CNN’s Peter Bergen: The Rise, Fall and Impact of Osama bin Laden, Commonwealth Club online
Image – Peter Bergen
Live Stream
CNN’s Peter Bergen: The Rise, Fall and Impact of Osama bin Laden
Buy Tickets
Commonwealth Club
As we approach the 20th anniversary of 9/11, what is the lasting influence of Osama bin Laden? CNN national security analyst and New America Vice President for Global Studies Peter Bergen has been called the world’s leading expert on bin Laden. In his new book, The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden, Bergen provides the first reevaluation of the man responsible for precipitating America’s long wars with al-Qaeda and its descendants, capturing bin Laden in all the dimensions of his life: as a family man, as a zealot, as a battlefield commander, as a terrorist leader, and as a fugitive.
Thanks to exclusive interviews with family members and associates, and documents unearthed only recently, Bergen’s portrait of bin Laden reveals for the first time who he really was and why he continues to inspire a new generation of jihadists.
Join a fascinating conversation about the man who set the course of American foreign policy for the 21st century and whose ideological heirs the U.S. continues to battle today.
Notes
This is a free-for-members program. Members: Click on the “Buy Tickets” button above to order your tickets, and select the members link on the left side of the page. Your username is the email you used to sign up as a member. You can also request a password reset if needed. Discount will automatically be applied at checkout.
This is an online-only program; please pre-register to receive a link to the live-stream event.
Copies of The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden are available for purchase at checkout (U.S. domestic shipping only).
Photo by CNN/Brent Stirton.
All ticket sales are final and nonrefundable.
Peter Bergen
Journalist; Documentary Producer; CNN National Security Analyst; Vice president for Global studies & Fellow, New America; Author, The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden
Image – Brian Fishman
In Conversation with Brian Fishman
Director, Counterterrorism and Dangerous Organizations, Facebook; Former Researcher, New America; Former Director of Research, Combatting Terrorism Center at West Point
FORMAT
3–4 p.m. (Pacific Time) program
The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden, New America online
Share
Tweet
[ONLINE] – Peter Bergen, The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden
Event
In The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden, Peter Bergen provides the first reevaluation of the man responsible for precipitating America’s long wars with al-Qaeda and its descendants, capturing bin Laden in all the dimensions of his life: as a family man, as a terrorist leader, and as a fugitive. The book sheds light on his many contradictions: he was the son of a billionaire, yet insisted his family live like paupers. He adored his wives and children, yet he brought ruin to his family. And while he inflicted the most lethal act of mass murder in United States history, he failed to achieve any of his strategic goals.
“A compelling, nuanced portrait of America’s erstwhile public enemy No. 1… Throughout, Bergen turns up revealing details and sharp arguments against received wisdom… Essential for anyone concerned with geopolitics, national security, and the containment of further terrorist actions.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Comprehensive, authoritative, and compelling.” — H.R. McMaster, author of Dereliction of Duty and Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World
Join the International Security Program, Peter Bergen, and Candace Rondeaux for a discussion on the life and legacy of Osama bin Laden.
Follow the conversation @NewAmericaISP and via #RiseandFall on Twitter.
Speakers:
Peter Bergen, @peterbergencnn
Vice President, Global Studies & Fellows at New America
Author, The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden
Professor of Practice, Arizona State University
Candace Rondeaux, @CandaceRondeaux (moderator)
Director, Future Frontlines at New America
Professor of Practice, Arizona State University
Copies of The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden are available for purchase here through our bookselling partner Solid State Books.
The worst speech of Biden’s presidency, CNN.com
“Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is author of the forthcoming book “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden.” The views expressed here are his own. View more opinion at CNN.”
(CNN)On Thursday President Joe Biden spoke in defense of his ill-considered, hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan, in remarks peopled with straw men and littered with false assertions.
First, Biden contended that he was bound by a 2020 Trump administration agreement with the Taliban to withdraw all US troops by May 2021. But that was an agreement conducted by a previous administration — so it’s not binding — and it was predicated on the Taliban breaking with al-Qaeda.
They didn’t, according to the UN in a report released just last month.
It was also predicated on the Taliban engaging with the Afghan government in real peace negotiations.
They haven’t, according to Abdullah Abdullah, an Afghan official who leads the High Council for National Reconciliation. He told CNN a week ago that there has been “very little progress” in those negotiations.
A comparison with the Iranian nuclear agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, is instructive. It was negotiated by the Obama administration with a sovereign government and was a deal that, after it was consummated in 2015, was being observed by the Iranians: they were not enriching nuclear fuel, according to both international inspectors and the US intelligence community.
That deal was also brokered, together, with three of the US’s closest allies, Britain, France and Germany.
Yet, the Trump administration pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal, while Biden is now honoring an agreement with an insurgent/terrorist group that is not abiding by the terms of the deal that was negotiated last year by the Trump team.
Second, Biden claimed in his speech that the US Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation, Zalmay Khalilzad, would “work vigorously” for a negotiated solution between the Taliban and the Afghan government.
This is a fanciful notion, as this is the same Zalmay Khalilzad who, while working under the Trump administration, ceded much of Afghanistan to the Taliban with the “peace” negotiations he spearheaded — based on the farcical premise the Taliban would renounce al Qaeda and also engage with real peace talks with the Afghan government. In any event, Afghanistan leaders accused Khalilzad of cutting them out of his negotiations with the Taliban. Trump administration officials denied the allegations.
The Khalilzad-led peace process hasn’t worked for the past three years. Why would it suddenly work now?
Third, Biden said that the US can’t be in Afghanistan “indefinitely,” yet there are some 28,000 US troops in South Korea three-quarters of a century after the end of the Korean War, because the US has a strategic interest in defending the country against the nuclear armed North Korean despot, Kim Jong Un.
So too, the US could have left its 2,500 troops in place in Afghanistan, a force that is less than 10% of the American service personnel in South Korea, to enable the Afghan government to fight the Taliban and its jihadist allies, such as al Qaeda.
Fourth, Biden speciously implied that if the US has troops in Afghanistan then somehow it won’t be strong enough to “meet the strategic competition with China and other nations.”
The US military consists of 1.3 million active-duty personnel and yet it can’t leave 2,500 troops in Afghanistan? To use a trademark Biden expression: C’mon man!
After his speech, Biden told reporters that it’s “highly unlikely” that the Taliban will take over Afghanistan, which is not what his own intelligence community is warning.
Biden also claimed that Afghanistan has never been unified, an odd assertion when a united Afghanistan has existed since 1747, making it older than the United States.
In response to a question about whether he saw any parallels between this withdrawal and the US exit from Vietnam in 1975, the President asserted “none whatsoever.” He went on to say that “There’s going to be no circumstance for you to see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States from Afghanistan,” yet an urgent evacuation is exactly one of the contingencies US military planners are preparing for, a senior defense official with knowledge of the planning process told CNN.
To use another trademark Biden expression, his Afghanistan speech was a bunch of malarkey.
The many US blunders that contributed to looming disaster in Afghanistan, CNN.com
Updated 4:10 PM ET, Sun July 4, 2021
“Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is author of the forthcoming book “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden.” The views expressed here are his own. Read more opinion at CNN.”
(CNN) On Friday, the last US soldiers left Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, which was once home to tens of thousands of American troops.
An additional 7,000 NATO troops are pulling out, as well as approximately 6,000 American contractors, some of whom have been critical to maintaining the helicopters and planes of the Afghan air force. With only 650 US troops remaining to guard the US embassy in Kabul, the United States is leaving the Afghan government to fend for itself against Taliban forces.
The headline in Saturday’s New York Times trumpeted, “US departs last Afghanistan base, effectively ending 20 years of war.” But this headline is a classic example of the misguided idea that withdrawing American troops will usher in peace.
In fact, the Afghan War is likely about to escalate. Even the commander of US troops in Afghanistan, Gen. Austin “Scott” Miller, said publicly on Tuesday that Afghanistan faces the possibility of a disastrous civil war. The withdrawal of US troops effectively hands the Taliban a long-awaited victory as it gains increasing control in Afghanistan. More than a quarter of the country’s 421 districts have already been captured by the Taliban, and the US intelligence community has concluded that the Afghan government could collapse just six months after the American forces are gone.
In the words of the French statesman Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, “This is worse than a crime, it’s a blunder.”
But this blunder has been a long time coming; every US president since George W. Bush has either tried to limit the American role in Afghanistan, or to get out entirely.
The only thing that’s been consistent about the US approach in Afghanistan has been its inconsistency. There have been well-publicized talks within the White House about pulling out of Afghanistan for more than half a decade. And there have been years of futile “peace” talks with members of the Taliban, who have gained more at the negotiating table than they ever won on the battlefield. Those negotiations were also conducted almost entirely without any input from democratically elected Afghan governments.
And now, after 20 years of war, the US leaves Afghanistan on the brink of where it all started: with the Taliban seemingly poised to control much of Afghanistan.
Shortly after 9/11, the Bush administration sent a small contingent of US Special Forces and CIA officers into Afghanistan to root out the al-Qaeda leaders who’d planned the attack on the US. Backed by massive US airpower and allied to large Afghan militias, they overthrew the Taliban in just three months.
It was one of the great victories of American unconventional warfare, but securing the peace proved harder than overthrowing the regime, a lesson that the US would relearn in Iraq in 2003 (Bush again) and in Libya in 2011 (this time, President Barack Obama).
After the overthrow of the Taliban, then-US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who died on Tuesday, wanted to keep a small footprint in Afghanistan. The initial deployment of American soldiers to Afghanistan was one of the smallest per capita peacekeeping forces of any US post-conflict deployment since World War II.
Rumsfeld was also fixated on Iraq. On December 12, 2001 the very same day that Rumsfeld was being briefed on the recently updated plan to invade Iraq — al-Qaeda’s leader Osama bin Laden escaped during the battle of Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan.
By 2007, it was clear that the Taliban were regrouping in Afghanistan. There was an epidemic of suicide bombings and by the time President Barack Obama took office in 2009, what was seen as “the good war” — as opposed to the misguided Iraq War –was going badly.
On December 1, 2009, Obama traveled to the US Military Academy in West Point, New York, to deliver a key speech of his presidency. There, he announced 30,000 new troops would surge into Afghanistan, but news coverage focused on the fact that Obama promised to start bringing them home in mid-2011.
For the Taliban, the takeaway from Obama’s speech was not the surge of troops, but the withdrawal date.
Towards the end of his second term, Obama seriously considered following through on his promise to withdraw all US troops from Afghanistan. After all, he had run on a pledge of drawing down from America’s wars.
But the fiasco that had unfolded in Iraq after US troops were pulled out in 2011 (an operation then-Vice President Joe Biden oversaw) loomed over any discussion of the Afghan drawdown. What happened in Iraq contributed to a vacuum that gave rise to the Islamic State (ISIS), and no one wanted a repeat of that in Afghanistan.
While Obama wanted to withdraw, that would have left his successor, Donald J. Trump, with little flexibility for maneuver. In the last few months of his presidency, Obama announced a force of 8,400 troops would remain in Afghanistan.
The most contentious foreign policy decision of Trump’s first year in office was what to do about Afghanistan. On one side there was the “America First” camp that included Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon, who wanted to pull out US troops. On the other were those like National Security Adviser Lt. General H.R. McMaster, who believed that putting more US troops in Afghanistan would prevent a Taliban takeover that would lead Afghanistan to play host to al-Qaeda and other jihadist terrorist groups.
Trump remained convinced that Afghanistan was a futile endeavor, but he was persuaded by McMaster and the Pentagon that the only thing worse than staying in Afghanistan was leaving it entirely.
Trump called for an increase of troops in Afghanistan and the number of US forces grew to 14,000 by late 2017. But Trump was never comfortable with this decision and in his final months in office he announced all US troops would leave Afghanistan by Christmas 2020. That benchmark came and went and Trump left at least 2,500 troops in the country while his administration made a deal with the Taliban to withdraw completely by May 2021.
It was ultimately Biden’s decision to finish the US withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Could there have been another way? Perhaps. It could have been more politically and financially sustainable to “go light and go long” in Afghanistan, keeping several thousand US troops in the country focused on counterterrorism operations and supporting the Afghan military, while emphasizing the US’ commitment to stay in Afghanistan long-term. That commitment would have boosted the morale of the Afghan government and military and undercut the Taliban’s view that they could simply wait out the Americans — which they have done.
Now that Biden has finally done what two previous presidents have seriously considered, the likely result is that Afghanistan will descend into an intense civil war — and every jihadist terrorist group in the world will find a congenial home in the ensuing chaos.
The foreign policy crisis on Joe Biden’s doorstep, CNN.com
CNN Wire
June 24, 2021 Thursday 10:09 AM GMT
Copyright 2021 Cable News Network All Rights Reserved
Length: 1234 words
Byline: Opinion by Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst
Dateline: (CNN)
The two top officials in Afghanistan are meeting Friday with President Joe Biden at a moment when much of their country is in danger of being swallowed up by the Taliban.
The meeting with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and Chief Executive, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, comes after a report by the US Congressional Research Service released earlier this month that concluded, “By many measures, the Taliban are in a stronger military position now than at any point since 2001.”
In the past days, the Taliban have launched a major offensive in northern Afghanistan far from their traditional strongholds in the south and east of the country.
Habiba Sarabi, an Afghan government negotiator engaging in talks with the Taliban, told CNN, “With the imminent removal of all United States forces in just a few weeks, the Taliban are moving rapidly, resulting in a swift deterioration in the security environment. We were caught off guard by the scale and scope of setbacks in the north.”
The United States has contributed to the deteriorating security situation by consistently saying for more than a decade that it is leaving Afghanistan, which has undermined the Afghan government and strengthened the resolve of the Taliban who have won at the negotiating table from the Americans what they failed to win on the battlefield.
Without swift action by the Biden administration we could see in Afghanistan a remix of the disastrous US pullout from Saigon in 1975 and the summer of 2014 in Iraq when ISIS took over much of the country following the US pullout from the country three years earlier. That withdrawal was negotiated by then-vice president Biden.
The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a Washington-based think tank, assesses that the Taliban now control 25 per cent of the Afghan population, while the government controls 40 per cent of the population, and just over a third of Afghans live in regions that are contested between the Taliban and the government
The Taliban have seized 50 of the country’s 370 districts since May, according to the United Nations.
The premise of the many years of US-Taliban negotiations has been that the United States will draw down militarily in exchange for the Taliban severing relations with al-Qaeda — the terrorist organization it harbored at the time of the planning and execution of the terrorist attacks against the US on September 11, 2001.
This has been, to put it charitably, a charade, according to the United Nations, which reported just this month that the two groups remain “closely aligned and show no signs of breaking ties.” The UN report notes that Taliban-al Qaeda ties have actually “grown deeper.”
Meanwhile, US presidents going back to Barack Obama have consistently said the United States is leaving Afghanistan, but in the end, Obama left 8,400 troops when he completed his second term. Donald Trump also wanted to go to zero, but he left at least 2,500 soldiers.
In both the case of Obama and Trump, the Pentagon made the case that leaving a relatively small number of troops in Afghanistan acted as an insurance policy to prevent the Taliban taking over much of the country.
Now comes Biden, who has promised to go to zero troops by the 20th anniversary of 9/11; a more inappropriate end-date for the US presence would be hard to conjure.
The withdrawal of all US troops means that America’s NATO allies in Afghanistan are also pulling the plug. There were 7,000 allied troops in the country when Biden announced he was going to zero, but now they are also all heading for the exits.
After Biden’s announcement, the Australians decided to close their embassy in Kabul. Other countries will likely follow.
The Biden administration has said that some six thousand American contractors will have to leave Afghanistan as well.
This move completely undercuts the Afghan Air Force, which has capable pilots but relies on American contractors to service the complex helicopters and aircraft it has been given by the US government. Without those contractors the Afghan Air Force will be effectively grounded and the Afghan government would lose a key military advantage over the Taliban.
The US is also leaving in the lurch the many thousands of Afghans who have helped the US military. The nonprofit, No One Left Behind, has documented more than 300 cases since 2014 in which Afghans who had worked with the US military or their family members were killed by militant groups in Afghanistan.
Eighteen thousand Afghans who have worked with the US military are now seeking visas to leave Afghanistan for the United States as they quite reasonably fear for their lives, but these visas are generally taking many years to process. They also don’t account for a further 53,000 of their family members who are also trying to flee the wrath of the Taliban.
All this comes at a time when the Biden administration is admitting the lowest number of refugees in American history, even fewer than Trump, according to a report by the International Rescue Committee (IRC) that was released in April. The IRC found that the Biden administration will likely admit only around 4,000 refugees from around the entire world this fiscal year.
And, of course, all the hard-won gains made by women and minorities in Afghanistan over the past two decades now stand to be lost.
The Hazaras, a long-discriminated against minority in Afghanistan because of their Shia religion, make up around 15 per cent of the population. They were massacred by Taliban forces before 9/11, according to Human Rights Watch. The Taliban, which is largely made up of the Pashtun ethnic group, continue to attack Hazaras, as does the local branch of ISIS.
Hazaras are now arming themselves in anticipation of a return to the ethnic civil war that wracked Afghanistan in the mid-1990s.
Afghan women are understandably frightened that as the Taliban assert their power they will lose their rights to work and to be educated.
So how might anything be salvaged from this mess?
First, American contractors who are willing to stay in Afghanistan to service the planes and helicopters of the Afghan air force should be allowed to stay. Those contractors could be secured by elite Afghan commando forces.
Second, Afghans who have helped the US military must have their visas processed expeditiously, even if it means doing so in neighboring countries such as Pakistan. And if the visas can’t be issued in a timely fashion, the US government should have a plan to evacuate the thousands of Afghans whose lives may be at risk.
Third, Turkish troops must be allowed to continue to maintain security at Kabul airport. Turkey has long secured the key airport as part of its NATO duties and without security forces at the airport the United States and other nations will likely have to end their diplomatic presence as will international aid organizations, which would be in no one’s interests, including the Taliban who understand how dependent Afghanistan is on international support.
Fourth, the United States should make clear to the Taliban that it will intervene militarily in Afghanistan using airstrikes if the Taliban don’t sustain their agreements to sever ties with al-Qaeda and engage in genuine peace negotiations with the Afghan government.
Opinion by Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst
TM & © 2021 Cable News Network, Inc., a Time Warner Company. All rights reserved.
Finally, the US gets a strategy on fighting domestic terrorism, CNN.com
For the first time the United States has a government-wide strategy to counter domestic terrorism. The policy, which the Biden administration rolled out on Tuesday, is long overdue.
After all, the most lethal terrorist attack in the United States before 9/11 was the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building a quarter of a century ago, in which 168 people were killed by right-wing terrorists.
In recent years, right-wing extremists have carried out a number of lethal attacks, such as the <>assault in El Paso, Texas in 2019 that killed 22 people, the attack at a Pittsburgh synagogue a year earlier that <>killed 11 people and the attack at a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015 that killed nine congregants.
And in January, there was the unprecedented assault on the US Capitol by right-wing extremists seeking to overturn the results of the presidential election.
The new strategy issued by the White House points out that the domestic terrorism threat is principally from “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists… and militia violent extremists” who present “the most persistent and lethal threats.”
The strategy explains that these domestic extremists “often radicalize independently” because of what they are reading online “making detection and disruption difficult.”
The difficulty of stopping “lone actor” terrorists also characterized US government efforts after 9/11 when it came to preventing Americans from radicalizing because of propaganda from al-Qaeda or ISIS that they had read online. Omar Mateen, for instance, killed 49 people at an Orlando nightclub in 2016. Mateen had no contact with ISIS, yet he had become radicalized by what he had read and seen online and in the name of ISIS he carried out the most lethal act of terrorism in the US since the 9/11 attacks.
The issue is also made more complicated because being a radical is, of course, not a crime in the US, given the First Amendment, and relatively few people with radical ideas actually turn to violence.
So how do you stop radicals from committing violent acts?
The White House strategy rests on a number of actions. First, by acquiring a better government-wide understanding of the scope of these threats, which can come not only from extremists motivated by white supremacism but also from, for example, anti-abortion activists, animal rights and environmental militants, and so called “incel” — involuntary celibate — extremists.
Domestic extremists in the borderless world of the Internet are also communicating and in some cases training with extremist groups overseas. Indeed, it was for these types of reasons that the Trump administration for the first time an overseas white supremacist group, the Russian Imperial Movement, as a Foreign Terrorist Organization in 2020.
The Biden administration also plans to designate foreign militant groups if domestic extremists are receiving support or training from them.
The White House, sensibly, intends to enforce “legal prohibitions that keep firearms out of dangerous hands.”
The US government will make also publicly available a “Mobilization Indicators” booklet “that will include for the first-time potential indicators of domestic terrorism–related mobilization,” which is the kind of information that will be useful to local law enforcement, as there is often a “pathway to violence” that violent extremists predictably go down, beginning with their “grievance” and ending with a violent act.
The government will disseminate more widely intelligence about “domestic terrorism iconography, symbology, and phraseology,” since this is often closely held information by extremists. And the government will work to more strongly enforce laws already on the books prohibiting the existence of private militias.
The White House asserts that the “2022 Budget will include significant additional resources for the Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation to ensure that they have the analysts, investigators, and prosecutors they need to thwart domestic terrorism.”
For its part, the Department of Defense will do more work to educate those with military training about how they might be recruited by violent extremists, and there will be better mechanisms by which veterans can “report recruitment attempts by violent extremist actors.”
And, of course, the US government will do its best to work with the private sector to reduce the amount of online terrorist content, by providing Internet companies with information that will help them enforce their own terms of service, which prohibit terrorism-related activities on their platforms.
This was also an issue when ISIS was at its height from 2015 to 2016 and when it was recruiting online many dozens of Americans to fight in Syria and Iraq or encouraging its followers to carry out lethal attacks in the United States.
These are all commonsense measures which will help to reduce the scourge of domestic terrorism. Most importantly the new strategy shows that the US government has finally adopted an overall approach to counter the threat posed by the violent extremists living among us.
Opi
Michael Flynn is playing with fire, CNN.com
Opinion by Peter Bergen
Updated 10:23 AM EDT, Wed June 02, 2021
Editor’s Note: (Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is author of the book “Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos.” The views expressed here are his own. Read more opinion at CNN.)
(CNN) It’s hard to get a grip on what’s happened to one-time war hero, retired lieutenant general Michael Flynn.
Flynn, a former national security adviser to President Donald Trump, shockingly appeared to support a military coup in the United States during a Sunday keynote address to a Dallas conference organized by supporters of QAnon conspiracy theories.
To the extent that QAnon has a coherent worldview, it is that Trump will be returned to the White House following a military coup, similar to the one that happened in Myanmar in February.
An audience member at the Dallas event asked Flynn: “I want to know why what happened in Minamar (sic) can’t happen here?” The audience raucously cheered this question. Flynn replied, “No reason. I mean, it should happen here. No reason. That’s right.” Again, the audience cheered heartily.
Those who served with Flynn in Afghanistan and Iraq are mystified why he has now embraced a QAnon worldview. But you don’t have to be a veteran to know it is a danger for the republic for a senior, retired officer to be undermining democracy in this fashion.
Flynn is also playing with fire on a personal level. As a retired flag officer, he is subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Article 94 of the code says that active duty and retired Armed Force members engaged in acts of sedition can face the death penalty.
On Monday, Flynn seemed to be trying to dial back, saying on social media that he doesn’t support a military coup. Yet Flynn’s comments in Dallas Sunday were made on video, which can be seen here by anyone who wants to judge Flynn’s response for themselves.
And Flynn has more than flirted with such ideas before. After Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, Flynn told a host on the conservative Newsmax channel that Trump “could take military capabilities, and he could place those in states and basically rerun an election in each of those states.” Flynn added for good measure, “I mean, it’s not unprecedented. These people are out there talking about martial law like it’s something that we’ve never done. Martial law has been instituted 64 times.” (Then, as now, he seemed to back away from what he’d just said, stating “I’m not calling for that. We have a constitutional process,” and “that has to be followed.”)
Flynn and his lawyer Sidney Powell also participated in a White House meeting in mid-December with Trump in which they discussed how they might reverse the purportedly “rigged” presidential election, which Biden had won by large margins both in the electoral college vote and in the popular vote. And state and federal courts around the country dismissed dozens of cases challenging Biden’s win.
Flynn’s recent musings about coups, martial law and overturning legitimate presidential elections are all a very long way from the period after 9/11, when he served in the elite Joint Special Operations Command as a highly regarded intelligence officer in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Flynn was so well thought of that he was eventually promoted to lieutenant general and to run the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), but Flynn’s overseers in the Obama administration thought he was an ineffective manager of DIA, a large agency with 17,000 employees, and in 2014 he was pushed out of his post.
Flynn seemed embittered by his dismissal and a year later he was on the campaign trail with then-candidate Trump, with whom he shared similar views about the purported menace posed by Muslims. During the campaign, Trump said he had seen thousands of Arabs in New Jersey cheering the 9/11 attacks, while Flynn said that Democratic legislators in Florida were planning to install Sharia law. These claims were, of course, false.
After Trump won the presidency in 2016, he appointed Flynn his national security adviser, a post in which he served for the record briefest amount of time; only 24 days.
Flynn was fired for lying to Vice President Mike Pence about the content of conversations he had had with the Russian ambassador to the United States during the presidential transition. Flynn later pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about the same issue.
Trump pardoned Flynn, but the eradication of his conviction doesn’t seem to have impacted Flynn’s continuing lack of good judgment: Calling for the overturning of a legitimate presidential election; floating the imposition of martial law and appearing to approve of a coup in the United States.
Like so many who have entered into Trump’s orbit, Flynn’s once-sterling reputation is ever more seriously damaged.
[ONLINE] – Inside Money: Brown Brothers Harriman and the American Way of Power with Zachary Karabell, New America online
Event
Brown Brothers Harriman is among the oldest private banks in the United States, and throughout its history, conspiracy theories have swirled around it. And not without reason. It has played an important role in the story of how American power developed. In the nineteenth century, amid repeated financial panics, Brown Brothers quietly went from strength to strength, propping up the U.S. financial system at crucial moments. By the turn of the twentieth century, Brown Brothers was at the heart of the American Establishment. As America’s reach extended beyond its shores, it worked hand in glove with the State Department, notably in Nicaragua, where the firm essentially took over the country’s economy. In his new book, Inside Money, Zachary Karabell offers a look inside this institution against the backdrop of American history. Drawing upon complete access to the company’s archives, Karabell traces how its and America’s power evolved from the early 1800s to the present.
New America’s International Security Program and The Progress Network welcomes Zachary Karabell, author of Inside Money: Brown Brothers Harriman and the American Way of Power to discuss these topics. Zachary Karabell received his PhD from Harvard. He is the author of a dozen previous books, including The Last Campaign, which won the Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Prize, and The Leading Indicators. He is also a longtime investor, former financial services executive, and the founder of the Progress Network.
Join the conversation online using #BrownBrothers and following @NewAmericaISP.
PARTICIPANTS
Zachary Karabell, @zacharykarabell
Author, Inside Money: Brown Brothers Harriman and the American Way of Power
Founder, The Progress Network
MODERATOR
Peter Bergen, @peterbergencnn
Vice President, New America
Copies of Inside Money are available for purchase here through our bookselling partner Solid State Books.
Jared Kushner’s Middle East fantasy explodes, CNN.com
A decade later, Tim Hetherington’s work lives on, CNN.com
After he was killed, Tim’s life was documented by the writer Sebastian Junger in the 2013 HBO film, “Which Way is the Frontline From Here?” and a biography, “Here I Am,” was published the same year. Tim’s work has continued to be exhibited around the world, including at the
National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC.\
The day after Tim’s death, I
wrote this for CNN:
The first words that were used to describe Tim by almost anybody who knew him were “humble” and “modest.”
Yet, Tim was a guy who had great talents. He took highly artistic photos and had released a photography book, “Infidel,” which consists of his portraits of American soldiers fighting in the Afghan War.
He was also someone who would go out in the field and take the grittiest pictures of combat.\
For one of those photographs, he won the World Press Photo award in 2007. The photo showed an exhausted, battle-weary GI resting in a bunker in northern Afghanistan, an apt metaphor for what was then fast becoming the longest war in American history.
Tim had also gone to Oxford to study literature, something he never mentioned in the long days we spent talking and working together on stories for CNN while embedded with a group of Marines in southern Afghanistan in September 2009.
The Marine base in Nawa, Helmand province, was the kind of place that had no water or electricity, and where large barrels of human feces were burned off on a daily basis.
Tim loved it and his enthusiasm for the Marines and for Afghanistan in general was infectious.
Tim was a lot of fun to be around; a mensch, that not-completely-translatable Yiddish word that means someone people find to be an admirable man; someone they want to be around.
Then there was “Restrepo,” the film Tim codirected and coproduced with the author Sebastian Junger. Tim worked for more than a year shooting the film, flying back and forth from his apartment in Brooklyn to spend months in the Korengal Valley, then pretty much the most dangerous place in Afghanistan.
At one point during an intense firefight, Tim fell and broke his leg and had to be medevaced out. Yet, he soldiered on to complete the film.
“Restrepo” was a labor of love for Tim. He had a great deal of empathy for the young soldiers he documented. The resulting film is not only the best documentary about war I have ever seen, it is simply one of the greatest of all war films, sharing the epic quality of movies such as “Apocalypse Now” or “Full Metal Jacket.”
It is also very beautifully shot, revealing Tim’s great sense of picture composition.
“Restrepo” took no strong position on the Afghan War. When Tim screened it for audiences nationwide, he made it clear that he did not want the film to be seen as either an indictment or a celebration of the Afghan war, but more about what war does to small units of men.
And he wanted American audiences to have a more informed discussion of what this particular war was doing to its soldiers.
The approach made “Restrepo” so universal, it could have been made in Vietnam or World War II or in any other conflict where men kill other men; some die, some are wounded and others survive.
When Tim was nominated for an Oscar for “Restrepo” earlier this year, he was “completely delighted,” as he put it in an email to me.
In the end, he didn’t win the Oscar, but he wrote me afterward saying something that says a lot about Tim Hetherington: “While we didn’t get to take home the little gold man, going down the red carpet with those soldiers (from the film) was one of the highlights of my life so far … and a real finale to an incredible journey. And although this particular journey may be over, the film lives on!”
Tim lived and worked in the toughest environments in the world from, Liberia to Afghanistan, to Libya, where he died while chronicling violence in the war-torn city of Misrata.
But he was never jaded by those experiences, nor was he a showboat about his many years on the front lines.
He was a very gentle man. A gentleman.
