“Mitchell had never interrogated a terrorist. In fact, he had never interrogated anyone at all. His methods were not just cruel but bizarre. Abu Zubaydah was left naked and sleep-deprived as CIA officers blasted loud music into his cell. An interrogator playing the role of God would say “Tell me what you know?” only to leave the room every time Abu Zubaydah responded, “What do you want to know?” At one point, the CIA left a crayon in Abu Zubaydah cell, hoping he would spontaneously write down valuable information. Even other CIA officers on the ground were uncomfortable with these techniques. The pressure to torture came from the highest levels of the Bush administration.
Higher-ups eventually noticed that the information had stopped coming and gave Soufan permission to try his own methods. The torture stopped, and Abu Zubaydah began providing useful information again, leading to the arrest of wannabe bomber Jose Padilla.”
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“Abu Zubaydah was extensively tortured after that. His mental state deteriorated, and he lost an eye. The information he provided under torture did not stop a single terrorist plot, but the Bush administration used some of it to justify the invasion of Iraq. In 2005, CIA officers destroyed videotapes of Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation in order to cover their tracks. The following year, Abu Zubaydah was transferred to Guantanamo Bay, where he told a U.S. military tribunal that he had made false statements just to make the pain stop.”
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“Soufan managed to build a rapport with several detainees at Guantanamo Bay without torture. One prisoner—who knew bin Laden’s wife, it turns out—even promised to provide more information if the FBI allowed him to call his family. Soufan agreed, but the U.S. military officers at Guantanamo Bay refused. Those officials “wouldn’t let a detainee use a phone for a minute, which would have led to bin Laden,” Soufan writes, “but they didn’t mind disregarding the U.S. Constitution” with their harsh treatment of prisoners.
In September 2002, Pakistani forces handed militants Ramzi bin al-Shibh and Hassan bin Attash to the CIA. (Bin Attash is named only by a pseudonym in the book.) Soufan was given 45 minutes to interrogate them, against the wishes of CIA headquarters. Bin Attash knew that Soufan had previously treated suspects with kindness. Deciding to cooperate, he spilled the beans on Al Qaeda’s plot to blow up an oil tanker in Yemen.
The CIA refused to believe that bin Attash was telling the truth and transferred him to an unnamed country to be tortured. Al Qaeda blew up the MV Limburg off the coast of Yemen the next month, just as bin Attash had warned. The attack killed one, wounded 12, and caused an oil spill.
Soufan left the FBI in 2005. He testified against torture to the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2009 and remains an outspoken critic of the excesses of the war on terror.”
“One of the first things on the agenda this year for Kentucky Republicans was figuring out how to kneecap Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear. They dropped legislation in January that placed new limits on the governor’s emergency executive powers, quickly passed the bill, overrode his veto and then fought him in court.
In the months that have followed, lawmakers across the country — from Maine to California, Oregon to Florida — have proposed and, in many cases, passed similar measures to curtail the sweeping powers bestowed on their state executives.”
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“Most governors insisted throughout the crisis that they were being guided by evolving science and trying to navigate uncertain terrain as best they could. But patience appears to have worn out for many legislators consigned to the backseat.”
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“In some states, it has been a continuation of philosophical differences that have played out over the course of the still-ongoing pandemic. That dynamic has been particularly evident in places sporting Democratic governors contending with GOP-controlled statehouses like Kentucky, Kansas and Michigan, where conservative outrage over Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s pandemic mandates put her in physical danger last year.
But for other governors, it has been members of their own party who have been the ones trying to wrestle back control and deliver emphatic rebukes of their state’s leadership, as was the case in New York and Ohio last month.”
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“Generally speaking, however, the GOP has tilted far more toward limiting what governors are allowed to do by law than Democrats to date.”
“Saudi Arabia, along with several other countries in the region that joined its war effort, has been fighting a war in Yemen since 2015. They’re fighting to oust the Houthis, a rebel group backed by Iran that had just overthrown Yemen’s internationally recognized government led by President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi.
The Saudi-led coalition, which until recently was also supported by the US, wants to return Hadi, who currently lives in exile in Saudi Arabia, to power.
When Saudi Arabia and its allies launched the war, they used military force to stop planes from landing and ships from docking in Yemen, saying such measures were necessary to stop the Houthis from smuggling in weapons, including from Iran.
But critics warned the blockade would keep much-needed food, fuel, medicine, and humanitarian aid from reaching desperate Yemenis, including millions of children, who are caught in the middle of the fighting.
That concern proved devastatingly prophetic.
The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, the world’s top authority on food security, said last year that 47,000 Yemenis were suffering from famine-like conditions and that more than 16 million — over half of Yemen’s population — couldn’t reliably and adequately feed themselves. United Nations agencies have said that at least 400,000 Yemeni children could die this year alone if conditions don’t improve.
What CNN found last month fit the years-long pattern: Saudi warships had kept all oil tankers from docking in the Houthi-controlled port of Hodeidah since the start of the year.”
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“It turns out the State Department disagrees with the growing narrative since the CNN report’s release.
“It is not a blockade,” a spokesperson for the agency said Monday. “Food is getting through, commodities are getting through, so it is not a blockade.”
However, the administration does acknowledge there has been a slowdown in the amount of fuel coming into the country, and they’re concerned about it. “The United States understands the urgent need for fuel to get into Hodeidah port,” Lenderking told me on Tuesday. “This is a constant priority in our conversations with the Republic of Yemen government and Saudi Arabia.”
But the primary culprit for the fuel slowdown, the State Department and the National Security Council contend, is not Saudi Arabia but rather the Hadi government.
Here’s why: Even though it doesn’t actually control the bulk of the country and is operating out of Saudi Arabia, it is still the legitimate, recognized government of Yemen and thus retains authority over who is allowed to dock in Yemen’s ports.
Which means that if the Hadi government doesn’t grant permission to a particular ship to dock in Hodeidah (or elsewhere), that ship can’t dock. The Saudi-led coalition enforces those decisions if necessary with its ships and planes, blocking any vessels Hadi’s government says can’t come in.
And that process of approving ships to dock is where the State Department says the real problem lies, leading to the fuel shortage.
The State Department said it opposes any arbitrary restrictions of commodities entering Yemen, but that “we respect the right of the government to control its access to ports.” However, the spokesperson added, “We do press them and work with them to make sure that their process improves and runs as smoothly as possible.””
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“The Houthis are partly to blame here, too. Experts told me the rebels aren’t great about dispersing the fuel that is allowed to come off the ships. Sometimes they shut down gas stations so that the price of fuel they control on the black market goes up. So they are also responsible for why fuel isn’t getting to those who need it.”
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“All three parties — the Hadi government, the Saudis, and the Houthis — are guilty of purposely using fuel, and access to it, as a weapon in this war.”
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“the severe restrictions in fuel imports at Hodeidah aren’t happening out of pure malice, but they are happening on purpose. It’s part of an effort by the Hadi government and the Saudis to stop the Houthis from exploiting fuel revenues for their own benefit. The Hadi government “has declined to let them in [to Hodeidah] because of a long-running dispute with the Houthis over revenue payments,” the UN spokesperson told me.”
“I saw this firsthand when I worked in the Obama campaign and in the summer of 2008 met with Hoshyar Zebari, the Iraqi foreign minister. When I asked him about the agreement to withdraw, he told me it was a non-negotiable demand. When I relayed this to Denis McDonough, who was on the campaign trail with Obama and eventually became his chief of staff, he was surprised and asked me if I was certain about what I heard. In 2009, while on a visit to Iraq, I brought this up with several Iraqi government officials in the parliament and the executive branch and received the same answer. Finally, in December 2011, when Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki came to Washington to finalize the deal, I and several others, including Obama’s first national-security adviser General David Jones and future Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, met with him. I asked him directly if there was anything President Obama could have done to keep the troops in Iraq. He essentially said that Bush made an agreement and the U.S. must stick to it. At the meeting, Jones said Obama was willing to leave 10,000 troops.”
“in September in the midst of the war game, actual Chinese combat aircraft intentionally flew over the rarely crossed median line in the Taiwan Strait in the direction of Taipei an unprecedented 40 times and conducted simulated attacks on the island that Taiwan’s premier called “disturbing.” Amid those provocations, China’s air force released a video showing a bomber capable of carrying nuclear weapons carrying out a simulated attack on Andersen Air Force Base on the U.S. Pacific island of Guam. The title of the Hollywood-like propaganda video was “The god of war H-6K [bomber] goes on the attack!”
In case the new U.S. administration failed to get the intended message behind all that provocative military activity, four days after President Biden took office, a large force of Chinese bombers and fighters flew past Taiwan and launched simulated missile attacks on the USS Roosevelt carrier strike group as it was sailing in international waters in the South China Sea.
Little wonder that many foreign affairs and national security experts believe the global pandemic has accelerated trends that were already pushing the United States and China toward a potential confrontation as the world’s leading status quo and rising power, respectively. This month the Council on Foreign Relations released a special report, “The United States, China, and Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War,” which concluded that Taiwan “is becoming the most dangerous flash point in the world for a possible war” between the United States and China. In Senate testimony on Tuesday, the head of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, Adm. Phil Davidson, warned that he believes China might try and annex Taiwan “in this decade, in fact within the next six years.”
Meanwhile, a leading Chinese think tank recently described tensions in U.S.-China relations as the worst since the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, and it advised Communist Party leaders to prepare for war with the United States.
What many Americans don’t realize is that years of classified Pentagon war games strongly suggest that the U.S. military would lose that war.
“More than a decade ago, our war games indicated that the Chinese were doing a good job of investing in military capabilities that would make our preferred model of expeditionary warfare, where we push forces forward and operate out of relatively safe bases and sanctuaries, increasingly difficult,” Air Force Lt. Gen. S. Clinton Hinote, deputy chief of staff for strategy, integration and requirements, told Yahoo News in an exclusive interview. By 2018, the People’s Liberation Army had fielded many of those forces in large numbers, to include massive arsenals of precision-guided surface-to-air and surface-to-surface missiles, a space-based constellation of navigation and targeting satellites and the largest navy in the world.
“At that point the trend in our war games was not just that we were losing, but we were losing faster,” Hinote said. “After the 2018 war game I distinctly remember one of our gurus of war gaming standing in front of the Air Force secretary and chief of staff, and telling them that we should never play this war game scenario [of a Chinese attack on Taiwan] again, because we know what is going to happen. The definitive answer if the U.S. military doesn’t change course is that we’re going to lose fast. In that case, an American president would likely be presented with almost a fait accompli.””
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“Part of the problem is that China advanced its A2/AD strategy while the Pentagon was largely distracted fighting counterterrorism and counterinsurgency wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for two decades. Beijing is also laser-focused on Taiwan and regional hegemony, while the U.S. military must project power and prepare for potential conflict scenarios all around the globe, giving the Pentagon what Ochmanek calls an “attention deficit disorder.” Finally, there is the complacency of the perennial winner that makes it hard for senior U.S. military officers to believe that another nation would dare to take them on.”
“What Vekasi did agree with, though, was another element of Cotton’s plan: ending America’s reliance on China’s extraction and processing of rare-earth elements. These elements are used in high-technology items like smartphones and flat-screen TVs, as well as military weapons systems like warplanes — and that makes them extremely valuable.
The problem is that China is simply dominant in this space. In the making of specialized magnets for electronics, for example, “the Pentagon has had to repeatedly waive a ban on using Chinese-built components in US weapons so that it could install rare-earth magnets in F-35 fighters,” Cotton wrote in his report.
It doesn’t help that when the US extracts rare-earth elements from mines in California and Colorado, more often than not they’re shipped to China to be made into American products, Vekasi told me.
The US simply doesn’t have the labor force to compete with Beijing’s industries, and it won’t unless and until Washington decides to subsidize workers to get trained in that field and companies to hire them, Cotton argues. Until the government does that, the US will remain beholden to China’s firm grip on the rare-earths sector.”