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The post Daniel Hoffman: America now more vulnerable than at time of Sept. 11 attacks — we need a forward defense appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>On the morning of September 11, 2001 a dear friend and former CIA colleague of mine was in Manhattan when Al Qaeda terrorists struck our homeland and murdered almost 3,000 innocent people in New York City, the Pentagon and Shanksville, Pa.
My friend was standing on the street near the World Trade Center when American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175 crashed into the North and South Towers.
Witnessing the deadliest terrorist attack in human history had the most significant impact on my former colleague’s career. He later told me that the images of innocent victims jumping from the towers to their deaths remain seared in his consciousness.
Up to that point he had never served in South Asia. But he would go on to serve multiple tours in conflict zones there as well as in the Middle East, on the front lines in the fight against terrorism.
Sept. 11, 2001, was transformational for me and my colleagues in the intelligence community, State Department and military — and for our entire nation.
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I recall my parents’ and grandparents’ generations, who spoke of remembering exactly where they were when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Today everyone in their late 20s and older remembers exactly where they were on September 11, 2001.
Al Qaeda’s horrific act of mass murder demonstrated that our enemies could reach us in spite of the oceans that separated us from Europe, Africa and Asia. We had become accustomed to sending troops off to foreign lands in wartime. Now the war on terrorism had reached the continental United States.
When I was serving as a CIA station chief in South Asia in 2016, a visiting congressman asked me when this “war” would be over so we could withdraw from the region.
The world is even more interconnected today, including through cyberspace. This makes America even more vulnerable to attack. At the same time, security precautions at airports and federal buildings, in particular, have increased considerably since Sept. 11, 2001.
One of the most critical lessons of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks was that we need a robust forward presence to protect us, especially against threats emanating from ungoverned spaces. This includes intelligence collection, diplomacy and — when justified — military engagement so that we can detect threats and take appropriate action to prevent terrorists from striking us again.
A forward presence should be as small as necessary to accomplish the mission of defending our nation within a limited scope. Protecting America from attack should not be confused with an “endless war” or our failed efforts this century at nation-building.
What we need to do is follow the late columnist and Fox News contributor Charles Krauthammer’s strategy of “forward defense.” This entails confronting our enemies “over there” rather than allowing them to plan and execute attacks on our homeland from ungoverned space in failed states.
Krauthammer believed we should only risk spilling our nation’s blood and treasure when there is a strategic necessity.
In this Sept. 11, 2001, file photo, smoke rises from the burning twin towers of the World Trade Center after hijacked planes crashed into the towers, in New York City. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)
I know from firsthand experience how our brave patriots serve in harm’s way to prevent attacks on our homeland. They put service to our country ahead of their own safety, comfort and earning potential. They serve often in the most dangerous locations while their families back home worry about them. But there is no place they would rather be than on the front lines, protecting our nation from ruthless adversaries who seek to do us harm.
The key is to settle on the minimal forward-deployed presence required to detect and preempt threats before they are visited on our shores. We’ve drawn down our troops in Afghanistan and Iraq by massive amounts since surges during the previous decade. The Trump administration announced Wednesday that further withdrawals will leave only 3,000 U.S. troops in Iraq by the end of September and 4,500 in Afghanistan by early November.
President Obama’s precipitous withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Iraq in 2011, which helped create the conditions for the massive growth and spread of the ISIS terrorist group in the Middle East, is an admonition about the danger of withdrawing our forward-deployed capability before the threats are fully eliminated. Obama was forced to send combat troops back to Iraq in 2014 to fight ISIS.
When I was serving as a CIA station chief in South Asia in 2016, a visiting congressman asked me when this “war” would be over so we could withdraw from the region.
I told the congressman that as long as the local authorities were unable to eliminate the underlying causes of terrorism and as long as there were failed states — which terrorists exploit to recruit extremist followers and plot attacks against us — we would need to be on the watch and prepared to take action to defend ourselves in the most faraway places.
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Today Al Qaeda is still a threat. Its leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is still waging jihad. The U.S. destroyed the ISIS so-called caliphate in Iraq and Syria, but roughly 20,000 ISIS fighters have melted into an insurgency, which continues to threaten Iraq, the region and beyond.
We should start, therefore, with a clear assessment of the threats to our national security that emanate from terrorist hot spots like Afghanistan and Iraq. We can then consider how much or whether our forward-deployed U.S. military and intelligence personnel should withdraw even further — and if so, under what timetable and who should remain to work with forces of our allies.
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In a 2019 speech at the American University in Cairo, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo emphasized that when “America retreats, chaos often follows.”
On this most solemn day, let us remember terrorism’s innocent victims and be deeply thankful to our brave patriots continuing to serve our grateful nation on the front lines.
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]]>The post Adonis Hoffman: Big Tech leaders get justified criticism for wrongdoing and immense power at House hearing appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>When the leaders of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google testified via video before a House subcommittee Wednesday, hostile lawmakers demanded they explain their dominant market positions, monopoly power, and business practices that harm consumers, competitors and small businesses.
The hearing became a bipartisan beat-down that left the heads of the world’s biggest tech companies bloodied but unbowed, as both Democrats and Republicans took turns accusing the companies of business behavior bordering on the unlawful or possibly even crossing the line into illegality.
The case against Big Tech is indeed compelling. But it is also complicated.
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It’s also clear that the concentration of power by these companies is inconsistent with democracy. We should be wary of companies with such dominance that they become akin to private governments that thrive from such a concentration of power.
Facing a barrage of tough questions and well-researched allegations, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Tim Cook of Apple, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Sundar Pichai of Google did their best to remain courteous and contrite. But some of their answers appeared to be inconsistent with reputable reports of aggressive and predatory business practices by their companies.
The leaders of the tech giants were sometimes evasive as they gave canned responses, shoulder shrugs and feigned unfamiliarity with specific situations. Some of these responses were hard to believe. You would expect the heads of the companies to be aware of the problems raised by lawmakers.
This was the sixth in a series of hearings convened by the House Judiciary Committee’s Antitrust Subcommittee on the topic of Online Platforms and Market Power.
It’s also clear that the concentration of power by these companies is inconsistent with democracy.
In both prepared and opening remarks, the CEOs of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google stressed a few basic points: each is a home-grown American company; each lives by innovation; and most importantly, each strongly believes in robust competition.
Unimpressed, House members cited detailed examples of Big Tech business practices they said contravene competition and the cornerstones of antitrust law. Even if those practices are not found to be unlawful, it’s clear that many lawmakers find many of them highly objectionable.
The passion from the lawmakers was palpable as they leveled their attacks on the billionaire tech executives, and so was the aura of election year politics.
Lawmakers accused the tech giants of stifling information and allowing the spread of false information on COVID-19 cures and remedies; collecting personal information from minors and selling the data to advertisers; ripping off ideas and intellectual property from smaller competitors; and cloning technology from start-up companies and entrepreneurs.
And that wasn’t all. Subcommittee members also accused Big Tech of undercutting the price of rival products on their platforms; using size and scale to intimidate business partners into unfavorable deals; and suppressing conservative political opinions and blacklisting those voices.
On top of that, House members accused the tech CEOs of enabling the promulgation of racist hate speech; manipulating advertising to benefit their own products and services; strengthening China’s military through artificial intelligence collaboration projects; and fostering “cancel culture,” among other things
Subcommittee Chairman David Cicilline, D-R.I., said that each company is a bottleneck to distribution; each uses its digital platform to surveil others, including competitors; and each abuses its scale to favor its own products and services to the disadvantage and discrimination of others.
Rep. James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, the top Republican on the panel, pointed out that “being big is not inherently bad,” but noted that Big Tech’s market dominance is ripe for abuse, including the stifling of conservative views.
The Big Tech executives, of course, denied any wrongdoing and defended their companies against the attacks from subcommittee members.
While many of these allegations are well-known, the hearing did reveal new insights.
First, Big Tech is more intransigent than any of us may have known. Nothing in the testimony or responses of the CEOs reflected any semblance of retreat from their current positions or remorse for their practices. Even in the face of irrefutable evidence, it’s clear that the leaders of Big Tech will continue to delay, deny, deflect and deceive governmental efforts to change their behavior.
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Second, there are two important interests at stake for the future: revenue and the rules of competition.
In terms of revenue, there are billions of dollars to be earned in a growing digital market, involving everything from mobile messaging to online search over multiple media platforms. Underlying it all is advertising, which is both the operational framework and the business model for making massive amounts of money on the Internet.
As for the rules of competition, the question is not whether — but how — the antitrust rules should be rebalanced to address a rapidly changing market and dominant Internet players.
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Regulating Big Tech will require Congress to balance competing interests without sacrificing the future of a mainstay American industry. In the face of nefarious competition from China, Congress must advance antitrust principles and combat the anti-American technology crisis. It must promote responsible regulation and not preclude real-world innovation.
It is a daunting task to be sure. While the hearing Wednesday enabled House members to make the case for Big Tech’s bad behavior, the evidence for a breakup is far less clear. There is no single solution that will solve the problem, but bipartisan agreement on responsible regulation is a refreshing sign.
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]]>The post Daniel Hoffman: China’s assault on Texas – this project threatens US national security appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>During testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee in July 2019, FBI Director Christopher Wray emphasized: “there is no country that poses a more severe counterintelligence threat right now than China.”
Espionage has been a critical tool on which Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping has relied to enforce Orwellian big brother control over China’s population and mount increasingly aggressive policies in confrontation with the United States and its allies.
Xi has deliberately transformed what was once an intertwined, symbiotic economic relationship with the U.S. into the most palpable great power competition. China is militarizing the South China Sea; stealing our intellectual property as well as military and trade secrets; and sending its students, business people, and intelligence officers to flood the zone with spying operations targeting our academic institutions, private sector and national security officials.
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China menaces Taiwan and democracy activists in Hong Kong, exploits its “Belt and Road Initiative” as cover for debt-trap-diplomacy to project global influence, and knowing no bounds, brazenly targets the American Wild West.
The specific location in Xi’s crosshairs is the iconic frontier landscape, framed by the pristine Devils River and legendary Pecos River, in the West Texas borderlands of Val Verde County.
Beginning in 2015, GH America Investment Group purchased over 130,000 acres of property in Val Verde County. GH America is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Xinjiang-based Guanghui Industry Investment Group. Xinjiang is notorious for its so-called “re-education” camps, where China detains Uighur Muslims and other ethnic minorities against their will and violates their human rights.
Aside from gathering intelligence on U.S. border security operations and plugging into Texas’ critical infrastructure, China could use Sun’s wind farm as cover to collect intelligence on nearby Laughlin Air Force Base
Local elected officials and organizations dedicated to the protection, conservation and preservation of Val Verde County have expressed reasonable concern about GH America’s plans to erect the Blue Hills Wind farm, using some of the tallest onshore turbines in the country on the land it purchased. I’m a retired CIA officer and not a biologist, so I’ll leave it to the scientists for the most authoritative assessment on the extent to which GH America’s construction would decimate the fragile ecosystem, obstruct migratory flight paths, disrupt groundwater flows and degrade water quality in this area.
But I will loudly ring alarm bells about the threats to our national security from GH America and its Chinese Communist Party overlords. Sun Guangxin, the founder and director of Xinjiang Guanghui Industry Investment Group, served in the Chinese People’s Liberation Army and was the vice chairman of the Xinjiang Provincial Youth Federation. Having long maintained a close relationship with China’s Communist Party leadership, Sun is one of the 200 wealthiest businessmen in China.
Xi might allow Sun the independence to earn a staggeringly high income, but if Sun is like any other Chinese businessman, then he is also on the hook to serve as a surrogate against China’s adversaries, especially the U.S. According to China’s 2015 National Intelligence Law, “All organizations and citizens shall support, cooperate with, and collaborate in national intelligence work.” Sun reportedly overpaid for the land in Val Verde County and Blue Hills Wind appears to be his only renewable energy project in the U.S.
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Aside from gathering intelligence on U.S. border security operations and plugging into Texas’ critical infrastructure, including its electrical grid, China could use Sun’s wind farm venture as cover to collect intelligence on nearby Laughlin Air Force Base, which is the Air Force’s premier training facility and graduates hundreds of pilots per year.
With leadership from National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CFIUS) needs to review GHA’s purchase of this land, given its close proximity to a U.S. military installation. In a shockingly similar case, President Obama blocked the Chinese from building wind turbines near a military facility in Oregon.
In addition, Congress should determine whether Sun or any of his associates might fall into the category of Chinese officials, for whom President Trump just signed legislation calling for sanctions over their repression of Uighurs.
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In contrast to cloak-and-dagger espionage, China’s nefarious attack on our national security interests in the great state of Texas is endangering us in plain sight.
With a growing consensus on the need to confront Xi’s aggression, Democrats and Republicans must defend our home turf from China’s encroachment on our sovereignty, before our nation suffers the dire consequences.
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