts.”

Sending Americans to Guantánamo?

In August, in an interview with the Miami Herald, when asked if US citizens accused of terrorism should be tried in military commissions at Guantánamo, Trump approved such a policy. “I know that they” — an unspecified “they” — “want to try them in our regular court systems, and I don’t like that at all,” Trump said, adding, “I don’t like that at all. I would say they could be tried there, that’ll be fine.” Writing about Trump’s words this week, NPR noted that, “Under current law, American citizens cannot, in fact, be held in Guantánamo, much less tried there.”

In the Miami Herald, Carol Rosenberg noted that Cully Stimson was also far from enthusiastic about this proposal, encouraging the president-elect’s team to undertake “a very vigorous discussion by the lawyers in the know about whether that would be prudent and how that will affect the other detainees at Gitmo who are not U.S. citizens.”

Again, therefore, it’s worth considering that, if he did decide to pursue this plan, Trump would face serious obstacles from Democrats, lawyers, NGOs and activists, as well as international criticism.

On military commissions in general, however, it is unlikely that anything will change, and the broken system will almost certainly grind on slowly towards as yet unseeable trial dates for the seven men currently facing seemingly interminable pre-trial hearings. Trump can do little about this, although Cully Stimson told the Miami Herald said he had seen nothing “from the candidate Trump that he’s skeptical of commissions; I’m not sure he or his team would have an interest in pausing commissions.”

While not created by Obama, the commissions, which were first dragged out of the history books by Dick Cheney in November 2001, were, ill-advisedly, revived by Obama in his first year in office, as part of what Charlie Savage described as his deliberations about “whether to keep indefinite wartime detentions without trial and to continue using military commission prosecutions — if not at the Guantánamo prison, which he had resolved to close, then at a replacement wartime prison.” As Savage explained, “Told that several dozen detainees could not be tried for any crime but would be particularly risky to release, and that a handful might be prosecutable only under the looser rules governing evidence in a military commission, Mr. Obama decided that the responsible policy was to keep both the tribunals and the indefinite detentions available.”

This lamentable decision meant that, although Attorney General Eric Holder announced in November 2009 that the five men accused of the 9/11 attacks would be tried in federal court in New York, when pressure was exerted on Obama not to pursue a federal court trial, a ready-made but unwanted back-up plan was available instead — and this, of course, is what happened. When numerous high-profile critics made an unholy fuss, Obama dropped the federal court option and, in April 2011, the men were returned to the military commission system, which, throughout Obama’s presidency, has singularly failed to deliver justice to the relatives of those who lost their lives on September 11, 2001.

Keeping Guantánamo open 

President Obama might still be able to close Guantánamo before he leaves office, although it seems ever more unlikely. Here at Close Guantánamo, we will continue to do all we can to encourage him, and we ask you, if you care about the closure of Guantánamo, to join us in the latest stage of the Countdown to Close Guantánamo that we launched in January, counting down how many days are left before President Obama leaves office. Last week we launched a new video for the campaign, and for November 30, when Obama will have just 50 days left to close the prison, we’re asking supporters to print off a poster, take a photo with it and send it to us — with a message for President Obama, and even president-elect Donald Trump — if you want.

This week, in “Never mind closing Guantánamo, Trump might make it bigger,” Ben Fox and Deb Riechmann reported for the Associated Press that, at this point, “[i]t would take a bold and unlikely act of defiance, one that would face legal and political challenges, by Obama to shutter the prison before leaving office.” As they noted, Obama “can’t close the detention center because Congress has blocked it, most crucially with a ban on transferring men to facilities in the United States,” and, on Monday, at a news conference, President Obama himself said, “It is true that I have not been able to close the darn thing because of the congressional restrictions that have been placed on us.”

For NPR, Rosa Brooks, a Georgetown University constitutional law professor and former Pentagon official, suggested Obama could still close Guantánamo without too much effort. “If President Obama wanted to close Guantánamo tomorrow, he could do it,” she said, explaining that he “should simply ignore the ban Congress has imposed on sending any Guantánamo detainees to the U.S. for detention or trial,” as NPR described it. In Brooks’ words, “If I were President Obama and I wanted to close Guantánamo, I would say, I regard this particular limitation as an unconstitutional infringement on my inherent powers as commander in chief. You know, thank you for your input, Congress, but I’m doin’ it.”

That’s a bold take, but the reality, we suspect, is that any effort to close Guantánamo by executive order would face profound opposition in whichever state he chose to send prisoners to, in order to finally close the prison, and, as the Associated Press suggested in its recent article, Sen. Pat Roberts, a Republican who supports keeping Guantánamo open, “said last week that the Defense Department told him months ago that ‘the Obama administration had neither the time nor the money to close Gitmo and move detainees to Fort Leavenworth,’ in Roberts’ home state of Kansas,” the site of the Department of Defense’s only maximum security prison, and the most likely location to which prisoners would be moved.

In his speech on Monday, President Obama further acknowledged the difficulties of unilaterally closing Guantánamo — in terms of his administration’s perceptions of the remaining prisoners, and the obstacles raised by Congress:

There is a group of very dangerous people that we have strong evidence of having been guilty of committing terrorist acts against the United States. But because of the nature of the evidence, in some cases, that evidence being compromised, it’s very difficult to put them before a typical Article III court. And that group has always been the biggest challenge for us. My strong belief and preference is that we would be much better off closing Gitmo, moving them to a different facility that was clearly governed by U.S. jurisdiction. We’d do it a lot cheaper and just as safely.

Congress disagrees with me, and I gather that the President-elect does, as well. We will continue to explore options for doing that. But keep in mind that it’s not just a matter of what I’m willing to do. One of the things you discover about being President is that there are all these rules and norms and laws, and you got to pay attention to them. And the people who work for you are also subject to those rules and norms. And that’s a piece of advice that I gave to the incoming President.

However, despite these caveats, we fully expect President Obama to do all he can to release the 20 men, out of the 60 remaining, who have been approved for release — seven by 2009’s Guantánamo Review Task Force (still held seven years later, disturbingly), and 13 others approved for release in recent years by Periodic Review Boards. An administration official, speaking anonymously, said that “officials expect to complete a ‘substantial number’ of those transfers before Obama leaves office on Jan. 20.”

As for Donald Trump’s intentions, the Miami Herald noted that whether or not he rescinds Obama’s executive order of January 22, 2009 ordering the closure of Guantánamo simply “depends on whether he makes that a priority.”

John Hudak of the Brookings Institution, who, as the Miami Herald noted, has studied executive orders, said that it would simply be “a matter of someone senior in the administration deciding this is a Day One action item for Trump’s desk in the Oval Office soon after he’s sworn in,” adding that it “could be as simple … as drafting a document ‘saying that Guantánamo Bay will remain open and will continue operations there.’” Hudak added, “It could also be as simple as a directive to the Department of Defense: ‘Don’t close it.’”

In the Miami Herald, Carol Rosenberg also noted that those paying close attention to Guantánamo were “looking for what the White House tells the Pentagon to do about the Periodic Review Board[s] that Obama created with the mandate of reviewing the files of uncleared, uncharged captives.” Rosenberg added that “International Red Cross leadership had been advocating for this for years, especially at the height of a crippling hunger strike [in 2013], to provide the captives not just hope but a Geneva Convention-style format for reviewing their status.”

Torture

On torture, as Charlie Savage reported for the New York Times, repudiating torture was one of “two areas where Mr. Obama broke most cleanly with Bush-era practices” — the other being “the indefinite military detention of Americans and other terrorism suspects arrested on domestic soil.” As Savage noted, “Mr. Obama issued an executive order requiring interrogators to use only techniques approved in the Army Field Manual, and he later signed a bill codifying that rule into statute” — although as some commentators, including the psychologist Jeffrey Kaye, have noted, the Army Field Manual contains an appendix, Appendix M, which “includes numerous abusive techniques, including use of solitary confinement, sleep deprivation and sensory deprivation,” that can be authorized by military commanders.

In addition, as Charlie Savage noted in his wide-ranging analysis of President Obama’s counter-terrorism policies, torture was one of several areas in which his administration “ruled out criminal investigations into Bush-era officials … under a sweeping theory that the commander in chief could not be bound by anti-torture laws.”

War

Charlie Savage’s analysis of President Obama’s counter-terrorism policies took as its starting point what he described as Obama’s “have-it-both-ways approach to curbing what he saw as overreaching in the war on terrorism.”

“Over and over,” as Savage described it, “Mr. Obama has imposed limits on his use of such powers but has not closed the door on them — a flexible approach premised on the idea that he and his successors could be trusted to use them prudently.” However, with Donald Trump the unexpected winner in last week’s Presidential Election, he “can now sweep away those limits and open the throttle on policies that Mr. Obama endorsed as lawful and legitimate for sparing use.”

Two areas in which Trump might do this were identified by Savage as “the use of indefinite detention and military tribunals for terrorism suspects” and “targeted killings in drone strikes,” a policy that, it might be said, was President Obama’s main response to the face that Bush’s program of rendition, torture and indefinite detention has been such a disaster.

As Savage explained, “After [Obama’s] use of drones to kill terrorism suspects away from war zones led to mounting concerns over civilian casualties and other matters, he issued a ‘presidential policy guidance’ in May 2013 that set stricter limits. They included a requirement that the target pose a threat to Americans — not just to American interests — and that there would be near certainty of no bystander deaths,” something that it ought to have been obvious was extremely difficult to guarantee, but that, presumably, allowed President Obama to sleep easier at night.

In addition, Savage noted that the Obama administration “also successfully fought in court to establish that judges would not review the legality of such killing operations, even if an American citizen was the target,” as happened, of course, in the contentious case of Anwar al-Awlaki, a skilful anti-US publicist who was regarded as a military threat, and, even more contentiously, in the case of his 16-year old son Abdulrahman, who seems to have been killed because of who his father was and how his father’s death might have affected him rather than because of anything he had done — a disgraceful situation that, I believe, shows how mission creep has dangerously affected the entire drone-killing program.

Charlie Savage also made a point of noting that Donald Trump, “who has said he would ‘bomb the hell out of ISIS,’ beyond what Mr. Obama is doing, and go after civilian relatives of terrorists, prevailing over any military commanders who balked — could scrap the internal limits [on drone strikes] while invoking those precedents to shield his acts from judicial review,” because of the precedents established under Obama.

As Savage also noted, Obama’s decisions on which Bush-era practices to defend in court not only potentially affect the use of torture and drone killings, but also other policy areas — “the detention of Americans and other people arrested on domestic soil as ‘enemy combatants,’” for example, as in the case of Jose Padilla, a US citizen who had been tortured and held incommunicado as an “enemy combatant” on the US mainland. As Savage pointed out, the Obama administration “successfully argued that courts should dismiss the litigation without ruling on whether his treatment had been lawful, preventing any clear repudiation of the Bush-era legal theory.”

As Savage explained, because the Obama administration “fought in court to prevent any ruling that the defunct practices had been illegal,” it remains possible that “[t]he absence of a definitive repudiation could make it easier for Trump administration lawyers to revive the policies by invoking the same sweeping theories of executive power that were the basis for them in the Bush years.”

Conclusion

On Obama’s legacy, opinions are divided. Charlie Savage spoke to Bruce Ackerman, a Yale University law professor who he described as “helping with a lawsuit alleging that Mr. Obama is waging an illegal war against the Islamic State because Congress never specifically authorized it,” who suggested that “Mr. Obama had contributed to the growth of executive powers that Mr. Trump would inherit,” including “‘the fundamental institutional legacy’ of relying on executive branch lawyers to produce creative legal opinions clearing the way for preferred policies.”

In contrast, Geoffrey R. Stone, a University of Chicago law professor described as “a friend and adviser to Mr. Obama,” defended the president’s approach. He pointed out that, after 2010, “when Republicans took over the House, internal executive branch restraints were the only option because Congress was not going to enact legislation limiting national security powers.” As Savage described it, “He also said that even if Mr. Obama had gotten rid of indefinite detention or military tribunals, Mr. Trump could have brought them back.”

In his own words, Professor Stone said, “Short of legislation that restricts things, there is not much a president could do in these matters to restrain a successor.”

Another commentator was Gregory B. Craig, who was the White House counsel in 2009, and who, more than most, pushed to fulfill the president’s plans to close Guantánamo. Craig said that, in 2009, President Obama “was not thinking about 10 years out, but about 10 days out,” and, as Charlie Savage described it, “he especially did not want to send signals to Republicans that he was a zealot or out for revenge.” Instead, he “was thinking about working with Republicans and developing postpartisan relations on Guantánamo-related national security issues, not about what was going to happen a decade later.”

Anthony D. Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, which, like Close Guantánamo, has been critical of the Obama administration’s slow approach to closing Guantánamo, said that “it was now clear that Mr. Obama had ‘missed an opportunity’ to fundamentally reject the sort of policies that the Bush administration put in place after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.”

As he put it, “Obama’s failure to rein in George Bush’s national security policies hands Donald Trump a fully loaded weapon. The president’s failure to understand that these powers could not be entrusted in the hands of any president, not even his, have now put us in a position where they are in the hands of Donald Trump.”

And that, of course, should worry us all.

I wrote the above article (as “Donald Trump and Guantánamo: What Do We Need to Know?) for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, with the US attorney Tom Wilner. Please join us — just an email address is required to be counted amongst those opposed to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, and to receive updates of our activities by email.

By Ashok Malik

Memo to all attorneys submitting legal briefs to the U.S. Supreme Court: Be subtle and your chances of winning go up significantly.

A new study co-authored by a Michigan State University political scientist finds briefs written with emotional language are much less likely to win the justices’ votes.

Is your client an “elderly widow seeking to retain her lifelong home”? Stick with that. Taking it further by claiming she is an “innocent victim of a heartless system that lacks compassion” is simply too much, said Ryan C. Black, MSU associate professor of political science and a Supreme Court expert.

“Our findings show that Supreme Court justices are less likely to side with briefs that use flashy adjectives and emotionally charged language,” Black said. “Justices are trained in the traditional ‘rule of law’ approach that values objective, logical arguments.”

The legal brief is a lawyer’s main vehicle to persuade Supreme Court justices. The researchers used special software to determine how language was used in the legal briefs from 1,677 cases decided in the Supreme Court from 1984 to 2007. The software program flagged emotionally charged words such as “outrageous,” “apprehensive,” “wonderful” and “glorious.”

The results were definitive. For petitioners, or those asking the court to review a case, using minimal emotional language was linked to a 29 percent increase in capturing a justice’s vote. For respondents, or the party being sued, using minimal emotional language was tied to a 100 percent increase in winning a justice’s vote.

The findings held even after taking into account other features associated with success, including case quality, attorney quality, oral arguments and the justices’ ideological preferences.

Using emotional language decreases an attorney’s credibility in the eyes of the justices, the study argues. Using objective, measured language presents a more trustworthy and credible message to the court.

Emotional language may have an even bigger impact on judges in lower state and federal courts, the study says, as judges in those courts tend to rely more heavily on briefs filed by the parties than do U.S. Supreme Court justices.

“Of course, we do not argue that attorneys should avoid all emotional language. That would likely result in a boring brief no one would read,” the study says. “Rather, our argument is that attorneys should not make overt emotional appeals. The brief should be written in an objective tone with no flashy displays of adjectives intended to incite the court or enrage the opponent.”

Due to the burning of biomass and fossil fuels and, above all, due to agriculture, excessive quantities of reactive nitrogen are still being released into the atmosphere, soil and water — with negative effects on biodiversity, the climate and human health.

However, a differentiated analysis of nitrogen input pathways from the different sources reveals significant differences. While nitrogen inputs into soils — primarily due to agriculture — have elevated nitrate concentrations in the groundwater of many regions to values above the threshold of 50 mg per litre, atmospheric pollution is decreasing in large parts of Europe and North America due to emission-reducing measures. This means that less nitrogen is released into soils and water via atmospheric depositions.

Long-term measurements over the past 20 years clearly indicate that this is the case in Germany: On average 35 mg less atmospheric nitrogen was released into the soils per square metre per year. According to studies conducted by UFZ scientists, this leads to 0.08 mg less nitrate per litre per year entering streams and drinking water reservoirs.

“It does not sound like much, but in a number of natural areas not or hardly impacted by industry and agriculture, pre-industrial conditions will set in over time,” said UFZ hydrogeologist Dr. Andreas Musolff. “At less than 6 mg of nitrate per litre of water in some cases, conditions are far from the problematic nitrate concentrations measured in regions heavily impacted by industry or agriculture.”

That this positive development can also have negative implications became apparent when scientists started studying the causes of a brown coloration of water in reservoirs increasingly observable in Germany, northern Europe and North America. This brown coloration is especially problematic for drinking water treatment.

In reviewing various hypotheses, they noted that the brown coloration of the water was strongly correlated with the decreasing concentrations of nitrate in the riparian soils surrounding the tributary streams of the reservoirs. This is due to the fact that the presence of nitrate in the riparian wetlands where most of the stream flow is generated ensures that carbon, phosphate and various metals remain bound to oxidised iron. Lower nitrate levels allow a chemical reduction of iron compounds and thus the mobilisation of previously adsorbed substances. Thus, compounds previously bound to soil particles become mobile and are released into the streams with the rainwater.

In the case of carbon this means that the concentration of dissolved organic carbon increases and is visible as the brownish color of the water. In just under 40 percent of the 110 tributaries of drinking water reservoirs that were studied, the scientists found significantly increased DOC concentrations with an average of 0.12 mg more DOC per liter per year. The most significant increase was found in natural, forested, where nitrate concentrations in the water were less than 6 mg per liter.

In addition to DOC, phosphate concentrations are also increasing significantly in over 30 per cent of the tributaries. The calculated average 7 μg per litre per year tends to favor algae growth and is equally problematic for water quality in the long run. There is evidence that not only DOC and phosphate, but also adsorbed metals such as arsenic, vanadium, zinc and lead are increasingly becoming mobilized.

“We solve one problem by making the air cleaner, but in turn create a different problem in other areas,” said biologist Dr. Jörg Tittel, head of the project at the UFZ, explaining the unexpected effect. “None of the dissolved substances is toxic at this low concentration and the substances are also largely removed by water treatment. However, water treatment is becoming more expensive.”

Initial evidence confirming this hypothesis was provided by the evaluation of data collected for a small 1.7 km2 catchment in the Erzgebirge mountains near the Wilzsch, a tributary of the Zwickauer Mulde, which flows into the Carlsfeld reservoir. Thereafter scientists chose a much larger scale, focusing on 110 streams and their catchments entering a total of 36 drinking water reservoirs.

Despite a much greater diversity in terms of the size of the streams and their catchments, their topography, the amount of precipitation, land use and the chemical characteristics, the hypothesis could be confirmed based on this much larger data set as well: The observed increase in DOC is closely correlated with the decreasing amount of nitrate in the water.

In the meantime a discussion has begun as to how the results of this meta-analysis can be translated into practical measures to halt the increase in DOC, in partnership with the relevant authorities.

“The study helps to focus future research on the relevant processes and to plan appropriate field experiments that further improve the basis for decision-making in terms of concrete measures,” said Andreas Musolff.

By Tushar Ranjan Mohanty*

Three Shia students at Karachi University (KU) came under sectarian attack on November 11, 2016, when unidentified assailants opened fire on them in Block 4 of the Gulistan-e-Jauhar area in Gulshan Town, Karachi, the provincial capital of Sindh. One student, identified as Murtaza, died instantly while his colleagues Shahid and Ehsan were critically injured. Gulistan-e-Johar Police Station officials confirmed the sectarian nature of attack.

On November 4, 2016, three cadres of Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat (ASWJ), a front organization of the erstwhile Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP), were shot dead while returning from a rally organised by the outfit in the Shafiq Mor area of North Karachi. Elsewhere on the same day, two persons were shot dead near Fatima Bai Hospital in Patel Para area under the Jamshed Quarters Police Station in Jamshed Town. An unnamed ASWJ spokesman claimed that all the five victims were associated with their group. Further, a prayer leader, Shafiq Rehman (30), was shot dead in North Nazimabad. The victim was a Pesh Imam (prayer leader) of a mosque.

These sectarian killings came in the aftermath of the October 30 attack on a Shia woman’s mourning Majlis (gathering) in Nazimabad Town, in which five persons were killed when motorcycle borne unidentified assailants opened fire. Pakistani British national Naiyyar Mehdi Zaidi (60) from London and two of his brothers were shot dead, along with another man and a woman, while another six people sustained injuries. Senior Police official Tayyab Muqaddas Haider disclosed, “Two attackers on a motorbike opened indiscriminate fire on the participants coming for the gathering.” Al-Alami (international) group of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ) claimed responsibility for the attack.

In the wake of these sectarian killings, the Sindh Chief Minister Murad Ali Shah sought an explanation from the Deputy Inspector General (DIGs) of these areas on November 5 for their failure to stop these targeted attacks. Chief Minister Shah stated, “This [the killings] shows that there is lethargy and that’s why target killers are roaming free and escape after killing people… Why were police not patrolling these sensitive areas? This is very serious matter that the criminals killed people in an area and after changing their motorcycle carried out an attack at another place without any fear of the Police and other agencies. This is surprising and totally unacceptable.” Briefing the Chief Minister, Additional Inspector General of Police (AIG), Karachi, Mushtaq Maher noted, “They used the same pistol and only changed their motorcycle. I am further investigating the incidents and will submit a detailed report shortly.”

On November 6, in response to the Chief Minister’s reprimand, law enforcement agencies rounded up at least 40 suspects, including a prominent Shia scholar. Allama Mirza Yousuf Hussain, a Majlis Wahdat-e-Muslimeen (MWM) leader, was arrested late in the night of November 5 during a raid on his house at Jamia Masjid Noor-i-Iman in the Nazimabad of Karachi. Hussain, who is a prayer leader at Noor-e-Emaan Masjid, was taken into custody just a day after a former Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) senator Faisal Raza Abidi was arrested from his house in the New Rizvia Society of Nazimabad in the early hours of November 5, over his alleged involvement in sectarian killings. Weapons, including a G-3 rifle and sub-machine guns (SMGs), were also recovered during the half-an-hour long search, before Abidi was shifted to an undisclosed location for interrogation.

Taj Hanafi, secretary general of the proscribed Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat (ASWJ) and Allama Mirza Yusuf Husain, All Pakistan Shia Action Committee Chief, were detained in Karachi on November 6. According to the Rangers, Hanafi was arrested from Karachi’s Nagan Chowrangi area. An ASWJ spokesman also confirmed that Hanafi, who was to contest the November 24 National Assembly (NA) seat No-298 by-polls, had been arrested.

After a decline in scale and casualties, sectarian violence is once again surging in Sindh, particularly in Karachi, the provincial metropolis and economic hub of the country. Despite efforts by the state to bring peace to the city, sectarian killings continue, putting a question mark on Government claims. According to partial data compiled by the Institute for Conflict Management (ICM), Sindh has witnessed 17 sectarian attacks out of a total of 31 incidents throughout country in 2016; in 2015, Sindh accounted for 30 out of 53 such attacks. Of thee 17 attacks during the current year, only one incident was reported outside Karachi.

Sectarian violence in Karachi is just another chapter in Pakistan’s long history of violence against minorities. Sectarian strife has afflicted Pakistan virtually from the moment of its birth, but has escalated continuously since 1979, with the then President General Zia ul-Haq’s ‘Islamicisation’ of Pakistani politics. Shias resisted this process as the ‘Sunnification’ of Pakistan, since most of the laws and regulations introduced were based on Sunni Fiqh (Jurisprudence). Notably, in July 1980, 25,000 Shias gathered in Islamabad to protest the Islamicisation laws. But the more the Shias protested, the more were they targeted, and the strife widened. The violence worsened after September 11, 2001, and the expulsion of the Taliban from Afghanistan, eventually forcing then President Pervez Musharraf to ban some 104 terrorist and religio-extremist groups, including the LeJ and SSP, under growing international pressure.

Different sectarian terrorist outfits, including LeJ, LeJ-al-Alami, SSP and Sipah-e-Muhammad Pakistan (SMP), among others, are major players in engineering sectarian strife. The most prominent among these has been LeJ, which was formed in 1996, when it formally separated from SSP, to play a dominant role in bringing the culture of takfir (declaring others as being outside the pale of Islam) into the mainstream, along with physically eliminating sectarian ‘others’. LeJ aims to transform Pakistan into a Sunni state, primarily through violence. In response, Shia militant groups such as Sipah-e-Muhammad Pakistan (SMP) emerged, pursuing a strategy of tit-for-tat retaliation.

Sectarian violence routinely increases, especially in the month of Muhrram, the period of Shia mourning for the martyrs of the battle of Karbala, including the family of Imam Hussain, the grandson of the Prophet, in AD 680, at the hands of the Umayyad Caliphate. Unlike previous years, however, Muhrram passed relatively peacefully in 2016, unlike the previous year, when a suicide bomber targeted a Muharram procession near a park in the Lashari area of Jacobabad District, killing at least 22 persons, including eight children on October 23, 2015. Government had made robust plan for making 2016 Muharram month peaceful. Around 6,150 Police personnel were deployed for the main procession of 9th day of Muharram in Karachi. For the security of over 346 Imambargahs (Shia places of worship), 567 Majalis (gatherings) and 279 processions, more than 19,519 Police personnel were deployed.

Due to the implementation of the National Action Plan (NAP) and Operation Zarb-e-Azab (Sword of the Prophet), the financial and logistical support of various terrorist formations has suffered significant damage, resulting in a change in their strategy from large scale attacks to smaller hit and run strikes. Cadres of sectarian outfits have overwhelmingly hit soft targets, instead of attacking major processions and establishments.

The Sindh Government has launched a crackdown against 93 madrassas accused of fuelling sectarian violence following a recent uptick in sectarian killings in the metropolis. The madrassas have been described by officials as ‘nurseries of sectarian militants’. On November 3, the Sindh Government’s Apex Committee decided to launch a crackdown on drug dealers and criminals involved in street crime, besides compiling a list of people, particularly seminary students, who have been to Afghanistan, Iran and Syria in recent years. Earlier, on October 25, during a special meeting held at Chief Minister Murad Ali Shah’s House to review the law and order situation in the Province, 93 madrassas in Sindh were identified as having ‘solid links’ with terrorist or banned outfits, with intelligence agencies claiming they had credible information about the activities at these madaris. The Chief Minister directed the Police and Rangers to begin an operation against madaris harboring terrorists.

Under the NAP, geo-tagging of 7,724 madrassas has been completed by the Sindh Special Branch and IT Branch on September 5, 2016, helping security agencies define the exact location of these seminaries and to maintain a strict watch on them. Of this total 3,110 madaris are in Karachi, 1,290 in Hyderabad, 750 in Mirpurkhas, 1,536 in Sukkur and 1,037 in Larkana Division. Reports indicate that there are a total of 10,030 madrassas in Sindh, of which 2,309 have been sealed after different allegations against them, while 1,184 are yet to be registered. The Special Branch has written a letter to the relevant departments to take action against unregistered madrassas so that they are not used in any terror-related activities. Earlier on June 6, 2016, Sanaullah Abassi, AIG Dr. Sanaullah Abbasi Counter Terrorism Department (CTD) Sindh disclosed, further, “Since implementations of National Action Plan (NAP) in December 2014, the Sindh Police have shut down and sealed 167 unregistered seminaries.”

Pakistan’s two-faced strategy on Islamist terrorism and extremism was, however, exposed on November 4, when the purportedly ‘banned’ organized a huge rally in the heart of Islamabad, reducing the NAP and the Government’s ‘strategy’ against sectarian terrorism to ridicule. Pakistani duplicity on terrorism continues, and will yield it own harvest of blood in the foreseeable future.

*Tushar Ranjan Mohanty
Research Associate, Institute for Conflict Management

On Monday, French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve announced the arrests of six people for their alleged involvement in planning terror attacks, and said the detainees had not been known to the French intelligence services.

Cazeneuve further said the arrests, which were made overnight on Sunday, foiled “a terrorist act that had been envisaged for a long time,” without giving information on the target of the potential assault.

According to the premier, 43 people have been taken into custody in November alone as part of anti-terror operations following deadly Daesh (Islamic State) assaults in France over the past two years.

The news comes as Strasbourg has been on high alert over fears of attacks ahead of the opening of its Christmas market.

Local officials warned the market could be suspended or annulled if there were serious threats.

A state of emergency is still in place in France a year after attacks claimed by the Daesh group left at least 130 people dead in Paris.

In July, 86 people were killed when a truck rammed into a crowd in a southern resort in Nice. Daesh later claimed responsibility.

French intelligence services have warned recently that extremists might use new tactics by leaving explosive devices near sites that attract large crowds, especially those visited by foreign tourists.

They say the “new form of attack” could trigger huge casualties, while the perpetrator could escape unharmed.

Original source

By Deepak Kumar Nayak*

On October 31, 2016, Communist Party of India-Maoist (CPI-Maoist) cadres killed a farmer at Punjo Sona Toli under the Ghaghra Police Station area in Gumla District. Police recovered a pamphlet near the body, which was found half a kilometre away from the farmer’s residence. The pamphlet alleged he was an informer of the Jharkhand Jan Mukti Parishad (JJMP), a CPI-Maoist splinter group.

Earlier, on September 16, 2016, a 30-year-old youth, identified as Karma Oraon, a ward committee member, was reportedly killed by Maoists in the Vishunpur Block of Gumla District. The Maoists first dragged him to a kangaroo court [Jan (people’s) Adalat] at Kath Thokwa and then shot him dead.

On September 11, 2016, Ashish Yadav aka Ashish Da, a top CPI-Maoist leader who carried a bounty of INR 2.5 million, was killed in an encounter with Police and Central Paramilitary Forces at Borodih village under the Palkot Police Station area in the Gumla District. Three rifles, including one SLR (Self-Loading Rifle) and one American Springfield rifle, were recovered from the site of encounter. Yadav was a member of CPI-Maoist’s Bihar-Jharkhand Special Area Committee (BJSAC).

On May 31, 2016, a Police constable of the special branch was allegedly abducted from his house at Malam village in Gumla District and subsequently shot dead by CPI-Maoist cadres.

According to partial data compiled by the South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP), 14 fatalities, including 10 civilians, three Left Wing Extremists (LWEs) and one Policeman, have so far been registered in Gumla District in LWE/CPI-Maoist-linked violence since the beginning of 2016 (data till November 20). The total number of such killings across Jharkhand stands at 72 (29 civilians, 10 SF personnel and 33 LWEs/Maoists).

The first LWE-linked fatality in Gumla District, since the formation of CPI-Maoist on September 21, 2004, was recorded on April 20, 2005, when extremists of the Sangharsh Jan Mukti Morcha (SJMM) killed three labourers engaged in a road construction project near the Chingri Nawadih village under Bishunpur Police Station. SJMM is a splinter group of CPI-Maoist. Since 2005, Gumla has recorded 180 LWE/CPI-Maoist-linked fatalities, including 115 civilians, 20 SF personnel and 45 LWEs/Maoists.

Gumla District appears to experience a cyclical trend in annual fatalities. While, the highest number of fatalities, 26, in the District was recorded twice (2008 and 2013), there was not a single fatality registered in 2006 and 2007. The District recorded a relatively low five fatalities in 2015, but there has been a sudden surge in violence in the current year, with 14 dead, including 10 civilians, thus far.

With a total area of about 5,327 square kilometres, Gumla is covered by dense forests, hills and rivers. The forest cover in the District is 1,35,000 hectares out of a total of 521,000 hectares of land, i.e., about 27 per cent of the total area. The District is situated in the southwest portion of Jharkhand State, and was carved out of Ranchi District on May 18, 1983. Gumla shares its borders with Jashpur District to the west, Khunti and Ranchi Districts to the East, Latehar and Lohardaga District to the North, and Simdega District to the South. It also touches Chhattisgarh State to the west. The District’s geographical proximity with other Maoist affected areas of the Jharkhand and neighbouring Chhattisgarh makes it one of the Maoists’ preferred shelters in the region. Crucially, Chhattisgarh has 16 LWE-affected Districts out of its total of 27 Districts. Currently, Jharkhand has 21 LWE-affected Districts out of its total of 24 Districts. Gumla also finds place among the 35 worst LWE-affected Districts spread across seven States in the country.

A joint survey conducted by the US-India Policy Institute and the New Delhi based Centre for Research and Debates in Development Policy (CRDDP) found that, among 599 Districts across India (under purview of the survey) Gumla District was ranked 479th, i.e., among the most backward. The report of the survey, released on January 29, 2015, took composite development — measured in terms of economic development and the indices of health, education and material well-being – into consideration.

The topography as well as extreme backwardness of the Gumla has helped LWEs further their agenda in the District. Gumla alone accounts for 34.48 per cent of the total civilian fatalities recorded in the State in 2016, thus far. Moreover, the worst incident in terms of number of civilians killed in a single incident in the State in 2016 was reported from Gumla District. On March 17, 2016, at least four persons working on a road construction site were killed, allegedly by People’s Liberation Front of India (PLFI) cadres, in a village under Basia Police Station limits of Gumla District. PLFI is a splinter group of the CPI-Maoist.

Reports indicate that the Maoists in the Gumla have issued a diktat to the people to send “at least one child from each family for induction”. As the people refuse to obey the diktat, the Maoists are reportedly holding ‘public lotteries’ to draft children into the force. In their ‘defence’ they argue that this “unprejudiced process” was adopted as parents weren’t ready to “gift” their children to them. However, Gumla, Superintendent of Police (SP), Bhimsen Tuti, observed, “The Maoists have certainly mounted pressure on villagers to give away their children, but we have no information about them taking away children through lottery.”

According to a media report on May 24, 2016, CPI-Maoist cadres had set ablaze 35 vehicles involved in construction work in Jharkhand between January 19 and May 24, 2016, especially in Gumla. An unnamed Police officer involved in anti-Maoist operations claimed, “Maoists’ main source of earning is extortion and levy from the development and construction work. In the past, police cracked down on many companies involved in road construction that were giving levy to Maoists. This dented Maoists source of earning in a big way. The denial of levy led them to torch vehicles.”

The Maoists have also called for bandhs (general shutdown strikes) in the District on four occasions in 2016. In a recent bandh call on September 29, 2016, CPI-Maoist spokesperson for the Bihar-Jharkhand Regional Committee, Gopalji, announced a State-wide a 24-hour bandh in protest against the killing of top Maoist leader Ashish da in Gumla District on September 11, 2016.

Of the six Districts with which Gumla shares a border, five are LWE-affected. On August 6, 2016, State Director General of Police (DGP), D.K. Pandey, suggested that co-ordination among the LWE-affected Districts of Gumla, Palamau, Latehar, Garwah, Lohardaga in the State was necessary, as LWE-activities were recorded across these Districts, which needed to be ‘crushed with strong action’, adding, “The State Police will provide adequate security, if demanded by private or public sector engaged in implementing the flagship development schemes of the Government,”

Though there is no reliable data on the strength of forces deployed in Gumla in the open media, there are approximately 40 Battalions of Central Armed Police Force (CAPF), including 22 Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) battalions, 10 Jharkhand Armed Police (JAP) battalions and eight Indian Reserve Battalion (IRB) battalions presently deployed across Jharkhand. The Police-population ratio, i.e., policemen per hundred thousand population, stands at 172.40, significantly above the national average of 139.8, but still inadequate to sustain long term pressure on the Maoists in the State at large, and Gumla in particular where the Maoists have increased their activities in recent past.

*Deepak Kumar Nayak
Research Assistant, Institute for Conflict Management

Maryland Governor Larry Hogan recently signed an executive order forbidding Maryland public schools from beginning classes before Labor Day. Governor Hogan’s executive order benefits businesses in Maryland’s coastal areas that lose school-aged summer employees and business from Maryland families when schools start in August. However, as Governor Hogan’s critics have pointed out, some Maryland school districts, as well as Maryland schoolchildren, benefit from an earlier start to the school year.

Governor Hogan’s executive order is the latest example of how centralized government control of education leaves many students behind. A centrally planned education system can no more meet the unique needs of every child than a centrally planned economic system can meet the unique needs of every worker and consumer.

Centralizing education at the state or, worse, federal level inevitably leads to political conflicts over issues ranging from whether students should be allowed to pray on school grounds, to what should be the curriculum, to what food should be served in the cafeteria, to who should be allowed to use which bathroom.

The centralization and politicization of education is rooted in the idea that education is a right that must be provided by the government, instead of a good that individuals should obtain in the market. Separating school from state would empower parents to find an education system that meets the needs of their children instead of using the political process to force their idea of a good education on all children.

While many politicians praise local and parental control of education, the fact is both major parties embrace federal control of education. The two sides only differ on the details. Liberals who oppose the testing mandates of No Child Left Behind enthusiastically backed President Clinton’s national testing proposals. They also back the Obama administration’s expansion of federal interference in the classroom via Common Core.

Similarly, conservatives who (correctly) not just opposed Clinton’s initiatives but called for the abolition of the Department of Education enthusiastically supported No Child Left Behind. Even most conservatives who oppose Common Core, federal bathroom and cafeteria mandates, and other federal education policies, support reforming, instead of eliminating, the Department of Education.

Politicians will not voluntarily relinquish control over education to parents. Therefore, parents and other concerned citizens should take a page from the UK and work to “Ed-Exit” government-controlled education. Parents and other concerned citizens should pressure Congress to finally shut down the Department of Education and return the money to American families. They also must pressure state governments and local school boards to reject federal mandates, even if it means forgoing federal funding.

Parents should also explore education alternatives, such as private, charter, and religious schools, as well as homeschooling. Homeschooling is the ultimate form of Ed-Exit. Homeschooling parents have the freedom to shape every aspect of education — from the curriculum to the length of the school day to what their children have for lunch to who can and cannot use the bathroom — to fit their child’s unique needs.

Parents interested in providing their children with a quality education emphasizing the ideas of liberty should try out my homeschooling curriculum. The curriculum provides students with a well-rounded education that includes courses in personal finance and public speaking. The government and history sections of the curriculum emphasize Austrian economics, libertarian political theory, and the history of liberty. However, unlike government schools, my curriculum never puts ideological indoctrination ahead of education.

Parents interested in Ed-Exiting from government-run schools can learn more about my curriculum at ronpaulcurriculum.com.

This article was published by RonPaul Institute.

Much was made when Barack Obama made his historic run for the White House of the fact that in the course of his relatively young life he had been a “community organizer” and that in addition to having a law degree, he had actually taught Constitutional law. Just nine days after his inauguration as the nation’s first black president, he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, which he was awarded that October,. Norwegian Nobel Committee Chairman Thorbjorn Jagland, while insisting that the prize had not been awarded “for what may happen in the future,” did admit the award left the committee fearing”being labeled naïve for accepting a young politician’s promises at face value.”

As it turns out, all of these promising signs of progressive integrity and principle, based upon the thinnest of evidence and experience, have turned out to have been false.

Obama proved to be a disaster as an organizer president, except when it came to organizing support for his initial election win. He failed, even with majority control of both houses of Congress, to even try to rally his supporters to fight for real progressive change during the critical months after he had taken office, quickly abandoning workers whom he promised to provide with a more union-friendly National Labor Relations Act, for example. Premature Peace Prize in hand, he failed to end the nation’s wars, and instead began new ones, leaving this country mired in several conflicts — including Iraq and Afghanistan — even eight years later as he was leaving office, and adding a new disastrous precedent of presidential murder-by-drone.

Now, to add to the disappointing list of false hopes and promises, it turns out that Obama is no constitutional scholar either…or a man with even a scintilla of spine or principle.

The evidence: On a final trip to Europe, Obama, in an interview with the German news weekly Der Spiegel, asked whether he would consider pardoning NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, replied, “I can’t pardon somebody who hasn’t gone before a court and presented themselves, so that’s not something that I would comment on at this point.”

This facile answer is simply wrong. The founders deliberately gave presidents unlimited pardon powers, exempting only the right to pardon him or herself in the case of an impeachment — a logical exclusion. Otherwise there are no constraints on and no power to undo a presidential pardon. Nor does a pardon have to follow a person’s being convicted or even indicted.

President Gerald Ford’s pardon of his resigned predecessor Richard Nixon is a case in point. As Obama, the “Constitutional law” expert, surely knows, Nixon, though impeached in the House, was never tried by the Senate. He resigned rather than face that trial, which his advisors convinced him he would lose. President Bill Clinton also issued a pre-prosecution pardon to financier Marc Rich, who had fled the country rather than face federal racketeering charges.

In other words, President Obama could easily pardon Edward Snowden if he wanted to. Instead, he fell back on a convenient fiction, perhaps hoping that the German reporter and his editors would be ignorant enough about the US Constitution and about US history that his lie would slip by them.

After making the understated concession that “Mr. Snowden raised some legitimate concerns” about the National Security Agency’s secret mass electronic surveillance program,” Obama told the magazine he had done “something that did not follow the procedures and practices of our intelligence community.”

Knowing full well that his Justice Department has long been seeking to haul Snowden home to the US from his place of asylum in Russia to face prosecution under this country’s Espionage Act (or even to simply kill him, by some accounts), the president said, “At the point at which Mr. Snowden wants to present himself before the legal authorities and make his arguments or have his lawyers make his arguments, then I think those issues come into play.”

In other words, without offering any promise of a pardon even afterwards, he is saying Snowden would have to first offer himself up to the tender mercies of the American justice system — the same one that has time after time refused to allow indicted whistleblowers to make a defense based upon the public good — and then hope for a pardon after what would be an almost certain conviction given the legal roadblocks to any honest defense that are typically placed upon defendants in such cases by federal judges.

So much for this “Constitutional lawyer” president.

What all these failures by Obama to live up to his early billing, whether as an organizer, a Peace Laureate, or a constitutional scholar, have in common is that this president knows what’s right and what he should be doing. He just doesn’t do it. He actually did learn how to organize people, as he demonstrated in pulling together a huge coalition to win election in 2008. He knows what peace is and how to achieve it, but chose the path of war, over and over again, during his two terms of office. And in the interests of furthering secrecy in government, despite his early promise of a more open government made during his first campaign for the White House, he long ago decided instead to make his presidency the most aggressive prosecutor of whistleblowers in the history of that office. Snowden would simply become the big prize, should he decide to come home from Russia and place his trust in the American legal system.

It’s a sorry picture of bait-and-switch by a man who has played this country like a fiddle right to the end.

Donald Trump has nothing on his predecessor when it comes to saying one thing and doing another.

While the detente between Russia and US president-elect Donald Trump could not have come at a more tense time, the Kremlin appears to be accelerating its head-on collision course with NATO, and as a highly placed defense official said on Monday, Moscow will deploy S-400 surface-to-air missiles and nuclear-capable Iskander systems in the exclave of Kaliningrad in retaliation for NATO deployments, confirming previous media reports of Russian intentions to once again blanket central Europe with potential nuclear ICBM coverage.

While Russia has previously said it periodically sends Iskanders to Kaliningrad, until now it has always said these were routine drills. Moscow has not linked the moves explicitly with what it says is a NATO military build-up on Russia’s western borders.

However, perhaps sensing that the Kremlin has a supportive voice in the White House, and thus negotiating leverage, Putin has decided to tip his cards diplomatically and alert the world that Russia will escalate in what it sees a tit-for-tate game theoretical regime.

According to Reuters, after the election of Donald Trump, who has said he wants closer ties with the Kremlin and has questioned the cost of protecting NATO allies, some analysts predict an emboldened Moscow could become more assertive in eastern Europe. With recent military overtures in Syria and now Europe, this appears to be taking place.

Viktor Ozerov, chairman of the defense committee in the Federation Council, Russia’s upper house of parliament, said in remarks reported by RIA news agency that Russia was forced to react to the planned U.S. missile shield in eastern Europe.

“As response measures to such threats we will have… to deploy additional forces… This reinforcement includes deployment of S-400 and Iskander systems in Kaliningrad,” the Reuters quoted Ozerov as saying.

Additionally, Vladimir Putin also on Momday was quoted talking about how Russia has to respond to what it perceives as a threat from U.S.-led forces in eastern Europe.

“Why are we reacting to NATO expansion so emotionally? We are concerned by NATO’s decision making,” RIA quoted him as saying in an interview for a documentary that will be broadcast by Russian TV later on Monday.

“What should we do? We have, therefore, to take countermeasures, which means to target with our missile systems the facilities, that, in our opinion, start posing a threat to us,” Putin said.

If society continues to pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at the current rate, Americans later this century will have to endure, on average, about 15 daily maximum temperature records for every time that the mercury notches a record low, new research indicates.

That ratio of record highs to record lows may turn out to be much higher if the pace of emissions increases and produces even more warming, according to the study led by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).

“More and more frequently, climate change will affect Americans with record-setting heat,” said NCAR senior scientist Gerald Meehl, lead author of the new paper. “An increase in average temperatures of a few degrees may not seem like much, but it correlates with a noticeable increase in days that are hotter than any in the record, and nights that will remain warmer than we’ve ever experienced in the past.”

The 15-to-1 ratio of record highs to lows is based on temperatures across the continental United States increasing by slightly more than 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) above recent years, which is about the amount of warming expected to occur with the current pace of greenhouse gas emissions.

Over the last decade, in contrast, the ratio of record high temperatures to record lows has averaged about two to one.

The new research appears next week in the “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.” It was funded by the Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), which is NCAR’s sponsor. The study was co-authored by NCAR scientist Claudia Tebaldi and by Dennis Adams-Smith, a scientist previously at Climate Central and now at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory.

Hotter days

In a 2009 study, Meehl and colleagues found that the ratio of record daily high temperatures to record daily low temperatures has steadily increased since the 1970s as average temperatures over the United States have warmed. Computer models at that time indicated that the ratio could continue to increase during this century, although the research team looked into just one scenario of future emissions. The scientists also found that the models were overstating the ratio of record highs to record lows in recent years compared to observations.

By digging further into the issue and analyzing why the models differed from observations, Meehl and his co-authors have now produced a better calibrated projection of future record-breaking daily highs across the U.S. They based their projections on the average temperature increase over the continental United States, rather than on a particular scenario of future emissions.

By about 2065, for example, U.S. temperatures will rise by an average of slightly more than 3 degrees C (5.4 degrees F) if society maintains a “business as usual” increase in the emission of greenhouse gases. Under such a scenario, the ratio of record daily high temperatures to record daily lows will likely be about 15 to 1, although it could range anywhere from 7 to 1 up to 22 to 1, the study found.

If temperatures increase even more this century, the ratio of record highs to record lows will jump substantially. For example, if temperatures climb more than 4 degrees C (7.2 degrees F), Americans could experience about 38 record highs for every record low. Such an outcome could occur if society does not make any efforts to mitigate the production of greenhouse gases.

“Every degree of warming makes a substantial amount of difference, with the ratio of record highs to record lows becoming much greater,” Meehl said. “Even with much warmer temperatures on average, we will still have winter and we will still get record cold temperatures, but the numbers of those will be really small compared to record high maximums.”

If temperatures were not warming, Meehl said, the ratio of record highs to record lows would average out to about one to one.

Instead, record high temperatures have already become a common occurrence in much of the country. The ratio of record highs to lows has averaged about 2 to 1 over the first decade of the 21st century, but there is considerable year-to-year variation. The ratio was about 5 to 1 in 2012, dropping to about 1 to 1 in 2013 and 2014, then almost 3 to 1 in 2015. The unusual warmth of 2016, resulting from both climate change and natural patterns such as El Niño, has led to 24,519 record daily maximums vs. 3,970 record daily minimums — a ratio of about 6 to 1.

Precipitation and the warm 1930s

A key part of the study involved pinpointing why the models in the 2009 study were simulating somewhat more daily record high maximum temperatures compared with recent observations, while there was good agreement between the models and the observed decreases in record low minimums. The authors focused on two sets of simulations conducted on the NCAR-based Community Climate System Model (version 4), which is funded by DOE and NSF and developed by climate scientists across the country.

Their analysis uncovered two reasons for the disparity between the computer models and observations.

First, the models tended to underestimate precipitation. Because the air is cooled by precipitation and resulting evapotranspiration — the release of moisture from the land and plants back to the atmosphere — the tendency of the computer models to create an overly dry environment led to more record high temperatures.

Second, the original study in 2009 only went back to the 1950s. For the new study, the research team also analyzed temperatures in the 1930s and 1940s, which is as far back as accurate recordkeeping will allow. Because the Dust Bowl days of the 1930s were unusually warm, with many record-setting high temperatures, the scientists found that it was more difficult in subsequent years to break those records even as temperatures warmed. However, even taking the warm 1930s into account, the model-simulated and observed ratio of record highs to record lows has been increasing.

“The steady increase in the record ratio is an immediate and stark reminder of how our temperatures have been shifting and continue to do so, reaching unprecedented highs and fewer record lows,” said Tebaldi. “These changes pose adaptation challenges to both human and natural systems. Only a substantial mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions may stop this increase, or at least slow down its pace.”

By Terri Moon

Two initiatives were rolled out Monday to strengthen the cyber security environment in the Defense Department and the Army, DoD officials announced.

The first initiative is part of the “Hack the Pentagon” program that debuted last spring, officials said. Called the Vulnerability Disclosure Policy, it provides a legal avenue for digital security researchers who find and disclose vulnerabilities in DoD’s public websites.

The policy gives researchers clear guidance for testing and disclosing vulnerabilities, and also commits DoD to work openly and in good faith with outside researchers, officials said.

“The Vulnerability Disclosure Policy is like ‘see something, say something’ for the digital domain, Defense Secretary Ash Carter said.

“We want to encourage computer security researchers to help us improve our defenses. This policy gives them a legal pathway to bolster the department’s cybersecurity and ultimately the nation’s security,” the secretary said.

DoD Effort Aligns With Private Sector

The Hack the Pentagon pilot was the first bug bounty in the history of the federal government, officials said.

Using vetted hackers, DoD used a similar method to that of commercial-sector crowdsourcing, which identifies security vulnerabilities in DoD’s systems. ”Hack the Pentagon” was modeled after similar competitions conducted by some of the nation’s biggest companies to improve the security and delivery of networks, products, and digital services, according to officials.

When Hack the Pentagon results were released in June, the department recognized a need to provide a standard avenue for researchers to report vulnerabilities, said DoD’s Cyber Policy Senior Advisor, Charley Snyder and Defense Digital Service Bureaucracy Hacker Lisa Wiswell in a briefing with reporters Nov. 18.

The new policy, effective today, allows for a safe, secure, and legal opportunity for researchers to report such vulnerabilities, Snyder and Wiswell said.

While private industry produces similar policies, DoD’s initiative is the first in the federal government, officials said.

DoD consulted with the Justice Department’s criminal division when developing DoD’s Vulnerability Disclosure Policy, and Leslie Caldwell, DOJ’s assistant attorney general, called the initiative “a laudable way to help computer security researchers use their skills in an effective, beneficial and lawful manner to reduce security vulnerabilities.”

‘Hack The Army’ Debuts Today

The second initiative launching today is “Hack the Army,” the second bug-bounty challenge in DoD, Wiswell said, adding the Army’s initiative is modeled after the initial “Hack the Pentagon” challenge. Registration for the program begins today.

The Army bug bounty challenge will employ about 500 vetted security researchers, and will focus more on operationally relevant web sites, particularly those that affect Army recruiting, officials noted.

Army Secretary Eric Fanning announced his department’s cyber security challenge earlier this month as it partners with DoD’s Defense Digital Service.

“The security of these foundational systems is incredibly important to me, and security is everyone’s responsibility,” Fanning said.

The Army’s bug bounty program, much like DoD’s effort, will provide incentives to researchers to focus on specific high-priority networks and systems.

Officials said DoD has focused on efforts to modernize security, and to find ways to tap into sources of talent across the country. Both the Army and DoD programs and policies align with those goals, they added.

By Joyce Karam

Reading the tea leaves of US President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team, experts see a common thread in national security and foreign policy appointments pivoting in the direction of escalation in the war against Daesh and a harder line on Iran.

As Trump zeroes in on key foreign policy posts at the State Department and the Pentagon, the front-runners for the first being former Gov. Mitt Romney and former Mayor Rudy Giuliani and for Secretary of Defense retired Gen. James Mattis — a shift to the right is expected in the Middle East.

Loyalists vs. rivals

The Trump appointments so far are retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn as National Security Adviser, Reince Priebus as Chief of Staff, Republican Congressman Mike Pompeo as head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Sen. Jeff Sessions as Attorney General with Steve Bannon as Chief Strategist.

These are “rewards for the loyalists,” says Josh Kraushaar, Politics Editor at the National Journal.

Kraushaar explains that Trump so far is “rewarding the small group of supporters who stood by him through the campaign. The Secretary of State choice will be a key test of whether he is willing to bring in a prominent critic and establishment-minded Republican like Romney or whether he will continue to rely on loyalists if he chooses Giuliani.”

Romney, who flew from Hawaii to meet with Trump for almost 90 minutes on Saturday, was one of the president-elect’s fiercest critics during the campaign, calling him a “fraud” and a “phony.” Naming him as Secretary of State would unify Republican ranks and foster a more balanced foreign policy approach than the one heard from Trump during the campaign. In 2012, Romney called Russia the “number one geopolitical foe” and is a proponent of free trade — two positions that would calm NATO allies and the government in China.

Nicholas Heras, the Bacevich Fellow at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), suspects that Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts, might resemble in style current Secretary of State John Kerry. “He wouldn’t be that dissimilar as Secretary Kerry has been — both men have competent staff, like to be front and center, and to drive policy.”

Another name leading the pool for Department of Defense is retired Gen. Mattis who earned praise from Trump himself on Sunday. Heras, who briefed Mattis in the past, describes him as “an avid reader, he asks lot of questions, and is very thoughtful.”

Mattis’ 44-year record of service in the US military earned him the name “Mad Dog,” for “trying to avoid getting entangled in war but when you are engaged, you fight to win,” says Heras.

Daesh and Iran

On foreign policy, and specifically the Middle East, both Kraushaar and Heras agree that the Trump transition is an omen of more hawkish policies in the fight against Daesh and in addressing Iran’s regional role.

Kraushaar sees the biggest shift from US President Barack Obama to his successor “will be an increased urgency in defeating ISIS, both rhetorically and in its overseas engagement.” The appointment of Flynn, Pompeo and possibly Mattis “also means that the new administration will be taking a much harder line with Iran, viewing very skeptically the nuclear deal President Obama struck.”

Hours before his nomination as the new head of the CIA, Pompeo tweeted: “I look forward to rolling back this disastrous deal with the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism.”

While the current team holds different views on Russia, “one common theme between Bannon, Flynn and Mattis is their concern about the threat Islamist terrorism poses to Western civilization,” explains Kraushaar.

Heras sees in the anticipated uptick in the counterterrorism fight a “return to the Bush era and the global war on terrorism.” He explains the Trump team mindset as follows: “If the US should be engaged in the Middle East, it should be so to counter the threat to the homeland by extremist organizations, specifically ISIS and Al-Qaeda … without necessarily deploying ground troops.”

Confronting Iran has also emerged as a consensus among the Trump appointments. Heras notes that “both Flynn and Mattis have harsh experience in the Iraq war, seeing US service members getting killed by Iranian-backed militias, and express strong concerns and desires to confront Iran where necessary.”

A major dilemma here would be addressing Syria and how to “square the circle of competing against Iran regionally but potentially working with Russia and the Assad regime of whom Iran is a major partner in confronting Al-Qaeda and ISIS.”

A distinctive mark of the new US administration will also be the role of Congress where a Republican majority has control of both chambers.

“The Senate could play a stronger role in actual foreign policy in decisions of war and peace,” expects Heras. Already Republican Sen. Rand Paul has sent the Trump team a warning about nominating John Bolton for Secretary of State while Sen. John McCain has signaled readiness for legal confrontation if the Trump team restores harsh interrogation techniques and methods of torture.

For now, Trump’s approach to the new Cabinet is to reach outside the campaign box and show openness to pragmatic nominees in steering the US diplomatically and militarily while prioritizing the fight against Daesh and curbing Iran in the region.

For months we’ve been told that the Clinton Foundation, and it’s various subsidiaries, were simple, innocent “charitable” organizations, despite the mountain of WikiLeaks evidence to the contrary. Well, if that is, in fact, true perhaps the Clintons could explain why wealthy foreign governments, like Norway, are suddenly slashing their contributions now that Hillary’s political clout has been erased?

As the Norwegian newspaper Hegnar points out, Norway is expected to slash their contributions to the Clinton Foundation by 87% now that Hillary has lost the presidency. After contributing roughly $5mm per year to the Clinton Foundation between 2007 – 2013, the Norwegian government decided to boost their donations to ~$15mm and ~$21mm in 2014 and 2015, respectively. Ironically, that boost in contributions corresponded with Hillary’s decision to run for President in 2016…but we’re sure it’s just a coincidence. That said, it is fairly interesting that, since Hillary’s loss, Norway has decided to scale back their contributions by 87% in 2017.

After a record contribution from Norway to the disputed Clinton Foundation before the election year, is the contribution now in freefall. Financial newspaper can tell that next year’s contribution is down 83 percent from the peak year of 2015.

For 2016, the planned payments to Clinton Health Access Initiative totaling 35.9 million kroner, writes communications advisor Guri Solberg at the Foreign Ministry, in an email to Finance newspaper.

It is one-fifth of last year’s contribution, when nominating election campaign before the US primaries was in full swing, and the Clinton Foundation came under the spotlight in the US press.

According to Finance newspaper lay the annual Norwegian contribution of NOK 40 million on average from 2007 to 2013. In 2014, the contribution more than tripled, to 129 million. And in 2015 they increased to 174 million.

The money has gone to two of the Foundation’s programs, primarily Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI), but also the Clinton Climate Initiative (CCI).

For 2017 it is planned payments to Clinton Health Access Initiative 23 million, Solberg wrote in an email to Finance newspaper. It is further down 36 percent from the current year. By comparison, ran this program 169 million in 2015.

As Hegnar further notes, Norway was the third largest contributor to the Clinton Foundation after Saudi Arabia and Australia, followed by a number of Arab Gulf states, which is confirmed by the Foundation’s website.

But, as the NY Post points out this morning, wealthy foreign governments aren’t the only ones backing away from the Clinton Foundation as overall donations plummeted 37% YoY in 2015 just as the “pay-to-play” scandals started to surface.

Donations to the Clinton Foundation nose-dived last year amid Hillary Clinton’s presidential run, pay-to-play allegations, internal strife and a black mark from a charity watchdog.

Contributions fell by 37 percent to $108 million, down from $172 million in 2014, according to the group’s latest tax filings.

The cash plummeted as Hillary Clinton left the nonprofit in April 2015 after announcing her ill-fated candidacy. The foundation became a major issue in the race, with Donald Trump vowing to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate it.

Not only did contributions drop, but so did revenue the Clintons brought in from speeches. That income fell to $357,500 from $3.6 million in 2014.

By the time the foundation’s Clinton Global Initiative held its annual conference in September 2015, many donors had bailed, including Samsung and ExxonMobil.

With their power base eroded, the Clinton’s will need to double down on their efforts to get Chelsea elected to that NY Congressional seat asap.