By New Age Islam Edit
Desk
25 November
2020
• Why Is It So Difficult For Bangladeshi Women
To Get Justice?
By Meenakshi Ganguly
• Investing In A Feminist Peace
By Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka
• The Truth That Iraq And Afghanistan Veterans
Know
By Timothy Kudo
• The Left Is Accused Of Authoritarianism – But
It's The Right That Gets Away With It
Andy Beckett
• Happy Thanksgiving To All Those Who Told The
Truth In This Election
By Thomas L. Friedman
• Should Trump Be Prosecuted?
By Andrew Weissmann
-------
Why Is It So Difficult For Bangladeshi Women To
Get Justice?
By Meenakshi Ganguly
November
25, 2020
For
years, Bangladeshi rights organisations have been calling for victims of
violence to get speedy access to justice. Photo: Anisur Rahman
-----
In 2015,
Salma's husband and his parents held her down and poured nitric acid down her
throat because they wanted more than the Tk 100,000 (USD 1,100) that her
parents had already paid in dowry. For months since the wedding, her
father-in-law had beat her repeatedly, demanding more. Salma went to stay with
her parents to escape the abuse. But when villagers started gossiping about her
broken marriage, her parents told her to return to her in-laws. When she said
she was being physically abused, they told her "you just need to
endure." Now, she is fed through a tube in her stomach.
Salma's
story is disturbingly common in Bangladesh, where over 70 percent of married
women and girls have faced some form of intimate partner abuse, about half of
whom say their partners physically assaulted them. But the majority of women
never told anyone about this abuse and only three percent take legal action.
In many
cases like Salma's, survivors seeking help are turned away—by family,
community, and the police—and can be in even more danger when forced to return
to their abuser. When Salma tried to escape the violence, she was met with
stigma and—with only a handful of government-run shelters in the country and
limited access to support services—she had nowhere else to go.
Salma has
fought for a legal remedy for over five years now, but to little avail. Her
father, meanwhile, had a stroke and the family cannot afford to continue
pursuing justice. The public prosecutor bringing the case told her that her
in-laws were paying more bribes so she "should pay more money."
"That is how you will get justice," he told her. He too, of course,
requested bribes, she said.
Every time
they go to court to find out the status of the case, court officials, police
and the prosecutor all ask for "tea and snacks costs," Salma said.
Now she says she is telling her father, "You have been going to the courts
for the last five years and nothing is happening. Let's just give up."
But there
are concrete actions the the Bangladesh government and donor governments can
take now—during the 16 days of activism against gender-based violence—so that
Salma and other women and girls seeking legal recourse never have to give up.
The 16 Days
of Activism is an annual international campaign in which governments and
activists come together to address violence against women and girls. It runs
from November 25, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against
Women, until December 10, Human Rights Day.
The
Bangladesh government should work with concerned donor governments, activists
and the UN to conduct an audit of currently available shelters, disseminate
this information, and commit to opening at least one shelter in each of
Bangladesh's 67 districts by 2025. Shelters should remove restrictions that
limit their accessibility, such as requiring court orders to stay there or
restricting the presence of children. No woman or girl should ever have to
"just endure" violence because there is nowhere else to go.
The law
ministry should immediately create an independent commission to appoint public
prosecutors to ensure their independence. Donor governments like the US that are
involved in justice reform should ensure that training for public prosecutors
and police emphasises working with victims of gender-based violence and
consider joint training for prosecutors and investigating officers to improve
coordination on cases of gender-based violence.
As Salma
described, as cases go on for years, justice officials frequently demand
bribes, making it more and more difficult to continue to pursue justice. This
problem is exacerbated by a lack of transparency and accessibility of case
information, given Bangladesh's 3.7 million-case backlog. Without a centralised
filing system, cases get lost and survivors are forced to pay bribes to get
court officials to find their case information and move cases forward. The
German government led an impressive justice audit in Bangladesh and would be
well-placed to spearhead a project to move case files into a centralised online
filing system—gender-based violence cases would be a good place to start.
The
Bangladesh government should ensure that legal aid is reaching women and girls
in need and that they are aware of their rights. Last year, the national legal
aid services organisation distributed funds to 2.5 times more men than women.
The law
commission drafted a witness protection law nearly a decade ago—it should be
passed into law in consultation with Bangladeshi women's rights organisations,
and donor governments should support the implementation of a witness protection
programme.
Violence
against women and girls is so pervasive in Bangladesh, it is sometimes
dismissed as unsolvable. For these 16 days of activism, the government and
donors should listen to activists who are offering workable solutions.
----
Meenakshi Ganguly is South Asia Director at
Human Rights Watch.
https://www.thedailystar.net/opinion/news/why-it-so-difficult-bangladeshi-women-get-justice-2000469
-----
Investing In A Feminist Peace
By Phumzile
Mlambo-Ngcuka
November
25, 2020
Photo:
Reuters/Mariana Bazo
------
During the
Covid-19 pandemic, public life in much of the world has largely ground to a
halt. For the two billion people living in conflict-affected countries,
however, there has been no lull in violence and upheaval. Some of the world's
conflicts have even escalated or been reignited during the crisis, dealing
devastating new blows to infrastructure and healthcare systems that were only
beginning to be rebuilt. Globally, we continue to invest far more in the tools
of war than in the foundations of peace.
Of course,
some are working for peace. On March 23, at the outset of the pandemic, United
Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called for a global ceasefire, in
order to enable countries to focus on the Covid-19 crisis and allow
humanitarian organisations to reach vulnerable populations. More than 100
women's organisations from Iraq, Libya, Palestine, Syria and Yemen quickly
joined the appeal with a joint statement advocating a broad Covid-19 truce,
which could form the basis for a lasting peace.
It should
come as no surprise that women were among the first to support the call for a
ceasefire. This month, governments and civil society came together to mark 20
years since UN Security Council Resolution 1325 first recognised women's
pivotal roles on the frontlines of peace-building efforts.
It is
women—including young women—who do much of the painstaking, long-term work that
underpin high-profile formal agreements, which are still often reached in talks
that exclude them. For example, in Syria, women have negotiated ceasefires to
allow the passage of humanitarian aid, worked in field hospitals and schools,
distributed food and medicine, and documented human rights violations. In South
Sudan, women have mediated and resolved tribal disputes to prevent conflicts
from escalating to violence.
Women also
spearhead the critical work of campaigning for peace, including through
education programmes, which teach young people that conflict is never
inevitable. Feminist organisations have long called for nuclear disarmament,
arms control, and the reallocation of funds from the military to social
investments.
These
appeals are essential. But they have gone unanswered. So has the UN's call for
a Covid-19 ceasefire: according to the Norwegian Refugee Council, in the two
months following Guterres's appeal, armed conflict in 19 countries displaced at
least 661,000 people. Unless we listen to women, and shift our investments from
war toward peace, the devastation will continue.
Last year,
global military expenditure reached USD 1.9 trillion, following the largest
annual increase in a decade. In the last quarter-century—since the landmark
Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action called on governments to
"recognise and address the dangers to society of armed conflict and the negative
effect of excessive military expenditures"—defence spending has doubled.
More
weapons and soldiers mean fewer resources for the 55 percent of the global
population—including nearly two-thirds of the world's children—who lack any
social protection, leaving them exposed to the pandemic's brutal social and
economic consequences. Military might will not help the 83-132 million people
added by Covid-19 to the global tally of the undernourished in 2020.
Liberian
Peacemaker and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Leymah Gbowee has it right:
"Peace is not the absence of war," she has said, but rather "the
full expression of human dignity." It "is an environment in which
human needs can be met. It means education for our children, health systems
that function, a fair and unbiased justice system, food on the table in every
home, an empowered, recognised, appreciated, and fully compensated community of
women, and a lot more."
We should
be spending our money not on tools of destruction, but on a kind of
"feminist peace" that upholds basic economic and social rights for
all. This means guaranteeing broad social protections and delivering vital
services, such as health care, childcare, and education. The provision of such
services has been proven to reduce conflict-fueling inequality.
The
pandemic has highlighted the critical importance of other services as well. For
example, shelters for survivors of gender-based violence have faced surging
demand during Covid-19 lockdowns, and need more funding to meet it. In
addition, governments should be ensuring adequate supplies of medical and
personal protective equipment, which have often run out during the pandemic,
even in the world's richest countries.
A feminist
peace also means that everyone's voice is heard, with all groups included fully
and meaningfully in the decisions that affect their lives. Here, women's
organisations have a vital role to play, helping women and other marginalised
groups gain access to decision-making arenas and giving them the resources and
confidence to participate.
But, again,
more funding is needed. Bilateral aid to women's organisations in fragile or
conflict-affected countries averaged USD 96 million per year in 2017-18—a mere
0.005 percent of global military expenditure.
For all the
devastation it has caused, the Covid-19 crisis also represents a generational
opportunity to build more inclusive economies and societies, free of the
scourge of violent conflict. A concerted effort to demilitarise our world and
build a feminist peace—beginning with a global ceasefire, and followed by a
comprehensive reappraisal of how we allocate our resources—must be central to
this vision.
----
Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka is Executive Director of
UN Women.
https://www.thedailystar.net/opinion/project-syndicate/news/investing-feminist-peace-2000445
----
The Truth That Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans
Know
By Timothy Kudo
Nov. 24,
2020
The Defence
Department recently announced troop withdrawals by Jan. 15 that will reduce
American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan to 2,500 each from their one-time highs
of some 170,000 and 100,000 troops, respectively. This drawdown makes explicit
what those of us who served in the military have long realized: We lost.
War is evil
even when it is necessary but our inability to win has stolen even the possibility
that the ends might justify the means. For the roughly three million service
members whose boots touched soil in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past 19
years, our defeat is a uniquely personal loss.
When I was
sent to Iraq in 2009 it was to safeguard our withdrawal. During our entire
deployment in the once treacherous Sunni triangle we discovered and disposed of
a single roadside bomb on the main highway outside Falluja, where they had once
been as common as potholes. I returned home wishing I could have done more but
was glad to see how much progress had been made by the regiments who’d fought
so hard before me.
When I read
a few years later that the Islamic State had overrun that same area I began to
sense that our efforts had been in vain. But it was my Afghanistan deployment
in 2010-2011 that cemented their futility for me.
My company
defended a labyrinthine cluster of mud-walled villages set amid fields of poppy
and corn in the Musa Qala District of Helmand Province. As the northern tip of
the Marine campaign in Helmand we held a line alongside battalion after
battalion of Marines that extended south through the river valley to the
district center, where the bazaar and the governor were, and then down past
Sangin to the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, and further to Marja and
Garmsir.
People
often ask me what Afghanistan was like but I can never really answer: Each
district might as well have been its own war for the Marines who fought, with
victories and defeats known only to them.
I often
think back on the moments in my deployments when the crack of a gunshot or the
deep thud of a large roadside bomb suddenly infused my life at war with a clear
and tangible purpose. I remember the kids lining up the first day after the
school reopened, the first time the partners we trained in the Afghan Army took
the initiative to patrol without our assistance, and the rare smile on a
villager’s face after we’d provided the first aid that had saved the life of
his father, who had been shot in crossfire.
I try to remember
those small decencies instead of the casualties and the killing but they do
little to assuage the overwhelming senselessness of the greater war.
Five
American military veterans on why they see the war in Afghanistan as an
unwinnable conflict.
When I
signed up for the Marine Corps, I really believed in the mission. I believed
that it was bringing something like democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan. But now,
I don’ t see how you can be a killer and be a nation builder at the same time.
There’s a concept that if you kill the wrong person you just create more
insurgents. How do I win the hearts and minds of the local populace by walking
around with a machine gun in their neighbourhood and shooting at people?
Democracy doesn’t come in a box. It’s not something that fits every country.
And it’s an ideal that America has never been willing to let go. The fact that
we’ve gotten to this place now, in 2019, where poll after poll has shown that
nearly two-thirds of Afghan and Iraq veterans have said, quote, “The wars were
not worth fighting,” is remarkable, because that’s a higher rate than the
American people at large who didn’t serve. The United States does not possess
the capability to ultimately alter the outcomes meaningfully in Afghanistan. I
consider myself a conservative, a Republican. In 2011, I had read that things
were on the way to getting better. But when I was deployed to Afghanistan, I
can tell you, I saw violence was going up the civilians were getting killed,
the Afghan military were not being effectively trained. Our leadership had been
lying to us. You cannot accomplish with military power a political outcome.
”The bad news if we leave this place it’ll to go to shit in a year.”
“Seriously?” “If we pull out, this place will fall apart very, very quickly.”
“In terms of our security, you need to maintain some footprint or some
guarantee that Al Qaeda won’t resurge in the area.” There’s this line of
thinking that if we withdraw from Afghanistan, there will be a new civil war
that’s going to start. O.K., there is a civil war going on in Afghanistan right
now. The Afghans were having a civil war in 2001 when we first went in there.
They had been fighting for years. And our presence there does not stop it.
We’re keeping our troops there indefinitely because of this idea that if we
leave there’s going to be this vacuum. This idea really needs to be questioned.
It’s really not an idea of safety. It’s really keep our troops on the ground to
control the Muslims and the brown people of Afghanistan. I don’t think the
American people have actually really refreshed their browser on the Afghan war
since 2001 or two. All the guys who are responsible for 9/11 are dead. The
primary enemy in Afghanistan is the Taliban. It’s crucial for Americans to
understand that the Taliban is not Al Qaeda. Whereas Al Qaeda is centered on
going to war with the United States, the Taliban rejects that entire idea.
Their concern is not to make the world Islamic. It’s to make Afghanistan an
Islamic emirate. The fact is right now that tactically on the ground in
Afghanistan, the Taliban are in a very strong position. Southwest Afghanistan
is just a free-fire zone. Everybody is getting shot at regularly. The Taliban
own the area outside of us and they would just bombard our towers all day and
we’d fight back and forth. And then we’d have to go out on patrol, even though
patrolling was stupid because as soon as you leave the walls you have no
protection. I remember hearing the first explosion when the first Marine landed
on an I.E.D. and it seemed entirely meaningless to me. There seemed to be no
redemptive meaning behind this death. I was there when we had 140,000 troops on
the ground. And I can tell you there was vast areas of the country that we
didn’t even have influence. Now imagine the 14,000 troops we have there right
now. They’re not protecting anything back home. We’re creating war zones and
we’re creating refugees. People are going to get mad. They’re going to get
upset and they’re going to get tired of it. They’re going to want revenge and
they’re going to figure it out. It’s a war that we’ve spent $1 trillion on now.
It’s a war where thousands of people have died, where children are growing up
and all they’ve ever grown up in is a war zone. That’s the big lesson we need
to learn. Diplomacy and targeted military deterrence is what will keep you
safe. Whether we leave tomorrow or whether we leave 10 years from now, the
outcome is the same, which is a brutal civil war and half the country is going
to fall under Taliban rule again and women are going to live in a medieval
situation until the Afghan people as a whole come up with an Afghan solution to
an Afghan problem. It hurts like hell to say we should leave. But the argument
that we should stay there because we are protecting women’s rights is not good
enough anymore. Whatever we do is never going to ensure that the most
disenfranchised people in Afghanistan are going to be protected, that women are
going to have their rights protected. That is a burden that America will have
to bear on its soul. I’ve seen firsthand men that I’ve known that end up
getting blown up there, and I’ve questioned what do they sacrifice themselves
for. But I’ll tell you what I’m worried about even war is that is the ones who
haven’t died yet. Kids are joining the Army today — today — who were born after
9/11. Within six months, they’ll be in Afghanistan. My dad was in the military.
My grandpa was in the Marine Corps and my daughter’s 4 now — she’s about to be
5. And I want the war to be over. Because 12 to 15 years from now, I don’t want
my kid to die in the war that I went to.
Shortly
after I returned from Afghanistan in 2011, President Barack Obama announced
that Osama bin Laden had been killed during a raid on his compound in Pakistan,
where he was living after fleeing Afghanistan years before. As I watched people
celebrating outside the White House and outside ground zero I hoped that the
war was finally over, but even then it didn’t feel like victory.
The
conflict had grown so much bigger since the attacks of Sept. 11 that his death
felt like a footnote. The execution of a single dethroned sheikh suddenly paled
in significance to my own recent experience at war. Later that night I tried to
recall the circumstances surrounding the death of each man we’d killed and
count how many there had been but there were too many to remember.
The
Afghanistan war was finally lost for me in August 2015, several years after my
own deployment ended, when the Taliban recaptured Musa Qala, which five men in
my company had died defending. After the Taliban’s seizure, allied airstrikes
bombed the same government center we’d sacrificed so much to hold.
A member of
Parliament from Helmand Province later described that building as “completely
vanished from the earth.” Along with it was buried any hope there might have
been that the sacrifices I, and so many others, have made in service to our
country would not be in vain.
The cost of
these wars has been astronomical: Roughly $6 trillion in government spending,
with the Defense Department spending alone costing each American taxpayer an
estimated more than $7,000. Additionally, today’s young veterans face a legacy
of psychological and physical injury, as well as illness from our war’s Agent
Orange: the toxic burn pits whose smoke we inhaled.
Even more
costly are the approximately 515,000 people killed in Iraq, Afghanistan and
Pakistan, including more than 260,000 civilians. And for what? Iraq remains a
tenuous democracy teeming with militias while Afghanistan is locked in a
conflict with a resurgent Taliban, and peace talks are in deadlock.
Both
countries fail to meet the objectives of freedom and democracy set when
President George W. Bush started those wars. They fall short of President
Obama’s goals when he sent me and 30,000 other troops to Afghanistan and of the
claims he made when declaring an end to combat operation in Iraq only to see
the Islamic State undo those gains. President Trump does not seem to even have
a purpose for those 5,000 troops who will remain in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Like many
service members I wrote a letter in case I was killed during my deployment. It
began with an assurance to the friends and family I would have left behind: “It
was worth it.” I believed then that we had a moral obligation to not only
protect my fellow Americans but to leave the Afghan and Iraqi people with a
chance to live in peace.
That
obligation remains even though it cannot be fulfilled. Instead I am resigned
that these wars will finally enter the history books not only as defeats but as
stains on our national honor.
The
political theorist and philosopher Michael Walzer writes in “Just and Unjust
Wars” that “it still seems important to say of those who die in war that they
did not die in vain. And when we can’t say that, or think we can’t, we mix our
mourning with anger.” I would add that we also mix it with shame.
I recognize
that shame is not a very American trait but with it comes humility. Sadly, my
generation had to relearn the lessons of Vietnam in Iraq and Afghanistan. But
in coming to grips with our defeat, we have a chance to ensure that we do not
sacrifice future generations to such folly.
And by so
doing we may yet salvage some purpose from this tragedy: to do everything in
our power to avoid more wars, and to ensure that if and when the next war does
come, it is worth it.
-----
Timothy Kudo a former Marine captain who served
in Iraq and Afghanistan, is working on a novel about the Afghanistan war.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/24/opinion/iraq-afghanistan-troop-withdrawal.html?
----
The Left Is Accused Of Authoritarianism – But
It's The Right That Gets Away With It
By Andy Beckett
23 Nov 2020
For a
wearyingly long time now, one of the right’s favourite tactics against the left
has been to accuse it of planning a police state. From Winston Churchill’s 1945
claim that a Labour government would need “some form of Gestapo” to last year’s
warnings in the Tory press that Jeremy Corbyn would turn Britain into a version
of Venezuela, rightwing journalists and politicians have used the spectre of
authoritarianism to make the left seem sinister and foreign.
The tactic
is sometimes still effective. In this month’s US election, Donald Trump won the
key state of Florida in part by persuading Hispanic immigrants that Joe Biden,
a famously pragmatic Democrat, would instead form an intolerant leftwing
government. “I voted for Trump to prevent the United States from resembling
countries like Cuba,” Jose Edgardo Gomez told the Miami Herald. “We want the
United States to continue being free and to continue having a true democracy …
Many Americans don’t understand the threats that socialism poses.”
The fact
that no western democracy has ever been turned into a police state by the left
hasn’t completely neutralised this argument. Because there have been so few elected
socialist governments in the west, and even fewer that have enacted much of
their programmes, the left hasn’t had many opportunities to prove that it’s not
interested in ruling by authoritarian methods. Instead, the allegation has
lingered.
On rightwing
websites such as Spiked and Guido Fawkes, which often provide anti-Labour
attack lines to the Tory press and politicians, Keir Starmer is already being
described as an authoritarian, despite his history as a human rights lawyer. No
doubt tabloid picture researchers are scouring the archives for any photos of
him wearing a Russian hat. Corbyn had to waste some of his leadership denying
that his favourite cap was a tribute to Lenin’s; the Times told readers he rode
a “Chairman Mao-style bicycle”. Besides smearing the left and putting it on the
defensive, these red scares have another important but less noticed effect.
They serve as a political distraction.
Over the
past 40 years, while the right has continued to warn about hypothetical
leftwing dictatorships in the west, actual authoritarianism has become a
growing feature of rightwing government in Britain and the US. The change has
been incomplete and gradual. Authoritarianism is often a tendency, an official
inclination, rather than an absolute political state. And this autocratic turn
has gone largely undeclared: countries that won the second world war and the
cold war like to think they have no time for despots. But the outcome has been
a great strengthening of government against the governed.
In the
1980s, Margaret Thatcher politicised the police as strike-breakers, and
demonised her opponents as “the enemy within”. In the 2000s, the George W Bush
administration argued that the president’s powers should be almost unlimited,
and established the brutal detention camp at Guantánamo. Both premiers were
criticised for their draconian tendencies, but both were comfortably
re-elected, unrepentant.
Yet even
Bush has been shocked by the Trump presidency. Donald Trump’s intolerance of
press criticism and peaceful protest, threats to jail political opponents, and
contempt for the electoral process have arguably made the United States more of
an autocracy than a democracy. Meanwhile, similar impulses have been at work in
Boris Johnson’s premiership, with its illegal suspension of parliament, illegal
Brexit legislation and fury at the few remaining checks on its authority, such
as “activist lawyers”.
As with
Bush and Thatcher, the breaking of democratic norms by Trump and Johnson has
been accepted and sometimes welcomed by many voters. Over 10m more people chose
Trump this month than at the 2016 election. Last year, Johnson won the first
big Tory majority since 1987.
In
increasingly impatient, divided societies, frustration with the compromises and
deadlocks produced by previous, more consensual governments has left voters
open to more aggressive alternatives. Shortly before the 2019 election, a
prophetic survey by the Hansard Society found that 54% of Britons felt the
country “needs a strong ruler willing to break the rules”, and 42% believed
that Britain’s problems could be dealt with better “if the government didn’t
have to worry so much about votes in parliament”.
Even people
appalled by the transgressions of Trump and Johnson can be reluctant to
consider their implications. For the first few days after this month’s US
election, Trump’s refusal to concede defeat was widely seen as just a tantrum –
rather than a rejection of democracy and, in effect, a demand to head a
one-party state. If you’ve grown up with the idea that the US is a strong
democracy, or that British prime ministers respect the law, it’s frightening to
face up to the possibility that neither may be the case.
It may also
be frightening to realise that the Anglo-American right has a double standard on
authoritarian governments. That double standard used to be applied mainly to
other countries. During the 1980s, Jeane Kirkpatrick, an influential adviser to
the Republican president Ronald Reagan, argued that rightwing police states
were “less repressive” than leftwing, “totalitarian” ones, and should be
supported by the US when there were, from a conservative perspective, no better
alternatives. At the time, the consequences of her thinking were felt by people
living under rightwing foreign dictatorships, from the Philippines to
Argentina, that the US helped sustain in power. But with the Trump presidency
you could say that a version of her doctrine has been applied at home.
The US and
Britain’s authoritarian experiments may now be coming to an end. The sacked
Dominic Cummings was the source of much of the Johnson government’s autocratic
thinking. Trump, for all his manoeuvring, will almost certainly have to step
down when Joe Biden is inaugurated in January. The democratic and
constitutional pressures against him staying on are probably too great.
Yet the
conditions remain that made the experiments possible. In the US, after Trump’s
attacks on the election, many voters are disillusioned with democracy. And the
ground has been prepared for his party to refuse to accept future electoral
outcomes it doesn’t like – possibly starting with January’s crucial Senate
races in Georgia. In Britain, the government still contains deeply illiberal
figures, such as the home secretary, Priti Patel. And Johnson himself, like
Trump, has a dislike of being held accountable that’s so strong, he’s arguably
not a democratic politician in any sense beyond the winning of elections. As
with Trump, the fact that he lacks the focus and diligence to be a dictator is
not that reassuring. A more functional rightwing strongman could come along.
And the
scale of what has already happened during Trump and Johnson’s premierships
shouldn’t be played down, as just another stage in conservatism’s evolution. In
two of the world’s supposedly most stable political systems, the right have bent
democracy out of shape. In future, it would be good to have a bit less
self-righteous talk from them about dictatorships of the left.
-----
Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/23/left-authoritarianism-right-biden-starmer-trump-johnson
----
Happy Thanksgiving to All Those Who Told the
Truth in This Election
By Thomas L. Friedman
Nov. 24,
2020
With so
many families gathering, in person or virtually, for this most unusual
Thanksgiving after this most unusual election, if you’re looking for a special
way to say grace this year, I recommend the West Point Cadet Prayer. It calls
upon each of these future military leaders to always choose “the harder right
instead of the easier wrong” and to know “no fear when truth and right are in
jeopardy.”
Because we
should be truly thankful this Thanksgiving that — after Donald Trump spent the
last three weeks refusing to acknowledge that he’d lost re-election and
enlisted much of his party in a naked power play to ignore the vote counts and
reinstall him in office — we had a critical mass of civil servants, elected
officials and judges who did their jobs, always opting for the “harder right”
that justice demanded, not the “easier wrong” that Trump and his allies were
pressing for.
It was
their collective integrity, their willingness to stand with “Team America,” not
either party, that protected our democracy when it was facing one of its
greatest threats — from within. History will remember them fondly.
Who am I
talking about? I am talking about F.B.I. Director Christopher Wray, a Trump
appointee, who in September openly contradicted the president and declared that
historically we have not seen “any kind of coordinated national voter fraud
effort in a major election” involving mail-in voting.
I am
talking about Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger — a conservative
Republican — who oversaw the Georgia count and recount and insisted that Joe
Biden had won fair and square and that his state’s two G.O.P. senators, David
Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, did not garner enough votes to avoid election
runoffs. Perdue and Loeffler dishonorably opted for the easier wrong and
brazenly demanded Raffensperger resign for not declaring them winners.
I am
talking about Chris Krebs, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure
Security Agency, who not only refused to back up Trump’s claims of election
fraud, but whose agency issued a statement calling the 2020 election “the most
secure in American history,” adding in bold type, “There is no evidence that
any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes or was in any way
compromised.”
Krebs did
the hard right thing, and Trump fired him by tweet for it. Mitch McConnell,
doing the easy wrong thing, did not utter a peep of protest.
I am
talking about the Republican-led Board of Supervisors in Maricopa County,
Ariz., which, according to The Washington Post, “voted unanimously Friday to
certify the county’s election results, with the board chairman declaring there
was no evidence of fraud or misconduct ‘and that is with a big zero.’”
I am
talking about Mitt Romney, the first (and still virtually only) Republican
senator to truly call out Trump’s postelection actions for what they really
were: “overt pressure on state and local officials to subvert the will of the
people and overturn the election.”
I am
talking about U.S. District Judge Matthew W. Brann, a registered Republican,
who dismissed Trump’s allegations that Republican voters in Pennsylvania had
been illegally disadvantaged because some counties permitted voters to cure
administrative errors on their mail ballots.
As The
Washington Post reported, Brann scathingly wrote on Saturday “that Trump’s
attorneys had haphazardly stitched this allegation together ‘like
Frankenstein’s Monster’ in an attempt to avoid unfavorable legal precedent.”
And I am
talking about all the other election verification commissioners who did the
hard right things in tossing out Trump’s fraudulent claims of fraud.
Asking for
recounts in close elections was perfectly legitimate. But when that failed to
produce any significant change in the results, Trump took us to a new dark
depth. He pushed utterly bogus claims of voting irregularities and then tried
to get Republican state legislatures to simply ignore the popular vote totals
and appoint their own pro-Trump electors before the Electoral College meets on
Dec. 14.
That
shifted this postelection struggle from Trump versus Biden — and who had the
most votes — to Trump versus the Constitution — and who had the raw power and
will to defend it or ignore it.
To all of
these people who chose to do the hard right thing and defend the Constitution
and the rule of law over their party’s interest or personal gain, may you have
a blessed Thanksgiving.
You stand
in stark contrast to Bill Barr, Mike Pompeo (who apparently never attended
chapel at West Point), Mike Pence, Rudy Giuliani, Lindsey Graham, Mitch
McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, Nikki Haley, Kayleigh McEnany and all the other
G.O.P. senators and House members, who put their party and self-interest before
their country and opted for the easy wrongs. History will remember them, too.
Though
Trump is now grudgingly letting the presidential transition proceed, we must
never, ever, forget the damage he and his allies inflicted on American
democracy by attacking its very core — our ability to hold free and fair
elections and transfer power peacefully. Tens of millions of Americans now
believe something that is untrue — that our system is rigged. Who knows what
that will mean in the long run?
The depths
to which Trump and his legal team sank was manifested last Thursday when
Giuliani and Sidney Powell held a news conference alleging, among other things,
that software used to disadvantage Trump voters was created at the direction of
the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. It was insane.
As Jonah
Goldberg, a conservative critic of Trumpism, wrote in thedispatch.com: “The
G.O.P.’s social media account spewed sound bites from Powell and Giuliani out
into the country like a fire hose attached to a sewage tank.” Fox carried the
whole news conference live — uninterrupted — for virtually its entire 90
minutes.
Shame on
all these people.
Sure, now
Trump and many of his enablers are finally bowing to reality — but it is not
because they’ve developed integrity. It is because they WERE STOPPED by all
those people who had integrity and did the hard right things.
And “shame”
is the right word for these people, because a sense of shame was lost these
past four years and it needs to be re-established. Otherwise, what Trump and
all his sycophants did gets normalized and permanently erodes confidence in our
elections. That is how democracies die.
You can
only hope that once they are out of power, Barr, Pompeo, Giuliani and all their
compatriots will be stopped on the streets, in restaurants or at conferences
and politely but firmly asked by everyday Americans: “How could you have stayed
all-in when Trump was violating the deepest norms that bind us as a democracy?”
And if they
are deaf to the message being sent from their fellow citizens, then let’s hope
some will have to face an interrogation from their own children at the
Thanksgiving table this year:
“Mom, Dad —
did you really side with Trump when it was Trump versus the Constitution?”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/24/opinion/trump-election-democracy.html?
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Should Trump Be Prosecuted?
By Andrew Weissmann
Nov. 24,
2020
When the
Biden administration takes office in 2021, it will face a unique, fraught
decision: Should Donald Trump be criminally investigated and prosecuted?
Any renewed
investigative activity or a criminal prosecution would further divide the
country and stoke claims that the Justice Department was merely exacting
revenge. An investigation and trial would be a spectacle that would surely
consume the administration’s energy.
But as
painful and hard as it may be for the country, I believe the next attorney
general should investigate Mr. Trump and, if warranted, prosecute him for
potential federal crimes.
I do not
come to this position lightly. Indeed, we have witnessed two U.S. presidential
elections in which large crowds have found it acceptable to chant with fervent
zeal that the nominee of the opposing party should be jailed. We do not want to
turn into an autocratic state, where law enforcement authorities are political
weapons of the reigning party.
But that is
not sufficient reason to let Mr. Trump off the hook.
Mr. Trump’s
criminal exposure is clear. I was a senior member of the investigation led by
the former special counsel Robert Mueller to determine whether Russia attempted
to subvert our fundamental democratic source of political legitimacy: our
electoral system. Among other things, he was tasked with determining whether
Mr. Trump interfered with our fact-finding into this issue.
We amassed
ample evidence to support a charge that Mr. Trump obstructed justice. That view
is widely shared. Shortly after our report was issued, hundreds of former
prosecutors concluded that the evidence supported such a charge.
What precedent
is set if obstructing such an investigation is allowed to go unpunished and
undeterred? It is hard enough for the executive branch to investigate a sitting
president, who has the power to fire a special counsel (if needed, through the
attorney general) and to thwart cooperation with an investigation by use of the
clemency power. We saw Mr. Trump use his clemency power to do just that with,
for example, his ally Roger Stone. He commuted Mr. Stone’s sentence, who was
duly convicted by a jury but never spent a day in jail for crimes that a
federal judge found were committed for the president. The same judge found that
Paul Manafort, a former Trump campaign chairman, lied to us repeatedly,
breaching his cooperation agreement. He, too, was surely holding out hope for a
dangled pardon.
Mr. Trump
can’t point to what the special counsel investigation did not find (e.g.,
“collusion”) when he obstructed that very investigation. The evidence against
Mr. Trump includes the testimony of Don McGahn, Mr. Trump’s former White House
counsel, who detailed how the president ordered the firing of the special
counsel and how when that effort was reported in the press, Mr. Trump beseeched
Mr. McGahn to deny publicly the truth and, for safe measure, memorialize that
falsity in a written memorandum.
The
evidence includes Mr. Trump’s efforts to influence the outcome of a
deliberating jury in the Manafort trial and his holding out the hope for a
pardon to thwart witnesses from cooperating with our investigation. Can anyone
even fathom a legitimate reason to dangle a pardon?
His
potential criminal liability goes further, to actions before taking office. The
Manhattan district attorney is by all appearances conducting a classic
white-collar investigation into tax and bank fraud, and the New York attorney
general is engaged in a civil investigation into similar allegations, which
could quickly turn into a criminal inquiry.
These state
matters may well reveal evidence warranting additional federal charges. Such
potential financial crimes were not explored by the special counsel
investigation and could reveal criminal evidence. Any evidence that was not
produced to Congress in its inquiries, like internal State Department and White
House communications, is another potential trove to which the new
administration should have access.
The matters
already set out by the special counsel and under investigation are not trivial;
they should not raise concerns that Mr. Trump is being singled out for
something that would not be investigated or prosecuted if committed by anyone
else.
Because
some of the activities in question predated his presidency, it would be
untenable to permit Mr. Trump’s winning a federal election to immunize him from
consequences for earlier crimes. We would not countenance that result if a
former president was found to have committed a serious violent crime.
Sweeping
under the rug Mr. Trump’s federal obstruction would be worse still. The
precedent set for not deterring a president’s obstruction of a special counsel
investigation would be too costly: It would make any future special counsel
investigation toothless and set the presidency de facto above the law. For
those who point to the pardon of Richard Nixon by Gerald Ford as precedent for
simply looking forward, that is not analogous: Mr. Nixon paid a very heavy
price by resigning from the presidency in disgrace for his conduct.
Mr. Trump
may very well choose to pardon not just his family and friends before leaving
office but also himself in order to avoid federal criminal liability. This
historic turn of events would have no effect on his potential criminal exposure
at the state level. If Mr. Trump bestows such pardons, states like New York
should take up the mantle to see that the rule of law is upheld. And pardons
would not preclude the new attorney general challenging a self-pardon or the
state calling the pardoned friends and family before the grand jury to advance
its investigation of Mr. Trump after he leaves office (where, if they lied,
they would still risk charges of perjury and obstruction).
In short,
being president should mean you are more accountable, not less, to the rule of
law.
-----
Andrew Weissmann, a senior prosecutor in Robert
Mueller’s special counsel investigation, is a senior fellow at the New York
University School of Law and the author of “Where Law Ends: Inside the Mueller
Investigation.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/24/opinion/trump-prosecution.html?
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