TYB
Former UN Climate Chief Calls For Civil Disobedience
In a book out tomorrow, the woman who led the negotiations for the Paris Agreement calls for civil disobedience to force institutions to respond to the climate crisis.
“It’s time to participate in non-violent political movements wherever possible,” Christiana Figueres writes in “The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis,” which will be released tomorrow by Knopf.
Figueres served as executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) from 2010-16. She co-authored the book with her strategic advisor, Tom Rivett-Carnac. The two also support voting:
“Large numbers of people must vote on climate change as their number one priority,” they write. “As we are in the midst of the most dire emergency, we must urgently demand that those who seek high office offer solutions commensurate with the scale of the problem.”
But they note that electoral politics have failed to meet the challenge, largely because of systemic roadblocks including corporate lobbying and partisan opposition.
They endorse Extinction Rebellion and Greta Thunberg. They evoke legendary activists who effected change on the scale required by the climate crisis, including Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela.
“Civil disobedience is not only a moral choice, it is also the most powerful way of shaping world politics,” they write, citing scientific resources on the impact of civil disobedience.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2020/02/24/former-un-climate-chief-calls-for-civil-disobedience/#9dcf70832145
Christiana Figueres in support of Extinction Rebellion
woa! gotta sauce that shit, nigga
https://www.justsecurity.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/former-senior-united-states-officials-national-emergency-declaration-february-2019.pdf
I Helped Create the Nation’s Top Spy Job. It's About to Be Destroyed.
A Trump appointment presages a purge at our intelligence agencies.
It’s a really bad day at the office when the spooks are spooked. That’s what happened on Wednesday when President Trump announced that Richard Grenell, the ambassador to Germany, will become the acting director of national intelligence. Though Mr. Grenell is credited with effectively pushing the White House’s agenda on Iran and China, he has virtually no intelligence experience and is viewed as very partisan. This rattled the spy community and stoked fears that a purge may be coming, fears that seemed to be confirmed on Friday when Mr. Grenell ousted his office’s No. 2 official. In fact, our whole country should be spooked.
Mr. Grenell was appointed after the president reportedly became angered by a congressional briefing that said Russia is trying to help him in the 2020 election by meddling in the Democratic primaries. So Mr. Trump removed Joseph Maguire, the highly regarded acting director of national intelligence, and temporarily assigned Mr. Grenell, who is keeping his other roles.
Reports say that Kashyap Patel, a former National Security Council staff member who sought to discredit the Russia inquiry, is a senior adviser to Mr. Grenell. The worry is that this new team is meant to do one thing: undermine the core mission of the intelligence community, which is to speak truth to power.
We’ve seen this movie before, and it didn’t end well. In 2004, the C.I.A.’s director, Porter Goss, forced out career experts over a counterintelligence dispute. A review of that activity by the Silberman-Robb Commission ultimately resulted in Mr. Goss’s resignation. The coming purge could be far worse.
With acting cabinet secretaries everywhere, the Departments of Homeland Security and State hollowed out, and the recent departure of high-profile, nonpolitical appointees on the National Security Council staff (the Vindman brothers and Victoria Coates), the judgment and experience about who wants to attack us and where is basically gone. This creates an enormous risk to our country.
While our intelligence community is the most impressive in the world, we can’t see and know everything. No nation can. So we rely on other intelligence services. And not just the ones of Australia, Britain, Canada and New Zealand that, along with the United States, make up the “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance. We also need allies with eyes and ears in places we just can’t go, like North Korea and China. A purge of our best and brightest intelligence officers will signal to them that new management is coming, and current relationships aren’t useful any longer.
Allied services also won’t trust us if our own officers face constant pressure to politicize intelligence. That means reporting streams will dry up, we won’t get early warning on planned attacks and we will lose critical knowledge about the decisions adversaries are making that may not have consequences today, but could have huge ones in the next decade. It’s impossible to know how many clues we will miss if our intelligence community is isolated from the world and the president’s daily brief only reinforces what the administration wants to hear.
A so-called house clearing could damage our intelligence abilities for at least a generation. Recruitment and retention will of course plummet, and those officers and analysts left won’t have the mentorship or the experience to ensure our assessments are based on truth.
For the sake of our country, I hope Mr. Grenell makes a careful assessment of the intelligence community’s capacities and impressive work force before making further changes. How dangerous it would be if we lose the tip of the spear against those who would destroy us.
https://archive.ph/NwDKF
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/24/opinion/Richard-Grenell-intelligence.html
Buttigieg’s lengthy roster of endorsements is loaded with former intelligence operatives, national security hardliners, regime-change specialists, and vulture capitalists.
Among Buttigieg’s most notable endorsers is David S. Cohen, the deputy director of the CIA from 2015 to 2017, and a former Treasury official under George W. Bush.
Buttigieg was likewise endorsed by Charlie Gilbert, former deputy director of the National Clandestine Service, a top-ten leadership position at the CIA. Gilbert’s role was to “conceive, plan, and execute complex intelligence operations” against “hostile target [countries].”
Dennis Bowden, a 26-year CIA veteran, with much of that time spent in unspecified “executive leadership positions,” is also backing Mayor Pete.
The Buttigieg campaign has cited the support of former CIA senior analyst Sue Terry, who made a “record number of contributions to the President’s Daily Brief,” during her tenure from 2001 to 2008.
Two more CIA endorsements came from former senior intelligence officer Martijn Rasser, and former senior analyst Andrea Kendall-Taylor, who was also an officer at the National Intelligence Council.
correct sauce: https://fas.org/irp/offdocs/wmd_report.pdf