As of the last reporting I saw yesterday, UK authorities still have no clear account of the motives or identity of the people they arrested earlier this week outside of the Fairfold air base. They released the suspects surprisingly quickly, however, which tends to suggest no one actually thinks they were linked to a violent terrorist plot.
According to the Wall Street Journal, one emerging theory among the locals holds that "the men, all from London, may have been in the area to steal fuel[.]"
Now, in the midst of Trump's ongoing war in the Middle East, seemed like a particularly apt time to pick up Ryszard Kapuściński's classic book of reportage on Iranian politics, Shah of Shahs.
The book convincingly and indelibly portrays the Shah's former regime as a nightmare state of total despotism, in which neighbors feared to confide in neighbors, lest they find themselves reported to the authorities, and the deadly Savak secret police exercised a reign of terror over the public.
Just when I was starting to legitimately like Dr. Abdul El-Sayed's campaign in Michigan (his response to J.D. Vance's attacks was masterful), he's let me down by once again failing to distance himself from a rather unsavory admirer.
As the New York Times reported earlier this week, just days after a number of Jewish leaders in Michigan had said they would endorse El-Sayed in spite of certain misgivings, Tucker Carlson has come out as an improbable (or perhaps not so improbable) defender of the Democratic candidate.
In his book Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib, Seymour Hersh recounts at one point the testimony Donald Rumsfeld gave to Congress after photos came to light of the extreme abuse of prisoners at a U.S. military facility in Iraq. Rumsfeld says he was as appalled as anyone. The torture and humiliation displayed in the photos were "fundamentally un-American." They showed "acts that can only be described as blatantly sadistic, cruel, and inhuman."
Fast forward to yesterday's news, when a government inspector general published photos of 18-square-foot large wire cages in which people were apparently confined in the Florida heat at the so-called "Alligator Alcatraz" detention site. The administration, at first, made a bunch of claims about the "enclosures" that were hard to credit. People asked to go inside the boxes, they say. Huh? There were no locks on the doors. The Inspector General found locks on the doors.
In his contributions over the past week to the 9/11 25th anniversary discourse, Matt Yglesias has offered a fine synthesis of the chief strands of the emerging liberal nostalgia for Bush. Yglesias wants us to remember that, however many mistakes the U.S. made in its response to 9/11 (and he agrees there were many), the motive force behind the "War on Terror" was a genuine commitment to universal values.
Bush really meant it, in other words, when he said that stuff about advancing "freedom" and "democracy" around the world. Many neoconservative and even liberal and left intellectuals (Christopher Hitchens, e.g.) went along with it because they believed it too. The post-9/11 response, then, really was part of a larger commitment to "liberal cosmopolitanism" in that era, as Yglesias puts it.
In the many think pieces that filled my news feed last week on the subject of the 25th anniversary of 9/11, astonishingly few devoted any attention to the question of whether we are at risk of suffering another conventional attack on U.S. soil of a similar scale.
This seems like a question we really ought to be asking ourselves, since we are in a protracted war with a foreign adversary that has a long history of sponsoring international terrorism.
Today marks 25 years since 9/11, and every commentator and newspaper editorial board will be penning obligatory pieces on the meaning of the attacks and the way they reshaped the world over the last quarter-century. Matt Yglesias, in a podcast episode this week on the subject, kicked off his reflections by quipping something like, "so—9/11 was bad." The joke being that this is such an obvious and universal sentiment that it hardly passes for a "take."
But of course—and however strangely—it's not actually a universal sentiment. One of the biggest political controversies of the summer revolved around a years-old remark from leftist bro streamer Hasan Piker asserting that "America deserved 9/11" (Piker later disavowed the comment as "inappropriate" and quibbled "I didn't say Americans deserved 9/11—I said America deserves 9/11"—which is an interesting and perhaps not entirely hollow distinction; we'll return to that later).
Yesterday evening, the Trump administration's comms team apparently rolled out a set of retro flash games on the official White House website.
One of them is called "Rio Run." God help me, I clicked on it.
You play in the game as an old white man who wanders around the screen intercepting "border crossers."
The news has been dominated this week by two big tales of our current government's colossal self-inflicted economic mismanagement: namely, 1) the rise of the national debt to over $40 trillion; and 2) Trump's renewed trade war with our closest neighbor and biggest trading partner, Canada.
I've been talking less about the second of these two, in part because I tend to lump these tariff wars into the mental category of the merely inane aspects of Trump's rule—as opposed to the genuinely evil aspects, like his wars and enforced disappearances of innocent people to overseas detention camps.
The U.S. military has all but admitted at this point that they blew up a school full of children in the opening hours of our ongoing war of aggression against Iran.
But, having tacitly confessed this much, they claim this incident was wholly unique. There is only "one active civilian casualty investigation from the 13,629 munitions," as one military spokesperson told Congress earlier this year.
In his historical novel The Gladiators, Arthur Koestler writes at one point about the fate of the Roman exiles who fled the tyranny of Sulla's dictatorship.
They first sought refuge in Numidia, he says, whose king appeared to welcome them.
"It turned out, however, that the King of Numidia, who had seemed friendly and put them off with all sorts of promises, had only done so in order to make them feel safe, and extradite them to the dictator; for dictator Sulla's power reached far and his thirst for vengeance was unquenchable."
The third article of the U.S. Constitution includes a striking phrase forbidding Congress to "work Corruption of Blood." This was intended to forbid the practice under the old tyrannical kings of punishing children and heirs for the acts of their parents. It therefore appeals to a basic moral intuition: the innocent should not suffer for the deeds of another person.
And yet, right now, there is reportedly an Iranian family—a mother, a father, and a teenage son—being held captive in a detention camp on U.S. soil—all because one of them happens to be the child of someone indirectly involved in the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis.
Meanwhile, as the left is converging on a new agenda defined by economic and affordability issues (to the chagrin of people like me who still think things like racism, refugee rights, trans rights, police violence, etc. are also important and need to be talked about)—the right seems to be trying to head in the opposite direction.
To be sure, plenty of Republicans and even some "MAGA" bros keep urging Trump to focus on gas and food prices. Yet, pundits who support Trump's actual policies, like attacking Iran and imposing trade barriers on the rest of the world, have to argue that voters should just suck it up and tolerate a certain amount of economic pain for the sake of the administration's cultural and power politics goals.
You'd think just reading a mainstream newspaper would be enough on its own to make one acquainted with the depths of depravity in the Trump administration. But sometimes, one catches a glimpse of the alternative media ecosystem in which the American MAGA right lives, and one sees that the abyss is even deeper than one could have imagined.
Today, for instance, I was trying to look up news reports about the TPS designation for Somalia, when I stumbled upon a press release from some evangelical group. They were applauding a MAGA representative for drawing up articles of impeachment against Judge Allison Burroughs for daring to pause Trump's termination of Somali refugees' legal status under the TPS program.
A recent article in the Intercept reports that the Pentagon has begun to use overt references to scripture in its online recruiting. One recent ad from the U.S. military prominently features the phrase "Send Me" over images of soldiers gearing up for battle.
And if this sounds ambiguous to most of us, a Pentagon spokesperson went on to quote a full passage from Isaiah that uses the phrase; and the official "Department of War" accounts reportedly re-shared that post in turn.
Leave it to the Trump administration to eliminate any shade of subtlety.
Since we are still apparently stuck in the middle of Trump's illegal, futile, and endless war on Iran, I turned to Jonathan Swift's 1711 anti-war tract, The Conduct of the Allies, in the hope that it might have some wisdom to teach our present generation.
Alas, I found the essay far less ideologically congenial than I had hoped. Swift's pamphlet argues in favor of a treaty over the continuance of war, but it is far from a pacifist tract. Indeed, Swift offers essentially no humanitarian arguments against war. Instead, his arguments rest almost entirely on appeals to gut-level selfishness and the pocket-book. (And I remind you what Mencius had to say about that.)
Trump is very obviously telegraphing his desire at this point to wriggle out of the war he started with Iran. But that doesn't mean he won't still commit various crimes and obscenities in his flailing efforts to do so.
One of those obscenities was plastered across the front of the New York Times yesterday. A visual analysis from the paper showed an enormous crater where had once stood a family home. Three people reportedly died in the strike: a mother, a father, and their two-year-old child.
The analogy that has become very common to draw in recent years between Israel and apartheid South Africa has always been imprecise. Arab people living in Israel's 1948 borders have rights of citizenship. They vote in Israel's elections and send representatives to the Knesset.
Indeed, if Israel were still limited to its 1948 borders today, it would be a straightforward democracy. A flawed and unequal democracy in many ways, to be sure—but then, what democracy isn't? (Our own democracy here in the States, one may have noticed, is not doing so hot.)
A recent Daily Kos headline reads: "Trump only 'pretty sure' Lindsey Graham is in heaven."
The reference was to Trump's eulogy yesterday for the departed senator. Apparently the full quote was: "I think I know where he is, and I think he’s up there. I think he’s watching us. I’m pretty sure of it."
A recent piece in the Intercept traces Pete Hegseth's obsession with testosterone levels—and other manifestations of masculine insecurity—to a lifelong desire to model himself on Teddy Roosevelt.
The writer, Nick Turse, includes an anecdote from early in Hegseth's military career: "Stuffed in Hegseth’s Army-issue green duffle bag when he arrived at Gitmo was a sheet of plain white copy paper inside a black plastic frame with a quote from his hero, former President Teddy Roosevelt."
