10/01/2024

Bay Area United Against War Newsletter, October 2, 2024

  


 *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

  *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


 *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

  *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*



*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

  *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

Naim Qassem during a televised address on September 20, 2024. (Photo: Screenshot from Al Jazeera YouTube Channel)


Israel’s Genocide Day 360: Israel tells U.S. Lebanon invasion ‘imminent’ as Hezbollah says it is ‘ready to engage’ Israeli forces

 

Hezbollah’s Deputy Secretary General said Hezbollah’s military capacities remain intact, while Israel has reportedly informed the U.S. that an Israeli ground invasion of southern Lebanon is “imminent.”



By Qassam Muaddi, September 30, 2024


Casualties

 

·      41,615 + killed* and at least 96,359 wounded in the Gaza Strip. 32,280 of the slain have been identified, including 10,627 children and 5,956 women, representing 60% of the casualties, and 2,770 elderly as of August 6, 2024. Some 10,000 more are estimated to be under the rubble*

 

·      719+ Palestinians have been killed in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem. This includes at least 146 children.**

 

·      Since the beginning of the current Israeli offensive on Lebanon, Israel has killed 1,640 Lebanese and wounded at least 8,000, according to Lebanese authorities.

 

·      Israel revised its estimated October 7 death toll down from 1,400 to 1,140.

 

·      The Israeli army recognizes the death of 714 Israeli soldiers and the injury of at least 4,100 others since October 7.***

 

* Gaza’s branch of the Palestinian Ministry of Health confirmed this figure in its daily report, published through its WhatsApp channel on September 26, 2024. Rights groups and public health experts estimate the death toll to be much higher.

 

** The death toll in the West Bank and Jerusalem is not updated regularly. This is the latest figure according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health as of September 25, 2024.

 

*** These figures are released by the Israeli military, showing the soldiers whose names “were allowed to be published.” Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot reported on August 4, 2024, that some 10,000 Israeli soldiers and officers have been either killed or wounded since October 7. The head of the Israeli army’s wounded association told Israel’s Channel 12 that the number of wounded Israeli soldiers exceeds 20,000, including at least 8,000 who have been permanently handicapped as of June 1. Israel’s Channel 7 reported that according to the Israeli war ministry’s rehabilitation service numbers, 8,663 new wounded joined the army’s handicap rehabilitation system since October 7 and as of June 18.

Source: mondoweiss.net

 
FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA PALESTINE WILL BE FREE!
END ALL U.S. AID TO ISRAEL!
FOR A DEMOCRATIC, SECULAR PALESTINE!

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

  *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


Leave a message at the Whitehouse:
www.whitehouse.gov/contact

Write to:

Leonard Peltier 89637-132

USP Coleman 1

P.O. Box 1033

Coleman, FL 33521

Note: Letters, address and return address must be in writing—no stickers—and on plain white paper.

Video at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWdJdODKO6M&feature=youtu.be



My Whitehouse message:
"Leonard Peltier should have been granted parole but, again, his parole has been denied. Leonard was convicted even though there was no actual proof of his guilt. And, anyway, he was not sentenced to life without possibility of parole. He has been incarcerated for over 49 years and he's almost 80 years old and in poor health. His release would pose no danger or threat whatsoever to the public. He deserves to spend his last years with family and loved ones. Please grant clemency to him now—today." —Bonnie Weinstein 

U.S. Parole Commission Denies Leonard Peltier’s Request for Freedom; President Biden Should Grant Clemency

 

In response to the U.S. Parole Commission denying Leonard Peltier’s request for parole after a hearing on June 10, Paul O’Brien, Executive Director of Amnesty International USA, made the following statement:

 

“Continuing to keep Leonard Peltier locked behind bars is a human rights travesty. President Biden should grant him clemency and release him immediately. Not only are there ongoing, unresolved concerns about the fairness of his trial, he has spent nearly 50 years in prison, is approaching 80 years old, and suffers from several chronic health problems.  

 

“Leonard Peltier has been incarcerated for far too long. The parole commission should have granted him the freedom to spend his remaining years in his community and surrounded by loved ones.  

 

“No one should be imprisoned after a trial riddled with uncertainty about its fairness. We are now calling on President Biden, once again, to grant Leonard Peltier clemency on humanitarian grounds and as a matter of mercy and justice.”

 

Background

 

·      Leonard Peltier, Native American activist and member of the American Indian Movement (AIM), was convicted of the murders of two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in 1975. He has always maintained his innocence. Amnesty International joins Tribal Nations, Tribal Leaders, Members of Congress, former FBI agents, Nobel Peace Prize winners and former U.S. Attorney James Reynolds, whose office handled Peltier’s prosecution and appeal, in urging his release.  

·      Parole was also rejected at Peltier’s last hearing in 2009. Due to his age, this was likely the last opportunity for parole.  

·      A clemency request is pending before President Joe Biden. President Biden hascommitted opens in a new tabto grant clemency/commutation of sentences on a rolling basis rather than at the end of his term, following a review of requests by the White House Counsel’s Office and the Department of Justice.

Amnesty International has examined Peltier’s case extensively for many years, sent observers to his trial in 1977, and long campaigned on his behalf. Most recently, Amnesty International USA sent a letter to the U.S. Parole Commission urging the commission to grant him parole.

https://www.amnestyusa.org/press-releases/u-s-parole-commission-denies-leonard-peltiers-request-for-freedom-president-biden-should-grant-clemency/

Write to:

Leonard Peltier 89637-132

USP Coleman 1

P.O. Box 1033

Coleman, FL 33521

Note: Letters, address and return address must be in writing—no stickers—and on plain white paper.

Video at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWdJdODKO6M&feature=youtu.be


Sign our petition urging President Biden to grant clemency to Leonard Peltier:

 

https://www.freeleonardpeltier.com/petition

 

Email: contact@whoisleonardpeltier.info

Address: 116 W. Osborne Ave. Tampa, Florida 33603


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

  *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*



Beneath The Mountain: An Anti-Prison Reader (City Lights, 2024) is a collection of revolutionary essays, written by those who have been detained inside prison walls. Composed by the most structurally dispossessed people on earth, the prisoner class, these words illuminate the steps towards freedom. 

 

Beneath the Mountain documents the struggle — beginning with slavery, genocide, and colonization up to our present day — and imagines a collective, anti-carceral future. These essays were handwritten first on scraps of paper, magazine covers, envelopes, toilet paper, or pages of bibles, scratched down with contraband pencils or the stubby cartridge of a ball-point pen; kites, careworn, copied and shared across tiers and now preserved in this collection for this and future generations. If they were dropped in the prison-controlled mail they were cloaked in prayers, navigating censorship and dustbins. They were very often smuggled out. These words mark resistance, fierce clarity, and speak to the hope of building the world we all deserve to live in.  


"Beneath the Mountain reminds us that ancestors and rebels have resisted conquest and enslavement, building marronage against colonialism and genocide."

—Joy James, author of New Bones Abolition: Captive Maternal Agency

 

Who stands beneath the mountain but prisoners of war? Mumia Abu-Jamal and Jennifer Black have assembled a book of fire, each voice a flame in captivity...Whether writing from a place of fugivity, the prison camp, the city jail, the modern gulag or death row, these are our revolutionary thinkers, our critics and dreamers, our people. The people who move mountains. —Robin D.G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

 

Filled with insight and energy, this extraordinary book gifts us the opportunity to encounter people’s understanding of the fight for freedom from the inside out.  —Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Golden Gulag and Abolition Geography

 

These are the words each writer dreamed as they sought freedom and they need to be studied by people inside and read in every control unit/hole in every prison in America. We can send this book for you to anyone who you know who is currently living, struggling, and fighting 

 

Who better to tell these stories than those who have lived them? Don’t be surprised with what you find within these pages: hope, solidarity, full faith towards the future, and most importantly, love. 

 

Excerpt from the book:

"Revolutionary love speaks to the ways we protect, respect, and empower each other while standing up to state terror. Its presence is affirmed through these texts as a necessary component to help chase away fear and to encourage the solidarity and unity essential for organizing in dangerous times and places. Its absence portends tragedy. Revolutionary love does not stop the state from wanting to kill us, nor is it effective without strategy and tactics, but it is the might that fuels us to stand shoulder to shoulder with others regardless. Perhaps it can move mountains."  —Jennifer Black & Mumia Abu-Jamal from the introduction to Beneath The Mountain: An Anti Prison Reader

 

Get the book at:

https://www.prisonradiostore.com/shop-2/beneath-the-mountain-an-anti-prison-reader-edited-by-mumia-abu-jamal-jennifer-black-city-lights-2024

 *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

  *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*



Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky 

By Monica Hill

In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries.

Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin: 

“To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?”

Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine.

A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism.

To sign the online petition at freeboris.info

Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024

https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine. 


Petition in Support of Boris Kagarlitsky

We, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison.

Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles.

The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested.

On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release.

The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison.

The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences.

There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering.

Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course.

We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally.

We also call on the authorities of the Russian Federation to reverse their growing repression of dissent and respect their citizens' freedom of speech and right to protest.

Sign to Demand the Release of Boris Kagarlitsky

https://freeboris.info

The petition is also available on Change.org

  *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

  *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*Major Announcement*

Claudia De la Cruz wins

Peace and Freedom Party primary in California!


We have an exciting announcement. The votes are still being counted in California, but the Claudia-Karina “Vote Socialist” campaign has achieved a clear and irreversible lead in the Peace and Freedom Party primary. Based on the current count, Claudia has 46% of the vote compared to 40% for Cornel West. A significant majority of PFP’s newly elected Central Committee, which will formally choose the nominee at its August convention, have also pledged their support to the Claudia-Karina campaign.

 

We are excited to campaign in California now and expect Claudia De la Cruz to be the candidate on the ballot of the Peace and Freedom Party in November.

 

We achieved another big accomplishment this week - we’re officially on the ballot in Hawai’i! This comes after also petitioning to successfully gain ballot access in Utah. We are already petitioning in many other states. Each of these achievements is powered by the tremendous effort of our volunteers and grassroots organizers across the country. When we’re organized, people power can move mountains!

 

We need your help to keep the momentum going. Building a campaign like this takes time, energy, and money. We know that our class enemies — the billionaires, bankers, and CEO’s — put huge sums toward loyal politicians and other henchmen who defend their interests. They will use all the money and power at their disposal to stop movements like ours. As an independent, socialist party, our campaign is relying on contributions from the working class and people like you.

 

We call on each and every one of our supporters to set up a monthly or one-time donation to support this campaign to help it keep growing and reaching more people. A new socialist movement, independent of the Democrats and Republicans, is being built but it will only happen when we all pitch in.

 

The Claudia-Karina campaign calls to end all U.S. aid to Israel. End this government’s endless wars. We want jobs for all, with union representation and wages that let us live with dignity. Housing, healthcare, and education for all - without the lifelong debt. End the ruthless attacks on women, Black people, immigrants, and LGBTQ people. These are just some of the demands that are resonating across the country. Help us take the next step: 

 

Volunteer: https://votesocialist2024.com/volunteer

 

Donate: https://votesocialist2024.com/donate

 

See you in the streets,

 

Claudia & Karina

 

Don't Forget! Join our telegram channel for regular updates: https://t.me/+KtYBAKgX51JhNjMx

  

 *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

           *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*    




Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!

FREE HIM NOW!

Write to Mumia at:

Smart Communications/PADOC

Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335

SCI Mahanoy

P.O. Box 33028

St. Petersburg, FL 33733


Join the Fight for Mumia's Life


Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.

Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical Defense Fund, Official 2024

Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.

Send to:

 Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio

P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103

Prison Radio is a project of the Redwood Justice Fund (RJF), which is a California 501c3 (Tax ID no. 680334309) not-for-profit foundation dedicated to the defense of the environment and of civil and human rights secured by law.  Prison Radio/Redwood Justice Fund PO Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94141


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


Updates From Kevin Cooper 

A Never-ending Constitutional Violation

A summary of the current status of Kevin Cooper’s case by the Kevin Cooper Defense Committee

 

      On October 26, 2023, the law firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, LLP wrote a rebuttal in response to the Special Counsel's January 13, 2023 report upholding the conviction of their client Kevin Cooper. A focus of the rebuttal was that all law enforcement files were not turned over to the Special Counsel during their investigation, despite a request for them to the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office.

      On October 29, 2023, Law Professors Lara Bazelon and Charlie Nelson Keever, who run the six member panel that reviews wrongful convictions for the San Francisco County District Attorney's office, published an OpEd in the San Francisco Chronicle calling the "Innocence Investigation” done by the Special Counsel in the Cooper case a “Sham Investigation” largely because Cooper has unsuccessfully fought for years to obtain the police and prosecutor files in his case. This is a Brady claim, named for the U.S. Supreme court’s 1963 case establishing the Constitutional rule that defendants are entitled to any information in police and prosecutor's possession that could weaken the state's case or point to innocence. Brady violations are a leading cause of wrongful convictions. The Special Counsel's report faults Cooper for not offering up evidence of his own despite the fact that the best evidence to prove or disprove Brady violations or other misconduct claims are in those files that the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office will not turn over to the Special Counsel or to Cooper's attorneys.

      On December 14, 2023, the president of the American Bar Association (ABA), Mary Smith, sent Governor Gavin Newsom a three page letter on behalf of the ABA stating in part that Mr.Cooper's counsel objected to the state's failure to provide Special Counsel all documents in their possession relating to Mr.Cooper's conviction, and that concerns about missing information are not new. For nearly 40 years Mr.Cooper's attorneys have sought this same information from the state.

      On December 19, 2023, Bob Egelko, a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an article about the ABA letter to the Governor that the prosecutors apparently withheld evidence from the Governor's legal team in the Cooper case.

      These are just a few recent examples concerning the ongoing failure of the San Bernardino County District Attorney to turn over to Cooper's attorney's the files that have been requested, even though under the law and especially the U.S. Constitution, the District Attorney of San Bernardino county is required to turn over to the defendant any and all material and or exculpatory evidence that they have in their files. Apparently, they must have something in their files because they refuse to turn them over to anyone.

      The last time Cooper's attorney's received files from the state, in 2004, it wasn't from the D.A. but a Deputy Attorney General named Holly Wilkens in Judge Huff's courtroom. Cooper's attorneys discovered a never before revealed police report showing that a shirt was discovered that had blood on it and was connected to the murders for which Cooper was convicted, and that the shirt had disappeared. It had never been tested for blood. It was never turned over to Cooper's trial attorney, and no one knows where it is or what happened to it. Cooper's attorneys located the woman who found that shirt on the side of the road and reported it to the Sheriff's Department. She was called to Judge Huff's court to testify about finding and reporting that shirt to law enforcement. That shirt was the second shirt found that had blood on it that was not the victims’ blood. This was in 2004, 19 years after Cooper's conviction.

      It appears that this ongoing constitutional violation that everyone—from the Special Counsel to the Governor's legal team to the Governor himself—seems to know about, but won't do anything about, is acceptable in order to uphold Cooper's conviction.

But this type of thing is supposed to be unacceptable in the United States of America where the Constitution is supposed to stand for something other than a piece of paper with writing on it. How can a Governor, his legal team, people who support and believe in him ignore a United States citizen’s Constitutional Rights being violated for 40 years in order to uphold a conviction?

      This silence is betrayal of the Constitution. This permission and complicity by the Governor and his team is against everything that he and they claim to stand for as progressive politicians. They have accepted the Special Counsel's report even though the Special Counsel did not receive the files from the district attorney that may not only prove that Cooper is innocent, but that he was indeed framed by the Sheriff’s Department; and that evidence was purposely destroyed and tampered with, that certain witnesses were tampered with, or ignored if they had information that would have helped Cooper at trial, that evidence that the missing shirt was withheld from Cooper's trial attorney, and so much more.

      Is the Governor going to get away with turning a blind eye to this injustice under his watch?

      Are progressive people going to stay silent and turn their eyes blind in order to hopefully get him to end the death penalty for some while using Cooper as a sacrificial lamb?


An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:


Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213

 

www.freekevincooper.org

 

Call California Governor Newsom:

1-(916) 445-2841

Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish, 

press 6 to speak with a representative and

wait for someone to answer 

(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

                   


The writers' organization PEN America is circulating this petition on behalf of Jason Renard Walker, a Texas prisoner whose life is being threatened because of his exposés of the Texas prison system. 


See his book, Reports from within the Belly of the Beast; available on Amazon at:

https://www.amazon.com/Reports-Within-Belly-Beast-Department-ebook/dp/B084656JDZ/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8

Petition: https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/protect-whistleblowers-in-carceral-settings


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*



Daniel Hale UPDATE:  

 

In February Drone Whistleblower Daniel Hale was transferred from the oppressive maximum-security prison in Marion, Illinois to house confinement.  We celebrate his release from Marion.  He is laying low right now, recovering from nearly 3 years in prison.  Thank goodness he is now being held under much more humane conditions and expected to complete his sentence in July of this year.     www.StandWithDaniel Hale.org

 

More Info about Daniel:

 

“Drone Whistleblower Subjected To Harsh Confinement Finally Released From Prison” 

https://thedissenter.org/drone-whistleblower-cmu-finally-released-from-prison/

 

“I was punished under the Espionage Act. Why wasn’t Joe Biden?”  by Daniel Hale

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/3/5/joe-biden-the-espionage-act-and-me?ref=thedissenter.org

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


Resources for Resisting Federal Repression

https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/

 

Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests. 

 

The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page. 

 

Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.

 

Emergency Hotlines

If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities. 

 

State and Local Hotlines

If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for: 

 

Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312

San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org

Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963

National Hotline

If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:

 

National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


Articles

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


1) ‘Don’t Kill My Child. Kill Me Instead.’

By Nicholas Kristof

Opinion Columnist, reporting from the Chad-Sudan border, Sept. 28, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/28/opinion/darfur-sudan-atrocities.html

a photograph of a woman whose young son’s hand is on her shoulder

Naima with her son, Nazir, outside their hut. Credit...Nicholas Kristof/The New York Times


Side by side with the worst of humanity, you regularly encounter the best. And so it was that while covering murder, rape and starvation in Sudan, I was awed by a heroic refugee, Naima Adam.

 

I’m on the Chad-Sudan border reporting on atrocities against Black African ethnic groups in Sudan, wrenchingly similar to the Darfur genocide here two decades ago. To report here is to appreciate that “evil” is not just an archaic Hebrew Bible term, but a force still powerful in the 21st century.

 

And yet: When civilization collapses and we humans are tested, some people reveal themselves as sociopaths, but a remarkable number turn out to be saints like Naima.

 

Naima, 48, is a member of one of the Black ethnic groups that have been targeted by destructive extremists in Sudan’s Arab leadership. Four times in the last 20 years Arab marauders have burned her home in their efforts at ethnic cleansing of non-Arab groups, and the Janjaweed Arab militia murdered her husband nine years ago.

 

After two military factions started a civil war in 2023, one of them — a descendant of the Janjaweed called the Rapid Support Forces, armed and supported by the United Arab Emirates — tried once again to drive Black Africans from Darfur. Naima recounted the same pattern I heard from so many people: The militia surrounded her village, lined up men and boys, then shot them one by one.

 

“We’re going to get rid of this Black trash,” she quoted the Arab gunmen saying.

 

Then the gunmen went house to house to kill, plunder and rape. Mostly, those they raped were girls and women, she said, but they also raped at least one man.

 

Two men took one of Naima’s daughters into a room and closed the door; she suspects they raped the girl, but sexual violence is such a taboo that she never asked her daughter what happened. Rape survivors bear the trauma on their own, and while a civil society group has formed a women’s center on the border to help, it is a struggle to find funding.

 

With the militia killing even young boys, Naima was terrified the gunmen would murder her 10-year-old son, Nazir. So she put Nazir on her back, the way Sudanese moms carry young children, to make him seem smaller.

 

A gunman saw through the ruse and demanded that she hand Nazir over.

 

“He’s a boy,” the man shouted. “Kill him!”

 

“Don’t kill my child,” Naima pleaded. “Kill me instead.”

 

One man clubbed Naima with the butt of his rifle to try to grab the boy. Another raised his gun and shot Naima twice, through the breast and in the leg; she showed me the scars. Both were flesh wounds, and even as she bled she fought and would not surrender her son.

 

Some men in the militia think it is bad luck to shoot a woman, and perhaps for that reason the attackers retreated and went on to attack the next house. Naima and her children were able to escape and find refuge in another village.

 

But the Rapid Support Forces then attacked this new location, she said, and this time they grabbed Naima’s 14-year-old niece to rape. Naima blocked them and told them to rape her instead.

 

So two of the gunmen men stripped Naima naked and held her down, she said, while one of the attackers pulled down his pants and prepared to rape her. This was hard for her to talk about, but eventually she explained how she stopped the assault: She grabbed the man’s penis and yanked.

 

“I bent it like this,” she said, demonstrating a furious shaking movement. “I tried to break it.”

 

The man clubbed her with his gun and was ready to shoot her, but his partner was rattled and told him to leave her alone, she said. They left without raping her or her niece.

 

Naima may single-handedly have done more to disincentivize rape in Sudan than all the world leaders put together.

 

Naima’s mother was murdered, and her father and one of her sons are missing and may be dead. She led the surviving members of her family to the safety of a refugee camp across the border in Adré, Chad, where one of her adult sons remains hospitalized after brutal torture in Sudan. He suffered a mental breakdown and can’t talk about what he endured.

 

Nazir has nightmares but is recovering. He is devoted to his mother and told me gravely that he understands that she was shot for saving his life.

 

As for Naima, she has recovered from the bullet wounds but is impoverished. I asked if she was sending Nazir to school in the camp. She laughed at the idea that she could afford school fees. “I was embarrassed that I couldn’t make tea for you,” she said. “I have nothing.”

 

Yet she still supports orphans in the refugee camp. Helping those in danger is a priority for her.

 

I asked her whether she wanted revenge against the Sudanese Arabs who had caused her so much tragedy. Would she favor attacking Arab villages, killing the men and raping the women?

 

She looked shocked at the question. “We are human beings,” she told me firmly. “We are Muslims. We have principles. We don’t want this to happen to the Arabs.”

 

In one sense, Naima is exceptional; in another, she reflects the magnificent response of so many ordinary Sudanese and Chadians to the recent atrocities. Sudan has been largely abandoned by the world, including by President Biden and other leaders. But Sudanese civil society has been as heroic as the country’s military leadership has been deplorable.

 

Sudanese doctors work without pay, local groups set up soup kitchens and refugee volunteers train child victims of trauma to make handicrafts that they can sell to earn money. I spoke to one of these trainers, Um Salama Umar, who said that the Rapid Support Forces had murdered two of her sons and three of her sisters; now she tries to heal by helping traumatized children rebuild their lives.

 

Anybody who wants to help might consider grass-roots groups in the Mutual Aid Sudan coalition, MutualAidSudan.org.

 

So, yes, Sudan reveals the human capacity for evil, but it’s also a reminder of an equally powerful human capacity for strength, resilience and courage. It’s thus possible to return from a land aching from famine, massacres and rape and feel honored to be part of the same gallant species as those Sudanese like Naima who emerge from an ultimate test as moral exemplars for us all.


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


2) Why the World’s Biggest Powers Can’t Stop a Middle East War

The United States’ ability to influence events in the Mideast has waned, and other major nations have essentially been onlookers.

By Roger Cohen, Sept. 29, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/29/world/middleeast/middle-east-war-peace-nasrallah.html
A man in a dark jacket walks through the rubble of destroyed buildings.
A man walking through the rubble of buildings in Baalbek, Lebanon, last week after Israeli airstrikes. Credit...Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times

Over almost a year of war in the Middle East, major powers have proved incapable of stopping or even significantly influencing the fighting, a failure that reflects a turbulent world of decentralized authority that seems likely to endure.

 

Stop-and-start negotiations between Israel and Hamas to end the fighting in Gaza, pushed by the United States, have repeatedly been described by the Biden administration as on the verge of a breakthrough, only to fail. The current Western-led attempt to avert a full-scale Israeli-Hezbollah war in Lebanon amounts to a scramble to avert disaster. Its chances of success seem deeply uncertain after the Israeli killing of Hassan Nasrallah, the longtime leader of Hezbollah on Friday.

 

“There’s more capability in more hands in a world where centrifugal forces are far stronger than centralizing ones,” said Richard Haass, the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations. “The Middle East is the primary case study of this dangerous fragmentation.”

 

The killing of Mr. Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah over more than three decades and the man who built the Shiite organization into one of the most powerful nonstate armed forces in the world, leaves a vacuum that Hezbollah will most likely take a long time to fill. It is a major blow to Iran, the chief backer of Hezbollah, that may even destabilize the Islamic Republic. Whether full-scale war will come to Lebanon remains unclear.

 

“Nasrallah represented everything for Hezbollah, and Hezbollah was the advance arm of Iran,” said Gilles Kepel, a leading French expert on the Middle East and the author of a book on the world’s upheaval since Oct. 7. “Now the Islamic Republic is weakened, perhaps mortally, and one wonders who can even give an order for Hezbollah today.”

 

For many years, the United States was the only country that could bring constructive pressure to bear on both Israel and Arab states. It engineered the 1978 Camp David Accords that brought peace between Israel and Egypt, and the Israel-Jordan peace of 1994. Just over three decades ago, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel and Yasir Arafat, the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, shook hands on the White House lawn in the name of peace, only for the fragile hope of that embrace to erode steadily.

 

The world, and Israel’s primary enemies, have since changed. America’s ability to influence Iran, its implacable foe for decades, and Iran’s proxies like Hezbollah, is marginal. Designated as terrorist organizations in Washington, Hamas and Hezbollah effectively exist beyond the reach of American diplomacy.

 

The United States does have enduring leverage over Israel, notably in the form of military aid that involved a $15 billion package signed this year by President Biden. But an ironclad alliance with Israel built around strategic and domestic political considerations, as well as the shared values of two democracies, means Washington will almost certainly never threaten to cut — let alone cut off — the flow of arms.

 

The overwhelming Israeli military response in Gaza to the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre of Israelis and its seizure of some 250 hostages has drawn mild reprimands from Mr. Biden. He has called Israel’s actions “over the top,” for example. But American support for its embattled ally has been resolute as Palestinian casualties in Gaza have risen into the tens of thousands, many of them civilians.

 

The United States, under any conceivable presidency, is not about to desert a Jewish state whose existence had been increasingly questioned over the past year, from American campuses to the streets of the very Europe that embarked on the annihilation of the Jewish people less than a century ago.

 

“If U.S. policy toward Israel ever changed, it would only be at the margins,” Mr. Haass said, despite the growing sympathy, especially among young Americans, for the Palestinian cause.

 

Other powers have essentially been onlookers as the bloodshed has spread. China, a major importer of Iranian oil and a major supporter of anything that might weaken the American-led world order that emerged from the ruins in 1945, has little interest in donning the mantle of peacemaker.

 

Russia also has scant inclination to be helpful, especially on the eve of the Nov. 5 election in the United States. Reliant on Iran for defense technology and drones in its intractable war in Ukraine, it is no less enthused than China over any signs of American decline or any opportunity to bog America down in a Middle Eastern mire.

 

Based on his past behavior, the potential return to the White House of former President Donald J. Trump is likely seen in Moscow as the return of a leader who would prove complaisant toward President Vladimir V. Putin.

 

Among regional powers, none is strong enough or committed enough to the Palestinian cause to confront Israel militarily. In the end, Iran is cautious because it knows the cost of all-out war could be the end of the Islamic Republic; Egypt fears an enormous influx of Palestinian refugees; and Saudi Arabia seeks a Palestinian state, but would not put Saudi lives on the line for that cause.

 

As for Qatar, it funded Hamas with hundreds of millions of dollars a year that went in part to the construction of a labyrinthine web of tunnels, some as deep as 250 feet, where Israeli hostages have been held. It enjoyed the complicity of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who saw Hamas as an effective way to undermine the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and so undercut any chance of peace.

 

The disaster of Oct. 7 was also the culmination of the cynical manipulation, by Arab and Israeli leaders, of the Palestinian quest for statehood. A year on, nobody knows how to pick up the pieces.

 

So in their annual pilgrimage, now ongoing, world leaders troop to the meeting of the General Assembly of the United Nations, where the Security Council is largely paralyzed by Russian vetoes over any Ukraine-related resolutions and American vetoes over Israel-related resolutions.

 

The leaders listen to Mr. Biden depict, yet again, a world at an “inflection point” between rising autocracy and troubled democracies. They hear the U.N. secretary general, António Guterres, deplore the “collective punishment” of the Palestinian people — a phrase that incensed Israel — in response to the “abhorrent acts of terror committed by Hamas almost a year ago.”

 

But Mr. Guterres’s words, like Mr. Biden’s, seem to echo in the strategic vacuum of an à la carte world order, suspended between the demise of Western domination and the faltering rise of alternatives to it. The means to pressure Hamas, Hezbollah and Israel all at once — and effective diplomacy would require leverage over all three — do not exist.

 

This unraveling without rebuilding has precluded effective action to stop the Israel-Gaza war. There is no global consensus on the need for peace or even a cease-fire. In the past, war in the Middle East led to soaring oil prices and tumbling markets, forcing the world’s attention. Now, said Itamar Rabinovich, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States, “the attitude is, ‘OK, so be it.’”

 

Absent any coherent and coordinated international response, Mr. Netanyahu and Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader and a mastermind of the Oct. 7 attack, face no consequences in pursuing a destructive course, whose endpoint is unclear but which will certainly involve the loss of more lives.

 

Mr. Netanyahu has shunned a serious American effort to bring about the normalization of relations with Saudi Arabia, perhaps the most important country in the Arab and Islamic world, because its price would be some serious commitment to the establishment of a Palestinian state, the very thing he has devoted his political life to preventing.

 

Mr. Netanyahu’s interest in the prolonging of the war to sidestep a formal reprimand for the military and intelligence failures that led to the Oct. 7 attack — a catastrophe for which the buck stopped on the prime minister’s desk — complicates any diplomatic efforts. So does his attempt to avoid facing the personal charges of fraud and corruption brought against him. He is playing a waiting game, that now includes offering little or nothing until Nov. 5, when Mr. Trump, whom he considers a strong ally, may be elected.

 

Israeli families who send their children to war do not know how committed their commander in chief is to bringing those young soldiers home safely by seizing any viable opportunity for peace. This, many Israelis say, is corrosive to the soul of the nation.

 

As for Mr. Sinwar, the Israeli hostages he holds give him leverage. His apparent indifference to the massive loss of Palestinian life in Gaza affords him considerable sway over world opinion, which has progressively turned against Israel as more Palestinian children are killed.

 

In short, Mr. Sinwar has little reason to change course; and, in what Stephen Heintz, the president of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund philanthropic organization has called “the age of turbulence,” the world is not about to change that course for him.

 

”The institutions that have guided international relations and global problem solving since the mid-20th century are clearly no longer capable of addressing the problems of the new millennium,” Mr. Heintz wrote in a recent essay. “They are inefficient, ineffective, anachronistic, and, in some cases, simply obsolete.”

 

That, too, has been a lesson of the year since Hamas struck.


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


3) Israel Bombards Hezbollah in Lebanon and Strikes Yemen’s Houthis

The Israeli military said it struck the Yemeni port city of Hodeidah in response to recent attacks by the Iranian-backed Houthis that targeted Israel.

By Euan WardAaron Boxerman and Matthew Mpoke Bigg, September 29, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/09/29/world/israel-hezbollah-lebanon-nasrallah
[object Object]

An Israeli airstrike near Beirut.

Israel’s military pounded Hezbollah targets in Lebanon on Sunday as it also carried out a strike against another Iranian-backed adversary, the Houthis, in Yemen.

 

The attacks in Lebanon are part of a major escalation of Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah over the past two weeks, after nearly a year of trading cross-border fire. This has increased the threat of an all-out regional war that could potentially draw in Iran, whose proxies include Hezbollah, the Houthis and Hamas in Gaza. In recent weeks, the Houthis have launched missiles at targets in Israel — and Israel’s military said the strikes on Sunday were a response.

 

The attack in Yemen came after Israel’s military said on Sunday that it had struck dozens of targets in Lebanon, including rocket launchers and buildings that it said were used for storing weapons,  and announced that it had further targeted the group’s top leadership. At least four people were killed in eastern Lebanon, according to the country’s health ministry.

 

At least one strike hit the same area south of Beirut where Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, was killed on Friday in an attack that Israel’s military said had hit the militia’s underground headquarters. On Sunday, video showed the extent of the damage in that area.

 

Mr. Nasrallah was a beacon for anti-Israel forces across the Middle East and beyond, and his death is a major blow to Hezbollah. It deprives the organization of a leader whose stature, experience, political relationships and rhetoric served as a powerful unifying force.

 

Both Hezbollah and Israel’s military chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, have vowed to continue fighting.

 

Here’s what else to know:

 

·      Hezbollah’s leadership: Two days after Mr. Nasrallah was killed and one day after announcing his death, Hezbollah has yet to provide information about his funeral — or name his successor. In the meantime, several other senior Hezbollah leaders have been confirmed dead. The Israeli military said on Sunday that it had killed Nabil Kaouk, the deputy head of the group’s central council, in an airstrike a day earlier. Hezbollah confirmed that death and also that of Ali Karaki, another top commander.

 

·      Israeli prime minister: Benjamin Netanyahu said in a video statement on Saturday that he had ordered the assassination of Mr. Nasrallah because he could have rebuilt Hezbollah, no matter how battered. Mr. Netanyahu said that his death was necessary to advance Israel’s goal of allowing tens of thousands of displaced residents of northern Israel to return home. He said the work was “still incomplete.” Israel’s strikes in Lebanon in recent days have been a moment of triumph for the Israeli leader.

 

·      The toll in Lebanon: The health ministry in Lebanon said that 14 paramedics had been killed over the past two days and that about half a million people had been displaced in recent weeks. Thousands of people have camped on the streets and beaches of Beirut, where some reacted to Mr. Nasrallah’s death with grief and shock. The World Food Program said it had plans to provide food assistance for up to a million people in shelters.

 

·      International reaction: The White House wants a cease-fire and a diplomatic solution rather than all-out war, President Biden’s national security spokesman, John F. Kirby, told CNN on Sunday. For its part, Iran, Hezbollah’s main backer, has reacted with caution to Mr. Nasrallah’s killing. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, mourned publicly, calling on all Muslims to rise against Israel, but did not pledge retaliation or revenge.

 

Farnaz Fassihi and Edward Wong contributed reporting.


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


4) Video shows that Israel most likely used 2,000-pound bombs in attack that killed Hezbollah leader.

By Aric Toler and Riley Mellen, September 28, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/09/29/world/israel-hezbollah-lebanon-nasrallah
Israel Defense Forces via Telegram



A video published by the Israeli military showed that planes it said were used in the attack that killed Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, on Friday night carried 2,000-pound bombs, according to munitions experts and a New York Times analysis.

 

The video showed eight planes fitted with at least 15 2,000-pound bombs, including the American-manufactured BLU-109 with a JDAM kit, a precision guidance system that attaches to bombs, according to Trevor Ball, a former U.S. Army explosive ordnance disposal technician. These bombs, a type of munition known as bunker busters, can penetrate underground before detonating.

 

Wes Bryant, a former U.S. Air Force targeting specialist who also reviewed the video, agreed with the analysis. In text messages with The Times, he said the bombs were “exactly what I would expect” to be used in what Israel has said was an attack on Mr. Nasrallah in Hezbollah’s underground headquarters.

 

In May, the Biden administration announced it had paused a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel because of concerns over civilian safety in Gaza.

 

The video, published Saturday on the Israeli military’s official Telegram channel with the caption “Israeli Air Force Fighter Jets Involved in the Elimination of Hassan Nasrallah and Hezbollah’s Central Headquarters in Lebanon,” shows at least eight planes in a row armed with 2,000-pound bombs. Some are too far away to clearly identify the exact model, but the closer planes are seen armed with BLU-109 bombs. That model of bomb is also identifiable when the video shows two planes taking off, with one plane carrying at least seven of those munitions. Then the video shows a plane returning at dusk to the Israeli air base without any bombs.

 

While the video does not show the planes dropping the bombs, Mr. Ball said that videos showing the explosions in the densely populated southern suburbs of Beirut, as well as the damage caused, are consistent with the 2,000-pound bombs carried by the Israeli jets in the video. A New York Times analysis of verified videos, photos and satellite imagery showed that the attack destroyed at least four apartment buildings that were each at least seven stories tall.

 

Two senior Israeli defense officials told The Times that more than 80 bombs were dropped over a period of several minutes to kill Mr. Nasrallah, but did not confirm the type of munitions used. The Israeli military did not answer questions from The Times on the bombs seen in this video or used on the attack on Mr. Nasrallah. U.S. government officials referred questions on the munitions to the Israeli military.

 

Israel continued to pound Beirut’s southern suburbs on Saturday. Visual evidence analyzed by The Times shows at least 13 sites were struck on Friday and Saturday across at least three miles of densely developed city. The full extent of the strikes is unclear.

 

Lebanon’s health ministry said on Saturday that at least 33 people had been killed and more than 195 people injured by the strikes, and the toll is expected to rise with many still buried under rubble.

 

Mr. Nasrallah’s assassination was a stunning escalation of Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah in a conflict that has gone on for nearly a year. Hezbollah began firing into northern Israel on Oct. 8 in solidarity with Hamas, which is also supported by Iran, and Israel frequently responded, intensifying its attacks dramatically over the last two weeks. That has fueled fears of an all-out regional war that could draw in bigger players like Iran.

 

A correction was made on Sept. 29, 2024: An earlier version of this report misstated the number of munitions carried by an Israeli military plane. It was at least seven, not six.

 

Devon Lum, Aaron Boxerman, Eric Schmitt and Ronen Bergman contributed reporting. McKinnon de Kuyper contributed video editing.


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


5) There’s a Dangerous Misconception About the Military’s Obligations to the President

By Graham Parsons, Sept. 29, 2024

Dr. Parsons is a professor of philosophy at the United States Military Academy at West Point, where he studies and teaches military ethics.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/29/opinion/trump-military.html

By James Marshall

The prospect of a second Trump administration has rekindled a debate from four years ago about the proper role of the military in our democracy.

During the tumultuous period before and after the 2020 presidential election, several extraordinary conflicts took place between Donald Trump and senior leaders of the military. In June 2020, for example, Defense Secretary Mark Esper said publicly that active-duty military should not be used to control protests in American cities — despite a threat from Mr. Trump to do precisely that.

Likewise, Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, took a series of unusual steps during the final months of the Trump administration to protect the country from a president who he believed was looking for ways to remain in power. General Milley even went as far as to solicit assurances from the military chain of command that it would not launch a nuclear strike on Mr. Trump’s order without his involvement.

Recent reporting has raised concerns that a second Trump administration would once again strain relations between the military and civilian authorities. Mr. Trump and his potential appointees are apparently considering deploying the military for a variety of purposes that might invite scrutiny from military leaders: to patrol the border, arrest undocumented immigrants, combat urban crime and quell protests.

Now, as then, a question arises: When is the military permitted (and perhaps obligated) to criticize or even refuse an order from a commander in chief — and when must it defer?

Of course, if an order is clearly illegal, service members are legally bound to disobey it. But the law in this space can be ambiguous. For example, the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 generally prohibits using the U.S. military for domestic policing purposes, but that prohibition has exceptions — and the Insurrection Act of 1807 grants the president the authority to unilaterally deploy the military to restore domestic law and order. A president’s advisers have plenty of wiggle room to make reasonable-sounding legal defenses of domestic policing operations.

This sort of legal uncertainty might seem to dictate a very strict policy of military deference. Indeed, people on both the right and the left have criticized General Milley and Mr. Esper for their actions in 2020, arguing that they overstepped, undermining the authority of the commander in chief and compromising the military’s political neutrality. The assumption here is that political neutrality means the military must obey all presidential orders, as long as those orders are not clearly illegal.

But this assumption is mistaken. It is true that political neutrality means having the military generally defer to civilian authority. But neutrality also means not letting the military become a partisan political tool, which is why service members are prohibited from, among other things, taking part in political events in uniform. If the president orders the military to take actions that jeopardize its neutrality, the military is ethically justified in criticizing and even resisting the order, even if it is not clearly illegal.

Critics of General Milley and Mr. Esper fail to appreciate that political neutrality exists to solve two problems. The first is to ensure that the military does not usurp power and turn on the society it is designed to defend. Insofar as the military remains obedient to civilian authorities, there is no risk of a military coup.

If avoiding military coups were the only problem that political neutrality was meant to solve, equating neutrality with obedience would suffice, and actions like General Milley’s probably would violate it. But political neutrality exists to solve a second problem, as well: to ensure that the military is subordinate only to legitimate democratic authority — not to, say, a tyrant.

In a political system like ours, unlike in an autocracy, the people are the ultimate sovereign. This is why, when members of the military take their oath of office, they pledge to defend the Constitution, not the president. Political neutrality is a democratic ideal. As such, it is not a promise of absolute military subordination to the executive. On the contrary, it is a commitment to uphold the political order that ensures the sovereignty of the people. This requires a clear separation of the military from the president’s partisan political agenda.

For this reason, the military has an obligation to object to or resist certain commands that blur this line. If the president orders the military to disperse protesters who are upset that the president will not leave office after losing an election, military leaders could be obligated to refuse on the ground that the operation threatens the democratic order.

If the president orders the military to police urban areas, military leaders could be obligated to refuse on the ground that the operation threatens the due process rights of civilians (because the military is designed to confront combatants, not enforce laws in a civil society). Mere passive obedience to orders like these would be inconsistent with the demands of political neutrality.

Regardless of who ends up in the White House in 2025, it is crucial to a just and stable society that we understand how the relationship between the military and civilian leaders ought to function. Contrary to a dangerously naïve conception of military obligation, resisting a legal order is not necessarily a violation of political neutrality. Military resistance does not always undermine the rightful authority of civilian leaders, nor is it always tantamount to putting one’s personal political or moral convictions above one’s loyalty.

Sometimes resistance is essential to preserving our democracy. And that is one of the fundamental purposes of our military.


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


6) Israel Conducts Raids in Lebanon to Set Up Possible Invasion, Officials Say

Military officials said no decision had yet been made about whether or when to launch a major ground operation targeting Hezbollah. An Israeli airstrike killed a Hamas leader in Lebanon, extending a string of attacks against Iranian-backed militias.

Patrick KingsleyRonen BergmanNatan Odenheimer and Mike Ives, September 30, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/09/30/world/israel-lebanon-hezbollah

A multistory residential building with rubble below and damage to upper floors.

An apartment block damaged by a blast on Monday in Beirut, Lebanon. Credit...David Guttenfelder for The New York Times


Israeli commando units have made brief incursions into Lebanese territory in recent days to prepare for a possible wider invasion targeting Hezbollah, although no decision has yet been made about whether or when to begin one, officials said.

 

The raids — confirmed by six Israeli officers and officials, and one Western official — have focused on gathering intelligence about Hezbollah positions close to Israel’s northern border, as well as on identifying Hezbollah tunnels and military infrastructure in preparation to attack them from the air or the ground.

 

The officials all spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive military matter. The incursions follow months of similar covert missions in which Israeli special forces briefly crossed the Lebanon border for reconnaissance, but have increased in intensity in recent days as commanders prepared for a wider maneuver, three of the officials said.

 

American officials said on Monday that the United States has been trying to dissuade Israel from conducting a major ground invasion, and they believe those efforts have been productive. Israel is now planning smaller, targeted incursions, these officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss diplomatic negotiations and intelligence reports.

 

Publicly, however, Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defense minister, has hinted that Israel could send ground troops into Lebanon. On Monday, he told mayors from Israeli towns along the border with Lebanon that “the next stage of the war against Hezbollah will soon commence.” In a statement released by his office, Mr. Gallant pledged that the next phase would “constitute a significant factor in changing the security situation,” allowing the tens of thousands of Israelis who have fled Hezbollah rocket fire over the past year to return to their homes.

 

The preparations come as Israel conducts a far-reaching string of attacks across the Middle East aimed at Iranian-backed militias including Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis in Yemen.

 

Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, released an English-language video addressing the Iranian public, saying, “The people of Iran should know — Israel stands with you.” He reiterated his threats against Iran, saying, “There is nowhere in the Middle East Israel cannot reach. There is nowhere we will not go to protect our people and protect our country.”

 

Here’s what else to know:

 

·      Hamas official killed: Hamas said on Monday that its leader in Lebanon, Fatah Sherif, had been killed with his family in an airstrike on a refugee camp for Palestinians in southern Lebanon. The Israeli military said he had coordinated Hamas’s ties with Hezbollah. The main United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said on Monday that Mr. Sharif had been an employee of the agency but had been placed on leave in March after it received allegations “about his political activities.”

 

·      Hezbollah’s future: Sheikh Naim Qassem, the deputy secretary general of Hezbollah, said in a televised address on Monday that the group would name a leader to replace Hassan Nasrallah “at the closest opportunity.” Israel killed Mr. Nasrallah on Friday in a bombardment in a densely populated neighborhood near Beirut, and launched dozens more attacks on Hezbollah targets on Sunday, targeting rocket launchers and buildings that Israel said the militia had used to store weapons.

 

·      Beirut strike: Israel said it was behind a blast in Beirut that hit a residential building overnight. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a militant group based in Lebanon and Gaza, said that three of its members had been killed in the blast, in the largely Sunni Muslim neighborhood of Cola. The group is mostly known for a string of airline hijackings and bombings decades ago. It was the first known Israeli attack in central Beirut since Israel and Hezbollah fought a war in 2006.

 

·      Yemen: Israeli warplanes attacked power plants and shipping infrastructure on Sunday in Yemen, where the Iran-backed Houthi militia has been conducting attacks against Israel and menacing trade in the Red Sea. The Houthis have been acting in solidarity with Hamas, the Iran-backed group fighting Israel in the Gaza Strip.

 

·      Gaza: An Israeli strike in northern Gaza on Sunday killed at least four Palestinians and wounded several others, according to the Palestinian civil defense. The Israeli military said it had struck Hamas militants who were using a school-turned-shelter as a command and control center.

 

Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting.


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


7) U.S. officials believe they have talked Israel out of a full Invasion of Lebanon

By Julian E. Barnes, Reporting from Washington, September 30, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/09/30/world/israel-lebanon-hezbollah

A large group of Israeli military vehicles arranged in a field.

Israeli vehicles staged in northern Israel on Sunday. Israeli special operations forces have been conducting raids into southern Lebanon. Credit...Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times


American officials said on Monday that they believed they had persuaded Israel not to conduct a major ground invasion of southern Lebanon.

 

The understanding came after intense talks over the weekend. The United States saw some signs that Israel was preparing to move into Lebanon, and some American officials believed a major ground operation was imminent.

 

After the discussions, U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence and diplomatic negotiations, said they believed Israel was planning only smaller, targeted incursions into southern Lebanon. The recent raids by Israeli special operations forces would be designed to eliminate fighting positions from which Hezbollah has attacked towns in northern Israel.

 

But Israeli officials assured their American counterparts that they did not intend to follow up those incursions with a bigger operation by conventional forces or by occupying parts of southern Lebanon. U.S. officials said they believed the commandos would quickly pull back after the operations were finished.

 

It is not clear if Israel has made a final decision, and it is possible that a full-scale invasion could still follow targeted raids, despite the White House’s concerns.

 

On Monday, after the raids became public, U.S. officials said the possibility of “mission creep” remained, and that Israel could decide it needed to support the raids with a larger force. But for now, American officials believe, Israel will not conduct a full-scale invasion.

 

U.S. officials have tried to prevent a wider regional conflict since the war in Gaza began last October after Hamas-led attacks in Israel.

 

Israel eventually cut back the intensity of its bombing campaign in Gaza, but months after the U.S. military had urged a shift to more targeted operations. The United States wanted the Israeli military to eschew major combat operations and said that operations in the city of Rafah needed to be more precise. The eventual Israeli operations in Rafah were extensive.

 

This month, some officials in the U.S. government have watched the Israeli operations against Hezbollah anxiously, fearing that the extensive attacks would provoke Iran to join the fight far more openly. But other officials believe that Israel’s actions have dramatically curbed Hezbollah’s military power. The risk of Iranian intervention remains, American officials said.

 

Still, to keep the wider conflict in check, American officials want to persuade Israel not to move large number of forces into Lebanon. U.S. and French officials had been pushing for a cease-fire proposal. But after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel authorized the strike on Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, U.S. officials said that for now their cease-fire plan had been withdrawn.

 

Despite hitting pause on the effort to broker a cease-fire, Americans have tried to convince Israeli officials that a ground invasion would be counterproductive.

 

American intelligence agencies stuck by their assessment throughout September that any sort of large-scale invasion of southern Lebanon would court disaster. While Israel’s strikes have diminished Hezbollah’s caches of weapons and hurt its ability to launch rocket attacks, the group’s forces maintain dug-in positions in the hilly and easily defended terrain of southern Lebanon.

 

The Hezbollah tunnel network largely remains intact, and American officials assessed that Hezbollah fighters would be able to move through it quickly to ambush advancing Israeli forces.


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


8) U.S. and Allies Sound Alarm Over War Ties Among Axis of Adversaries

The Biden administration is struggling to halt cooperation among Russia, China, North Korea and Iran. It feels urgency over the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East while also aiming to protect Taiwan.

By Edward Wong, Sept. 30, 2024

Reporting from New York during the United Nations General Assembly and from Ukraine and China on trips with the U.S. secretary of state

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/30/us/politics/us-axis-china-iran-russia.html

President Biden standing at a lectern, with people seated on a dais behind him and in rows of seats in front of him.

In speeches and closed-door talks, most recently at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, U.S. officials have been sounding the alarm on the coalition of powers working to strengthen one another’s militaries to defeat America’s partners. Credit...Dave Sanders for The New York Times


Call it the Axis of Anger.

 

It is ripped from the pages of the World Wars or the Cold War: a coalition of powers working to strengthen one another’s militaries to defeat America’s partners and, by extension, the United States.

 

That is how the Biden administration characterizes Russia, China, North Korea and Iran, as those nations align more closely. U.S. officials have been sounding the alarm in speeches and closed-door talks around the world, most recently at the United Nations General Assembly in New York that ended over the weekend.

 

As the conflict in the Middle East widens — and as the world watches for whether Iran will retaliate against Israel for the killing on Friday of Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and its strikes across Lebanon — U.S. officials feel an even greater sense of urgency.

 

Yet the partnerships are not as unified as they might appear, and U.S. officials say they still see ways to slow that trend.

 

At a Security Council meeting on Tuesday, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said the council’s priority should be stopping the stream of military aid — including ballistic missiles, drones and artillery shells — from North Korea and Iran to Russia. And he noted that China had sent machine tools, microelectronics and other supplies to Russia’s defense industry as President Vladimir V. Putin presses his invasion of Ukraine.

 

“If countries stopped supporting Russia, Putin’s invasion would soon come to an end,” Mr. Blinken said.

 

Russia, in turn, is helping those nations meet their ambitions, including by sharing nuclear technology and “space information” with Iran, Mr. Blinken said. Another senior U.S. official said that while the nuclear aid to Iran seemed to be for use in its civilian nuclear program for now, the space information was more alarming — it could eventually allow Iran to develop capable intercontinental ballistic missiles.

 

Russia is also considering arming the Iran-backed Houthi forces in Yemen with advanced anti-ship cruise missiles, U.S. officials say.

 

Those nations have denied some of the specific American assertions. And they say it is the United States that is forming blocs around the world to maintain dominance. On Saturday at the United Nations, Sergey V. Lavrov, the foreign minister of Russia, said the Americans were “merely seeking to preserve their hegemony and to govern everything.”

 

But there is no doubt those powerful countries seeking to counter the United States have grown their military, diplomatic and economic cooperation.

 

Leaders of U.S. partner nations are quick to point out the growing threats. In an interview with The New York Times at the United Nations last week, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine denounced the shipments of arms to Russia from North Korea and Iran.

 

Sitting next to him, the prime minister of Denmark, Mette Frederiksen, said, “This is a global issue, because the closer cooperation between North Korea, Iran and Russia is a challenge for all of us, of course, including the U.S., and with China helping one way or the other.”

 

Some of the leaders of the adversarial nations are making flashy displays of their alliances, as if throwing a gauntlet down at the Americans. In June, Mr. Putin revived a Cold War-era mutual defense pact with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, during a visit to Pyongyang, the capital. Those two nations are “all in” on anti-American cooperation, said the senior U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence.

 

Two weeks before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Moscow and Beijing announced a “no limits” partnership in a 5,000-word joint statement when Mr. Putin visited President Xi Jinping in China.

 

“The militarization of these relationships is very remarkable,” said Michael Kimmage, a former State Department official and a professor of Cold War history and U.S.-Russia relations who is a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. “The overt part is the most worrying aspect for the U.S.”

 

Mr. Kimmage cautioned that “it’s possible to over-interpret the degree of political alignment,” and that “what the U.S. got wrong during the Cold War is that they interpreted more homogeneity in this than was the actual reality.”

 

In important ways, the current alignments are a continuation of the Cold War. Now, as then, the center of gravity of the anti-American partnerships is Russia. That nation has pitted itself against an American and European partner — Ukraine — and is trying to wipe it out that. Russia is attracting aid from North Korea, Iran and China.

 

In fact, Ukraine has become the kind of proxy-war battlefield that was common during the Cold War, in places like the Korean Peninsula and Vietnam. The shadow of the Korean War, which never officially ended, is even at play here: While North Korea is giving weapons to Russia, South Korea has done the same with Ukraine, via the United States.

 

But coalitions are not as hardened as they appear, which the United States discovered in the sprawling conflicts of the 20th century, sometimes belatedly. And today they are based not so much on a shared ideology — communism was a unifying factor for much of the Cold War — as on opposition to U.S. power rooted in each autocratic nation’s specific interests. Analysts say the partnerships now are marriages of convenience or pragmatism.

 

For instance, the theocratic leaders of Iran obviously have a different ideological perspective than do the leaders of Russia, China or North Korea, known formally as the D.P.R.K., which all share a communist history.

 

China, the most powerful of those nations and the greatest challenger to American power, does not seem intent on knitting together a cohesive coalition based on a grand ideology, the way the Soviet Union once tried to do.

 

“China’s foreign policy is drawing the dividing line using the U.S. as the criteria,” said Yun Sun, the director of the China program at the Stimson Center. “What it means is that when China looks at Russia, D.P.R.K. and Iran, it sees anti-U. S. partners.”

 

“China believes it doesn’t have an alliance or axis with these countries, as the very thing that anchors their alignment is the U.S.,” she added. “But for the end result, the motivation matters much less than the substance, and the relationships come across as an axis. When it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is a duck.”

 

For months, the Biden administration has warned China against commercial trade that allows Russia to rebuild its defense industry. The Biden administration has imposed sanctions on more than 300 Chinese entities. But U.S. officials also say China has not given direct weapons aid to Russia.

 

China has the world’s second-largest economy and does robust trade with the United States and its allies. American officials note that Mr. Xi appears to want to keep China within the global network of institutions and commerce that the United States has dominated for decades. They say he believes that America is in terminal decline, and that his aim is to displace the United States within that network rather than build a rival global system.

 

Mr. Blinken and Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, often meet with Wang Yi, China’s top foreign policy official, and occasionally with Mr. Xi. Their idea is that keeping up high-level diplomacy, along with bolstering U.S. military power in Asia, will help deter China from invading Taiwan or making other aggressive moves. On Friday, Mr. Blinken and Mr. Wang met in New York and talked about areas of both cooperation and concern.

 

“Our intent is not to decouple Russia from China,” Mr. Blinken told reporters afterward. “But insofar as that relationship involves providing Russia what it needs to continue this war, that’s a problem, and it’s a problem for us and it’s a problem for many other countries, notably in Europe, because right now Russia presents the greatest threat, not just to Ukrainian security, but to European security since the end of the Cold War.”

 

U.S. and allied officials say the kind of Sino-Soviet split that began between the late 1950s and early 1960s is unlikely. But European officials are calling out China’s aid to Russia in the hopes that Chinese leaders will realize they are placing their economic ties with Europe in jeopardy.

 

On a trip to Ukraine with Mr. Blinken this month, David Lammy, the foreign secretary of Britain, said, “We’re seeing this new axis — Russia, Iran, North Korea; we urge China not to throw their lot in with this group of renegades, renegades in the end that are costing lives here in Ukraine.”

 

U.S. and allied officials are also carefully watching Iran to see whether there is a diplomatic opening, perhaps through future nuclear negotiations, to try to get it to limit its cooperation with Russia. They are wary, because Iran has a decades-long history of hostility with the United States and Israel. But analysts say Iranian leaders are intent on getting the United States and its allies to lift sanctions on Iran.

 

In a speech on Tuesday at the United Nations, the country’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, used conciliatory language, saying, “We want peace for all and seek no war or quarrel with anyone.”

 

After leaving New York, Mr. Pezeshkian wrote on social media that his government “is seeking political and economic diplomacy from west to east, from New York to Samarkand.”

 

Julian E. Barnes and Farnaz Fassihi contributed reporting.


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


9) U.S. Ramps Up Hunt for Uranium to End Reliance on Russia

Miners aim to meet a growing demand for emissions-free energy, though a failure to clean up old sites haunts the industry.

By Ivan Penn and Rebecca F. Elliott, Photographs and Video by Jesse Rieser, Sept. 30, 2024

Ivan Penn reported from Kaibab National Forest in Arizona, and Rebecca Elliott from Sweetwater County, Wyo.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/30/business/energy-environment/uranium-russia-united-states.html

Two gloved hands hold a gray rock of uranium ore.

Uranium ore held by Matthew Germansen, an assistant mine superintendent at Pinyon Plain.


More than 1,400 feet below an Arizona pine forest, miners are blasting tunnels in search of a radioactive element that can be used to make electricity.

 

Two states north, in central Wyoming, drillers have been digging well after well in the desert, where that element — uranium — is buried in layers of sandstone.

 

Uranium mines are ramping up across the West, spurred by rising demand for electricity and federal efforts to cut Russia out of the supply chain for U.S. nuclear fuel.

 

Those twin pressures have helped lift uranium prices to their highest levels in more than 15 years, according to the consulting firm TradeTech, helping to resuscitate mining regions that entered a steep decline toward the end of the Cold War.

 

Nuclear power is coming back into vogue in the United States as politicians and investors embrace the technology as a way to meet growing energy demand without releasing the gases responsible for climate change. This month, Microsoft, which is building energy-hungry data centers, said it would pay an energy company to reopen the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania, closed since 2019.

 

Uranium is just one of the elements that corporations and government officials are seeking to produce domestically to help the country transition away from oil, gas and coal. Lithium and nickel are some of the others.

 

Whether the new generation of American uranium prospectors thrives or fails will largely depend on how long that momentum lasts — and whether prices remain high enough to encourage companies to dust off old mines.

 

“I liken it to a broken arm that’s been in a cast for a long time,” said John W. Cash, chief executive of Ur-Energy, a mining firm that is ramping up uranium production in central Wyoming. “The muscle atrophies, and that’s where our industry is.”

 

While some communities have welcomed the new investment, others — particularly in Arizona — are pushing back over concerns about the potential health and environmental consequences of harvesting radioactive materials near homes and livestock.

 

“We’re already contaminated here in the Southwest,” said Carletta Tilousi, a member of the Havasupai, a tribe that recognizes land near a uranium mine in Kaibab National Forest, south of the Grand Canyon, as sacred. “This is our homeland.”

 

Workers began extracting uranium from that mine, Pinyon Plain, late last year. Owned and operated by a company called Energy Fuels, the facility is composed of a web of damp, 10-foot-by-10-foot tunnels that are a five-minute elevator ride below the ground. Miners with hand-held jackleg drills and explosives remove dark gray chunks of uranium-rich ore from the earth.

 

Back above ground, that rock is trucked some 260 miles northeast to the White Mesa uranium mill in Utah, where workers turn it into a bright powder known as yellowcake. That concentrated form of uranium is then further processed, enriched and turned into fuel for nuclear power plants.

 

In 1980, the United States produced nearly 44 million pounds of yellowcake, federal data show, enough to feed most domestic nuclear reactors today.

 

But nuclear power fell out of favor after accidents that included a cooling failure at Three Mile Island in 1979 and an explosion at the Soviet Union’s Chernobyl plant in 1986. After the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia agreed to dilute weapons-grade uranium for use in U.S. reactors, flooding the market.

 

Last year, the United States produced just 50,000 pounds of yellowcake. The rest was harvested in mines from Canada to Kazakhstan, and enriched in several countries, including Russia.

 

The United States is now seeking to reduce its dependence on Russia after the country invaded Ukraine in 2022. A law that went into effect this year will block American power plants from buying Russian uranium by 2028. Roughly a quarter of the enriched uranium used in U.S. nuclear reactors comes from Russia, federal data shows.

 

Consultants expect domestic mining activity to rebound relatively quickly, with U.S. production reaching roughly six million pounds of yellowcake around 2028.

 

But people who live near uranium mines, including Indigenous tribes, fear such a quick rebound.

 

Much of the activity during the last American uranium boom of the 1950s through the 1980s happened on or near Native lands. When prices collapsed, companies abandoned hundreds of mines. Scores of those sites have yet to be cleaned up, leaving residents exposed to elevated levels of radiation, which can increase the risk of developing lung and bone cancer and other diseases.

 

Signs put up on Navajo land along Energy Fuels’ transportation route in Arizona by the Environmental Protection Agency warn people against “Building, Gathering, Playing, Corrals, Digging.” The agency has been working with the Navajo Nation and mining companies to assess and clean up contamination.

 

This summer, members of the Navajo and Havasupai tribes were among those who staged protests seeking to block Energy Fuels from trucking ore through Navajo land. Energy Fuels voluntarily suspended uranium transportation in August and said it was working with the tribes.

 

Mable Franklin, 66, was among the Navajos who protested. Referring to the abandonment of mines in the area, she said, “It’s just something that shouldn’t have happened.”

 

Environmental regulations and radiation safety have improved over the past half-century, in part because of the Federal Mine Safety and Health Act. Companies operating today, including Energy Fuels, are required to monitor radiation levels in the soil and water around their sites, as well as post bonds to cover cleanup costs.

 

Tribal communities are particularly concerned about their groundwater. In the tunnels at Pinyon Plain, water levels can be at the midpoint of an adult’s calf muscle from moisture in the rock.

 

But a former Arizona regulator who was charged with approving state permits, Misael Cabrera, said the mine does not pierce underground barriers to the major aquifer that supplies drinking water throughout the state.

 

Mr. Cabrera, a former director of the state’s Department of Environmental Quality, said Pinyon Plain was “the most stringently regulated facility in the state of Arizona.”

 

In an Aug. 13 letter to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Arizona’s attorney general requested a supplemental environmental impact study related to surrounding aquifers. The letter followed an Energy Fuels report to state regulators about elevated levels of heavy metals in water pumped from the mine in 2023. The company said that the pumped water is placed in a pond designed to protect the surrounding area.

 

Miners today are exposed to far less radiation on the job than they were in the 1970s. Risks differ, though, depending on the type of mine. Underground mines can be hazardous for workers if poorly ventilated.

 

Energy Fuels said it did not operate and abandon mines on Navajo land. The company, which is based in Lakewood, Colo., said it pumped fresh air underground through enormous ducts to help clear harmful gases such as carbon monoxide and radon.

 

In an interview, the company’s chief executive, Mark Chalmers, said he knew well the toll that uranium mining had taken on Native American communities. The owner of the first mine where Mr. Chalmers worked was dying of cancer from inhaling toxic air in a uranium mine when he gave Mr. Chalmers part ownership of the operation, with a warning: “Don’t be stupid like I am.”

 

Because of that experience, Mr. Chalmers said, he has made sure his mines are properly ventilated. Energy Fuels said it also protected neighboring communities by controlling dust, monitoring radiation levels and cleaning up sites.

 

Even so, many tribal communities filed lawsuits that blocked Pinyon Plain’s mining operations for a time. The tribes claimed that the company was mining on sacred ground. Eventually, the courts determined that the operation could proceed, and Arizona regulators approved permits in 2022, Mr. Cabrera said.

 

The uptick in mining activity hasn’t sparked the same pushback in other places, some of which are more remote.

 

In Wyoming, Ur-Energy’s Lost Creek mine is some 15 miles from the nearest town, Bairoil, home to fewer than 100 people. The company’s extraction process is akin to the techniques used to produce oil and gas. Rather than removing chunks of rock from the earth, the company is drilling hundreds of small wells in the desert, then sending groundwater mixed with oxygen and carbon dioxide into the uranium-rich sandstone below.

 

Some 450 feet beneath the surface, uranium dissolves into that fluid, and Ur-Energy pumps it back up. Nearby, the company sends the solution through a series of tanks and a vacuum dryer, processing it into yellowcake. The water is reused to extract more uranium.

 

This technique is the most common way of producing uranium, partly because it is generally less expensive and requires fewer people than other approaches.

 

That’s one reason uranium mining is unlikely to ever become the economic engine it once was. Fewer than 400 people worked in the industry in the United States last year, down from around 22,000 in 1979, according to federal records.

 

Byron T. Seeley lives and works as a potter north of Lost Creek, in the onetime uranium boomtown of Jeffrey City. The wind regularly gusts more than 30 miles per hour there, whipping past abandoned homes.

 

“I doubt the town’s ever coming back,” Mr. Seeley said. “Nobody wants to live someplace like this.”

 

Susan C. Beachy contributed research.


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


10) Iran is poised to launch an attack on Israel, U.S. and Israeli officials say.

By 1 hour ago

Patrick Kingsley, Ronen Bergman and Eric Schmitt

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/10/01/world/israel-lebanon-hezbollah

A yellow billboard with an illustration of Hassan Nasrallah displayed on a large building.

A billboard of the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Tehran, Iran’s capital, on Sunday after he was killed in an airstrike last week. Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times


Iran is poised to launch an attack on Israel in the coming hours, according to the Israeli government and two U.S. officials.

 

The Israeli military said Israel had been informed about preparations for the attack by the United States government.

 

Three Israeli officials said the attack would involve unmanned drones and missiles fired toward Israel. One of the U.S. officials said it would involve ballistic missiles, while the second said that it was unclear what kind of attack would be launched. The officials all spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive military matter.

 

Any attack would significantly raise the risk of an all-out war between Israel and Iran, including its proxies across the Middle East. For years, the two countries have fought a shadow war, with Iran seeking Israel’s destruction and Israel seeking to blunt Iran’s regional influence, destroy its nuclear program and unseat its government.

 

Now they are moving closer to direct confrontation, after a year of rising conflict between Israel and several Iranian allies including Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthi militia in Yemen.

 

The rise in tensions follows Israel’s decision over the past month to escalate its attacks on Hezbollah, including by assassinating the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in an airstrike last week, and culminating in its overnight invasion of southern Lebanon, a Hezbollah stronghold.

 

Iran has faced rising pressure to come to Hezbollah’s aid but has been caught between the desire to protect its proxy and sustain its own prestige and influence, and the need to avoid a devastating counterattack from Israel that could wreck its nuclear program or kill senior Iranian leaders.

 

The three Israeli officials said that the target of the new Iranian attack would be three military air bases, as well as an intelligence headquarters north of Tel Aviv, which was evacuated on Tuesday afternoon.

 

Iran last fired a barrage of missiles and drones at Israel in April, after Israeli warplanes fired strikes that killed several top Iranian commanders as they visited Syria. At that time, an all-out war was avoided after both sides chose to de-escalate. Six months later, diplomats and experts say that a full-scale war is much likelier, with Israel expected to strike back hard after any new Iranian attack.

 

A group of Israel’s allies, led by the United States, helped intercept most of the missiles and drones in April, resulting in only limited damage to Israeli infrastructure.

 

Helene Cooper, Farnaz Fassihi and Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting.


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


11) As Israel invades, Lebanon’s government is nowhere to be found.

By Vivian Yee, Vivian Yee reported from Beirut, Lebanon, where she lived from 2018 to 2020

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/10/01/world/israel-lebanon-hezbollah

A man in shorts and a black T-shirt walks through the rubble of a building in Hilaniyeh, Lebanon.

The aftermath of an Israeli strike in Hilaniyeh, Lebanon, last week, part of a bombing campaign that some experts have called one of the most intense in contemporary warfare. Credit...Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times


Even for the Lebanese, it can be hard to say where it all went wrong for their tiny, beautiful country.

 

Certainly it was long before early Tuesday morning, when Israeli troops marched into southern Lebanon. Long before Friday, when Israel assassinated Hassan Nasrallah, the revered and reviled Hezbollah leader who had a chokehold on the country’s politics and security for years.  

 

And long before last October, when Hezbollah and Israel began trading airstrikes and rocket fire across the border, bringing the war in Gaza to Lebanon’s green, fertile south.

 

Hezbollah, the Iran-funded Shiite Muslim militia that doubles as a major political party and social services organization, does not run Lebanon in any official sense. But under Mr. Nasrallah, it sometimes seemed as if it was the only force that mattered: a state within a state with its own military, schools, hospitals and youth programs.

 

Now his death has come as the latest thunderbolt to jolt Lebanon, a Mediterranean country of 5.4 million people already stuck in a dejected state of nonstop emergency.

 

Many say Lebanon’s current anguish began in 2019, when the economy imploded and took the country’s once-robust middle class with it. Mass anti-government protests that fall did nothing to dislodge the country’s widely loathed political class.

 

Others might mention 2020, the year the coronavirus further crippled the economy, and the year an enormous explosion at Beirut’s port shattered entire neighborhoods of the capital.

 

A good case could be made for going all the way back to the 15-year civil war that ended in 1990, which birthed the movement that became Hezbollah, and from which the country never really recovered.

 

All these crises and more have left Lebanon in no shape to withstand a sharply escalating conflict with Israel, like a 10-car pileup caught in the path of a tornado.

 

That much became obvious over the last week, when at least 118,000 Lebanese fled Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon’s south, in its agricultural Bekaa Valley and in the Hezbollah-dominated Dahiya suburbs of Beirut.

 

The official response was “chaos,” said Mark Daou, an independent member of Parliament, as the TV in his office played news footage of the hourslong traffic jams on the roads from the south last week.

 

He was not surprised the government seemed stupefied. “They have no money and they have no control over what’s happening on the ground,” he said, noting that Lebanon’s nominal military has little actual power. “They’re hostage to whatever Hezbollah decides unilaterally.”

 

While the government designated hundreds of public buildings as shelters for the displaced, it provided no mattresses, bedding, food or other supplies.

 

Information about shelters spread haphazardly through word of mouth and on WhatsApp, with little official guidance. Shelters filled quickly, leaving hundreds to sleep in public squares, a seaside promenade, a beach and under bridges when they evacuated the Dahiya suburbs after Friday’s huge airstrike on Hezbollah headquarters under the neighborhood.

 

As the longtime head of a group the United States considers a terrorist organization, but one that drove Israel out of southern Lebanon when the state could not, Mr. Nasrallah was a hero to some Lebanese and anathema to others. But his power was such that few can predict what the country will look like without him.

 

Mired in political paralysis — partly, Mr. Daou said, because Hezbollah has moved to block attempts at resolution — Lebanon has gone nearly two years without a president and has only a caretaker government.

 

The state provides barely any electricity, leaving everyone dependent on generators, if they can afford the fees. Many generators can power only one appliance at a time, so residents unplug refrigerators or forgo air-conditioning just to do laundry.

 

The financial crisis has left many people who could once afford overseas vacations, ski weekends in Lebanon’s mountains and sun-dazzled afternoons at its beach clubs nearly destitute, their savings trapped in banks that deny them access to their own money. Desperate, a few account holders have resorted to holding up bank branches to demand their own funds.

 

Thousands of doctors, nurses and medical technicians, as well as many young professionals, entrepreneurs, designers and artists, have left the country. Teachers routinely go unpaid; many of their students cannot afford textbooks.

 

“The country in many respects cannot withstand a long-term war,” said Sleiman Haroun, the president of a national association of Lebanese hospitals. Though the health care system had performed well so far, he said, he worried that there were not enough medical professionals left to cope with a sustained Israeli onslaught.

 

But, he added, “This is our fate. We have to face it.”

 

Enraged at their leaders, the Lebanese long ago stopped expecting anything from them.

 

Into the void left by the state have stepped private donors, individual volunteers, citizen aid groups, entrepreneurs and social-services organizations affiliated with political parties.

 

In wealthier pockets of the country, their efforts, along with the chic cocktail bars, nightclubs, manicured beach clubs and sophisticated restaurants, mask Lebanon’s collapse so effectively that first-time visitors are frequently taken aback by its high-functioning facade.

 

Residents and business owners have installed solar panels on rooftops across Lebanon to compensate for the lack of government-supplied electricity. Private donors pay for street lighting in some Beirut neighborhoods.

 

Over the last week, as shelters overflowed with displaced residents, a patchwork of volunteers and local aid groups rushed to fill the gap.

 

Just inside the gate of a private school in central Beirut last week sat Sarah Khalil, a board member who was helping to manage wave upon wave of donations — food, water, a refrigerator — arriving in the courtyard. The school’s board had opened its 50 classrooms to displaced families, and faculty, neighbors, students’ family members and other school affiliates were showing up with provisions.

 

“This is the only way,” she said. “We can’t rely on the government, but we surely can rely on those around us.”

 

At Dr. Sobhy Salah Middle School in the Bir Hassan neighborhood, the Ministry of Education unlocked the doors for displaced families. But it was the scouting organization affiliated with the Amal Movement, a major Shiite Muslim political party, that was running the shelter and gathering donated supplies.

 

Asked why the government had not provided more, Mohamed Jaber, a volunteer, let out a laugh.

 

“There’s no government to begin with,” he said. “The government will only wake up way after the war has ended.”

 

Families at the shelter said they had come there after hearing about it from relatives or through word of mouth. But many shelters filled quickly, including this one, leaving the latest wave of displaced arrivals with few options if they had no family or friends to take them in.

 

That was how several Syrian families ended up under a bridge in Beirut on Wednesday afternoon, beaten-up minibuses and gleaming SUVs honking around them. Their presence was a reminder of yet another crisis that has strained Lebanon: The country plays reluctant host to an estimated 750,000 refugees from next-door Syria, driven to Lebanon by Syria’s brutal civil war, its economic crisis and a powerful earthquake last year.

 

Bushra Ali, 24, stood under the bridge with her 4-year-old son, 2-year-old daughter and a black plastic bag of necessities, all they had been able to grab on Wednesday morning as they evacuated Dahiya, the Hezbollah-dominated suburb of Beirut that Israel has struck repeatedly.

 

Originally from Aleppo, Syria, her family came to Lebanon last year, after the earthquake in northern Syria destroyed their home. But the move had not been a success.

 

Her husband was laid off from a Lebanese shoe factory three months ago. Their rent was rising every month. Now bombs were falling and schools were closed, so they had decided to go back to Aleppo.

 

“It’s a really horrible feeling,” she said, her face crumpling as she stroked her son’s hair.

 

The Lebanese government appeared similarly missing-in-action after the port explosion on Aug. 4, 2020, that damaged more than half of Beirut and killed 218 people — a catastrophe that later investigations by media outlets and rights groups found was rooted in the government’s neglect, corruption and mismanagement. In the days after, while soldiers sat smoking on street corners, it was regular citizens who showed up to clean up the debris.

 

In the blast’s wake, a small, scruffy group of friends began distributing donations and free meals from an abandoned gas station in east Beirut. Four years later, now a full-fledged community kitchen and local aid group, Nation Station has begun delivering around 1,600 meals and sandwiches a day to shelters.

 

“The country, it’s already down. Like, I can’t believe we’re doing this again,” said Josephine Abou Abdo, a co-founder, who manages the crew of young staff and volunteers. “It’s back to Aug. 4 vibes.”

 

Four years ago, they were motivated by their own government’s inaction. Now, she said, it was Israel’s assault that was drawing Lebanese together in solidarity.

 

With Israel attacking them, she said, “this is the least that we can do.”

 

Jacob Roubai contributed reporting from Beirut.


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


12) Port Workers Strike on East and Gulf Coasts

Members of the International Longshoremen’s Association walked out for the first time since 1977 in a standoff over wages, benefits and job security.

By Peter Eavis, Reporting from Bayonne, N.J., and New York, Oct. 1, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/01/business/economy/port-strike.html

Harold J. Daggett, the union president, wearing a sweatshirt that says “The Docks Are Ours” and speaking alongside a group of workers.

Harold J. Daggett, president of the International Longshoremen’s Association, speaking to members at a port in Elizabeth, N.J., early Tuesday. Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times


For the first time in nearly 50 years, longshoremen on the East and Gulf Coasts went on strike Tuesday, a move that will cut off most trade through some of the busiest U.S. ports and could send a chill through the economy.

 

Members of the International Longshoremen’s Association union, or I.L.A., which represents roughly 45,000 workers, started setting up pickets after 11th-hour talks failed to avert a work stoppage.

 

“Nothing’s going to move without us — nothing,” said Harold J. Daggett, the president of the union, addressing picketers outside a port terminal in Elizabeth, N.J., in a video posted early Tuesday to a union Facebook account.

 

The United States Maritime Alliance, which represents port employers, declined to comment early Tuesday. The two sides were not able to agree on wage increases, and the use of new technology in the ports was a sticking point for the union.

 

On Tuesday morning, Mr. Daggett’s son, Dennis A. Daggett, who is an I.L.A. executive vice president, was part of a large picket line outside a port terminal in Bayonne, N.J. He said that morale was “phenomenal,” and that the union was going to keep pushing for better wages.

 

“The raises we had in our previous contract — inflation really ate into them,” he said in an interview, but he declined to say how big an increase the union had asked for in recent talks.

 

Businesses now face a period of uncertainty. Trade experts say that a short strike would cause little lasting damage but that a weekslong stoppage could lead to shortages, higher prices and even layoffs.

 

“When we talk about a two- to three-week strike,” said J. Bruce Chan, a transportation analyst at Stifel, a Wall Street firm, “that’s when the problem starts to get exponentially worse.”

 

The prospect of significant economic damage from a strike puts President Biden in a quandary five weeks before national elections. Before the strike, he said he was not going to use a federal labor law, the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, to force an end to a port shutdown — something President George W. Bush did in 2002. But some labor experts said he might use that power if the strike started to weigh on the economy.

 

Michael Vigneron, president of the I.L.A.’s Atlantic Coast district, who was also at the Bayonne picket, said he hoped the president would not use the law. “We hope that we have this settled before that,” he said. “That’s the goal here — to get a contract.”

 

Longshoremen move containers off ships, sort them and put them on trucks or trains, and handle bulk cargo, too. Around three-fifths of the nation’s container shipments go through ports on the East and Gulf Coasts, including the Port of New York and New Jersey, the third busiest in the country, and fast-growing ports in Virginia, Georgia and Texas.

 

A strike will also stop the shipment of cars and heavy machinery through the Port of Baltimore, where operations were curtailed for most of the spring after a container ship crashed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge.

 

Automakers said that they were monitoring the strike but that it was too early to say how it would hit them.

 

Cruise ship operations are unaffected by the strike, and military shipments will continue. Rick Cotton, the executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, said on Monday that around 100,000 containers would be stored at the port during the strike and that 35 ships arriving over the next week would be anchored offshore.

 

“The stakes are very high,” Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York said at a news conference on Monday. “The potential for disruption is significant.” But she also sought to calm consumers, saying shortages of food and pharmaceutical products were not expected.

 

For bringing large amounts of goods in and out of the country, there is no practical alternative to ports. And ports cannot operate without longshoremen, giving them strong leverage in labor negotiations.

 

West Coast ports are open. Longshoremen there belong to a different union and agreed last year on a new contract that includes a significant increase in wages.

 

Under the contract that expired on Monday, longshoremen on the East and Gulf Coasts earned a top rate of $39 an hour. The I.L.A. wants a $5-an-hour raise in each of the six years of a new agreement, giving it a 77 percent raise over the life of the contract.

 

The two sides had barely communicated for months before the walkout. But in recent days, the maritime alliance said on Monday, it had “traded counteroffers related to wages” with the I.L.A. and offered to extend the contract. The alliance also said its latest offer to the union would raise pay “nearly 50 percent” over the course of the contract.

 

Dennis Daggett, the I.L.A. official, said focusing on the $39 top wage would be misleading because longshoremen with less than six years of experience earn around half that sum per hour. He said the union was determined to secure higher wages for newer workers in its next contract.

 

With overtime and shift work, many longshoremen earn well over $100,000 a year, putting them ahead of other workers without a college degree. But they say they have put in far more hours than workers in other jobs earning similar amounts, and do so in often harsh or dangerous conditions.

 

The high inflation of the last few years has reduced their wages’ purchasing power. And longshoremen contend that they have a right to a slice of the increased profits that their employers — some of which are large global shipping lines — made during the pandemic trade boom in 2021 and 2022.

 

Knowing that a strike was possible, many companies rushed in merchandise before Tuesday, including most of the durable consumer goods that they intend to sell during the holiday sales period. But even a short strike could hurt importers of perishable goods like fruit.

 

Daniel J. Barabino, chief operating officer at Top Banana, a fruit distributor based at the Hunts Point Produce Market in the Bronx, N.Y., said a strike could cause him to run out of bananas, his main product, by the end of next week. “It’s going to be everyone in the region, all the banana importers — nobody’s going to have fruit,” he said.

 

Mr. Barabino added that shipping fruit by air was too costly. And he said he couldn’t make up the shortfall with sales of produce other than bananas. “They pay the coffee bill, maybe the bottled water bill,” he said, “but they’re not paying the electric bill, the rent, the truck leases or employee salaries.”

 

The I.L.A. last walked out across all East and Gulf Coast ports in 1977, snarling container shipping for more than six weeks. The deal that ended the strike included wage raises well above those proposed by employers, increased contributions to pension plans and took steps to address the I.L.A.’s concern that new technology could cause job losses.

 

The union is still fighting automation. It broke off talks with the maritime alliance in June, saying a port in Mobile, Ala., was checking trucks using technology that was not authorized under its labor contract. (The technology had been in use since the port opened in 2008, a source familiar with its operations said.)

 

Under the expired contract, port operators were permitted to use “semi-automated” technology but not equipment “devoid of human interaction.” The alliance said it had offered in recent talks to carry that commitment into a new contract.

 

On Tuesday, Dennis Daggett was standing outside the most automated terminal in New Jersey, Port Liberty Bayonne, operated by CMA CGM, a large shipping company based in Marseille, France. He said the non-automated container cranes in the Port of New York and New Jersey could be more productive than the semi-automated equipment in Port Liberty. CMA CGM did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

 

Recently, other unions have gotten much of what they asked for in contract negotiations. Labor experts said the I.L.A. was hoping to capitalize on that winning run.

 

“The union has shown it’s fighting hard,” said Harley Shaiken, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, who has specialized in labor and trade. “The employers’ association is also well aware that the broader environment is that strikes have delivered for unions in the last year or so.”

 

Neal E. Boudette contributed reporting.


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


13) Here’s Where U.S. Forces Are Deployed in the Middle East

The Pentagon is preparing to send more troops and aircraft to the region. This is an overview of the U.S. military presence there.

By Mike Ives and Agnes Chang, Oct. 2, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/02/world/middleeast/us-troops-middle-east-map.html




































As U.S. warships helped Israel shoot down missiles from an Iranian attack on Tuesday, the Pentagon was preparing to send thousands more U.S. troops, including three additional aircraft squadrons, to the Middle East.

 

That highlighted the scale of the American military presence in a region where war appears to be spreading.

 

Here’s an overview of where U.S. forces are operating in the Middle East, and what they are doing:

 

Eastern Mediterranean

 

·      The United States has an amphibious assault ship and three guided-missile destroyers in the eastern Mediterranean, the part of the sea that borders Israel and Lebanon.

 

·      U.S. warships there helped Israel shoot down Iranian missiles on Tuesday, President Biden told reporters after the attack.

 

·      An aircraft carrier, the Harry S. Truman, left Virginia in late September on a scheduled deployment to the eastern Mediterranean. As of Monday it was still crossing the Atlantic.

 

Red Sea

 

·      In the Red Sea, which lies south of Israel and borders Yemen and other countries, U.S. forces have been trying in recent months to stop attacks on commercial ships by the Houthis, an Iranian-backed militia that has described itself as acting in solidarity with Hamas. Some American ships have come under attack.

 

·      As of Monday, the Navy had deployed several guided missile destroyers to the sea, according to the U.S. Naval Institute.

 

Gulf of Oman

 

·      The aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln is on an extended deployment in the Gulf of Oman, south of Iran. Like other aircraft carriers, it is part of what is known as a carrier strike group, which also includes fighter jets and guided-missile destroyers.

 

·      In August, Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III sent the Abraham Lincoln’s strike group to the Middle East as part of an effort to strengthen the U.S. presence in the region. On Sunday, he ordered it to remain there.

 

Military bases

 

·      About 40,000 American troops are stationed on bases across the Middle East. On Tuesday, the Pentagon declined to say how many more it was deploying, saying only that it would send a “few thousand.”

 

·      As of September, about 2,500 troops were in Iraq, many of whom served as a defense against attacks by a resurgent Islamic State, and 900 in neighboring Syria.

 

·      Qatar, across the Persian Gulf from Iran, hosts the largest U.S. military base in the Middle East. Nearby Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates also host American bases, as does Djibouti, an African country across the Red Sea from Yemen.

 

·      Kuwait, southeast of Iraq on the Persian Gulf, had about 13,500 U.S. troops on bases as of 2021. At the time, only Germany, Japan and South Korea had more U.S. forces. Kuwait was a hub for American forces during the Iraq war.


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


14) A Wider War in the Middle East, From Hamas to Hezbollah and Now Iran

The main questions now are how much the conflict will escalate and whether the United States will get more directly involved in the defense of Israel.

By David E. Sanger. Oct. 2, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/02/us/politics/israel-iran.html

Three streaks of light cross the sky above the skyline of Ashkelon, Israel, as Israel’s antimissile system intercepts projectiles from Iran.

Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system intercepted rockets after Iran fired a salvo of ballistic missiles on Tuesday. Credit...Amir Cohen/Reuters


The long-feared “wider war” in the Middle East is here.

 

For the last 360 days, since the images of the slaughter of about 1,200 people in Israel last Oct. 7 flashed around the world, President Biden has warned at every turn against allowing a terrorist attack by Hamas to spread into a conflict with Iran’s other proxy, Hezbollah, and ultimately with Iran itself.

 

Now, after Israel assassinated the Hezbollah chief, Hassan Nasrallah, and began a ground invasion of Lebanon, and after Iran retaliated on Tuesday by launching nearly 200 missiles at Israel, it has turned into one of the region’s most dangerous moments since the Arab-Israeli War of 1967.

 

The main questions now are how much the conflict might escalate and whether the United States will get more directly involved.

 

The past few days may be a turning point. Since Israel killed Mr. Nasrallah on Friday, the Biden administration has been shifting from cautioning against a wider war to trying to manage it. Officials have defended Israel’s right to strike back at Iran, but are advising against direct attacks on its nuclear facilities that could tip the conflict out of control.

 

This is the spiral that Mr. Biden has cautioned against but has not been able to stop, even with major American forces in the region.

 

“From Israel’s perspective, we have been in a regional war since Oct. 7, and that war is now an all-out war,” said Michael Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States, a historian and one of the country’s more hawkish diplomats. “We are in a war for our national survival, period.” Winning over the next few weeks, he said, is a “duty” for a nation “created in the aftermath of the Holocaust.”

 

The unknown is how Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel will interpret that existential mission as he weighs how, not whether, to strike back at Iran.

 

Mr. Biden’s warnings started early, on his visit to Israel less than two weeks after Oct. 7, to show solidarity after one of the most gruesome terrorist attacks of modern times.

 

That was before Israel obliterated Gaza from above and sent its military in on the ground, against Mr. Biden’s advice in a series of heated conversations with Mr. Netanyahu. It was before Israel booby-trapped pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah that exploded across Lebanon, and before Israel not only killed Mr. Nasrallah but systematically decapitated much of the Hezbollah leadership.

 

It was before the administration hinted that Israel would join a 21-day cease-fire, only to be defied, again, by Mr. Netanyahu, who then turned around and authorized the strike that killed Mr. Nasrallah.

 

To Mr. Biden’s critics on the right, this is all the result of American hesitance, his unwillingness to back Israel unconditionally, to nuance every promise of aid with a warning not to make the mistakes the United States made after the Sept. 11 attacks.

 

To his critics on the left, what has happened in the past 10 days is another example of Mr. Biden’s failure to make use of American leverage, including the threat of withholding American weapons from Israel, after more than 41,000 people have died in Gaza.

 

To many Israelis, the escalation was inevitable, another chapter in a struggle for survival that began with the nation’s creation in 1948.

 

Mr. Netanyahu clearly has America’s blessing to retaliate. At the White House on Tuesday, Jake Sullivan, Mr. Biden’s national security adviser, said the Iranian attack had been “defeated and ineffective,” largely because of the coordinated efforts of American and Israeli forces, who had spent months planning how to intercept the incoming missiles. “We have made clear that there will be consequences — severe consequences — for this attack, and we will work with Israel to make that the case,” Mr. Sullivan told reporters.

 

Mr. Sullivan said the White House was consulting extensively with Israel, including with the prime minister’s office, to formulate the appropriate response. He emphasized the degree of communication, leaving unsaid the obvious. Mr. Biden and Mr. Netanyahu barely talked as Israel invaded Gaza and took the fight to Lebanon. But once Iran, a lethal threat to Israel with military powers that Hamas and Hezbollah can only aspire to, directly entered the fray, America’s tone and strategy changed.

 

The behind-the-scenes negotiations now boil down to Mr. Netanyahu’s intent. Will he send another message to Iran about what Israel could do in the future, as he did in April when he aimed at military facilities in the holy city of Isfahan? Will he take out oil production facilities and ports?

 

Or will he aim directly for the facilities he has threatened to strike for years, starting with the underground Natanz facility where Iran is enriching uranium to near-bomb grade?

 

American officials believe they can persuade Mr. Netanyahu to make his point without setting off a full-blown war. But they concede that the Israeli prime minister may see the next five weeks until the American presidential election as a ripe moment to try to set that program back by years. After all, former President Donald J. Trump would not complain about a major attack on Iran’s military infrastructure, and Democrats cannot afford to be accused of restraining Israel after Tuesday’s missile attack.

 

“Israel will do its best to be disproportionate,” Gen. Wesley K. Clark, a former supreme allied commander of NATO, said on CNN on Tuesday. White House officials take the opposite view: Mr. Netanyahu, they say, cannot afford to be anything but proportionate.

 

This new era runs many risks. There is the risk that Iran, frustrated by the failure of its missile force to break through Israeli and American weapons, will convince itself that it is finally time to race for a nuclear weapon, viewing that risky move as the only way to hold off an adversary who has penetrated iPhones and pagers and computer systems. There is the risk that despite the election of a moderate-sounding new Iranian president, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps will win the country’s internal arguments and double down on its missile programs and agents of influence.

 

“A full-scale war, or even a more limited one, could be devastating for Lebanon, Israel, and the region,” said Jonathan Panikoff, the director of the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council. “But from it, unexpected opportunities will also come — to undermine Iranian malign influence in the region, for example, by actively impeding its efforts to reconstitute Hezbollah. And a new administration should be prepared to take advantage of them.”

 

That is what old wars and hot wars do. They create new power dynamics, vacuums to be filled.

 

But there remains the danger that wider wars, once begun, take years to put back in the box. And the presence of nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles and an instinct to escalate creates a particularly toxic brew.


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


15) ‘If Germany Can Do It, Why Can’t We?’

By Serge Schmemann, Oct. 2, 2024

Mr. Schmemann, a former Bonn, Germany, bureau chief for The Times, is a member of the editorial board.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/02/opinion/germany-border-policy.html

A photo taken from behind of two police officers on a sidewalk, facing an approaching car. One holds out an apparatus that looks like a small tennis racket, in a manner meant to ask the driver to stop. It is dusk, and the police officers are silhouetted.

Officers in Germany stop a car near the border with Poland. Credit...Jens Schlueter/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images


When Angela Merkel declined to shut Germany’s doors in 2015 to asylum seekers coming into Europe, the center-right chancellor garnered bouquets from liberals, but also hoots from the far-right and grumbling from European neighbors miffed that Germany was unilaterally taking the high ground without taking their interests into account.

 

Nine years later, the tables have turned. In September, the government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz, a center-left Social Democrat, ordered border controls along Germany’s wide-open western and northern borders to catch undocumented immigrants. The controls were already in force along the eastern and southern borders with Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria and Switzerland, but as of Sept. 16 they were extended to the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark and France.

 

Again, the neighbors fumed. Here was Germany once again breaking European solidarity — this time along the low road — when the whole of the European Union was feeling overwhelmed by a rising tide of immigrants from the Middle East, Africa and, most recently, Ukraine.

 

Germany was the country that had declared they should all be let in — “Wir schaffen das,” We’ll manage this, was Ms. Merkel’s grand promise in 2015. But now that immigration had become an acute political problem for Berlin, the Germans were pushing unwanted refugees back into neighboring countries that had just as little interest, and no greater responsibility, for taking them in.

 

The mass migration of people seeking refuge from war and poverty in prosperous democracies has become a major challenge of the 21st century. While it has posed differing and often real problems in different parts of North America and Europe, a common repercussion has been the rise of far-right movements, which feed popular — and often misguided — fears of invading alien tribes stealing jobs and benefits, spreading terrorism and crime and diluting national cultures and identities. The far right recently scored big in elections to the E.U. Parliament and in France, and immigration is a primary weapon in Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

 

The mass migration of people seeking refuge from war and poverty in prosperous democracies has become a major challenge of the 21st century. While it has posed differing and often real problems in different parts of North America and Europe, a common repercussion has been the rise of far-right movements, which feed popular — and often misguided — fears of invading alien tribes stealing jobs and benefits, spreading terrorism and crime and diluting national cultures and identities. The far right recently scored big in elections to the E.U. Parliament and in France, and immigration is a primary weapon in Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

 

Germany, Europe’s economic powerhouse and a state with generous social services, has been a prime destination for refugees. Their number reached a record 3.48 million refugees and others fleeing conflict, including Ukrainians, as of the end of June, by far the most of any European state. The public has reacted accordingly. A recent poll in Germany found that 44 percent of respondents said migration and refugees are the country’s most pressing problem, and about 77 percent said Germany needed a change in its policies.

 

One consequence has been the rapid rise, after Ms. Merkel flung open the borders, of Alternative for Germany (AfD), a far-right party that has morphed into a rabidly anti-immigration and anti-Muslim party that the German intelligence service has classified as “suspected extremist.” Once a marginal political player, AfD came in first and second, respectively, in state elections in the eastern states of Thuringia and Saxony. Those elections came in the wake of popular fury over a horrific knife attack in the western city of Solingen, allegedly by a Syrian whose asylum claim had been denied.

 

The Social Democrats (SPD) did well in recent elections in Brandenburg, but the victory was tenuous. It’s estimated the AfD came in second by a scant percentage point or two, and exit polls indicated that three-quarters of those who voted for the Social Democrats did so only to block the AfD.

 

Announcing the extended border controls, the German interior minister, Nancy Faeser, explained that the measure was necessary to protect against “acute dangers posed by Islamist terrorism and serious crime.” European Union rules do allow temporary controls for six months, but only “as a last resort measure, in exceptional situations.”

 

Germany’s neighbors saw nothing of the sort. What they saw was a shaky government in dire political straits trying to co-opt some of the right’s political thunder.

 

There were few initial indications of how well the border measures were working, but the effect was probably not great. Germany’s western borders have been open for decades in the Schengen border-free zone in western Europe, and countless highways and byways freely crisscross state boundaries.

 

Even if it is largely symbolic, the images of German police searching cars aroused acrimonies old and new — and some schadenfreude on the far right. Austria has already angrily declared that it would not accept anyone rejected by Germany, while Geert Wilders, whose AfD-like anti-immigration party won the largest share of seats in Dutch elections last year, asked: “If Germany can do it, why can’t we?”

 

What happens in Germany invariably takes on a special significance, in part because it is the most populous country in Europe, but also because of its Nazi past. When a provincial leader of a far-right party in Germany spouts banned Nazi rhetoric, as Björn Höcke, who led the AfD to victory in Thuringia was found guilty of doing, that generates greater concern than it would elsewhere in Europe or the United States.

 

But what bugs Germany’s neighbors more these days is what they see as a big, powerful and overbearing neighbor paying ever less heed to the high-minded principles of European solidarity, especially on an issue as intractable and Europe-wide as migration. “There’s an impatience with Germany, with its somewhat smug assumption of a moral high ground, its we-can-do, we-doing-right position,” said Liana Fix, a fellow for Europe at the Council on Foreign Relations. “It’s perceived as German arrogance when Germany takes unilateral decisions on migration at the expense of its neighbors without coordinating the action with them.”

 

Critics cite Germany’s attitude following the 2008 economic crisis, when Berlin insisted on imposing onerous measures on indebted countries, especially Greece. Germany was also criticized for its unilateral decision to close all its nuclear power plants following the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, a decision that set back the European drive to cleaner energy and led to greater German dependence on Russian gas.

 

What makes it more frustrating for the neighbors is that Germany is, in fact, in the driver’s seat, especially since the exit of Britain from the E.U. and the decline of France’s influence.

 

Acting in its own interest, however, and irritating its neighbors in the process, will not solve Germany’s — or Europe’s — immigrant problem. The problem across Europe is that while uncontrolled migration creates political headaches, there is an acute need for skilled labor. That requires Europe-wide action, and despite various plans and proposals, the goal of reducing numbers remains elusive, and is likely to remain so as long as wealthy democracies like Germany remain a beacon of hope for suffering people.


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*