Category Archives: Terror

Iran Conducts Ballistic Missile Test, UN Violation

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Iran conducts ballistic missile test, US officials say

FNC: Iran on Sunday conducted a ballistic missile test in yet another apparent violation of a United Nations resolution, U.S. officials told Fox News.

The launch occurred at a well-known test site outside Semnan, about 140 miles east of Tehran.

The missile was a Khorramshahr medium range ballistic missile and traveled 600 miles before exploding, in a failed test of a reentry vehicle, officials said.

U.N. resolution 2231 — put in place days after the Iran nuclear deal was signed — calls on the Islamic Republic not to conduct such tests, however, this is at least Iran’s second such test since July. The resolution bars Iran from conducting ballistic missile tests for eight years and went into effect July 20, 2015.

Iran is “called upon not to undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons, including launches using such ballistic missile technology,” according to the text of the resolution.

The landmark nuclear deal between Iran and world powers does not include provisions preventing Iran from conducting ballistic missile tests.

Iran claims its ballistic missile tests are legitimate because they are not designed to carry a nuclear warhead.

***  DW
Historical Iranian events beginning in 1982 as provided by IranPrimer:
1982
Jan. 22 – Parliamentary Speaker Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani said, “Iran does not want to attack the small countries of the Persian Gulf and does not want to interfere in their internal affairs.” The next day, Bahrain’s prime minister accused Iran of instigating Shiite communities throughout the Persian Gulf to overthrow their governments.
March 1 – Following weeks of heavy fighting around Susangerd, Shush and
Bostan, Special U.N. Envoy Palme announced failure to mediate a truce between Iran and Iraq. Jordanian volunteers left to join Iraqi troops.
March 9 – Ayatollah Khomeini announced that President Saddam Hussein was “past salvation and we will not retreat even one step.”
May 24 – Iran recaptured the City of Khorramshahr, an oil-rich area in southern Iran, taken by Iraq during its initial attacks in 1980.
June 12 – Iran dispatched a contingent of 1,000 Revolutionary Guards to Lebanon after Israel’s invasion. Iranian forces supported the formation of Hezbollah, a Shiite militia, but never directly confronted Israel.
July 19 – American University of Beirut President David Dodge was taken hostage. He spent the next year in Iran, before being released after Syrian intervention.
June 20 – President Hussein announced that Iraq had begun to pull out of Iran. He announced completion of its withdrawal on June 29, which Iran said was “a lie.”
July 12 – Iran rejected a U.N. ceasefire resolution. Iraq reported an Iranian attack that same day near the southern oil port of Basra.
Oct. 4 – The United Nations Security Council unanimously voted for an end to the Iran-Iraq War and a withdrawal of all forces from occupied territory. Tehran rejected the move, while Baghdad said it would accept a ceasefire.
1983
April – Washington suspected Iran was indirectly involved in a suicide bombing which killed 63 people at the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon. The Reagan administration blamed Hezbollah for the attack, which U.S. officials believed was being funded by Iran and Syria.
Aug. 23 – Reacting to internal squabbling, Ayatollah Khomeini urged unity between the military and the Revolutionary Guards
Sept. 17 – President Hussein said Baghdad wanted peace with Tehran based on mutual non-interference. The next day Iran repeated threats to block oil exports if its shipments were disrupted.
Oct. 23 – A suicide bomber attacked the barracks of U.S. Marine peacekeepers in Beirut, killing 241 Marines, the largest loss of U.S. military life in a single incident since Iwo Jima in World War II. The United States suspected Iran-backed Hezbollah.
Dec. 3 – The U.S. press reported the Reagan administration’s policy shift toward Iraq was because of a belief that an Iraqi defeat would hurt U.S. interests.
1984
Jan. 23 – The Reagan administration put Iran on the State Department list of governments supporting terrorism.
Feb. 11 – Iraq attacked civilian targets in Dezful, triggering a new phase of the war. Iran responded on Feb. 12 by shelling seven Iraqi cities. After repeated incidents, Iran accepted an Iraqi ceasefire offer on Feb. 18. Both agreed to allow a U.N. mission to assess damage in civilian areas. But in late February, Iran announced new offensives on the northern and southern fronts.
March 3 – Iran charged Iraq with using chemical weapons, a practice which Iraq continued throughout the war.
March – Hezbollah abducted American hostages in Beirut, including CIA station chief William Buckley, who died in captivity.
May 13 – After a run of at least six Iraqi strikes on tankers doing business with Iran, Iran for the first time attacked a Persian Gulf ship, the Kuwaiti Umm Casbah, marking the outbreak of the “tanker war.” Parliamentary Speaker Rafsanjani declared on May 15, “Either the Persian Gulf will be safe for all or for no one.”
 
July – The CIA began giving Iraq intelligence that was reportedly used for subsequent mustard gas attacks against Iranian troops.
 
Sept. 20 – Hezbollah was once again suspected of being behind an attack against the new U.S. Embassy in Beirut, which killed 24 people.
1985
Feb. 21 – The United Nations reported that both Iran and Iraq were violating the
Geneva Convention on prisoners of war treatment.
March 14 – Iraq began a bombing campaign against Iranian cities, particularly targeting Tehran. Iran responded with its own scud missile attacks. The “war of the cities” air strikes continued until 1988.
Aug. 14 – A shipment of U.S. TOW antitank missiles was shipped to Tehran from Israel as part of the Reagan administration’s arms-for-hostage swap. The Reagan administration secretly facilitated the sale of Israeli arms to Iran (which was subject to an arms embargo), in exchange for Iran’s help in the release of American hostages in Lebanon.
Nov. 22 – Another shipment of HAWK antiaircraft missiles was shipped to Tehran from Israel as the second phase of the arms-for-hostage swap. But the deal fell far short of what was promised, and Iran ordered a refund of payment and a resupply.
1986
Nov. 3 – The Lebanese magazine Ash-Shiraa exposed the secret arms-for-hostage dealings between Iran, Israel, and the United States.
July 20 – The U.N. Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 598, demanding an immediate ceasefire.
October – During Operation Nimble Archer, the United States attacked Iranian oil platforms in retaliation for an Iranian attack on the U.S.-flagged Kuwaiti tanker, Sea Isle City.
1988
June 2 – Ayatollah Khomeini named Parliamentary Speaker Rafsanjani acting commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran
April – The U.S. Department of Commerce reportedly approved the shipment to Iraq of chemicals for agricultural use that were later used to manufacture mustard gas. Four major battles were fought between April and August in which Iraqis used massive amounts of chemical weapons against Iran. By that time, the United States was aiding Saddam Hussein by gathering intelligence and assisting in battle plans.
Apr. 14 – The frigate USS Samuel B. Roberts was badly damaged by an Iranian mine. U.S. forces responded with Operation Praying Mantis on April 18, the U. S. Navy’s largest engagement of surface warships since World War II. Two Iranian oil platforms, two Iranian ships and six Iranian gunboats were destroyed.
Aug. 20 – Iran and Iraq accepted U.N. Resolution 598, ending the eight-year war. Iran claimed to suffer over 1 million casualties.
1992
March 17 – A suicide bombing at the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires killed around 30 and wounded more than 300 individuals. A group called the Islamic Jihad Organization, with alleged links to Iran and Hezbollah, claimed responsibility for the attack. Iran and Hezbollah denied involvement.
1994
April – Iran expelled workers from the Island of Abu Musa. Tehran began to station Revolutionary Guards on the islands of Abu Musa and the Greater and Lesser Tunbs. The islands had been a source of tension between Iran and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) since Iran seized them in the early 1970s. Both countries claim rights to the islands.
April – President Clinton gave what Congress later termed a “green light” for Iran to transfer arms to the Muslim government of Bosnia fighting Serbian forces. The permission came despite a United Nations arms embargo against Iran. In 1996, the Senate Intelligence Committee and the House Select Subcommittee confirmed the U.S. role in the Iranian arms transfer.
July 18 – The bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, which killed 85 and wounded 300, was blamed on Iran and Hezbollah. The charges were denied by both parties. In 2006, Argentine prosecutors called for the arrest of former President Rafsanjani.
1996
April 6 – Belgian customs officials seized a large mortar from an Iranian shipment of pickles destined for Munich, Germany. Belgian officials speculated the military equipment was meant for attacks targeting Israeli interests in Europe.
June – Iran was suspected of masterminding the June 25 bombing of Khobar Towers, a U.S. Air Force housing complex in Saudi Arabia. Iran denied the allegations.
1997
April 10 – A German court ruled that the Iranian government was behind the murders of four Kurdish dissidents in Berlin in 1992. Iran denied allegations.
1998
Aug. 8 – Nine diplomats were killed by the Taliban militia during an attack on the Iranian consulate in Mazar-e Sharif. At the time, more than 70,000 Iranian troops were deployed along the Afghan border. U.N. mediation defused the situation. Iran and the Taliban held talks in February 1999, but relations did not improve.
2001
April – Iran and Saudi Arabia signed a security agreement with particular emphasis on the fight against drug smuggling and terrorism.
Oct. 2 – Russia signed a military accord with Tehran, six years after it halted arms sales to Iran under U.S. pressure. The agreement included the sale of jets, missiles and other weapons.
Oct. 8 – Supreme Leader Khamenei condemned U.S. strikes on Afghanistan. At the same time, Iran agreed to perform search-and-rescue missions for U.S. pilots who crashed on Iranian soil during the war.
2002
January – Israel seized the Karina A, a ship carrying 50 tons of arms which Israeli officials claimed were supplied by Iran for the Palestinian authority.
2005
June – Former Revolutionary Guards commander and presidential candidate Mohsen Rezaei said Iran played a more significant part in the overthrow of the Taliban than given credit for by the United States. Washington consistently denied that Iranians made meaningful contributions.
June 16 – Iran and Syria signed an agreement for military cooperation against what they called the “common threats” presented by Israel and the United States. In a joint press conference, the defense ministers from the two countries said their talks had been aimed at consolidating their defense efforts and strengthening mutual support.
June 6 – Iran was given observer status in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a security organization including China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. It applied for full membership on March 24, 2008. But its admission was blocked because of ongoing sanctions levied by the United Nations.
2007
February – Iran denied accusations by the United States that it was stirring violence in the Iraq.
May 28 – Iran and the United States held the first official high-level talks in 27 years. The meeting, which took place in Baghdad, came after Iraq hosted a security conference attended by regional states and the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council. The talks were on Iraq’s security and were followed by two more rounds in July and November. The United States urged Tehran to stop supporting Shiite militias in Iraq. The talks ultimately did not lead anywhere and stopped after three meetings.
Sept. 6 – NATO forces in Afghanistan intercepted a large Iranian shipment of arms destined for the Taliban. The shipment included armor-piercing bombs. Washington said that the shipment’s large quantity was a sign that Iranian officials were at least aware of the shipment, even if not directly involved. Tehran denied the charges.
October – U.S. military commander Gen. David Petraeus claimed Iran was triggering violence in Iraq. Petraeus also accused Iran’s ambassador to Iraq of being a member of the elite Qods Force, a wing of the Revolutionary Guards responsible for foreign operations.
2008
April – The United States accused Iran of continuing its alleged support of Taliban insurgents.
July 9 – Iran test-fired a new version of the Shahab-3 long-range missile with a range of 1,240 miles, which Iran said was capable of hitting targets in Israel.
2009
Feb. 2 – President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced the launch of Iran’s first domestically produced satellite, Omid, prompting fears in the West that it would enable Iran to launch long-range ballistic missiles.
May 1 –The State Department designated Iran as the “most active state sponsor of terrorism.” Tehran countered that the United States could not accuse others of terrorism after its actions at Iraq’s Abu Graib prison and Guantanamo Bay.
May 20 – Iran successfully tested the Sejjil-2 ballistic missile which has a range between 1,200 and 1,500 miles. The Obama administration said the missile was “a significant step,” and indicated that Tehran was enhancing its weapons delivery capability.
Sept. 22 – Iran held a military parade showing off its Shahab-3 and Sejjil ballistic missiles and, for the first time, the Russian-built Tor-M1 air defense system. The medium-range ballistic missiles both have a range that can reach Israel.
Sept. 27-28 – Iran carried out a series of missile tests as part of a military exercise called Operation Great Prophet IV. Short-range missiles included the Shahab-1, Shahab-2, Fateh-110 and Tondar-69.
December – Gen. Petraeus accused Iran of backing Shiite militants in Iraq and giving a “modest level” of support to the Taliban in Afghanistan.
2010
March – Iran and Qatar signed a security agreement, underlying the need for security cooperation and a fight against terrorism.
August – Iran successfully test-fired a new generation of the Fateh-110, a medium-range ballistic missile with a 155-mile range.
2011
February – Iran sent two warships through Suez Canal for first time since the 1979 revolution.
Dec. 4 – Iran captured a U.S. drone near the northeastern city of Kashmar and refused to return it to the United States.
 
December 2011 – January 2012 – Iran threatened to close off the Strait of Hormuz.
 
2012
Jan. 1 – Iran test-fired an advanced surface-to-air missile during a drill in international waters near the Strait of Hormuz.
 
Aug. 21 – Iran unveiled an upgraded version of a short-range surface-to-surface ballistic missile, known as the Fateh-110.
Nov. 1 – Iranian jets fired on a U.S. drone over the Persian Gulf. The drone was not damaged and was able to return to its base.
Nov. 4 – Iran inaugurated a new naval base near three disputed Persian Gulf islands also claimed by the United Arab Emirates.
Dec. 4 – Iran reported that it had captured a U.S. drone that entered its airspace over the Gulf, but the United States denied this claim.
2013
Feb. 2 – Tehran unveiled the new Qaher F313 fighter and claimed that it could evade radar.
Feb. 7 – Iran released footage it claimed to have salvaged from a U.S. drone that it reportedly downed in 2011.
March 14 – The Pentagon reported that an Iranian fighter jet targeted a U.S. drone over the Gulf. No shots were fired and the jet left the area after a verbal warning.
April 18 – Iran unveiled the H-110 Sarir long-range drone, equipped with cameras and air-to-air missiles.
May 9 – Iran unveiled the Hemaseh combat drone, capable of surveillance, reconnaissance, and missile and rocket attacks.
Sept. 28 – Iran unveiled the Yasir combat drone, equipped with an advanced reconnaissance system and capable of detecting remote targets.
Nov. 18 – Iran unveiled its largest missile-equipped drone to date, known as the Fotros drone. It supposedly had a range of 2,000 km.
2014
Aug. 24 – Iran unveiled two new drones, the Karar-4 and Mohajer-4, and two new missiles, the Ghadir ground-to-sea and sea-to-sea missile and the Nasr-e Basir missile.
Aug 28 – Iran test-fired the Talaash 3 missile defense system successfully.
Sept. 2 – Iran unveiled the Keyhan and Arash 2 radar systems, which can intercept fighter jets and stealth aircraft.
Sept. 23 – Iran introduced a new missile-equipped drone capable of destroying different types of aircraft.
Sept. 29 – Iran unveiled the Sadeq 1 drone and Fath 2 radar system.
Nov. 13 – Iran announced that it had reverse-engineered a version of the American RQ-170 Sentinel drone it captured in 2011, improving its speed and fuel efficiency. But a Pentagon spokesperson claimed there was “no way” the Iranian drone matched American technology.
2015
Jul 4 – Iran unveiled a second Ghadir long-range early warning radar system able to track aircraft from 600 km away and ballistic missiles up to 1.100 km away.
Oct 11 – Iran test-fired the new Emad ballistic missile. It was a surface-to-surface l missile with the supposed ability to be precision guided to its target. Washington called it a clear violation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1929, which prohibits Iran from test launching ballistic missiles.
Oct 14 – The IRGC allowed broadcasting of rare images from inside an underground missile bunker.
Nov. 21 – Iran reportedly tested a Ghadr-110 medium-range ballistic missile near the port city of Chabahar on November 21.
2016
Jan. 12 – Iranian military forces seized two U.S. Navy vessels and held them on Iran’s Farsi Island in the Persian Gulf. Nine men and one woman were aboard the small riverine boats. The Pentagon received assurances from Iran that the crew and vessels would be returned promptly.

 

Jan. 13 – U.S. sailors detained by Iran were safely released to the U.S. Navy after an overnight flurry of diplomatic efforts. Secretary of State John Kerry and Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif spoke at least five times about the incident.

Jan. 17 – The United States imposed new sanctions on 11 individuals and entities for supporting Iran’s ballistic missile program. The new measures followed a December report by U.N. experts that concluded that an Iranian test launch in October violated sanctions banning Iran from test firing missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons.

Feb. 8 – The IRGC test fired Shahab-1, Shahab-2, as well as Ghadr-H and Ghadr-F ballistic missiles as part of a large-scale military drill. The launches, publicized widely by Iranian media outlets, were intended to display Iran’s “deterrence power” and “full readiness to confront all kinds of threats against the Revolution, establishment and territorial integrity,” according to the IRGC.
Feb. 9 – Iran test fired two Ghadr-H ballistic missiles. IRGC Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh said Iran designed the weapons with a range of 2,000 km to be able to hit Israel “from a safe distance.”

Foreign Service Personnel Dissent Letter to Pres. Trump

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We heard last week that several top policy people at the State Department left their positions. The State Department has a culture of very lenient diplomacy where few governments are ever disciplined or rebuked for decisions and actions that counter agreements, treaties, human rights and more. Iran is the topic example.

Now we have the next level of State Department personnel that are pushing back hard on President Trump’s Executive Order on suspension of travel visas and travel bans from listed countries. Secretary of State nominee, Rex Tillerson when confirmed will have a rank and file challenge on his hands.

Perhaps those behind the signatures on this dissent letter could answer some questions on the recommendations made by the 9/11 Commission Report where the entire chapter was dedicated to immigration of which every member of Congress, both sides of the aisle signed in approval to accept the recommendations and work to implement. (Pre 9/11 status quo has infected diplomacy again)

Countless foreign service officers have drafted a memo to the White House.

LawFareBlog: Numerous Foreign Service officers and other diplomats have drafted a dissent memo expressing opposition to President Donald Trump’s executive order banning refugees and immigrants from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen from entering the United States. ABC reported this morning on the draft, which is likely to be submitted today.

Here’s a copy of the actual draft. We are hearing that literally hundreds of foreign service officers are planning to be party to the dissent memo; it’s still unclear exactly how many. We have redacted all names and personally identifiable information from this document.

**

(First page on the left) The State Department’s Dissent Channel is a mechanism for employees to confidentially express policy disagreement, created in 1971 as a response to concerns within the Department over the government’s handling of the Vietnam War. Authors of a memo submitted through the Channel, which is open to all regular employees of the State Department and USAID, may not be subject to any penalty or disciplinary action in response. Once a memo is submitted, the Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff must acknowledge its receipt within two working days and will usually distribute it to the Secretary of State, the Deputy Secretary of State, the Under Secretary for Political Affairs, the Chairperson of the Open Forum, and, if the memo’s author is employed by USAID, by the head of that agency as well. Taking into account the wishes of the author, the memo may also be distributed more broadly within the State Department and may be done so anonymously.

The ultimate significance of the channel is that memos must receive a substantive response within 30-60 working days

Trump Approved CT al Qaeda Operation in Yemen, 1 Dead

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 FoxNews  NYMag

In part from the Defense Department press release: The raid is one in a series of aggressive moves against terrorist planners in Yemen and worldwide, according to the Centcom release. Similar operations have produced intelligence on al-Qaida logistics, recruiting and financing efforts. 

A US commando died and three others were wounded in a deadly dawn raid on the al-Qaeda militant group in southern Yemen, which was the first military operation authorised by US President Donald Trump.

The US military said 14 militants died in the attack on a powerful al-Qaeda branch that has been a frequent target of US drone strikes.

Medics at the scene, however, said around 30 people, including 10 women and children, were killed.

The gunbattle in the rural Yakla district of al-Bayda province killed a senior leader in Yemen’s al-Qaeda branch, Abdulraoof al-Dhahab, along with other militants, al-Qaeda said.

Eight-year-old Anwar al-Awlaki, the daughter of US-born Yemeni preacher and al-Qaeda ideologue Anwar al-Awlaki, was among the children who died in the raid, according to her grandfather. Her father was killed in a US drone strike in 2011.

“She was hit with a bullet in her neck and suffered for two hours,” Nasser al-Awlaki told Reuters. “Why kill children? This is the new (US) administration – it’s very sad, a big crime,”

The US military said in a statement that the raid netted “information that will likely provide insight into the planning of future terror plots”.

The American elite forces did not seize any militants or take any prisoners offsite, said a US military official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The three commandos who were injured were hurt when a military aircraft experienced a hard landing and was “intentionally destroyed in place,” the Pentagon said.

“The operation began at dawn when a drone bombed the home of Abdulraoof al-Dhahab and then helicopters flew up and unloaded paratroopers at his house and killed everyone inside,” said one resident, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

“Next, the gunmen opened fire at the US soldiers who left the area, and the helicopters bombed the gunmen and a number of homes and led to a large number of casualties.”

A Yemeni security officer and a local official corroborated that account. Fahd, a local resident who asked that only his first name be used, said several bodies remained under debris and that houses and the local mosque were damaged in the attack.

In a message on its official Telegram messaging account, al Qaeda mourned al-Dhahab as a “holy warrior” and other slain militants, without specifying how many of its fighters were killed.

***

Related reading: Ex-Guantanamo detainee now al Qaeda leader in Yemen

***

Commandos from the Navy’s SEAL Team 6 carried out the surprise dawn attack in Bayda Province in a ground raid that lasted a little less than an hour. A military aircraft assisting in the operation crash-landed nearby, leaving two more service members injured, the statement said. That aircraft, identified by a senior American official as an MV-22 Osprey sent to evacuate the troops wounded in the raid, was unable to fly after the landing and was intentionally destroyed by American airstrikes. More here from NYT’s.

****

From 2009 and it is germane today:

Al‐Qa’ida represents itself as the vanguard of the Muslim community, committed to upholding Islamic values and defending Muslim people against Western forces, but its behavior represents a callous attitude toward the lives of those the group claims to protect. Al‐ Qa’ida absolves responsibility for the deaths of Muslims by claiming that they are either martyrs or apostates. The definition of apostate, however, varies considerably. Al‐ Qa’ida considers any Muslim that impedes their struggle by working with the West or an unfriendly regime as an apostate, and therefore a legitimate target. This includes Muslims serving in the armed forces, serving as police officers, and even those occupying civilian jobs. Al‐Qa’ida makes convenient use of this designation to justify its indiscriminate use of violence.
To justify the killing of innocent Muslims, or martyrs, al‐Qa’ida references a shari’a rule called al‐tatarrus. Al‐tatarrus refers to the use of human shields, the practice of avoiding hostility by hiding behind others. Muslims are not supposed to kill other Muslims, and historically, enemies used this prohibition against Muslim military forces by surrounding themselves with other Muslims. Muslims found the al‐tatarrus rule was a strategic liability and looked for ways to circumvent the ban. The notion that it is okay to kill Muslims being used as human shields, is not widely invoked or discussed in other contemporary circles. Al‐Qa’ida resurrected the term to justify the killing of innocents, arguing that these people were essentially human shields, and if innocent, they died martyrs. Among the only justifications for this obscure rule is Abu Yahya al‐ Libi’s book entitled “Al‐Tatarrus in the Modern Jihad,” and Ayman al‐Zawhiri cited this source during his open forum referenced above.15 Al‐Qa’ida has acknowledged that assailants should be patient and wait for the right time to carry out attacks (in martyr videos and announcements), but this report shows there is scant evidence of prudence or effort to limit violence. Irrespective of al‐Qa’ida’s justifications, if history provides a glimpse into the future, the group and its associates will pose the greatest threat to fellow Muslims. Read more here.

For Trump: Inter arma enim silent leges

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Translation: For among times of arms, the laws fall mute. But is this true?

Much opposition was forced on President GW Bush for his actions by executive order and presidential findings directly after the 9/11 attack. Bush ordered countless legal authorities inside and outside government for legal decisions on every step he took including that of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’.

We have a major debate that will not be solved any time soon on the legality of the President Trump executive order on the refugee question which has caused major protests and legal action already as we see detentions of foreign nationals at airports. All executive orders are subject to judicial review. Presidents have been given the option of using extraordinary power and in many cases that is a good condition, yet in the matter of law, there have been without question many abuses.

This post is not meant to form any conclusion on the legal veracity of this executive order, rather it is designed to add it more facts and additional questions moving forward. President Trump has a mess to clean up left by Barack Obama, of this, there is no dispute. The White House did take action at the stroke of the pen to begin to make America safer, however was this action taken too soon and without legal opinions including that of the Office of Legal Council? That has not been answered.

So, here are some items that must be included in this debate that extends the whole view and argument.

These are not in any specific order so the reader can individually prioritize.

  1. Should President Trump have set an effective date of this Executive Order?
  2. How was TSA, DHS and all other associated agencies briefed on those already in transit and with validated travel documents in hand?
  3. Did the White House consider exemptions or waivers for those that have been vetted previously that worked or work for the USG in some capacity?
  4. Why were some countries on this list while others were not? The San Bernardino shooters were from Pakistan, but do we need Pakistan for the war in Afghanistan?
  5. The majority of the terrorists on 9/11 were from Saudi Arabia and yet Saudi was omitted from the list, why? Could it be that Trump had/has business interests there or because some that were formally in the Kingdom did aide often the United States when it came to terror like in the case of kidnapped CIA operative William Buckley in Beirut of which the Saudis helped finance his recovery? It is without question the Saudis dislike Iran as much as the United States.
  6. We have seen millions of refugees enter all parts of Europe in recent years and yet they can enter the United States under the ‘visa waiver’ program. Did the Trump White House take this under full consideration? The answer is a ‘kinda, yes’ they did but that review has been ordered and not yet deployed.
  7. We have countless refugees and asylees entering the United States from our southern border, but was Mexico on the list? No, yet we don’t know either if the phone discussion President Trump had with President Nieto, this topic was addressed.
  8. There are in fact limitations to who can be accepted into the United States under 8 U.S. Code S 1182 and applying those restrictions remain in the authority of the President while waivers can be issued and it is germane to ask if this law has been considered.
  9. Refugees too have rights and legal protections which was in fact determined after WW II and we have witnessed millions in the Middle East that are forced to live outside their homeland in camps that are simply inhumane. So when it comes to the ‘huddle masses’, the United States does have a responsibility however, the genesis of the current refugee/asylee issue remains with Susan Rice, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. The solution in the long term is almost impossible for President Trump and his team to solve unless the hostilities and conflicts in the Middle East are solved.
  10. The protests of those standing against the Trump executive order was not spontaneous, nor were those immediate lawsuits against this temporary refugee ban. Following the money and the continued chaos will not soon go away. What is the proper counter-measure going forward? A question that remains without an answer.
  11. In 2011, Obama did ban Iraqis wanting to enter the United States and this was in fact the exact year the United States pulled out in total from Iraqi. Obama did however issue some selective waivers. The concern for Obama at the time was the matter of two people in Kentucky plotting a terror attack. This alone is a single great argument for Trump’s action and Senator Schumer should be reminded as should Nancy Pelosi. But it is not the full argument as noted by the items above.
  12. It should be noted the actions of President Carter who ordered all Iranians to leave the United States and cut all interactions with Iran with few exceptions.

There are historical events that do offer President Trump great legal standing that is unless courts will rule otherwise in upcoming cases.

ABC: Over the veto of President Woodrow Wilson, Congress passed the 1917 Immigration Act amid social outcry over national security during World War I. According to the Office of the Historian of the U.S. Department of State, the legislation extended to barring most Asian nation immigration overall, with the exception of Japan, which was protected by a prior bilateral diplomatic agreement, and the Philippines, then a U.S. colony.

The act was officially repealed by the Magnuson Act in 1943, in the context of the U.S. alliance with China against Japan during World War II. Still, actual Chinese immigration to the U.S. remained capped at 105 persons a year until 1965.

National Origins Formula

For the first time in the 1920s — through the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the Immigration Act of 1924, or the Johnson-Reed Act — the U.S. further restricted immigration by establishing a wide-scale quota system based on national origins. According to the Office of the Historian of the U.S. Department of State, in addition to putting a blanket ban on immigration from Asian countries, now including Japan in the case of the Johnson-Reed Act, the national origins immigration policies also had the effect of reducing immigration from southern and eastern Europe.

According to a 2015 report by the Pew Research Center about 20th century U.S. immigration, the impact of the system was intended to “try to restore earlier immigration patterns by capping total annual immigration and imposing numerical quotas based on immigrant nationality that favored northern and western European countries.”

The U.S. immigration system remained based on the national origin of would-be immigrants until the passage of the Immigration Act of 1965 during the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson.

“It was designed for racist reasons,” said Steve Legomsky, professor of law at the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, referring to the national origins system as well as the prior exclusion of Asian immigrants. “Today, I don’t think that’s what’s driving the immigration ban [proposed by Trump]. I think it’s more a fear of terrorism and a concern for national security.”

Legomsky, who was also formerly the chief counsel of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, added that “the impulses are different [now], but the effect is the same.”

In summary, this article is hardly complete with all the facts and laws, rather it is meant for the reader to consider a wider range of moving parts while inviting the reader to individually research more before an ‘all in’ as full support of Trump’s executive action be assumed.

Your comments are invited and encouraged.

In closing, it was in 2014 that now deceased Justice Scalia said, in times of war, laws fall silent.

The Untold Holocaust in Russia on Remembrance Day

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The Forgotten Holocaust: The Films of Boris Maftsir

An Israeli filmmaker works to revive the neglected, terrible history of Shoah victims in the Soviet Union

Tablet: In a series of spellbinding documentaries, Boris Maftsir, an Israeli filmmaker, has been racing to prevent the last traces of the Holocaust in the USSR from vanishing for good. He went deep into the forests of Belarus to film the remnants of Tuvie Bielski’s partisans’ camp and document instances of Jewish resistance that have not been widely known until now. While it is hard to imagine anything remains to be said about the Shoah, that, says Maftsir, is because we keep retelling half the story—the story of the destruction of the Western European Jewry, from ghettos to gas chambers and everything those stand for: the merciless, mechanized, industrial-scale killing machine that organized the murder of millions into a precise, assembly-line-like operation.

While half of all the Shoah victims died in the Soviet Union, they died very different deaths. Here, people died in mass executions in ravines, forests, and village streets, at the hands of Germans or local collaborators. They perished right where they lived, in front of people who had been their neighbors.

Because the Nazis put Soviet Jews, whom they called Judeo-Bolsheviks, in a separate category and viewed them as particularly dangerous (and because they expected a quick victory here) with a few notable exceptions, they almost never bothered with organizing the Jews into long-term ghettos or transporting them to faraway places. Jews began dying the moment Germans invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941.

“By the end of 1941,” writes Timothy Snyder in Holocaust: The Ignored Reality, “the Germans (along with local auxiliaries and Romanian troops) had killed a million Jews in the Soviet Union and the Baltics. That is the equivalent of the total number of Jews killed at Auschwitz during the entire war. By the end of 1942, the Germans (again, with a great deal of local assistance) had shot another 700,000 Jews, and the Soviet Jewish populations under their control had ceased to exist. … By 1943 and 1944, when most of the killing of West European Jews took place, the Holocaust was in considerable measure complete.”

A different set of numbers throws this into even sharper relief. An estimated 25 to 27 percent of Amsterdam Jews who found themselves under occupation survived—the lowest rate in Western Europe. In France, 75 percent of Jews survived the Nazi occupation. By contrast, of the conservatively estimated 2.61 to 2.75 million Soviet Jews who found themselves living under Nazi occupation, an estimated 103,000 to 119,000 survived, for a survival rate of between 2.7 percent and 4 percent. (Estimates of victims include only those who died as a result of direct anti-Jewish actions by the Nazis; they do not include hundreds of thousands of Jews who fell in battle while serving in the Red Army or died during sieges of Leningrad and Odessa from bombings, hunger, illness, and other causes. These are estimated to constitute several hundred thousand.)

Maftsir doesn’t mince words when he talks about the near-erasure of the eastern half of the Holocaust. “The place of memory of the Holocaust is already taken up,” he says. “There is the Victim—Anne Frank. There is the Saint—Janusz Korczak. There is the Villain—Adolf Eichman. There is Hell, it’s Auschwitz. There is heroism—the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. And that’s it.”

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I met Maftsir in September 2016 in Kyiv, where I was attending a series of events commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Babi Yar massacre. At one of the events, Maftsir showed the first film of his Holocaust in the USSR project, Guardians of Remembrance. It was the first time in my life that I, who grew up in the Soviet Union, saw people I could recognize and relate to—survivors from Belarus, Russia, Ukraine—speaking to me from the screen, in Russian, about the horrors of the Holocaust. They told the story of a Holocaust that happened in places where my family had lived.

Maftsir has been working on his project since 2013, but its roots go back to his time at Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, where for seven years he headed up the effort to recover the names of the Soviet victims of the Shoah. When he took the job in 2006, he was shocked to discover how many were still missing.

“I knew that in Soviet times, for ideological and political reasons, there was neither documentation, nor memorialization, nor the study of the Holocaust,” he told me. “But I couldn’t imagine that out of the 1.5 million Jews we believe died in Ukraine, we had only 10 to 15 percent of the names.” This figure stood in contrast to the names of Western European Jews who died in the Holocaust, 90 percent of which were known at the time.

Maftsir spent the next several years traveling to some 160 Shoah sites in the former Soviet Union, a mind-boggling number that is nevertheless only a fraction of the total of 2,000 sites connected to the Holocaust. Today, these sites are spread out across several post-Soviet states. Step by step, he built a network of local volunteers who sought out Holocaust survivors, non-Jewish witnesses, and local memory activists—the so-called guardians of remembrance. “We did not work with archives,” Maftsir emphasized. “We were looking for living memory.”

His team collected hundreds of thousands of names. And at the end of his seventh year on the project, Maftsir realized that he needed to bring this story before a larger audience. As a professional filmmaker, he chose film as his medium. In 2012 he resigned from the project at Yad Vashem to make Guardians of Remembrance.

“What does it mean to shoot almost everyone or to destroy nearly 3 million people across a span of a given territory?” asks Maftsir. The question is only partly rhetorical. In the USSR, it meant there were virtually no survivors left to tell their stories. Those who had managed to evacuate before the German invasion or who had served in the Red Army came back to find empty homes and mass graves. Their grief was suppressed under the blanket Soviet policy of silence and denial of the specificity of the Jewish nature of the Holocaust.

The Soviets, of course, knew exactly what had happened to the Jews in their territory. Even before the war ended, a special state commission began investigating German crimes, including those against the Jews. A group of Soviet Jewish writers began collecting witness testimony and preparing it for publication in a work that became known as the Black Book of Soviet Jewry. Some of these materials became evidence in the Nuremberg trials.

But the findings of the commission were never published in the USSR. Many of those who worked on the Black Book were executed a few years later, charged with disloyalty, as the campaign against “rootless cosmopolitanism” unfolded. It would have been ideologically uncomfortable for Stalin to emphasize Jews as a particular target, for doing so could have detracted from the special status of the USSR as a whole as a target of Hitler’s aggression. It could also have given credence to Hitler’s propaganda about the Judeo-Commune and reinflamed anti-Semitic tendencies among the local populations that needed to be reintegrated—and reindoctrinated—after prolonged periods of living under the German occupation.

In the vast majority of cases, there were no monuments or other works commemorating the execution sites. In the few cases with some sort of memorial, the inscriptions referred to the victims as “peaceful Soviet citizens.” Relatives were not permitted to gather at the memorial sites. Those who did were often arrested. Western scholars were denied access to the archives to conduct research.

“What do deniers of the Holocaust say?” asks Maftsir. “They say: Look at the USSR. Show us the corpses. But everything there is burned down, everything is ground down, everything is destroyed. The forgetting by the Soviet power for 40-50 years has led to the fact that there is no direct connection anymore. And that is how memory goes away.”

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As Dr. Inna Gerasimova, the founder of the Museum of Jewish History and Culture of Belarus, tells her story in one of the opening scenes of Guardians of Remembrance, the camera pans across a square garden in the center of Minsk, where she and Maftsir are discussing the events of November 1941.

“This is where the gallows stood,” she tells him, motioning with her hand. Around them is a street scene that is unremarkable in its normalcy. Passers-by are going about their business, some with the habitual urgency of a city-dweller, some just strolling. Most are oblivious to the cameras. It’s a gray, rainy afternoon in late November, and pedestrians are studiously avoiding the puddles. You can almost feel the chill in the air.

“It is precisely here that once in a while they hanged people,” Gerasimova continues, and the growing dissonance between her words and the humdrum, quotidian reality on the screen sets off a barely detectable alarm bell of internal discomfort in the viewer.

“The people began to panic from the very beginning. They felt frightened because right away they realized the most scary thing—the complete permissiveness that was indulged in by those who kept them here. They raped women, they raped girls, and they did it openly.” As she speaks, the camera cuts over to a well-dressed young woman with two school-age sons. The boys look back at the camera, giggling the way preteen boys anywhere might do. Gerasimova’s narrative of the horror that took place in these very streets clashes with the visual of the weirdly normal, peaceful scene playing out on-screen.

And suddenly it hits you. It was people just like these—regular, ordinary residents whom any one of us could identify with—who became swept up in the horrible events she is describing. Suddenly you can visualize and feel in your gut the shock and horror of seeing the gallows erected in the heart of your city. It could have been anyone who happened to be a Jew. It could have been you.

It is Maftsir’s ability to create this presence that makes his films so powerful. To achieve this, he films on location, at the same time of year when the events his informants describe took place. This means that he’s had to film in 1 degree F in Sukhari in Belarus, 104 degrees F in Zmievskaya Balka in the south of Russia, and in the pouring rain in Minsk. His films are based entirely on witness and survivor testimony, and he takes his witnesses to the places where they experienced the events. He asks them to tell their stories in the language they spoke in their childhood, whether it be Russian, Yiddish, Ukrainian, or Romanian.

This produces a lot of difficulties. “Physically, it’s very hard,” he told me. “You come to Berezhany in Western Ukraine with a witness. He is over 80, he is afraid of getting sick. And the rain starts, and he thinks, naturally—what will happen to me? And you have to work with people so they don’t cry, so they can tell the story.”

And they do tell their stories. They tell their stories all over the Holocaust country of the former Soviet Union, from Nalchik to Khatyn to Lubavichi, the birthplace of Chabad. The relentless narrative of Maftsir’s films, in which each episode of annihilation unfolds chronologically as one story builds on another, paints a picture of what he refers to as “the organized chaos” of the Holocaust in the USSR. In many ways, it can be said that it was here that the Nazis invented, practiced, and perfected techniques of mass executions; learned to manipulate and control crowds of future victims to prevent panic from setting in too early; learned what incentives worked to supply them with streams of local collaborators. It was out of the chaos of these early months of the Holocaust that the well-oiled extermination machine of later years arose.

To be sure, Germans had their orders to annihilate Soviet Jews, but, in Maftsir’s view, there wasn’t an organized plan.

“Take the example of the Romanians,” he says. “Why is it that in Zhmerinka you have an ‘exemplary’ ghetto, and in Bershad hundreds are dying each day? That one is run by Romanians and this one is run by Romanians. In Bogdanovka there are executions taking place locally, but in the northern part of Vinnytsa region people are basically told to live or die any way they wish.”

This lack of organization and preplanning, in his view and that of many historians, extended even to such massive events as Babi Yar.

“Babi Yar was a horrible tragedy,” says Maftsir. “But it wasn’t the first. And it wasn’t even unique in its scale.” He rattles off several notorious mass execution sites. Kamenets-Podolsk: two days, 23,600 people, a full month before Babi Yar. The Rumbula massacre in Riga: 25,000 Jews over two nonconsecutive days in late November and early December 1941. By then, he says, “they already knew how to do it.”

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So far, Maftsir has completed four of the nine films he has planned. All four—Guardians of Remembrance, Holocaust: The Eastern Front, Beyond the Nistru (parts 1-3 and 4-5), and Until the Last Step—are available online. Of particular interest in Until the Last Step, which is shot in Belarus, are stories of little-known instances of Jewish resistance.

How reliable are the accounts he presents? Witness testimony is a contentious issue among historians. One problem is that people’s memories can be unreliable, especially many decades later. Bystander testimony can be particularly problematic, Dr. Kathleen Smith, a professor at Georgetown University focusing on issues of memory and historical politics, told me: “Bystanders are people who perhaps weren’t specifically targets of repression. They were there, and one might ask, well, what were you doing? Were you a collaborator or were you just someone who was scared? Were you someone who tried to help the victims? It’s much more messy when you try to pull information out of people who were bystanders.” In fact, it is well known that neighbors often benefited from the Jews’ misfortune.

When I put these questions to Maftsir, he is careful to emphasize that his witnesses were children or teenagers when the events took place. “Each of them talks about what they saw. And they do it sometimes very honestly,” he says. “It was a terrible time. It was occupation. I don’t know how people lived and how they survived. Even the righteous who saved people did not do it for free: they had to get food for the people. Those who saved themselves had to pay for it.”

Not a single historian who has viewed his films has ever raised objections about the veracity of testimonies, says Maftsir. “I don’t make things up and I don’t uncover anything new,” he stresses. “All the events that are described are well documented. I simply recreate these events. Each witness talks only about what she saw.”

In fact, a number of organizations in Israel use his films in their Holocaust education programs, including the Ghetto Fighters’ House museum.

“To what extent are these testimonies history? I don’t know,” he says. “It’s memory. And my entire project is about the restoration of memory about the Holocaust in the USSR. I collect imagery to convey the scale, the prevalence, the uniqueness, the systematic nature of what happened through personal stories.”

In a strange way, Maftsir’s films give one a sense of hope. After all, these are the stories of survival and resurrection of memory; stories that defied the intended triple annihilation of death, burial in mass graves, and forgetting.

One of the most emblematic scenes in the film is one of a Soviet World War II veteran, Emil Ziegel, who now lives in Israel, coming back to Mineralny Vody, Russia, with his Israeli grandson to show him where he came from and tell him the story of losing his family in the Shoah. “By the time you have children, I probably won’t be alive,” he says to him. “You bring them here, tell them what I told you today.”

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To read J. Hoberman’s Tablet magazine review of a series of Holocaust movies made in Communist countries, click here.