• Accountability for Islamic State Fighters: What Are the Options?

    President Trump’s precipitous decision to withdraw U.S. forces from northern Syria has already had dramatic consequences. One of the questions Trump’s hasty Twitter announcement raises involves the fate of the thousands of ISIS fighters no in detention in Syria. The Kurdish SDF is currently holding more than 10,000 Islamic State fighters—including at least 8,000 Iraqis and Syrians and 2,000 foreign fighters—in overflowing temporary detention centers in northeastern Syria. The biggest camp, al-Hol, houses around 70,000 people related to ISIS fighters, including about 10,000 foreigners and 30,000 Islamic State loyalists. The SDF has already said that it was withdrawing its guards from the Islamic State detention centers and camps in order to deal with the Turkish invasion. On Sunday, nearly 900 ISIS followers have escaped from one of the camps. Emma Broches writes that as Turkey’s offensive continues, it’s useful to review what the future might hold for these prisoners. “If the security surrounding the detainees deteriorates, the Islamic State will likely exploit the situation and create a further opportunity for its ongoing resurgence.”

  • AI Could Be a Force for Positive Social Change – but We’re Currently Heading for a Darker Future

    Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already re-configuring the world in conspicuous ways. Data drives our global digital ecosystem, and AI technologies reveal patterns in data. Smartphones, smart homes, and smart cities influence how we live and interact, and AI systems are increasingly involved in recruitment decisions, medical diagnoses, and judicial verdicts. Whether this scenario is utopian or dystopian depends on your perspective.

  • Can American Values Survive in a Chinese World?

    The People’s Republic of China bounds from strength to strength. Every year sees increases in its wealth and power relative to the world. But what do its leaders hope to achieve with their newfound clout? Jonathan D. T. Ward’s book China’s Vision of Victory traces the Chinese desire to shape the future of all mankind (not just the East Asian part of it) to a national myth taught to schoolchildren across China. According to this narrative, China was once the center of the world; China was the mother of invention, the seat of global wealth, and the beacon of civilization. This is China’s natural role in the world order—a role disrupted by the “century of humiliation” between the Opium Wars and World War II, when China suffered at the hands of foreign powers. But now that age of suffering is over. China’s destiny, according to its leaders, is to reclaim its natural perch as the leading force of human civilization. Tanner Greer writes that these global ambitions raises serious questions for the United States – questions which go beyond whether Americans will be willing to live in a world where China is the supreme economic and military power. The “hardest question may be whether we are willing to live in a world where dominant economic and military power is wielded by an insecure regime whose leaders believe that the same authoritarian techniques used to control enemies within their society must be used to surveil, coerce, and corrupt those enemies outside it.”

  • A Healthy Fear of China

    “I have seen the future, and it works,” the left-wing journalist Lincoln Steffens famously declared, after observing Bolshevik Russia in its infancy. What was intended as a utopian boast soon read as a dystopian prediction — but then eventually, as Stalinist ambition gave way to Brezhnevian decay, it curdled into a sour sort of joke. Today, though, there is a palpable fear in the liberal West that Beijing is succeeding where Moscow failed, and that the peculiar blend of Maoist dogmatics, nationalist fervor, one-party meritocracy and surveillance-state capitalism practiced in the People’s Republic of China really is a working alternative to liberal democracy — with cruelty sustained by efficiency, and a resilience that might outstrip our own.

  • Campaign Finance Enforcement Is an Essential Component of National Security

    Russia is at it again, so this week’s campaign finance enforcement action – in which two Russian-born associates of Rudy Giuliani have been indicted and arrested for violating campaign finance laws, including allegedly funneling Russian money into the main pro-Trump political action committee (PAC) — could not have come at a more important time for defending American democracy from foreign interference. The 2016 presidential election was subject to “sweeping and systematic” interference, and the next presidential election is just a year away with the FBI warning that “the Russians are absolutely intent on trying to interfere with our elections.”

  • Russia's Disinformation War Is Just Getting Started

    The disinformation wars are only just getting started, warns a new report on Russian social media interference released by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Published last week, the report offers the most comprehensive look at the efforts of the Russian propaganda factory known as the Internet Research Agency to divide Americans, undermine public faith in the democratic process, and aggressively support Donald Trump before and after the 2016 election. Paris Martineau writes in Wired that in addition to affirming much of what had been reported about Russian online interference over the past three years—including in Robert Mueller’s sweeping indictment of the IRA in February 2018—the report offers a comprehensive look at the extent of past foreign influence operations and recommendations on how best to prepare for those yet to come. It’s the second volume to come out of the Senate Intel Committee, though this one is “much more detailed in its analysis, meticulously cited, and concerned with influence and impact,” says one expert. “The conclusions in the second volume are notably bolder and unequivocal in supporting academic research and the advisory groups’ findings. It reads like a different report altogether.”

  • Racists Are Recruiting. Watch Your White Sons.

    Raising teenagers can be terrifying. Squishy little babies become awkward hormonal creatures who question their parents’ authority at every turn. Joanna Schroeder writes that she expected that. “What I didn’t predict was that my sons’ adolescence would include being drawn to the kind of online content that right-wing extremists use to recruit so many young men,” she writes. “Unfortunately, extremists know how to find new recruits in the very place our sons spend so much of their time: online. And too often, they’re more aware than we are of how vulnerable young white men are to radicalization.”

  • Victims of IRA Terror Tell Jeremy Corbyn to Apologize

    Nearly 40 victims of IRA violence have called on Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn to apologize for his support for Irish republicanism, accusing him of “giving succor” to terrorists. In an open letter to mark the 35th anniversary of the Brighton bombing, the families of the dead demand that he condemn the terrorist campaign waged by the IRA in the 1970s and 1980s. A report from Mainstream, a new campaign group against extremism in politics, also reveals evidence of Corbyn’s closeness to London Labour Briefing, which ran an infamous editorial after the Brighton attack claiming that “the British only sit up and take notice when they are bombed into it.” The 1984 bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton, during the Conservative Party conference, killed five people and injured thirty-one.

  • German Synagogue Attacker Used Homemade 3D-Printed Plastic Gun

    Experts say that the fact that the neo-Nazi who on Wednesday attacked a synagogue in Germany used a 3D-printed gun should serve as a warning to security services, experts have said. The 27-year old suspect had been experimenting with 3D-printed guns for two years, and along with racist and anti-Semitic tracts, he posted instructions on plastic gun making which, he noted, would take no more than $50 for the materials and one weekend worth of time.

  • Why Undermining the Kurds Could Hurt U.S. relations with Allies

    Commenting on President Trump’s precipitous decision to withdraw U.S. troops from northern Syria, Duke University’s Professor Peter Feaver said that “When the president makes a decision in this fashion, abruptly flip-flopping from a settled interagency process, ignoring the earnest advice of virtually all of his own national security advisers and breaking with all of his political supporters except the most extreme isolationist fringe of the party, then he magnifies the risk to him and to the country.” Feaver noted that the consequences of Trump’s impulsive decision could hurt relationships with allies down the road. Most leaders help the United States if they think we will aid them later. But that depends on leaders trusting the U.S. will return the favor, he said. “In the real world, most political actors try to balance short- and long-term interests, and see value in, for instance, helping the United States today in the hopes of being helped by the United States tomorrow. That depends on trusting the United States to do likewise. President Trump’s actions have undermined that trust and made it that much harder to build effective coalitions the next time.”

  • Turkey’s Syria Assault Halts the Fight Against ISIS

    The Trump administration’s abrupt decision to pull out of Syria has, as expected, led to a pause in the fight against the Islamic State. Leaders of the SDF, the mostly Kurdish group that has done the bulk of the fighting on the ground in Syria, culminating in the defeat of the group’s so-called caliphate earlier this year, said that Kurdish fighters are being reassigned from counterterrorism missions – including guarding more than 10,000 ISIS fighters in detention camps – to the battle against Turkish incursions. The decision to withdraw U.S. troops from the border region, paving the way for Turkey to launch a catastrophic assault on the Kurds, is “the worst foreign policy decision since the Iraq war,” the senior administration official said.

  • Distrust of Media Doesn't Give Government Permission to Harass Journalists

    In an unsettling, patently ridiculous exchange at Dulles International Airport Thursday, Ben Watson, a news editor at Defense One was held by a passport screening official and repeatedly questioned whether he wrote “propaganda.” The CBP officer refused to return the passport to Ben Watson until Watson responded, “For the purposes of expediting this conversation, yes,” to the question of whether he was writing “propaganda.” Watson had to repeat that answer several times before he was waved through.

  • Amid Questions of Legality on Delaying Ukraine Aid, White House Shifted Authority: Report

    The White House earlier this year authorized a politically appointed official to withhold military aid meant for Ukraine after budget staff members questioned the legality of delaying the congressionally approved funds, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday. After the OMB’s budget staff members questioned Trump’s blocking of the congressionally approved military aid to Ukraine, Michael Duffey, associate director of national security programs in OMB, was given the authority to continue holding the funds. Duffey was previously a high-ranking Pentagon official and the executive director of the Wisconsin Republican Party. Former OMB officials told the Journal that it’s highly unusual for a political officer like him to gain such power.

  • Western Security Officials Believe Secret Russian Unit Responsible for Attacks in Europe: NYT

    Western security officials have identified a secret Russian intelligence unit that has tried to carry out assassinations and destabilization operations in foreign countries, according to a detailed New York Times report. Senior intelligence officials told the newspaper that the secret unit has only been identified in recent months, but that it has operated covertly for at least a decade. The unit, No. 29155, is based in Moscow and is part of the Defense Ministry’s military intelligence agency, known as the GRU. The GRU orchestrated the Kremlin’s successful campaign to help Donald Trump win the 2016 presidential election.

  • Senate Intel Committee: Russia Is Already Trying to Influence the 2020 Election

    In recent months, President Donald Trump has intensified his efforts to advance the lies spread by the Kremlin and undermine the U.S. intelligence community consensus that Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential election. On July 25, Trump asked his Ukrainian counterpart to help push a Russian and far-right conspiracy theory that the U.S. cybersecurity company Crowdstrike worked with Ukranians and Democrats to frame Russia for election meddling. Patrick Tucker writes in Defense One that one important contribution of the second report on Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election, issued by the Republican-led Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, is that the committee, chaired by Sen. Richard Burr (R-North Carolina), is decisively refuting Trump and his conspiracy theory.