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发帖数: 28835 | 1 【 以下文字转载自 Military 讨论区 】
发信人: breakupfee (poison pill), 信区: Military
标 题: 最新的分析和大料，毛骨悚然
发信站: BBS 未名空间站 (Mon Jan 30 19:07:33 2017, 美东)
The theme of this morning’s news updates from Washington is additional
clarity emerging, rather than meaningful changes in the field. But this
clarity is enough to give us a sense of what we just saw happen, and why it
happened the way it did.
I’ll separate what’s below into the raw news reports and analysis; you may
also find these two pieces from yesterday (heavily referenced below) to be
useful.
From “The Day After Tomorrow.” I resisted the temptation to use the
analogous shot from “Planet of the Apes.”
News Reports
(1) Priebus made two public statements today. One is that the ban on Muslims
will no longer be applied to green card holders. Notably absent from his
statement was anything about people with other types of visa (including long
-term ones), or anything about the DHS’ power to unilaterally revoke green
cards in bulk.
The other was that the omission of Jews from the statement for Holocaust
Remembrance Day was deliberate and is not regretted.
A point of note here is that Priebus is the one making these statements,
which is not normally the Chief of Staff’s job. I’ll come back to that
below.
(2) Rudy Giuliani told Fox News that the intent of yesterday’s order was
very much a ban on Muslims, described in those words, and he was among the
people Trump asked how they could find a way to do this legally.
(3) CNN has a detailed story (heavily sourced) about the process by which
this ban was created and announced. Notable in this is that the DHS’
lawyers objected to the order, specifically its exclusion of green card
holders, as illegal, and also pressed for there to be a grace period so that
people currently out of the country wouldn’t be stranded—and they
were personally overruled by Bannon and Stephen Miller. Also notable is
that career DHS staff, up to and including the head of Customs & Border
Patrol, were kept entirely out of the loop until the order was signed.
(4) The Guardian is reporting (heavily sourced) that the “mass resignations
” of nearly all senior staff at the State Department on Thursday were not,
in fact, resignations, but a purge ordered by the White House. As the
diagram below (by Emily Roslin v Praze) shows, this leaves almost nobody in
the entire senior staff of the State Department at this point.
The seniormost staff of the Department of State. Blue X’s are unfilled
positions; red X’s are positions which were purged. Note that the “filled
” positions are not actually confirmed yet.
As the Guardian points out, this has an important and likely not accidental
effect: it leaves the State Department entirely unstaffed during these
critical first weeks, when orders like the Muslim ban (which they would
normally resist) are coming down.
The article points out another point worth highlighting: “In the past, the
state department has been asked to set up early foreign contacts for an
incoming administration. This time however it has been bypassed, and Trump’
s immediate circle of Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn, son-in-law Jared Kushner
and Reince Priebus are making their own calls.”
(5) On Inauguration Day, Trump apparently filed his candidacy for 2020.
Beyond being unusual, this opens up the ability for him to start accepting
“campaign contributions” right away. Given that a sizable fraction of the
campaign funds from the previous cycle were paid directly to the Trump
organization in exchange for building leases, etc., at inflated rates, you
can assume that those campaign coffers are a mechanism by which US nationals
can easily give cash bribes directly to Trump. Non-US nationals can, of
course, continue to use Trump’s hotels and other businesses as a way to
funnel money to him.
(6) Finally, I want to highlight a story that many people haven’t noticed.
On Wednesday, Reuters reported (in great detail) how 19.5% of Rosneft,
Russia’s state oil company, has been sold to parties unknown. This was done
through a dizzying array of shell companies, so that the most that can be
said with certainty now is that the money “paying” for it was originally
loaned out to the shell layers by VTB (the government’s official bank),
even though it’s highly unclear who, if anyone, would be paying that loan
back; and the recipients have been traced as far as some Cayman Islands
shell companies.
Why is this interesting? Because the much-maligned Steele Dossier (the one
with the golden showers in it) included the statement that Putin had offered
Trump 19% of Rosneft if he became president and removed sanctions. The
reason this is so interesting is that the dossier said this in July, and the
sale didn’t happen until early December. And 19.5% sounds an awful lot
like “19% plus a brokerage commission.”
Conclusive? No. But it raises some very interesting questions for
journalists to investigate.
What does this all mean?
I see a few key patterns here. First, the decision to first block, and then
allow, green card holders was meant to create chaos and pull out opposition;
they never intended to hold it for too long. It wouldn’t surprise me if
the goal is to create “resistance fatigue,” to get Americans to the point
where they’re more likely to say “Oh, another protest? Don’t you guys
ever stop?” relatively quickly.
However, the conspicuous absence of provisions preventing them from
executing any of the “next steps” I outlined yesterday, such as bulk
revocation of visas (including green cards) from nationals of various
countries, and then pursuing them using mechanisms being set up for Latinos,
highlights that this does not mean any sort of backing down on the part of
the regime.
Note also the most frightening escalation last night was that the DHS made
it fairly clear that they did not feel bound to obey any court orders. CBP
continued to deny all access to counsel, detain people, and deport them in
direct contravention to the court’s order, citing “upper management,” and
the DHS made a formal (but confusing) statement that they would continue to
follow the President’s orders. (See my updates from yesterday, and the
various links there, for details) Significant in today’s updates is any
lack of suggestion that the courts’ authority played a role in the decision.
That is to say, the administration is testing the extent to which the DHS (
and other executive agencies) can act and ignore orders from the other
branches of government. This is as serious as it can possibly get: all of
the arguments about whether order X or Y is unconstitutional mean nothing if
elements of the government are executing them and the courts are being
ignored.
Yesterday was the trial balloon for a coup d’état against the United
States. It gave them useful information.
A second major theme is watching the set of people involved. There appears
to be a very tight “inner circle,” containing at least Trump, Bannon,
Miller, Priebus, Kushner, and possibly Flynn, which is making all of the
decisions. Other departments and appointees have been deliberately hobbled,
with key orders announced to them only after the fact, staff gutted, and so
on. Yesterday’s reorganization of the National Security Council mirrors
this: Bannon and Priebus now have permanent seats on the Principals’
Committee; the Director of National Intelligence and the Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff have both been demoted to only attending meetings
where they are told that their expertise is relevant; the Secretary of
Energy and the US representative to the UN were kicked off the committee
altogether (in defiance of the authorizing statute, incidentally).
I am reminded of Trump’s continued operation of a private personal security
force, and his deep rift with the intelligence community. Last Sunday,
Kellyanne Conway (likely another member of the inner circle) said that “It
’s really time for [Trump] to put in his own security and intelligence
community,” and this seems likely to be the case.
As per my analysis yesterday, Trump is likely to want his own intelligence
service disjoint from existing ones and reporting directly to him; given the
current staffing and roles of his inner circle, Bannon is the natural
choice for them to report through. (Having neither a large existing staff,
nor any Congressional or Constitutional restrictions on his role as most
other Cabinet-level appointees do) Keith Schiller would continue to run the
personal security force, which would take over an increasing fraction of the
Secret Service’s job.
Especially if combined with the DHS and the FBI, which appear to have
remained loyal to the President throughout the recent transition, this
creates the armature of a shadow government: intelligence and police
services which are not accountable through any of the normal means,
answerable only to the President.
(Note, incidentally, that the DHS already has police authority within 100
miles of any border of the US; since that includes coastlines, this area
includes over 60% of Americans, and eleven entire states. They also have a
standing force of over 45,000 officers, and just received authorization to
hire 15,000 more on Wednesday.)
The third theme is money. Trump’s decision to keep all his businesses (not
bothering with any blind trusts or the like), and his fairly open diversion
of campaign funds, made it fairly clear from the beginning that he was
seeing this as a way to become rich in the way that only dedicated
kleptocrats can, and this week’s updates definitely tally with that.
Kushner looks increasingly likely to be the money-man, acting as the liaison
between piles of cash and the president.
This gives us a pretty good guess as to what the exit strategy is: become
tremendously, and untraceably, rich, by looting any coffers that come within
reach.
Combining all of these facts, we have a fairly clear picture in play.
Trump was, indeed, perfectly honest during the campaign; he intends to do
everything he said, and more. This should not be reassuring to you.
The regime’s main organizational goal right now is to transfer all
effective power to a tight inner circle, eliminating any possible checks
from either the Federal bureaucracy, Congress, or the Courts. Departments
are being reorganized or purged to effect this.
The inner circle is actively probing the means by which they can seize
unchallenged power; yesterday’s moves should be read as the first part of
that.
The aims of crushing various groups—Muslims, Latinos, the black and
trans communities, academics, the press—are very much primary aims
of the regime, and are likely to be acted on with much greater speed than
was earlier suspected. The secondary aim of personal enrichment is also very
much in play, and clever people will find ways to play these two goals off
each other.
If you’re looking for estimates of what this means for the future, I’ll
refer you back to yesterday’s post on what “things going wrong” can look
like. Fair warning: I stuffed that post with pictures of cute animals for a
reason. |
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