Latest news with #11September2001
Yahoo
3 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
Bernard Kerik, head of New York police during 9/11, dies at 69
Bernard Kerik, New York City's former police commissioner during the 11 September 2001 attacks, has died aged 69. His death was confirmed by FBI Director Kash Patel, who said the former police officer died Thursday after a "private battle with illness." Kerik oversaw the police response to the deadliest terrorist attack in US history, and was later appointed by former US President George Bush as head of a provisional police force in Iraq. He pleaded guilty to charges of tax fraud in 2009 and served three years in prison, though he was pardoned by President Donald Trump in 2020. Those who paid tribute to Kerik include former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, who was in office when Kerik served as commissioner of the NYPD, and current mayor Eric Adams. "We've been together since the beginning. He's like my brother," Giuiliani said Thursday on his show. "I was a better man for having known Bernie," Giuiliani said. "I certainly was a braver and stronger man." Adams, who had been friends with Kerik for nearly 30 years, said he had visited him in hospital before his death. "He was with his loved ones who are in my prayers tonight," Adams said in a statement. "He was a great New Yorker and American." Kerik, a former army veteran and a decorated law enforcement officer, rose up the ranks through his career, and was nearly tapped to run the Department of Homeland Security under Bush in 2004 before he abruptly withdrew his nomination. In 2009, Kerik pleaded guilty to federal charges after he was accused of lying to investigators about interest-free loans he received from an Israeli billionaire and a New York real estate magnet while he was in public office. He was granted a full pardon by Trump in 2020, and later joined Giuiliani's efforts to overturn Trump's election loss that same year. What happened on 9/11?
Yahoo
7 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump's foreign policy is not so unusual for the US – he just drops the facade of moral leadership
JD Vance is an Iraq war veteran and the US vice-president. On Friday, he declared the doctrine that underpinned Washington's approach to international relations for a generation is now dead. 'We had a long experiment in our foreign policy that traded national defence and the maintenance of our alliances for nation building and meddling in foreign countries' affairs, even when those foreign countries had very little to do with core American interests,' Vance told Naval Academy graduates in Annapolis, Maryland. His boss Donald Trump's recent trip to the Middle East signified an end to all that, Vance said: 'What we're seeing from President Trump is a generational shift in policy with profound implications for the job that each and every one of you will be asked to do.' US foreign policy has previously zigged and zagged from isolation to imperialism. Woodrow Wilson entered the first world war with the the goal of 'making the world safe for democracy'. Washington retreated from the world again during the 1920s and 1930s only to fight the second world war and emerge as a military and economic superpower. Related: Trump's West Point graduation address veers from US-first doctrine to politics Foreign policy during the cold war centered on countering the Soviet Union through alliances, military interventions and proxy wars. The 11 September 2001 attacks shifted focus to counterterrorism, leading to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq under George W Bush with justifications that included spreading democracy. Barack Obama emphasized diplomacy and reducing troop commitments, though drone strikes and counterterrorism operations persisted. Trump's first term pushed economic nationalism, pressuring allies to pay their way. Joe Biden restored multilateralism, focusing on climate, alliances and countering China's influence. As in many other political arenas, Trump's second term is bolder and louder on the world stage. Trump and Vance have sought to portray the 'America first' policy as a clean break from the recent past. Human rights, democracy, foreign aid and military intervention are out. Economic deals, regional stability and pragmatic self-interest are in. But former government officials interviewed by the Guardian paint a more nuanced picture, suggesting that Trump's quid pro quo approach has more in common with his predecessors than it first appears. Where he does differ, they argue, is in his shameless abandonment of moral leadership and use of the US presidency for personal gain. On a recent four-day swing through Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, Trump was feted by autocratic rulers with a trio of lavish state visits where there was heavy emphasis on economic and security partnerships. Saudi Arabia pledged $600bn in investments in the US across industries such as energy, defence, technology and infrastructure, although how much of that will actually be new investment – or come to fruition – remains to be seen. A $142bn defence cooperation agreement was described by the White House as the biggest in US history. Qatar and the US inked agreements worth $1.2tn, including a $96bn purchase of Boeing jets. The UAE secured more than $200bn in commercial agreements and a deal to establish the biggest artificial intelligence campus outside the US. Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of the Atlantic magazine, said Trump had shown 'the outlines of America's newest foreign policy doctrine: extreme transactionalism'. He had prioritized quick deals over long-term stability, ideological principles or established alliances. But, Goldberg noted, the president had also advanced the cause of his family's businesses. The president said he will accept a $400m luxury plane from Qatar and use it as Air Force One. Abu Dhabi is using a Trump family-aligned stablecoin for a $2bn investment in the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange. And the Trump Organization, run by the president's two oldest sons, is developing major property projects including a high-rise tower in Jeddah, a luxury hotel in Dubai, and a golf course and villa complex in Qatar. Analysts say no US president has received overseas gifts on such a scale. Aaron David Miller, who served for two decades as a state department analyst, negotiator and adviser on Middle East issues for both Democratic and Republican administrations, said: 'He gives transactionalism a bad name. The concept of an American national interest that transcends party politics and partisanship has gone the way of the dodo Former state department analyst Aaron David Miller 'The level of self-dealing in this administration means the notion that the national interest is now seamlessly blended with Donald Trump's personal interests and financial interests. The concept of an American national interest that transcends party politics and partisanship has gone the way of the dodo.' Ned Price, a former US state department spokesperson during the Biden administration, said: 'I actually think calling this 'transactional' is far too charitable, because so much of this is predicated not on the national interest but on the president's own personal interest, including his economic interests and the economic interests of his family and those around him.' Presidential trips to the Middle East usually feature at least some public calls for authoritarian governments to improve their human rights efforts. But not from Trump as he toured the marble and gilded palaces of Gulf rulers and deemed them 'perfecto' and 'very hard to buy' while barely mentioning the war in Gaza. In his remarks at a VIP business conference in Riyadh, the president went out of his way to distance himself from the actions of past administrations, the days when he said US officials would fly in 'in beautiful planes, giving you lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affairs'. Trump said: 'The gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called nation-builders, neocons or liberal non-profits like those who spent trillions and trillions of dollars failing to develop Kabul, Baghdad, so many other cities. Instead, the birth of a modern Middle East has been brought by the people of the region themselves, the people that are right here.' But Price challenges the notion that Trump's aversion to interventionism represents revolution rather than evolution. 'It is fair to say that presidents have successively been moving in that direction,' he said. 'The sort of military adventurism that characterised the George W Bush presidency is not something that President Obama had an appetite for. It's not something that President Biden had an appetite for. President Obama's version of 'Don't do stupid shit' has echoes of what President Trump said. Of course, as he often does, President Trump took it one step further.' Price added: 'Most people who worked under President Biden or President Obama would tell you it doesn't have to be either/or: you don't have to be a nation builder or an isolationist. You can engage on the basis of interest and values at the same time and it's about calibrating the mix rather than declaring the age of nation building is entirely over and from now on we're not going to lecture, we're just going to come in and be feted with your goods.' In his address in Riyadh, Trump made no reference to the 2018 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul which, the CIA found, had been sanctioned by the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. The president's willingness to turn a blind eye to human rights violations was condemned by Democrats. Ro Khanna, who serves on the House of Representatives' armed services committee, said: 'I was opposed to the Iraq war and I'm opposed to this idea that we can just go in and build nations. But I'm not opposed to the idea of human rights and international law. 'To see an American president basically embrace cultural relativism was a rejection of any notion that American values about freedom and rule of law are not just our cultural constructs but are universal values.' Khanna added: 'The past century of development in global governance structures has pointed us towards human rights and dignity. He wants to go back to a a world where we just have nation-states and that was the world that had wars and colonialism and conflict.' Trump is hardly the first president to court oil-rich nations in the Middle East and tread lightly on human rights issues. Nor is he the first to be accused of putting interests before values. The public was deceived to justify wars in Vietnam and Iraq. Democratically elected leaders have been ousted and brutal dictators propped up when it suited US policy goals. John Bolton, a former national security adviser to Trump, said: 'Different presidencies say they have different priorities but I would be willing to go down the list and all of their record is mixed and somewhat hypocritical in terms of exactly what they do on the values side of things. Just take Biden as the most recent example. He started off by calling Saudi Arabia a pariah but by the end of it he was going to visit the crown prince as well.' In that sense, Trump's lack of pretension to an ethical foreign policy might strike some as refreshingly honest. His supporters have long praised him for 'telling it like it is' and refusing to indulge the moral platitudes of career politicians. Miller, the former state department official who is now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace thinktank in Washington, said: 'He's made explicit what is implicit in Republican and Democratic administrations. I'm not saying presidents don't care about values; Joe Biden cared a lot about American values. But the reality is, when it comes time to make choices, where or what do we choose?' Miller added: 'No administration I ever worked for made human rights or the promotion of democracy the centerpiece of our foreign policy. There are any number of reasons for that. But Donald Trump, it seems to me, is not even pretending there are values. He's emptied the ethical and moral frame of American foreign policy.' Trump's lifelong aversion to war is seen by many as a positive, including by some on the left. But it comes with an apparent desire to achieve significant and flashy diplomatic breakthroughs that might win him the Nobel peace prize. The president also displays an obvious comfort and preference for dealing with strongmen who flatter him, often siding with Russia's Vladimir Putin against Ukraine. Miller commented: 'Trump has no clear conception of the national interest. It's subordinated to his grievances, his pet projects – tariffs – his political interests, his vanity, his financial interests. I worked for half a dozen secretaries of state of both political parties. That he is so far out of the norm with respect to foreign policy frankly is less of a concern to me than what's happening here at home.'
The Guardian
01-03-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
ACLU sues to block White House from sending 10 immigrants to Guantánamo
Civil rights attorneys sued the Trump administration Saturday to prevent it from transferring 10 undocumented immigrants detained in the US to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, their second legal challenge in less than a month over plans to hold up to 30,000 people there for deportation. The latest federal lawsuit so far applies only to 10 men facing transfer to the naval base in Cuba, and their attorneys said the administration will not notify them of who would be transferred or when. As with a lawsuit the same attorneys filed earlier this month for access to people already detained there, the latest case was filed in Washington and is backed by the American Civil Liberties Union. At least 50 people are known to have been transferred already to Guantánamo Bay, and the civil rights attorneys believe the number now may be about 200. They have said it is the first time in US history that the government has detained non-citizens on civil immigration charges there. For decades, the naval base was primarily used to detain foreigners associated with the 11 September 2001 attacks. Trump has said Guantánamo Bay, also known as 'Gitmo', has space for up to 30,000 people and that he plans to send 'the worst' or high-risk 'criminal aliens' there. The administration has not released specific information on who is being transferred, so it is not clear which crimes they are accused of committing in the US and whether they have been convicted, or merely charged or arrested. 'The purpose of this second Guantánamo lawsuit is to prevent more people from being illegally sent to this notorious prison, where the conditions have now been revealed to be inhumane,' said Lee Gelernt, an ACLU attorney and lead counsel on the case. 'The lawsuit is not claiming they cannot be detained in US facilities, but only that they cannot be sent to Guantánamo.' The 10 men are from nations including Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Venezuela, and their attorneys say they are neither high-risk criminals nor gang members. In a 29 January executive order expanding operations at Guantánamo Bay, Trump said that one of his goals was to 'dismantle criminal cartels'. Their attorneys described their latest lawsuit as an emergency filing to halt imminent transfers and challenge the Trump administration's plans. They contend that the transfers violate the men's right to due legal process, guaranteed by the fifth amendment to the US constitution The latest lawsuit also argues that federal immigration law bars the transfer of non-Cuban migrants from the US to Guantánamo Bay and that the US government has no authority to hold people outside its territory, and that the naval base remains part of Cuba legally. The transfers are also described as arbitrary. The men's attorneys allege that many of the people who have been sent to Guantánamo Bay do not have serious criminal records or even any criminal history. Their first lawsuit, filed 12 February, said people sent to the naval base had 'effectively disappeared into a black box' and could not contact attorneys or family. The US Department of Homeland Security, one of the agencies sued, said they could reach attorneys by phone. In another, separate federal lawsuit filed in New Mexico, a federal judge on 9 February blocked the transfer of three immigrants from Venezuela being held in that state to Guantánamo Bay. Their attorneys said they had been falsely accused of being gang members. Sign up to Headlines US Get the most important US headlines and highlights emailed direct to you every morning after newsletter promotion The migrant detention center at Guantánamo operates separately from the US military's detention center and courtrooms for foreigners detained under George W Bush during what Bush called the post-9/11 'war on terror'. It once held nearly 800 people, but the number has dwindled to 15, including accused 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Pete Hegseth, the US defense secretary, who was assigned to Guantánamo when he was on active duty, has called it a 'perfect place' to house undocumented immigrants, and Trump has described the naval base as 'a tough place to get out of'. A United Nations investigator who visited the military detention center in 2023 said conditions had improved, but that military detainees still faced near constant surveillance, forced removal from their cells and unjust use of restraints, resulting in 'ongoing cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment under international law'. The US said it disagreed 'in significant respects' with her report.
Euronews
05-02-2025
- Politics
- Euronews
First military flight carrying deported US migrants lands in Guantanamo
The first US military flight deporting migrants from the United States to Guantanamo Bay landed in Cuba on Tuesday evening, according to a US official. It was the first step in an an expected surge in the number of migrants sent to the US naval base, which for decades was primarily used to detain foreigners associated with the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001. US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, who was assigned to Guantanamo Bay when he was on active duty, has called it a 'perfect place' to house migrants. Additional US troops been deployed to the facility in the past few days to help prepare. There are currently approximately 300 service members supporting the holding operations at Guantanamo Bay, and the numbers will fluctuate based on the requirements of the Department of Homeland Security, which is the lead federal agency. At least 230 of those service members are US Marines from the 6th Marine Regiment, who began deploying on Friday. Amy Fischer, director of the Refugee and Migrant Rights Program at Amnesty International USA, has criticised the use of Guantanamo. 'Sending immigrants to Guantanamo is a profoundly cruel, costly move. It will cut people off from lawyers, family and support systems, throwing them into a black hole so the U.S. government can continue to violate their human rights out of sight. Shut Gitmo down now and forever!" Fischer said in a statement. The US also flew Indian immigrants back to India on Monday and the first group of Haitian migrants deported from the US arrived back in the Caribbean nation on Tuesday. There had previously been seven deportation flights; to Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras and Peru. A number of Colombian officials also flew to the US and took two flights of migrants back to their country. There are more than 725,000 immigrants from India living in the US without authorisation, the third most of any country after Mexico and El Salvador, according to the Pew Research Centre. Recent years have also seen a jump in the number of Indians attempting to enter the country along the US-Canada border. The US Border Patrol arrested more than 14,000 Indians on the Canadian border in the year ending 30 September, which amounted to 60% of all arrests along that border and more than 10 times the number two years ago.
The Guardian
30-01-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
‘America's gulag': Trump's Guantánamo ploy tars migrants as terrorists
It has been denounced as 'America's gulag': a secretive, abuse-ridden Caribbean prison camp for terror suspects that Donald Rumsfeld once said contained 'the worst of the worst'. 'All of us have scars in our souls, deformities, from living at Guantánamo,' a former Yemeni inmate recalled of his time at the notorious military detention facility in south-east Cuba. Even Donald Trump once balked at the 'crazy' amount of money being spent confining prisoners in orange jumpsuits to Guantánamo's concertina-wired cages. This week the US president changed his tune, announcing plans to send tens of thousands of 'criminal illegal aliens' to the US naval base that houses the Guantánamo Bay jail as part of his 'mass deportation' campaign. 'It's a tough place to get out of,' Trump noted sarcastically after revealing that he had instructed the heads of the defense and homeland security departments to prepare a '30,000-person migrant facility' on the island. 'We have 30,000 beds in Guantánamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people,' said Trump, who claimed the move would help eradicate 'the scourge of migrant crime in our communities, once and for all'. The announcement delighted Trumpists. 'The president is 100% correct to use Guantánamo,' the Texas Republican Chip Roy told Fox News, with the channel's reporter celebrating Trump's 'creative' and 'innovative' idea. But it also sparked anger and revulsion, in the US and around the world. Many interpreted Trump's move as an attempt to further demonize undocumented migrants by conflating them with the terror suspects who were imprisoned at Guantánamo's detention centre after the then secretary of defense Rumsfeld opened it for 'enemy combatants' three months after the 11 September 2001 attacks. 'This is political theater and part of the Trump administration's broader effort to paint immigrants as threats in the United States … and fan anti-immigrant sentiment,' said Eleanor Acer, the senior director for refugee protection at the advocacy group Human Rights First. Vincent Warren, head of the Center for Constitutional Rights legal advocacy group, said: 'Trump's order [sends] a clear message … Migrants and asylum seekers are being cast as the new terrorist threat, deserving to be discarded in an island prison, removed from legal and social services and supporters'. There was even stronger condemnation in Latin America, from where many of the migrants expected to end up in Trump's camp hail. An editorial in Mexico's leftwing newspaper La Jornada called the move 'institutionalized sadism' and a Trumpian 'spectacle of violence' designed to excite hardcore supporters. 'The reopening of an international symbol of human rights abuses is a signal to Trumpists who believe the workers of the global south deserve the same punishment as supposed members of al-Qaida and the Islamic State,' it said. 'What Trump is doing in sending migrants to Guantánamo – a place of torture and death – makes me think that the author of the book about Trump being the antichrist is on to something,' tweeted the Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff. Adam Isacson, a migration expert from the Washington Office on Latin America thinktank, said Trump's headline-grabbing initiative was 'absolutely part of the narrative' that a military response was needed to tackle the supposed threat from migrants, whom the recently installed US president has repeatedly cast as dangerous 'animals' and 'trash'. 'And the idea is to just scare the hell out of immigrant communities all around the United States too,' Isacson added. 'They're just trying to scare people and maybe scare people into just making their own arrangements and leaving the country on their own. This is all shock and awe.' Sign up to This Week in Trumpland A deep dive into the policies, controversies and oddities surrounding the Trump administration after newsletter promotion Trump's decision to create a massive migrant facility at Guantánamo would not be the first time it has been used to house those seeking a new life in the US. In the 1990s, during the presidencies of both George HW Bush and Bill Clinton, tens of thousands of Haitians and Cubans were held there in open-air camps after being picked up while making the perilous sea journey to Florida. More recently, a far smaller number of migrants have reportedly been held there after being intercepted by the US Coast Guard. Those migrants have been held in a separate part of the base to alleged terrorists, 15 of whom are now imprisoned there, compared to hundreds after al-Qaida's 9/11 attacks. The most notorious is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged Pakistani mastermind of that plot. It remains uncertain precisely whom Trump might send to his expanded Guantánamo camp and whether it will be used to hold migrants accused or convicted of crimes or simply anyone lacking documents. Acer said the 'outrageously vague and incredibly sweeping language' in Trump's memorandum ordering Guantánamo's expansion meant it was unclear who would be targeted. The three-paragraph directive calls for 'all appropriate actions' to be taken to expand the facility in order to 'address attendant immigration enforcement needs'. However, the activist called the president's comment that the base was 'tough' to escape 'a disturbing signal that the Trump administration may be planning to hold people there indefinitely'. During George W Bush's 'war on terror', 'the US chose to hold people on the Guantánamo base because they believed that it would be removed from legal scrutiny,' Acer recalled. Now she suspected Trump also planned to treat it 'as a sort of rights-free zone'. 'The whole thing is just absurd … Guantánamo is essentially designed to prevent outside scrutiny. Human rights abuses will be hidden,' Acer warned, adding: 'The Trump administration is thumbing its nose at the law and the rule of law.'
