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— Michael Novakhov (@mikenov) August 22, 2021
The Man Who Should Be Merrick Garland’s Role Model https://t.co/jOiHpIrS8T
As Senator Edward Kennedy put it after Hoover’s death, “The FBI has never before been truly accountable to anyone for anything.”
President Joe Biden is facing problems Gerald Ford would have appreciated. Like Ford in 1974, Biden has come into office following a president accused of criminality. Both Biden and Ford inherited a Department of Justice plagued by scandal and well-grounded charges of politicization. Both had to choose a nominee for attorney general knowing that recent occupants of that office contributed to partisanship and displayed a lack of integrity. And both took office while questions lingered about recent leadership of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a component of the DOJ.
Ford managed to make progress on all of these problems in just two and a half years. By the end of his presidency, he had laid the groundwork for a historic improvement in both the appearance and the reality of nonpartisanship and professionalism at the DOJ. Jimmy Carter’s one-term presidency continued the work. The 1970s ended in a much better place than they had begun, with solidly entrenched laws, rules, and norms that kept the DOJ largely—not entirely, but largely—free from partisanship and serious misconduct for decades.
Understanding the nadir reached at the department in the early 1970s, and the creative repair that took place under Ford and Carter, reveals how aberrational Donald Trump’s relationship with the department was, and, looking ahead, what problems and opportunities today face Biden and the new attorney general, Merrick Garland, as they attempt to move on from the past four years. Scandal can create political will for reform. Biden and Garland have an opportunity to both shore up the 1970s framework and address new problems revealed by the Trump presidency.
David A. Graham: What’s the Justice Department actually for?
In a certain sense, they have an easier task than their predecessors in the 1970s. The leadership failures at the DOJ were much worse in the previous era compared with today. James Comey mishandled the public disclosures about the Hillary Clinton email investigation, which might have affected the 2016 election, but he was an honorable and law-abiding FBI director—a far cry from J. Edgar Hoover. Comey’s replacement, Chris Wray, is competent and professional. Trump’s attorney general William Barr acted unethically in a number of high-profile matters, but there is no evidence that he committed crimes in office, as Nixon’s attorney general John Mitchell had. Moreover, under Ford, new policies needed to be created from scratch. Today, there is already a model and a department workforce acculturated to prize nonpartisanship and professionalism.
But the repudiation of Nixon and Watergate was ultimately bipartisan. Today’s Republican Party, by contrast, has yet to reject Trump and what he did to the country’s institutions. For Biden and Garland, that makes the work ahead much more difficult.
Perhaps Ford’s most important decision was to seek a nominee for attorney general who would be indisputably independent of the White House and understood by all to be a person of high integrity. He selected Edward Levi, the president of the University of Chicago and a former law professor and law-school dean who had served in the DOJ early in his career. A very successful academic administrator, Levi was widely admired for his probity and commitment to calm, reasoned problem solving. At his Senate confirmation hearing, Levi testified that he was not sure if he had ever registered as a Republican or a Democrat to vote. In addition to being independent in his personal politics, Levi pledged to operate the department free from any partisan or other improper interference from the White House.
At his swearing-in ceremony, Levi described the need for the appointment of someone like him, noting a “corrosive skepticism and cynicism concerning the administration of justice,” in particular the belief that law might be “an instrument of partisan purpose.” There was good reason for this cynicism. For some time, presidents—Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and John F. Kennedy—had appointed senior campaign aides to the attorney general’s post. Nixon took this bad idea to a new level. When confirmed, Levi became the sixth attorney general in five years. Nixon’s first, Mitchell, was a close friend of Nixon’s who had run his 1968 presidential campaign. Mitchell started working on the president’s 1972 reelection campaign while still attorney general, participating in decisions about both legal and illegal campaign activities. He eventually resigned his government position and moved to the campaign full-time. Mitchell was deeply involved in the Watergate crimes, and was indicted along with a number of White House aides in early 1974, while Nixon was still president. His career ended with a prison sentence and disbarment.
Read: The operatic life of Richard Nixon
Nixon’s next attorney general, Richard Kleindienst, came from a political background in Arizona. He allegedly learned early on about White House involvement in the Watergate crimes but kept it to himself. Kleindienst resigned in 1973 after only nine months in office while details about Watergate were slowly leaking out; he said too many colleagues and friends appeared to be involved for him to stay on. The next year he was convicted of having lied to the Senate about a Nixon White House directive to go easy on ITT in an antitrust case because the company gave money to the Republican Party.
Nixon’s third attorney general, the exemplary Elliot Richardson, did not last long. When Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox sent a subpoena to Nixon calling for previously secret Oval Office tape recordings, the president ordered Richardson to fire Cox. Richardson—who had vowed to the Senate at his confirmation hearing to protect the Watergate investigation—refused and resigned, starting the so-called Saturday Night Massacre. Richardson’s deputy, William Ruckelshaus, who immediately became the acting attorney general, also refused and left office that day. The third in line at the DOJ—Robert Bork—was willing to fire Cox. Nixon abolished the office of special prosecutor, and White House aides directed the FBI to seal the offices of Cox, Richardson, and Ruckelshaus. Yet the explosion of outrage in Congress and the press forced Nixon to acquiesce to a new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, who would work independently of the attorney general. Congress began impeachment proceedings a week after the firings, and Jaworski pursued the litigation that would result in a Supreme Court order to Nixon to turn over the damning tapes. Nixon’s end was near, but the Justice Department’s reputation had already been severely damaged.
The FBI was consumed with troubles of its own. A few months before Nixon’s 1972 reelection, FBI Director Hoover died in office after nearly 50 years at the helm. Nixon appointed as acting director a Justice Department lawyer, L. Patrick Gray, because he was an old Nixon friend and campaign aide and was expected to be a White House loyalist. Gray destroyed incriminating Watergate documents and allowed White House aides to have access to confidential FBI files and interviews on the Watergate investigation, and soon resigned in disgrace.
Meanwhile, information was leaking out about the FBI’s manifold misdeeds under Hoover. The roots of the abuses and illegality dated back to before Nixon and Watergate. For instance, it was Robert Kennedy, attorney general in his brother John’s administration, who in 1963 approved an FBI wiretap of Martin Luther King Jr. Throughout his tenure as director, Hoover had done what he wanted. As Senator Edward Kennedy put it after Hoover’s death, “The FBI has never before been truly accountable to anyone for anything.” Under Hoover, the FBI surveilled, infiltrated, and disrupted supposedly subversive groups involved in the civil-rights movement, Vietnam War protests, and environmental activism. Prominent cultural figures suspected of left-wing views were monitored, including Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, Langston Hughes, and John Lennon. Hoover kept files of salacious or otherwise damaging information on politicians, too, and was viewed as untouchable in his job because of his potential to blackmail. He was also willing to use illegal methods to gather political intelligence for Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Nixon, including wiretapping sitting members of Congress, executive-branch officials, journalists, and others.
In the early and mid 1970s, various congressional committees investigated misdeeds at the Justice Department and its FBI component, and some important members of Congress proposed radical institutional change. Senator Sam Ervin, a Democrat from North Carolina, introduced a bill to turn the DOJ into an independent agency—akin to the Securities and Exchange Commission or the Federal Trade Commission. Ervin proposed that the attorney general be removed from the Cabinet, given a six-year term in office, and protected by statute from presidential dismissal unless “for neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.” Ervin’s bill would also have given hiring and firing authority over the FBI director and U.S. attorneys to the attorney general rather than to the president. Other reform-minded senators made similar proposals. For instance, Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, a Democrat from Washington, proposed a bill that would have made the FBI director removable by the president only for good cause, such as neglect of duty or criminal conviction.
Ultimately, both constitutional realities and calculations of good policy doomed these proposals. Advised by the Congressional Research Service, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, and other legal experts, Congress in 1973 and 1974 concluded that Article II of the Constitution—which gives the president “the executive power” and the duty to “take care that the laws shall be faithfully executed”—required that the president be able to fire the attorney general and FBI director at any time. The Constitution, it was agreed, anticipates that the president sets the broad policy directions for law enforcement, and that the most senior executive officials heading law-enforcement entities are directly accountable to the president—to ensure that the president’s policies are carried out and to prevent the rise of another Hoover.
Yet there was also widespread agreement that the White House should only rarely, in unique circumstances, involve itself in specific investigative or charging decisions. After the president and his political advisers determined priorities and broad policies, the specifics should be left to a functionally independent Justice Department. There was likewise agreement that considerations of political partisanship or other corrupt motives should never again be allowed to influence federal law enforcement, and that lawbreaking by DOJ officials could never again be tolerated.
The idea that the Justice Department should be independent of the White House had been developing for a long time, and was certainly already present by the early 1970s. This is why Nixon acted secretly when he tried to undermine the Watergate investigation from within while publicly claiming that the department would pursue the matter vigorously. But the revelations about Watergate and Hoover’s FBI, and the intense public and congressional conversations about reforms, helped crystallize the need for an independent, professional, nonpartisan Justice Department in the minds of the country’s political class.
When he took office in early 1975, Attorney General Levi began the process of implementing this broadly shared vision. His work, which was continued by Attorneys General Griffin Bell and Benjamin Civiletti, who served under President Jimmy Carter, was spectacularly successful.
One set of efforts was aimed at transparency and accountability for past abuses. Levi committed to Congress that information would be uncovered and released where possible and that Justice Department officials would cooperate with investigations. Congress and the public were understandably shocked by many of the revelations. Former FBI Assistant Director William Sullivan testified to the Senate’s Church Committee—a select group formed to investigate intelligence-related abuses by the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, FBI, and other entities—that the FBI’s work in domestic intelligence gathering had been “a rough, tough dirty business,” and that the bureau had used the same techniques against Americans as it did against the KGB. Members of Congress were displeased (to put it mildly) to learn about the secret FBI dossiers kept on some of them. Levi ordered a full review of the FBI’s actions against King.
Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes: How to corrupt the Justice Department
Dozens of criminal investigations were opened on FBI agents who had ordered or carried out illegal “black-bag jobs.” Two very senior FBI officials were convicted of authorizing illegal break-ins at the homes of relatives of members of the Weather Underground, a violent far-left group. Together with the criminal convictions of Attorneys General Mitchell and Kleindienst, this helped emphasize the message that illegality would not be tolerated any longer.
Levi also created two offices to investigate misconduct by DOJ officials and employees. Both were called the Office of Professional Responsibility—one for the FBI and one for the DOJ as a whole. Later, Congress added more oversight by creating an inspector general for the department, tasked with rooting out waste, fraud, and illegality and reporting to both Congress and the attorney general.
Levi’s team at the department developed guidelines to govern FBI investigations, with the aim of ensuring that only legitimate inquiries were pursued and that more intrusive investigative techniques were reserved for serious cases. As noted, a particular problem under Hoover had been investigations of groups composed of American citizens who held views critical of the government—whether it be in the area of civil rights, the war in Indochina, or other areas. The FBI often targeted groups based purely on expressive behavior that should have been considered protected by the First Amendment. To stop such abuses, Levi issued Domestic Security Investigation Guidelines, which required a defined factual predicate to initiate any investigation. A full investigation could only be authorized by the FBI headquarters, and required the bureau to have “specific and articulable facts” suggesting acts of violence or federal crimes. Levi also centralized oversight of the FBI by Justice Department lawyers.
Another key innovation was developed by Attorney General Bell. In a 1978 speech to Justice Department employees, Bell announced that all communications coming from Congress or the White House to the Justice Department about specific party matters must be routed through the attorney general or the department’s second- and third-in-command lawyers, the deputy attorney general and the associate attorney general. Communication about broad matters of policy could flow freely, but White House intervention in specific cases would be severely limited and monitored.
Congress added other key reforms. The Senate announced that political operatives would not be considered appropriate nominees for attorney general. Two landmark statutes—the first in 1968 concerning ordinary criminal cases, and the second in 1978 concerning foreign intelligence investigations—require both high-level executive-branch sign-off and judicial review before bugging or wiretapping is allowed in the United States.
Another 1978 statute created the independent-counsel mechanism to investigate wrongdoing at high levels in the executive branch. Responding to the Saturday Night Massacre, Congress expressly cut the president out of the loop for initiating or terminating such investigations. (Both parties in Congress were happy to let this law lapse in 1999 after the experience of Ken Starr and other overly aggressive independent counsels.)
The combined effect of these and other reforms served the country well for decades. But few reforms were actually codified in statute. Most operated at the level of norms, practices, and sub-statutory executive-branch policies. The success of the system therefore depended on multiple actors continually agreeing to abide by relevant rules. The Senate needs to be consistently vigilant about who it confirms into senior offices, and Congress must exercise active oversight to detect and deter abuses. Attorneys general, FBI directors, and other senior political appointees need to be people of high character who are devoted to the ideals that Levi embodied. Presidents, White House counsels, and other political aides of the president likewise need to commit themselves to respecting the independence of the Justice Department, even if it feels inconvenient at times. The various watchdog offices within the department need to do their jobs fearlessly and with integrity. Career employees at the FBI and the DOJ need to strive to make decisions solely on the basis of law and facts, without regard for improper considerations such as partisanship. The press and outside interest groups need to monitor, publicize, and criticize any deviations from the important norms crystallized in the 1970s.
This system and these commitments were severely stressed by the presidency of Donald Trump. Trump openly challenged the norms of Justice Department independence in a way Nixon never did. Trump publicly called on the department to punish enemies and protect his friends. He fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions because Sessions was not implementing this corrupt program. Trump fired FBI Director Comey for refusing to pledge personal fealty, and then admitted on television that he had acted to protect himself personally from the Russia investigation. And so on.
Biden has so far said and done the right things. He (or aides speaking for him) has stated frequently as a candidate and president that he will have an “independent” Department of Justice that does not answer to the White House. Biden also picked as attorney general a person of outstanding character and qualifications. Perhaps even more importantly, as the legal commentator and scholar Benjamin Wittes wrote, Garland is “the closest thing American political and legal life offers in this polarized time to a figure above politics.” Garland and several senators paid tribute to the example of Ed Levi at Garland’s confirmation hearing.
In some ways, Biden and Garland face an easier task than Ford and Levi did. Levi, with crucial assistance from Congress, needed to come up with new policies from scratch, whereas Garland inherits a Justice Department with an honorable tradition to return to.
But in other ways, the problems are knottier today. Trump’s frontal assault on the notion of independent, nonpartisan, professional law enforcement took place in an era of political polarization that is much worse than in the 1970s. “Political sectarianism” or “pernicious polarization” in American politics has made it intensely difficult to cooperate across party lines in Congress, or even to agree on important facts. (Was there collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia? Who truly won the 2020 presidential vote?)
In the 1970s, the leaders of both parties more or less shared a common understanding about the abuses of Nixon and Hoover. “Alternative facts” had not yet infected our politics. Abusive government behavior toward the other side of the aisle was not tolerated or even lauded by party leaders. The relative agreement about facts and values allowed important norms to develop to protect the independence and professionalism of the Justice Department. The two political parties were still able to reach common ground about nominees for key roles, and about important legislation.
Kevin Wack: American justice isn’t impartial anymore
Congress was a crucial partner in crafting and implementing the 1970s reforms. Today, polarization, a 50–50 Senate, and the filibuster mean that Congress might be absent in the reform effort.
There is another way in which Garland is facing a tougher job than Levi did. Only one month after Nixon’s resignation made him president, Ford granted his predecessor a full pardon for any federal criminal offenses he might have committed. Levi thus came to office freed of the awesome responsibility of figuring out how to handle the alleged criminality of a former president. By contrast, Biden pledged during the campaign that he “absolutely” will not pardon Trump and that the Department of Justice will decide independently of the White House how to proceed on any federal investigations or criminal charges. That is a weighty burden for Garland and the department today.
Enduring constitutional realities mean that fundamental restructuring of the Justice Department is off the table today, as it was in the 1970s. Federal law enforcement can never be turned entirely into an apolitical civil-service bureaucracy. As a result, weaknesses revealed by the Trump years must be addressed in more fine-grained and subtle ways. There are a number of good proposals already circulating. Jack Goldsmith and Robert Bauer—a senior DOJ official under George W. Bush and White House counsel to Barack Obama, respectively—just published a book filled with helpful ideas. Groups such as Protect Democracy and the Center for American Progress have proposed reforms, as have thoughtful members of Congress, including Representative Jerrold Nadler, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, and Representative Adam Schiff, chair of the House Intelligence Committee. (I have also offered a few ideas.) The stakes are very high: Nonpartisan, professional law enforcement is one of the key factors that separate tyrannies from countries with a meaningful rule of law. The country is fortunate that the work of people like Ed Levi in the 1970s set the United States on the right path; their values and ideas can be an enduring source of guidance.
WASHINGTON, Aug 20 (Reuters) - The FBI has found scant evidence that the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was the result of an organized plot to overturn the presidential election result, according to four current and former law enforcement officials.
Though federal officials have arrested more than 570 alleged participants, the FBI at this point believes the violence was not centrally coordinated by far-right groups or prominent supporters of then-President Donald Trump, according to the sources, who have been either directly involved in or briefed regularly on the wide-ranging investigations.
"Ninety to ninety-five percent of these are one-off cases," said a former senior law enforcement official with knowledge of the investigation. "Then you have five percent, maybe, of these militia groups that were more closely organized. But there was no grand scheme with Roger Stone and Alex Jones and all of these people to storm the Capitol and take hostages."
Stone, a veteran Republican operative and self-described "dirty trickster", and Jones, founder of a conspiracy-driven radio show and webcast, are both allies of Trump and had been involved in pro-Trump events in Washington on Jan. 5, the day before the riot.
FBI investigators did find that cells of protesters, including followers of the far-right Oath Keepers and Proud Boys groups, had aimed to break into the Capitol. But they found no evidence that the groups had serious plans about what to do if they made it inside, the sources said.
Harrowing scenes from the U.S. Capitol siege
Pro-Trump protesters storm the U.S. Capitol to contest the certification of the 2020 U.S. presidential election results by the U.S. Congress, at the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., U.S. January 6, 2021. Picture taken January 6, 2021. REUTERS/Ahmed Gaber - RC263L9P157M
Prosecutors have filed conspiracy charges against 40 of those defendants, alleging that they engaged in some degree of planning before the attack.
They alleged that one Proud Boy leader recruited members and urged them to stockpile bulletproof vests and other military-style equipment in the weeks before the attack and on Jan. 6 sent members forward with a plan to split into groups and make multiple entries to the Capitol.
But so far prosecutors have steered clear of more serious, politically-loaded charges that the sources said had been initially discussed by prosecutors, such as seditious conspiracy or racketeering.
The FBI's assessment could prove relevant for a congressional investigation that also aims to determine how that day's events were organized and by whom.
Senior lawmakers have been briefed in detail on the results of the FBI's investigation so far and find them credible, a Democratic congressional source said.
The chaos on Jan. 6 erupted as the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives met to certify Joe Biden's victory in November's presidential election.
It was the most violent attack on the Capitol since the War of 1812, forcing lawmakers and Trump's own vice president, Mike Pence, to scramble for safety.
Four people died and another died the following day, and more than 100 police officers were injured.
TRUMP'S SPEECH
Trump made an incendiary speech at a nearby rally shortly before the riot, repeating false claims that the 2020 election was stolen and urging supporters to march on the Capitol to pressure lawmakers to reject Biden's victory.
In public comments last month to the Democratic-led congressional committee formed to investigate the violence, police officers injured in the mayhem urged lawmakers to determine whether Trump helped instigate it. Some Democrats have said they want him to testify.
But the FBI has so far found no evidence that he or people directly around him were involved in organizing the violence, according to the four current and former law enforcement officials.
More than 170 people have been charged so far with assaulting or impeding a police officer, according to the Justice Department. That carries a maximum sentence of 20 years.
But one source said there has been little, if any, recent discussion by senior Justice Department officials of filing charges such as "seditious conspiracy" to accuse defendants of trying to overthrow the government. They have also opted not to bring racketeering charges, often used against organized criminal gangs.
Senior officials had discussed filing such charges in the weeks after the attack, the sources said.
Prosecutors have also not brought any charges alleging that any individual or group played a central role in organizing or leading the riot. Law-enforcement sources told Reuters no such charges appeared to be pending.
Conspiracy charges that have been filed allege that defendants discussed their plans in the weeks before the attack and worked together on the day itself. But prosecutors have not alleged that this activity was part of a broader plot.
Some federal judges and legal experts have questioned whether the Justice Department is letting defendants off too lightly.
Judge Beryl Howell in July asked prosecutors to explain why one defendant was allowed to plead to a misdemeanor charge carrying a maximum sentence of six months, rather than a more serious felony charge.
Spokespeople for the Justice Department and U.S. Attorney's office in Washington, which is leading the Jan. 6 prosecutions, declined to comment.
The congressional committee investigating the attack will talk with the FBI and other agencies as part of its probe.
Reporting By Mark Hosenball; Editing by Andy Sullivan, Kieran Murray and Daniel Wallis
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
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Afghan President Ashraf Ghani slipped out of his country Sunday in the same way he had led it in recent years — a lonely and isolated figure.
Ghani quietly left the sprawling presidential palace with a small coterie of confidants — and didn’t even tell other political leaders who had been negotiating a peaceful transition of power with the Taliban that he was heading for the exit.
Abdullah Abdullah, his long-time rival who had twice buried his animosity to partner with Ghani in government, said that “God will hold him accountable” for abandoning the capital.
Ghani’s destination was not immediately known. In a social media post from an unknown location, he wrote that he left to save lives. “If I had stayed, countless of my countrymen would be martyred and Kabul would face destruction and turn into ruins that could result to a human catastrophe for its six million residents” Ghani wrote.
Abdullah, as well as former President Hamid Karzai, who had beaten a path to Ghani’s door on numerous occasions to plead with him to put compromise above retaining power, were blindsided by the hasty departure. They said they had still been hoping to negotiate a peaceful transition with the Taliban, said Saad Mohseni, the owner of Afghanistan’s popular TOLO TV.
“He left them in them lurch,” he said. Earlier Sunday, Karzai had posted a message to the nation on his Facebook page, surrounded by his three daughters, to reassure Kabul residents that the leadership had a plan and was negotiating with the Taliban.
Just hours later, he discovered the presidential palace had been abandoned.
“Ghani’s inability to unite the country and his proclivity to surround himself with his cadre of Western-educated intellectuals brought Afghanistan to this point,” said Bill Roggio, senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a U.S.-based research institute. “As Afghanistan collapsed, he refused to deal with the problems and further isolated himself from the power brokers he needed to deal with the problem, and the Afghan people as well.”
Ghani’s style of rule was often characterized as cantankerous and arrogant, rarely heeding the advice of his government and often publicly berating those who challenged him.
He was accused by ethnic minorities of championing the ethnic Pashtuns, like himself, seeing himself as a counter to the Taliban, who are mostly from the same ethnic group. He alienated other ethnic minorities and the gap between Afghanistan’s ethnic groups grew ever wider.
As he campaigned for the presidency in 2014, Ghani was taking an anger management course. It seemed to have faltered as multiple tribal elders in meetings with the president have spoken of his verbal lashings.
Ghani’s critics say his heavy-handed leadership style is to blame, to some degree, for the rapid disintegration of the Afghan army and an anti-Taliban alliance of warlords who fled or surrendered to the insurgents rather than fight for a widely unpopular president.
“His downfall was his insistence on centralizing power at all costs and a stubborn refusal to bring more people under his tent,” said Michael Kugelman, deputy director of the Asia Program at the U.S.-based Wilson Center. “Later on, his inability to develop a clear strategy to address the Taliban insurgency and perceptions that he was obstructing the peace process hurt him as well.”
Ghani, 72, spent most of his career overseas as a student and academic before returning to Afghanistan in 2002.
He arrived with a powerful set of economic credentials. He was attractive to the West with his World Bank background and was seen as a possible solution to Afghanistan’s crumbling and corrupt economy. He was finance minister for two years until 2004. He survived cancer.
In 2014 he fought his first presidential race. It was criticized as deeply flawed and allegations of widespread fraud threatened to destabilize the still fragile nation. Both Ghani and his rival Abdullah Abdullah claimed victory. In the end, the United States brokered a compromise and divided power between the two men and even created a new position of chief executive.
The next election in 2019 fared the same. Again, accusations swirled of deep corruption and both Ghani and Abdullah declared themselves president. They eventually ended months of bickering and Abdullah became head of the National Reconciliation Council that was to bring Afghanistan’s warlords and political leaders together to put a united face before the Taliban.
But Ghani’s belligerent operating style undermined him again.
“He worked with a very small circle of ‘yes’ men and got filtered news about the country from them,” said Torek Farhadi, a former adviser to the Afghan government. “Others didn’t dare talk truth to him. He replaced all experienced people in the army and the government with junior people beholden to him. In a traditional country, Ghani was the guy who governed upside down.”
As the Trump administration opened negotiations with the Taliban in 2016, Ghani was asked by U.S. peace envoy Zalmay Khalilzad to cobble together a strong united team __ one that could conduct tough negotiations with the Taliban. Efforts quickly faltered.
In April a frustrated U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken urged Ghani to forge a united stand. He warned the president that he had to expand his circle and be inclusive.
“Unity and inclusivity .... I believe is essential for the difficult work ahead,” Blinken wrote.
“Even with the continuation of financial assistance to your forces from the United States after an American military withdrawal, I am concerned the security situation will worsen and that the Taliban could make rapid territorial gains,” Blinken warned.
Roggio, of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said there are many reasons for the government’s collapse, but “Ghani was not the man to lead Afghanistan during its darkest hour.”
The world’s democracies are in retreat. But there’s always hope when popular protests break out in the corrupt dictatorships of Africa, Asia and Latin America, or in authoritarian socialist regimes such as Belarus, Nicaragua and Cuba.
Freedom House, a think tank that promotes democratic practices, reports that freedom across the globe has declined for 15 straight years. Last year, 18 countries suffered declines in democratic trends, while six improved.
Recent additions to this rollback range from Hungary in the European Union to Turkey, Hong Kong, and Myanmar. The most successful at quelling dissent are military-backed regimes and those devoted to totalitarian ideologies, of which the standouts are China, Russia, Iran and Venezuela.
Three decades ago, it was a different story, as the Soviet Union collapsed, giving a dozen or more nations their chance for freedom. For the most part, these transitions were remarkably peaceful, particularly in eastern Europe. In central Asia, the former Soviet rulers merely changed their labels and slogans, carrying on with business as usual.
In all but one example, these countries asserted their newly-found independence. The exception was the German Democratic Republic (GDR), which was absorbed into the German Federal Republic after 40 years under the control of the Socialist Unity Party, better known as the SED.
The SED was led by German communists who had spent World War II in Moscow. They could count on the occupying Red Army to suppress any dissent or demands for Western-style democracy.
One of those communists was Erich Mielke, an admirer of the Bolsheviks’ Cheka secret police established during the Russian Revolution in 1917. The Cheka was the predecessor of the NKVD and the KGB.
Failed uprising
In 1953, the year of Stalin’s death, an uprising by east German workers threatened the new GDR state. Four years later, Mielke took charge of the Ministry for State Security, or Stasi for short, and built it into world’s most pervasive secret service. Like its Russian big brother, the Stasi had an international arm, the HVA, but its main purpose was to spy on the GDR’s 16 million citizens.
Its functions went beyond internal surveillance and foreign espionage to include the roles of the police and judiciary. It opened mail, monitored telephone calls, issued travel permits, and scrutinised applicants for government and university posts.
It later emerged the Stasi also controlled dozens of businesses, including construction, electronics, military weapons trading and smuggling, as well as operating a bus service and running the national sports organisation.
By 1953, the Stasi already had more officers than Hitler’s Gestapo and, at its abolition in 1989, had nearly 100,000 full-time staff. In addition, it had some 190,000 active informers, known as IMs, meaning every 63rd citizen had a Stasi connection. They operated from 209 offices throughout the GDR, which was a third bigger in area than New Zealand.
During its existence, the Stasi employed some 250,000 full-timers, had 600,000 informants, and imprisoned some 280,000 citizens. It held files on six million individuals. Many were interrogated, typically using techniques such as sleep deprivation.
Punishment lacking
Yet, after the agency was dismantled, only 182 officers were charged and 87 convicted of Stasi-related crimes. Just one was jailed. Mielke, who held the top post until the end, served a two-year sentence but not for a Stasi crime. This was not the fate of many Gestapo officers, who faced trial for war crimes and were severely punished.
The free ride for the Stasi created a substantial lobby of past members who are still active in German life and politics. They are the subject of The Grey Men, by former FBI agent Ralph Hope who, among many positions, was deputy head of the agency’s Baltic States office.
Hope’s book follows that of Australian writer Anna Funder, whose Stasiland was published in 2002 and remains one of the best-known books in English of first-hand accounts by Stasi officers and their victims.
Coincidentally – because Hope does not list Funder in his bibliography – both books start with events that triggered the effective collapse of the GDR on November 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall was breached.
Funder chose the peaceful occupation of the Ruden Ecke, headquarters of the Stasi in Leipzig, as citizens sought to prevent the destruction of files. Stasi officers had fled, fearing their fate would resemble that of the Gestapo. Hope opts for Dresden, with the added drama of the intruders being turned away at gunpoint from the KGB’s office, then headed by Stasi-card carrying Vladimir Putin. Both authors note the shock of occupiers finding thousands of glass jars containing items of clothing that identified the “scent” of suspect citizens.
Standing joke
While the GDR’s sudden collapse was a surprise to both Eastern and Western intelligence agencies, it was not unexpected. Funder recalls a standing joke in Stasi circles about why the Titanic should be raised: the Americans wanted the jewels, the Russians the technology, and the East Germans the band that was playing as it went down.
After Mikhail Gorbachev loosened the reins of Communist Party power in the Soviet Union, all of the eastern bloc satellites were in revolt. It was obvious Moscow would not help the SED.
Yet Meilke had a plan to foil any widespread uprising. Operation Day X would round up 86,000 suspects and put them in already arranged detention centres. But the order was never given and the Stasi did not fire a shot.
Both books are built around personal case studies but Hope has a wider agenda. He wants to know what happened to the SED’s US$11 billion in hard currency that has not been traced. He suspects some of it has been used to continue the influence of ex-Stasi officers.
The SED was renamed as the Party of Democratic Socialists and later became part of Die Linke, Germany’s most left-wing political organisation. Its main cause continues to be the global anti-fascist (antifa) movement, a term first coined in Moscow in 1923.
Criminal state
Among its many crimes, the GDR earned hard currency by ransoming political prisoners to the Federal government; selling its own citizens’ blood donations to foreign health services, which was lucrative during the height of the HIV Aids epidemic; and engaging in large-scale trading of illegal weapons, drugs and migrants seeking entry to the European Union.
Hope describes the difficulties still faced by advocates for Stasi victims and those who wish to curate its history. One of them, Hubertus Knabe, headed a campaign to turn the Stasi’s Berlin headquarters from a museum into a living memorial but he was later removed as director.
Hope blames this on the ex-Stasi establishment, many of whom kept their positions in the judiciary, educational institutions and other government agencies. Some were elected to the German parliament where they have supported ‘hate speech’ legislation that is aimed at curbing extreme right-wing groups such as neo-Nazis but not those who ran a repressive regime for 40 years.
Protected by privacy laws, former Stasi officers are running large businesses, such as the Nord Stream pipeline controlled by Russia and investment funds. Those who taught in Stasi-controlled faculties on how to commit murder and administer deadly poisons are still in their posts.
Germany’s oldest and most prestigious university, Humboldt, was one such institution. It lavished degrees on GDR sympathisers in the West, including a PhD for Angela Davis, a leader of the Black Panthers movement in the US.
Hope says even the highly-praised film about the Stasi, The Lives of Others, was tainted by ex-Stasi involvement. In return for expert advice on Stasi techniques, the surveillance officer in the drama prevented the arrest of his victim, something Hope says never occurred in real life.
While Hope often overstates his case, and repeats himself with inconsistent information, the whitewashing of the GDR is more real than imagined. Ostalgia is a neologism for the phenomenon of looking back at the GDR as a “funny and harmless” period in German history. This is in contrast to the Nazi period, which lasted for less than a third of that time.
Undoubtedly, the peaceful unification of East and West is a matter of pride for many Germans. This is confirmed by the rapid rise of Angela Merkel to be chancellor of united Germany in 2005 after entering politics for Democracy Awakening, a non-communist party. After the first (and last) free election in the GDR, she became deputy government spokesperson, and was present at the final formal media conference before this unlamented state officially ended on October 3, 1990.
The Grey Men: Pursuing the Stasi into the present, by Ralph Hope (Oneworld/Bloomsbury).
Stasiland, by Anna Funder (Text Publishing).
Nevil Gibson is a former editor at large for NBR. He has contributed film and book reviews to various publications.
This is supplied content and not paid for by NBR.
The News And Times: #FBI Investigating #Russian #Diaspora - posted at 10:31:20 UTC | The News And Times #TheNewsAndTimes News Review #NewsReview
The so called "#ImmortalRegiment" is #FRONT & #COVER for #RussianFifthColumns #AROUND THE #WORLD, #Espionage
thenewsandtimes.blogspot.com/2021/06/the-ne…
The News And Times #FBI Investigating #Russian #Diaspora - posted at 10:31:20 UTC | The News And Times #TheNewsAndTimes News Review #NewsReview
The so called "#ImmortalRegiment" is #FRONT & #COVER for #RussianFifthColumns #AROUND THE #WORLD, #Espionage
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"Кто-то даже публично осмеливается говорить, что несправедливо якобы, что России принадлежат богатства такого региона, как Сибирь, только одной стране… Все нас пытаются укусить или что-то от нас откусить, – но они должны знать, что мы зубы выбьем всем, так чтобы они не могли кусаться, и залог этого – развитие вооруженных сил". Блогеры обсуждают очередное заявление Путина. ( Подробнее здесь: https://www.svoboda.org/a/31266601.html
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Hamas leaders targeted in Israeli airstrikes by BBC World Service
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Michael Novakhov - SharedNewsLinks℠ | In Brief |
Now that Congressional Republicans have seen fit to expel Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) from her leadership post in the U.S. House of Representatives, the warning lights are flashing red for American democracy.
Submission to Trump knows no boundaries
Republicans are punishing Cheney because she has committed the cardinal sin of contradicting the former U.S. President and defending the U.S. 2020 presidential election results as legitimate.
In the party’s upper echelons, ever submissive to their “main man” Donald Trump, this is now considered treason.
Growing Parallels With Germany in the 1930s
The Republican Party is not a fascist party – yet – but the parallels with Germany in the 1930s are growing closer.
Like many Germans of that era, large numbers of Republican voters and politicians have abandoned democratic values.
In particular, they no longer believe that government policies should reflect the will of the majority. They simply consider the party opposing them illegitimate, “radical” and “socialist.”
Transfer of power? Fuggedaboutit
Many Republicans also no longer accept the core democratic principle that a party in power must transfer that power if it loses an election.
To ensure one-party rule, Republicans are busy stacking the electoral deck, basically by making it harder for black Americans and Democratic voters mainly in urban areas to vote.
Strongman worshippers
These Republicans blindly follow their leader, a strongman who openly admires autocrats and who refuses to accept the result of a fair election.
They also believe his Big Lie, that the Democrats stole the election and the system is rigged. There is no evidence to support this claim, but they don’t care.
The Nazis and the original Big Lie
In the original Big Lie, Nazis claimed that Germany had lost World War I only because certain “internal groups” had sabotaged the war effort. That was also completely false.
But they subsequently used that Big Lie very effectively to blame Jews and democratic Weimar politicians, quite a few of whom were Social Democrats (not Socialists), for Germany’s defeat.
De facto race baiting in 2021
Now, Republicans must be absolutely loyal to their leader, as Donald Trump spews lies about the election, disparages racial minorities and appeals to white supremacists.
Some of his followers, as we saw on January 6, 2021 – another day in U.S. history that will live in infamy — will use violence to achieve their goals.
Paramilitary parallels
Many self-styled “patriots” in the Trumpista camp have organized into heavily armed paramilitary groups, the militias. They have intimidated politicians in Michigan, occupying the state legislature, and paraded with their guns near Black Lives Matters protestors.
The Proud Boys, a neo-Nazi group, and the Oath Keepers are fervent Trump supporters and associated with white supremacists.
Abandoning democratic principles
The analogy with Weimar Germany may seem alarmist, but let’s step back for a minute and consider how bizarre the current situation is:
Hypocrisy knows no boundaries
The vast majority of Republican voters thus reject the results of an election — even though it was untainted by fraud. After all, 50 Secretaries of State, many of them Republican, certified that the results were fair.
The Republicans in the U.S. Congress are being hypocritical, of course. They think that they were elected or re-elected legitimately, via the same ballots that voters cast in the Presidential race.
These may not be fascist attitudes, strictly speaking, but they are fundamentally anti-democratic. What term would you prefer? Authoritarian? Illiberal?
Those labels seem rather bland, given the danger these attitudes pose for our system of government.
Republican “leaders”? Trump’s handmaidens!
In a normal political party and in a healthy democracy, we would not be talking about Donald Trump and his “iron grip” on the Republican Party.
Instead, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-TN) would have promptly acknowledged that Joe Biden won the election and publicly congratulated him.
When Donald Trump refused to accept the election results, they would have called upon the President to recognize his defeat.
Ever eager to please the Great Leader
And after Trump instigated the attack on the Capitol, which endangered those Republicans’ lives, they would have called for Trump to step down, or they would impeached him. They would have made him a pariah and ejected him from their party.
Instead, a modern-day Quisling-like Senator Lindsey Graham says the Republican Party “cannot grow” without Trump.
Meanwhile, ambitious younger politicians like Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY), repeat Trump’s lies about the election, all so they can ride on the Great Leader’s coattails.
Echoes of the German Weimar Republic
Don’t underestimate these politicians or assume that they are boorish “rednecks.” They are bright Ivy-League graduates. And they know that they are lying. Like their German counterparts in the 1930s, they have lots of intelligence but no principles.
The cyber-attack on the Colonial Pipeline once again raised the “cursed question” many law enforcement agencies around the world are asking these days: How they are supposed to cooperate with their counterparts in countries where there isn’t a clear line between the criminal police and political police?
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