Hasta La Gadget!

WASHINGTON ― After President Donald Trump launched a Tomahawk missile strike on a Syrian airfield, the debate among congressional Democrats was not over the actual merits of bombing Syrian airfields but instead about Trump’s decision process.

The reaction of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the most progressive member of the Senate Democratic caucus, was a case in point.

“It is very questionable whether it is legal” to bomb the Syrian air force without congressional involvement, Sanders told The Huffington Post.

Some of Sanders’ colleagues were less equivocal, including Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who said this “certainly is not a lawful act.” On the other end of the spectrum, Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) said it “seems like a reasonable exercise of presidential power.” 

But only a handful of Democrats questioned the evidence that Syrian President Bashar Assad used chemical weapons on civilians, the efficacy of using force to address that crime or the overall pattern of U.S. involvement in the Middle East.

The relatively measured criticism from top Democrats reflects a complex array of factors that have again put the party out of step with some grassroots members. In many cases, Democratic lawmakers simply agree with the need to punish Assad for using chemical weapons on the town of Khan Sheikhoun, even as they are uneasy about Trump’s leadership, the legality of his actions or the consequences of a strike.

That leaves Democrats in an interesting political position. For months they have taken every opportunity to lambaste Trump as a threat to the very fabric of the American republic. And from Trump’s travel ban to the Obamacare replacement debacle, the strategy has largely paid off. Now, with Trump launching the first direct attacks on the Syrian government, Democrats are more ambivalent.

Larry Korb, a senior fellow at the Democratic-aligned Center for American Progress, said he was “not surprised” that Democrats were sympathetic to the idea of a retaliatory airstrike. Many Democrats subscribe to a “responsibility to protect” doctrine that swift force is justified to prevent major humanitarian catastrophes, according to Korb.

Democrats should be more concerned, Korb said, with the prospect of this leading to more significant U.S. intervention in Syria.

“The real question is: What comes next?” said Korb, who supported the Obama administration’s decision not to heed calls to arm Syrian rebel groups more aggressively or remove Assad by force.

The fact that Democrats may have substantial reasons to embrace the idea of retaliating against Assad does not diminish the divide between many elected leaders and the ardent anti-interventionism of the party’s base.

“My expectations [of Democrats] were very low, and my expectations were met,” said Phyllis Bennis, a foreign policy expert at the left-wing Institute for Policy Studies. “Am I disappointed that we don’t have an antiwar party? Yes, I am.”

Bennis represents a wing of the peace camp that believes military force, whether legal or not, is justified only in very limited circumstances of self-defense. The last U.S. intervention she considers “legitimate” was World War II.

Bennis and other progressive critics argue that there should be a full international investigation of the use of chemical weapons to determine definitively whether Assad is responsible, which they admit is extremely likely.

“Having a full investigation is not some sort of delaying tactic. It is essential to getting real accountability,” said Stephen Miles, director of the progressive Win Without War coalition.

The residue of the decision not to bomb in 2013 created an environment where the next time it happened, a strike was going to be a foregone conclusion.
Steven Simon, former National Security Council official

That view got a high-profile boost from Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who urged caution in an interview with The Globe and Mail on Thursday. Trudeau called for a United Nations Security Council resolution that will enable the world “to determine first of all who was responsible for these attacks and how we will move forward.”

Even if Assad’s guilt is established, punishing him militarily would not be an effective response, according to Miles of Win Without War. He supports removing the weapons from Syria, negotiating a diplomatic end to the war and trying alleged war criminals.

“The ultimate accountability comes from international tribunals,” Miles said. “It is really gratifying to blow things up, but that doesn’t make it accountability.” 

But Win Without War, Credo, MoveOn.org and Peace Action, which jointly condemned Trump’s strike as a “reckless act of war,” have largely mirrored Democrats’ talking points about the strikes’ legality in their mobilization strategy.

A petition Credo is circulating that quickly picked up over 57,000 signatures calls on Democrats to “rein in Donald Trump’s unauthorized military strikes and hold immediate emergency deliberations on Trump’s illegal escalation of military engagement in Syria.”

Miles praised House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) for demanding that Congress reconvene to debate a new authorization for use of military force ― and saved his criticism for Democratic lawmakers, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who voiced unreserved agreement with Trump’s decision.

“It’s not the first time we have seen Democrats in Congress who are way out of touch with where their base is,” he said.

Democrats have often chafed under Republican claims that they are weak on national security. After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, critics saw signs of this insecurity in the ease with which Democratic lawmakers lined up behind then-President George W. Bush’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

But veteran Democratic foreign policy thinkers argue that Democrats’ ambivalence about President Trump’s missile strikes against Assad have more to do with former President Barack Obama and his foreign policy legacy than the ghosts of the Bush presidency.

Obama famously warned the Syrian government that use of chemical weapons would cross a “red line,” forcing the United States to consider military action against Assad’s regime.

When the U.S. concluded in August 2013 that Assad had used chemical weapons against civilians in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, Obama announced plans to launch missile strikes against Syrian military targets.

After the British Parliament rejected a bid for the United Kingdom to participate in the strike, Obama decided to seek congressional approval for the move. It soon became clear that the strike faced bipartisan opposition, and the White House pulled the request.

Despite public opposition to the retaliatory strike, Obama endured a lot of criticism, including from members of his own party, for not honoring his “red line” ultimatum, undermining U.S. credibility.

“The residue of the decision not to bomb in 2013 created an environment where the next time it happened a strike was going to be a foregone conclusion. There’d be no alternative,” said Steven Simon, who was senior director of Middle Eastern and North African affairs on Obama’s National Security Council in 2011 and 2012.

That leaves Democrats who want to avoid a replay of 2013 with limited grounds on which to criticize Trump, admitted Simon, now a history professor at Amherst College.

“They have sort of squared the circle by applauding the use of force but registering concerns about lack of congressional consultation,” Simon said.

Then there is the matter of deeper disagreement within the Democratic Party about Obama’s broader policy toward Syria. Obama rejected the suggestions of many advisers, including then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, to intervene more forcefully to protect Syrian civilians and speed up Assad’s ouster. Those disagreements were evident in Clinton’s campaign promise to create a no-fly zone in Syria, as well as her calls Thursday for the U.S. to take out all of Assad’s airfields ― a more ambitious step than Trump ended up taking.

Clinton and other proponents of greater intervention in Syria argue that by declining to diminish Assad, the U.S. will never have the leverage needed to stop his atrocities and forge a diplomatic solution.

As a candidate, Trump ran against Clinton’s strategy, repeatedly insisting that Assad was preferable to the Syrian groups trying to overthrow him.

For Democrats hoping Trump would adopt a more Clintonian approach, it is tempting to view his strike on the Syrian airfield as the beginning of a recognition that Assad must face greater pressure, including the threat of force, to end the conflict.

But one such proponent of more robust action, Michael Breen, president of the center-left Truman Center and Truman National Security Project, warned against getting too optimistic. Breen is concerned about Trump’s haste and apparent lack of strategy. 

“A lot of people wanted to see the U.S. get more involved in Syria and wanted to see a response to the regime’s atrocities, but it is way too early to suddenly say Donald Trump is a different president than he was two days ago.”

Ryan Grim and Mike McAuliff contributed reporting.

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Will Smith famously turned down the lead role in “The Matrix.”

But how would the mind-melting 1999 sci-fi movie have turned out if the “Fresh Prince of Bel Air” actor had actually starred as Neo, in place of Keanu Reeves?

Luckily, YouTube channel The Unusual Suspect is on hand to give a glimpse as to what the film may have looked like.

It posted a recut trailer of the movie online Thursday, which has since garnered more than 700,00 views. Via Reddit, the channel has also revealed just how it created the spoof clip:

type=type=RelatedArticlesblockTitle=Related Coverage + articlesList=58c3c674e4b0ed71826cf7a6,58c8d075e4b01c029d775edc,56df7585e4b0860f99d717d3,58c1c332e4b070e55af9ece0

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Muhammed Ali Khan tried to do one of the most boring, responsible things an American taxpayer can do: set up a government-guaranteed retirement savings account. He was rejected because the Treasury Department thought he might be a terrorist.

He isn’t. He’s a software consultant from Fullerton, California. But he shares a first name (with a different spelling), last name and middle initial with a financier of a Pakistani terror group. That man, Mohammad Naushad Alam Khan, is on the Treasury Department’s Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List (SDN). The 1,026-page catalog lists people and organizations that U.S. citizens and residents are barred from doing business with because of their ties to terror cells, drug cartels or rogue states.

The SDN is essentially a financial no-fly list that cuts people off from U.S. banks ― and, as a result, the global financial system. The SDN has more than doubled in length in the last five years. 

Khan later found out that his credit reports from Experian and TransUnion had also been flagged as a potential match. The trouble this caused him was relatively minor ― after he got over the shock of seeing a terrorism flag on his credit report, he spent a few hours navigating customer service lines with the Treasury Department and the two credit bureaus. He got his retirement account set up and his credit reports cleared after providing some personal information to show that he was not the man who had financially supported the 2008 Mumbai attacks. (Neither TransUnion nor Experian answered The Huffington Post’s questions about how they handle such false positive flags.)

Some other people wrongly believed to be on the SDN ― either because they share a name with someone who is or because their name partially matches an alias used by someone on the list (and international criminals often have a lot of aliases) ― are hurt far worse than Khan.

They can have their airline ticket purchases rejected or hotel reservations declined. Their bank accounts can be frozen. Loans to buy a home or a car can be declined. Wire transfers can be seized and held for up to a year while the freeze is litigated, which can destroy small businesses, block real estate transactions or delay inheritances. 

Such delays impose “a tremendous burden,” Peter Djinis, a former anti-money laundering regulator at the Treasury Department, told HuffPost.

“It can become a business disadvantage to people whose name just happens to be similar to that of someone actually on the list,” he said. “This is a real problem.”  

Bank accounts can be frozen. Loans to buy a home or a car can be declined. Wire transfers can be seized and held for up to a year.

The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC, maintains the SDN list. The catalog was created in 1940, but the department massively increased its efforts to block terrorist financing after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

OFAC is a relatively small office compared to other parts the law enforcement and national security apparatus, although the Treasury Department told HuffPost that OFAC has enough staff and that its size is appropriate relative to U.S. sanctions programs. However, OFAC is especially small relative to its mission of blocking thousands of people from the U.S. financial system. 

This means day-to-day enforcement is largely left up to the private sector.

A Treasury Department spokesman told HuffPost that “OFAC manages individuals and entities on its list in coordination with relevant U.S. government agencies, and has processes in place to ensure that designations are applied appropriately, and to assist and provide due process to anyone who believes they should be removed.”

A whole industry has popped up around this, producing what is known as interdiction software ― programs that banks use to see if a customer’s name matches one on the blocked list. This software produces a staggering volume of hits and leads to lots of false positives, like Khan’s.

Banks tend to be conservative in their risk management, and cast as wide a net as possible to try to stop anything improper. This is because sanctions are enforced under the legal standard of strict liability, meaning any transaction with anybody on the list is illegal, regardless of intention. Fines are steep, too: either $284,000 per violation, or twice the value of the transaction ― whichever is higher. 

Companies that peddle interdiction software turn banks’ worries into a selling point. Yet the software’s results often don’t live up to its promises, and financial institutions are struggling to deal with the mountains of data the software produces. The Treasury Department declined to comment on interdiction software.

A compliance software executive who asked not to be named because it could harm his business told HuffPost that big banks, credit card companies and payment processors can have between 200 and 500 employees who sift through hits and gather information to try to clear false positives from the OFAC list. When a potential client’s name matches one on the list, the financial institution staffers then have to call OFAC to figure out if the person really is on the SDN or if they are dealing with a false positive.

The SDN doesn’t often provide much in the way of specifics ― a name, a few aliases, a nationality and sometimes a date of birth. Financial institutions would like more identifying information about the people on the SDN so they could vet their customers more quickly.

But the government is often hamstrung because it has limited personal information about the people on the list, often because the SDN targets are concealing as much about their lives as possible. The Treasury Department told HuffPost it compiles and releases as much identifying information about the people on the list as it can in order to reduce the number of false positives. The department declined to release data on the number of transactions or transfers halted due to false positives.  

It can become a business disadvantage to people whose name just happens to be similar to that of someone actually on the list.
Peter Djinis, a former anti-money laundering regulator at the Treasury Department

False hits ― people like Khan ― are “a bigger problem, not a smaller problem,” explained Djinis, the former regulator. And clearing up false hits is a labor-intensive process.

The safe, simple option for the financial institution is often to just stop doing business with a customer whose name gets flagged.

The complex nature of financial transactions makes this process even more difficult for customers with names that are likely to get wrongly flagged. For instance, a simple money transfer abroad might involve two retail banks and an intermediary bank to facilitate. The transfer can be held up if software run by any of the three banks flags any party involved.

Some financial institutions have tried to fix this by buying more software to help sort through the results ― which is great for the software providers, and could help the people the system has wrongly flagged. “We are going to make so, so much money selling them stuff to fix this,” the software executive said.

The application of the SDN list has become “guilt by association,” Shereef Akeel, a civil rights lawyer in Michigan who has worked on the issue, told HuffPost. The Treasury spokesman said the department wasn’t worried that enforcing the list raised any civil rights issue. 

The vast number of false positives, Akeel said, “actually compromises our national security … because everyone is busy looking at all these other names, they don’t have enough time to really catch the bad guys.” 

Instead, Akeel said, the burden falls on people like Khan, who have to try to prove that they are not someone else. Khan succeeded in setting up his retirement fund, but there’s no way for him to proactively tell every U.S. financial institution that he isn’t Mohammad Naushad Alam Khan.

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President Donald Trump paid tribute to former prisoners of war, despite having mocked Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) for having been captured.

Declaring Sunday “National Former Prisoner of War Recognition Day,” Trump said that “America honors our service men and women imprisoned during war.  These patriots have moved and inspired our Nation through their unyielding sacrifices and devout allegiance.”

The honor, which is undoubtedly a deserving one, is a bit ironic given Trump’s previous comments about POWs. Trump has on multiple occasions criticized McCain’s military credentials and mocked him for having been a prisoner of war.

“He’s a war hero because he was captured,” he said in July 2015. “I like people who weren’t captured.”

Days later, he retweeted a tweet claiming McCain “is not a hero.”

Trump has also said that he “wouldn’t want to be in a foxhole” with McCain, who spent 5 years as in captivity after being shot down in Vietnam. 

Trump avoided serving in the Vietnam War with multiple draft deferments. He once joked that his sex life was his “own personal Vietnam.”

But the irony of this weekend’s tribute extends far beyond the president’s feud with McCain. In his federal budget proposal released last month, Trump proposed cutting services that many vets rely on, including Meals on Wheels, affordable housing, and a key interagency council on homelessness. He also received widespread criticism after attacking the parents of a slain U.S. soldier.

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STOCKHOLM (Reuters) – The man arrested yesterday in relation to the attack in the centre of Stockholm is suspected of being the driver of the truck that killed four people, police said on Saturday.

“The person in question has been arrested as the culprit … in this case the driver,” police spokesman Lars Bystrom said.

“Then, there can be other people who are associated with him, but we do not know that at the current time.”

The man was detained in a northern Stockholm suburb on Friday and later arrested on suspicion of having committed a terror crime.

Police also found a bag of undetonated explosives in the truck, CNN reported, citing Swedish media.

(Reporting by Stockholm Newsroom: Editing by Simon Johnson)

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