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https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-koch-brothers-are-sti_b_4396033

THE BLOG

The Koch Brothers Are Still Trying to Break Wind

The Koch brothers have turned loose their network of advocacy groups, think tanks and Capitol Hill friends to kill a key federal tax break for the wind industry, despite the fact that the oil and gas industry has been getting four times more in tax breaks and subsidies annually since 1918.

Elliott Negin, Contributor

Senior Writer, Union of Concerned Scientists

Dec. 9, 2013, 09:01 AM EST | Updated Dec. 6, 2017

This post was published on the now-closed HuffPost Contributor platform. Contributors control their own work and posted freely to our site. If you need to flag this entry as abusive, send us an email.

As Congress dithers for the umpteenth time over extending a key subsidy for wind energy, the industry once again is up in the air. Called theproduction tax credit (PTC), the subsidy helps level the playing field between wind and fossil fuels and has proven to be critical for financing new projects, helping to make wind one of the fastest growing electricity sources in the country. Given the planet needs to transition as quickly as possible away from coal and natural gas to carbon-free energy to avoid the worst consequences of climate change, who would be against renewing wind's tax credit.

The Koch brothers, that's who.

Charles G. and David H. Koch -- the billionaire owners of the coal, oil and gas Koch Industries conglomerate -- have enlisted their extensive network of think tanks, advocacy groups and friends on Capitol Hill to spearhead a campaign to pull the plug on the PTC. Never mind the fact that the oil and gas industry has averaged four times what the wind tax credit is worth in federal tax breaks and subsidies annually for the last 95 years.

The Koch network is fighting the wind industry on a number of fronts. Last month, Koch-funded Congressman Mike Pompeo (R-Kansas) sent a letter signed by 52 House members to the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, urging him to let the PTC expire. Meanwhile, a coalition of some 100 national and local groups organized by the Koch-founded Americans for Prosperity sent a letter to each member of Congress asking them to do the same. And earlier this month, the Koch-funded Institute for Energy Research launched an anti-PTC ad campaign and released a report claiming that only a handful of states actually benefit from the subsidy.

Malcolm Gladwell didn't include this battle in his new book David and Goliath because, given the odds, it's more like Bambi versus Godzilla.

The Kochs' Man in Congress

The fact that Kansas Rep. Mike Pompeo is the Kochs' point man to scuttle the PTC in the House is a bit ironic given his state is a wind energy leader. Kansas has the second highest wind potential in the country, it has already attracted more than $5 billion in wind industry investment, and last year wind generated 11.4 percent of its electricity. With stats like that, the industry has broad bipartisan support. Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback and Sens. Jerry Moran and Pat Roberts -- all Republicans -- are big fans.

Pompeo, who has been in Congress since only 2011, would argue that he's against all energy tax credits. For the second year in a row, he has introduced a bill that would eliminate tax breaks that benefit oil, natural gas, coal, nuclear, electric vehicles, alternative fuels, solar and wind, including the PTC, which gives wind developers a tax credit of 2.3 cents for each kilowatt-hour of electricity they produce.

But there's a catch. Although it appears evenhanded, Pompeo's bill would severely hamper wind and solar but preserve a number of oil, gas and coal subsidies, including the percentage depletion allowance, the ability to expense the costs of exploration, and the accelerated depreciation of certain kinds of "geologic property." These and other tax breaks he left out of his bill would be worth about $12.5 billion to the oil and gas industry from 2011 through 2015, according to a March 2012 Congressional Research Service report.

Why is Pompeo so down on wind? Perhaps it's because Koch Industries is headquartered in Wichita, smack-dab in the middle of his district -- and the fact that the company is by far and away his biggest campaign contributor. Since 2010, Koch Industries has given him $200,000, more than four times what his second highest contributor kicked in. Besides Koch Industries, three other oil companies are among Pompeo's top five contributors -- McCoy Petroleum, Mull Drilling and Richie Exploration -- and they're also based in Wichita.

What about the other 51 House members who signed Pompeo's letter? As it turns out, 65 percent of them received contributions from Koch Industries during the last two or three campaign cycles, according to Federal Election Commission data compiled by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. A quarter of them, meanwhile, cashed checks from ExxonMobil. And except for two congressmen who didn't take any energy industry money, the signatories received sizable contributions from a number of other corporations that compete with wind, including coal barons Arch Coal and Alpha Natural Resources; oil and gas giants Chesapeake Energy, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and Valero Energy; and Exelon, which owns the most nuclear reactors in the country.

Americans for (Koch) Prosperity Weighs In

Pompeo's letter came on the heels of a letter from the Kochs' flagship advocacy group, Americans for Prosperity, calling for Congress to kill the PTC. AFP's letter, which was signed by 102 organizations, claims that "the wind industry has very little to show after 20 years of preferential tax treatment" and declares that "Americans deserve energy solutions that can make it on their own in the marketplace -- not ones that need to be propped up by government indefinitely."

Is that right? Little to show? Preferential tax treatment?

In fact, until Congress left the wind industry hanging late last year, it had been doing quite well. Even with a deep recession and slow recovery, over the previous five years -- with the help of the PTC, stimulus spending and state renewable electricity standards -- the industry doubled its electricity output, employment and private investment. In 2012, domestic manufacturers produced roughly 72 percent of the wind turbine equipment erected across the country -- nearly triple the percentage in 2006 -- and more than 13,000 megawatts of new wind generation capacity was installed. By the end of last year, there were enough wind turbines to power 15 million typical American homes -- without toxic pollutants or carbon emissions.

But AFP's complaint that the wind industry has been on the dole far too long is even more galling. What about the oil and gas industry? It's been feeding at the federal trough since 1918! On average, the industry has benefited from $4.86 billion in tax breaks and subsidies in today's dollars every year since then, according to a 2011 study by DBL Investors, a venture capital firm. Renewable energy technologies, meanwhile, averaged only $370 million a year in subsidies between 1994 and 2009. The 2009 stimulus package did provide $21 billion for wind, solar and other renewables, but that support barely begins to balance the scales that have tilted toward nuclear power for more than 50 years, oil and gas for 95 years, and coal for more than two centuries.

So who signed the AFP letter? About half of the signatories are local tea party affiliates and anti-wind NIMBY groups of indeterminate size and funding. The other half are, for the most part, relatively obscure national groups, but there are a few that have attracted attention over the years for their contrarian views on climate science and renewable energy. Like AFP, those groups are awash in petrodollars. The American Energy Alliance (and its parent, the Institute for Energy Research), Competitive Enterprise Institute, Freedom Works, Frontiers of Freedom and Heritage Action (and its parent, the Heritage Foundation) collectively have received millions of dollars from Koch family foundations, ExxonMobil and the American Petroleum Institute, the oil and gas industry's premier trade association.

The Institute for Energy Research's Questionable Research

On December 3, the Institute for Energy Research and its political arm, the American Energy Alliance, sponsored what they dubbed the "wind welfare" summit in Washington, D.C., featuring IER founder and CEO Robert Bradley Jr., a Koch network veteran. AEA announced it would spend $40,000 on print and digital ads calling for an end to the PTC and is flying in anti-PTC advocates for meetings on Capitol Hill.

Bradley presumably highlighted the findings of a report IER released the day before claiming that a small number of states with wind resources -- Iowa, North Dakota, Oklahoma and Texas -- are reaping the benefits of the PTC while 30 states and the District of Columbia are "losing millions" to fund it.

The report's findings, however, don't hold up to scrutiny.Mike Jacobs, a senior energy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, pointed out in a recent blog that IER ignored the fact that a number of the states it identified as "net payers" are home to wind industry manufacturing facilities. There are 62 companies in Ohio making turbine components, for example, 40 in Michigan and 21 in California. Jacobs also discovered that IER downplayed the fact that "the PTC benefits consumers where wind-generated electricity adds to the supply and lowers the price of electricity, landowners who receive lease payments from the wind turbines, and local communities that collect tax payments on installed wind farms."

Jeff Spross, blogging on the Center for American Progress' ThinkProgress website, also chided IER, pointing out that most industries are not equally distributed across the country. "The oil and gas industries, for instance, benefit from a wealth of federal tax carve-outs," he wrote, "but the economic activity they generate is concentrated in just a few key states."

In other words, it's disingenuous to single out the wind industry.

Twisting in the Wind

While Congress has generously provided the fossil-fuel and nuclear-energy industries a number of permanent subsidies, it has typically granted the wind industry the PTC on a short-term basis and then wavered over renewing it. Last year the PTC expired on December 31, but as part of the "fiscal cliff" budget deal the next day, Congress extended it for the seventh time since it debuted in 1992 -- for only one year.

This uncertainty over the PTC's status has put wind developers at a distinct disadvantage, making it difficult to attract investors and plan ahead. Last year's cliffhanger, for example, definitely did a number on the industry. Wind farm construction has fallen off dramatically compared with 2012: Only one utility-scale wind turbine was installed in the first six months of this year. Business picked up somewhat in the third quarter, with 68.3 megawatts installed, according to the American Wind Energy Association, but that's far below the average of more than 1,000 megawatts that the industry constructed in most quarters in recent years.

Given that it takes years to plan, finance and construct a wind farm, Congress is again undermining the industry's potential by slow-walking the PTC extension this year. And that potential is tremendous. Wind currently generates about 4 percent of U.S. electricity, but by 2030 it could produce more than 20 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. The DOE's National Renewable Energy Laboratory also is bullish on wind and renewables writ large. Last year, it published a report that concluded today's commercially available renewable technologies could easily generate 80 percent of U.S. electricity by 2050, with nearly half coming from wind. If the Koch brothers and their allies have their way, however, it likely will take a lot longer to get there -- and it will cost a hell of a lot more.

Elliott Negin is the director of news and commentary at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

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Pompeo called out for threatening families

Andrea Germanos / Common Dreams

Amnesty International on Wednesday rebuked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo over new comments bashing the International Criminal Court and threatening court staff—and their family members—investigating alleged war crimes committed by…

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/mike-pompeo-called-out-for-threatening-families/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/evil-and-heartless-trump-administration-hits-iran-with-brutal-sanctions-amid-its-devastating-covid-19-outbreak/

pow

https://theintercept.com/2020/03/05/iran-coronavirus-medicine-sanctions/

DESPITE A MASSIVE coronavirus-related public health crisis, an anti-Iran pressure group with close ties to the Trump administration is urging major pharmaceutical companies to “end their Iran business,” focusing on companies with special licenses — most often under a broadly defined “humanitarian exemption” — to conduct trade with Iran.

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With a novel strain of coronavirus rapidly spreading around the world, Iran has been hit particularly hard, with 107 deaths and 3,515 infections recorded so far. Yet the pressure group, United Against Nuclear Iran, is carrying on with its campaign targeting medical trade with Iran despite the Trump administration’sspecial financial channels for humanitarian goods and medicine to reach the beleaguered country.

“U.S. sanctions have had a long-term impact on Iran’s ability to freely import medical supplies,” said Tyler Cullis, an attorney specializing in sanctions law at Ferrari & Associates. He pointed to “outside groups” that seek to bolster the Treasury Department’s investigatory heft and provide information on companies doing trade with Iran. “In tandem with U.S. sanctions,” Cullis said, “these groups have sought to impose reputational costs on companies that engage in lawful and legitimate trade with Iran, including humanitarian trade.”

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“These groups have sought to impose reputational costs on companies that engage in lawful and legitimate trade with Iran, including humanitarian trade.”

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The medical and humanitarian trade are carved out of crippling sanctions against Iran through special licenses issued by the Treasury Department. But companies must apply for the licenses then carry out the trade — something United Against Nuclear Iran, known as UANI, seeks to discourage.

“Their efforts are not insignificant,” Cullis said. “It is, after all, not an altogether lucrative enterprise selling medical supplies to Iran, so the name-and-shame operations of outside groups have a significant impact on the cost-benefit analysis associated with doing business with Iran.”

Joshua Silberberg, a spokesperson for UANI, declined to respond to questions about the group’s effort to name and shame companies doing medical trade with Iran. “UANI has a long history of expressing support and solidarity with the Iranian people,” he said, pointing to a statement applauding the finalization of the Swiss Humanitarian Trade Arrangement, an agreement arranged by the U.S. and Swiss governments.

UANI says it aims to persuade “the regime in Tehran to desist from its quest for nuclear weapons, while striving not to punish the Iranian people.” (The U.S. intelligence community does not believe that Iran has any desire or plans to build nuclear weapons.) UANI’s efforts, however, have extended beyond sanctions into pressuring companies that do legal trade with Iran, often under the Treasury Department’s humanitarian exemptions to sanctions — including medical-related trades that would presumably aid in combating a massive public health crisis like this  coronavirus outbreak.

UANI operates an “Iran Business Registry” that provides an online database of companies it believes are conducting business in or with Iran — a name-and-shame strategy to increase Iran’s economic isolation. The pressure campaign has targeted multiple medical companies with Treasury Department licenses to conduct trade with Iran. Nine pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical-device corporations, all with special licenses, are listed on UANI’s business registry. Companies urged by UANI to “end their Iran business” include Bayer, Merck, Pfizer, Genzyme, AirSep, Medrad, Becton, Dickinson & Company, Eli Lilly, and Abbott Laboratories.

The legal channels for humanitarian trade are widely reported to be failing to provide a sufficient flow of medicine and other humanitarian goods.

UANI’S EFFORTS ARE particularly notable in light of the group’s close ties to the Trump administration; Iran’s regional adversaries Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Israel; and the Republican Party’s biggest donors, Sheldon and Miriam Adelson.

Senior UANI adviser John Bolton worked for UANI both before and after his stint in the Trump administration as national security adviser. UANI’s umbrella group, Counter Extremism Project United Inc, paid Bolton $240,000 between 2016 and 2017.Bolton’s appointment as national security adviser was quickly followed by Trump’s withdrawal from the nuclear deal with Iran.

Besides Bolton, the Trump administration twice sent Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to UANI’s annual conference, held during the United Nations General Assembly. Pompeo used the occasions to promote outlandish claims about Europe purportedly financing Iranian terrorism and to present the administration’s “maximum pressure” strategy to UANI’s audience, which included senior diplomats and intelligence officials from the Persian Gulf and Israel.

The group’s last summit, held in September, featuredU.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell, who is now Trump’s acting director of national intelligence, as well as a who’s who of the Trump administration’s hawkish Middle East partners, including top diplomats from Persian Gulf monarchies and Israel. (UANI and its affiliated organizations have a number of links to Gulf monarchies, including a 2014 email from a UANI advisory board member soliciting “support” from the United Arab Emirates.)

UANI’s top funder, billionaire Thomas Kaplan — an investor whose companies have looked to profit from “political unrest” in the Middle East — was also in attendance at the summit.

Finally, Sheldon and Miriam Adelson’s financial support for UANI closely tracks the Republican megadonors’ hawkish views toward Iran.In 2013, Sheldon Adelson told an audience at Yeshiva University that Obama should launch a nuclear strike on Iran and threaten that Iran will be “wiped out” if it doesn’t dismantle its nuclear program. The Adelsons were Trump’s biggest funders in the 2016 election and the GOP’s biggest funders in the 2018 cycle. They are expected to contribute at least $100 million to Trump’s reelection efforts and Republican congressional candidates in the 2020 cycle.

While the Trump administration’s extreme financial pressure against Iran is coinciding with the coronavirus outbreak, Tyler Cullis, the sanctions lawyer, was careful to note that issues with ensuring a robust trade of medical and humanitarian supplies to Iran began under previous administrations. “While those problems have been exacerbated under the Trump administration,” Cullis said, “their origination takes place more than a decade ago when prior administrations first started imposing enormous sanctions pressure on Iran’s financial sector.”

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some new

Ahead of the launch of President Trump's Israeli-Palestinian peace plan, the White House has been engaging with Evangelical leaders to reassure them about the plan.

Why it matters: Evangelicals are a crucial part of Trump's political base and senior officials in his administration, like Vice President Pence and Secretary of State Pompeo, are Evangelicals. Most U.S. Evangelicals are strong supporters of Israel, and many Evangelical leaders are stanch allies of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.

On Thursday a group of Evangelical leaders arrived at the White House for a briefing with Trump's Middle East envoy Jason Greenblatt.

• Among those present were Pastor John Hagee, Pastor Jentezen Franklin, Pastor Paula White and others. Although the meeting was off-the-record many of the attendees tweeted about it.
• A source who attended the meeting said that several of the Evangelical leaders raised concerns about the peace plan, especially about the possibility it will give the Palestinians a capital in parts of East Jerusalem.
• "They didn't give many details about the plan but they wanted to hear concerns and red lines and answer questions the Evangelical leaders had," the source said.
• The source added that Greenblatt told the group the peace plan will be fair and can benefit both sides — but both will have to make compromises. The White House declined to comment on this account.

Joel Rosenberg, an author who heads an evangelical foundation and has attended the meetings, refused to give any details of their content.

• Rosenberg, who is also a personal friend of Pence and Pompeo, says he told the other Evangelical leaders in the meetings that Palestinian President Abbas is never going to make a deal, so there is no need to be too worried that Jerusalem is going to be sacrificed.
• Rosenberg said he stressed to the other Evangelical leaders: "We need to allow the President freedom of movement and latitude to present a plan that would allow those Arab states which are more willing than ever to make peace with Israel to move forward. We need to give the Arab States the ability to support this. If the Saudis, the Egyptian and others can say that this plan is credible it will open the door for, after the Palestinians say no, to talk about how to move forward with Israel."

nyt 2/19

no lnx

Mike Pompeo’s Mission: Clean Up Trump’s Messes

This week’s North Korea meeting is just the latest challenge in a larger balancing act for the secretary of state.

Mike Pompeo at the State Department in Washington.Credit...Adam Ferguson for The New York Times

By Mattathias Schwartz

Feb. 26, 2019

One of the first problems that Mike Pompeo solved for Donald Trump was the President’s Daily Brief. On every morning (or at least some of them), the president has traditionally received the most crucial findings of the United States spying apparatus, personally delivered in a solemn face-to-face exchange with a senior intelligence official. Beginning in late 2016, a series of anonymously sourced reports claimed that Trump was not taking the brief with sufficient frequency, or seriousness, or focus, or preparation. Even after the inauguration, there were claims that the spies did not trust him and were holding the good stuff back; there were claims that Trump did not even believe in objective reality. In the middle of it was Pompeo, Trump’s new C.I.A. director, who some in the president’s circle felt was the man best suited to educate Trump about the complexities of foreign policy. The president “has a steep learning curve, but you’ve got to get him up it quickly,” Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s former senior adviser, says he told Pompeo.

The day after the inauguration, Bannon recalls, Pompeo showed Trump around his office in Langley, Va.Pompeo, he says, “can connect with this guy. You can tell the president is differently engaged with Pompeo than with anybody else.” Pompeo learned to arrive at the White House with answers to the president’s favorite questions: Why should we care? What’s in it for us? Can anyone else do it? How much does it cost? By mid-2017, the gripes about the president’s briefing habits grew milder. Now the focus had narrowed to Trump’s dislike of written briefings.

In early 2018, Pompeo appeared on a panel and made it sound as if everything was normal. As a listener, he said, Trump was “at the same level” as 25-year intelligence veterans: “He’s using it. He’s taking it on board.” He even had examples in which Trump had drilled down into P.D.B. items on Yemen and Venezuela. Pompeo’s interlocutor, the Washington Post columnist and former Bush administration speechwriter Marc Thiessen, seemed convinced. Two days later, he repeated Pompeo’s claims, unchallenged, in The Post. The headline: “Rest Easy About Trump’s Fitness.”

Pompeo, one of the last remaining members of Trump’s original White House team, is now secretary of state. As Trump tries to execute some hairpin policy turns, often by tweet, it is Pompeo who travels the world to clean up the wreckage. Gen. Michael Hayden, the former C.I.A. and National Security Agency head, likens him to Winston (the Wolf) Wolfe, Harvey Keitel’s hard-nosed problem-solver in “Pulp Fiction.” It’s the Wolf who is dispatched by the crime boss Marsellus Wallace to deal with an unexpected dead body in the back of his enforcers’ car. “He’s got to clean up Kim Jong-un, because there wasn’t a deal,” Hayden said of Pompeo, referring to the vagueness of the promises that resulted from Trump’s first meeting with the North Korean leader in June 2018. “Now, he’s got to clean up Mohammed bin Salman,” the crown prince of Saudi Arabia accused of ordering the murder of a journalist — a situation with just as much complexity and far less upside.

One of Pompeo’s most recent cleanup missions took him to the American University in Cairo, where, on Jan. 10, he delivered a speech titled “A Force for Good: America Reinvigorated in the Middle East.” The speech was supposed to be the centerpiece of a nine-country Middle East trip that Pompeo planned weeks in advance. Initially, he intended to focus his conversations with United States allies on Israeli-Palestinian peace talks and the possible formation of an “Arab NATO” that would save the United States money while encircling Iran. But this had been complicated by a tweet from @realDonaldTrump proclaiming that “We have defeated ISIS in Syria.” Later that day, the commander in chief filmed a video in front of the White House: “Our boys, our young women, our men, they’re all coming back. And they’re coming back now.”

So in addition to the usual hand-holding and deal-making of international diplomacy, Pompeo would be doing a lot of explaining to skittish allies. The previous day, he visited with United States troops and Iraqi ministers, flying from Amman to Baghdad to Erbil to Baghdad to Amman, and then to Cairo. Three days in, he was already hoarse; his voice at the lectern sounded like a tire rolling through wet gravel. He is a bearish man — the administration’s backslapping offensive lineman, shorter and rounder than Trump. His face is appealing but not handsome, firm but not unkind. He often looks to be surveying some amber waves of grain; you could imagine his official photo gracing the wall of an Elks lodge or a Cadillac dealership. “He just loves the farm,” Pompeo’s wife, Susan, told me, describing his resemblance to the Kansans on his mother’s side of the family. “Hardiness. Hard-working. Stoic. ‘What do you mean you don’t work past 5:01?’?”

The Cairo speech was designed to serve as, among other things, the Trump administration’s rebuttal to the “New Beginning” speech that Obama gave in Cairo nearly a decade before, which itself had been an attempt to rebuke the mistakes of the Bush administration. The audience was smaller than Obama’s — around 300 in the sterile suburbs of New Cairo, compared with the more than 1,000 who saw Obama at Cairo University in Giza. Pompeo’s crowd was a friendly one, handpicked by the United States Embassy, and a few seats in the venue remained empty. As we waited for Pompeo to enter the room, I was warned, along with other members of the media who were present, not to stray from our assigned area to take part in the general mingling. The constraints were not surprising, given Trump’s own attitude toward the media and his closeness with Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Egypt’s strongman ruler, who has jailed dozens of reporters and blocked hundreds of websites.

The speech that lay before Pompeo on the lectern was an energetic one, laying out a muscular vision of “American power” as a “liberating force.” But Pompeo looked tired, and it wasn’t hard to imagine that some of his weariness was existential. Trump’s Syria announcement had been poorly received by many of his own senior staff members. Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis resigned. Pompeo would now have to spend much of the trip trying to interpret Trump’s intentions in public. He would have to walk a difficult tightrope, respecting Trump’s instincts while channeling them into something coherent. If he failed, United States allies in the region might look elsewhere for protection. In recent months, the leaders of Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates all had meetings with Vladimir Putin.

In Cairo, Pompeo tried to spin the announced Syria withdrawal as a sign of renewed American commitment. He said the United States would “use diplomacy and work with our partners to expel every last Iranian boot.” Expelling the last Iranian boot would more likely take years or decades, not the 120 days that was the Pentagon’s interpretation of Trump’s “coming back now.” The genius of the “last Iranian boot” was that Pompeo’s divergence from Trump lay below the surface; the promise of an extended United States presence was never made fully explicit.

Pompeo’s rhetoric was at once revolutionary, claiming to be overturning the policies of the Obama years, and institutionalist, claiming to be rooted in some earlier tradition of American goodness. “It was here, here in this city, that another American stood before you,” Pompeo said. Never citing Obama by name, he ran down a list of his errors: failing to connect terrorism with its ideological “Islamist” roots, denigrating America’s post-9/11 conduct and suggesting that “a new beginning” was even necessary. (“I don’t think I ever went to their motivations,” Pompeo told me later. “It was always about how they grabbed the wrong end of the stick.”)

It has often fallen to Pompeo to take Trump’s shifting foreign-policy instincts and weave them together into something legible, defensible and sometimes even coherent, all without angering a president who is reputed to interpret disagreement as a form of disloyalty. Trump’s tweets, abrupt changes of mind and penchant for creating staff turmoil combine to make this a Sisyphean endeavor. And yet Pompeo has tenaciously kept on rolling this particular boulder. You can look at most every place where Trump has made a lasting impact on United States foreign policy and find Pompeo not far away: withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement and the Iran nuclear deal; imposing sanctions against the governments of Iran and Venezuela; offering kind words for autocrats in Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Pompeo is the primary architect of Trump’s continuing negotiations over the nuclear arsenal controlled by North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un.

In the process, he seems to have retained Trump’s loyalty, even as critics of the administration (including Hayden) credit him with having reined in the president’s instinctive isolationism. “He’s an internationalist,” says Barbara Stephenson, a former ambassador to Panama, who leads a professional association for United States foreign-service officers. “He believes American global leadership is a good thing.” But regardless of whether Pompeo’s conduct in the Oval Office is that of a Trump enabler or a Trump whisperer, whether he is a member of Trump’s war cabinet or the last adult in the room, his attempt to weld Trump’s moves into a real doctrine will outlast the presidency that gave birth to it. Whoever winds up inheriting Trump’s foreign-policy legacy will begin in the shadow of Mike Pompeo.

Soon after Trump nominated him to lead the State Department, Pompeo arranged a call with each of his living predecessors to ask for their advice. Among them was Hillary Rodham Clinton. As a member of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, Pompeo had called her response to the 2012 attacks “morally reprehensible” and said that it was “worse, in some ways,” than Watergate. During the 2016 campaign, he tweeted out news of hacked emails from Clinton’s campaign with the word “BUSTED.” At the time, he cited as his source WikiLeaks, an organization he later, as C.I.A. director, called a “nonstate hostile intelligence service.” By the time of his call with her, Pompeo’s take on Clinton seemed to have undergone a similarly dramatic reversal. “I want to thank you for your noble service to our country,” he said to her, according to a person familiar with their conversation.

“She was most gracious,” Pompeo said, quietly, when I asked him how he had managed to pick up the phone and make the call to a longtime adversary. “I am all about moving forward.”

We were sitting in Pompeo’s office on the seventh floor of Main State, the blocky old Harry S. Truman Building in Foggy Bottom, Washington. The room was stuffed with Pompeo-related bric-a-brac — a poster from an oil-supply company Pompeo had led; a gumball machine honoring the Wichita State Shockers; a drawing executed by Pompeo himself, in crayon, at age 8. He was holding a binder-clipped sheaf of what looked to be eight or nine long notecards, with a handwritten list on top. Instead of taking a seat behind his desk, Pompeo had selected a more casual position at a side table opposite the window. He seemed to want to communicate to me that he was still fairly awe-struck by the place. “You see Lincoln,” he said, as he showed me around the office. He pointed to the view of the monuments outside the window. “If you look all the way up, you can see the planes land. Up on the eighth floor, there’s a balcony where we watch fireworks with all the ambassadors on the Fourth of July. And it’s a chance to develop some good relationships.”

“No eternal allies and no permanent enemies,” Henry Kissinger’s gloss on realpolitik (borrowed from Lord Palmerston), could also describe Pompeo’s approach to relationships. Former secretaries of state had told him that his success would depend on the strength of his White House ties. “To a person, they began by saying that the most valuable asset you have is your relationship with the president,” he told me. It sounded like a brag, but he hadn’t meant it that way, so he corrected himself. “The most valuable asset to a secretary of state is having a good working relationship with the president. They weren’t referring necessarily to mine.”

When he arrived at the State Department in April, Pompeo had the good fortune to directly follow Rex Tillerson, who was widely seen by the career diplomatic corps as having been sent by the White House to restructure the department into oblivion. Tillerson instituted a hiring freeze while he undertook a lengthy “reorganization” to root out “inefficiencies.” More than half the department’s senior-level career diplomats resigned. Pompeo was able to generate almost instant good will by lifting the hiring freeze. He installed the diplomatic equivalent of a four-star general, the career ambassador Dan Smith, to lead the Foreign Service Institute, the department’s in-house training academy. At some points during Tillerson’s tenure, it wasn’t clear who spoke for America. “Save your energy, Rex, we’ll do what has to be done!” Trump tweeted, in the midst of Tillerson’s discussions with North Korea. Tillerson, Trump complained, was “wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man.” The public squabbling aggravated a longtime worry within State that their work simply didn’t matter, having been eclipsed by the gigantic budget of the Pentagon and the superior White House access of the National Security Council. Under Obama, the job of secretary of state went to Hillary Clinton and then to John Kerry (Obama’s second choice), two heavyweight politicians who nevertheless struggled at times to maintain their influence with the president’s core team. Pompeo was the first secretary in many years who seemed to have a bond with the president comparable to Kissinger’s with Nixon. Pompeo’s pull with the White House gave the department a renewed sense of purpose, even among those who differed with Trump on policy.

[Read Jason Zengerle’s profile of Rex Tillerson when he was secretary of state.]

During his first months in Foggy Bottom, Pompeo identified four priorities — Syria, Iran, North Korea and Afghanistan — and brought in four new special representatives to tackle them and report directly to him. “I go in there with my arguments better prepared than I have at any time in my life,” says Stephen E. Biegun, the special representative for North Korea, when describing Pompeo’s management style. “I feel like I coasted in my previous jobs.” (As Venezuela became a concern, Elliott Abramswas brought on to address the crisis there. During the 1980s, Abrams was a staunch anti-Communist; at the State Department under President Reagan, he gave United States military assistance to Central American leaders who massacred tens of thousands of civilians. In 1991, Abrams pleaded guilty to withholding information from Congress about a secret effort to arm Nicaraguan guerrillas. Pompeo has praised his “passion for the rights and liberties of all peoples.”)

In his major policy speeches, like the one in Cairo, Pompeo has situated Trump somewhere between the neoconservative militarism of Paul Wolfowitz and the isolationism of Rand Paul. In so doing, he has helped to coalesce what might be called a frugal-hawk foreign policy, reflecting a new species of Republican leader who wants America to talk tough, avoid war, punish its enemies through economic sanctions and prod allies to pick up a larger share of the tab. In this worldview, only stubbornly anti-American governments like Venezuela’s are castigated for abusing and stealing from their own citizens; the domestic misbehavior of countries like Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia will be ignored so long as their foreign policies remain friendly. Iran, despite its relatively fair elections, did wrong by trying to go nuclear and backing militias that attack United States-allied forces in the region.

Much of this vision was put forward in the administration’s National Security Strategy, a document produced during Trump’s first year in office. North Korea, like Iran, is a “rogue regime,” the lowest of the low, but its more advanced nuclear program means it holds a higher hand, so it gets a temporary pass in exchange for ceasing nuclear tests and talking nice about giving up its weapons. Russia and China, for their part, are strategic competitors, the military-industrial complex’s new reason for being as the threat of terrorism fades. America would also make good on its outstanding commitments, including the war against ISIS in Syria and Iraq, to which America would contribute “until they are destroyed.”

The frugal-hawk platform is an appealing one for taxpayers who have laid out trillions for post-9/11 military interventions but still can’t stomach the idea of America in full retreat. A good chunk of it isn’t so different from that of the president Trump replaced. In some places, like North Korea, Trump has applied his unorthodox tactics to the establishment’s orthodox goals. In other places, he has tried to color so far outside the lines that his ideas have been either been heavily discounted (exiting Syria now; threatening to leave NATO) or have disappeared completely (a joint investigation with Russian intelligence on United States soil, which Trump endorsed at Helsinki).

Trump’s major substantive difference with Obama has been over the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or J.C.P.O.A., more commonly referred to as “the Iran deal.” Kerry and Obama labored mightily to get France, Russia, China, Britain and Germany on board with having Iran drastically cut its enrichment of uranium in exchange for lifting economic sanctions. Tillerson helped persuade Trump to delay his long-promised exit of the deal; Trump finally exited in May, to the delight of Israel and Saudi Arabia, two countries whose leaders much prefer Trump to Obama.

Among former Obama-era officials, there are concerns that Pompeo’s previous role as director of the C.I.A. may have helped him influence Trump’s decision to exit. “On one level, as C.I.A. director, it should have been none of Pompeo’s business to recommend staying or not staying in the deal,” says Tony Blinken, who served as Kerry’s deputy. “His job as C.I.A. director was to give an objective analysis of whether Iran was sticking with its commitments, not whether the U.S. should be in or out. That’s a policy question. That’s not the C.I.A. director’s job.”

“I wasn’t the first C.I.A. director to be a former congressman,” Pompeo responded, when I brought up his influence over policy during the interview in his office. He added: “I think it’s pretty clear that the most political C.I.A. director in history was my predecessor” — John Brennan, who has emerged as a vociferous critic of the new administration since leaving office.

[Read Mattathias’s profile of John Brennan.]

If Pompeo has succeeded in defining Donald Trump’s foreign policy, he has made similar strides in advancing a story about Trump the man that is consistent, if not always convincing. Pompeo’s Trump is the Trump of the National Security Strategy, a wise and clearheaded executive who knows what he wants and has respect for the collaborative nature of statecraft. Pompeo’s Trump is someone who is willing to shame rogue nations with “moral clarity,” just as Ronald Reagan declared his allegiance to the long-suffering people of the Soviet Union by calling out its leadership as “an evil empire.” Trump’s instructions percolate down through his cabinet in the form of something called “commander’s intent,” a military concept used to help units interpret their missions. Even his apparently impulsive tweets, in Pompeo’s telling, are part of a broader campaign of “targeted rhetorical and practical pressure” meant to bring “outlaw regimes” to heel, as Pompeo put it in a Foreign Affairs article. (An administration official elaborated on this account, telling me that some @realDonaldTrump tweets are written at the suggestion of agencies and then workshopped by the White House communications team. Early-morning tweets, they said, are more likely to be unfiltered Trump.)

“I’ve spent a lot of time building an understanding of what President Trump’s mission statement is,” Pompeo said. “And therefore, what my mission statement is. Commander’s intent. What is it that we are trying to accomplish, and how is it that we’re going to deliver that for the American people?” To Pompeo’s supporters, his gift for channeling the president’s true intent has helped bring a strong sense of direction to the department. “He builds bonds of mutual respect and common purpose in organizations he leads,” said Gen. H.R. McMaster, Trump’s former national security adviser. “He is comfortable with relinquishing control to those he trusts.” Ulrich Brechbuhl, Pompeo’s counselor at the State Department, who has known him since they attended West Point, says: “He thinks of things in terms of the mission. How do you know if you’ve achieved your mission? What are the resources you need to accomplish the mission? And what is the game plan to apply those resources to the mission?”

By statute, the role of foreign-service officers is different from that of soldiers. In addition to following orders, they engage in “policy formulation.” But under Pompeo, State has emphasized unity and obedience in a distinctly military fashion. “We take our direction from the commander in chief,” he wrote in an internal newsletter about a gathering of 185 heads of United States missions around the world called One Team, One Mission, One Future. When Vice President Mike Pence addressed the group at Main State, he called Trump “our one team captain.” He rattled off some marching orders from the commander: The diplomats, whom he called “our front-line emissaries,” were to return to their posts and inform allies that the United States’ Southern border would be secured; that peace would be preserved through the “strongest military in the history of the world”; and that “people of faith” would be championed around the world. “America is back,” he said.

Pompeo was born in 1963 in Orange, Calif. His parents, who met through their work, each had a career in aerospace. His father served in the Navy during the Korean War, but Pompeo’s interest in attending West Point was sparked, he said, by a catalog he chanced upon in his high school counselor’s office. “It looked to me to be a very egalitarian place, where if someone went there and did their best and worked hard, you might have a chance of being very, very successful.”

While he attended church growing up, his Christian faith intensified at West Point, where he joined a small Bible-study group led by older cadets. He graduated first in his class, in 1986, during the last years of the Cold War. After training, he shipped off to Germany to serve as a second lieutenant in an Army tank unit. Pompeo was stateside when the Berlin Wall fell, but he does remember speaking with a fellow soldier who was there. “He said, ‘They’re only coming one direction.’ Toward freedom, right?” In Pompeo’s view, the Kremlin is still among the authoritarian regimes that the United States needs to call out and shame. “If the people know what it was those governments were up to — in Russia, for example, the corruption that takes place — the people wouldn’t stand for it, and they wouldn’t tolerate it, and they’d seek new leadership.”

Pompeo’s unit did not deploy to Iraq for the first gulf war. The military was getting smaller, and there were fewer opportunities to advance, so he left shortly afterward, having done the five years’ service required of West Point graduates. He was accepted to Harvard Law School, where he was mentored by Prof. Mary Ann Glendon, a conservative Catholic who later served under George W. Bush as the United States’ ambassador to the Holy See in Rome.

At that time, Pompeo seemed to be headed for conventional success as a corporate lawyer. Then, in the mid-1990s, he made a series of changes: divorcing his wife; leaving his job at a top-flight Washington law firm; and moving to Kansas, to go into business with three of his West Point classmates, including Brechbuhl. The group’s analysis showed a concentration around Wichita of small, valuable aerospace companies owned by families with no succession plans — and so the group set out to acquire some of them. The partners named their company Thayer Aerospace, after an 18th-century brigadier general who was an early West Point superintendent. Among Thayer’s investors were Charles and David Koch, the billionaire brothers who own a controlling share of the privately held Koch Industries and are a dominant force in Kansas politics and the national Republican Party. “Mike is a very determined person,” says Marc Short, who was president of Freedom Partners, a Koch-funded nonprofit, and will soon be chief of staff to Vice President Pence. The Kochs, he says, “were passive investors in Thayer. The introduction came through business circles.”

In 2006, Pompeo sold his interest in Thayer and spent the next few years running an oil-field-supply business. He served on the board of a performing-arts center and a Koch-affiliated think tank. In 2000, he married Susan Justice Mostruous, a former Wichita State homecoming queen who worked as a senior vice president at a local bank. Pompeo had some ties to the Wichita area through his mother’s family; Susan knew the local terrain well through her work with alumni groups and charities. Susan had a 9-year-old son, Nick, from her second marriage. Pompeo, who has no other children, legally adopted him as his own. “It was a very personal, emotional moment when we first told Nick that we were going to get married,” Susan told me.

In 2010, Pompeo ran for Congress against Raj Goyle. Unlike Pompeo, Goyle, who is Indian-American, grew up in Kansas; Pompeo’s campaign used Goyle’s ethnicity to paint him as an outsider. The campaign’s Facebook and Twitter feeds shared a blog post by a retired Marine that called Goyle a “turban topper” along with “the evil muslim communist USURPER,” President Obama. (The campaign apologized and claimed it had been “inadvertently posted.”) Later, a pro-Pompeo billboard from an outside group urged Kansas to “Vote American.” Goyle told me he faults Pompeo for not condemning the billboard. “Secretary Pompeo is a shrewd politician, and I understand he says that he respects people of all backgrounds,” he said. “But when it counted, his campaign tolerated race-based personal attacks to win an election. I’ve moved on, but I’ll never forget that.”

During Obama’s second term, Republican members of Congress with military experience and graduate degrees were looking for places where they could undermine his approach to the Muslim world. Starting in 2015, Pompeo, along with Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, [xian?] another Army-trained, Harvard-educated Tea Party firebrand, began to mount an attack on the administration’s attempts to improve relations with Iran. Pompeo and Cotton went together on an investigative trip to Vienna, which also took them to London, where Cotton and Pompeo met Gina Haspel, the C.I.A. station chief there. Later, Pompeo would recommend Haspel to replace him at as the head of the agency. Cotton told me that their military training taught them to persevere in what they saw as their duty to expose the mistakes of the Obama White House. “You learn to make life-changing decisions on the fly,” he says. “It trains you in boldness, audacity. To always push forward, to stay on offense.”

During the 2016 primary, Pompeo initially backed Marco Rubio. He delivered a speech at the Kansas caucus, where he said that “it’s time to turn the lights down on the circus” and even warned, The Wichita Eagle reported, of a potentially authoritarian presidency. But after Trump won the primary, Pompeo moved into the fold, offering advice to Trump’s vice-presidential pick, Mike Pence, on foreign policy. Pompeo rode the elevator up to the president-elect’s suite in Trump Tower the week after the election, and that same week he was announced as the president-elect’s choice at the C.I.A.

On Jan. 7 of this year, the secretary and Mrs. Pompeo flew to the Middle East with a packed schedule. Over eight days, there were plans for 13 bilateral meetings, two strategic dialogues, eight working meals and five “meet and greets” with United States Embassy personnel.

Pompeo had a lot of work to do. He would be paying respects to small countries (Qatar, Bahrain) that host important United States bases and the big accounts (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan) that have long acted as United States proxies. To outsiders, the face-to-face interactions that form the heart of diplomacy are a black box. You can try reading something into the arrangement of the seats, the duration of the meetings and the faces of the participants before and after. But it might be years before a full account of what was said emerges.

To move Pompeo and his team among all these rooms, he would travel, as every secretary of state does, in a kind of imperial bubble. I was one of eight journalists given a berth within it. Blocks of rooms in luxury hotels are purchased. Highways are closed off for the motorcade’s swift passage. Entire airports are repurposed for the secretary’s plane. Our passports were held by the State Department and returned afterward, full of visas and stamps, despite our never having stopped at a checkpoint or spoken to an immigration official. The world in which statesmen dwell has no borders or walls.

A few minutes after takeoff, Pompeo walked back to the reporters’ seats and said he would be carrying a message of ongoing United States commitment to the fight against ISIS and the diplomatic effort against Iran. “Our commitment to support Middle East stability is still full-throttle,” he said. When asked about the withdrawal from Syria, he replied, “We don’t talk about timelines,” his eyes turning downward. His voice took on an edge when he had to repeat the same answer.

On Syria, Trump’s team had been quietly nibbling away at the tweeted position of an immediate withdrawal. “There’s no contradiction whatsoever,” Pompeo said two days later, when asked about apparent differences. “This is a story made up by the media.”

Pompeo is still learning how to interact with the press, something he didn’t have to do nearly as often at the C.I.A. He’ll often respond to hard questions as if they were rude questions, with the words “ridiculous” or “ludicrous.” For a senior official who is the face of United States foreign policy, the threshold for triggering his temper is unusually low.

The outbursts are not random. Pompeo tends to flare up around those issues where the tensions between the president and the diplomatic corps are greatest. “There’s no difference,” Pompeo answered, when I asked why he had referred to “Islamist” terrorism in Cairo instead of the “Islamic” terrorism that Pence and Trump talk about on the stump. But clearly, there is a difference. And a few minutes after Pompeo suggested that his choice of “Islamist” was accidental, a senior State Department official, unaware of the answer Pompeo had just given, told me that “Islamist” was a “deliberate choice” made for the sake of depriving terrorists of religious legitimacy.

The next day, after the transcript of my exchange with Pompeo circulated, the senior official revised his answer. “It’s all the same,” he said. “We’re not trying to hide behind words.” The most generous reading of this discrepancy is that the White House simply doesn’t agree with United States allies and counterterrorism experts around the world that the gap between these two words matters. You could also call it “commander’s caprice” — the president’s servants awkwardly jitterbugging as they try to follow the leader.

During Pompeo’s speech in Cairo, despite the embassy’s efforts to pack the room, he earned exactly one midspeech burst of applause: after he thanked Sisi, the Egyptian president, “for his courage.” That burst, beginning in the middle of the room and flowing toward the front, where Pompeo’s inner circle was seated, originated with a middle-aged American sitting in the row behind me. He had straw-colored hair, glasses and an easygoing manner. His name wasJoel C. Rosenberg. Pompeo, he said, was a fan of his books. Rosenberg told me that Pompeo’s staff had contacted him a few years ago and asked to meet; the two had kept in touch since then. (A person close to Pompeo confirmed that the two men were acquainted, and that Pompeo had read Rosenberg’s books.)

Rosenberg is a best-selling author and a powerful force in the evangelical movement. Born to a Jewish father and a Christian mother, he immigrated to Israel and now lives in Jerusalem with his family as a dual citizen. Some of Rosenberg’s books deal with biblical prophecies about the end of the world. Others deal with the future of the Middle East. One work of speculative nonfiction, “Epicenter,” explores connections between the two. When asked on Fox News in 2013 if the Syria conflict could lead to the fulfillment of biblical end-times prophecies from the Books of Isaiah and Jeremiah, he replied, “We don’t know for certain,” adding: “It is possible, because these prophecies have not yet been fulfilled.” Elsewhere, he has suggested that the War of Gog and Magog, an apocalyptic battle prophesied in Ezekiel and Revelation, will involve Jordan, Russia and Iran. He has met personally with the king of Jordan and Mohammed bin Salman. In 2017, he joined an evangelical delegation for a meeting with President Sisi. He is also friendly with Vice President Pence, who showed his family around the West Wing during Trump’s first year in office.

Rosenberg and I rode with Pompeo’s motorcade out to an enormous Coptic cathedral in what is slated to become Cairo’s new administrative capital — a vast desert moonscape where Sisi has promised a reported $45 billion of state-planned development. The cathedral is an official gesture of Sisi’s solidarity with Egypt’s Coptic Christians, who have been frequently targeted by terrorists. Even as it has shifted away from calling out authoritarian rulers like Sisi, the Trump administration has emphasized protecting the rights of “religious minorities,” conspicuously Christians in the Middle East — a priority it calls “religious freedom.”

After touring the cathedral, Pompeo took one question from the traveling pool on the rights of religious minorities and then gave a longer interview, arranged by Rosenberg, with the Christian Broadcasting Network. “Christianity is at the heart of the history of this place here in the Middle East,” he said. “All you got to do is grab a Bible and read the places and the names.” Before returning to the hotel, he and Susan toured a brand-new mosque a short way up the road. Like the church, he said, it was a place where “the Lord is clearly at work.”

Some Democrats have attacked the policy implications of Pompeo’s religiosity.During his confirmation hearing for secretary of state, Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey brought up a 2015 speech that Pompeo gave at Summit Church in Kansas. Speaking with an ease and humor that were missing from his delivery in Cairo, Pompeo had approvingly quoted a pastor who denounced an America where we “worshiped other gods and called it multiculturalism and endorsed perversion and called it an alternative lifestyle.” In response to Booker’s repeatedly demanding a yes-or-no answer to the question of whether he considered homosexuality to be a perversion, Pompeo demurred.

A few days after the Cairo speech, in the midst of a strategic dialogue in Qatar, I had the chance to ask Pompeo about his religious views. I brought up another line from the 2015 speech, given at the invitation of Summit’s pastor at the time, Terry Fox. Near the end, Pompeo spoke of “the Rapture,” a term that doesn’t appear in the New Testament but is associated by some evangelicals with passages that presage the end of the world and the bodily ascension of believers into heaven. “We will continue to fight these battles,” Pompeo said in 2015. “It is a never-ending struggle until that moment, folks, Pastor Fox spoke about. Until the Rapture.”

“There are 40,000-page treatises on Christianity,” Pompeo explained to me in Qatar. “We are not going to be able to begin to scratch the surface of the question that you just asked me. I am sufficiently humble to recognize that my exegesis of the Bible in 30 seconds is going to fail.”

I asked what he meant by the Rapture at the time.

“Look, read the book,” he said. “Capital T, capital B.” He brought up the doctrines of human dignity and the Ten Commandments. Without mentioning the Rapture directly, he circled around to the concept of resurrection. “These are central tenets that form the foundation of the faith of Christianity,” he said. “And the central idea that it is through the grace of God we will all accede to heaven. Those are basic conceptions that people have had in mind for thousands of years.”

Pompeo “has never wavered in his biblical convictions,” Pastor Fox told me in a phone conversation. “There can be a great cost to any politician who stands on biblical principles. Most people will bend and become more moderate in their strong biblical convictions, with marriage and abortion and things like that. He has not done that. He’s stood strong, no matter what the political cost.”

Pompeo, he said, spoke at the church on multiple occasions while in Congress. “We’re proud of him,” Fox said. “He’s not going to force his views on anyone. When he represented Kansas, he represented all people, whether they were Christians or not.”

In his reference to the Rapture, Fox said, Pompeo had meant “staying faithful to the word of God. Stay faithful to your beliefs. Until the Lord comes to take us home. The Lord is coming back, and the Christians will be called to meet him in the air. It’s a reference to the Last Days. That’s what he would have meant by that.”

The most sensitive bilateral meeting on Pompeo’s schedule was in Saudi Arabia, with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Prince Mohammed, also known as M.B.S., is close to Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who sees him as a keystone of a hoped-for Israel-Palestine peace deal. Inconveniently, both for Trump and for the venerable United States-Saudi relationship, M.B.S. also appears to be a murderer. According to the medium-to-high-confidence assessment of the C.I.A., M.B.S. ordered the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident, Washington Post contributor and resident of Virginia; the agency has concluded that Khashoggi was lured to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2 under the pretext of obtaining documents for an impending marriage, then strangled with a plastic bag and cut to pieces with a bone saw. M.B.S.’s responsibility for Khashoggi’s murder is the latest conclusion reached by the United States intelligence community that Trump has been unwilling to accept.

Pompeo made his first trip to the Saudi Royal Court to discuss the Khashoggi murder on Oct. 16. Under previous presidents, such a meeting would most likely have been one on one, with Pompeo’s leverage in the room enhanced by Trump’s absence. But on this day, @realDonaldTrump managed to thrust himself into the center of the world-historical spotlight. Somehow, in the middle of the Pompeo-M.B.S. meeting, Trump himself got on the phone with M.B.S. Almost immediately, he tweeted a readout of their exchange. M.B.S. had “totally denied any knowledge of what took place. … Answers will be forthcoming shortly,” he announced. That was four months ago. Trump said that if M.B.S. knew about the murder, “that would be bad,” and then subsequently that “it could very well be that the crown prince had knowledge of this tragic event.”

Pompeo implied that the call had been his idea. “I wanted to make sure that the president heard directly from the crown prince,” he told me. “It was important that the two of them connect directly.” The most lasting images from the first Pompeo-M.B.S. meeting were photos of Pompeo, smiling broadly as he sat across from M.B.S. and bantered about jet lag. “He was all smiles and happiness, as though it were not a significant issue for an ally to assassinate an American resident and journalist,” says Senator Jeff Merkley, a Democrat from Oregon.

This time, Pompeo seemed intent on at least giving the appearance that M.B.S. didn’t have the White House in his pocket. The Saudi legal process had not yet “hit that threshold of credibility and accountability,” a senior State Department official said during a background call laying out plans for the trip. In Riyadh, the Saudis seemed equally intent on engaging in some chest-thumping. The first sign came moments after landing, when Pompeo was corralled into a four-on-four pull-aside at the airport with M.B.S.’s brother. A spokesman insisted that the meeting was not a surprise, but one of Pompeo’s four, Ambassador David Satterfield, had to dash back across the rugs of the V.I.P. terminal and into the closed chamber where tea was already being poured. The plan had been for Pompeo and M.B.S. to meet that night. We soon learned that the meeting had been pushed back to the following morning.

After two hours of breakfasting and waiting around, the motorcade drove from the hotel to the Saudi Royal Court, arriving at its black steel gates eight minutes before 10 in the morning. We crossed two sets of high inner gates, past an armored vehicle with a gun turret and around a large fountain that flowed beneath an enormous Saudi flag hanging slack in the desert air.

Walking with Pompeo as he entered the Royal Court was Joe Semrad, his low-key and unfailingly polite special assistant, carrying two zippered black briefcases full of Pompeo’s papers. Just inside the entrance, near the X-ray scanner, there was a raised-voice argument with Saudi security about whether the briefcases could remain in Semrad’s possession. The American chargé d’affaires tried to use his Arabic to intercede with a member of the Saudi Royal Guard. “I speak English!” the guard exclaimed. The Saudis prevailed, and the briefcases were sent back to the motorcade. “I didn’t mean to make such a scene,” Semrad told me later. “They were just doing their job, and I was doing mine.”

The interior of the Royal Court has a martial vibe. The octagonal entrance chamber has a model of the old Riyadh fortress at its center. The rugs that lay over the marble floors muffled the sandaled footfalls of the robed and bearded men of the court who stood now in small groups, a safe distance away from the visitors, their heads bent in conversation. Some carried guns; some wore swords. There were no Saudi women to be seen inside the building. The American women dressed modestly, in pants and long-sleeved shirts; they did not cover their heads. Pompeo and his four diplomats were waiting in an antechamber, where they languished for a full 15 minutes before being summoned down a long corridor, smoky with incense, where M.B.S.’s father, King Salman, was waiting. Just as Pompeo extended his right hand for a shake, a courtier relieved the king of his ivory-handled cane.

Later, as M.B.S. walked Pompeo to the exit after a private one on one, a Saudi photographer caught the two men walking in sync. M.B.S. looks calm and thoughtful. Pompeo, mid-stride, grins as though he is in the midst of telling a joke. On his own feed, @SecPompeo wore the solemn face of man seeking, as the tweet put it, “accountability” on Khashoggi. He would repeat that word many times over the coming days as Republicans in Congress continued to indicate that they considered the White House line on Khashoggi to be unacceptable.

“That’s a ridiculous question,” Pompeo said in mid-February, when asked if he believed the CIA’s assessment that M.B.S. was responsible for the killing. Then, without mentioning M.B.S. by name, he repeated the promises that had been the administration’s line since Trump’s October tweet. The Saudi relationship was important. The murder was bad. The investigation was continuing. “Fact sets” were being developed. “We will hold everyone responsible for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi accountable.”

These equivocations made it easy to forget that there had actually been a private conversation between M.B.S. and Pompeo. What happened during their meeting? According to tweets from the Saudi foreign ministry, the two men “reviewed the historic relations between the two friendly countries” and “discussed regional and international developments.” Their side made no mention of Khashoggi.

On Feb. 1, I saw Pompeo for the last time in the Treaty Room outside his office. I tried to pin him down regarding Khashoggi and got nowhere.

“Are you comfortable,” I asked, “in your heart of hearts, that M.B.S. had nothing to do with the death of this man?”

“I know this drives you crazy — I’ve been painfully consistent,” he said, adding: “It’s an outrageous act. It’s unacceptable.”

He said this was the official United States position. I said that I wanted Pompeo’s own position.

“It’s Mike Pompeo’s position too,” he said. “Secretary of state — it’s my position too. We’re going to hold everyone who was responsible for this accountable. Every time the United States government can determine a set of facts, with sufficient confidence, we’re going to hold everyone who was responsible for this accountable. The president has told me that’s my guidance. And, by the way, told others.” He then referenced the sanctions of 17 Saudi officials that had come from the Treasury Department.

“That didn’t sound like a yes or no,” I said. “But I’m happy to leave it — ”

“Yes! The answer is yes. No, the answer is yes. Am I comfortable? Yes.”

“You are comfortable that he had nothing to do with this?”

“No, no, no. No, you — no, you asked if I was comfortable with the U.S. position. At least I understood that to be your question.”

“The question was, Are you sure he had nothing to do with this. Your answer didn’t sound like a yes or a no.”

“I gave you my answer. My answer is we’re going to hold everyone that we determine is responsible for this accountable in an appropriate way, a way that reflects the best of the United States of America.” There was more back-and-forth. Pompeo declined to offer a timeline on when the government would have a categorical answer on M.B.S. “When we know,” he said. “I don’t want to talk about any particular individual,” he said. “We continue to work it.”

In mid-February, after reports that M.B.S. had told an aide he would use “a bullet” on Khashoggi in 2017, I asked Pompeo if he had anything more to say about the murder. His answer, given by email, was almost identical to what he’d told me before. “This is an unacceptable murder,” he said. “President Trump and this administration are committed to holding each individual accountable as we develop fact sets that permit us to do it.”

Arguably Pompeo’s greatest test so far as secretary of state is in Hanoi, Vietnam, where Trump has his second meeting with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un. The meeting is a product of months of intricate negotiations by Pompeo and his team. “Today, if you asked me, I would not say with any conviction that the North Koreans have decided to denuclearize,” says Biegun, the special representative on North Korea. “But our policies are built around the expectation that they can make that decision.”

Last year, Trump set a high bar for success — “the complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization” of North Korea. Gen. James Clapper, the intelligence chief who handled many of the Obama administration’s negotiations with North Korea, is skeptical that Pompeo and Trump can deliver. “The North Koreans are NOT going to denuclearize,” Clapper wrote to me in an email. “Why would they give up what leverage they have, simply because we demand they do so?” When I asked him to give the Trump administration’s performance a letter grade, he said he would give them “an ‘E’ for effort and, at best, an ‘INC,’ as in incomplete, for results.”

“President Trump and I have both been very clear,” Pompeo responded, when I read him Clapper’s critique in early February. “We set about developing a strategy that maximized the likelihood that we would get the outcome that the world wants.”

Biegun points to the rapport between Trump and Kim as a positive sign. “At the leader level, the chemistry was quite good,” he says. “I think it was exactly what it looked like.” But the chemistry between the two leaders carries its own risks. Two issues that could arise in the negotiation are a formal end to the Korean War and the withdrawal of United States troops from the peninsula. There are concerns that the administration might give away the first for too little; and that Trump himself could overrule his subordinates, take South Korea by surprise, and put the second on the table. Success was hard to imagine unless Kim Jong-un could be made to read Trump as an equal, strong and unwavering, with the whole of the United States government both firmly under his control and standing squarely behind him. Pompeo could design the set, write a script and block out seats for the players. But in the end, it would be a one on one, and Trump would most likely be ad-libbing.

When I sat down for my first interview with Pompeo in his office, his open Bible lay between us on the table. It was well used, with many verses highlighted. A Swiss Army knife marked his place at the end of Esther and the beginning of Job, two books with insight into how to serve a difficult boss. In Job, God is the boss, inflicting his whims on a long-suffering employee who doesn’t know that God is doing all this to win a bet with Satan. In Esther, a vain and fickle king nearly succumbs to the influence of a wicked minister before being tamed with great finesse by Queen Esther, who risks death to get his ear.

Along with Vice President Mike Pence and other Trump cabinet members, Pompeo has attended Bible study sessions held in federal offices and led by Ralph Drollinger, the founder of Capitol Ministries. Drollinger has compared Pence to Mordecai, Esther’s uncle and one of the book’s protagonists. Mordecai husbands his influence, remaining loyal to the king even when it looks as if official policy could result in the death of his people. Drollinger has praised Mordecai’s “outward respect for the king, strongly suggesting inward respect, at least for the office”; he “displays a manifest unfaltering loyalty to the country’s civil leader at times when it would have been easy to do otherwise.” Mere displays of loyalty will never suffice. Only an obedient heart can win the king’s favor.

“It informs everything I do,” Pompeo said, when I asked him about the Bible. Seeing the pages in question, I tentatively compared Melania Trump to Queen Esther — both were outsiders married to difficult sovereigns, after all, and the first lady’s trip to the Southern border had seemed to coincide with a softening of Trump’s heart regarding the family-separation policy.

Pompeo absorbed my dubious analogy while looking down at the book on the table. “There are many lessons,” he said.

==

capt pompeo718 919

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/07/11/bolton-mek-and-trump-iran-strategy/

leupp

There are growing indications that the Trump administration plans to use the Mojahedin-e Khalq (People’s Mojahedin of Iran, or MEK) as a key element in its strategy to destabilize Iran preparatory to regime change.

On June 30 Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph Giuliani told the group in Paris: “We are now realistically being able to see an end to the regime in Iran. Trump doesn’t turn his back on freedom fighters.”

On July 1, 2017 John Bolton, former State Department official and Trump supporter, addressed a large gathering of MEK supporters in Paris.

“There is a viable opposition to the rule of the ayatollahs,” he told the enraptured crowd, “and that opposition is centered in this room today…I have said for over 10 years since coming to these events that the declared policy of the United States should be the overthrow of the regime in Tehran. The behavior and the objectives of the regime are not going to change. And therefore the only solution is to change the regime itself. And that’s why before 2019 we here will celebrate in Tehran!”

Yes, the man who has been U.S. National Security Advisor since April 9 predicted to MEK that he would celebrate with them the downfall of the Iranian regime by next year. On May 8 of this year Bolton’s boss withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

So it’s virtually official. MEK freedom fighters will be chief U.S. proxy in the coming confrontation, or rather the ongoing confrontation renewed when Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Iran deal, threatening all countries with sanctions if they so much as buy Iranian oil. They are comparable to the peshmerga of Syria, or the Northern Alliance warlords in Afghanistan, or the motley array of militia that overthrew Gaddafi in Libya with U.S.-NATO support—willing accomplices in a regime-change effort directed from Washington.

Who are these people? MEK was founded in Iran in 1965 as a revolutionary anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist organization dedicated to the violent overthrow of the U.S.-backed regime of the Shah. It sought to produce a synthesis of Shiite Islam and Marxism, an inherently problematic project that has been more or less abandoned, especially as MEK has in recent years courted U.S. officials like Bolton. (A huge number of prominent U.S. officials and former officials have spoken in recent years, often for large fees, at MEK events. They include Howard Dean. Gen. Wesley Clark, Rudolph Giuliani, Porter Goss, Gen. Michael Hayden, Gen. Richard Myers, Bill Richardson, and Gen. Anthony Zinni.)

Embracing urban guerrilla warfare tactics in the 1970s, MEK targeted the regime and the U.S. military presence, conducting many attacks on U.S. personnel and gunning down Lt. Col. Louis Lee Hawkins, a U.S. Army comptroller, in 1973. Its members trained with the PLO and al-Fateh and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Oman.

During the revolution of 1979 that toppled the Shah, MEK was the largest of the radical left parties (if we exclude the Tudeh or Communist Party founded in 1941, dismissed by MEK as “revisionist”). It worked with smaller communist groups, notably Sardedaran (Union of Iranian Communists) founded in the U.S. by Iranian students in 1976 under the strong influence of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA.

Initially, MEK aligned itself with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, whose triumphant return from French exile had met with a rapturous response. They perceived him as a popular nationalist leader. But when he denied its leaders input into the writing of a constitution, and forbade them from running for political office, they revolted. Results of their uprising were disastrous; about 10,000 perished and thousands of its members including the leadership fled to Iraq or France. Hosted by Saddam Hussein, they fought alongside the Iraqi Army against their countrymen throughout the 1980s. This is one reason they are generally, according to plausible reports, despised in Iran even by those who chafe under the mullah’s rule.

Camp Ashraf in Iraq was created by the MEK to accommodate its 3500 soldiers in the country. This camp was taken over by the U.S. following the 2003 invasion. Indeed the U.S. protected MEK from the Iraqis’ intention to deport them and indeed housed them at Camp Fallujah and arranged for some to be relocated to Albania.

In 1975 MEK split into its component parts; that is, a faction arguing rather simply that Marxism, not Islam, is the revolutionary path, and the dominant faction arguing the opposite. This is the MEK that hosts the most reactionary U.S. officials and—after inveighing against Zionism for decades—now cultivates ties with Israeli intelligence. In 1997 it was listed as a “terrorist” organization by the U.S. State Department. The UK and EU soon followed suite. But MEK was delisted as terrorist by Britain in 2008, the EU in 2009, and the U.S. in 2012.

Why? Hillary Clinton determined that MEK had changed its ways and given up terrorism. Plus, MEK was so useful, cooperating as it was and is with U.S. and Israeli intelligence, smuggling intelligence out of Iran, abetting U.S.-Israeli disinformation schemes, maintaining an underground presence in Iran that will be useful (some suppose) when the regime-change moment comes.

Analysts agree that MEK is a very unusual organization. Led by a married couple, Massoud Rajavi and his wife Maryam Rajavi, it imposes strict discipline including life-long celibacy on its members. It forbids them to entertain sexual thoughts. It punishes rules infractions with public shaming and sleep deprivation. It is often termed a cult.

That this group should become a key U.S. ally—as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo virtually declares war on Iran—is truly perplexing. Surely U.S. officials know that MEK is hated in Iran, and that its tactics in Iran have not produced mass support. Other underground opposition parties, such as the National Front of Iran, founded by Mohammed Mossadegh (toppled by the CIA in 1953), will not likely cooperate with them in producing a second regime change. The idea is as wild as Bolton’s idea that Cuba’s pharmaceutical plants are producing biological weapons.

Can it be that Pompeo does not understand the enduring outrage felt among Iranians about that 1953 coup? The U.S. didn’t just “interfere” in somebody else’s election, it toppled a democratically elected prime minister because he had the temerity to try to nationalize the nation’s petroleum industry. The world knows the U.S. interferes in other nations’ politics and electoral processes habitually, and that the “bi-partisan” National Endowment for Democracy “NGO” funnels billions into pro-U.S. forces in countries targeted for “color revolutions.” Only the cable anchors on CNN, MSNBC and Fox seem clueless, wide-eyed, indignant and outraged at the thought that “Russia interfered in OUR election!” As though we, as a people, ever had a real election in 2016.)

Bolton resembles his boss in that he cares nothing for the truth; lies boldly with angry, smug confidence, daring his audience to differ; is a loud bully with an ego and an agenda to which he hopes to commit the president. His main project is the Iranian regime change, much as Iraqi regime was Paul Wolfowitz’s preoccupation from 9/11/2001 to March 2003 when the plot to conduct a war-based-on-lies was finally consummated. (Bolton continues to say: “I still think the decision to overthrow Saddam was correct,” and that the U.S. has the right to overthrow sovereign states at will.)

Bolton has told reporters (who note his changing stance on war with North Korea) that anything he may have said in print or on television in the past is irrelevant now since he is in the service of the president and committed to his policies. But he happily realizes his boss is an air-head, ignorant and impressionable, generally Islamophobic, committed to a hawkish anti-Iran policy because (1) he wants to reverse any Obama policy; (2) he made a campaign promise; (3) he’s slavishly deferential to Binyamin Netanyahu, who wants the U.S. to bomb Iran; and (4) hostility towards Iran invites little opposition in Netanyahu’s fan club, Congress. Bolton has lots to work with there.

Congressional attitudes could change if U.S. secondary sanctions applied on European allied nations further strain the Atlantic Alliance already stressed by the trade wars Trump has unleashed. The EU, Russia and China all need to unite in demanding that the U.S. not only end its threats to attack Iran but respect other nations’ rights to trade with that great, large, relatively wealthy nation. (The IMF ranks Iran as 27th of 191 nations in terms of GDP; that is, it’s among the world’s top 15%. China, UAE, Germany and India are main trade partners.)

As U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo provokes Iran with his arrogant demands—“preconditions” for a U.S. return to the deal, which essentially demand that it grovel at America’s feet—the U.S. provokes the rest of the world too, for multiple reasons. Its demand for allies’ cooperation in its efforts to undermine Tehran conflict with their efforts to improve both diplomatic and trade relations, to say nothing of their hopes for more stability in the region flooding Europe with refugees....

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/senate-approval-mike-pompeos-secretary-state-nomination-would-spell-disaster

hard to think of a worse candidate than Mike Pompeo to lead the State Department. As leaders of national organizations working toward a more just, sustainable, and peaceful world, we are not trying to sound hyperbolic in asserting that Pompeo is a threat to people everywhere and to the survival of the planet. His performance at last week's Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing only confirmed how dangerous he really is.

The Senate's confirmation of Pompeo to lead the CIA was a grave mistake, but thankfully, it is a mistake that can now be rectified. The Senate—particularly the 14 Democrats and one Independent who cast their vote for Pompeo to head the CIA—should make amends and reject Pompeo’s nomination for secretary of state. No senator can now credibly argue that Trump deserves the benefit of the doubt.

The State Department is an entirely different institution from the CIA. Its mandate is vast, with a portfolio of issues ranging from international climate change negotiations to diplomacy to avert war, and from protection of religious freedom to human rights and women’s reproductive health. Given such a massive portfolio, there’s simply no room for the person heading the State Department to be an anti-Muslim, climate-denying warmonger who has ardently defended torture. In other words, that person must not be Mike Pompeo

...

secretary of state is supposed to be the nation’s top diplomat, but Pompeo has a unique disdain for diplomacy. During his hearing last week, he gave no indication that he would push to preserve the Iran nuclear deal, and he has in the past advocated for military strikes on Iran. He also refused to rule out a first strike on North Korea. He is a hawk’s hawk, and his hard-fisted approach to highly sensitive diplomatic issues could undo the best chance we have had in a very long time for foundational peace on the Korean peninsula.

Mike Pompeo’s hawkish tendencies alone would be bad enough, but he is set to join the Cabinet of a president who cavalierly threatens nuclear war and who is now being advised by a national security adviser with views so extreme, he was previously unable to be confirmed by a Republican Senate. Senators hoping to prevent the next war may not be able to stop Donald Trump or John Bolton, but they can help constrain them by rejecting Pompeo's nomination.

Yet as dangerous as the threat of war is now, we are already living with an existential threat to humanity: climate change. On this front as well, Mike Pompeo is intolerably dangerous. He is an unabashed denier of the basic science of climate change. Letting him represent our country in international climate negotiations, as is the responsibility of the secretary of state, is like having a fox guard a henhouse, eat the hens—and then deny that the hens ever existed in the first place.

It is no surprise that Pompeo holds such extreme views on climate change. He owes his political career to the Big Oil billionaire Koch brothers. They not only kick-started his run for the House seat representing Wichita, Kansas, where Koch Industries is headquartered, they also showered him with so much cash that when his tenure ended in Congress, Pompeo was the all-time top recipient of Koch Industry money, according to OpenSecrets.org. In fact, Pompeo is such a scion of the Kochs that the nicknames "Koch Brothers' Congressman" and "the Congressman from Koch" have haunted his political fortunes.

To the detriment of the planet, the Koch's investment in Pompeo has delivered sound dividends. Pompeo described former president Barack Obama's involvement with the U.N. Paris Climate Agreement as "bow(ing) down to radical environmentalists." Further, while National Intelligence Assessments under both Democratic and Republican administrations found that climate change poses a threat to national security, and the Department of Defense characterized climate change as a "threat multiplier," Pompeo told the Senate last year that viewing climate change as a major national security threat is "ignorant, dangerous, and absolutely unbelievable."

As the Senate weighs his nomination, they must also examine his record on human and civil rights. Here too, Mike Pompeo's career and beliefs should be disqualifying. Throughout his decades in the public eye, he has expressed deeply troubling views on the most basic rights of Muslims, LGBTQ individuals and women.Pompeo's underwhelming concession at the April 12 Senate hearing that humans "likely" contribute to climate change comes straight from the climate-denier's playbook. It provides us no comfort and in no way demonstrates that Pompeo sees climate change as the global emergency that it is.

The United States—and the rest of the world—cannot afford to have Mike Pompeo as secretary of state. The Senate must vote down his confirmation

==

omfg, down for the ct then rand paul does his usual fake maverick schtik then cave 180

https://www.democracynow.org/2018/4/27/headlines/senate_confirms_mike_pompeo_as_secretary_of_state

see binney

==

promoted to primary

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Pompeo Changes Tune on Climate After Green Groups Oppose Top Diplomat Nomination

When Mike Pompeo was director of the CIA, there were concerns that his climate change waffling would prevent him from taking it seriously as a national security threat.

A Politico analysis of the Trump team's climate views, reported on by EcoWatch in March, pointed out that the Pentagon had excluded climate change from the 2018 National Defense Strategy, and quoted a 2013 interview in which Pompeo hedged on climate science.

"There's some who think we're warming, there's some who think we're cooling, there's some who think that the last 16 years have shown a pretty stable climate environment," he had said.

But now that Pompeo is seeking Senate confirmation to replace Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State, a role for which an accurate assessment of national security risks is also essential, he is changing his climate tune somewhat.

"[I] believe that the climate is changing, that there's a warming taking place. I'm happy to concede there is likely a human component to that," Pompeo said during his confirmation hearing Thursday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Quartz reported.

He also said that the State Department should work to meet climate-based security threats.

"You're heading in the right direction," Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR), who he had been addressing, said, according to Quartz.

But an Associated Press live-update of the proceedings printed in the Washington Post reported that Democrats found his remarks "insufficient."

During his 2017 Senate hearing to be named CIA director, Pompeo had refused to "get into the details of climate debate and science," Quartz reported.

His most climate-accurate remarks to date come two days after more than 200 environmental groups sent a letter to senators asking them to reject Pompeo for the secretary of state position due to his history of climate change denial, The HIll reported.

"Any Senator who votes in support of his nomination to the important position of Secretary of State is complicit in advancing the Trump/Pompeo pro-fossil fuel, anti-climate agenda," The HIll reported the letter read, in part.

Tillerson, who Pompeo would replace if confirmed, ended up being one of the more climate-friendly members of the Trump administration, despite his former role as CEO of ExxonMobil. He supported staying in the Paris agreement, though he also cut the position of U.S. climate envoy.

Pompeo's updated views on climate might not be enough to win him Tillerson's old gig. Since Republican Senator Rand Paul has already said he would not recommend Pompeo for secretary of state, if the two Democratic senators on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee join him, Pompeo would not get a favorable recommendation overall. Republicans could still bring Pompeo's nomination to a Senate vote without the recommendation of the committee, but it would be an unusual move, CNN reported Thursday.

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==

https://theintercept.com/2017/12/04/trump-white-house-weighing-plans-for-private-spies-to-counter-deep-state-enemies/

THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION is considering a set of proposals developed by Blackwater founder Erik Prince and a retired CIA officer — with assistance from Oliver North, a key figure in the Iran-Contra scandal — to provide CIA Director Mike Pompeo and the White House with a global, private spy network that would circumvent official U.S. intelligence agencies, according to several current and former U.S. intelligence officials and others familiar with the proposals. The sources say the plans have been pitched to the White House as a means of countering “deep state” enemies in the intelligence community seeking to undermine Donald Trump’s presidency.

The creation of such a program raises the possibility that the effort would be used to create an intelligence apparatus to justify the Trump administration’s political agenda.

“Pompeo can’t trust the CIA bureaucracy, so we need to create this thing that reports just directly to him,” said a former senior U.S. intelligence official with firsthand knowledge of the proposals, in describing White House discussions. “It is a direct-action arm, totally off the books,” this person said, meaning the intelligence collected would not be shared with the rest of the CIA or the larger intelligence community. “The whole point is this is supposed to report to the president and Pompeo directly.”

North, who appears frequently on Trump’s favorite TV network, Fox News, was enlisted to help sell the effort to the administration. He was the “ideological leader” brought in to lend credibility, said the former senior intelligence official.

Some of the individuals involved with the proposals secretly met with major Trump donors asking them to help finance operations before any official contracts were signed.

The proposals would utilize an army of spies with no official cover in several countries deemed “denied areas” for current American intelligence personnel, including North Korea and Iran. The White House has also considered creating a new global rendition unit meant to capture terrorist suspects around the world, as well as a propaganda campaign in the Middle East and Europe to combat Islamic extremism and Iran.

“I can find no evidence that this ever came to the attention of anyone at the NSC or [White House] at all,” wrote Michael N. Anton, a spokesperson for the National Security Council, in an email. “The White House does not and would not support such a proposal.” But a current U.S. intelligence official appeared to contradict that assertion, stating that the various proposals were first pitched at the White House before being delivered to the CIA. The Intercept reached out to several senior officials that sources said had been briefed on the plans by Prince, including Vice President Mike Pence. His spokesperson wrote there was “no record of [Prince] ever having met with or briefed the VP.” North did not respond to a request for comment.

According to two former senior intelligence officials, Pompeo has embraced the plan and lobbied the White House to approve the contract. Asked for comment, a CIA spokesperson said, “You have been provided wildly inaccurate information by people peddling an agenda.”

At the heart of the scheme being considered by the White House are Blackwater founder Erik Prince and his longtime associate, CIA veteran John R. Maguire, who currently works for the intelligence contractor Amyntor Group. Maguire also served on Trump’s transition team. Amyntor’s role was first reported by BuzzFeed News.

Michael Barry, who was recently named NSC senior director for intelligence programs, worked closely with Prince on a CIA assassination program during the Bush administration.

Prince and Maguire deny they are working together. Those assertions, however, are challenged by current and former U.S. officials and Trump donors who say the two men were collaborating.

As with many arrangements in the world of CIA contracting and clandestine operations, details of who is in charge of various proposals are murky by design and change depending on which players are speaking. An Amyntor official said Prince was not “formally linked to any contract proposal by Amyntor.” In an email, Prince rejected the suggestion that he was involved with the proposals. When asked if he has knowledge of this project, Prince replied: “I was/am not part of any of those alleged efforts.”

The former senior intelligence official with direct knowledge of the efforts scoffed at Prince’s denials. “Erik’s proposal had no company names on the slides,” this person said, “but there is no doubt that Prince and Maguire were working together.”

Prince and Maguire have a long professional relationship. Maguire recently completed a stint as a consultant with Prince’s company, Frontier Services Group, a Hong Kong-based security and logistics company partially owned by the Chinese government. FSG has no known connections to the private spy plan.

Prince has strong ties to the Trump administration: His sister Betsy DeVos is secretary of education, he was a major donor to the Trump election campaign, and he advised the transition team on intelligence and defense appointments, as The Intercept has previously reported. Prince has also contributed to Pence’s campaigns.

Maguire spent more than two decades as a paramilitary officer in the CIA, including tours in Central America working with the Contras. He has extensive experience in the Middle East, where he helped plan the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Maguire and Prince met together in September with a senior CIA official at a Virginia restaurant to discuss privatizing the war in Afghanistan.

Prince told a top fundraiser that Maguire was working on part of his Afghanistan plan, characterizing it as the first part of a multi-pronged program. The fundraiser added that Prince never directly asked him for money. But sources close to the project say Maguire did seek private funding for Amyntor’s efforts until a CIA contract materialized. “They’ve been going around asking for a bridge loan to float their operations until the CIA says yes,” said a person who has been briefed on the fundraising efforts.

Beginning last spring and into the summer, Maguire and a group of Amyntor representatives began asking Trump donors to support their intelligence efforts in Afghanistan, the initial piece of what they hoped would be a broader program. Some Trump fundraisers were asked to provide introductions to companies and wealthy clients who would then hire Amyntor for economic intelligence contracts. Maguire explained that some of the profit from those business deals would fund their foreign intelligence collection. Others were asked to give money outright.

“[Maguire] said there were people inside the CIA who joined in the previous eight years [under Obama] and inside the government, and they were failing to give the president the intelligence he needed,” said a person who was pitched by Maguire and other Amyntor personnel. To support his claim, Maguire told at least two people that National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, in coordination with a top official at the National Security Agency, authorized surveillance of Steven Bannon and Trump family members, including Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump. Adding to these unsubstantiated claims, Maguire told the potential donors he also had evidence McMaster used a burner phone to send information gathered through the surveillance to a facility in Cyprus owned by George Soros.

Amyntor employees took potential donors to a suite in the Trump Hotel in Washington, which they claimed was set up to conduct “secure communications.” Some White House staff and Trump campaign supporters came to refer to the suite as “the tinfoil room,” according to one person who visited the suite. This account was confirmed by another source to whom the room was described. “John [Maguire] was certain that the deep state was going to kick the president out of office within a year,” said a person who discussed it with Maguire. “These guys said they were protecting the president.”

Maguire and others at Amyntor have boasted that they have already sent intelligence reports to Pompeo.

...

PRINCE, MAGUIRE, AND North have long shared a common frustration over the failure of the U.S. government to bring two suspects from a high-profile terrorist event in the 1980s to justice. Last summer, Maguire discussed rendering the suspects with White House officials after learning the men had been located in the Middle East. Despite having no U.S. government approval, associates of Maguire began working on a snatch operation earlier this year, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Prince colleague.

Maguire, concerned that the FBI would not take action, made an offer to senior White House officials. The message, according to a person with direct knowledge of the rendition plan, was: “We’re going to go get these guys and bring them to the U.S. Who should we hand them over to?”

The rendition plan was meant to be a demonstration that Maguire and his associates had an active intelligence network and the capability to grab suspects around the world. Prince maintains he has nothing to do with that plan. But according to a source with extensive knowledge of Prince’s networks, Prince was working in parallel to assemble a team to help apprehend the men.

According to two people who have worked extensively with Prince in recent years, Prince has been contacting former Blackwater personnel who worked on a post-9/11 era CIA assassination program targeting Al Qaeda operatives. That program, which the Bush White House prohibited the CIA from disclosing to congressional intelligence committees, was revealed to Congress in 2009 by then-CIA Director Leon Panetta. The CIA says the program did not result in any assassinations.

Among the capabilities Prince offers is a network of deniable assets —  spies, fixers, foreign intelligence agents — spread across the globe that could be used by the White House. “You pick any country in the world Erik’s been in, and it’s there,” said a longtime Prince associate. “They’re a network of very dark individuals.” The associate, who has worked extensively with Prince, then began rattling off places where the private spies and paramilitaries already operate — Saudi Arabia, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, “all across North Africa.”

Opaque contracting arrangements are typical for Prince, who became a lightning rod in his Blackwater days and now prefers to minimize controversy by operating in the shadows, disguising his involvement in sensitive operations with layers of subcontractors and elaborately crafted legal structures. “That’s his exact MO,” said the longtime Prince associate, adding that Prince consistently attempts to ensure plausible deniability of his role in U.S. and foreign government contracts.

“I have zero to do with any such effort and saying that I did/do would be categorically false,” Prince said in his email to The Intercept. “Knowingly publishing false information exposes you to civil legal action. The only effort I’ve quite publicly pitched is an alternative to Afghanistan.”

THE INTELLIGENCE AND covert action program would mark an unorthodox return to government service for Prince, the onetime CIA contractor who built a mercenary force that became notorious during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It would also raise new questions about Prince’s foreign entanglements since he sold Blackwater.

In addition to Prince’s former assassination network, the hidden cadre of spies with no official cover — NOCs in CIA jargon — includes the assets of another key player in the Iran-Contra affair, CIA Officer Duane Clarridge, who died in 2016. Maguire, who worked under Clarridge as a young CIA paramilitary in Central America during the mid-1980s, took over the network of contract spies, who operate mostly in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Last summer, as Prince pushed his public proposal to privatize the war in Afghanistan, he and Maguire had broader ambitions, according to a person involved in the discussions. “The goal was to eventually get their network of NOCs worldwide, but they initially started with Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

“Prince seems to be firing on a lot of cylinders and pitching overt and covert plans,” said a current intelligence officer who has closely monitored Prince’s career and been briefed on several of Prince’s recent efforts, including the proposals to Pompeo. The official declined to discuss details of the plans but pointed to Prince’s much-discussed pitch to privatize the war in Afghanistan as a smokescreen for offering other more controversial programs and operations.

Prince’s Afghanistan plan, which received substantial media attention and got a hearing at the highest levels of the Trump administration, “was brilliant because it changed the narrative and made him relevant,” the officer said, referring to Prince’s scandal- and investigation-plagued career at Blackwater. The officer also added that the very public Afghanistan pitch, replete with cable news interviews and op-eds, provided a legitimate reason “to justify meeting with people” at the White House, CIA, or other government agencies.

“Erik has no hobbies,” said the longtime Prince associate. “Counterterrorism is his hobby.”

In some ways, these plans mirror operations Prince led during the Bush-Cheney administration. When Prince was running Blackwater, he and a former CIA paramilitary officer, Enrique Prado, set up a global network of foreign operatives, offering their “deniability” as a “big plus” for potential Blackwater customers, according to internal company communications.

In a 2007 email, with the subject “Possible Opportunity in DEA—READ AND DELETE,” Prado sought to pitch the network to the Drug Enforcement Administration, bragging that Blackwater had developed “a rapidly growing, worldwide network of folks that can do everything from surveillance to ground truth to disruption operations.” He added, “These are all foreign nationals (except for a few cases where US persons are the conduit but no longer ‘play’ on the street), so deniability is built in and should be a big plus.”

The longtime Prince associate said that the nexus of deniable assets has never gone away. “The NOC network is already there. It already exists for the better part of 15 years now,” he said.

Prince has long admired North and viewed his role in Iran-Contra as heroic, said the Prince associate. In 2007, Prince testified defiantly before Congress following the Nisour Square massacre in Baghdad, in which Blackwater operatives gunned down 17 Iraqi civilians, including women and children. Shortly after his testimony, Prince’s longtime friend, conservative California Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, praised the Blackwater chief. “Prince,” Rohrabacher said, “is on his way to being an American hero just like Ollie North was.”

North, a Marine lieutenant colonel on the Reagan National Security Council, oversaw a scheme to divert proceeds from illicit arms sales to Iran to Contra death squads in Nicaragua. The resulting scandal became known as the Iran-Contra affair, and North was convicted of three felonies, though these convictions were later thrown out.

Both North and Maguire attended a small reception in 2014 celebrating Prince’s third marriage — to his former spokesperson Stacy DeLuke. “It was an intimate affair,” said the Prince associate. “Only Erik’s closest friends were invited to that reception.” On election night in 2016, DeLuke posted photos on social media from inside Trump headquarters.

On November 30, Prince testified behind closed doors before the House Intelligence Committee about his January trip to the Seychelles to meet with Mohammad bin Zayed, crown prince of Abu Dhabi, and a Russian fund manager close to Vladimir Putin. According to the Washington Post, Prince presented himself as an unofficial envoy of President-elect Trump. The Intercept reported last week that the fund manager was Kirill Dmitriev, head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund. Prince repeatedly said that he did not remember the identity of the Russian, but on Thursday, in testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, Prince admitted that he did in fact meet with Dmitriev.

Prince may have revealed part of his strategy in a July 2016 radio interview with Steve Bannon, when he proposed recreating the CIA’s Phoenix Program, an assassination ring used in the Vietnam War, to battle the Islamic State. Prince said in the interview that the program would be used to kill or capture “the funders of Islamic terror, the wealthy radical Islamist billionaires funding it from the Middle East.”

==

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/13032018/mike-pompeo-koch-brothers-secretary-state-climate-change-rex-tillerson-exxon?

With Rex Tillerson's firing, President Donald Trump's new choice for Secretary of State—Mike Pompeo, a former Kansas congressman currently serving as director of the CIA—signals a hardening stance against international engagement on climate change.

Pompeo's career in business and politics was tightly intertwined with the oil magnate Koch brothers, and he has shown a deep disregard for climate science and the need to address the climate crisis.

As a congressman, Pompeo said the Paris climate agreement amounted to "bow(ing) down to radical environmentalists," and he blasted President Barack Obama for what Pompeo called a "perverse fixation on achieving his economically harmful environmental agenda" in the 2015 talks.

Pompeo's past statements indicate a far more recalcitrant stance than Tillerson's.

Tillerson, a longtime oil executive, argued that the U.S. should keep a "seat at the table" in global climate change talks and unsuccessfully sought to persuade Trump to stay in the Paris accord. Environmentalists noted the irony that the best advocate of their cause in the Trump administration—albeit never an effective one—was the former CEO of Exxon.

"In a strange kind of way, [Tillerson's] experience at Exxon dealing with energy and heads of state and climate gave him a deeper understanding of the diplomatic, economic and political dimensions of the issue," said Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy for the Union of Concerned Scientists. "From what we know, that does not seem to be the case with Pompeo."

As a congressman, Pompeo described the new 2015 Paris climate pact as a "costly burden" to the United States. "Congress must also do all in our power to fight against this damaging climate change proposal and pursue policies that support American energy, create new jobs and power our economy," he said.

During the hearings that led to his confirmation as CIA director last year, Pompeo dodged a direct answer on his views on climate change, but he made clear—as Tillerson did during his own confirmation hearing—that he did not view it as a national security issue.

"I, frankly, as the director of CIA, would prefer today not to get into the details of climate debate and science," he said in response to questions from Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) "It just seems—my role is going to be so different and unique from that. It is gonna be to work alongside warriors keeping Americans safe."

Meyer predicted that Pompeo will not be able to evade discussing his views on climate change so easily at his next confirmation hearing, before the Senate Foreign Relations committee, which is chaired by retiring Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.).

Pompeo's Koch Brothers Connections

Pompeo, who graduated first in his class at West Point and served in the mechanized cavalry during the Gulf War, earned a law degree at Harvard and built a business career as founder of an aerospace and security firm with an investment from Koch Industries. He later became president of the oilfield services firm Sentry International, which partnered with Koch.

Pompeo was among the Tea Party class that was swept into office in 2010 and helped the Republicans regain control of the U.S. House. The Koch advocacy group Americans for Prosperity was among the right-wing groups that spent tens of thousands of dollars to attack his opponent in the primary and secured him the Republican nomination. Every year after that, the Kansas congressman was the No. 1 recipient of money from the political action committee of Wichita-based Koch Industries, with more than $375,000 in contributions.

Pompeo's close ties to the Koch brothers and his dismal environmental voting record have raised alarm bells with climate advocates. Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune said replacing Tillerson with Pompeo amounts to turning "our global diplomatic efforts over from Exxon to the Koch Brothers."

"Every single other world leader accepts climate science, and every single other nation wants to be a part of the Paris Agreement, yet Trump wants to give the stewardship of our international relations to an extremist," Brune said.

Tiernan Sittenfeld, senior vice president of government affairs for the League of Conservation Voters, said that, "with a history of questioning the science of climate change, a close relationship with the polluter Koch brothers and lifetime LCV score of 4 percent, Mike Pompeo has no business becoming the next secretary of state."

Influence Over Future Climate Efforts

If Pompeo is confirmed, one of the big questions is how much attention he will give to climate change at all, given the pressure of addressing upcoming talks with North Korea and the international trade disputes arising in the wake of Trump's tariff decisions, Meyer said.

Meyer, who has more than 30 years of experience as an observer of international climate talks, described Tillerson's approach as akin to "benign neglect."

"He allowed career diplomats to continue to engage on issues that have had bipartisan support in the past, without backing away from the Trump administration's stand," Meyer said. For example, allowing them to argue for greater transparency and reporting, and against the divide between developing and developed nations.

"To me, it's an open question whether Pompeo will continue that, or does he actively try to shift U.S. policy?" Meyer said.

Harvard economist Robert Stavins writes: "Perhaps Mr. Tillerson should be credited for the fact that the State Department has at least remained engaged in the climate change negotiations. ... However, such continued bureaucratic involvement cannot make up for the fact that the U.S. is disengaged at political levels, which must be attributed—at least in part—to Tillerson's ineffectiveness in tilting the president toward a more sensible path on climate change policy."

PUBLISHED UNDER:

POLITICS CLIMATE DENIAL GLOBAL CLIMATE TREATY

CLIMATE CHANGE REX TILLERSON MIKE POMPEO

they're baaaaack

Once upon a time there were hopes that Donald Trump as president might pursue a different kind of American foreign policy; call it non-interventionist, or isolationist, or transactional.

He certainly broke with conventional Washington discourse. When the foreign policy establishment of Washington almost unanimously urged President Obama in September 2013 to punish the Syrian government for a chemical gas attack, Trump tweeted, “Do not attack Syria” three times in two days.

Trump denounced previous administrations, Democratic and Republican, for casting America as the "policeman of the world.” He criticized President George W. Bush even more harshly than many liberal critics did. ...No longer. For the first year of his presidency, Trump intensified U.S. military action in every war theater he inherited from Obama. He sent more troops to Afghanistan. He dropped more bombs on Somalia than Obama and Bush combined. He loosened the rules of engagement in Syria. And he supplied Saudi Arabia with the bombs to besiege the civilians of Yemen.

Only on the issue of Iran did Trump exercise a degree of restraint. While he repeatedly disparaged the 2015 international agreement on Iran’s nuclear program, he deferred to the triumvirate of his national security advisers: Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Defense Secretary James Mattis and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster.

They all told Trump that international inspectors confirm Iran is abiding by the terms of the deal, and the results serve American security interests by blocking Iran’s path to a nuclear weapon at least until 2025.

But Tillerson’s "differences" with Trump on Iran chafed the president and finally cost Tillerson his job.

Neo-Continuity"When you look at the Iran deal, I thought it was terrible,” Trump said of Tillerson Tuesday. “He thought it was okay. I wanted to either break it or do something, he felt a little differently.”

Trump is now moving toward renouncing the deal in May, a move Pompeo has long advocated. Along the way, Trump is adopting the worldview of the neoconservatives he once scorned.

“For anybody who thought that Trump was bluffing about his May 12 deadline to fix the deal or nix it, the appointment of Mike Pompeo as secretary of state should be a wake-up call,” said Mark Dubowitz, an executive at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which has close ties to the Trump administration.

The foundation, created in 2001, embodies the continuity between the neoconservative policies of the Bush administration and the Trump administration. Founded by a “group of visionary philanthropists and policymakers who understood the threat facing America, Israel and the West,” the foundation's advisers include former Sen. Joe Lieberman, columnists Bret Stephens and Charles Krauthammer, and neoconservative guru William Kristol.

The personnel has changed—Kristol is now a Never Trump conservative—but the song of “regime change” in Iran remains the same.Even before the invasion of Iraq, the foundation’s ideologues were dreaming of invading Iran. “Everyone talks about going to Baghdad,” said one British official of the neoconservatives. "Real men talk about going to Tehran."

“The potential for a democratic transition exists in Iran, where such aspirations have been growing for over 100 years,” Reuel Marc Gerecht, senior fellow at the foundation, wrote last week in the Wall Street Journal. “As regime-shaking street protests have repeatedly revealed, the country is a volcano. We want it to erupt. For the U.S. and the Middle East, sooner is better than later.”

The ostensible goal of reaching a better agreement with Iran cannot conceal a larger ambition. In 2016, Pompeo said, “Congress must act to change Iranian behavior, and ultimately, the Iranian regime."

Pompeo, much more than Tillerson, identifies with Israel, which has sought to kill the Iran agreement even while it was being negotiated. He was much more energetic than Tillerson in cultivating the Persian Gulf oil states that feel most threatened by Iran.

Jim Lobe notes that Pompeo met with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia in December to promote an anti-Iran coalition of Israel and the Gulf Arab states. The Jerusalem-Riyadh axis wants to enlist the United States in their campaign to confront and disrupt Iran.

“We absolutely need Sunni partners,” Pompeo said in a talk at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute. “This administration has broadly reached out to Sunni countries all throughout the Middle East to form coalitions… not only against ISIS, but against Iran as well.”

Enter Bolton?

“Tillerson’s dismissal has also deepened speculation about the departure of the national-security adviser, General H. R. McMaster,” says Robin Wright of the New Yorker. “The former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, an über-hawk on foreign policy, visited the White House last week; Republicans in previous administrations told me that he is an increasingly likely candidate to replace McMaster, whose long-winded lectures Trump has grumbled about.”

Bolton's policy goals are not subtle. In a 2015 New York Times opinion column, he advocated bombing Iran immediately.

Trump’s firing of Tillerson and his chumminess with Bolton is a reminder that the president once harbored the belief that instigating war with Iran would be a good move for a president in need of a boost at the polls.

In 2011 and 2012, Trump tweeted six times that Obama was going to attack Iran in order to win the election.

...[tweets]

https://www.alternet.org/return-neoconservatives-trump-administration

==

Tillerson's troubled tenure at the State Department has been marked by frequent clashes with President Trumpover policy as well as fierce opposition from career diplomats in the department. CIA director Mike Pompeo is thought to be the top choice to replace Tillerson. Unlike Tillerson, who paid some lip service to climate science and occasionally stood at odds with the White House on international action, Pompeo has an extensive record of climate denial, once calling the assertion that climate change is a national security threat "ignorant, dangerous and absolutely unbelievable."

==

https://www.ecowatch.com/fossil-fuels-advocate-mike-pompeo-may-replace-exxonmobil-ceo-rex-tillerson-as-secretary-of-state-2514044018.html

Fossil Fuels Advocate Mike Pompeo May Replace ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State

The White House is readying a plan to push out former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State in the coming weeks, multiple outlets reported Thursday.

Tillerson's troubled tenure at the State Department has been marked by frequent clashes with President Trumpover policy as well as fierce opposition from career diplomats in the department. CIA director Mike Pompeo is thought to be the top choice to replace Tillerson. Unlike Tillerson, who paid some lip service to climate science and occasionally stood at odds with the White House on international action, Pompeo has an extensive record of climate denial, once calling the assertion that climate change is a national security threat "ignorant, dangerous and absolutely unbelievable."

==

According to an investigation by Foreign Policy into changes in the intelligence community under President Donald Trump, the CIA has set aside plans to diversify and has become more white and more Christian under new director Mike Pompeo.

Noting the Pompeo, a former Republican congressman from Kansas,  is a self-professed evangelical, the report states that the new director once claimed, Islamist terrorists will “continue to press against us until we make sure that we pray and stand and fight and make sure that we know that Jesus Christ is our savior is truly the only solution for our world.”

Insiders—many of whom are afraid to come forward—say Pompeo’s religious beliefs are becoming part of CIA dogma to the dismay of longtime employees.

“According to four sources familiar with the matter, Pompeo, who attends weekly Bible studies held in government buildings, referenced God and Christianity repeatedly in his first all-hands speech and in a recent trip report while traveling overseas,” the report states, adding that since taking over, Pompeo has also set about establishing a chaplaincy on the CIA campus.

A spokesperson for the CIA defended the move, saying, “Director Pompeo is a man of faith. The idea that he should not practice his faith because he is Director of CIA is absurd.”

According to Michael Weinstein, founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, he is being flooded with complaints about the creeping evangelical Christianity that is beginning to pervade the intelligence agency.

Weinstein notes that insiders are afraid to speak up, stating, “They don’t typically file formal complaints within the government. But certain things are making them especially uncomfortable, such as officials signing off with the phrase ‘have a blessed day.’ That’s something “straight out of The Handmaid’s Tale.”

“In the intelligence community, we see supervisors wanting to hold Bible studies during duty hours [and] inviting lower-ranking individuals to their homes for Bible studies,” Weinstein  continued. “Our clients at CIA feel extremely isolated in a way they have not felt before.”

The CIA dismissed complaints about the Christian influence at the agency, saying they are staying true to their mission.

“They demonstrate their commitment to the diversity required to achieve that mission in the most important way possible: by living the creed of crushing our adversaries by hiring and training the best spies the world will ever know,” a statement asserted.

Tom Boggioni

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176295/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_the_making_of_a_pariah_nation/#more

big pict status quo:

...

Meanwhile, at home, despite all that wealth, despite billionaires galore, including the one running for president, despite the transnational corporate heaven inhabited by Google and Facebook and Apple and the rest of the crew, parts of this country and its infrastructure were starting to feel distinctly (to use a word from another universe) Third Worldish.  He sensed that, too.  He regularly said things like this: “We spent six trillion dollars in the Middle East, we got nothing… And we have an obsolete plane system. We have obsolete airports. We have obsolete trains. We have bad roads. Airports.”  And this: “Our airports are like from a third-world country.”  And on the nation’s crumbling infrastructure, he couldn’t have been more on the mark.

In parts of the U.S., white working-class and middle-class Americans could sense that the future was no longer theirs, that their children would not have a shot at what they had had, that they themselves increasingly didn’t have a shot at what they had had.  The American Dream seemed to be gaining an almost nightmarish sheen, given that the real value of the average wage of a worker hadn’t increased since the 1970s; that the cost of a college education had gone through the roof and the educational debt burden for children with dreams of getting ahead was now staggering; that unions were cratering; that income inequality was at a historic high; and... well, you know the story, really you do.  In essence, for them the famed American Dream seemed ever more like someone else’s trademarked property.

Indispensable? Exceptional? This country? Not anymore. Not as they were experiencing it.

And because of that, Donald Trump won the lottery.  He answered the $64,000 question.  (If you’re not of a certain age, Google it, but believe me it’s a reference in our president’s memory book.)  He entered the Oval Office with almost 50% of the vote and a fervent base of support for his promised program of doing it all over again, 1950s-style....

Despite the mainstream pieties of the moment about the nature of the system Donald Trump appears to be dismantling in Europe and elsewhere, it was anything but either terribly “liberal” or particularly peaceable.  Wars, invasions, occupations, the undermining or overthrow of governments, brutal acts and conflicts of every sort succeeded one another in the years of American glory.  Past administrations in Washington had a notorious weakness for autocrats, just as Donald Trump does today.  They regularly had less than no respect for democracy if, from Iran to Guatemala to Chile, the will of the people seemed to stand in Washington’s way.  (It is, as Vladimir Putin has been only too happy to point out of late, an irony of our moment that the country that has undermined or overthrown or meddled in more electoral systems than any other is in a total snit over the possibility that one of its own elections was meddled with.)  To enforce their global system, Americans never shied away from torture, black sites, death squads, assassinations, and other grim practices.  In those years, the U.S. planted its military on close to 1,000 overseas military bases, garrisoning the planet as no other country ever had.

Nonetheless, the cancelling of the Trans Pacific Partnership trade deal, the withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, threats against NAFTA, the undermining of NATO, the promise of protective tariffs on foreign goods (and the possible trade wars that might go with them) could go a long way toward dismantling the American global system of soft power and economic dominance as it has existed in these last decades.  If such acts and others like them prove effective in the months and years to come, they will leave only one kind of power in the American global quiver: hard military power, and its handmaiden, the kind of covert power Washington, through the CIA in particular, has long specialized in. If America’s alliances crack open and its soft power becomes too angry or edgy to pass for dominant power anymore, its massive machinery of destruction will still be left, including its vast nuclear arsenal.  While, in the Trump era, a drive to cut domestic spending of every sort is evident, more money is still slated to go to the military, already funded at levels not reached by combinations of other major powers.

Given the last 15 years of history, it’s not hard to imagine what’s likely to result from the further elevation of military power: disaster.  This is especially true because Donald Trump has appointed to key positions in his administration a crew of generals who spent the last decade and a half fighting America’s catastrophic wars across the Greater Middle East.  They are not only notoriously incapable of thinking outside the box about the application of military power, but faced with the crisis of failed wars and failing states, of spreading terror movements and a growing refugee crisis across that crucial region, they can evidently only imagine one solution to just about any problem: more of the same.  More troops, more mini-surges, more military trainers and advisers, more air strikes, more drone strikes... more.

After a decade and a half of such thinking we already know perfectly well where this ends -- in further failure, more chaos and suffering, but above all in an inability of the U.S. to effectively apply its hard power anywhere in any way that doesn’t make matters worse.  Since, in addition, the Trump administration is filled with Iranophobes, including a president who has only recently fused himself to the Saudi royal family in an attempt to further isolate and undermine Iran, the possibility that a military-first version of American foreign policy will spread further is only growing.

Such “more” thinking is typical as well of much of the rest of the cast of characters now in key positions in the Trump administration. Take the CIA, for instance.  Under its new director, Mike Pompeo (distinctly a “more” kind of guy and an Iranophobe of the first order), two key positions have reportedly been filled: a new chief of counterterrorism and a new head of Iran operations (recently identified as Michael D’Andrea, an Agency hardliner with the nickname “the Dark Prince”).  Here’s how Matthew Rosenberg and Adam Goldman of the New York Times recently described their similar approaches to their jobs (my emphasis added):

“Mr. D’Andrea’s new role is one of a number of moves inside the spy agency that signal a more muscular approach to covert operations under the leadership of Mike Pompeo, the conservative Republican and former congressman, the officials said. The agency also recently named a new chief of counterterrorism, who has begun pushing for greater latitude to strike militants.”

In other words, more! ...

==

==

missle and MOAB press cheers; wikileake assange Jeff sessions pompeo

...

==

https://www.democracynow.org/2017/4/21/headlines/cnn_trump_administration_seeks_to_arrest_wikileakss_julian_assange

CNN is reporting the Trump administration has prepared an arrest warrant for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. At a Thursday news conference, Attorney General Jeff Sessions confirmed that the Justice Department is seeking to put Assange in jail.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions: "We have professionals that have been in the security business of the United States for many years that are shocked by the number of leaks. And some of them are quite serious. So, yes, it is a priority. We’ve already begun to step up our efforts. And whenever a case can be made, we will seek to put people in jail."

Last week, CIA chief Mike Pompeo blasted WikiLeaks as a "hostile intelligence service," calling Julian Assange and his supporters "demons." That’s despite Pompeo’s praise for WikiLeaks on Twitter last year and despite this comment from Donald Trump on the campaign trail last October.

Donald Trump: "This just came out. This just came out. WikiLeaks! I love WikiLeaks!"

We’ll have more on the Trump administration’s plans to seek the arrest of Julian Assange after headlines. We’ll speak with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, co-founder of The Intercept.

==

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/meet-mike-pompeo-far-right-christian-zealot-who-will-lead-trumps-cia

One of the many side stories that has been lost in the chaos of the Trump transition is the fact that far-right Islamophobe Frank Gaffney has been serving as a foreign policy adviser. Considering President-elect Donald Trump’s views about Muslims, this isn’t too surprising.

Trump’s shallow understanding of the issue of Islamist extremism has obviously been gleaned from the right-wing fever swamps and Gaffney owns that end of the bog. (The Southern Poverty Law Center has posted a full Gaffney dossier.)

But with all the excitement over Trump’s various mounting scandals, Gaffney’s influence has flown under the radar, at least until this week. That’s when one of his close associates went to Capitol Hill to testify at his CIA director confirmation hearing. That’s right, Trump’s nominee to run the Central Intelligence Agency, Rep. Mike Pompeo of Kansas, is a Gaffney guy.

Michelle Goldberg in Slate delved into Pompeo’s ultra-conservative religious beliefs, which clearly inform his ideas about Islam. And it led him to an alliance with Gaffney, who is so extreme that he believes Grover Norquist is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood who has infiltrated the National Rifle Association. Gaffney is so far out there that he was banned from the Conservative Political Action Conference for insisting that its board was similarly tainted. According to Goldberg, Trump’s CIA director nominee appears frequently on Pompeo’s radio show:

Gaffney once called Pompeo “one of the most intelligent men I know in public life,” and the two see the world similarly. In February 2015, they spoke about President Obama’s use of the term “violent extremism” instead of “radical Islam,” a linguistic choice that some on the right see as a secret message of solidarity with jihad. Gaffney suggested that Obama might be conveying “an affinity” for ISIS’s cause, if not all its tactics: “the raising up of the Muslim Ummah, a grand rebalancing of America’s role in the world.” Pompeo relied, “Frank, every place you stare at the president’s policies and statements, you see what you just described . . .  every policy of this administration has treated America as if we are the problem and not the solution.”

While we have no word on Pompeo’s position about Grover Norquist, Pompeo has told Gaffney on his show that he believes “there are organizations and networks here in the United States tied to radical Islam in deep and fundamental ways. They’re not just in places like Libya and Syria and Iraq, but in places like Coldwater, Kansas, and small towns all throughout America.”

Pompeo is a deeply conservative evangelical Christian who has said, “America had worshipped other Gods and called it multiculturalism. We’d endorsed perversion and called it an alternative lifestyle.” He believes politics is “a never-ending struggle . . . until the rapture.”

He does not sound like the type of person one normally associates with the intelligence community. But this is Trump’s administration, and Trump has promised to shake things up. An apocalyptic Islamophobic fanatic at the head of CIA will no doubt bring change to the agency.

Before the hearings began on Thursday, I had assumed that one of the main attractions for Trump of having Pompeo fill the job must have been his enthusiastic support for CIA torture. Pompeo was on the record after the Senate Select Intelligence Committee’s  report as being fully supportive of the program:

“Our men and women who were tasked to keep us safe in the aftermath of 9/11 — our military and our intelligence warriors — are heroes, not pawns in some liberal game being played by the ACLU and Senator Feinstein,” Pompeo said in a statement on Dec. 9, 2014. “These men and women are not torturers, they are patriots. The programs being used were within the law, within the constitution, and conducted with the full knowledge [of] Senator Feinstein. If any individual did operate outside of the program’s legal framework, I would expect them to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”

They were done under secret legal findings and were not within the Constitution, but that’s another story. The fact is that Pompeo has clearly been an advocate of torture and his new boss, Donald Trump, is ecstatic about it, as his statements indicate:

“They asked me, What do you think about waterboarding, Mr. Trump?’ I said I love it. I love it, I think it’s great. And I said the only thing is, we should make it much tougher than waterboarding, and if you don’t think it works folks, you’re wrong.”

Trump has also declared that his presidential orders to torture suspected terrorists would not be refused by those under him. When told that torture is illegal, he simply said he would change the law because we “have to get tougher.”

Pompeo surprised the committee when he said he would not comply with an order to torture and that he couldn’t imagine that Trump would ask him to do it. He insisted he would always comply with the law. Of course, he also has said the Bush administration’s torture regime was legal, so that’s not entirely reassuring. Still, Pompeo’s testimony was widely interpreted as distancing him from Trump’s stated position.

And Pompeo also seemed to come down hard on the Russian hacking allegations, which was again seen as diverting from the Trump party line.

But then it was pointed out that Pompeo had enthusiastically tweeted about the Democratic National Committee hacking, and he stumbled badly under questioning by Sen. Angus King of Maine. King asked Pompeo if he consider WikiLeaks a reliable source, and Pompeo said he did not. Then King inquired why Pompeo had cited WikiLeaks as “proof” that “the fix was in.” Pompeo hemmed and hawed and finally said he’d have to go back and look at it. But that tweet shows that Pompeo has the temperament of a right-wing political activist, not the sober and mature temperament required for the CIA director job.

Like many of Trump’s nominees, Pompeo has deviated just enough from the boss’s craziest pronouncements and policies to give the impression that he will serve as a moderating force in the administration. This seems odd, considering Trump’s domineering personality. It is more likely that Trump and his team are telling the nominees to say whatever they need to say to be confirmed.

Maybe Trump isn’t listening to what his nominees say on the Hill or just doesn’t care. Whatever the case, it doesn’t matter. Trump will be the president and they will either do as he says or will have to resign. Judging from Pompeo’s past comments and his apocalyptic worldview, if Trump orders actions against “radical Islamic terrorists” or demands the torturing of suspects, Pompeo will probably have no problem following orders. Indeed, he will likely be eager to do so.

==

The Washington Post is reporting that Donald Trump has chosen Kansas Congressmember Mike Pompeo as CIA director. Pompeo has opposed closing Guantánamo Bay prison. In 2013, he visited the notorious U.S. prison and said of the prisoners who were on hunger strike, "It looked to me like a lot of them had put on weight." He’s also a vocal opponent of the Iran nuclear deal.

==

DARK act

http://www.independentsciencenews.org/science-media/the-gmo-dark-act-cannot-survive-the-light/

pompeo

==

==

http://www.innovationfiles.org/the-dark-side-loses-another-one-with-house-passage-of-state-labeling-preemption-bill/

giddings

==

5/15

Recently introduced legislation (H.R.1599) would prohibit any state efforts to require labeling of genetically engineered foods (GMOs), overruling legislation already passed in Maine, Vermont and Connecticut as well as bills moving in many other states.1

That's why I started a petition to the U.S. House of Representatives, which says:

I urge you to reject Representative Mike Pompeo's "Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act" (H.R.1599), which would prohibit states from requiring the labeling of genetically engineered foods, or GMOs.

This bill, which is being promoted by the Grocery Manufacturers Association, would prevent states from requiring GMO labels at any time. In fact, this bill is so anti-consumer it is commonly referred to as the "Deny Americans the Right to Know (or DARK) Act."

https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/1599/cosponsors

==

FIRST ELECTED:2010

Leadership PAC (1):

CavPAC

Career Fundraising

2009 - 2014 Total Receipts: $6,174,807

2009 - 2014 Total Spent: $4,496,029

Debts: $0

Last Report: Wednesday, July 16, 2014

Top 5 Contributors, 2009 - 2014

Contributor Total Indivs PACs

Koch Industries $295,850 $265,850 $30,000

Textron Inc $57,200 $27,200 $30,000

Mull Drilling $54,300 $54,300 $0

McCoy Petroleum $44,850 $44,850 $0

Ritchie Exploration $42,954 $42,954 $0

Intrust Bank $37,450 $37,450 $0

Onex Corp $36,900 $20,400 $16,500

Emprise Bank $36,455 $36,455 $0

Poet LLC $33,500 $32,500 $1,000

Beechcraft Corp $33,000 $8,000 $25,000

USAA $32,000 $12,000 $20,000

American Bankers Assn $28,000 $0 $28,000

Cox Enterprises $26,300 $15,300 $11,000

JP Weigand & Sons $25,600 $25,600 $0

Berry Companies $25,350 $25,350 $0

AT&T Inc $25,250 $250 $25,000

National Assn of Home Builders $25,000 $0 $25,000

Boeing Co $22,950 $5,450 $17,500

Berexco Inc $22,700 $22,700 $0

Bartlit, Beck et al $20,250 $20,250 $0

...view more data

Top 5 Industries, 2009 - 2014

Industry Total Indivs PACs

Oil & Gas $857,160 $626,160 $231,000

Health Professionals $287,770 $138,770 $149,000

Retired $242,392 $242,392 $0

Air Transport $192,329 $74,250 $118,079

Lawyers/Law Firms $178,515 $149,915 $28,600

...view more data

==

By Carey Gillam

Sept 3 (Reuters) - Opponents of mandatory labeling for foods made with genetically modified organisms spent more than $27 million in the first six months of this year on GMO-related lobbying, roughly three times their spending in all of 2013, according to an analysis released Wednesday.

The Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) and major food makers such as Coca-Cola Co and PepsiCo Inc and top biotech seed makers Monsanto Co and DuPont were among heavy spenders on GMO labeling-related lobbying, among other food issues, according to a report issued by the Environmental Working Group.

The group analyzed lobbying disclosure forms that cited labeling of foods containing genetically modified organisms (GMOs) along with other policy issues.

All told, the opponents of GMO labeling disclosed $15.2 million in lobbying expenditures for the second quarter of 2014, bringing the six-month total for 2014 to $27.5 million. That compared with $9.3 million reported in 2013, according to EWG, a Washington-based nonprofit that supports GMO labeling.

In contrast, supporters of GMO labeling disclosed $1.9 million in lobbying expenditures for the first half of 2014, up slightly from $1.6 million spent in 2013.

Mike Gruber, vice president for government affairs for the Grocery Manufacturers Association, said that the EWG report is "grossly misleading." The lobbying work the dollars in the report includes a host of issues unrelated to GMO labeling, he said.

GMA said the dollars spent lobbying on GMO issues are far less than what the EWG report indicates.

"The GMO issue is a very important issue without a doubt but so is food safety so is international trade," said Gruber.

The expenditures by food and biotechnology companies come as the group pushes for passage of a bill introduced in April by U.S. Representative Mike Pompeo that would block state laws that require GMO labeling on food packages.

Vermont in May became the first U.S. state to pass a mandatory GMO labeling law that requires no other trigger to become effective. More than 20 other states are considering mandatory labeling of GMO foods, including Colorado and Oregon, which have the issue on the ballot for the November election.

Consumer groups and lawmakers pushing for mandatory labeling of GMOs say there is no scientific consensus on their safety, and consumers have the right to know if GMOs are in the food they eat. They say high pesticide use associated with GMOs and pesticide residues on food containing GMOS is a health concern.

But the food and agriculture industries, including the makers of genetically modified corn, soybeans, canola and other crops widely used in packaged foods, say their products are proven safe. They have sued to block the Vermont law and say that labeling will imply GMO products are unsafe, confuse consumers and increase costs for consumers as well as farmers and food companies. (Reporting by Carey Gillam in Kansas City; Editing by Cynthia Osterman and Lisa Shumaker)

As Congress dithers for the umpteenth time over extending a key subsidy for wind energy, the industry once again is up in the air. Called the production tax credit (PTC), the subsidy helps level the playing field between wind and fossil fuels and has proven to be critical for financing new projects, helping to make wind one of the fastest growing electricity sources in the country. Given the planet needs to transition as quickly as possible away from coal and natural gas to carbon-free energy to avoid the worst consequences of climate change, who would be against renewing wind's tax credit?

The Koch brothers, that's who.

Charles G. and David H. Koch -- the billionaire owners of the coal, oil and gas Koch Industries conglomerate -- have enlisted their extensive network of think tanks, advocacy groups and friends on Capitol Hill to spearhead a campaign to pull the plug on the PTC. Never mind the fact that the oil and gas industry has averaged four times what the wind tax credit is worth in federal tax breaks and subsidies annually for the last 95 years.

The Koch network is fighting the wind industry on a number of fronts. Last month, Koch-funded Congressman Mike Pompeo (R-Kansas) sent a letter signed by 52 House members to the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, urging him to let the PTC expire. Meanwhile, a coalition of some 100 national and local groups organized by the Koch-founded Americans for Prosperity sent a letter to each member of Congress asking them to do the same. And earlier this month, the Koch-funded Institute for Energy Research launched an anti-PTC ad campaign and released a report claiming that only a handful of states actually benefit from the subsidy.

Malcolm Gladwell didn't include this battle in his new book David and Goliath because, given the odds, it's more like Bambi versus Godzilla.

The Kochs' Man in Congress

The fact that Kansas Rep. Mike Pompeo is the Kochs' point man to scuttle the PTC in the House is a bit ironic given his state is a wind energy leader. Kansas has the second highest wind potential in the country, it has already attracted more than $5 billion in wind industry investment, and last year wind generated 11.4 percent of its electricity. With stats like that, the industry has broad bipartisan support. Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback and Sens. Jerry Moran and Pat Roberts -- all Republicans -- are big fans.

Pompeo, who has been in Congress since only 2011, would argue that he's against all energy tax credits. For the second year in a row, he has introduced a bill that would eliminate tax breaks that benefit oil, natural gas, coal, nuclear, electric vehicles, alternative fuels, solar and wind, including the PTC, which gives wind developers a tax credit of 2.3 cents for each kilowatt-hour of electricity they produce.

But there's a catch. Although it appears evenhanded, Pompeo's bill would severely hamper wind and solar but preserve a number of oil, gas and coal subsidies, including the percentage depletion allowance, the ability to expense the costs of exploration, and the accelerated depreciation of certain kinds of "geologic property." These and other tax breaks he left out of his bill would be worth about $12.5 billion to the oil and gas industry from 2011 through 2015, according to a March 2012 Congressional Research Service report.

Why is Pompeo so down on wind? Perhaps it's because Koch Industries is headquartered in Wichita, smack-dab in the middle of his district -- and the fact that the company is by far and away his biggest campaign contributor. Since 2010, Koch Industries has given him $200,000, more than four times what his second highest contributor kicked in. Besides Koch Industries, three other oil companies are among Pompeo's top five contributors -- McCoy Petroleum, Mull Drilling and Richie Exploration -- and they're also based in Wichita.

What about the other 51 House members who signed Pompeo's letter? As it turns out, 65 percent of them received contributions from Koch Industries during the last two or three campaign cycles, according to Federal Election Commission data compiled by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. A quarter of them, meanwhile, cashed checks from ExxonMobil. And except for two congressmen who didn't take any energy industry money, the signatories received sizable contributions from a number of other corporations that compete with wind, including coal barons Arch Coal and Alpha Natural Resources; oil and gas giants Chesapeake Energy, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and Valero Energy; and Exelon, which owns the most nuclear reactors in the country.

Americans for (Koch) Prosperity Weighs In

Pompeo's letter came on the heels of a letter from the Kochs' flagship advocacy group, Americans for Prosperity, calling for Congress to kill the PTC. AFP's letter, which was signed by 102 organizations, claims that "the wind industry has very little to show after 20 years of preferential tax treatment" and declares that "Americans deserve energy solutions that can make it on their own in the marketplace -- not ones that need to be propped up by government indefinitely."

Is that right? Little to show? Preferential tax treatment?

In fact, until Congress left the wind industry hanging late last year, it had been doing quite well. Even with a deep recession and slow recovery, over the previous five years -- with the help of the PTC, stimulus spending and state renewable electricity standards -- the industry doubled its electricity output, employment and private investment. In 2012, domestic manufacturers produced roughly 72 percent of the wind turbine equipment erected across the country -- nearly triple the percentage in 2006 -- and more than 13,000 megawatts of new wind generation capacity was installed. By the end of last year, there were enough wind turbines to power 15 million typical American homes -- without toxic pollutants or carbon emissions.

But AFP's complaint that the wind industry has been on the dole far too long is even more galling. What about the oil and gas industry? It's been feeding at the federal trough since 1918! On average, the industry has benefited from $4.86 billion in tax breaks and subsidies in today's dollars every year since then, according to a 2011 study by DBL Investors, a venture capital firm. Renewable energy technologies, meanwhile, averaged only $370 million a year in subsidies between 1994 and 2009. The 2009 stimulus package did provide $21 billion for wind, solar and other renewables, but that support barely begins to balance the scales that have tilted toward nuclear power for more than 50 years, oil and gas for 95 years, and coal for more than two centuries.

So who signed the AFP letter? About half of the signatories are local tea party affiliates and anti-wind NIMBY groups of indeterminate size and funding. The other half are, for the most part, relatively obscure national groups, but there are a few that have attractedattention over the years for their contrarian views on climate science and renewable energy. Like AFP, those groups are awash in petrodollars. The American Energy Alliance (and its parent, the Institute for Energy Research), Competitive Enterprise Institute, Freedom Works, Frontiers of Freedom and Heritage Action (and its parent, the Heritage Foundation) collectively have received millions of dollars from Koch family foundations, ExxonMobil and the American Petroleum Institute, the oil and gas industry's premier trade association.

The Institute for Energy Research's Questionable Research

On December 3, the Institute for Energy Research and its political arm, the American Energy Alliance, sponsored what they dubbed the "wind welfare" summit in Washington, D.C., featuring IER founder and CEO Robert Bradley Jr., a Koch network veteran. AEA announced it would spend $40,000 on print and digital ads calling for an end to the PTC and is flying in anti-PTC advocates for meetings on Capitol Hill.

Bradley presumably highlighted the findings of a report IER released the day before claiming that a small number of states with wind resources -- Iowa, North Dakota, Oklahoma and Texas -- are reaping the benefits of the PTC while 30 states and the District of Columbia are "losing millions" to fund it.

The report's findings, however, don't hold up to scrutiny. Mike Jacobs, a senior energy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, pointed out in a recent blog that IER ignored the fact that a number of the states it identified as "net payers" are home to wind industry manufacturing facilities. There are 62 companies in Ohio making turbine components, for example, 40 in Michigan and 21 in California. Jacobs also discovered that IER downplayed the fact that "the PTC benefits consumers where wind-generated electricity adds to the supply and lowers the price of electricity, landowners who receive lease payments from the wind turbines, and local communities that collect tax payments on installed wind farms."

Jeff Spross, blogging on the Center for American Progress' ThinkProgress website, alsochided IER, pointing out that most industries are not equally distributed across the country. "The oil and gas industries, for instance, benefit from a wealth of federal tax carve-outs," he wrote, "but the economic activity they generate is concentrated in just a few key states."

In other words, it's disingenuous to single out the wind industry.

Twisting in the Wind

While Congress has generously provided the fossil-fuel and nuclear-energy industries a number of permanent subsidies, it has typically granted the wind industry the PTC on a short-term basis and then wavered over renewing it. Last year the PTC expired on December 31, but as part of the "fiscal cliff" budget deal the next day, Congress extended it for the seventh time since it debuted in 1992 -- for only one year.

This uncertainty over the PTC's status has put wind developers at a distinct disadvantage, making it difficult to attract investors and plan ahead. Last year's cliffhanger, for example, definitely did a number on the industry. Wind farm construction has fallen off dramatically compared with 2012: Only one utility-scale wind turbine was installed in the first six months of this year. Business picked up somewhat in the third quarter, with 68.3 megawatts installed, according to the American Wind Energy Association, but that's far below the average of more than 1,000 megawatts that the industry constructed in most quarters in recent years.

Given that it takes years to plan, finance and construct a wind farm, Congress is again undermining the industry's potential by slow-walking the PTC extension this year. And that potential is tremendous. Wind currently generates about 4 percent of U.S. electricity, but by 2030 it could produce more than 20 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. The DOE's National Renewable Energy Laboratory also is bullish on wind and renewables writ large. Last year, it published a report that concluded today's commercially available renewable technologies could easily generate 80 percent of U.S. electricity by 2050, with nearly half coming from wind. If the Koch brothers and their allies have their way, however, it likely will take a lot longer to get there -- and it will cost a hell of a lot more.

Elliott Negin is the director of news and commentary at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/elliott-negin/the-koch-brothers-are-sti_b_4396033.html

House Republicans Have Passed 3 Bills To Help The Natural Gas Industry Just This Week

Posted: 11/21/2013 5:33 pm EST  |  Updated: 11/21/2013 5:51 pm EST

WASHINGTON -- Republicans in the House have been busy this week, passing three pieces of legislation that would help the natural gas industry by circumventing environmental regulations and making it easier to drill for and transport fossil fuels.

President Barack Obama has issued a veto threat for all three bills, and they are unlikely to make it through the Senate.

The bills, should they became law, would benefit the thriving domestic oil and gas industry. The sector is growing largely as a result of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a process that involves injecting wells with a mix of water, sand and chemicals to release oil and gas trapped in rock. But many Democrats and environmentalists worry that the bills help the energy industry at the expense of the environment.

The House approved the first bill on Wednesday, a measure to expedite permitting for oil and gas drilling. Later in the day, the House also voted to prevent the Department of the Interior from implementing proposed rules that would require full disclosure of fracking chemicals, and would governhydraulic fracturing on public lands. Both bills garnered around 10 Democratic votes.

Rep. Bill Flores (R-Texas) sponsored Wednesday's bill to block the Interior Department's rules for fracking on federal and Native American lands. The bill's supporters say the rules are unnecessary, as states often have their own fracking regulations or guidelines. Rep. Doc Hastings (R-Wash.), chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee and a co-sponsor of the bill, argued that "imposing a 'one-size-fits-all' federal regulatory structure, as the Obama Administration is attempting to do, is both unnecessary and simply will not work."

The bill's critics say that many state regulations are too weak, and that strong federal regulations should take precedence. Courtney Abrams, federal clean water program director for advocacy group Environment America, called the bill "reckless" in a statement, arguing that the bill "puts our special places and the communities that rely on them for drinking water and recreation at risk from fracking."

House Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) also attached a provision to the Flores bill that would modify the Environmental Protection Agency's ongoing study of fracking's effects on drinking water. "In its zeal to regulate, the EPA too often has rushed to link water contamination to hydraulic fracturing," Smith said in a statement after the bill passed, adding that the "legislation holds the EPA accountable by requiring the agency to provide context for any identified risks."

The other bill passed Wednesday came from Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.), and would speed up permitting for oil and gas drilling. Lamborn said the bill was meant to expand the domestic energy boom beyond state and private lands. "The only reason we haven't seen that same dynamic growth on federal lands is because of excess regulations," Lamborn told the Associated Press, in reference to energy development already underway in North Dakota, Montana, Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia.

The third bill, passed mid-day Thursday, was the Natural Gas Pipeline Permitting Reform Act, from Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.). The bill would compel regulators to issue rulings on natural gas pipeline permits more promptly. That bill passed with 26 Democratic votes, many from oil- and gas-producing states.

The Hill reports that Rep. James McGovern (D-Mass.) expressed concern that the pipeline permitting bill "may result in truncated or inadequate environmental analysis, which threatens the health and safety of communities these potentially hazardous pipelines run through."

The White House also expressed skepticism of the measure. "The bill's requirements could force agencies to make decisions based on incomplete information or information that may not be available within the stringent deadlines, and to deny applications that otherwise would have been approved, but for lack of sufficient review time," the White House said in a statement.

==

ultra donor;

Mike Pompeo (R) KS Koch Industries $110,000

Twelve members of Congress want to make a bad situation even worse, sponsoring the industry-backed General Duty Clarification Act; its banal title hiding that, as reported by Tim Murphy at Mother Jones magazine, “The bill is designed to sap the Environmental Protection Agency of its powers to regulate safety and security at major chemical sites, as prescribed by the Clean Air Act.”

“‘We call that the Koch brothers bill,’ Greenpeace legislative director Rick Hind says, because the bill’s sponsor, GOP Rep. Mike Pompeo, represents the conservative megadonors’ home city of Wichita, Kansas. (The sponsor of the sister legislation in the senate, GOP Sen. Pat Roberts, represents the Kochs’ home state of Kansas.) The brothers have huge investments in fertilizer production, and Hind thinks they’ll ultimately get what they want, whether or not the bill becomes law.”

No coincidence, perhaps, that the sponsors of the House bill and Senator Roberts, Public Campaign reports, “have collectively taken over $670,000 from the chemical manufacturing industry over their careers.” Since 2011, the industry has spent $85.1 million lobbying.

Congress quietly acquiesces as the regulations meant for our safety are whittled away. The progressive website ThinkProgress notes that even though food related infections — which kill 3,000 and sicken 48 million Americans each year — rose last year, congressional and White House budget cuts may mean up to 600 fewer food inspectors at meat and poultry plants, leaving it up to the industry to police itself. That rot you’re smelling isn’t just some bad hamburger....

http://billmoyers.com/2013/04/26/do-nothing-congress-gives-inertia-a-bad-name/

lowdown 9/11

How about sheltering children from dangerous toys? Just a few years ago, marketers like Mattel had to pull made-in-China toys, cribs, etc... off the shelves because they contained lead, toxic paint, and other dangers. Responding to public outrage, a bipartisan congressional majority voted in 2008 to beef up the staffing and authority of the then-dormant Consumer Product Safety Commission, giving it a firm mandate to protect our children. In one excellent reform, CPSC set up an easily accessible database so parents themselves can report product hazards or read injury reports. Great--it's effective, consumer-driven, and in-expensive! Kill it, squawked industry lobbyists this year, calling it a government intrusion into the marketplace. The tea party's Mike Pompeo of Kansas sponsored an amendment to cut all funding for CPSC's database. Not for nothing is Pompeo called the "Congressman from Koch." His Wichita business was financed by a Koch Industries subsidiary, he was a trustee for a Koch think tank in Kansas, the Koch PAC was his campaign's top donor (by far) last year, David Koch's own front group (Americans For Prosperity) organized and mobilized tea party support for Pompeo, and a Koch lobbyist is now Pompeo's chief of staff in Washington. Mike's amendment passed 234 to 187, enjoying full tea party support.

LAST:

Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.), who represents Koch

Industries' home district, launched an aerospace company

with investment help from a Koch subsidiary. He sold the

company last year. His chief of staff is Mark Chenoweth,

a former Koch Industries lawyer.

Cross-posted from the Wonk Room.

http://www.grist.org/article/2011-02-17-mike-pompeo-r-koch-gets-to-work-slashing-epa-funding

Last night, Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) proposed an amendment to the Continuing Resolution that would "sharply cut funding for an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) program that collects data on industrial greenhouse gas emissions." The $8.4 million cut would leave funding for the registry at $3.2 million, unless the EPA shifts funds from another program to the registry.

Toeing a fine line between conspiracy theorist and Koch Industries profit protector, Pompeo took the house floor where "he called the registry part of an EPA plot to destroy U.S. jobs":

EPA would, I am sure, tell you that they are simply collecting a little bit of data on greenhouse gases, that this registry is simply a very innocent effort to learn a little bit more about who is emitting greenhouse gases -- who or what.

But this data is the very foundation of the EPA's effort to pursue its radical anti-jobs agenda. Indeed, continuing the greenhouse gas registry at currently funded levels will permit the EPA regulatory nose inside the job-destroying tent. We cannot head down this path.

The amendment passed in a 239-185 vote.

Despite the Koch-approved rhetoric, even fellow Republicans found the bill to be poorly crafted. Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) -- who apparently is incredibly frightened by the EPA's quest to keep our air clean -- originally supported the amendment, but after talking to businesses, decided to vote nay, because the business community "told him the greenhouse gas registry was a useful compliance tool for them."

Pompeo is the congressman "spawned by ‘Kochtopus‘" and "essentially a subsidiary of the Koch brothers' business empire." He made his fortune off of a Koch backed company, sidled up to Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity in his 2010 campaign, signed the AFP anti-climate change pledge, took more campaign contributions from Koch Industries than any other candidate in 2010, and hired on an ex-Koch lobbyist to be his chief of staff. In fact, Koch Industries even ranked at top of Pompeo's campaign contribution list, outpacing the second top contributor by $60,000.

So it's no surprise that the representative from Koch took to the House floor to champion one of Koch Industries' top causes -- stripping the EPA's ability to regulate greenhouse gases. Pompeo earned a plush position on the House Energy and Commerce Committee From Koch, and quickly went to work to do the big polluter's bidding.

Kristen Bartoloni is a researcher at Center for American Progress.

http://thinkprogress.org/2010/09/21/koch-mike-pompeo/

Meet Mike Pompeo: The Congressional Candidate Spawned By The ‘Kochtopus’

Mike PompeoOver the weekend, the Kansas City Star published a lengthy article explaining how Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS), the Republican gubernatorial candidate in Kansas, has for years maintained a symbiotic relationship with the right-wing oil plutocrats David and Charles Koch and their conglomerate Koch Industries. Alongside Brownback in the Senate, Koch Industries, which is based in Wichita, has counted outgoing Wichita Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-KS) as one of its closest allies in the House of Representatives.

Former Rep. Dan Glickman (D-KS), who was defeated by Tiahrt in 1994, said that Koch Industries funneled resources — including its employees and funds — to oppose him. Now, with an open seat in Koch Industries’ backyard, the massive “Kochtopus” network of Koch money and front groups is working to elect a new right-wing Republican to fill the seat: Mike Pompeo. Pompeo isn’t just another Wall Street-friendly, pro-polluter GOP radical (his initial response to the BP oil disaster was to say that he “fervently” hoped the government wouldn’t “overreact”), he is essentially a subsidiary of the Koch brothers’ business empire:

– Pompeo developed much of his wealth from a firm he founded, Thayer Aerospace, which he ran with investment funds from Koch Industries. According to a December 11, 1998 article in the Wichita Business Journal, “[Pompeo's] company’s capital base is drawn in part from Wichita’s Koch Venture Capital, a division of Koch Industries.” Pompeo sold Thayer in 2006.

– Pompeo still relies on Koch for his private wealth. After the sale of Thayer, Pompeo became the President of Sentry International, a business specializing in the manufacture and sale of equipment used in oilfields. Sentry International is a partner to Koch Industries through its Brazilian subsidiary, GTF Representacoes & Consultoria.

– Pompeo won his Republican primary largely with the support of Koch Industries’ PAC, which gave him one of his largest endorsements in March. Despite the fact that Koch Industries is the recipient of tens of millions in federal contracts, Pompeo boasted about the endorsement: “The employees of the Koch Companies have jobs here in the Wichita because of their own hard work and creativity, not because a federal agency deemed it to be so.”

– With $31,400 in contributions from KOCHPAC, Koch Industries is by far the greatest contributor to Pompeo’s campaign. The second largest contributor, the law firm Bartlit Beck LLP, gave $7,200 to the campaign. As ThinkProgress first uncovered, Koch Industries also works with Democracy Data & Communications, a firm specializing in helping major corporations to activate their employees politically.

– Pompeo has leaned on Americans for Prosperity (AFP), the right-wing Tea Party group founded and financed by David Koch. On August 28, 2009, Pompeo spoke at a large Tea Party rally organized by AFP, and AFP has used its extensive Kansas-based staff to mobilize dozens of other right-wing events in and around the 4th Congressional District. In addition to the rallies and Tea Party events, AFP has touted Pompeo for signing onto its pledge to ignore climate change. The Kansas chapter of AFP was previously run by Alan Cobb, who once served as a chief lobbyist for Koch Industries. Cobb is now coordinating state efforts nationwide for AFP.

– According to his campaign biography, Pompeo’s only substantive political experience appears to be his stint as a trustee of the Flint Hills Center for Public Policy, a Koch-organized front formerly known as the Kansas Policy Institute. The Flint Hills Center for Public Policy is staffed primarily with Koch-funded operatives and economists, like Art Hall. Until recently, George Pearson — a libertarian activist who began working for the Koch brothers in the early seventies — chaired the board of the Center. In an interview with the Wichita Eagle, Pompeo said he supports Social Security privatization and explained that his ideas for health reform came from Koch’s Flint Hills Center.

The Koch brothers have historically leaned on their home state Republican members of Congress for lobbying assistance. For instance, Business Week reported on how Koch Industries used then-Sen. Bob Dole (R-KS) to try to suppress an investigation into Koch Industries’ massive theft of oil from Indian reservations. In another case, Koch Industries faced a $55 million civil suit for causing more than 300 oil spills over a five-year period. Again, Dole, a major recipient of Koch money and support, sponsored a bill that would allow Koch to easily defend itself from the oil spill charges. Investigative reporter Robert Parry found that David Koch “also helped Dole achieve majority leader status through his checkbook, contributed mightily to a Dole foundation and even turned his Gatsbyish estate in Southampton, New York, into the site for celebrating Dole’s 72nd birthday in July 1995, raising $150,000 for his campaign.”

Recently, Koch Industries has lobbied aggressively against clean energy jobs legislation and against H.R. 4213, a law closing tax loopholes for companies that ship jobs overseas.

While much attention has been paid to Koch’s role in funding the organizers of the Tea Party movement and its supporting institutions, it should be noted that the right-wing conglomerate is also sponsoring its own candidate for election this November.

http://www.whorunsgov.com/Profiles/Michael_Pompeo

A longtime businessman, lawyer and Army officer, Pompeo became the new conservative voice of Kansas' 4th district, winning in the 2010 elections with 59 percent of the vote.

At the time, he was the  Republican National Committeeman for Kansas and earned endorsements from  Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), former Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.), and chairman and CEO of Koch Industries, Charles Koch.Pompeo for Congress, Endorsements.(1)Pompeo for Congress, Endorsements.

In 2010, Pompeo bid against Democrat Raj Goyle to replace  Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R), who vacated his seat to run for the Senate post held by 2010 gubernatorial candidate and Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.).Shane D'Aprile, "Pompeo Wins GOP Primary in Rep. Tiahrt's District", The Hill, August 4, 2010.(2)Shane D'Aprile, "Pompeo Wins GOP Primary in Rep. Tiahrt's District", The Hill, August 4, 2010.  Tiahrt lost in the primary election against Rep. Jerry Moran (R)

Campaigning on limited government and reducing public spending, Pompeo built on his many years of experience as a businessman. He founded Thayer Aerospace (now Nex-Tech Aoerospace) and is currently president of Sentry International, an oil-field services company. Pompeo for Congress, Meet Mike(3)

TWO

SoS 10/18

919 bak

surprisingly dominionist, w/ vpence? scary red calf aramgeddon shite (shiite?) here?!

recall neo-con wolfie lust for "aircraft carrier" in ME

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/the-pompeo-doctrine-a-formula-for-catastrophe

no lnx

The Pompeo Doctrine: A formula for catastrophe

Written by Michael Klare / TomDispatch September 12, 2019

Donald Trump got the headlines as usual — but don’t be fooled. It wasn’t Trumpism in action this August, but what we should all now start referring to as the Pompeo Doctrine. Yes, I’m referring to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and, when it comes to the Arctic region, he has a lot more than buying Greenland on his mind.

In mid-August, as no one is likely to forget, President Trump surprised international observers by expressing an interest in purchasing Greenland, a semi-autonomous region of Denmark. Most commentators viewed the move as just another example of the president’s increasingly erratic behavior. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen termed the very notion of such a deal “absurd,” leading Trump, in an outburst of pique, to call her comments “nasty” and cancel a long-scheduled state visit to Copenhagen.

A deeper look at that incident and related administration moves, however, suggests quite a different interpretation of what’s going on, with immense significance for the planet and even human civilization. Under the prodding of Mike Pompeo, the White House increasingly views the Arctic as a key arena for future great-power competition, with the ultimate prize being an extraordinary trove of valuable resources, including oil, natural gas, uranium, zinc, iron ore, gold, diamonds, and rare earth minerals. Add in one more factor: though no one in the administration is likely to mention the forbidden term “climate change” or “climate crisis,” they all understand perfectly well that global warming is what’s making such a resource scramble possible.

This isn’t the first time that great powers have paid attention to the Arctic. That region enjoyed some strategic significance during the Cold War period, when both the United States and the Soviet Union planned to use its skies as passageways for nuclear-armed missiles and bombers dispatched to hit targets on the other side of the globe. Since the end of that era, however, it has largely been neglected. Frigid temperatures, frequent storms, and waters packed with ice prevented most normal air and maritime travel, so — aside from the few Indigenous peoples who had long adapted to such conditions — who would want to venture there?

Climate change is, however, already altering the situation in drastic ways: temperatures are rising faster in the Arctic than anywhere else on the planet, melting parts of the polar ice cap and exposing once-inaccessible waters and islands to commercial development. Oil and natural gas reserves have been discovered in offshore areas previously (but no longer) covered by sea ice most of the year. Meanwhile, new mining opportunities are emerging in, yes, Greenland! Worried that other countries, including China and Russia, might reap the benefits of such a climate-altered landscape, the Trump administration has already launched an all-out drive to ensure American dominance there, even at the risk of future confrontation and conflict.

The scramble for the Arctic’s resources was launched early in this century when the world’s major energy firms, led by BP, ExxonMobil, Shell, and Russian gas giant Gazprom, began exploring for oil and gas reserves in areas only recently made accessible by retreating sea ice. Those efforts gained momentum in 2008, after the U.S. Geological Survey published a report, Circum-Arctic Resources Appraisal, indicating that as much as one-third of the world’s undiscovered oil and gas lay in areas north of the Arctic Circle. Much of this untapped fossil fuel largess was said to lie beneath the Arctic waters adjoining Alaska (that is, the United States), Canada, Greenland (controlled by Denmark), Norway, and Russia — the so-called “Arctic Five.”

Under existing international law, codified in the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), coastal nations possess the right to exploit undersea resources up to 200 nautical miles from their shoreline (and beyond if their continental shelf extends farther than that). The Arctic Five have all laid claim to “exclusive economic zones” (EEZs) in those waters or, in the case of the United States (which has not ratified UNCLOS), announced its intention to do so. Most known oil and gas reserves are found within those EEZs, although some are thought to be in overlapping or even contested areas beyond that 200-mile limit, including the polar region itself. Whoever owns Greenland, of course, possesses the right to develop its EEZ.

For the most part, the Arctic Five have asserted their intent to settle any disputes arising from contested claims through peaceful means, the operating principle behind the formation in 1996 of the Arctic Council, an intergovernmental organization for states with territory above the Arctic Circle (including the Arctic Five, Finland, Iceland, and Sweden). Meeting every two years, it provides a forum in which, at least theoretically, leaders of those countries and the Indigenous peoples living there can address common concerns and work towards cooperative solutions — and it had indeed helped dampen tensions in the region. In recent years, however, isolating the Arctic from mounting U.S. (and NATO) hostilities toward Russia and China or from the global struggle over vital resources has proven increasingly difficult. By May 2019, when Pompeo led an American delegation to the council’s most recent meeting in Rovaniemi, Finland, hostility and the urge to grab future resources had already spilled into the open.

Reaping the Arctic’s Riches

Usually a forum for anodyne statements about international cooperation and proper environmental stewardship, the lid was blown off the latest Arctic Council meeting in May when Pompeo delivered an unabashedly martial and provocative speech that deserves far more attention than it got at the time. So let’s take a little tour of what may prove a historic proclamation (in the grimmest sense possible) of a new Washington doctrine for the Far North.

“In its first two decades, the Arctic Council has had the luxury of focusing almost exclusively on scientific collaboration, on cultural matters, on environmental research,” the secretary of state began mildly. These were, he said, “all important themes, very important, and we should continue to do those. But no longer do we have that luxury. We’re entering a new age of strategic engagement in the Arctic, complete with new threats to the Arctic and its real estate, and to all of our interests in that region.”

In what turned out to be an ultra-hardline address, Pompeo claimed that we were now in a new era in the Arctic. Because climate change — a phrase Pompeo, of course, never actually uttered — is now making it ever more possible to exploit the region’s vast resource riches, a scramble to gain control of them is now officially underway. That competition for resources has instantly become enmeshed in a growing geopolitical confrontation between the U.S., Russia, and China, generating new risks of conflict.

On the matter of resource exploitation, Pompeo could hardly contain his enthusiasm. Referring to the derision that greeted William Seward’s purchase of Alaska in 1857, he declared:

“Far from the barren backcountry that many thought it to be in Seward’s time, the Arctic is at the forefront of opportunity and abundance. It houses 13% of the world’s undiscovered oil, 30% of its undiscovered gas, and an abundance of uranium, rare earth minerals, gold, diamonds, and millions of square miles of untapped resources.”

Of equal attraction, he noted, was the possibility of vastly increasing maritime commerce through newly de-iced trans-Arctic trade routes that will link the Euro-Atlantic region with Asia. “Steady reductions in sea ice are opening new passageways and new opportunities for trade,” he enthused. “This could potentially slash the time it takes to travel between Asia and the West by as much as 20 days… Arctic sea lanes could come [to be] the 21st century’s Suez and Panama Canals.” That such “steady reductions in sea ice” are the sole consequence of climate change went unmentioned, but so did another reality of our warming world. If the Arctic one day truly becomes the northern equivalent of a tropical passageway like the Suez or Panama canals, that will likely mean that parts of those southerly areas will have become the equivalents of uninhabitable deserts.

As such new trade and drilling opportunities arise, Pompeo affirmed, the United States intends to be out front in capitalizing on them. He then began bragging about what the Trump administration had already accomplished, including promoting expanded oil and gas drilling in offshore waters and also freeing up “energy exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge,” a pristine stretch of northern Alaska prized by environmentalists as a sanctuary for migrating caribou and other at-risk species. Additional efforts to exploit the region’s vital resources, he promised, are scheduled for the years ahead.

A New Arena for Competition (and Worse)

Ideally, Pompeo noted placidly, competition for the Arctic’s resources will be conducted in an orderly, peaceful manner. The United States, he assured his listeners, believes in “free and fair competition, open, by the rule of law.” But other countries, he added ominously, especially China and Russia, won’t play by that rulebook much of the time and so must be subject to careful oversight and, if need be, punitive action.

China, he pointed out, is already developing trade routes in the Arctic, and establishing economic ties with key nations there. Unlike the United States (which already has multiple military bases in the Arctic, including one at Thule in Greenland, and so has a well-established presence there), Pompeo claimed that Beijing is surreptitiously using such supposedly economic activities for military purposes, including, heinously enough, spying on U.S. ballistic missile submarines operating in the region, while intimidating its local partners into acquiescence.

He then cited events in the distant South China Sea, where the Chinese have indeed militarized a number of tiny uninhabited islands (outfitting them with airstrips, missile batteries, and the like) and the U.S. has responded by sending its warships into adjacent waters. He did so to warn of similar future military stand-offs and potential clashes in the Arctic. “Let’s just ask ourselves, do we want the Arctic Ocean to transform into a new South China Sea, fraught with militarization and competing territorial claims?” The answer, he assured his listeners, is “pretty clear.” (And I’m sure you can guess what it is.)

The secretary of state then wielded even stronger language in describing “aggressive Russian behavior in the Arctic.” In recent years, he claimed, the Russians have built hundreds of new bases in the region, along with new ports and air-defense capabilities. “Russia is already leaving snow prints in the form of army boots” there, a threat that cannot be ignored. “Just because the Arctic is a place of wilderness does not mean it should become a place of lawlessness. It need not be the case. And we stand ready to ensure that it does not become so.”

And here we get to the heart of Pompeo’s message: the United States will, of course, “respond” by enhancing its own military presence in the Arctic to better protect U.S. interests, while countering Chinese and Russian inroads in the region:

“Under President Trump, we are fortifying America’s security and diplomatic presence in the area. On the security side, partly in response to Russia’s destabilizing activities, we are hosting military exercises, strengthening our force presence, rebuilding our icebreaker fleet, expanding Coast Guard funding, and creating a new senior military post for Arctic Affairs inside of our own military.”

To emphasize the administration’s sincerity, Pompeo touted the largest NATO and U.S. Arctic military maneuvers since the Cold War era, the recently completed “Trident Juncture” exercise (which he incorrectly referred to as “Trident Structure”), involving some 50,000 troops. Although the official scenario for Trident Juncture spoke of an unidentified “aggressor” force, few observers had any doubt that the allied team was assembled to repel a hypothetical Russian invasion of Norway, where the simulated combat took place.

Implementing the Doctrine

And so you have the broad outlines of the new Pompeo Doctrine, centered on the Trump administration’s truly forbidden topic: the climate crisis. In the most pugnacious manner imaginable, that doctrine posits a future of endless competition and conflict in the Arctic, growing ever more intense as the planet warms and the ice cap melts. The notion of the U.S. going nose-to-nose with the Russians and Chinese in the Far North, while exploiting the region’s natural resources, has clearly been circulating in Washington. By August, it had obviously already become enough of a commonplace in the White House (not to speak of the National Security Council and the Pentagon), for the president to offer to buy Greenland.

And when it comes to resources and future military conflicts, it wasn’t such a zany idea. After all, Greenland does have abundant natural resources and also houses that U.S. base in Thule. A relic of the Cold War, the Thule facility, mainly a radar base, is already being modernized, at a cost of some $300 million, to better track Russian missile launches. Clearly, key officials in Washington view Greenland as a valuable piece of real estate in the emerging geopolitical struggle Pompeo laid out, an assessment that clearly wormed its way into President Trump’s consciousness as well.

Iceland and Norway also play key roles in Pompeo’s and the Pentagon’s new strategic calculus. Another former Cold War facility, a base at Keflavik in Iceland has been reoccupied by the Navy and is now being used in antisubmarine warfare missions. Meanwhile, the Marine Corps has stationed several hundred combat troops at bases near Trondheim, Norway, the first permanent deployment of foreign soldiers on Norwegian soil since World War II. In 2018, the Pentagon even reactivated the Navy’s defunct Second Fleet, investing it with responsibility for protecting the North Atlantic as well as the Arctic’s maritime approaches, including those abutting Greenland, Iceland, and Norway. Consider these signs of heating-up times.

And all of this is clearly just the beginning of a major buildup in and regular testing of the ability of the U.S. military to operate in the Far North. As part of Exercise Trident Juncture, for example, the aircraft carrier Harry S. Truman and its flotilla of support ships were sent into the Norwegian Sea, the first time a U.S. carrier battle group had sailed above the Arctic Circle since the Soviet Union imploded in 1991. Similarly, Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer recently announced plans to send surface warships on trans-Arctic missions, another new military move. (U.S. nuclear submarines make such journeys regularly, sailing beneath the sea ice.)

The Irony of Arctic Melting

Although Secretary Pompeo and his underlings never mention the term climate change, every aspect of his new doctrine is a product of that phenomenon. As humanity puts more and more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and global temperatures continue to rise, the Arctic ice cap will continue to shrink. That, in turn, will make exploitation of the region’s abundant oil and natural gas reserves ever more possible, leading to yet more burning of fossil fuels, further warming, and ever faster melting. In other words, the Pompeo Doctrine is a formula for catastrophe.

Add to this obvious abuse of the planet the likelihood that rising temperatures and increasing storm activity will render oil and gas extraction in parts of the world ever less viable. Many scientists now believe that daytime summer temperatures in oil-producing areas of the Middle East, for instance, are likely to average 120 degrees Fahrenheit by 2050, making outdoor human labor of most sorts deadly. At the same time, more violent hurricanes and other tropical storms passing over the ever-warming waters of the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico could imperil the continuing operation of offshore rigs there (and in other similarly storm-prone drilling areas). Unless humanity has converted to alternative fuels by then, the Arctic may be viewed as the world’s primary source of fossil fuels, only intensifying the struggle to control its vital resources.

Perhaps no aspect of humanity’s response to the climate crisis is more diabolical than this. The greater the number of fossil fuels we consume, the more rapidly we alter the Arctic, inviting the further extraction of just such fuels and their contribution to global warming. With other regions increasingly less able to sustain a fossil-fuel extraction economy, a continued addiction to oil will ensure the desolation of the once-pristine Far North as it is transformed into a Pompeo-style arena for burning conflict and civilizational disaster.

Michael T. Klare, a TomDispatch regular, is the five-college professor emeritus of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and a senior visiting fellow at the Arms Control Association. His new book, All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change (Metropolitan Books), will be published in November.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

Copyright 2019 Michael T. Klare

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/mike-pompeo-celebrates-the-defeat-of-an-international-probe-into-possible-u-s-war-crimes/

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Mike Pompeo celebrates the defeat of an international probe into possible U.S. war crimes

Written by Andrea Germanos / Common Dreams August 28, 2019

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Tuesday affirmed President Donald Trump’s disdain for the International Criminal Court when he appeared to boast of the White House’s successful bullying effort to stop the court from launching a probe into possible war crimes committed by U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

Pompeo made the remarks in a “Celebrating Americanism in Our Foreign Policy” speech at the American Legion National Convention in Indianapolis

“Americanism means taking care of our own,” said Pompeo.

“We stopped international courts from prosecuting our service members,” Pompeo continued, adding that the potential probe “was an outrage.”

In April, the ICC announced that it rejected a probe into possible war crimes and crimes against humanity in Afghanistan. Outgoing ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda requested the investigation in 2017, saying at the time that there was a “reasonable basis to believe” that war crimes were committed by the Taliban, Afghan National Security Forces, U.S. armed forces, and the CIA.  That move won the praise of human rights organizations and triggered over one million statements from alleged Afghan victims.

But the potential prosecutions also prompted threats from the White House, with Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, warning of sanctions against ICC officials if they moved ahead with probes into U.S. or Israeli war crimes.

Pompeo confirmed earlier this year that the administration would revoke or deny visas for ICC personnel who try to investigate or prosecute U.S. officials or key allies for potential war crimes. A month later, in April, the administration followed through and revoked prosecutor Bensouda’s visa for entry into the U.S.

Trump, for his part, celebrated the rejected war crimes probe as an “international victory.”

Human rights groups had a notably different takeaway.

“It is outrageous,” said Jamil Dakwar, director of ACLU’s group’s human rights program, “that victims of war crimes are far less likely to get justice for well-documented atrocities because of the Trump administration’s authoritarian efforts to sabotage an investigation before it could even get started.”

“No one except the world’s most brutal regimes win,” Dakwar said, “when we weaken and sabotage international institutions established to fight impunity and hold the human rights abusers accountable.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/mike-pompeo-torn-to-shreds-by-former-us-officials-in-brutal-new-yorker-profile-a-heat-seeking-missile-for-trumps-ass/

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...One former American ambassador, meanwhile, went even further and described Pompeo as “a heat-seeking missile for Trump’s ass.”

During the 2016 campaign, Pompeo warned that Trump would be “an authoritarian President who ignored our Constitution.” Three years later, the report says, Pompeo has rationalized his past reservations about the president by believing that God may have chosen him to enact His will.

“Pompeo, an evangelical Christian who keeps an open Bible on his desk, now says it’s possible that God raised up Trump as a modern Queen Esther, the Biblical figure who convinced the King of Persia to spare the Jewish people,” the New Yorker reports. “He defines his own job as serving the President, whatever the President asks of him.”

pompeo hu rights

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/not-a-straight-white-male-us-religious-conservatives-are-coming-for-you/

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Not a straight white male? US religious conservatives are coming for you

CPAC is hosted by the American Conservative Union. Image via Wikimedia Commons / Michael Vadon.

Written by OpenDemocracy.Net August 4, 2019

by Jessica Stern, Yifat Susskind

Any schoolchild in the United States knows that the US Declaration of Independenceguarantees individuals’ rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.

Now, imagine what these principles mean for right-wingers and religious fundamentalists: where “life” refers to fetuses; “liberty” includes the prerogative to discriminate against LGBTIQ people; and “the pursuit of happiness” is reserved for straight, white patriarchs.

For more nightmare fuel, look no further than the new government body that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced earlier this month: The Commission on Unalienable Rights. For the uninitiated: this project’s name might sound progressive, but it’s most definitely not.

Everything we’ve heard about this Commission is full of coded language that’s about as subtle as a brick through a window. This isn’t business as usual – even for the Trump administration. It represents an acceleration of a longstanding fundamentalist agenda.

According to its statement of intent, the Commission is needed as human rights “discourse has departed from our nation’s founding principles of natural law and natural rights”.

In case you’re wondering how to distinguish “natural” rights, they’re the ones bestowed by God (at least according to Pompeo’s commissioners). One of them, Peter Berkowitz, argues that Christianity is the source of all human rights. Another, Shaykh Hamza Yusuf Hanson, sees marriage equality for LGBTIQ people as a sign of the “End Times”.

In typical fundamentalist fashion, this project seeks to impose the same interpretation of law and rights used for generations to uphold slavery, genocide, categorical disenfranchisement, marital rape, domestic violence, and the criminalisation of LGBTIQ lives. Turning the clock back 200 years: this is how Pompeo proposes to make America great again.

In an op-ed published by the Wall Street Journal, the Secretary of State attacks “politicians and bureaucrats [who have created] new rights”, and thus “blur the distinction between unalienable rights and ad hoc rights granted by governments”. He also asserts that “rights claims are often aimed more at rewarding interest groups and dividing humanity into subgroups”.

But people whose rights are in danger because of their race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or any other real or perceived identity are not “interest groups”. We are the majority of the world. And we’ve fought for generations to ensure that human rights frameworks are truly inclusive of all people. Now, this Commission wants to undo our gains.

The Commission chair, former US Ambassador to the Holy See Mary Ann Glendon, says it will “work at the level of principle, not policy”. This should set off alarm bells. Policies, after all, can be reversed. But principles set the parameters of what kinds of policies are even possible. That’s their real aim: to circumscribe the range of acceptable ideas, scale back hard-won universal rights, and thus limit our possibilities.

We expect they’ll start with foreign policy, taking a page from a tried-and-true playbook. For decades, what American ultra-conservatives couldn’t get away with at home, they’ve exported abroad – through such heinous policies as the so-called Global Gag Rule, and the Helms Amendment, for instance, which have limited women’s access to safe abortion services around the world.

And once these right-wing policies are established – and legitimated – in foreign policy, they’re brought home to roost. Recently, a US court of appeals ruled that Trump’s Domestic Gag Rule can go into effect (further limiting abortion access here as well).

As the directors of international organisations for women and LGBTIQ people, OutRight Action International, and MADRE, we’re working to create a world of human rights and gender justice, where all people live free from violence and discrimination.

This work threatens the aims of ultra-conservatives, whose worldview depends on women being subservient within societies and LGBTIQ people disappearing altogether.

Their frontal assault is against abortion and the rights of LGBTIQ people, but that’s only their opening salvo. Unless you are part of the narrow demographic of rich, white men deemed to have rights in 1776, they’re coming for you too. In fact, their ideology threatens the vast majority of people – which is one reason it must be justified as “natural” and God-given.

The right’s concerted attack on reproductive rights and LGBTIQ people reflects the centrality of gender as a system for asserting the control and domination they seek. They target us because we’re upending that system. But allying feminist and LGBTIQ rights movements is more than a mutual defense pact: it’s a strategy to defeat the right.

Just last month, our organisations won a major victory after a year-long campaign around a pending international treaty on crimes against humanity. We ensured that this draft treaty dropped an outdated definition of gender, affirming the rights of all people.

In that campaign, we saw many of the same attacks that are now embedded in Pompeo’s new Commission – including claims that we were assaulting the ‘natural order’ and that our advocacy threatened traditional conceptions of rights.

One right-wing organisation C-FAM even claimed that our victory represented an attack by homosexual men on “our mothers and our sisters and our daughters”. That might seem a strange charge against an effort led jointly by LGBTIQ and women’s organisations, but they see the threat represented by our unified efforts and seek to drive a wedge between us.

One of the greatest successes of human rights advocates over generations is this: When our own governments and constitutions fail us, we can turn to international human rights to seek justice and reparation. We can share our testimonies about the abuses we’ve endured and, perhaps most importantly, change the global conversation. In doing so, we’ve influenced policies and practices at home and around the world.

Attacks on human rights, gender protections, and the multilateral system are a transparent attempt to close down that channel of progressive change-making. But by aligning our efforts as women’s and LGBTIQ rights organisations, and making common cause with other progressive movements, we can face down this latest assault.

Right-wingers are not coming after us because we’re weak. They’re coming after us because they’re afraid, we’re strong, and we know how to take them on.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/the-trump-administration-is-abolishing-the-very-idea-of-human-rights-as-a-part-of-american-identity/

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The Trump administration is abolishing the very idea of human rights as a part of the American identity

Written by Karen J. Greenberg / Tom Dispatch July 25, 2019

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the Grimm’s fairy tale, Hansel and Gretel. Terrified by cruel conditions at home, the brother and sister flee, winding their way, hungry and scared, through unknown woods. There, they encounter an old woman who lures them in with promises of safety. Instead, she locks one of them in a cage and turns the other into a servant, as she prepares to devour them both.

This article originally appeared on Tom Dispatch.

Written in nineteenth-century Germany, it should resonate eerily in today’s America. In place of Hansel and Gretel, we would, of course, have to focus on girls and boys by the hundreds fleeing cruelty and hunger in Central America, believing that they will find a better life in the United States, only to be thrown into cages by forces far more powerful and agents much crueler than that wicked old woman. In the story, there are no politics; there is only good and bad, right and wrong.

Rather than, as in that fairy tale, register the suffering involved in the captivity and punishment of those children at the U.S.-Mexican border, the administration has chosen a full-bore defense of its policies and so has taken a giant step in a larger mission: redefining (or more precisely trying to abolish) the very idea of human rights as a part of the country’s identity.

This week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo left no doubt: the reality of those children locked in cages, deprived of the most basic needs, and brazenly abused by the administration he works for has been an essential part of the Trump team’s determination to abandon human rights more generally. That willingness to leave children unprotected is part of a far larger message, not merely an unfortunate byproduct of ill-thought out and clumsy actions by an overwhelmed border police force.

Children in Detention Camps

The story of the children at the border is indeed gruesome. The United States has long had migrants pushing at its southern border, often in larger numbers than at present. In fact, since the 1980s, the numbers crossing that border exceeded one million in 19 different years. While the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) continues to estimate that current immigration rates are on track to exceed one million by September, many other experts don’t think it will even happen this year.

What’s genuinely new with the current border crossings is the number of children among the migrants. According to Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Kevin McAleenan’s sobering recent testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the presence of such children has risen 72% in recent years. Some even come “unaccompanied.” Others belong to migrant families. And while last month the government officially stopped its cruel policy of separating families, leaving many of those children (even toddlers and babies) alone in custody, Vox reports that “at any given time, for the past several weeks, more than 2,000 children have been held in the custody of U.S. Border Patrol without their parents.”

The conditions in the camps, strewn along the U.S. borderlands from Arizona to Texas, are shameful and fall most harshly on those very children. A recent Department of Homeland Security Inspector General report, issued in redacted form just days before the July 4th holiday celebrating the birth of this country as a beacon of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” described the staggering squalor and danger at such confinement facilities. There, children were often deprived of changes of clothes, beds, hot meals, toothbrushes, soap, showers, even adequate medical attention. Other eyewitness accounts have provided graphic details on the nature and scale of the deprivation, showing us children in soiled diapers, living with the stench of urine, sleeping on concrete floors, many weeping. On the somewhat more civilized floor of the Senate, members were told of children sleeping outside, exposed to the elements, and of the spoiled food at the camps.

Add to this the emotional toll that family separations have wrought on thousands of young people, as a new report issued by the House of Representatives Oversight Committee reveals and as others have documented. An El Paso immigration lawyer visiting one facility, for instance, described seeing a young boy who had scratched his own face until it bled. There are first-hand accounts by visitors to the camps of children trying to choke themselves with the lanyards from their own identification cards and others who dreamed about escaping by jumping out of windows high above the ground.

No wonder at least seven children have died while in such circumstances and many more are suffering from lice, scabies, chickenpox and other afflictions. Yet when doctors from the American Association of Pediatricians traveled to the camps to offer their help, their services were refused. Michelle Bachelet, the U.N. Commissioner for Human Rights, herself a pediatrician, has labeled the situation of the migrants “appalling” and noted that “several U.N. human rights bodies have found that the detention of migrant children may constitute cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment that is prohibited by international law.” Others have been less circumspect, explicitly comparing the treatment of the children to torture.

It’s hard not to assume that, however overwhelmed CBP may be, at least some of this treatment is intentional. Why else turn away doctors offering help or refuse supplies of donated aid sent by worried citizens? Why arrest a humanitarian aid volunteer who gave food and water to two ill and desperate undocumented Central American migrants and tried to get them medical help? The administration acknowledges that the overall situation is dire, but its officials on the spot have basically thrown up their hands, complaining that they have been “overwhelmed” by the situation they created, are “not trained to separate children,” and are powerless to address the problem of scarce resources.

While those on the ground have claimed helplessness in the face of the challenge, the rest of the administration refuses even to admit to the appalling conditions. (“They are run beautifully,” said President Trump of the border facilities, blaming the Democrats for any problems there.) Instead, top officials have repeatedly called the disgracefully unacceptable acceptable. Former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who bore responsibility for creating much of the mess, assured Congress that the children were “well taken care of,” claiming that “we have the highest standards.” Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions echoed her words. “The children,” he insisted, “are well cared for. In fact, they get better care than a lot of American kids do.”

In court, Department of Justice lawyer Sarah Fabian refused to admit that the absence of soap, a toothbrush, a bed, and sleep constituted unsafe and unsanitary conditions, the legal standards applying to the detention of migrant children. The U.S. Border Patrol chief for the El Paso region callously remarked, “Twenty years ago, we were lucky if we had juice and crackers for those in custody. Now, our stations are looking more like Walmarts, with diapers and baby formula and all kinds of things, like food and snacks.” Vice President Mike Pence highlighted the refusal to acknowledge reality recently by calling the two camps he visited, neither solely for children, but one housing families, examples of “compassionate care… care that every American would be proud of.”

Really? In whose world are filth, disease, and persistent emotional cruelty acceptable? In what America is the brutal incarceration of children not a violation of founding principles? In what America is rejecting the advances in protections that have been a hallmark of U.S. and international policy since the Second World War standard operating procedure? Since when do American officials just throw up their hands and declare defeat (as a kind of victory of cruelty) rather than muster their best talents, energies, and resources to confront such a problem? The answer, of course, is in Donald Trump’s America. And don’t for a moment think that this is just a matter of the piling up of unintended consequences. It’s not.

A Declaration of Inhuman Rights

Recently, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo offered some insights into the mindset of such an administration when it comes to the country’s longstanding embrace of the very idea of human rights. Soon after July 4th, he announced the creation of a new Commission on Unalienable Rights at the State Department. Its purpose, he claimed, was to rethink the spread of human rights protections as a part of American foreign policy. The very idea of rights, Pompeo insisted, had spun out of control. “Human-rights advocacy has lost its bearings and become more of an industry than a moral compass,” he said, wagging his finger at 70 years of history. “‘Rights talk’ has become a constant element of our domestic political discourse, without any serious effort to distinguish what rights mean and where they come from.”

Rather than expand rights further, he explained, the country would do well to return to (his idea of) the context of the founding fathers and explore just what they really meant in their classic writings. Essential to his goal, experts suggested, was rolling back abortion rights. A remarkable number of the commission members were, in fact, known for their anti-abortion positions and this should have surprised no one, since the State Department had already withdrawn all health assistance from international organizations that offer abortion counseling and care. In doing so, it expanded what, in prior Republican administrations, were more modest restrictions on abortion-related care. Striking as such a global anti-abortion-rights position might be, however, Pompeo’s urge seems far grander. His goal is evidently to unilaterally reject the evolution of human rights that has prominently defined the country since the post-World War Two era, and that has been an essential piece of American democratic rhetoric since its founding.

To begin the process, Pompeo promptly misappropriated the very language of the Declaration of Independence to promote an agenda explicitly calling for the removal of rights. “My hope,” he announced, “is that the Commission on Unalienable Rights will ground our understanding of human rights in a manner that will both inform and better protect essential freedoms — and underscore how central these ideas are not only to Americans, but to all of humanity.” As the rest of his comments showed, he was invoking the freedom to deprive others, exclude others, and cause hardship for others. Placed alongside the border realities, it was a testament to the administration’s determination to erase rights from the nation’s identity. Putting a fine point on his goals, Pompeo added that, in his view, human rights and democracy were distinctly in opposition to each other. As he pungently put it, “Loose talk of ‘rights’ unmoors us from the principles of liberal democracy.”

Pompeo’s attempt to recast the founders’ intent in the context of today’s cruelty may be the most full-throated articulation to date of what this administration has been up to. The ongoing mistreatment of children at the border, a story that has lasted for well over a year, suggests that the spirit of Pompeo’s Declaration of Inhuman Rights has long been on the agenda. He had one thing right, however: those border camps do seem to belong to another place and time, one that preceded the U.N.’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, another document he invoked, intending to reshape American adherence to it.

The New Status Quo

This is hardly the first time the Trump administration has revealed its cynicism over democracy. Redefining the very purpose of “liberal democracy,” as I wrote more than a year ago, had been part of its mission since the beginning. In its first 18 months, the administration removed the language of democracy from the mission statements of many of its departments, including the phrase “nation of immigrants” from that of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Still, after two and a half years of reorienting the executive branch of government away from equal protection under the law, the equal right to vote, and a respect for the very idea of welcoming immigrants, Pompeo’s “commission” may be the most brazen conceptual act yet when it comes to erasing the language of human rights from the country’s identity.

It’s in this still-developing context that the migrant children crisis should be understood. It should be seen as a graphic version of the insistence of this administration on changing the very meaning of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” in the modern age. For Pompeo (as for his president), the evolution of the country towards more rights for more people is nothing but a mark of shame. How far back would he take us? To before the Civil War?

No wonder, on learning each day’s news from the border, it’s easy to feel we’ve entered a dismal fairy tale from an age of ogres and witches, where the forces of evil and ill will have taken charge and the prospect of saving helpless children seems as irretrievably long gone as those crumbs eaten by the birds following Hansel and Gretel on their grim journey into the witch’s lair. Attacking the most vulnerable among us — infants, toddlers, young children, teens — leaves little room for doubt. This administration is determined to undo the country’s commitment to human rights and so change its identity in a way that should concern us all.

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Tony Perkins, president of the anti-LGBTQ Religious Right organization Family Research Council, was invited to speak at an event hosted by the State Department this week, where he has been rubbing elbows with some of the Trump administration’s top brass, who have been dropping by his radio studio for exclusive interviews on his show, Washington Watch.

The State Department is hosting a three-day Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom in Washington, where a bipartisan lineup of high-ranking officials is discussing threats to religious liberty across the world. Perkins spoke at the event yesterday, and broadcast his weekday radio program from the State Department.

In addition to his role at Family Research Council, Perkins chairs the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, to which he was appointed on the recommendation of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell despite the fact that Perkins’ group was identified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center for its attacks against the LGBTQ community and brings with it a well-documented track record of anti-Muslim rhetoric.

On Monday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was a guest on Perkins’ show, there to hype the State Department’s event to Perkins’ Religious Right audience. The following day, Mark Green, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), joined Perkins on his radio show to talk about the importance of USAID pairing with religious groups to fulfill their missions abroad.

“For us at USAID, around the world, we are far more effective when we partner with the community of faith,” Green said. “The community of faith, faith-based organizations, help us to reach corners that we could not reach in this world through the government.”

Perkins agreed, praising the Trump administration for its work with religious groups, adding, “Together we can do so much more than if we try to do it alone.” At the end of the interview, Green told Perkins, who has a troubled history regarding racism: “I’m honored to be with you.”

That affirming message is in stark contrast to the elements of Perkins’ public record that raised concerns about his appointment to the USCIRF. As Right Wing Watch’s Peter Montgomery noted after Perkins’ election to USCIRF chair in June:

As recently as 2015, Perkins claimed that Islam “is incompatible with the Constitution.”  That same year, he defended calls to restrict the immigration of Muslims by declaring that “only 16 percent of Islam is a religion.” The year before, he suggested that Christians who support legal equality for LGBTQ people don’t have the same legal protections as more conservative Christians, because a “true religious freedom” has to be “based on orthodox religious viewpoints.”

It’s also worth noting that the Family Research Council is one of the Religious Right groups that have eagerly worked with the most religiously oppressive regimes—those classified by the USCIRF as among the worst for religious liberty—in order to resist international recognition for the rights of LGBTQ people and to defend governments’ right to enforce “traditional” religious views on gender, sexuality, and family.

Scholars have argued that religious intolerance at home undermines the United States’ ability to advocate for human rights overseas.

Tags: Mark GreenMike PompeoTony PerkinsAnti-LGBTReligious RightFamily Research CouncilU.S. State DepartmentUSAID

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omg

While Hagee’s influence and the influence of his organization CUFI are stronger than ever with Trump in the White House, his political clout with the Trump administration is, at least partially, due to the presence of staunch Christian Zionists in two of the top offices in the executive branch: vice president and secretary of state.

Pence and Pompeo push “holy war”

Though several Trump officials spoke at the recent CUFI summit, two stand out — not just for their high-ranking positions but also for their open admissions that their Christian Zionist beliefs guide their policies. These officials are Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State and former CIA Director Mike Pompeo.

After Trump chose his running mate, Pence’s religious fervor came under media scrutiny, with several outlets noting that he was known to be an ardent Christian Zionist. Pence’s faith gained particular attention owing to his past statements on Israel, which he has often described in prophetic terms.

Though raised Catholic, Pence gradually transitioned to an “evangelical Catholic” and then to an evangelical Protestant and has since become a key political figure representing the fundamentalist Christian movement that promotes “dominionism,” an ideology that varies in its interpretations but ultimately seeks to see the secular nature of the U.S. government shift towards one governed by “Biblical law.” Pence’s association with this movement has led prominent voices in the media to accuse him of supporting a theocratic form of government.

Though many of the initial concerns about Pence revolved around his likely effects on domestic policy, much of his influence has instead been seen in foreign policy, including the administration’s Middle East policy. His public identification as a Christian Zionist and his speech to the 2017 CUFI summit, the first vice president to ever speak at the annual event, have led some to worry that the Christian Zionist view of prophecy is guiding Pence’s political actions.

[ pix Pence visits the Western Wall, Judaism’s holiest site in Jerusalem’s Old City, Jan. 23, 2018. Oded Balilty | AP

Following Pence’s first speech at CUFI, Daniel Hummel, a scholar and fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School, told the Washington Post:

Christian Zionism has a long history in American politics, but it has never captured the bully pulpit of the White House. Past administrations often used general biblical language in reference to Israel, but never has the evangelical theology of Christian Zionism been so close to the policymaking apparatus of the executive branch.

By identifying with Christian Zionism while in office, Pence risks the Trump administration’s ongoing search for an ‘ultimate deal’ to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and erodes the U.S.’ claim that it can be an ‘honest broker’ in the Middle East.”

Concerns that the U.S. is under the influence of extremist religious Zionism and Christian Zionism that would prevent the country from acting as an “honest broker” in the Israel-Palestine conflict have, unsurprisingly, been proven true. In fact, Pence’s religious beliefs are believed to have been a major factor in Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and to move the U.S. Embassy to the contested city.

Though Mike Pence is the highest-ranking member of the Trump administration who is openly a Christian Zionist, it is Pompeo that is the most overt and open about how his religious beliefs regarding the end times guide his decision-making as head of the U.S. State Department.

For much of his political career, Pompeo has framed U.S. counterterrorism policy as a “holy war” between Christianity and Islam, which he believes is the earthly equivalent of a cosmic battle between good and evil. In 2017, as CIA director, Pompeo claimed:

Radical Islamic terror [will] continue to press against us until we make sure that we pray and stand and fight and make sure that we know that Jesus Christ is our savior [and] truly the only solution for our world.”

That same year, Pompeo created a new CIA “mission center” targeting Iran headed by Michael D’Andrea, whose CIA nickname is “The Prince of Darkness.” Pompeo, like many Christian Zionists, believes that war between the United States and Iran is part of the end times, a belief that is outright alarming given his prior control over CIA covert operations and his focus on Iran, as well as his current role as the U.S.’ chief diplomat, in which he has also been laser-focused on promoting an aggressive policy towards Iran.

In addition to his views on “holy war,” Pompeo also frequently discussed his views on the rapture while serving as CIA director. TYT reported last year that Pompeo had spoken about the rapture so frequently that it had reportedly frightened top CIA officials.

According to Michael Weinstein — founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, a watchdog group on issues of religious freedom in the military and intelligence community — who was quoted in the TYT report:

He [Pompeo] is intolerant of anyone who isn’t a fundamentalist Christian. The people that worked under him at the CIA that came to us were never confused — they never had time to be confused. They were shocked and then they were scared shitless.”

A 2015 video of Pompeo that surfaced while he was CIA director also shows the former congressman describing politics as “a never-ending struggle … until the rapture.”

More recently, a New York Times article published in March again brought Pompeo’s obsession with the end times back into public view. Titled “The Rapture and the Real World: Mike Pompeo Blends Beliefs and Policy,” the article detailed how Pompeo has made it standard operating procedure to mix his Christian Zionist views with his approach to foreign policy. That article also referenced the statement Pompeo made earlier this year, in which he opined that it was “certainly possible” that President Trump had been sent by God to “save the Jewish people from the Iranian menace.”

Pompeo made those statements during an official trip to Jerusalem that was also controversial for other reasons. Indeed, in a state department video shared on social media and meant to publicize Pompeo’s trip, footage of a model of the Third Jewish Temple was included while footage of the Al Aqsa mosque was notably excluded, despite it being the most iconic building in Jerusalem.

[ vid]

Given that Pompeo had also visited the tunnels that have worn away the historic mosque’s foundations, many Palestinians took the video as a sign that the Trump administration was colluding with the Temple Activist movement in Israel, which was discussed in detail in Part II of this series.

Joining forces to target Jerusalem

Well before Theodore Herzl founded political Zionism and published The Jewish State, Christian Zionists in the United States and England were already seeking to direct and influence the foreign policy of both nations in service of a religious obsession with ushering in the end times. The historical record clearly shows how Christian Zionists have influenced events throughout history, particularly in regard to the founding of the state of Israel and subsequent developments in the Israel-Palestine conflict.

In the pursuit of these dispensationalist end-times prophecies, Christian Zionists have forged alliances with Jewish Zionists and each has opportunistically used the other in order to usher in the common events that are believed to facilitate the coming of their respective apocalypses or to aid more secular, political goals. From Hechler and Herzl, to Scofield and Untermeyer, to Begin and Falwell, these alliances have shaped the policy of Western governments, particularly the U.S. and England, for over a century.

Today, only one such prophecy has yet to be fulfilled, the construction of a Third Jewish Temple on the Temple Mount, which is currently occupied by the Al Aqsa mosque compound. Now, more than ever before, Israel’s government, as shown in Part II, is filled with high-ranking officials who openly call for Al Aqsa’s destruction and seek to hastily construct a Third Temple. Similarly, as this report has shown, the Trump administration is greatly influenced by Christian Zionists who also seek the mosque’s destruction, in hopes that the Third Temple will soon be built.

Yet, the Trump administration’s ties to this apocalyptic ideology go even deeper than has been discussed in this article, as many other influential members in the Trump administration — especially top Trump advisers Jared Kushner and Jason Greenblatt, and U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman — also share and actively promote this extremist religious Zionist ideology that seeks to rebuild a Third Temple. As will be seen in the next installment of this series, this ideology is also a driving factor for top Trump and Republican Party donors such as Sheldon Adelson.

The end result is that the hold of this apocalyptic ideology on both the governments of Israel and the United States appears to be stronger now than ever, meaning that the danger currently facing Al Aqsa mosque, and with it world peace, looms large.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/trump-supporters-are-calling-for-pompeos-ouster-after-he-pushed-president-into-a-corner-on-iran-report/

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POMPEO playing gulf of tonkin card hard

no lnx many pix

If there were any lingering hopes that the corporate media learned from its role in perpetuating the lies that led to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and would never again help start a Middle East war on the basis of false or flimsy evidence, the headlines that blared across the front pages of major U.S. news websites Thursday night indicated that such hopes were badly misplaced.

The U.S. military late Thursday released blurry, black-and-white video footage that it claimed—without any underlying analysis or further details—showed an Iranian patrol boat removing an unexploded limpet mine from the Japanese-owned Kokuka Courageous, one of the oil tankers damaged in attacks in the Gulf of Oman.

Here’s how CNN presented the U.S. military’s video:

Iran has denied any involvement in the attacks, and Yutaka Katada—the owner of the Kokuka Courageous—contradicted the Trump administration’s account during a press conference on Friday.

“Our crew said that the ship was attacked by a flying object,” Katada said. “I do not think there was a time bomb or an object attached to the side of the ship.”

Independent critics were quick to call for extreme skepticism in the face of U.S. government claims, given the quality of the “evidence” and the warmongering track records of those presenting it.

Trita Parsi

?

@tparsi

A serial liar is President.

A warmonger and a serial fabricator who helped get us into the disastrous Iraq war and who has sabotaged numerous attempts at diplomacy is the NatSec Advisor.

But go ahead, Media, treat Pompeo's accusations as "evidence"...#OilTanker #GulfOfOman

405

12:33 PM - Jun 13, 2019

Twitter Ads info and privacy

203 people are talking about this

But the media displayed no such caution.

Just taking a random sample of screenshots after the news broke Thursday night, major outlets largely did the Pentagon’s dirty work by posting uncritical headlines that took the claims at face value.

The Washington Post used the word “purported” in its headline, but erroneously reported that the video was taken “before” the explosion on the vessel, not after. The headline was later changed, but was made no more critical of the military’s claim:...

Iran's Isna news agency published an unverified image of what it said was a burning tanker in the Gulf of Oman

US footage shows 'Iran removing unexploded mine'

Iran has strongly denied the US allegation that it was behind attacks on tankers in the Gulf of Oman on Thursday.

bbc.com

107 people are talking about this

In a blog post on Friday, historian and Middle East expert Juan Cole wrote that the Trump administration’s narrative that Iranians were removing an unexploded mine from the damaged oil tanker “doesn’t make any sense at all” and said the video footage released by the U.S. “needs to be carefully analyzed” before any conclusions are drawn.

“[Secretary of State Mike] Pompeo alleged that only the Iranians had the expertise to deploy these mines,” Cole wrote. “We heard this crock for 8.5 years in Iraq—all shaped charges had to be Iran-backed, even those of al-Qaeda, because Iraqis didn’t have the expertise…. Sure. Had to be Iran, helping those hyper-Sunni al-Qaeda. Very likely story.”

On Twitter, Sina Toossi, research associate at the National Iranian American Council, echoed Cole’s call for skepticism and an investigation.

“What we need is an impartial investigation,” Toossi wrote, “and to be highly skeptical of claims and intel assessments from Bolton/Pompeo.”

Sina Toossi

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all in on venez coup

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many many lnx

The Rapture and the Real World: Mike Pompeo Blends Beliefs and Policy

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has linked Christian beliefs with foreign policy, raising questions about the extent to which his evangelism is influencing American diplomacy.

By Edward Wong

March 30, 2019

JERUSALEM — When Secretary of State Mike Pompeo sat down for an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network in a hotel in Jerusalem earlier this month, he made a remark that was perhaps the most revelatory of any in his nearly one year in office.

An evangelical Christian, Mr. Pompeo had just returned from tours of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, built on the ground where Jesus is said to have been crucified and buried, and of tunnels beneath the Western Wall, by the holiest site in Judaism. The interviewer posed a question around a biblical tale about a queen who saved Jews from slaughter by a Persian official: Did Mr. Pompeo think President Trump had been “raised for such a time as this, just like Queen Esther, to help save the Jewish people from the Iranian menace?”

“As a Christian, I certainly believe that’s possible,” Mr. Pompeo said. “It was remarkable — so we were down in the tunnels where we could see 3,000 years ago, and 2,000 years ago, if I have the history just right — to see the remarkable history of the faith in this place, and the work that our administration’s done, to make sure that this democracy in the Middle East, that this Jewish state, remains. I am confident that the Lord is at work here.”

White evangelical Christians are a powerful force in the Republican Party. Vice President Mike Pence is a staunch believer and former President George W. Bush is an adherent, too.

But no secretary of state in recent decades has been as open and fervent as Mr. Pompeo about discussing Christianity and foreign policy in the same breath. That has increasingly raised questions about the extent to which evangelical beliefs are influencing American diplomacy.

On Monday, in a speech at the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel group, Mr. Pompeo told an anecdote about Tibor Baranski, a Christian who saved 3,000 Jews in Hungary during World War II. Then he said, “As secretary of state and as a Christian, I’m proud to lead American diplomacy to support Israel’s right to defend itself.”

The next day, Mr. Pompeo announced an expansion of Trump administration anti-abortion policies, saying the United States would stop funding foreign organizations that support other groups that perform abortions. It is a policy popular with conservatives, Catholics and evangelical Christians.

Though Mr. Trump is secular, white evangelicals are a big part of his voter base, and some of his major foreign policy moves, planned or supported by Mr. Pompeo, are intended to shore up political support.

[ Image

“I am confident that the Lord is at work here,” Mr. Pompeo told a reporter in Jerusalem who asked whether President Trump was sent to protect Israel from Iran.CreditJim Young/Reuters]

The most notable examples involve Israel. When Mr. Trump moved the United States Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, evangelicals applauded.

Studies show that white evangelicals are much more likely than other Americans to believe that Israel fulfills a biblical prophecy. Known as Christian Zionists, they believe God promised the land to the Jews, and that the gathering of Jews in Israel is foretold in the prophecy of the rapture — the ascent of Christians into the kingdom of God.

Mr. Pompeo talks about the rapture. “We will continue to fight these battles,” he said at a “God and Country Rally” in 2015, because there is a “never-ending struggle” until “the rapture.”

“Be part of it,” he said at the meeting, at the Summit church in Wichita, Kan. “Be in the fight.”

In November, Mr. Pompeo told a reporter for The New York Times Magazine that the Bible “informs everything I do.” The reporter noticed an open Bible in his office, with a Swiss Army knife marking his place at the end of the book of Queen Esther.

Mr. Pompeo, 55, became a devoted Christian at West Point, where he joined a Bible study group. After moving to Kansas, he joined the Eastminster Presbyterian Church in Wichita, which is affiliated with the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, a relatively conservative denomination.

The State Department did not respond to questions about the intersection of Mr. Pompeo’s Christian beliefs and policy.

American evangelicals who supported Mr. Trump’s embassy move might also approve if Israel  annexes part or all of the West Bank. After Mr. Trump formally recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights in a meeting on Monday with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, many conservative Israelis said they are hopeful that annexing part of the West Bank will be next.

Then there is the question of what an Israeli-Palestinian peace plan, as drawn up by Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s adviser and son-in-law, will recommend for the disputed territories of Jerusalem and the West Bank.

[Image

Evangelical Christians supported Mr. Trump’s order to move the United States Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.CreditMenahem Kahana/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images]

Martin Indyk, a former assistant secretary of state for Near East affairs, noted the evangelical influence on the Trump administration in saying he doubted that the peace plan would propose ceding any Israeli-occupied territory in the West Bank to Palestinians. Nor was it likely to provide a route to Palestinian sovereignty, Mr. Indyk said.

“In the view of evangelicals, that is the land that God gave to the Jews,” he said. “They’re strongly opposed to any territorial concession there. If there is any of that in the plan, I think there will be strong evangelical opposition to it.”

Mr. Trump’s decision in December 2017 to move the American Embassy was intended to please evangelical voters in the United States, as well as some Jews. Mr. Netanyahu has embraced evangelical support for his right-wing policies, and sees evangelicals as more reliable American allies of Israel than liberal American Jews.

An evangelical pastor, Robert Jeffress of First Baptist Dallas, gave an opening prayer at the embassy building’s dedication ceremony in May. His presence made many Israelis uncomfortable; he has said Jews, Muslims and Mormons are bound for hell. In 2017, during a conference call of Mr. Trump’s top evangelical supporters, Mr. Jeffress led a prayer for the protection of Mr. Pompeo, then C.I.A. director, and thanked God for putting him in the job.

Mr. Pompeo has gotten rid of a diplomatic consulate in Jerusalem for Palestinians and merged its work into the new embassy.

Elsewhere in the Middle East, Mr. Pompeo also has broadcast his Christian beliefs. At the start of a January speech in Cairo, Mr. Pompeo said the trip was “especially meaningful” for him “as an evangelical Christian, coming so soon after the Coptic Church’s Christmas celebrations.”

He added, “In my office, I keep a Bible open on my desk to remind me of God and his word, and the truth.”

Observers found it  remarkable that Mr. Pompeo would open a speech in a majority-Muslim country by highlighting his Christianity. And some critics have pointed out that Mr. Pompeo, before becoming secretary, made us-versus-them statements about Christians and Muslims while talking about terrorism and war.

[Image

Mr. Pompeo broadcast his beliefs in Cairo, where he said his trip to Egypt, a Muslim-majority country, was “especially meaningful” for him “as an evangelical Christian.”CreditPool photo by Andrew Caballero-Reynolds]

At Mr. Pompeo’s confirmation hearing in April 2018, Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, asked him about his ties to prominent anti-Islam activists. Mr. Pompeo acknowledged the ties but said he had a strong record “with respect to tolerance and the equal treatment of people.”

When Mr. Pompeo traveled to Lebanon after his recent stop in Israel, he toured a church and a Crusader citadel and talked with a bishop about religious freedom, one of his favorite themes. He plans to host a second conference on religious freedom at the State Department in July.

Mr. Pompeo has made Iran a signature issue, blaming it for stirring unrest in the Middle East. He reliably calls the country by its full name — the Islamic Republic of Iran — to highlight its religious identity.

Last year, Mr. Pompeo and Mr. Pence led an extraordinary campaign to pressure President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, a proponent of political Islam, to release an American evangelical pastor, Andrew Brunson, who was arrested in 2016.

But Mr. Pompeo, citing the mission of religious freedom, has also defended the rights of Muslims oppressed by some Asian nations.

He has criticized Myanmar for its ethnic cleansing of Rohingya, though he has declined to describe it as genocide. And Mr. Pompeo has denounced China for its detentions of one million or more Muslims.

Hours before leaving for Kuwait, Israel and Lebanon, Mr. Pompeo hosted an on-the-record conference call with just “faith-based media,” barring journalists who regularly cover the State Department.

Though widely criticized for the move, Mr. Pompeo and the State Department have refused to say who was on the call or release a transcript.

Representative Susan Wild, Democrat of Pennsylvania, told Mr. Pompeo during a House hearing on Wednesday that his action “raises concerns about First Amendment violations.”

Mr. Pompeo said it was “no different” than giving selective interviews. He added, “I am confident I will do so again.”

Elizabeth Dias contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A10 of the New York edition with the headline: The Rapture and the Real World: Pompeo Mixes Beliefs and Policy.

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https://www.vox.com/world/2018/4/12/17230078/mike-pompeo-secretary-of-state-confirmation-cory-booker

Cory Booker just excoriated Trump’s secretary of state nominee, Mike Pompeo, during his confirmation hearing over Pompeo’s past associations with prominent anti-Muslim ideologues.

For most of his hearing on Thursday morning, Pompeo (who’s currently the CIA director) seemed prepared and capable of handling every question the Senate Foreign Relations Committee threw at him. But the nominee stumbled — badly — under a cleverly prepared series of questions from the New Jersey Democrat.

First, Booker asked Pompeo about a 2013 speech in which Pompeo blasted American Islamic leaders for their “silence” in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings and said that made them “potentially complicit” in terrorism. (American Muslim leaders in fact spoke out forcefully against terrorism and extremism in the wake of the attacks and organized effortsto help victims.)

Pompeo responded by saying that he wasn’t trying to cast aspersions on all Muslims but was simply pointing out that Muslims have more ability to discourage other Muslims from joining militant groups. “For certain forms of violence, there are certain people who are better positioned” to act, he said.

Pompeo added, “Each and every human, not just Americans, each human being has an obligation to push back against this extremist use of violence.”

This seemed like a decent evasion at first — but it soon became clear that Pompeo had walked into a dangerous trap.

Booker said he agreed with Pompeo that “silence in the face of injustice lends strength to that injustice.” Then he sprang the trap: He brought up Pompeo’s long history of association with two of America’s most prominent Islamophobes, Frank Gaffney and Brigitte Gabriel, and asked whether Pompeo had ever used his “position” to denounce their extremist views.

Gaffney, a conspiracy theorist who has accused most American Muslim civic organizations of being fronts for Islamist groups, had hosted Pompeo on his radio show. Gabriel, an anti-Islam activist who has described Islam as “a political movement cloaked in religion,” hosted a dinner in Pompeo’s honor in 2016 — where she gave him an award that he accepted. Did Pompeo ever condemn them in the way he expects all Muslims to condemn terrorists?

Pompeo had no good answer: “Senator, I couldn’t tell you,” he responded. “I don’t recall each statement I’ve made over 54 years.”

Here’s the exchange a transcript, if you prefer reading:

BOOKER: I’m wondering, Sir — do you know Frank Gaffney?

POMPEO: Yes, I do.

BOOKER: And you’ve been on his show dozens of times?

POMPEO: I was on his show some, yes.

BOOKER: I have here over 20 times. And he has talked about [how] Muslims who abide by the adherence of the faith should be considered to be tried for acts of sedition and prosecuted. I have a lot of his statements. Did you remain silent — and, from my notes at least, you’re a friend of his — were you silent in your position of authority in these words that devalue the American constitution?

POMPEO: Sir, my record on this is unambiguous ...

BOOKER: If that’s your response, you did not say anything to call out his remarks. What about Brigitte Gabriel. Do you know her?

POMPEO: I do.

BOOKER: Someone who runs an organization that has been considered a hate group by the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center. Were you silent? Did you ever call her out on her remarks that are hateful or bigoted?

POMPEO: Senator, I’ve spoken to a number of groups, and I believe my record with respect to tolerance and the equal treatment of people, I think it ...

BOOKER: But, yes or no, did you ever call her out?

POMPEO: Senator, I couldn’t tell you. I don’t recall each statement I’ve made over 54 years.

BOOKER: Okay, well, I believe this special obligation that you talk about for Americans to condemn things that for attacking our Constitution or ideals would obligate you under your own definition to speak out.

Mike Pompeo isn’t the only person in the White House with ties to these kinds of groups in the Trump administration. Both National Security Adviser John Bolton and Attorney General Jeff Sessions have a long record of association with Gaffney in particular. Trump cited a “study” on Muslim public opinion conducted Gaffney’s organization, the Center for Security Policy, as a justification for his Muslim ban.

But this is the most aggressively, to my recollection, that any Trump administration official has ever been questioned about their association with Islamophobic individuals or groups. And it’s incredibly telling that Pompeo, who’s typically clever and quick on his feet, had no real answer for Booker’s very simple questions.

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D.C. – During a Senate Foreign Relations Committee confirmation hearing on the nomination of CIA Director Mike Pompeo to be Secretary of State, U.S. Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) questioned Pompeo about his past statements targeting Muslim and LGBTQ Americans.

A video of the exchange is available here, high quality audio can be downloaded here, and a rush transcript is below:

Cory Booker (CB): I want to pick up on one of the themes we talked at length about and that involves many of your past statements concerning Muslim Americans.

CB: Perhaps I just want to start with some of your language – in a speech you talked about folks who “worshipped other gods and called it multiculturalism.” You mourned that we live in a country where that happens. Do you have any views of the Muslim faith or people who believe in worshipping quote-unquote other gods, is that something negative in our country?

Mike Pompeo (MP): No senator, you can look at my record, you don’t have to take my word for it here today –my record is exquisite with respect to treating people of each and every faith with the dignity they deserve to protect the right to practice their religion or no religion for that matter in the way that they want to. [Crosstalk] I’ve heard these critiques – I’ve worked closely with Muslim leaders, with Muslim countries…the CIA has saved countless, thousands of Muslim lives during my 15 months… this is at the core of who I am Senator Booker. I promise you I will treat persons of each faith or no faith with the dignity and respect that they deserve.

CB: Your words right now are really encouraging, words do matter, it’s not just actions. In a nation where you see too much bigotry you and I both know words matter. So I do understand your actions and I will stipulate to the actions you just said. But I want to get to the bottom of people who are going to be reading your past statements and give you a chance to further explain them.

CB: I woudl like to go back to what we talked about you and I – this idea that “a special obligation falls on Muslims” in regards to terrorist attacks in our country and you said something very dramatic. And I know you know this. You said that people who are silent are complicit in those terrorist attacks. Do you think that Muslim Americans in this country – who serve in the military, who serve in the State Department – their failure to speak up, are they complicit in terrorist attacks?

MP: Senator each and every human, not just Americans, has an obligation to push back against this extremist use of violence, from whatever faith.

CB: So you don’t create a special class of people in this country based upon their religion that have a special obligation as you said to condemn terrorist attacks?

MP: No senator, having said that, and you and I had a chance to discuss this yesterday and I’m not sure we ended up completely agreeing, but perhaps we did, I also do believe this firmly: that for certain places for certain forms of violence there are certain [people] who are better positioned, folks who are more credible, more trustworthy have a more shared experience. So when it comes to making sure we don’t have terrorists brewing in places where Muslims congregate, there’s a special place, right? They have a, it’s more than than a duty it’s an opportunity, to be treated as, when someone of another faith says it...

CB: So if I can go on because I have some more questions… So you think that Muslims in America who are in positions of leadership have a different category of obligation because of their religion, that’s what I’m hearing you saying.

MP: It’s not an obligation it’s an opportunity, senator.

CB: It’s interesting because I would agree with you, that silence in the face of injustice – we’ve seen this in the Holocaust, we’ve seen this in the Civil Rights Movement – I do agree with you silence in the face of injustice lends strength to that injustice. I do have a problem though when you start creating, dicing up American people and saying certain Americans – I don’t care if its Kareem Abdul Jabbar or Muslims that serve on my staff, that they’re in positions of leadership, that suddenly have a special obligation. I do believe, though, all of us when it comes to violent actions or words have an obligation. So I’m wondering, sir, do you know Frank Gafney?

MP: Yes I do.

CB: And you’ve been on his show dozens of times.

MP: I was on his show some, yes Senator.

CB: I have here over 20 times. And he’s talked about Muslims who abide by the adherence of their faith should be tried for acts of sedition and should be prosecuted. Did you remain silent when you were on his show? Did you ever question? Because I have a lot of his statements here. Did you remain silent, and from my notes at least he’s a friend of yours, were you silent in your position of authority against these words that are violative of the American Constitution? Were you silent with him?

MP: My record is unambiguous.

CB: If that’s your response, you did not say anything to call out his remarks. What about Bridget Gabriel, do you know her?

MP: I do.

CB: Someone who has been, who runs an organization that has been considered a hate group by the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center. Were you silent? Did you ever call her out on her remarks are that are hateful and bigoted?

MP: Senator I’ve spoken to a number of grounds, and I believe my record with respect to tolerance and the equal treatment of people is –

CB: Yes or no, did you ever call her out?

MP: Senator I couldn’t tell you, I don’t recall each statement I’ve made over 54 years.

CB: OK, well I believe the special obligation that you talk about for Americans to condemn things that are attacking their Constitution or ideals would obligate you in your own definition to speak out.

MP: Senator, if I might, I have called out… we had a terrible fellow in Kansas called Fred Phelps, and I called him out…

CB: Sir, I have a minute left, because I do want to give you a chance to speak about your comments about gays and lesbians. You said in a speech, that, mourning an America that “endorses a perversion and calls it an alternative lifestyle” – those are your words. Is being gay a perversion?

MP: Senator, when I was a politician I had a very clear view on whether it was appropriate for two same sex persons to marry. I stand by that.

CB: So you don’t think it’s appropriate for two gay people to marry?

MP: Senator I continue to hold that view, it’s the same view for the record…

CB: And so people in the State Department that are married under your leadership – you don’t believe that that should be allowed?

MP: We have, I believe it’s the case that we have married gay couples at the CIA. I treated them with the exact same set of rights –

CB: Do you believe gay sex is a perversion? Yes or no? [Crosstalk] Because that’s what you said here in one of your speeches.

MP: Senator I’m going to give you the same answer here that I gave you previously. My respect for every individual regardless of their sexual orientation is the same, and it will continue to be so if I am confirmed.

CB: So I will conclude by saying, you’re going to be Secretary of State of the United States at a time when we have increase in hate speech and hate actions against Jewish Americans, Muslim Americans, Indian Americans – hate acts are on the increase in our nation. You’re going to representing this country and its values abroad in nations where gay individuals are under untold persecution, untold violence. Your views do matter, you’re going to be dealing with Muslim states and on Muslim issues and I do not necessarily concur that you are putting forward the values of our nation when you believe that there are people in this country who are perverse and where you think that you create different categories of Americans and their obligations when it comes to condemning violence. So I’ll have another round but thank you.

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omg

Pompeo actually just cheered the ‘new opportunities’ presented by the Arctic’s melting ice sheets

by Cody Fenwick May 6, 2019

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has never been terribly worried about climate change, but in a new speech to the Arctic Council Ministerial Meeting in Finland on Monday, he seemed…

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verge on dominionism?

few months ago, Katherine Stewart—whose reporting focuses on the intersection of politics and religion—wrote something pretty jarring about the white evangelicals who dominate Trump’s base.

As the Trump presidency falls under siege on multiple fronts, it has become increasingly clear that the so-called values voters will be among the last to leave the citadel. A lot of attention has been paid to the supposed paradox of evangelicals backing such an imperfect man, but the real problem is that our idea of Christian nationalism hasn’t caught up with the reality. We still buy the line that the hard core of the Christian right is just an interest group working to protect its values. But what we don’t get is that Mr. Trump’s supposedly anti-Christian attributes and anti-democratic attributes are a vital part of his attraction.

Today’s Christian nationalists talk a good game about respecting the Constitution and America’s founders, but at bottom they sound as if they prefer autocrats to democrats. In fact, what they really want is a king.

Stewart wrote that in the context of noting that some white evangelicals have compared Donald Trump to King Cyrus, who ruled the Persian empire in the 6th century BC.

Isaiah 45 celebrates Cyrus for freeing a population of Jews who were held captive in Babylon. Cyrus is the model for a nonbeliever appointed by God as a vessel for the purposes of the faithful.

Now we learn that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is comparing Trump to another biblical figure.

In an interview in Jerusalem, the Christian Broadcast Network’s Chris Mitchell asked Pompeo, “could it be that President Trump right now has been sort of raised for such a time as this, just like Queen Esther, to help save the Jewish people from the Iranian menace?” Esther is the main heroine of the Jewish holiday of Purim, which was celebrated this week.

“As a Christian, I certainly believe that’s possible,” Pompeo said.

Pompeo added that he is “confident that the Lord is at work here” when he sees the “remarkable history of the faith in this place and the work that our administration’s done to make sure that this democracy in the Middle East, that this Jewish state, remains.”

According to the Book of Esther in the Old Testament, she became queen of the Persian Empire during the 5th century BC and saved the Jews from being exterminated. Notice that, for the reporter from the Christian Broadcast Network, Esther saved the Jewish people from the “Iranian menace.” That is exactly how Christian nationalists like Pompeo are framing the threat today: Donald Trump is defending Israel against the current-day Iranian menace.

All of this is cultish and disturbing on many levels—not the least of which is the fact that our foreign policy is being managed by a man who thinks he’s playing out some kind of biblical prophecy. But the most dangerous part is that cults are inherently authoritarian, which takes me back to what Stewart wrote.

I have attended dozens of Christian nationalist conferences and events over the past two years. And while I have heard plenty of comments casting doubt on the more questionable aspects of Mr. Trump’s character, the gist of the proceedings almost always comes down to the belief that he is a miracle sent straight from heaven to bring the nation back to the Lord. I have also learned that resistance to Mr. Trump is tantamount to resistance to God.

This isn’t the religious right we thought we knew. The Christian nationalist movement today is authoritarian, paranoid and patriarchal at its core. They aren’t fighting a culture war. They’re making a direct attack on democracy itself.

They want it all. And in Mr. Trump, they have found a man who does not merely serve their cause, but also satisfies their craving for a certain kind of political leadership.

The fact that Christian nationalists have anointed the most amoral man to ever occupy the White House as their savior tells us that their allegiance to him isn’t grounded in principle, but in authoritarian power that puts them above the law. That’s the kind of political leadership they’ve been looking for.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/mike-pompeo-lashes-out-at-the-international-criminal-court-to-shield-the-us-from-war-crimes-prosecutions/

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/mike-pompeo-just-blatantly-lied-to-jake-tapper-here-are-5-follow-up-questions-the-cnn-host-should-have-asked/

n korea

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/pence-and-the-apocalypse-the-vp-and-mike-pompeo-juggle-work-and-doomsday-rituals/

Trump’s vice president and secretary of state appear to have a conflict between their private religious beliefs and their public duties, according to a financial journalist.

Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo are each a “genuine, end-of-days, believer in the apocalypse,” and Financial Times journalist Edward Luce said their religious beliefs about the end times exerts a troubling influence on their duties.

“Generally I believe a public figure’s beliefs should be irrelevant to their job,” Luce wrote. “Whether they’re atheist, Opus Dei, Buddhist or Muslim, should have no bearing on our assessment of their fitness for office. Yet I can’t help but feel anxious that both of Donald Trump’s main global envoys, Pompeo and Pence, have a conflict between their private beliefs and what they publicly claim to be doing.”

Luce argued that both Trump administration officials were part of a “millenarian cult,” and he worried their “militant creed” would influence their public policies to spark a “final conflagration in which the righteous will vanquish the wicked.”

“Call me a serial fretter, but I don’t take comfort from the fact that Pence is a heartbeat away from being commander-in-chief,” Luce wrote. “Nor do I see Pompeo as one of the grown-ups restraining Trump. He’s an enabler, not a preventer. Where Trump goes, Pompeo will follow. Let’s hope Trump never gets religion.”

Read more of Luce’s column here.

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https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2018/10/02/kochpac-pay-play-aims-slow-solar-renewables/

One of Koch Industries’ favorite current federal bills would change how states regulate utilities on renewable energy. A Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) analysis shows the legislation is supported by politicians receiving large contributions from the Koch Industries Political Action Committee (KochPAC).

The Pay

The so-called “Ratepayer Fairness Act of 2017” (H.R. 1572) would require state public utility commissions to determine whether the setting of electricity rates for technologies deployed by individual customers, such as solar energy or energy storage, results in subsidies to those customers from customers who do not deploy those technologies.

Rep. Richard Hudson (R-NC) sponsored H.R. 1572 and received $15,000 from Koch Industries in the 2017-2018 election cycle to his campaign and First in Freedom PAC. The only U.S. House member to co-sponsor it is Rep. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK), who has also received a combined $15,000 from KochPAC into his congressional re-election committee and his leadership PAC.

The Play

H.R. 1572 seeks to limit utility commissions from designing electricity rates favorable to solar or renewable energy if that technology causes customers or classes of customers to subsidize other customers or customer classes.

The bill would force utility commissions to hold hearings to consider whether setting electricity rates for a technology disproportionately affects some customers or customer classes, even if all customers gain in the long run (for example in reducing the need for new electricity generating plants).

If a commission finds that such subsidies or disproportionate effects exist, the bill then requires it to determine whether those subsidies are “appropriate,” as defined under current law. If the legislature or utility commission took a narrow view of “appropriate,” that policy could be used to stifle solar and other renewables.

Legislatures and public utility commissions do wander away from “true” cost allocations to pursue other values like “just and reasonable rates” for residential customers.

Some public utility commissions can currently consider the environmental cost of changes in rates among classes, and many renewable advocates argue that the social costs of carbon — such as aridization, or pollution and its public health effects — should also be considered, as it is in the European Union.

Although the Trump Administration has retreated from assigning a social cost to carbon in its decision-making, state utility commissions are taking up the practice.

H.R. 1572 is consistent with the Administration’s attempt to slow the use of storage facilities by solar energy and other renewable energy sources.

The Players

The bill was originally introduced into the U.S. House in the last congressional session by then-U.S. Representative Mike Pompeo, now the Secretary of State. Koch Industries was Pompeo’s top contributor in every election between 2010 and 2016.

Jane Mayer noted in her book, Dark Money:

After his election, Pompeo turned to the company for his chief of staff, choosing Mark Chenoweth, a lawyer who had worked for Koch Industries’ lobbying team. Within weeks, Pompeo was championing two of Koch Industries’ legislative priorities — opposition to Obama’s plans to create a public EPA registry of greenhouse gas polluters and a digital database of consumer complaints about unsafe products.

Among other ties to the Kochs, The Washington Post notes that Pompeo started a business with private equity financing from the Kochs.

The only company other than Koch Industries lobbying for this bill is Edison International, the parent company of Southern California Edison, and both have been large contributors to Republican congressional political organizations.

Companion legislation in the U.S. Senate (S. 613) was introduced by Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ), a climate change denier who took $166,000 from oil and gas companies, including Koch Industries, in his last election in 2012.

With Flake retiring from the Senate, no significant action is expected on this legislation this year, but the Kochs always have the money to push new policies.