It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Sunday, September 13, 2020
UK
“What have we become?” Ministers said to be considering opt outs of Human Rights Act laws
Labour's Shadow Justice Secretary said: “A future where (the) UK breaks its international law obligations, and opts out of Human Rights protections is a very bad future.”
Boris Johnson has instructed ministers to look at opt-outs from the Human Rights Act, with a formal review expected to be announced in the coming weeks.
The Tory manifesto pledged to “update” the Act after Brexit, but the move is contentious with Brussels and negotiators have expressed concern over the UK’s commitment to the European Convention on Human Rights.
The moves could prevent many migrants and asylum seekers from using the legislation to avoid deportation and protect British soldiers against claims relating to overseas operations.
Dominic Cummings, the Prime Minister’s most senior adviser, has previously attacked the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg for judgments, based on the ECHR, blocking the deportation of “dangerous” foreign criminals.
Mr Cummings has warned that voters would expect the jurisdiction of European judges to end in the UK as part of the Brexit process, but others have expressed dismay at the move.
Shadow Justice Secretary, Lord Falconer, said: “A future where (the) UK breaks its international law obligations, and opts out of Human Rights protections is a very bad future.”
While Jo Maugham QC added: “Shocking that the United Kingdom, once thought a leader amongst nations, should in a single week signal a desire to flout both international law and to fail to adhere to basic human rights protections. What have we become?”
Cummings now wants to roll back human rights laws. He’s out of control.
The Telegraph has reported that Boris Johnson’s government is set to ‘opt out’ of human rights laws. This is, of course, part of Brexit. It also appears to have Dominic Cummings’ hands all over it. But the reality is that even under EU rules, successive Tory governments flouted them anyway.
Human rights under threat?
On Sunday 13 September, the Telegraphsaid that the UK government was planning to put in place “optouts” [sic] from the Human Rights Act. The Telegraphwrote that ministers:
are drawing up proposals to severely curb the use of human rights laws in areas where judges have ‘overreached’.
One group the government is targeting is asylum seekers. It wants to stop judges applying to the European Court of Human Rights in asylum cases. TheTelegraphnotedthat the government will be doing a formal review into the laws. This is in line with the Tories’ 2019 manifesto commitments.
But as with many government actions, Johnson’s aide Cummings appears to be at the centre.
Take the boy on the anti-female website, and watch him grow into an adult misogynist
Treating misogyny as a hate crime will allow us to stop young males from being ‘groomed’
‘Technology is changing the way the men who objectify and hate women are created.’ Illustration: Dom Mckenzie/The Observer
Sun 13 Sep 2020
Two books about hate and gender have been published in recent weeks; one is pretty much irrelevant, but has been propelled into the global spotlight thanks to an overly zealous French official and a tiny but astute publisher. The other is a profoundly important piece of work that is unlikely to get the universal attention it deserves. These topsy-turvy reactions reveal much about skewed societal reactions to feminism.
First, the irrelevant: a tract entitled I Hate Men by a 25-year-old French feminist, set for an initial print run of 450. None of us would have heard of it but for the civil servant who wrote to her publishers telling them to pull it because “incitement to hatred on the grounds of gender is a criminal offence”. Except it turns out the civil servant was freewheeling rather than speaking for the French government. I’ve never encountered any feminists who hate all men, but the global media’s fascination with this niche provocation shows that there is something irresistible about associating feminism with misandry.
That is the wry observation of Laura Bates, the author of Men Who Hate Women, a book everyone should read. “It makes me smile when people ask me whether you have to be a woman who hates men to write a book about men who hate women… in reality the opposite is true,” she writes. Her book is a chilling investigation into the world of online extreme misogyny and its real-world consequences: the incels (“involuntary celibates”) who believe women are denying them their right to have sex and consequently deserve to be raped and murdered; the pick-up artists who believe women can be manipulated and controlled into sleeping with them; the “men who go their own way”, who believe women are so toxic they must cut them out of their lives altogether.
It is too easy to dismiss these as sinister but irrelevant internet cesspits, filled with dysfunctional loners who fantasise about committing sick acts of violence against women that they will never get the chance to act upon. That is a mistake: one of the most disturbing aspects of Bates’s book is how she came to her subject matter. She realised a couple of years ago through her regular work with schools that some boys were increasingly parroting the kinds of arguments about women common in these online communities.
Bates also documents the murderous rampages inflicted by incels: men such as Elliot Rodger, who killed six people and injured 14 others in California in 2014, or Ben Moynihan who stabbed three women in Portsmouth the same year. Yet despite fitting the definition for terrorism – the use or threat of action designed to intimidate the public to advance a political, religious, racial or ideological cause – there is only one case of an incel attack being treated by authorities as terrorism, when a 17-year-old murdered a woman using a machete in Toronto earlier this year. It seems a dangerous hatred of women simply doesn’t meet the ideological bar, a bizarre and troubling minimisation of extreme misogyny.
Links between terrorism, misogyny and domestic violence have been well-documented; last year, Joan Smith described how most terrorists involved in far-right and Islamist attacks have a track record of abusing women. There is, however, little evidence that this insight has filtered through to the government’s counter-terrorism efforts. Yet Smith observes that one thing that unites far-right and Islamist extremists is their embrace of rape and domestic violence and its use as a recruiting tool.
But there is another link between extreme misogyny and other forms of terrorism that Bates exposes: the ways in which boys and young men are radicalised into these extremist ideologies. The grooming techniques are identical: pushing initially relatively mild misogynist memes and humour on to vulnerable teenagers with low self-esteem on platforms such as YouTube, Instagram and bodybuilding websites, which then leads to darker and more violent stuff. The platforms are complicit: Bates describes how YouTube’s content-pushing algorithm takes someone searching “what is feminism?” to an interview with Milo Yiannopoulos decrying feminism as “primarily about man-hating” and spreading a “constant message that men are evil” via just one other video.
These are important insights into how technology is changing the way the men who objectify and hate women are created, making it ever easier for vulnerable young men to be caught up in the damaging orbit of extreme misogyny. Only a tiny number of these will engage in the terrorism of a Rodger, but the same is true of far-right and Islamist terrorism, and that, rightly, does not prevent us from pouring billions into countering them. And that is before we consider the wider costs: how many of these boys will grow up more likely to be domestic abusers? (To put this in context, 49 people tragically lost their life to terrorist attacks in the UK between 2010 and 2017 –around one every 10 weeks – but two women a week are murdered by a current or former partner.) Or the worrying trend of women in their 20s being pressured to take part in dangerous sex acts such as choking.
We need to start taking extreme misogyny seriously rather than writing it off as a community of oddballs: not to do so is to utterly fail in our duty to keep this generation of boys and girls safe. It is imperative that misogyny gets classed as a hate crime in the same way as crimes motivated by hostility towards people because of their race, disability or sexual orientation are. This is not about criminalising wolf-whistling, but understanding the extent to which crimes are motivated by hatred of women. Treating it as terrorism could at a sweep multiply the resources available to tackle violent misogyny many times over. And we need to develop our understanding of how to help those boys at risk of getting groomed down this path and prevent it from happening in the first place. As Bates says, failing to act is the mark of a society that devalues not just women, but men.
• Sonia Sodha is chief leader writer at the Observer and an Observer and Guardian columnist
Heather Cox Richardson’s How the South Won the Civil War is not principally about that war. Instead, it is a broad sweep of American history on the theme of the struggle between democracy and oligarchy – between the vision that “all men are created equal” and the frequency with which power has accumulated in the hands of a few, who have then sought to thwart equality. A disputed election, a constitutional crisis, polarisation … welcome to 1876
What she terms the “paradox” of the founding – that “the principle of equality depended on inequality”, that democracy relied on the subjugation of others so that those who were considered “equal”, principally white men, could rule, led to this continuing struggle. She draws a line, more or less straight, between “the oligarchic principles of the Confederacy” based on the cotton economy and racial inequality, western oligarchs in agribusiness and mining, and “movement conservatives in the Republican party”.
There, aided by migration of white southerners, “Confederate ideology took on a new life, and from there over the course of the next 150 years, it came to dominate America.” This ranged from western Republicans working with southern Democrats on issues like agriculture, in opposition to eastern interests, to shared feelings on race. Does American democracy somehow require the subjugation and subordination of others?
Once Reconstruction ended, and with it black voting in the south, Republicans looked west. Anti-lynching and voting rights legislation lost because of the votes of westerners, and new states aligned for decades more “with the hierarchical structure of the south than with the democratic principles of the civil war Republicans”, thanks to their reliance on extractive industries and agribusiness.
For Richardson, Barry Goldwater’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act in 1964 was thus not an electoral strategy but a culmination of a century of history between the south and west, designed to preserve oligarchic government in “a world defined by hierarchies”. Richardson sees Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and the reaction against it as “almost an exact replay of Reconstruction”. What she terms the “movement conservative” reaction promoted ideals of individualism – but cemented the power of oligarchies once again.
But isn’t America the home of individualism? Richardson agrees, to a point. The images of the yeoman farmer before the civil war and the cowboy afterwards were defining tropes but ultimately only that, as oligarchies sought to maintain power. Indeed, she believes, during Reconstruction, “to oppose Republican policies, Democrats mythologized the cowboy, self-reliant and tough, making his way in the world on his own”, notably ignoring the brutal work required and the fact that about a third of cowboys were people of color.
These tropes mattered: “Just as the image of the rising yeoman farmer had helped pave the way for the rise of wealthy southern planters, so the image of the independent rising westerner helped pave the way for the rise of industrialists.” And for Jim and Juan Crow and discrimination against other races and women, which put inequality firmly in American law once again. The flame was never fully extinguished, despite the burdens of inequality on so many
Yet ironically, as in the movies, the archetype came to the rescue: “Inequality did not spell the triumph of oligarchy, though, for the simple reason that the emergence of the western individualist as a national archetype re-engaged the paradox at the core of America’s foundation.” In the Depression, “when for many the walls seemed to be closing in, John Wayne’s cowboy turned the American paradox into the American dream.” (Wayne’s Ringo Kid in Stagecoach marked the emergence of the western antihero as hero.)
Indeed, the flame was never fully extinguished despite the burdens of inequality on so many. In Reconstruction, the Radical Republicans fought for equality for black people. The “liberal consensus” during and after the second world war promoted democracy and tolerance. Superman fought racial discrimination.
In all it is a fascinating thesis, and Richardson marshals strong support for it in noting everything from personal connections to voting patterns in Congress over decades. She errs slightly at times. John Kennedy, not Ronald Reagan, first said “a rising tide lifts all boats” (it apparently derives from a marketing slogan for New England); she is too harsh on Theodore Roosevelt’s reforms; and William Jennings Bryan – a western populist Democrat who railed against oligarchy even as he did not support racial equality – belongs in the story.
Barack Obama addresses the Democratic national convention, in August. Photograph: DNCC/Getty Images
Richardson has achieved prominence for her Letters from an American series, which daily chronicles the latest from the Trump administration. As with many American histories these days, Trump and Trumpism form a backdrop to her work. She subtly draws connections between echoes of the past and actions of the Trump administration which appear as their natural, if absurd, conclusion. Rick Perlstein: 'If you're not writing about the berserk, you're not writing about America'
As Richardson writes, after the Kansas-Nebraska Act extended the possibility of slavery in those territories, “moderate Democrats were gone, and slave owners had taken control of the national party”. She needn’t finish the analogy, other than to say that “[t]he world of 2018 looked a lot like that of 1860”.
The broader question is vital: does American democracy somehow require the subjugation and subordination of others? Richardson eloquently and passionately accounts why that principle is so dangerous and damaging.
Refuting it – precisely by asking America to extend the benefits of the founding to everyone – is the principal task for Americans today. She concludes that “for the second time, we are called to defend the principle of democracy” – something that can be done only by expanding its definition in practice to match the ideal. Only in that way can the American paradox be resolved.
Or, as Joe Biden recently said in fewer words: “Democracy is on the ballot.”
Trump doesn't care if wildfires destroy the west – it didn't vote for him Robert Reich
The climate crisis is upon us all but the president pursues more rollbacks. This election offers an existential choice
Cars drive along the Golden Gate Bridge under an orange smoke-filled sky – at midday in San Francisco. Photograph: Harold Postic/AFP/Getty Images
Sun 13 Sep 2020
The air outside my window is yellow today. It was orange yesterday. The Air Quality Index is over 200. The Environmental Protection Agency defines this as a “health alert” in which “everyone may experience more serious health effects if they are exposed for 24 hours”. Unfortunately, the index has been over 200 for several days.
The west is burning. Wildfires in California, Oregon and Washington are incinerating homes, killing scores of people, sickening many others, causing hundreds of thousands to evacuate, burning entire towns to the ground, consuming millions of acres, and blanketing the western third of the United States with thick, acrid and dangerous smoke.
Yet the president has said and done almost nothing. A month ago, Trump wanted to protect lives in Oregon and California from “rioters and looters”. He sent federal forces into the streets of Portland and threatened to send them to Oakland and Los Angeles.
One reason: these states voted against him in 2016 and he still bears a grudge.
He came close to rejecting California’s request for emergency funding. He told us to stop giving money to people whose houses had burned downMiles Taylor
“He told us to stop giving money to people whose houses had burned down because he was so rageful that people in the state of California didn’t support him,” said former Department of Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor.
Another explanation for Trump’s silence is that the wildfires are tied to human-caused climate change, which Trump has done everything humanly possible to worsen.
Extreme weather disasters are rampaging across America. On Wednesday, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration released its latest State of the Climate report, finding that just in August the US was hit by four billion-dollar calamities. In addition to wildfires, there were two enormous hurricanes and an extraordinary Midwest derecho.
These are inconvenient facts for a president who has spent much of his presidency dismantling every major climate and environmental policy he can lay his hands on.
Starting with his unilateral decision to pull out of the Paris climate agreement, Trump has been the most anti-environmental president in history.
He has called climate change a “hoax”. He has claimed, with no evidence, that windmills cause cancer. He has weakened Obama-era limits on planet-warming carbon dioxide from power plants and from cars and trucks. He has rolled back rules governing clean air, water and toxic chemicals. He has opened more public land to oil and gas drilling.
He has targeted California in particular, revoking the state’s authority to set tougher car emission standards than those required by the federal government.
In all, the Trump administration has reversed, repealed, or otherwise rolled back nearly 70 environmental rules and regulations. More than 30 rollbacks are still in progress. The core of [Biden’s] economic agenda is a hard-left crusade against American energyDonald Trump
Now, seven weeks before election day, with much of the nation either aflame or suffering other consequences of climate change, Trump unabashedly defends his record and attacks Joe Biden.
“The core of [Biden’s] economic agenda is a hard-left crusade against American energy,” Trump harrumphed in a Rose Garden speech last month.
Not quite. While Biden has made tackling climate change a centerpiece of his campaign, proposing to invest $2tn in a massive green jobs program to build renewable energy infrastructure, his ideas are not exactly radical. The money would be used for improving energy efficiency, constructing 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations, and increasing renewable energy from wind, solar and other technologies.
Biden wants to end the use of fossil fuels to generate electricity by 2035, and to bring America to net zero emissions of greenhouse gases by no later than 2050. His goals may be too modest. If what is now occurring in the west is any indication, 2050 will be too late. 'Unprecedented': the US west's wildfire catastrophe explained Read more
Nonetheless, Americans have a clear choice. In a few weeks, when they decide whether Trump deserves another four years, climate change will be on the ballot.
The choice shouldn’t be hard to make. Like the coronavirus, the dire consequences of climate change – coupled with Trump’s utter malfeasance – offer unambiguous proof that he couldn’t care less about the public good.
Sun 13 Sep 2020 07.27 BSTLast modified on Sun 13 Sep 2020 11.02 BST
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An orca feeding near a Moroccan fishing boat in the Strait of Gibraltar. Photograph: Patty Tse/Alamy
Scientists have been left baffled by incidents of orcas ramming sailing boats along the Spanish and Portuguese coasts.
In the last two months, from southern to northern Spain, sailors have sent distress calls after worrying encounters. Two boats lost part of their rudders, at least one crew member suffered bruising from the impact of the ramming, and several boats sustained serious damage.
'I've never seen or heard of attacks': scientists baffled by orcas harassing boats
Read more
The latest incident occurred on Friday afternoon just off A Coruña, on the northern coast of Spain. Halcyon Yachts was taking a 36ft boat to the UK when an orca rammed its stern at least 15 times, according to Pete Green, the company’s managing director. The boat lost steering and was towed into port to assess damage.
Around the same time there were radio warnings of orca sightings 70 miles south, at Vigo, near the site of at least two recent collisions. On 30 August, a French-flagged vessel radioed the coastguard to say it was “under attack” from killer whales. Later that day, a Spanish naval yacht, Mirfak, lost part of its rudder after an encounter with orcas under the stern. Play Video 1:15 'It broke the rudder!': orcas damage Spanish naval yacht – video
Highly intelligent social mammals, orcas are the largest of the dolphin family. Researchers who study a small population in the Strait of Gibraltar say they are curious and it is normal for them to follow a boat closely, even to interact with the rudder, but never with the force suggested here.
The Spanish maritime authorities warned vessels to “keep a distance”. But reports from sailors around the strait throughout July and August suggest this may be difficult – at least one pod appears to be pursuing boats in behaviour that scientists agree is “highly unusual” and “concerning”. It is too early to understand what is going on, but it might indicate stress in a population that is endangered.
On 29 July, off Cape Trafalgar, Victoria Morris was crewing a 46ft delivery boat that was surrounded by nine orcas. The cetaceans rammed the hull for over an hour, spinning the boat 180 degrees, disabling the engine and breaking the rudder, as they communicated with loud whistling.
It felt, she said, “totally orchestrated”. Earlier that week, another boat in the area reported a 50-minute encounter; the skipper said the force of the ramming “nearly dislocated the helmsman’s shoulder”. Boats off Spain damaged in orca encounters
At 11.30 the previous night, British couple Beverly Harris and Kevin Large’s 40ft yacht was brought to a sudden halt, then spun several times; Harris felt the boat “raise a little”.
Earlier that evening, Nick Giles was motorsailing alone when he heard a horrific bang “like a sledgehammer”, saw his wheel “turning with incredible force”, disabling the steering as his 34ft Moody yacht spun 180 degrees. He felt the boat lift and said he was pushed around without steering for 15 minutes.
It is not known if all the encounters involve the same pod but it is probable. Dr Ruth Esteban, who has studied the Gibraltar orcas extensively, thinks it unlikely two groups would display such unusual behaviour.
Alfredo López, a biologist from the Coordinator for the Study of Marine Mammals in Galicia, said orcas made their way up the coast each September from the Gulf of Cadiz to chase tuna into the Bay of Biscay.
Morris’s sailing job was abandoned after the boat was lifted for repair, and she was diverted to another delivery. She is currently sailing down the Spanish coast and in the early hours of Friday a VHF radio warning came in. “All ships, all ships,” it began. “Orca just north of Vigo” – five miles from her location.
After her last experience, Morris is a little jumpy, but, as a science graduate with plans to study marine biology, she is concerned for this vulnerable population of orcas and interested to learn more. She’d just prefer not to get too close a view next time.
Palestinians condemn U.S.-brokered Bahrain, Israel normalization deal
Palestinians carry placards during a protest in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, on Saturday to condemn the normalization of ties between Israel, UAE, and Bahrain in a deal announced in Washington by President Donald Trump. Photo by Ismael Mohamad/UPI | License Photo
Sept. 12 (UPI) -- The Palestinian Authority leadership has condemned the U.S.-brokered deal to normalize Bahraini-Israeli relations.
Palestinian officials on Friday accused Bahrain of betraying the Palestinian people and called the U.S.-brokered deal to establish full diplomatic relations between Israel and Bahrain "disgraceful and treacherous."
The deal was a "stab to the national rights of the Palestinian people and their national cause," Palestine Liberation Organization Executive Committee member Ahmed Majdalani said.
The U.S. administration's "delusion that it can make peace between the occupying state and the Arab countries without the Palestinians and without an Israeli withdrawal from the occupied Palestinian territories is political stupidity," Majdalani added.
The Palestinian Authority Foreign Ministry announced it will recall its ambassador to Bahrain in protest.
Similarly, Palestinian leadership denounced the U.S.-brokered deal last month to normalize relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and recalled its ambassador to Abu Dhabi.
President Donald Trump announced the deal to normalize diplomatic relations between Israel and Bahrain on Friday.
"They will exchange embassies and ambassadors, begin direct flights between their countries and launch cooperation initiatives across a broad range of sectors, including health, business, technology, education , security and agriculture," Trump said.
The move makes Bahrain the fourth Arab country to establish full diplomatic ties with Israel, after Egypt, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates.
Trump said that he hoped both the UAE and Bahrain deals would encourage normalization between Israel and other Arab nations
California allows inmates to become firefighters; 4M acres burn in West Flames from the Bobcat Fire appear above homes in the foothills of Monrovia, Calif. on Friday. Photo by Jim Ruymen/UPI | License Photo
Sept. 12 (UPI) -- California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation allowing inmate fire crew members to have careers as firefighters after completing their prison sentences.
The new law comes as the state battles its worst wildfire season in recorded history. The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection said dozens of fires have burned some 3.1 million acres of land in recent weeks.
The new law, AB 2147, eliminates barriers that previously barred former inmates from pursuing permanent jobs as firefighters.
"This legislation rights a historic wrong and recognizes the sacrifice of thousands of incarcerated people who have helped battle wildfires in our state, and I would like to thank the Legislature for passing this bill," Newsom said Friday after signing the law.
Under the law, former inmates can petition the state to expunge their records and waive parole time in order to have careers in emergency response.
"Signing AB 2147 into law is about giving second chances. To correct is to right a wrong; to rehabilitate is to restore," Assemblymember Gomez Reyes said. "Rehabilitation without strategies to ensure the formerly incarcerated have a career is a pathway to recidivism. We must get serious about providing pathways for those that show the determination to turn their lives around."
The state is experiencing an unprecedented wildfire season, with five of the state's Top 10 largest wildfires in history currently burning.
One of the fastest-growing blazes, the August Complex, exploded to more than 491,000 acres with 25% containment Friday. Situated in the Mendocino National Forest, U.S. officials said it was the largest fire in California history. It comprises several fires that have merged, include the Doe Fire.
Emergency officials have evacuated residents from multiple counties in its vicinity. The blaze killed one firefighter in late August.
Overall, fires in the West have killed at least two dozen people, including 19 in California, seven in Oregon and one in Washington. The most deadly blaze is the North Complex of fires, which has burned more than 252,000 acres and killed at least 10 people in Butte, Plumas and Yuba counties. The blaze was 23% contained as of late Friday.
Two other large complexes of wildfires neared containment this week. The SCU Lightning Complex was 98% contained after burning nearly 400,000 acres and the LNU Lightning Complex was 95% contained after burning more than 363,000 acres.
In Oregon, some 60 people were unaccounted for as blazes scorched more than a million acres. Among the dead were a 13-year-old boy found huddling his dog inside a vehicle and the boy's grandmother in Lyons.
Most of those unaccounted for were residents of Jackson County, location of the Holiday Farm Fire.
On Saturday Oregon State Police said the Oregon state fire marshal, Jim Walker, resigned shortly after being placed on administrative leave.
Mariana Ruiz-Temple, who had served as his chief deputy, was appointed as acting fire marshal and has since been appointed as fire marshal.
"Mariana has led with grace, transparency and courage," Gov. Kate Brown said in a statement. "She embodies the experience Oregon needs to face this crisis, in this moment."
Officials did not say why Walker, who had served in the role since 2014, was removed.
Also on Saturday, a spokesman for Facebook said the service would begin removing posts containing claims that wildfires in Oregon were set by certain groups.
This is consistent with our past efforts to remove content that could lead to imminent harm given the possible risk to human life as the fires rage on. (2/2)— Andy Stone (@andymstone) September 12, 2020 Remove
Since Thursday law enforcement officials and local media outlets have attempted to dispel rumors that antifascist activists deliberately set the fires, and reporters have described being stopped by people carrying guns as they attempt to survey the damage.
When Professionalism Mattered: Dissent Against U.S. Policy on Landmines
A Former Ambassador Obtains His Newly Declassified Cable
An Afghan orthopaedic technician makes artificial limbs in a workshop at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) hospital for war victims and the disabled in Kabul, on March 27, 2019. According to the United Nations Mine Action Service (UNMAS), casualties from landmines and so-called “explosive remnants of war” soared five-fold between 2012 and 2017. (Photo by WAKIL KOHSAR/AFP via Getty Images)
We face a dangerous moment when U.S. diplomats and defense professionals are being cashiered for expressing responsible dissent based on their on-the-ground knowledge, and at the same time, President Donald Trump is recklessly abandoning longstanding policy that has severely restricted the use of landmines, a major shift described in Mary Wareham’s recent article on Just Security. These two current threads converge in an instructive look back to 1997 to see how another administration addressed internal dissent.
That summer, U.S. policy on anti-personnel landmines (APL) was hotly debated in Washington. In the midst of global negotiations in Oslo on the Ottawa Treaty, which would eventually ban the production, transfer, and use of APL, U.S. government “hawks” opposed acceptance of universal measures. They cited exceptional military requirements the U.S. had incurred as leader of the Western alliance, including the defense of South Korea against invasion from the north. By contrast, other policymakers were arguing that the United States should support the immediate and total ban for humanitarian, strategic, and “soft power” interests.
The hawks were winning. The State Department sent instructions in August 1997 to U.S. ambassadors in Angola, Bosnia, Cambodia, Mozambique, Nicaragua, and other mine-affected countries to press their host governments to soften their positions on the landmine ban. We were instructed to ask them to permit the United States and presumably other countries to exercise numerous waivers, exempt anti-tank weapons, exclude South Korea, and accept lengthy implementation timeframes. These moves would have unraveled the delicate emerging consensus.
I was serving as U.S. ambassador to Angola and I refused to make the demarche. In a confidential cable just declassified by the State Department, entitled “Dissent Against U.S. Positions on Landmines at Oslo APL Conference,” I called the U.S. position “indefensible, filled with contradictions, and inconsistent with true U.S. national security and foreign policy interests.”
I reminded my colleagues that Angola was emerging from a lengthy civil war that left the country the world’s most heavily mined. I described a visit I took in Angola in December 1994 with then-National Security Adviser Anthony Lake, four weeks after the signing of the Peace Accords. We saw the vast devastation of two decades of war, including thousands of amputees from landmine accidents. At a hospital in the destroyed city of Kuito, we saw a pregnant woman who had ventured into a minefield to get food for her unborn child; a mine explosion had induced labor, and she was giving birth and having her shattered leg removed at the same time. It was a sight that will remain with us for the rest of our lives. It was clear to us then that one type of war in Angola was ending, but another — the war to rid this country of the legacy of millions of landmines planted by a dozen armies — was just beginning.
I concluded my dissent message by asking, “How can America’s global responsibilities and foreign policy interests dictate that we protect weapons so horrible and barbaric that virtually all our closest allies are seeking a global treaty to eliminate them without delay?”
I nervously awaited a formal reply. This was my first such message in more than two decades in the Foreign Service. But no response ever came. I later learned this non-reply was a compromise between those in Washington who wanted to reprimand me and those who wanted to thank me. National Security Adviser Samuel Berger, who had taken office just months before my dissent cable, later told me that my voice from the field helped spur a reassessment of our policy amid the public advocacy of U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), soon-to-be Nobel Peace laureate Jody Williams, Vietnam Veterans of America co-founder Bobby Muller, Landmine Survivors Network’s Jerry White, Human Rights Watch’s Steve Goose, and others.
Regrettably, the United States did not sign the Ottawa Treaty. But the U.S. government has conformed to its basic precepts under Republican and Democratic administrations since the Ottawa Convention came into force in 1999 – at least until Trump’s recent order. And we ramped up aggressive anti-mine programs in Angola, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Mozambique, Cambodia, Rwanda, Laos, Central America, and 30 other regions.
We helped demine the most dangerous minefields, train humanitarian deminers, teach civilians how to identify and avoid these weapons, invest in new technologies to assist mine detection and clearances, and provide landmine survivors with medical, vocational, legal, and psychosocial support. The efforts of State Department colleagues Rick Inderfurth, Pat Patierno, Jim Lawrence, and Stacy Bernard Davis, among others, deserve recognition.
Reward for Principled Dissent
Was I punished for my dissent? Quite the opposite. In 1998, when I left Angola, President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright appointed me to serve as their Special Representative for Global Humanitarian Demining.
In that role, I addressed the U.N. General Assembly in November 2000, to describe the compromise on U.S. APL policy. I welcomed the international commitment to protect civilians around the world from landmines embodied in the Ottawa Treaty and saluted the governments, international organizations, and civic groups who made up the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. I noted that the United States had destroyed 3.3 million landmines and permanently banned the export or transfer of anti-personnel landmines. We would also end the use of all APL outside of South Korea by 2003. We committed to seek alternatives to landmines and adhere to the treaty if we found and deployed these alternatives.
No, this was not where treaty advocates – including me – wanted to end up, but it was as much as the market would bear. With some modifications, it remained a rational, nuanced, morally defensible, and bipartisan stance until Trump’s irresponsible reversal last month.
And in an instructive postscript, Secretary of State Colin Powell in 2001 named me deputy director of policy planning. One of my principal and proudest duties: to monitor and encourage use of the State Department’s Dissent Channel. Yes, some people get it.
State Dept. Inspector General Report: A Troubling Message on Arms Sales
The U.S. State Department’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) recently released a report that, even in its redacted form, makes plain that the Trump administration circumvented U.S. law in multiple ways to carry out arms transfers to the Saudi-led Coalition in Yemen. In doing so, the administration failed to fully and accurately assess the humanitarian impact of U.S. support, according to the report. That is a stunning revelation given the repeated, severe cases of civilian casualties resulting from Saudi-led Coalition operations over the past several years. Although an unredacted version of the report was leaked, a key annex remains classified so the full extent of how this administration’s actions transpired remains hidden from the public. However, what is clear is that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo undertook several steps to evade arms export controls to put lethal munitions into the hands of Coalition members, which human rights groups have alleged have committed war crimes against civilians. (See earlier coverage here). This article discusses the OIG’s findings with reference to what is at stake for the people of Yemen and the worrisome deterioration of U.S. arms control policy under the Trump administration.
The Costly War in Yemen
On August 9, 2018, a school bus carrying children on an excursion in Dhahyan, a city in northern Yemen, was struck by a 500-pound paveway MK-82 laser-precision guided munition, made in the United States by Lockheed Martin and exported to Saudi Arabia for its air force’s use in the war in Yemen. Fifty-one civilians were killed in the strike — 49 of them were children. The incident was just one in a series of attacks on civilians launched by the Saudi-led Coalition, a group that includes Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan (a controversy in itself). (Qatar withdrew in 2017; Morocco withdrew in February of 2019, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) followed suit in July 2019). This operation, like others, was apparently executed with American-made weapons. In March 2016, the coalition used an MK-84 precision-guided munition (PGM) in an attack on a market that killed 97 civilians, including 25 children. Earlier that year, coalition forces deployed a U.S.-made MK-82 PGM in a strike on a funeral hall in Sana’a. One hundred fifty-five people died and 600 were injured. Since 2015, Physicians for Human Rights has documented 120 attacks on medical infrastructure and health workers, a distinctive feature of this already deadly conflict. A similar report counts 380 attacks on, or in close proximity to, educational facilities. Many of these were airstrikes on areas where researchers insist there were no military targets present. Mwatana for Human Rights, the premier human rights documentation organization in Yemen, co-authored both reports based upon their painstaking research on the ground. An open source intelligence investigation by Bell¿ngcat reveals a stunning collection of allegedly unlawful airstrikes by the Coalition in Yemen.
Since its initial involvement in 2015, the Saudi-led Coalition has repeatedly killed or injured civilians in attacks they claimed either targeted legitimate military objectives or were the result of “mistakes.” Yet, it is hard not to wonder how bombing hospitals, wedding parties, funeral processions, markets, schools, and school buses could possibly serve any legitimate military purpose and how such a seemingly sophisticated coalition could make so many mistakes that take such a consistent and flagrant toll on human life. Indeed, Justice Renate Winter — an Austrian expert on the Committee of the Rights of the Child and former judge of the Special Court for Sierra Leone — pointedly asked the Saudi representative in a session before her Committee:
You say it’s an accident. How many such accidents can you bear and how many such accidents can people in the country bear?
Taken together, these strikes blend into a clear and dominant pattern that has emerged around the Coalition’s behavior in the war in Yemen — the reckless, indiscriminate, or intentional targeting of civilians and an overall disregard for human rights. Individuals, armed groups, and states that deliberately or indiscriminately target civilians, or utilize disproportionate force in their operations, are in violation of International Humanitarian Law (IHL), or the laws of war, and the prohibition on war crimes. Furthermore, the continued use of a knowingly flawed targeting process that cannot distinguish between civilians and military objectives also implicates IHL and the prohibition against war crimes in particular, as has been explained in the past on these pages. To be sure, the Houthi rebels and their supporters are not operating with clean hands either. They too have been credibly accused of war crimes. However, that is no excuse for the Saudi-led coalition, or the United States acting in support, to depart from their legal obligations to respect civilian life.
Restrictions on U.S. Arms Sales to Protect Civilians
Although the United States is not ever listed as a formal member of the Saudi Coalition, its munitions have been instrumental in the Coalition’s operations and the harm to civilians they have caused. Given the magnitude of weapons (ranging from cluster munitions to laser-guided missiles), intelligence, expertise, and logistical support (including, at one point, mid-air refueling) being provided, and even not counting its airstrikes in the country aimed at al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and ISIS, one can query what threshold of involvement would have to be crossed for the United States to be officially considered a member of this Coalition — or, more precisely, a party to the armed conflict between the Saudi-led Coalition and the Houthis — notwithstanding that Washington is assisting from the sidelines. This question has been taken up here; this article focuses on the way in which the Trump administration has managed to avoid civilian protection elements of U.S. arms control measures in its sale of munitions to Saudi Arabia.
While the U.S. arms export regime is primarily designed to protect against the export of sensitive military technology and arms sales that could pose threats to U.S. national security, its underpinnings are also meant to minimize civilian casualties and prevent U.S. weapons from being exported to states where they could be used in violation of IHL. For this reason, the U.S. Munitions List (USML) grants an oversight power for the trade of defense-related articles, services, and equipment to the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs — which must coordinate with State’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor — and the Bureau of International Security and Non-proliferation. This system requires a rigorous assessment of end-users, and their history of war fighting, before permission will be granted for foreign military sales or direct commercial sales of U.S.-made weapons to ensure that arms are not used to commit acts that violate the law.
Since Jimmy Carter occupied the White House, the United States has maintained a Conventional Arms Transfer (CAT) Policy. The Obama-era CAT Policy (Presidential Policy Directive 27) explicitly prohibited the State Department from approving arms transfers in instances in which there was a risk the weapons would contribute to abuses of human rights and violations of IHL. In considering arms transfer decisions, the executive branch took into account:
The likelihood that the recipient would use the arms to commit human rights abuses or serious violations of international humanitarian law, retransfer the arms to those who would commit human rights abuses or serious violations of international humanitarian law, or identify the United States with human rights abuses or serious violations of international humanitarian law.
The Obama administration pledged not to authorize any transfer if it knew that arms would be used to commit: genocide; crimes against humanity; grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 1949; serious violations of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions of 1949; attacks directed against civilian objects or civilians who are legally protected from attack or other war crimes as defined in 18 U.S.C. § 2441. Likewise, it would consider whether the transfer of weapons would raise concerns
about undermining international peace and security, serious violations of human rights law, including serious acts of gender-based violence and serious acts of violence against women and children, serious violations of international humanitarian law, terrorism, transnational organized crime, or indiscriminate use.
Congress has a role here as well. Perhaps most importantly, the Arms Export Control Act (AECA), while vesting power in the president to authorize the export of defense articles, also requires a formal advance notification of certain arms sales to Congress. This advance notification (see Sections 36(b), 36(c), and 36(d) of the AECA (22 U.S.C. § 2776)) gives Congress the opportunity to review, deliberate upon, and pass a Joint Resolution of Disapproval in instances in which it would like to block an arms transfer.
President Trump’s Erosion of These Protections
Across the board, the Trump administration has significantly weakened this export regime and these civilian-protection policies, in part to preserve U.S. dominance in the international arms market. The amended Conventional Arms Transfer Policy (National Security Presidential Memorandum 10, issued on April 19, 2018) contains similar references to taking into account the risk that the weapons transferred would be used to commit atrocity crimes. However, it now includes language that narrows the scope of end-user risks to prohibiting only arms transfers in cases in which the United States has actual knowledge its arms exports will be used in attacks “intentionally” directed against civilians. The addition of the word “intentionally” means that arms sales would only be prohibited under a circumstance in which officials have actual knowledge of plans for an intentional civilian massacre, which could exclude instances of U.S. arms being used in indiscriminate or disproportionate attacks when civilians are collateral damage. The use of disproportionate force, even absent an intent to harm civilians, constitutes a war crime under IHL. The International Committee of the Red Cross designates the following as a war crime:
launching an attack in the knowledge that such attack will cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects which would be clearly excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.
Furthermore, the Trump administration recategorized several lethal articles on the USML as “commercial products” that will now be exported under the authority of the Department of Commerce, therefore no longer requiring end-user vetting from the State Department. (Although the Obama administration migrated a few categories, mostly component parts, none of the categories comprised lethal weapons). Such “commercial products” include lethal munitions such as certain semi-automatic firearms, their ammunition and accessories. Besides nullifying the arms exports laws that apply to these categories, this decision comes with other lethal consequences. Among them, experts expect increased illicit arms trafficking and the increased use of U.S. lethal weapons in human rights violations.
And, in April 2019, President Trump withdrew the U.S. signature from the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT). During the Obama administration, the United States was instrumental in negotiating this treaty so that it would be consistent with U.S. export regulations then in place. Secretary of State John Kerry signed the ATT in 2013, and President Obama submitted it to the Senate for ratification. The ATT, whose members and signatories met virtually last week, contains ground-breaking language at Article 6(3) prohibiting any state party from transferring conventional arms if
it has knowledge at the time of authorization that the arms or items would be used in the commission of genocide, crimes against humanity, grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, attacks directed against civilian objects or civilians protected as such, or other war crimes as defined by international agreements to which it is a Party.
Although the U.S. never ratified the treaty, its signature indicated its agreement with this approach and its pledge not to violate the object or purpose of the treaty.
These are clear examples of a deterioration in human rights considerations in the arms trade and US arms export policy but over the course of the Trump administration, we have witnessed a disintegration of civilian protections in policies governing U.S. operations as well.
For example, the Trump administration implemented retrograde policies on landmines and cluster munitions. First: the Trump administration reversed an Obama-era prohibition on the use of landmines, which had brought U.S. policy in closer alignment with the Ottawa Convention (the Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on Their Destruction) and global humanitarian standards. In 2018 alone, civilians represented more than 70 percent of causalities caused by landmines — more than half of those were children. Under the Trump administration, the Defense Department’s policy on landmines now permits the use and production of anti-personnel landmines. In 2017, DoD also reversed a long-standing policy that required the United States to destroy all but a small selection of its active stockpile of cluster munitions. The new policy grants U.S. military commanders the right to approve the use of cluster munitions, DoD the right to acquire new cluster munitions, and U.S. exporters the right to transfer cluster munitions in accordance with existing law, an overarching policy that seems to indefinitely delay the implementation of regulations more in line with the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions.
To provide another pertinent example, the Trump White House issued Executive Order 13862, which revokes an important reporting requirement that mandates the Directorate of National Intelligence to release an annual report on strikes undertaken by all U.S. departments and agencies against terrorist targets, a requirement originally contained in Section 3 of Obama’s EO 13732 on Pre -and Post-Strike Measures to Address Civilian Causalities in U.S. Operations involving the Use of Force.
U.S. Track Record in Training Allies in Airstrikes
Notably, EO 13732 features another policy pertinent to the discussion of this article. It directs U.S. agencies and officials to engage with foreign partners on “best practices for reducing the likelihood of and responding to civilian causalities,” particularly in airstrikes. However, past efforts to convey this training, especially with the Saudi-led Coalition, have been fruitless. The Coalition has time and again eschewed the rules and regulations suggested by U.S. officials. This is according to Larry Lewis, former State Department Adviser on Civilian Harm, who, in commenting on the Obama administration’s decision to withdraw training in an interview with the New York Times, said, “the response was, ‘clearly the Saudis aren’t learning.’” Likewise, former senior DOD official Andrew Exum wrote: “decades of U.S. training missions had not produced a Saudi military capable of independently planning and executing an effective air campaign that minimized collateral damage.”
The State Department Inspector General’s Report on U.S. Breaches of These Policies
However watered-down and weakened, this network of laws and policies still expressly prohibits the State Department from approving the sale of arms — like the Mark 80 precision-guided missile (PGM) series — when officials have knowledge that the arms will be used deliberately against civilians. They also clearly grant Congress the right and authority to exercise oversight over, and to block, such transfers. Yet, in its most recent report on the subject, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) lays bare the fact that the State Department not only neglected its responsibility to consider human rights in approving arms transfers but also intentionally circumvented Congress’s attempt to block the $3.8 billion sale of PGMs to Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
The OIG reported that on May 23, 2019, Pompeo certified “an emergency existed” in the war in Yemen, referring vaguely to “recent Iranian aggression” in the Persian Gulf. Pompeo thus invoked emergency authorities put forth in Section 36 of the AECA to approve and “fast track” 22 arms transfer transactions — $8.1 billion in defense articles, mostly missiles and missile support systems — to Saudi-led Coalition forces. This process waived congressional review requirements for all 22 transfers and yet, these same items had been the subject of congressional holds in the past: in 2018, Congress put a hold on 15 of these transfers. Six of these had been in place for more than a year. In response to the “emergency” certification, which Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee Eliot Engle described as “phony,” Congress — with bipartisan support — passed three bills, again attempting to block the sales, but Trump vetoed all three and the Senate failed to override the presidential vetoes.
The Inspector General specifically avoided assessing whether this was a bona fide declaration of an emergency — an essential question for determining compliance with the law. While this certification maneuver did indeed expedite the transfers, the unredacted version of the report reveals that the schedule of transfers, despite being “fast tracked,” would still take at least a year to implement, bringing into question whether or not an emergency actually existed or, in the very least, raising doubts about whether or not these transfers could in earnest be considered a response to a true emergency. It also revealed a timeline showing that State Department officials first proposed pursuing an emergency certification on April 3, 2019 — a full month before the White House began releasing statements on Iran —but that it took until May 24th to transmit the certification to Congress. While the OIG’s report avoids commenting on the legal questions around State’s decision to declare an emergency certification with respect to events in Yemen — other than noting that it properly adhered to the certification process — it does reach two other clear and damning conclusions: First, it states that “the Department [of State] did not fully assess risks and implement mitigation measures to reduce civilian causalities and legal concerns associated with the transfer of PGMs.” Pursuant to this conclusion, the report makes a recommendation that is only articulated in the classified version of the review and so cannot be reported upon. Second, the report concludes that State, “approved below-threshold arms transfers that included components of precision-guided munitions,” a particularly conniving maneuver that dis-assembled the arms transfers put to Congress for review due to their large size, and re-assembled them into smaller packages that would not require congressional approval.
Pompeo refused to sit for an interview with the IG after being briefed about the report’s conclusions, but R. Clarke Cooper, assistant secretary of the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, did send a letter to the OIG in which he claimed the Department still “takes the risk of civilian casualties extremely seriously” and stated that “the Department, working with the Department of Defense, established and implemented the Advanced Target Development Initiative,” which is meant to help train end-users of U.S.-made PGMs. Sadly, since this administration took office, the rate of civilian causalities caused by the Saudi-led Coalition has nearly doubled.
The OIG report came out four months after Trump fired State Department Inspector General Steve Linick at Pompeo’s request. Linick had not only been investigating these emergency weapons sales but had also been looking into claims that Pompeo had “improperly directed political appointees to run personal errands for him.” Linick’s successor, a Trump insider, has already quit, after only a few months in office. So, it was left to Diana Shaw, acting inspector general, to submit the report, referencing Linick’s removal from office in her very first sentence.
The OIG report reveals that, in addition to formally dismantling the civilian protection export controls, the Trump administration is also attempting to skirt what limitations remain in place by evading congressional review and placing lethal weapons in the hands of the Saudi coalition — all to the detriment of Yemeni civilians. Even in its redacted form, the report underlines a need for significant policy and legislative improvements, but to help experts strengthen laws and close loopholes in the arms export regime, this or the next administration should declassify and release the entire OIG report. In addition to reversing the harmful changes to the USML, CAT, anti-personnel landmines, and cluster munitions policies, lawmakers will also need to implement more robust measures to improve human rights standards in U.S. export laws. As Rachel Stohl and Diana Ohlbaum argue, Congress should “flip the script and require that sales obtain affirmative congressional approval … instead of trying to stop an objectionable sale.”
This pressing need to enhance congressional oversight goes well beyond the obvious humanitarian imperatives, although these are legion. Yemen is a human-made humanitarian tragedy, teetering on the brink of mass famine. Besides these heart-rending considerations, there are legal concerns as well. Given that the United States has knowledge of, and has provided substantial assistance to, its client states’ operations in Yemen, continued provision of lethal munitions and other forms of assistance may actually entail legal liability on the part of the United States, U.S. officials implementing the Yemen policy, and even corporate actors producing the munitions being deployed. If these attacks are indeed war crimes, there are at least three legal grounds, according to Oona Hathaway, under which the United States “would potentially be legally responsible for violations of international humanitarian law committed by the Saudi coalition in Yemen.” First: U.S. actors could be liable under a complicity theory of responsibility. Second: the United States could be liable under principles of State responsibility. Third: the United States could be in breach of Common Article 1 of the Geneva Conventions, which obliges state parties to “ensure respect” for the treaty.
These are matters that a Biden-Harris administration, if not the current administration, would need to urgently take up in order to better align U.S. arms exports with the imperative of atrocities prevention and civilian protection. Dozens of former senior Obama administration officials now agree and have said so publicly in an open letter. Although the support for the Saudis started while he was Vice President, Joe Biden has already signaled during his presidential campaign that he plans to change course, stating bluntly: “It is past time to end U.S. support for the war in Yemen.”
