January 28, 2017

Donald Trump has broken America's promise to the world. And people are already suffering for it.

http://www.vox.com/2017/1/28/14424528/trump-refugee-ban-impact

President Trump’s executive order barring nearly all refugees from entering the United States has been in effect for less than 24 hours. But it has already upended the lives of real people. It’s keeping families apart and destroying their plans to continue — or rebuild — their lives.

In New York, two Iraqi refugees, Hameed Khalid Darweesh and Haider Sameer Abdulkhaleq Alshawi, were detained overnight at John F. Kennedy International Airport.

Both of these men worked with the US military and contractors in Iraq. Their lives were threatened as a result. According to the legal complaint filed on behalf of the two men, Darweesh had his home raided by militia-affiliated police, while two of his coworkers were killed “as soon as they arrived at work”; he had to move twice during his time working with the US for his safety. Alshawi’s brother-in-law (who worked with Alshawi) was killed by an IED placed on a family car.

These horrible events were the direct result of helping the United States. And America turned its back on them in return. (Darweesh was released from detention Saturday afternoon, though it’s not yet clear whether he’ll be allowed to stay in the US.)

These men are just two examples of many that began to come into focus within a day of the order’s signing. A Syrian refugee family was scheduled to fly to Cleveland from a Turkish refugee camp on Tuesday, only to have their travel — and their plan to rebuild their lives — scrapped. An Iranian genomics researcher tweeted Saturday morning that she was excited to start her new job in a Boston lab, but hadn’t been allowed to get on the plane.

These are just the examples we know of. We do not know the full extent to which this policy is already wrecking lives. But we do know that it will continue to do real damage.

January 8, 2017

Dear Trump supporters, you lost, too. It just hasn't hit you yet.

It will, though. It will.

January 7, 2017

Ex-CIA chief Panetta on Trump's distrust in intel: 'I've never seen anything like this'

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/trump-intelligence-briefing-leon-panetta-233282

Leon Panetta, the former CIA director, aired concerns with Donald Trump’s public resistance to the intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia sought to disrupt the election through cyberattacks, calling it “unheard of and unprecedented.”

“I've never seen anything like this in my lifetime,” Panetta told NBC’s Matt Lauer in an interview taped Thursday and aired Friday on the "Today" show. “The fact that the president-elect is tweeting on this issue and taking it to the public, and in many ways undermining the credibility of the very intelligence agencies that have to provide information to him in order for him to be president of the United States, this is just unheard of and unprecedented, and I think we all have to be concerned about this.”

“This is not the kind of bickering that ought to be going on in public,” he concluded.

Panetta, a Democrat who led the CIA and later the Defense Department during the Obama administration, was blunt in his interview with Lauer. He sounded dismayed that Trump has taken to Twitter to question intelligence officials’ conclusion from October that Russia was behind cyberattacks on top Democratic Party officials during the presidential campaign.