| Kommentar | (???) Meanwhile, other bad things keep happening, in the last throes of Trump. The greatest recent blow may be the complete failure to prosecute the corrupt Mexican general for his drug cartel ties, and the related loss of permission for US law enforcement to operate in the country, setting back decades-long enforcement efforts even more drastically than policy reversals in recent years in Colombia. But the still-separated migrant families now exposed to the pandemic, the abandoning of Afghanistan to the Taliban and al-Qaeda, the corrupt NRA seeking to flee justice, the sheer lies told to and by so many evangelical Christians, the growing environmental damage -- all now overshadowed by US pandemic deaths approaching 400,000, and organized rioters openly threatening the lives of the vice president and members of Congress, brandishing Nazi T-shirts and Confederate flags in the US Capitol. Trump, his enablers, and his voters carry all this and more on their consciences. __________________ In Blow to U.S. Alliance, Mexico Clears General Accused of Drug Trafficking
The Biden administration will need to rebuild drug-enforcement cooperation after Mexico exonerated Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos, discounting U.S. evidence that he worked for a cartel....
When U.S. officials agreed to hand back over to Mexico a former defense minister whom they had accused of being on a drug cartel’s payroll, they did it in hopes of salvaging the badly fraying security cooperation between the two countries.
But on Friday that relationship lay in ruins after Mexico exonerated the former official, Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos, without a trial, and accused its American allies of trying to smear him without solid evidence.
Angry American officials saw it as a stunning breach of trust by Mexican officials, who they had expected would thoroughly investigate General Cienfuegos. The Americans said they had sent them copious evidence that linked the general to the cartel when he was returned to Mexico in November. ...
In Mr. López Obrador, the country’s generals have found an eager ally. He has made the military a central pillar of efforts to fight violence, and it has been deployed across the country to patrol city streets, track down cartel members and shut down drug labs.
The armed forces have also been endowed with a growing set of civilian responsibilities, including the distribution of the coronavirus vaccine distribution and the construction of a new airport in Mexico’s capital.
As the military’s responsibilities have grown, so have its coffers. While Mr. López Obrador has gutted public funding across the board under a strict policy of fiscal austerity, he has spared the armed forces, increasing defense spending by nearly 40 percent since taking office in 2018. The defense ministry’s budget this year is five times as large as the budgets of the foreign, interior and economy ministries combined. ...
The Justice Department said in a statement on Friday that the United States “reserves the right to recommence its prosecution of Cienfuegos if the government of Mexico fails to do so.”
American prosecutors had amassed thousands of BlackBerry messages that together suggested General Cienfuegos had set up meetings between military officials and members of the violent H-2 cartel, and had orchestrated operations against rival organized crime groups.
But it was not clear whether General Cienfuegos was ever directly captured on a wiretap sending messages himself ...
“There was a tremendous amount of naïveté in sending him back to Mexico,” said one of the former officials, who emphasized that the United States had released the general in an attempt to maintain American law enforcement access to operate within Mexico.https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/15/world/amer...US has conceded too much to Taliban, says Afghan vice-president ...
With the US due to complete the withdrawal of another 2,500 troops from Afghanistan, the Afghan vice-president tells the BBC the US made a mistake in conceding too much to the Taliban. ...
Amrullah Saleh says the American mission, which began 20 years ago, is not yet accomplished.
Last year President Donald Trump made a peace deal with the Taliban and agreed to drastically reduce US troops. ...
The deal signed in February 2020 said that the US and its Nato allies will withdraw all troops in 14 months if the Taliban upholds its promise to stop attacks. The Taliban also promised not to allow al-Qaeda or other militants to operate in areas it controls.
As a condition of starting negotiations with the Afghan government, the Taliban demanded that 5,000 of their men be released from Afghan prisons. The final 400 prisoners were set free in August last year. ...
"I am telling them [US] as a friend and as an ally that trusting the Taliban without putting in a verification mechanism is going to be a fatal mistake," Mr Saleh said.
"The US delegation came to us and swore on every Holy Scripture that if you release these 5,000 Taliban prisoners there will be no violence. We told them at the highest level that our intelligence indicated otherwise, and if we do this violence will spike. Violence has spiked," he added. ...
There are now estimated to be three times as many Nato troops in Afghanistan as there are US soldiers. Afghan Vice-President Amrullah Saleh ... believes the mission that foreign troops came here for has not been accomplished, and that the West should be "very worried" about the threat of al-Qaeda if their group is allowed to strengthen its base here.
Many Afghans ... fear that the Taliban will come back to power if international forces leave without a sustainable peace deal between the Afghan government and the Taliban. Women in particular are worried about what rights they would have.
On the ground, violence has surged, killing dozens of Afghans every day. And the humanitarian situation is perilous - according to the UN, half of all Afghan children under the age of five are facing malnutrition.https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-55666152Trump official admits family separation policy 'should never have been implemented'
Rod Rosenstein publicly denounces ‘zero-tolerance’ policy for first time, following report showing US didn’t effectively coordinate care for children ...
For the first time, a senior Trump administration official who helped implement family separation has condemned the hardline immigration policy ... [that] made it possible for the government to take more than 3,000 children, including infants, from their parents at the US-Mexico border in 2018.
In response to a damning report published on Thursday ... , the former deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein said the policy “should have never been proposed or implemented”.
The justice department’s Office of Inspector General’s (OIG) long-awaited report said department leadership knew the policy would result in children being separated from their families and that the former US attorney general Jeff Sessions “demonstrated a deficient understanding of the legal requirements related to the care and custody of separated children”. ...
In a conference call in May 2018, Sessions told prosecutors: “We need to take away children,” according to notes taken by people on the call and provided to the OIG.
Rosenstein, who publicly denounced the policy for the first time on Thursday, told the OIG he had known the zero-tolerance policy would result in family separations. He also told investigators he had not been involved with the formulation of the policy and had received reassurances about it that he now believed were wrong.https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/...Trump Ignites a War Within the Church
After a week of Trumpist mayhem, white evangelicals wrestle with what they’ve become. ...
After staying basically level for four years, Trump’s approval ratings dropped roughly 10 points across several polls in a week. The most popular piece on the Christianity Today website is headlined, “We Worship With the Magi, Not MAGA.” In the world of secular conservatism, The Wall Street Journal editorial page called on Trump to resign. ...
One core feature of Trumpism is that it forces you to betray every other commitment you might have: to the truth, moral character, the Sermon on the Mount, conservative principles, the Constitution. In defeat, some people are finally not willing to sacrifice all else on Trump’s altar.
The split we are seeing is not theological or philosophical. It’s a division between those who have become detached from reality and those who, however right wing, are still in the real world.
Hence, it’s not an argument. You can’t argue with people who have their own separate made-up set of facts. ...
The problem is, how do you go about reattaching people to reality?https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/14/opinion/tr...N.R.A. Declares Bankruptcy and Seeks to Exit New York
The group, which said it planned to reincorporate in Texas, is currently being investigated by New York’s attorney general, who is seeking to dissolve it. ...
Seeking an end-run around an investigation by the New York attorney general, the National Rifle Association said Friday that it was declaring bankruptcy and would reincorporate in Texas. ...
The plan raised immediate questions from Letitia James, the New York attorney general and a Democrat, who is seeking to use her regulatory authority to dissolve the N.R.A. She has been conducting an investigation into corruption at the gun group since 2019 that has led to infighting and discontent, as well as some departures from the group’s board.
Typically, non-profit groups that are chartered in New York and under investigation are prohibited from relocating during an inquiry; in recent years, the attorney general’s office prevented the Trump Foundation from closing before it had reached the conclusion of an investigation into that organization. ...
The N.R.A. has weathered years of revelations about its spending and oversight practices, including hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on Mr. LaPierre’s Zegna suits and far-flung travel to places like the Bahamas, Palm Beach, Reno and Italy’s Lake Como. The group even once explored buying a $6 million mansion in a Dallas-area gated community for his use.
The N.R.A. conceded in recent tax filings that Mr. LaPierre and other executives had received hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of improper benefits from the group, which were reimbursed.https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/15/us/politic...Trump Opens Habitat of a Threatened Owl to Timber Harvesting
Going far beyond expectations, the Trump administration eliminated protection from more than three million acres of northern spotted owl habitat in the Pacific Northwest. ...
The Trump administration on Wednesday removed more than 3 million acres of Pacific Northwest land from the protected habitat of the northern spotted owl, 15 times the amount it had previously proposed opening to the timber industry. ...
Wildlife biologists expressed shock at the decision.
“I’ve gotten several calls from wildlife biologists who are in tears who said, ‘Did you know this is happening? The bird won’t survive this,’” said Susan Jane Brown, a staff attorney at the Western Environmental Law Center, a conservation group that advocates on behalf of the northern spotted owl.
The decision is the latest in a series of midnight regulations the Trump administration has pushed out in recent weeks that privilege industry over protecting the environment, including shielding industry from fines and prosecution if they kill migratory birds and reducing protections for animals and plants under the Endangered Species Act.
Conservation groups are almost certain to sue, and they said they would lean on House and Senate Democrats to use the Congressional Review Act — a procedural tool that allows lawmakers to nullify recently finalized regulations with a simple majority vote. But it could fall to the incoming Biden administration to do the slow work of unwinding the decision through the federal regulatory process.https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/13/climate/tr... |
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