David K. Shipler's Blog, page 15

By David K. Shipler
                Donald Trump certainly acted like a guilty man when it came to accusations that he and his campaign had cooperated with Russia in promoting his candidacy. If a playwright had created such a character, he would have been considered too obvious.                This is the fourth key question in assessing Russia’s actions during the 2016 campaign. The first three—whether the Russians hacked the Democrats’ emails, whether the Russians impersonated Americans online to exacerbate fissures in the society, and whether those activities helped elect Trump—were examined in Part One. Now we look at numbers 4 through 6.                4. Based on Trump’s display of anxiety about the Russia investigation, his attempts to stop it, his aides’ interactions with Russians, and the lies some told to Congress and FBI agents, the assumption of a cover-up seemed reasonable. Trump and some of his people acted as if they were hiding something illicit or illegal.Furthermore, the Mueller report said, dozens of Russian tweets and posts were cited or retweeted by campaign officials, including Donald J. Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Kellyanne Conway, and Michael T. Flynn. But there is no evidence that they knew of the Russian origins. And the investigation didn’t find cooperation or coordination or conspiracy. Rather, the evidence it lays out portrays a haphazard array of contacts among Americans and Russians in erratic pursuit of two apparent goals: profitable business opportunities and improved superpower relations.Several Trump associates and campaign advisors, such as Carter Page, overstated their closeness to Trump, evidently to impress Russian businessmen, some of whom may have exaggerated their connections to the Kremlin. Because of encrypted messaging, vanished digital communications, and refusal by some to talk to investigators, many gaps pockmark the picture. But what’s there seems less sinister than it appeared in the context of Russia’s program of hacking and disinformation. Without those cyber intrusions into the American political debate, the Trump-Russian contacts would have been regarded as unorthodox but probably not especially worrisome.It’s not uncommon for various countries’ officials to reach out to presidential candidates and their staffs, both to gauge future foreign policy and, they hope, promote friendly dialogue. But mixing aspirations for personal financial profit into governmental policy is unusual and problematic. It raises the specter of graft and corruption. President Vladimir Putin cleverly employs Russian oligarchs as tools of foreign affairs, and he surely sees Trump as a willing player on that field. Trump hardly ever divorces business from international policy—even promising North Korean Kim Jung-un that denuclearization would bring an economic boom to his country, courtesy of the United States.Nevertheless, the Mueller report portrays the Trump campaign as mostly passive and uninterested when Russians and their hopeful American contacts tried to set up meetings and discussions. One exception was Donald Trump Jr.’s eager response to a supposed Russian offer of dirt on Hillary Clinton, which never materialized.Another was campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s move, through a middleman, to end a business dispute by giving internal polling data to a Russian billionaire, who may or may not have received it. Manafort had received huge sums (plus a $30,000-to-$40,000 jar of black caviar) from Ukraine’s president, Viktor Yanukovych, and his pro-Russian party for political consulting. On Aug. 2, 2016, at the height of the campaign, Manafort met “with his long-time business associate Konstantin Kilimnik, who the FBI assesses to have ties to Russian intelligence,” according to the Mueller report. “Kilimnik requested the meeting to deliver in person a peace plan for Ukraine that Manafort acknowledged to the Special Counsel's Office was a ‘backdoor’ way for Russia to control part of eastern Ukraine; both men believed the plan would require candidate Trump 's assent to succeed (were he to be elected President).” Two weeks later, after news reports of his Ukraine connections, Manafort left the campaign but continued to give advice. Manafort also provided Kilimnik with information on the campaign’s strategy, which might have aided Russia’s disinformation efforts in targeting wedge issues to help Trump. The censored version of the Mueller report, however, contains no evidence that Manafort knew that Russians were masquerading as Americans online. More generally, the lack of substantive contact became apparent when Putin and other Kremlin officials floundered around after the election, trying to set up channels of discussion with the transition team and the incoming president.The prominent goal, according to the report, was improving relations, hardly an evil plan as long as US security interests weren’t compromised. Given that the country has only one president at a time, it’s customary during transitions for the incoming administration to defer on policy until after the inauguration, or at least to communicate on policy matters through the outgoing White House and the State Department’s established diplomatic channels.The Trump transition team departed from that protocol, most dramatically after Obama imposed new sanctions in late December 2016 to punish Russia for its election interference.The main conduit was Michael Flynn, in line to become Trump’s national security adviser. As head of the Defense Intelligence Agency under Obama, he had been keen to improve counter-terrorism cooperation with Russia. I recall hearing him wax ecstatic about being invited to visit Moscow by the head of Russian military intelligence, the same GRU that later hacked the Democrats’ emails, to discuss swapping intelligence on terrorists.Years later, after Obama’s sanctions three weeks beforeTrump’s inauguration, Flynn requested through Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak “that Russia not escalate the situation, not get into a ‘tit for tat,’ and only respond to the sanctions in a reciprocal manner,” according to the Mueller report.The appeal was successful, and a good thing, too. But Flynn inexplicably lied to FBI agents about his conversation. Perhaps he worried that he’d violated the 1799 Logan Act, which prohibits an unauthorized citizen from attempting to influence a foreign government in “any disputes or controversies with the United States.” But nobody has ever been prosecutedunder the law (there was one indictment in 1803), and the probability that an incoming national security adviser would be charged seems very remote. Instead, the crime that got Flynn indicted was the lie. He pleaded guilty and awaits sentencing.The Flynn-Kislyak conversation was legitimate, according to Jack Matlock, a veteran diplomat and former ambassador to the Soviet Union. “As the person in charge of our embassy in Moscow during several political campaigns,” he wrote, “I would often set up meetings of candidates and their staffs with Soviet officials. Such contacts are certainly ethical so long as they do not involve disclosure of classified information or attempts to negotiate specific issues.”5. The suspicion that Putin had compromising material on Trump laced much of the post-election discussion. Representative Adam Schiff, Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, has raised the question of money-laundering, but he has no answer to date. “If the Russians were laundering money through the Trump Organization,” he said, “the Russians would know it, the president would know it, and that could be very powerful leverage.”Mueller found no such evidence that has made public, although the report refers to twelve ongoing criminal prosecutions whose nature has not been disclosed. The paragraphs were blacked out.The principal known source of speculation on what Russians call “kompromat” is a dossier compiled by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent with extensive experience and contacts in Russia. The dossier nearly evaporated in Mueller’s report. His investigators spent two days interviewing Steele in London, according to The New York Times, and found and interviewed at least one of his sources, but apparently failed to verify the unsavory allegations of illicit and kinky sex, questionable financial dealings, or other behavior that could have made Trump vulnerable to blackmail.Late in the campaign, a Russian businessman, Giorgi Rtskhiladze, texted Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, “Stopped flow of tapes from Russia but not sure if there’s anything else.” The supposedly compromising tapes were fake, Rtskhiladze said he’d been told.It would have been very unlike Russian intelligence to neglect an opportunity to entrap a prominent American businessman like Trump. Such attempts were standard on the KGB’s checklist during the Soviet era, and it’s hard to imagine the practice having been abandoned under Putin. Given Trump’s obvious proclivities toward extramarital sex, the allegation struck Trump critics as credible. But Mueller’s report gives no account of the team’s efforts to check out any elements in the Steele dossier, and the lack of confirmation seems to put the matter to rest.6. The notion that Putin is embarked on a grand strategy “to undermine the US-led liberal democratic order,” as US intelligence agencies put it, has many adherents among experts, pundits and politicians across the spectrum. “Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency,” the intelligence report of January 2017 declared. But the theory seems illogical to Stephen F. Cohen, a retired professor of Russian history at Princeton and NYU who writes frequently on Russia. In his recent book, War With Russia? , he notes that from 2000, when Putin took over a country in chaos and poverty, “until the Ukrainian crisis erupted in 2014, much of Putin’s success and domestic popularity was based on an unprecedented expansion of Russia’s economic relations with Europe and, to a lesser extent, with the United States. Russia provided a third or more of the energy needs of several European Union countries while thousands of European producers, from farmers to manufacturers, found large new markets in Russia, as did scores of US corporations. “Why, then, would Putin want to destabilize Western democracies that were substantially funding Russia’s rebirth at home and as a great power abroad? . . . Putin never expressed such a goal or had such a motive.” A different appraisal comes from Michael McFaul, US ambassador to Russia under Obama. He sees what he calls Putin’s “assault on Western democracy” as a driving strategy. “The worldwide ideological struggle between capitalism and communism is history,” he writes, “but Russian President Vladimir Putin has anointed himself the leader of a renewed nationalist, conservative movement fighting a decadent West. . . . Putin believes he is fighting an ideological war with the West, and he has devoted tremendous resources to expanding the reach of his propaganda platforms in order to win.” McFaul calls for a mixture of containment and cooperation akin to the Cold War. He sees prospects for agreement where overlapping interests prevail, as in reducing nuclear arms and nuclear proliferation, combating terrorism, and limiting cyberattacks. To those could be added the goal of inducing North Korea to relinquish its burgeoning nuclear arsenal, a topic of discussion in recent days between Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jung-un.Cohen worries that the demonization of Putin precludes his being regarded as a national-security partner. In any event, there seems little prospect for a containment-cooperation approach without the kind of canny skill now absent in Washington. As long as Trump is in office overseeing an administration with thin expertise and sophistication, and devoid of orderly process to construct or implement coherent policy, Russia and the United States seem destined to hurtle along dangerously, hopefully not to an affirmative answer to the title of Cohen’s book, War With Russia?

By David K. Shipler
                Imprecise thinking about Russia has afflicted the United States in the wake of the 2016 election. The lines between fact and speculation have been blurred. The evidence of Russian misdeeds has been expanded into broad, unproven theories about Moscow’s motives and the impact on the election results. Legitimate contacts between Americans and Russians have been clouded with suspicion. And together, all these parts—both Russian activities and American reactions—have hobbled the ability of the United States to engage Russia in the kind of fruitful relationship that would promote American national interests.                The election interference was only part of a broad deterioration, notes Kenneth Yalowitz, a veteran diplomat who served many years in Moscow, and then as US ambassador to Georgia and Belarus. It was preceded by a series of damaging episodes that broke down dialogue. “The bureaucracies have no connections anymore,” he said. “There’s no systematic conversation any longer. We don’t know each other. Given the very difficult state of the relationship, this is the time we should be talking to each other.” Instead, he said, “Our policy is just sanctions and breaking agreements.”The downward slide can be mapped with landmarks of hostility: the West’s expansion of NATO to Russia’s borders, which ignited historic Russian fears of close encirclement; the European Union’s courting Ukraine, the home of defense industries and a Russian naval base; American support for street protesters’ ouster of Ukraine’s elected, pro-Moscow president; then Russia’s thinly-disguised invasion of eastern Ukraine and overt annexation of Crimea, which reanimated Western fears of aggressive expansionism; a Russian tit-for-tat maneuver in America’s back yard to help prop up the anti-US regime in Venezuela; Russia’s military intervention in Syria, which restored Moscow’s foothold in the Middle East; Moscow’s violations of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, and President Trump’s scrapping the agreement instead of renegotiating; Russian backing for right-wing racist parties in Europe; Moscow’s cyber intrusions into politics and elections in Estonia, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Germany, France, and Austria; and Russian money to support Brexit, seen as part of a grand plan by the Kremlin to break up European cohesion.                It’s a grim and dangerous list. When the election is added, with the surrounding political anger, the rigor and clarity required to evaluate what has happened is going to be hard to achieve. Trump, who campaigned on improving the relationship, has handcuffed himself by appearing unduly pro-Russia. He has fawned over President Vladimir Putin, downplayed the election interference, tried to thwart Mueller’s investigation, and left real policy to such hawks as National Security Adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.                Moreover, the American debate has been muffled, thanks largely to Russia’s having cemented its standing as an adversary. Unorthodox voices have been marginalized as they question conventional wisdom and hold Washington at least partly responsible for the rising tensions.                 The election experience illustrates the problem. The toxin of Russian cyber intrusions has spread into related questions, poisoning the capacity to avoid guesswork and assumptions.For example, if we accept the conclusion of the Mueller report and US intelligence that Russia hacked Democrats’ emails and impersonated Americans online to exacerbate the society’s fissures, does that mean that they threw the election to Trump? Since Putin said publicly last July that he had hoped Trump would win, does that mean Trump’s campaign coordinated? Since Trump has been so pro-Russian, does that mean that he’s being blackmailed? And since Putin has directed broad cyber intrusions at other countries, does that mean that he seeks to undermine American-led liberal democracy?Until the Mueller report, and perhaps since, many of Trump’s critics would answer yes to these questions. But each one deserves a critical look. And to do that, it’s worth hearing from some of the skeptics who have been largely ignored in the discussion. Some of their arguments are implausible, dismissive of Russian wrongdoing, and insufficiently outraged by a foreign government’s attempt to distort our most sacred political enterprise. But as John Stuart Mill wrote, considering an opposing view enables “the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”This, Part One, examines the first three of six key issues, reports on the dissenters without endorsing their positions, and distills the findings of the Mueller investigation.                 1. The hacking of prominent Democrats, the Democratic National Committee, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee was traced by some US intelligence officials to the Russian military intelligence agency, the GRU. To a non-technical eye, the detailed evidence that has been publicized looks persuasive, but much of the methodology, labeled “investigative technique,” is blacked out in the Mueller report. Documentation supporting the conclusions remains classified.                Skepticism has been expressed by a group of 19 former intelligence officers, who believe that purloined emails could have come from an inside leaker rather than an outside hacker. They wrote in March: “We recently discovered that the files reveal a FAT (File Allocation Table) system property. This shows that the data had been transferred to an external storage device, such as a thumb drive, before WikiLeaks posted them.”According to Bill Binney, a computer expert who held a prominent position at the National Security Agency, metadata in the emails posted by WikiLeaks indicated that they had been downloaded at much higher speeds than would be possible over an internet connection—49.1 megabytes per second as opposed to 12 megabytes per second, which was the fastest transatlantic internet speed he and colleagues could achieve. That supported his conclusion that the download was not done remotely.                Binney’s doubts caught the attention of President Trump, who requested that Pompeo, then CIA director, meet with him, which they did on July 24, 2017. Pompeo asked Binney if he’d talk to the FBI and the NSA, and Binney agreed. But the agencies didn’t follow up.The Mueller report does not directly address Binney’s assessments of download speeds or the FAT file, but it does suggest that after the Russian hacking, the email transfer to WikiLeaks could have been made in person “by intermediaries who visited [WikiLeaks head Julian Assange] during the summer of 2016.”                2. Several Russian entities created false identities online, in which fake organizations and users posing as Americans promoted demonstrations and carried out “a social media campaign designed to provoke and amplify political and social discord in the United States,” according to the Mueller report. It’s not clear how much reinvestigation was done by Mueller’s office. The report appears to rely mainly on the intelligence agencies’ intercepts and cyber tracing whose specifics remain classified. Mueller identifies the main purveyor of the disinformation as the Internet Research Agency (IRA), based in St. Petersburg, which “received funding from Russian oligarch Yevgeniy Prigozhin and companies he controlled,” the report states. “Prigozhin is widely reported to have ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.”Putin confirmed his preference for Trump over Hillary Clinton in July 2018, when he answered a reporter’s question at the Helsinki summit by saying that he wanted Trump “because he talked about bringing the US-Russia relationship back to normal.” So the intelligence agencies had gotten that right at least 18 months earlier, when they reported Putin’s wishes.Nevertheless, doubts about the agencies’ conclusions, in their assessment released in January 2017, were raised last June by Jack Matlock, a lifelong Russian specialist and former US ambassador to the Soviet Union. The merits of the assessment are difficult to judge, since the unclassified version contains no sources or documentation to support its findings. But Matlock was puzzled by the process, which relied on a discreet task force of the CIA, FBI, and NSA, isolated from the broader agencies where contradictory analysis might have been heard. Particularly odd, he wrote, was the exclusion of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, which is the “organ most expert on the GRU,” and the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), which he called the most competent to assess foreign intentions and political actions. “In my day,” Matlock said of the INR, “it reported accurately on Gorbachev’s reforms when the CIA leaders were advising that Gorbachev had the same aims as his predecessors.” Without inputs from the State and Defense Departments’ intelligence agencies, Matlock noted, the report could not be considered an assessment by the entire “intelligence community.”The process bypassed a system established after intelligence agencies had incorrectly reported that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction—the pretext for the 2003 US invasion. Called “analysis of alternatives,” it was not used in the Russian study, which raised a red flag for Scott Ritter, a former Marine intelligence officer who helped oversee the disarmament of Iraq’s WMDs after the first Gulf War and became a United Nations weapons inspector. He called the approach on Russia “eerily reminiscent of the analytical blinders that hampered the US intelligence community” in assessing the Iraq case.Nevertheless, neither Matlock nor Ritter nor any other respected specialist has effectively rebutted the conclusion that Russia sought to sway voters.                 3. Did Russians tip the balance to Trump in a tight race? Some of the president’s critics think so. “They subverted and sabotaged our election,” Mark Shields declared on the PBS NewsHour. But that’s a leap of logic. They tried, yes, but no reliable research was done to trace attitudes of Trump voters back to Russian-inspired bots, tweets, or Facebook posts.The hacked emails were mostly benign, with some mildly embarrassing content revealing the Democratic National Committee’s strong tilt toward Clinton and away from Bernie Sanders. That paled in comparison with other campaign issues. More important might have been Russians masquerading as Americans, duping real Americans into retweeting, liking, forwarding, and even following appeals to organize demonstrations promoted by Kremlin-backed players. That contributed to the general atmosphere of division and bigotry being promoted by Trump. But while “Facebook estimated the IRA reached as many as 126 million persons through its Facebook accounts,” the Mueller report states, the election analyst Nate Silver has played down the likely impact. “If you wrote out a list of the most important factors in the 2016 election,” he said, “I'm not sure that Russian social media memes would be among the top 100. The scale was quite small and there's not much evidence that they were effective.”                The Russian effort “blended into the background and had a cumulative effect over the entirety of the campaign,” Silver wrote, so its impact is hard to measure. It struck the same negative themes about Hillary Clinton as the Trump campaign and mainstream media coverage, “adding fuel to the right fire,” Silver said, portraying her as “dishonest and untrustworthy” and contributing to a decline in voter turnout among African-Americans. That drop “may have been inevitable,” he added, since black turnout had been buoyed in 2012 by Obama’s presence on the ballot.                Still, Silver called himself an agnostic on whether there was an impact. The disguised Russian campaign “could easily have had chronic, insidious effects that could be mistaken for background noise but which in the aggregate were enough to swing the election by 0.8 percentage points toward Trump — not a high hurdle to clear because 0.8 points isn’t much at all.”                That feeds into the intelligence report’s undocumented conclusion:  “We assess the Russian intelligence services would have seen their election influence campaign as at least a qualified success because of their perceived ability to impact public discussion.” Therefore, the Kremlin will continue to do it, the intelligence agencies predicted, “because of their belief that these can accomplish Russian goals relatively easily without significant damage to Russian interests.”                Next, Part Two: Trump’s responses and Putin’s motives.               

By David K. Shipler
                Of all the self-inflicted wounds by the United States since 9/11, the flawed military commissions set up to try suspected foreign terrorists rank high on the list. At Guantanamo, the commissions have been bogged down in a swamp of dubious ethical, legal, and procedural practices. Their constitutionality has been challenged, their partial secrecy denounced.Some of their military judges have demonstrated bias, and one was reprimanded this week by the powerful Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, which vacated all his orders back to Nov. 19, 2015, the date he initiated a conflict of interest by applying to the Justice Department to be an immigration judge. All rulings on his orders by the Court of Military Commission Review were also set aside, wiping the slate almost clean of pretrial decisions in the case, now requiring re-argument on many of the issues. It was a telling illustration of the mess that’s been created.Without the military commissions, it’s a good bet that the most prominent prisoners at Guantanamo would have been executed years ago, or at least be sitting on death row waiting for the needle. They would have been tried in civilian federal courts, which Republicans have blocked, although the courts are the jewel in the crown of the American judicial system. If juries had found them guilty, it’s hard to imagine anything but the death penalty. Instead, the alleged organizers of the 9/11 attacks and the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen have been in U.S. custody for more than 15 years, at taxpayers’ expense, waiting for trial by military commissions that are so ill-conceived as to be vulnerable to obstruction by prosecutors and multiple motions by defense attorneys seeking to guard their clients’ rights. Among five suspects in the 9/11 plot is the alleged mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. This week’s appeals-court ruling involved Abd al Rahim Al-Nashiri, charged with orchestrating the Cole bombing. Both men were tortured by the CIA in “black sites” before being transferred to Guantanamo. Al-Nashiri this week was granted a Writ of Mandamus, which he sought after his lawyers learned that the former judge in his case, Air Force Colonel Vance Spath, had been secretly promoting himself for a position with the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review. He had even cited his role in the Al-Nashiri case as a credential, and had submitted one of his pretrial orders as a writing sample. (Immigration judges are employees of the Justice Department, not part of the independent judiciary. And while the military commissions are run by the Defense Department, the Justice Department is involved in rule-making and appeals; a Justice Department lawyer played a major role in the team prosecuting Al-Nashiri.)The decision of the three-judge panel was unanimous. Written by Judge David Tatel, the opinion  stopped short of citing any evidence of actual bias in Spath’s orders—many of which were adverse to the defendant—but it noted that “jurists must avoid even the appearance of partiality. Judge Spath’s conduct falls squarely on the impermissible side of the line.” The opinion continued: “It is beyond question that judges may not adjudicate cases involving their prospective employers. The risk, of course, is that an unscrupulous judge may be tempted to use favorable judicial decisions to improve his employment prospects—to get an application noticed, to secure an interview, and ultimately to receive an offer.”To a layman’s eye, some of Spath’s rulings seemed to fit that pattern. One instance came after defense attorneys were warned by their officer in charge, Marine Brig. Gen. John Baker, “that he had lost confidence in the confidentiality of Guantanamo’s meeting spaces,” according to Tatel’s opinion. But Spath adamantly denied that any cause for concern existed that privileged consultations between Al-Nashiri and his lawyers were being monitored. He denied the defense’s motion for discovery, even after lawyers found a hidden microphone, which the government claimed was inoperative.When the three of Al-Nashiri’s lawyers, who were civilian employees of the Defense Department, concluded that professional ethics required them to withdraw from the case, General Baker granted their request. Spath ordered Baker to rescind his decision. Baker refused, so Spath ordered the general fined $1000 and confined to his quarters for 21 days.Last September, after retiring from the Air Force, Spath took the oath as an immigration judge, where he is making life-changing decisions for immigrants. His successor on the case, Colonel Shelly Schools, then followed the same route, seeking and accepting an immigration judgeship. When the defense got wind of it, and the government confirmed it, she had to step down as well.Military involvement in the terrorism cases began when President George W. Bush, ignoring the legislative branch, established tribunals to process Guantanamo detainees and others. For several years, he dodged and weaved in and out of a series of adverse Supreme Court rulings, finally enlisting a too-compliant Congress in 2005 and then in 2006 to establish military tribunals and commissions. Initially they could admit hearsay evidence, the fruits of illegal searches, and confessions coerced under torture.Then the Military Commissions Act of 2009 cleaned things up a bit but still empowered the executive branch to try a vast array of cases, even inside the United States, involving not U.S. citizens but “alien unprivileged enemy belligerents.”  A president and his attorney general can choose whether to send such defendants to trial before civilian judges and citizen jurors in federal criminal courts, or before panels of military officers in commissions. This is an enormous grant of executive power to evade a court system whose procedures have been seasoned by generations of constitutional precedent. The absence of such extensive precedent for military commissions is one reason for the litigation that is delaying trials.Under the law now in effect, appeals from the commissions can be heard by the appeals court in D.C., which can even second-guess a guilty verdict by reexamining the evidence. Statements by the accused or witnesses would be inadmissible if made under torture or “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment,” but less severe coercion might be allowed during capture or combat if a military judge finds the information “reliable and possessing sufficient probative value.” Because much of the torture remains classified, it is hard for defense lawyers to argue in detail how it was used to extract information that should be ruled inadmissible.As in civilian courts, the prosecution must disclose exculpatory facts to the accused, who may summon witnesses and confront those against him, but hearsay may also be admitted under restricted conditions. As in civilian courts, complex procedures governing classified evidence seem, on paper, to protect the accused against conviction by secret information he cannot challenge. It remains to be seen how effective that protection will be in practice.Some judges and some military lawyers who appear on both sides have shown impressive legal ethics and courage to work for justice within a system “flawed in both design and execution,” as General Baker, the Chief Defense Counsel, put it in a 2006 speech at Georgetown. “Put simply, the military commissions in their current state are a farce,” Baker said. “Instead of being a beacon for the rule of law, the Guantánamo Bay military commissions have been characterized by delay, government misconduct and incompetence, and even more delay.” The rest of his address is a point-by-point indictment of the system and its government practitioners. No system should depend entirely on the goodness of its participants. Our history contains no guarantee that one or another citizen who rises to authority will wield the immense power of the state with wisdom, fairness, and humaneness. Fragmentation of power, as with a judiciary independent of the executive branch, is the most reliable restraint.In his speech, General Baker quoted Justice Robert Jackson, whose opening argument as chief prosecutor at Nuremberg contained this admonition on trying our enemies: “We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well.”

By David K. Shipler
                In the 52 years since Israel took control of the West Bank from Jordan during the Six-Day War, the prospect of attaining peace by granting some form of self-government to the area’s Palestinian Arabs has hovered over the conflict like an apparition of hope or dread, depending on your political view. Now, that approach to solving the conflict might be closed off by Israel’s tight election results, since Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is positioned to form a right-wing coalition.In the first two decades after the 1967 war, the notion of an independent Palestinian state was so anathema to most Israeli Jews that it was supported only on the far left, mainly by Communists in the tiny Hadash party. Even liberal Peace Now leaders, who opposed Jewish settlements that were being built in the West Bank, avoided advocating Palestinian statehood for fear that their movement would lose credibility in Israel’s mainstream.Indeed, Israel’s 1978 Camp David accord with Egypt, which led to a peace treaty in 1979, stopped short of calling for a Palestinian state, providing instead for “autonomy,” which was ill-defined and never implemented. Once statehood gained traction in Israeli politics following the 1993 Oslo accords with the Palestine Liberation Organization, support among Israelis usually oscillated just above and below 50 percent, with occasional spikes during peaceful stretches.That support itself carried so many caveats that it would have been impossible to convert into statehood without broad changes of attitude among both Israelis and Palestinians. Spates of terrorism by Palestinians knocked off some percentage points, as would be expected, but even in relatively calm periods, Israeli Jews expressed serious doubts about statehood defined as Palestinians might accept, and Palestinians had their own reservations about the compromises they would have to make.A joint Israeli-Palestinian poll in December 2013, for example, found an abstract two-state solution supported by 63 percent of Israelis and 53 percent of Palestinians. But the numbers declined as details were specified. Israeli withdrawal from all but 3 percent of the West Bank—all Jewish settlements except those in several large blocks—was favored by only 44 percent of Israelis. A Palestine with no army and only a strong police and multinational force appealed to 60 percent of Israelis but just 28 percent of Palestinians. Dividing Jerusalem was accepted by merely 37 and 32 percent of Israelis and Palestinians respectively—each side wanted the city all for itself. And in December 2012, a refugee solution providing for compensation to Palestinian refugees, their right of return to the new Palestinian state, and an undefined number admitted to Israel, won only minority support on both sides—39 percent of Israelis and 49 percent of Palestinians.It’s conceivable that inspirational Israeli and Palestinian leaders could have moved both populations toward accommodation if there had been a long run of nonviolence. The Palestinians have never had such a figure, and since the ’67 war Israel has had only one—Yitzhak Rabin, the old warrior who signed the Oslo agreement and was then assassinated by a right-wing religious Jew. Netanyahu, now poised for a fifth term after yesterday’s elections, has narrowed Israel’s options by aggressively expanding Jewish settlements.“Settlements” is a misnomer. Some began as tiny outposts of house trailers under Labor governments, and grew intensively under the Likud government of Prime Minister Menachem Begin. Many are now small cities of apartments, synagogues, swimming pools, schools, and the like, so extensive that few contiguous swatches of territory remain to make a coherent Palestinian state without wholesale withdrawal of Jewish residents. And just before the election, Netanyahu—emboldened by the blank check President Trump has given for Israeli dominance—announced that if reelected he would annex the settlements by extending Israeli “sovereignty.”That would end the possibility of a Palestinian state, relegating Israel to a quasi-democracy. The 2.6 million West Bank Palestinians would remain disenfranchised under Israeli control. The term “apartheid,” already used by Israel’s severest critics, would become an appropriate description. An expanded Israel would face a demographic time bomb. The Jewish and Arab populations are now about even in the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, if you count the Palestinians in Israel proper (one-fifth of Israeli citizens are Arab); the Gaza Strip (now ruled by the radical Palestinian movement Hamas); East Jerusalem (annexed by Israel); and the West Bank (a patchwork of Israeli and Palestinian administrations). The disparities in birthrates guarantee that Jews would eventually be a minority ruling over an Arab majority.The center has not held on either side. Israelis and Palestinians have radicalized each other. As Palestinians have watched the spread of Jewish settlements and suffered the indignation and violence of Israeli army checkpoints and arrests, their politicians, journalists, teachers, and religious clerics have peddled mythical history and fantastic dreams that activate Israelis’ existential fears.In the last several decades, Palestinian society has been infected by the falsehood that no Jewish temples ever stood in the Old City of Jerusalem. Go to a West Bank school and you’re likely to hear this from Arab students, who parrot the argument that the two Jewish temples of biblical times are fictions concocted by Israelis to rationalize their claims to the land. This is a toxic lie, for it says to Israeli Jews: You have no roots here, you have no legitimacy here, you are interlopers and colonialists.Furthermore, Palestinians have increasingly championed their dreams of returning to Arab villages destroyed in Israel’s 1948 war of independence, or since converted to Jewish towns. High school students in Ramallah, on the West Bank, told me several years ago that they were from Jaffa (a formerly Arab city) or such-and-such Arab town and were merely “living in Ramallah.” In fact, no one in their immediate families had lived in those towns since their grandparents 71 years ago. In a cultural center in Dheisheh refugee slum near Bethlehem, each room is named after a destroyed Arab village inside Israel. This says to Israeli Jews: Your country will be overtaken by Palestinians.This might be empty propaganda, but it is regarded seriously by the Israeli right, and feeds the anxiety that a West Bank Palestinian state would be a well of constant struggle against the Jewish state. In addition, security concerns animate anxiety across much of the Israeli political spectrum. That’s a product of bad experience.The Oslo accords stimulated Palestinian radicals to disrupt the peace process by staging uprisings and suicide terrorist attacks, which provoked disproportionate Israeli attacks on the West Bank by air and artillery. Israel’s unilateral military withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 produced not peaceful coexistence but rockets instead, fired randomly into Israel by Hamas, which came to power after Israel’s departure.I am told by Israeli friends that Palestinians on the West Bank are hardly on the radar screen of most Jews, especially the young, who have lived their entire lives in the current situation. Israeli news coverage is minimal, no peace negotiations are underway, and terrorism is at a relatively low ebb. That is due in part to a security wall that Israel built along the West Bank border after earlier waves of attacks, and in part to efforts by the Palestinian Authority to cooperate with Israeli security in preventing terrorism. (The Oslo accords gave the Authority limited patches of West Bank territory to run.)               It could be that if Netanyahu goes ahead with annexation, Palestinians might want to get Israelis’ attention—in ways that wouldn’t be pretty. And if a Palestinian state is foreclosed, no other way to resolve the conflict is apparent. Israel would have deprived itself of flexibility, rarely a mark of wise policy. Slamming the door on others also means slamming the door on yourself.

By David K. Shipler
                Israel is surrounded by a minefield that protects it from critics who step carelessly, such as the new congresswoman, Ilhan Omar. The explosives, planted by history, are the ancient anti-Semitic stereotypes that will blow up the argument of anyone who triggers them, no matter how cogent her position is otherwise. That is what Omar has experienced. She first detonated her case with the longstanding caricature of moneyed Jews buying undue influence, and then with the old calumny of Jews as disloyal to their own country. In among those lethal comments, her valid points and humane pleas were covered by debris.You can’t truly appreciate the power of stereotypes without a sense of history. To understand the recent uproar and ugly resonance of the blackface worn years ago by Virginia’s Governor Ralph Northam and Attorney General Mark Herring, for example, you have to know about the demeaning minstrel shows of the past, which pictured blacks as stupid, lazy, and comically inept. To grasp the full implications of Omar’s statements, you have to recognize the nerves they touch in the collective memory of oppression.             It’s not enough to condemn someone who stumbles around in this landscape. Omar needs the kind of guidance that has been provided in the past by the Anti-Defamation League, which has engaged and taught, not just blamed, those guilty of anti-Semitic statements. In 1981, for example, after Rev. Bailey Smith, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, declared, “God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew,” the ADL invited him and a delegation on a nine-day visit to Israel. Officials who met him didn’t bring up the comment and portrayed him as well-meaning, probably unknowing. He confessed that he should not have singled out the Jews, when he meant that the way to God was only through Jesus Christ.So one has to wonder whether Omar knew what she was saying, and whether she is educable. Born in Somalia, fleeing at age eight with her family to a refugee camp in Kenya, and finally making it to the United States, she has clearly absorbed—perhaps unconsciously—at least a couple of the most virulent images from which Jews have suffered through centuries.              Does she know of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, that Russian-inspired hoax about a fabricated Jewish conspiracy to dominate the globe? Does she realize that the Nazis mobilized hatred of Jews by picturing them as conspiratorially rich and secretly powerful, harboring loyalties to their own people above the nation? Does she understand how, even now in some lands, Jews have been regarded as “others,” apart, suspect? Is she aware that overt hatred of Jews is on the rise in the United States, with a spike in anti-Semitic attacks, and that the ugliness is increasingly visible in France, England, Sweden, Hungary, and elsewhere? Of course her comments do not rise to those levels. But mines are sensitive to the slightest touch. You need a clear map to avoid them. If you want to challenge Israeli policies and American support for Israel, there are plenty of ways without saying that American legislators are influenced by Jewish money: “It’s all about the Benjamins baby,” she tweeted in February, a reference to Benjamin Franklin’s portrait on hundred-dollar bills. After being condemned by the House Democratic leadership, she apologized.If you want to criticize Aipac, which lobbies hard for Israel, there are plenty of ways without summoning up the specter of dual loyalty: “I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it’s OK for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country,” she declared at a forum last week. As the Democratic caucus has tried to come up with a palatable resolution against anti-Semitism, anti-Islamism, or hatred in general, Omar has not apologized.As the historian Deborah Lipstadt noted on NPR last week, all you have to do to find legitimate criticisms of Israeli policy clean of anti-Semitism is to go to haaretz.com, the website of the liberal Israeli newspaper, or read the arguments on the floor of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. Many Israelis are tougher on themselves than anybody else is. The right-wing government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is excoriated from the left for his new alignment with a party of anti-Arab bigots, for continued occupation of the West Bank, for violence against Palestinians there and in Gaza, for expanding Jewish settlements on West Bank land that might otherwise be available for a Palestinian state, and for failing to press ahead toward a two-state solution.Palestinians share responsibility for the stalemate: terrorism, rockets from Gaza, rejection of past Israeli offers of compromise, and the like—all adding up to stubborn miscalculations and self-defeating dogmatism. What you don’t hear from Omar is any criticism of the Palestinian side. Nor has she demonstrated, at least so far, a grasp of the situation’s complexity that would inform her arguments and make them more persuasive.Omar attributes the charges of anti-Semitism to her election as one of the first two Muslim women in Congress, along with Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. But Tlaib, of Palestinian background with a grandmother living on the West Bank, has avoided the anti-Semitic comments that have made Omar’s pro-Palestinian points easy to discredit. Indeed, her compassionate remarks at last week’s forum have been rendered sharp and brittle by her one-sentence dual-loyalty inference. Omar said that while her Jewish constituents in Minnesota speak of Israeli security fears, “We never really allow the space for the stories of Palestinians seeking safety and sanctuary. . . The demonization and the silencing of the particular pain and suffering of people should not be OK and normal.”Many older members of Congress, “there since before we were born,” she quipped, “were fighting for people to be free to live in dignity in South Africa. I know that many of them fight for people around the world to have dignity, to have self-determination. So I know, I know that they care about these things. But now that you have two Muslims that say, yeah, there’s a group of people that we want to have the dignity that you want everybody else to have, we get to be called names and we get to be labeled hateful? We know what hateful’s like. We experience it every single day.”As a Muslim, she said, “When I hear my Jewish constituents or friends or colleagues to speak about Palestinians who don’t want safety or Palestinians who aren’t deserving . . . I never go in the dark place of saying, here’s a Jewish person, they’re talking about Palestinians, Palestinians are Muslim, maybe they’re Islamophobic. I never allow myself to go there.” She has been vilified and threatened with death. “I know what intolerance looks like, so I’m sensitive when someone says, ‘The words you use, Ilhan, are examples of intolerance.’ And I am conscious of that, and I feel pained by that. . . . We get to be labeled, and that ends the discussion, and we end up defending that, and nobody ever gets to have the proper debate of, what is happening with Palestine?”Omar is right that legitimate criticism of Israel has been too readily branded as anti-Semitic. The line has been blurred by zealous pro-Israel Americans who apparently don’t realize that when the distinction is not made by Israel’s supporters, the line is blurred for Israel’s opponents as well. This is a symbiotic relationship of sloppy thinking and hateful rhetoric that feeds both sides and makes impossible any serious focus on real issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.It would be healthy to have a cogent opposition in Congress to the reflexive US support for any and all Israeli policies. But it has to be precise and focused and fact-based, and not wander off course where it lets itself get blown apart by the mines of anti-Semitism.

By David K. Shipler
                “When you strike at a king, you must kill him.” So said Ralph Waldo Emerson, as recalled by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. It is an admonition that ought to be placed as a screen saver on the computers of all the eager Democrats in the House of Representatives who are licking their chops at the prospect of impeaching President Trump. A king who survives an attempt on his throne can be wild with vengeance, especially when backed by zealous toadies and street fighters.                  If the report by special counsel Robert Mueller turns out to be an anti-climax after nearly two years of hype, Republicans who have circled the wagons around Trump will probably remain in place. As long as they don’t see Trump as a political liability, he’s safe, for impeachment is a legal-political hybrid. Without a smoking gun linking him explicitly to Russian manipulation of the 2016 election, hardly any House Republicans would vote for articles of impeachment, and the Republican-led Senate would fall far short of the two-thirds needed for conviction. The Republican Party of 2019 is a very different animal from the Republican Party of 1974, when its leaders, Senator Barry Goldwater among them, told Richard Nixon to resign or be impeached and convicted. Therefore, two other scenarios for dumping Trump seem more conceivable:                  1. A Democratic electoral sweep in 2020 decisive enough to force the Republican Party into a cowering fit of reform. This is the preferable outcome. If Democrats take the White House and the Senate, and keep or increase their majority in the House, Republicans might regroup as a more centrist, responsibly conservative movement that conducts serious debates over serious issues. Instead of rightist radicalism that favors the destruction of government, a reborn Republican Party might try to govern on behalf of a broader array of Americans.                Such wishful thinking can become reality only with a defeat resounding enough to discredit the hard right. It would be good for the Republican Party and good for the country as a whole, but it requires an uprising of voters who have had their fill of hateful extremism. And that can happen only if the Democrats figure out how to tap the burning energy of their angriest supporters on the left without scaring the wits out of centrists who fear dramatic upheavals in the American system.                The Democrats’ Medicare for all is a great idea—you’d be hard pressed to find a senior who didn’t love Medicare. The Green New Deal is a call to arms against the lethal dangers of climate change, albeit with some impractical goals. Gun control, voting rights, and the like are popular policies already being set into motion symbolically through House-passed bills. They will die in the Republican Senate, but at least they are on the record for Americans to see. Democratic success might depend less on policy, though, than on a presidential candidate who comes across as authentic to the middle ground of independent voters. She or he has to have the gift of charisma and an articulate vision of decency and progress that speaks to citizens who feel alienated from the nation’s sordid politics, marginalized by its social change, and left behind by its prosperity. A mobilization of conscience and renewal is required, a New Patriotism.  2. In the face of probable criminal indictments, a resignation by Trump in exchange for a pardon by his successor, Mike Pence, and pardons for his family members who are also in jeopardy.A sitting president cannot be indicted, according to current Justice Department guidelines, but from what we know of various cases already brought by Mueller and federal prosecutors, plus congressional testimony by the president’s former lawyer Michael Cohen, Trump appears likely to have committed numerous crimes before taking office—including bank fraud and tax fraud—and several as president, including illegal campaign expenditures in the form of hush money to the porn star Stormy Daniels. More serious would be a special counsel finding that he also committed perjury and obstruction of justice.If Trump thought that he was likely to be prosecuted after leaving office, a reelection bid would be a big gamble. If he lost, a Democratic president could hardly be expected to issue him a pardon as Republican President Gerald Ford did for Nixon. But if Trump resigned with a pardon from Pence, he would be home free, at least as far as federal charges go. New York State could still file against him for violating state tax and other local laws provided that statutes of limitation had not run out.A wrinkle in this scenario could have Trump losing the 2020 election, then resigning before the inauguration, giving the presidency to Pence just in time for a pardon. Or, Trump could pardon himself, although that’s a constitutionally debatable act with strong arguments on both sides. The Constitution sets no limits on the pardoning power, but common law as explained by William Blackstone, the 18th-century British legal scholar, precludes judging one’s own case, as Alan Hirsch observes in Impeaching the President .  That was “a sacred principle” for Blackstone, Hirsch writes, “and our founding fathers cited it routinely, including James Madison in The Federalist.”No president has ever been removed from office through the impeachment process sketched by the Framers of the Constitution. Andrew Johnson, who opposed universal suffrage by blacks after the Civil War and vetoed civil rights legislation, went to trial but survived by merely one vote in the Senate. Nixon was caught covering up his operatives’ break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate hotel, and enlisting the IRS and other federal agencies against political opponents. Clinton was acquitted by the Senate on impeachment charges of obstruction of justice and perjury in a civil suit alleging sexual harassment.And Trump? We shall see. Conviction for “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors,” in the Constitution’s words, can encompass a range of undefined behaviors that probably don’t have to be prosecutable crimes. We have already seen that Trump is incompetent in foreign policy, partial to nepotism, corrupt in using the presidency to enrich himself and his family, inept at running the federal government, emotionally unstable, contemptuous of factual reality, impulsively authoritarian, ignorant of history, disdainful of the rule of law, hostile to the constitutional separation of powers, demagogic in exploiting racial and ethnic hatreds, and on and on. But his dramatic flaws were clearly visible before his election. Millions of voters didn’t mind. Trump is dangerous, but unless the upcoming Mueller report and congressional investigations persuade the bulk of his supporters of that fact, they would feel disenfranchised and betrayed by impeachment. Using the ultimate tool of impeachment would—based on what is known so far—provoke an enraged sense of disenfranchisement and betrayal at the grassroots. No Democratic candidate could possibly win them over.Until some new, dramatic revelations surface, the best hope lies in the ballot box.

By David K. Shipler
                The United States desperately needs a Lewis Carroll to depict the satirical farce of our Wonderland. We have fallen into an alternative universe that cannot be captured by any responsible news reporter scrupulous about facts or careful nonfiction author tethered to footnotes. Only an imaginative talent for the bizarre can give us our current equivalents of the Hatter of the Mad Tea Party, the disappearing Cheshire Cat, the tyrannical Queen of Hearts with her dictum, “Off with his head!” Not to mention the Jabberwocky’s “Twas brillig, and the slithy toves, did gyre and gimble in the wabe.” He could be wearing a MAGA hat. Oh, for a Lewis Carroll!                The latest scene would be President Trump’s fictional southern border, a place of dystopian invasion by swarthy, half-bestial creatures pouring in with drugs and criminal intent, waved on by gleeful Democrats jumping up and down with joy unrestrained. But fear not! The Great Wall of Trump hermetically seals the dark evil from the pure white good, and all is calmly virtuous inside. And by the way, when the wall is not actually built, the Trumpists merely have to say that it is being constructed, and then pretend that it magically stands even where nobody can see it. And all who hear the Jabberwocky’s enticing poetry dream peacefully between their pure white sheets.                  Exaggerated fantasies of fictitious threats are not unheard of in American history. Driven by fears of French subversion, the Alien and Sedition Acts under President John Adams criminalized criticism of the government and subjected foreigners to arrest and deportation without cause or due process. President Woodrow Wilson led a campaign of paranoia, portraying opponents of entry into World War I as disloyal and deserving “a firm hand of repression.” Under him, the 1917 Espionage Act facilitated the prosecution of 2,000 socialists, anarchists, other political dissidents and labor union leaders. The 1918 Sedition Act set criminal penalties for “any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about” the American form of government, the Constitution, the flag, the military, or its uniforms. Imaginary dangers from Japanese-Americans during World War II landed them in very real internment camps. And the McCarthy era of nonsensical anxiety about communist infiltration generated career-busting witch hunts.                Against that background, Trump’s manipulation of his national-emergency power to move a few billion dollars around looks like a moderate test of the constitutional system’s checks and balances, but hardly the devastating wrecking ball that opponents have described. It is unwise, opportunistic, and contemptuous of the ingenious separation-of-powers mechanism that the Framers invented. If adopted as standard practice, it could also be used by future, liberal presidents to declare national emergencies in health care, climate change, and gun violence, as the few Republicans willing to stand up from their party’s supine position have warned.                However, the American system has proved capable of self-correction, at least to a point. When Republicans led by Thomas Jefferson came to power—the good old days of the now-extinct Republicans—all those convicted under the Sedition Act were pardoned, and the Alien Acts either expired or were abandoned into disuse. The 1918 Sedition Act was repealed in 1921. Some provisions of the 1917 Espionage Act remain, mostly unemployed, although they were invoked by the Obama administration to charge some leakers. The Supreme Court ultimately ruled against the Japanese internment, and Sen. Joseph McCarthy was eventually discredited.                In other words, the pendulum swings, and the gravity of reason has inevitably pulled it back from the most extreme point of its arc.                But a different level of damage is being done to American society in the Trump era, and it could be long-lasting. It is the psychological destruction of truth as the final arbiter of common sense. It is the widespread acceptance by millions of citizens of the mirages projected by Trump and his propaganda machine of Fox News, Sinclair Broadcasting, Shawn Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and others. They are masters at making reality appear suspect. They follow the method once outlined by a Soviet professor who defined propaganda as “a truth, a truth, a truth, and then a lie.” Limbaugh is especially skillful at mixing lies into truths so inseparably that it can take research to disentangle them.                The Trump phenomenon coincides with the decline of the once high professionalism and financial struggles of most news media. It thrives on the internet’s ironic capacity to both inform and deceive—making more information available than ever before, and making it harder than ever to judge accuracy. The psychological damage to the American mind is worsened by the near-term, self-serving politics of leaders who cannot see beyond the next campaign contribution.                 So, Trump is free to create both false threats and false successes. For the false threats he conjures up false remedies. For the false successes he crows victory without follow-through that might actually deliver. The nuclear pact with Iran is a bad deal, and withdrawal coupled with sanctions will parry Tehran. Meeting and exchanging love letters with Kim Jong-un defuses North Korea’s nuclear threat. North American trade devastates American workers, who are rescued by renaming an agreement containing minor tweaks. China abuses America, and tariffs are correcting the wrongs.When you get to the horizon where the mirages reside, they naturally vanish. Iran remains non-nuclear only as long as the Europeans, Russians, and Chinese can evade the American sanctions. North Korea continues its nuclear development, even without overt testing. The economies of Mexico, Canada, and the U.S. remain interdependent, and American jobs remain truly challenged by automation and cheaper labor abroad. China’s reciprocal tariffs hurt real-life American farmers and small businessmen, who lose positions in the Chinese market that took years to assemble.Meanwhile, actual problems and practical solutions—to health care, gun violence, poverty, inadequate schools, decaying infrastructure, climate change, air and water pollution, unsafe workplaces, government corruption, racial bigotry, police killings, and so on—remain off the radar of Trump’s Republicans. They are not seen by the damaged vision of where we are and where we should be going.“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” Alice asks the Cheshire Cat.“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” the Cat replies.When she says she doesn’t care, the Cat answers that it doesn’t matter her direction, then.“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” she says.“Oh, you can’t help that. We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”“How do you know I’m mad?” asks Alice."You must be, or you wouldn't have come here."

By David K. Shipler
                A significant question hovers over the furor surrounding Virginia Governor Ralph Northam’s evident racism at age 25: Does a racist act justify a life sentence, or can a person evolve? Are racist attitudes malleable or thoroughly embedded in character? Is bigotry curable or merely discoverable, as through an old statement, action, or photograph?                This conundrum, which is larger than Northam, has been mostly absent from demands that he resign. But it’s central to mapping ways forward from America’s quagmire of bigotry. If individuals’ racial prejudices are impervious to change, how does society make progress? Or if prejudice can be reduced, how is that best accomplished? These are not new issues, but they take on urgency with a President Trump who reflects and enables biases against an array of ethnic, racial, and religious groups, from Mexicans to blacks to Muslims.                Unfortunately, Northam has failed to lead the discussion where it should go. He has neither acknowledged his sin nor chronicled his redemption. He has forfeited a teaching opportunity that might have helped the public see how a person can confront and revise his prejudices—if that is indeed his case. It is worth wondering whether he might have salvaged his political career with candid introspection. Maybe not, but it would have served the greater good, for the journey from racism through reform is one needed by society as a whole.                  Northam’s sin was the inflammatory picture he evidently chose for his own page in his 1984 medical school yearbook. It showed two men standing side by side, one in blackface, the other in the white robes of the Ku Klux Klan. Northam either was or was not one of the men, depending on which of his ambiguous statements you credit. In any case, he also admitted darkening his face with shoe polish on another occasion, to imitate Michael Jackson in a dance. That touched a nerve of racial history, when whites in blackface used to perform in minstrel shows that mocked African-Americans as dumb, lazy, fearful, and ridiculous.                Relatively few whites are sufficiently attuned to the overtones of history, the undertones of stereotyping, and the innuendoes that trigger, for many African-Americans, the long echoes of hatred. If nothing else beneficial has happened during the Northam episode, the mainstream media have at least given a short course on the ugly practice of blackface. It still endures occasionally in Halloween costumes and “ghetto parties” on campuses, where administrators huff and puff and punish.                How to remedy the scourge of bigotry often depends on how changeable people seem to be. Since widespread redemption appears doubtful, the society has erected a superstructure of inhibitions—both legal and cultural—designed to prevent prejudiced thoughts from being translated into behavior. Violating anti-discrimination laws carries legal penalties; violating cultural norms can mean losing a job, a promotion, a friendship, a reputation. The results are anything but consistent, as illustrated vividly by the contrasting reactions to Northam and Trump. Northam’s Democratic Party denounces him, and Trump’s Republicans look the other way.                That superstructure of deterrence has never been airtight, but fissures widened under President Obama as racist resentments over having a black president reverberated into the country through the internet. Much of the prejudice was encrypted, disguised as legitimate criticism but amplified by resonance with age-old stereotypes: blacks as “other” and Obama as a foreign-born Muslim socialist; blacks as mentally inferior and Obama using a teleprompter; blacks as incompetent and Obama as out of his depth; blacks as threatening and Obama as angry (contrary to his low-key demeanor).                Since Trump entered the White House, the country’s underbelly of American anti-black and anti-Jewish hatred has become more obvious. His ability to retain a 40 percent approval rating, despite his winks and nods to white supremacists and neo-Nazis, says a good deal about the limited potential for racial progress, on the one hand. On the other, making raw racism visible might also generate renewed efforts to fight it, as during the civil rights movement, when much of the country was galvanized by the televised, twisted faces of white girls screaming epithets at blacks being led into newly integrated schools.Many respectable institutions, from colleges to corporations, have been trying to bolster the superstructure of decency without aiming at private thoughts. It’s a pragmatic strategy. An attempt to change people’s minds can be taken as impugning their morality, and can provoke defensive indignation and resistance. So, for example, the military works at racial harmony by focusing on unit cohesion. Its philosophy is essentially this: You can think anything you want. That’s your business. But if you behave in a discriminatory or hostile way that undermines the readiness of the unit, that’s our business, and it will not be permitted.Similar self-interest guides many corporations, which train employees that the diverse customer base and the diverse reservoir of potential workers and managers require a tolerant and diverse workplace. It’s simply good for business. And many colleges see a legal and educational obligation to provide a safe learning environment for students of all ethnicities, races, religions, and sexual orientations. Respectful interactions across those lines are also essential to prepare young people for the multifaceted world beyond.It seems likely that changing external behavior can eventually affect inner assumptions and images. Furthermore, shifts in society’s norms make certain forms of racist expression no longer acceptable, at least in most circles, and the taboos surely seep back into the thoughts of a good number of white Americans. Yet engaging those thoughts directly can be delicate. Some diversity trainers use cross-racial encounters in schools and workplaces to target internal attitudes. They try to inspire rethinking, often by absolving participants from guilt over their own racial biases. Growing up, we all had slanders and slurs recorded in our minds, the argument goes, and those recordings now play back to us in adulthood. A healthy response is to hear them, recognize them, define them as pieces of prejudice, and use the power of our awareness to sequester them beyond the reach of our behavior.Redemption is a mysterious process of individual complexity. Hugo Black, a Ku Klux Klan member from 1923 to 1925, opposed an anti-lynching bill as a Democratic senator. But he supported the New Deal and sponsored the first federal regulation of wages and hours under the Fair Labor Standards Act. He then became a Supreme Court justice on the liberal side of most civil liberties cases, especially on the First Amendment. He was part of the unanimous court in Brown v. Board of Education’s ruling on the unconstitutionality of segregated schools.His Klan membership ended in 1925. Ralph Northam’s picture of the Klansman appeared in 1984. Those six decades marked a great flow of progress in America, yet Northam was evidently caught in some back eddy of stagnation. Judging by his liberal policies today—expanding Medicaid, removing Confederate statues—he has also traveled a great distance since. If only he would tell us openly about that journey.

By David K. Shipler
                President Trump warmed the hearts of Americans today by declaring the wind chill factor “FAKE NEWS” concocted by “Democrat weathermen” who are part of the “deep state.”                “Wrong!” he tweeted right before breakfast toward the end of his insomnia. “The weathermen seem to be extremely passive and naïve when it comes to temperature. Don’t they read their own thermometers? The thermometer says 10 below, and they say it feels like 40 below! Sad!”                In case his point was lost, he added the obvious, somewhat gratuitously: “Perhaps meteorology (I got that from spellcheck) should go back to school!”                Millions of his fervent supporters across the country felt immediately warmer. In Wisconsin, the 27,000 citizens who put him over the edge in 2016 went without coats and gloves. One told a TV reporter at WXYZ, “See? Trump tells it like it is.” Another, who left his MAGA hat home, slapped his arms around himself and jumped up and down, his breath in a freezing fog before him. He declared happily, “Trump keeps his promises!”   

By David K. Shipler
                It’s too bad that air controllers and TSA agents didn’t call in sick on day one of the shutdown. Maybe next time. They’d get the government reopened in about 90 minutes.               That’s Lesson One. Here are some others:·         Financial security is a mirage for huge numbers of fulltime employees, not only of the federal government but of private firms as well. Wages are too low and expenses too high to generate an adequate cushion of savings for families in the so-called middle class. People quickly ran out of cash for such basic needs as housing and food. As a former Coast Guard commandant told NPR, petty officers with two or three kids are paid below the poverty line. ·         If those with steady government jobs are so vulnerable, think of the fragility of low-skilled laborers paid less, who might not be able to get more than part-time work. Every dime that comes in goes out, leaving them on the constant edge of crisis. An uncovered medical bill, missed work for a child’s illness, a car repair, a layoff, reduced food stamps, delayed housing subsidies, or myriad other disruptions can send families into a downward spiral.·         Those housing subsidies—particularly the government’s Section 8 vouchers that help pay rent to private landlords for low-income tenants—faced interruption, exposing the poor to eviction and surely undermining owners’ willingness to accept the vouchers. It’s hard enough in normal times to get landlords’ participation in the program, and funding is inadequate anyway. Waiting lists are long, and families who have to pay unsubsidized market rents are often forced to cut spending on food. That leads to malnutrition among children at crucial stages of brain development, studies have found, creating long-term intellectual impairment. This is likely to be a hidden cost of the shutdown.