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AMY GOODMAN: CNN is reporting the Trump administration has prepared an arrest warrant for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Attorney General Jeff Sessions confirmed the report at a news conference on Thursday.

REPORTER: Can you talk about whether its a priority for your department to arrest Assange, once and for all, and whether you think you can take him down?

ATTORNEY GENERAL JEFF SESSIONS: We are going to step up our effort and already are stepping up our efforts on all leaks. This is a matter thats gone beyond anything Im aware of. We have professionals that have been in the security business of the United States for many years that are shocked by the number of leaks. And some of them are quite serious. So, yes, it is a priority.

AMY GOODMAN: Last week, CIA chief Mike Pompeo blasted WikiLeaks as a, quote, "hostile intelligence service," in a stark reversal from his previous praise for the group. Pompeo made the remarks last week at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in his first public address as CIA director.

MIKE POMPEO: Its time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is: a nonstate, hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia. ... In reality, they champion nothing but their own celebrity. Their currency is clickbait, their moral compass nonexistent. Their mission, personal self-aggrandizement through destruction of Western values.

AMY GOODMAN: In his speech, Pompeo went on to accuse WikiLeaks of instructing Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning to steal information. He also likened Julian Assange to a "demon" and suggested Assange is not protected under the First Amendment. Its been nearly five years since Julian Assange entered the Ecuadorean Embassy in London seeking political asylum, fearing a Swedish arrest warrant could lead to his extradition to the United States.

For more, we go to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where were joined via Democracy Now! video stream by Glenn Greenwald, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and one of the founding editors of The Intercept. His recent piece is headlined "Trumps CIA Director Pompeo, Targeting WikiLeaks, Explicitly Threatens Speech and Press Freedoms."

Glenn, welcome back to Democracy Now! Your response to this latest news that the U.S. government, that the Justice Department, is preparing an arrest warrant for Julian Assange?

GLENN GREENWALD: Whats interesting is, the Justice Department under President Obama experimented with this idea for a long time. They impaneled a grand jury to criminally investigate WikiLeaks and Assange. They wanted to prosecute them for publishing the trove of documents back in 2011 relating to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, as well as the U.S. State Department diplomatic cables. And what they found, the Obama Justice Department found, was that it is impossible to prosecute WikiLeaks for publishing secret documents, without also prosecuting media organizations that regularly do the same thing. The New York Times, The Guardian, many other news organizations also published huge troves of the documents provided by Chelsea Manning. So it was too much of a threat to press freedom, even for the Obama administration, to try and create a theory under which WikiLeaks could be prosecuted.

Fast-forward five years later, theres been a lot more WikiLeaks leaks and publications, including some really recent ones of sensitive CIA documents, as well as having spent all of last year publishing documents about the Democratic National Committee, which means theyve made enemies not just of the right in America, but also the Democratic Party. And the Trump administration obviously believes that they can now safely, politically, prosecute WikiLeaks. And the danger, of course, is that this is an administration that has already said, the President himself has said, the U.S. media is the enemy of the American people. And this is a prosecution that would enable them not only to prosecute and imprison Julian Assange, but a whole variety of other journalists and media outlets that also routinely publish classified information from the U.S. government.

AMY GOODMAN: So lets go back to what CIA chief Mike Pompeo said in his first address as CIA director.

MIKE POMPEO: The days like today, where we call out those who grant a platform to these leakers and so-called transparency activists. We know the danger that Assange and his not-so-merry band of brothers pose to democracies around the world. Ignorance or misplaced idealism is no longer an acceptable excuse for lionizing these demons.

AMY GOODMAN: And CIA chief Mike Pompeo continued.

MIKE POMPEO: Julian Assange and his kind are not the slightest bit interested in improving civil liberties or enhancing personal freedom. They have pretended Americas First Amendment freedoms shield them from justice. They may have believed that, but theyre wrong. Assange is a narcissist who has created nothing of value. He relies on the dirty work of others to make himself famous. Hes a fraud, a coward hiding behind a screen.

AMY GOODMAN: Julian Assange responded to the comments earlier this week while speaking with Jeremy Scahill on the Intercepted podcast.

JULIAN ASSANGE: Pompeo said explicitly that he was going to redefine the legal parameters of the First Amendment to define publishers like WikiLeaks in such a manner that the First Amendment would not apply to them. What the hell is going on? This is the head of the largest intelligence service in the world, the intelligence service of the United States. He doesnt get to make proclamations on interpretation of the law. Thats a responsibility for the courts, its a responsibility for Congress, and perhaps its a responsibility for the attorney general. Its way out of line to usurp the roles of those entities that are formally engaged in defining the interpretations of the First Amendment. For anyfrankly, any other group to pronounce themselves, but for the head of the CIA to pronounce what the boundaries are of reporting and not reporting is a very disturbing precedent. This is not how the First Amendment works. Its justits just legally wrong.

The First Amendment is not a positive definition of rights. Its a negative definition. It limits what the federal government does. It doesnt say the federal government must give individuals rights and enforce that. It limits what the federal government can do to take away a certain climate of open debate in the United States. So, the First Amendment prevents Congress and the executive from engaging in actions themselves which would limit not only the ability of people to speak and to publish freely, but would also limit the ability of people to read and understand information, because it is that climate of public debate which creates a check on a centralized governmental structure from becoming authoritarian. Its a right, from that perspective, for all the people, not just the publisher.

AMY GOODMAN: So thats Julian Assange speaking on the Intercepted podcast. Glenn Greenwald, if you can respond to bothboth Julian as well as the CIA director, Pompeo, and what hes alleging?

GLENN GREENWALD: I think the key point here to understand is the way in which governments typically try and abridge core freedoms, because what they know is that if they target a group that is popular or a particular idea that people agree with, there will be an uprising against the attempt to abridge freedom. So what they always do, for example, when governments try and abridge freedom of speech, is they pick somebody who they know is hated in society or who expresses an idea that most people find repellent, and they try and abridge freedom of speech in that case, so that most people will let their hatred for the person being targeted override the principle involved, and they will sanction or at least acquiesce to the attack on freedom because they hate the person being attacked. But what happens is, the abridgment then gets institutionalized and entrenched. And that way, when the government goes to start to apply this abridgment to other people that you like more, its too late, because youve acquiesced in the first instance. And thats why groups like the ACLU, when they want to defend civil liberties, are oftenso often defending the most marginalized and hated groups, like neo-Nazis or white supremacists or the KKK, because thats where the attacks happen.

This is what Mike Pompeo is strategizing to do now and what Jeff Sessions wants to do, as well, is they know WikiLeaks is hated on all sides of the political spectrum. The right has long hated WikiLeaks because of all the publications they did of Bush-era war crimes, and Democrats now despise WikiLeaks, probably more than anybody else that they hate, because of the role that Democrats believe WikiLeaks played in helping to defeat Hillary Clinton. And so, what Jeff Sessions is hoping, and probably with a good amount of validity, is that Democrats, who should be the resistance to these sorts of attacks, will actually cheer for the Trump administration while they prosecute WikiLeaks, because they hate WikiLeaks so much, and that U.S. media outlets, which also hate WikiLeaks, wont raise much of a fuss. And that way, this very dangerous precedent of allowing the CIA and the Trump Justice Department to decide who is and who is not a journalist, what types of journalism are protected by the First Amendment and what types arent, will be entrenched as precedent. And that way, the next time theres a leak that they hate in The New York Times or by NBC News, they will have this theory, that everybody signed on to, that said that the First Amendment doesnt apply to certain people if you publish documents that are sensitive enough, or if you work enough with certain sources before the publication, that youre deemed a collaborator. Thats what makes this moment so dangerous for core press freedoms.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me get your response to this other point that CIA chief Mike Pompeo made.

MIKE POMPEO: In January of this year, our Intelligence Committee determined that Russian military intelligence, the GRU, had used WikiLeaks to release data of U.S. victims that the GRU had obtained through cyber-operations against the Democratic National Committee.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald?

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, first of all, theres been no evidence, of course, presented by the U.S. government that thats actually true. Theyve stated that over and over, but theres been no evidence presented of it so far.

But lets assume for the sake of argument that theyre actually telling the truth, that the Trump CIA director is being honest and that thats really what happened. What does that mean in terms of WikiLeaks? Nobody suggests that WikiLeaks did the actual hacking. In this case, even if what theyre saying is true, it would mean that WikiLeaks received information from a sourcein this case, a foreign governmentand then published that information that every U.S. media outlet in the country deemed newsworthy, because they constantly reported on it. This is a very common practice, where U.S. media outlets receive information from sources, often foreign sources, including officials within foreign governments, and then publish or report on the information that theyve been provided. If you allow that process to be criminalized simply because WikiLeaks source in this particular case happened to be a foreign government or a foreign intelligence agency, you are, again, endangering press freedoms in a very substantial way, because that is something that media outlets do very often. Thats where they get their information from.

AMY GOODMAN: And lets turn to CIA Director Mike Pompeo talking about your news organization, that you co-founded, Glenn, The Intercept.

MIKE POMPEO: The Intercept, which has in the past gleefully reported unauthorized disclosures, accused WikiLeaks in late March of, quote, "stretching the facts" in its comments about the CIA. In the same article, The Intercept added that the documents, quote, "were not worth the concern WikiLeaks generated by its public comments."

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, your response?

GLENN GREENWALD: So that was an article written by one of our reporters assessing WikiLeakss journalism. We criticize the journalism of pretty much every media outlet. Weve certainly written far more scathing critiques of The New York Times and NBC News and The Washington Post when theyve published fake stories or when theyve done misleading and deceitful journalism. So the fact that weve been critical of some of WikiLeakss journalism, just as WikiLeaks has sometimes been critical of ours, doesnt justify turning them into felons and prosecuting them. If bad journalism or making poor journalistic choices can now justify having the Justice Department prosecute you, there will be no media organizations left. So, he was trolling there by citing one of our articles that was mildly critical of WikiLeakss journalism, but that obviously does not remotely justify prosecuting WikiLeaks for having published secret documents.

AMY GOODMAN: So, what happens right now? There is Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorean Embassy for almost five years now. What does it mean that there is an arrest warrant from him by the United Statesfor him?

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, thatsthats a really significant question, Amy. And when Mike Pompeo made his speech, the one that youve been playing, it was very deliberately threatening. He was saying things like "We are no longer going to allow them the space to publish this information. This ends now." And the question that you just raised is the towering one for me, which is, OK, so the U.S. government indicts WikiLeaks and issues an arrest warrant for Julian Assange. It doesnt change the fact that hes currently in the Ecuadorean Embassy, where he has received asylum. And remember, the reason the Ecuadorean government gave Julian Assange asylum in the first place was because they said they were worried that if he were extradited to Sweden, that that would then be used to send him to the United States, where he would be prosecuted for publishing information, for doing journalism. That was always what Ecuador was most worried about. So it seems very unlikely that Ecuador is going to voluntarily withdraw its asylum.

So then the question becomes: Do they have any plans to physically seize Julian by invading the Ecuadorean Embassy, something the U.K. government actually thought about doing early on? Do theyare they trying to do a deal with the new Ecuadorean government to provide them benefits, or threaten them, in exchange for handing Julian over and withdrawing the asylum? Or is this just theater? Is this just show? Is this just a way of the Trump administration showing that theyre trying to crack down on leaks? I dont think we know the answer to that question. But the asylum that Julian has should prevent the U.S. government from apprehending him, even if they do decide to go ahead and indict WikiLeaks.

AMY GOODMAN: Chelsea Manning is about to be released in May. The argument that hes making that Julian Assange solicited Manning, the information, your final comment, Glenn?

GLENN GREENWALD: So the Obama administration, when they were trying to prosecute WikiLeaks, thought about: How can we do this in a way that makes it so that were accusing them of more than just publishing? And they said, "Maybe we can find evidence that Julian actually participated with Chelsea Manning in the theft of this material." And ultimately, they found no evidence whatsoever to support that theory. Nonetheless, Mike Pompeo asserted that this was true, obviously in anticipation of trying to use this as a theory to say, "Were not prosecuting WikiLeaks for publishing. Were prosecuting them for collaborating or conspiring in the theft of this information." Theres been no evidence ever that the Obama administration found. And I seriously doubt the Trump administration has found evidence for that, as well, but they asserted it in order to say, "Were not prosecuting them for publishing."

AMY GOODMAN: Were going to leave it there, but, of course, were going to continue to follow this. Glenn, thanks so much for joining us.

GLENN GREENWALD: Thanks, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, one of the founding editors of The Intercept.

When we come back, an explosive new investigation by Allan Nairn. Vice President Mike Pence has just left Indonesia. Well talk to the journalist. Stay with us.

See original here:
As U.S. Preps Arrest Warrant for Assange, Glenn Greenwald Says Prosecuting WikiLeaks Threatens Press Freedom for ... - Democracy Now!

By Joshua Muravchik and Jeffrey Gedmin By Joshua Muravchik and Jeffrey Gedmin April 19 at 6:00 AM

About the authors

Joshua Muravchik is a Distinguished Fellow at the World Affairs Institute.

Jeffrey Gedmin is a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council and a former President and CEO of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

Freedomdiminished aroundthe world in 2016for the 11th consecutive year, according to Freedom House.These years sawthe devastating failure of the Arab Spring and thesad turn of Russia and other states of the former Soviet Union back todictatorship. Russia, China and Iran are increasingly assertive in their regions.And illiberal populistparties nearly four dozen of various stripes are on the risein Europein parallelwitha new angry nationalism in the United States.Taken together, its hard not to at least contemplate whether democracy might be an endangered species.

To Americans, democracy is a given. But to the rest of the world, its a fairly recent invention a creature of the past two centuries.Thisisa relatively narrow slice of recorded history, briefer thantheMingor Songdynastiesin Chinaorvarious otherdynastieselsewherethat appear as mere blips in historical memory.Maybe this democratic moment is just another phase.

The original experiments with democracy in ancient Greece and Romedisappeared, and this form of government meaningfully returned only two millennialaterwith the birth of the American republic. Abraham Lincoln said at Gettysburg that the Civil War would determine whether any nation so conceived can long endure.In the 20th century,Communism, Nazism and fascism presented powerful challenges to the democratic world not only on the battlefieldbut also in the realm of ideas,offering models for how societies should be organized thatmany believed were superior to democracy.

The Washington Post's Griff Witte explains how French youth contributed to National Front party candidate Marine Le Pen's rise in popularity. (Sarah Parnass,Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post)

With the serial defeat of those enemies, democracysascentseemed assured. Francis Fukuyamasaidthe Wests victory in the Cold War amounted totheend of history, meaning thatdebate about the best form of society was resolvedfor all time.All countriesthat had not alreadyadoptedliberal democracy were nonetheless headed in that direction, he wrote.

Another political scientist, Samuel Huntington, took another approach in The Third Wave. He argued that democracydid not rollsteadily forward,butrose and fellin waves.The firstwavehad begun inthe United States when it was a young country, crested at the conclusion of World War I with the transformation of empires in Europe into independent, democraticstates, and then crashed in the 1920s asmost of those statesdevolved into dictatorships. The secondwave began after World War II, with the liberation of Asian and African colonies, but it too crashed as these newborn democracies fell, one after another,under strongman rule. The third wave began in 1974, with the democratization of Portugal followed by other countries in Southern Europe, then Latin America, then, most dramatically,the Soviet bloc.This wavehad not yetcrested when Huntington wrote, but it did so early in the 21st century, when Freedom House found that nearly two-thirds of the worlds countries were electoral democracies whilea record45 percent fulfilled thegroups more demandingcriteria for being labeled a free country.

[How fascist is Donald Trump? Theres actually a formula for that.]

Since then, democracy and freedom havebeen in gradual recession. The falloff has been modest,butaconstellation ofrecent eventsand trends suggests that an all-out crashcould follow.Each of the first two crashes left the world with a radically reduced number of democratic states.How many democracies might disappear and how many might remain afterathird crash? Since the crest of the third wave was higher than the first two,more might be left intact,butby the same token, a crash from this high crestmightprove tobe all themore momentous, darkening the livesof hundreds of millions of peopleand reshaping international relations and Americas place in the world.

* * * * * * * *

What makes thisevenseem possible? First,the new century has witnessed some major disappointments for democrats.The Arab Spring of 2011 promised for a moment to bring a large measure of democracy to the region that has been mostresistant to it. But only onesmall country, Tunisia, emerged more democratic, while a handful movedin the opposite direction, either because wary regimes (in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait andothers)tightened the screws or because countries collapsed into warringmilitary factions (as in Syria,Libyaand Yemen).Another bitter disappointment has been the former Soviet Union, which devolved into 15 independent states in 1991, each holding elections and adopting democratic institutions. Today,onlysixremain as democracies, of which half are none too stable; the rest are once again ruled by dictators, including some of the worlds most repressive ones.

Elsewhere,democratic reverses have occurredin pivotal countries thatseem likely to influence others around them. Turkey, for example, has been for decades a leading example of democracy in the Muslim world, especially in its Middle Eastern core, notwithstanding the imperfections of itsdemocraticinstitutions. Now,thegraspof Recep Tayyip Erdoganfordictatorial power will convince many that democracy is incompatible with Islam. In Hungary, the peeling away of freedoms is inspiring imitation in the other countriesof the formerEastern bloc.Unless reversed, recent moves by the government of Viktor Orban to close the Central European University in Budapest since its founding in 1991 a symbol of democratic transition and Western-style academic study are likely to have a chilling effect in the region.Hugo Chvez destroyed democracy in Venezuela and inspired imitators, who have weakened, albeit not eliminated, democracy inseveral other Latin nations. Other mercurial strongmen who have come to power through elections,in the Philippines and South Africa,couldwielda similar impact withintheir regions as well astheirown countries.

Influence is sometimes exerted more forcefully than merelybysetting an example. Threeaggressivedictatorships Russia, China and Iran are exercising increasing sway over theareas around them.

[Chill, America. Not every Trump outrage is outrageous.]

RussiasVladimir Putin,having stampedout the last embers of post-Communist democratization and imposedone-man rule,has invaded two of the former republics of the Soviet Union Georgia and Ukraine and uses economic leverage and dirty tricks to ensure the elimination of democracy inothers. Heno doubt aims to dothe same in thosethat remaindemocratic, but he is not stopping there. He is nurturing anti-democratic forces in former states of the Soviet bloc (Russian influence in media and politics is on the rise in the Czech Republic, once a model of Central European democratic development), as well as of Western Europe (Frances presidential front-runner, Marine Le Pen, recently made a pilgrimage to Moscow that reportedly bankrolls her party and others of its ilk). Putin is evenbeginning to reassert Russian influence in the Middle East, hoping to makehis country onceagain a global power. Likewise, Chinas Xi Jinping, having reversed a four-decade trend of liberalization, pushes forward an intimidating military buildup while flexing Chinas muscles in the surrounding seas. And Iran, having smothered the pro-democracyGreen Movementthat arose after the disputed 2009 presidential elections,has achieved dominance in Lebanonandmuch of Syria and wieldsgreatweightin Iraqand Yemen, all steps ontheway toits self-proclaimed goal ofregional dominance.

These deleterious actions weigh the more heavily in view of the abdication of American efforts in the opposite direction. TheUnited States hasbeen the modern worldsmost influential country and has promoted democracy passively by serving as a model and actively through its diplomatic efforts, aid, and even militaryand covert action practices. But President Barack Obamacameto office aiming to correct the overreach of President George W. Bush, who aspired to impose democracy on Iraq andperhaps the whole Middle East. Obama believed America should practice greater self-restraint andexercise extreme cautionabout saddling others with our beliefs. Wary of neo-imperialism, he resisted calls tomore forcefullycounteract Iranian and Russianassertionsof power.

President Trumps policies go in the same direction as Obamas, only further. This week, he congratulated Turkeys president for eliminating the parliament and consolidating power against the opposition. His America first nationalism focuses on what we can extract from the worldrather thanhow we can influenceit. His moral relativism toward Russia implies utter indifference to the behavior of foreign governments, unless commercial interests are at stake. Recently, he has added a couple further exceptions: Other countries mustnt gas babies or threaten America with intercontinental nuclear missiles. The list still falls dramatically short of Americas issues of interest and realm of influence. In aFebruary interview, when confronted with the assertion that Putin is a killer, Trump replied, there are a lot of killers. You think our countrys so innocent? The foreign policy thinkers who havegathered underTrumps banner have gone out of their way to de-emphasize or disparage Americas role in promoting democracy.

Notwithstanding a recent about-face the alliance is no longer obsolete, he said this month Trump has denigrated NATO, applaudedBrexit,and embracedEuropean politicians who seek to weaken or abolish the European Union. Given that economics and trade seem to be the centerpieces of his international interests andgivenhis apparent view that international relationsconstitutea zero-sum game, onethat America has been losing, it makes sense to welcome the disintegration of the E.U.

Yet it is preciselytherethat the dangers ofademocratic crash weighmost heavily. The countries of Western Europe have not only been Americas principal allies in the Cold War and the war against terrorism, they also, as stable, advanced and successful countries, constitute the other main cornerstone of the democratic world. The young democracies of Central and Eastern Europe were seen two decades ago as a source of inspiration for the older, more established West. Today,there is reason to fear for the solidity of Europes democracies (both East and West).

[Heres what demagogues like Trump do to their countries when they take power]

Many of these nations are being whipsawed between, on the one hand, burgeoning immigrant-and-refugee populations from predominantly Muslim landsthat sometimes show little attachment to their new countries or democratic institutions, and, on the other hand, populist parties channeling anti-immigrant feelings parties that are themselvesequivocalin their commitment to democratic values and institutions.Conditions vary from country to country, but a variety of additional factors also lie at the root of European populism, including low growth and high youth unemployment in the south; voter frustration with Brussels over regulations and matters of sovereignty; anxiety about terrorism; and dissatisfaction with globalization and free trade. The central problem is not that citizens speak out and voice concern in a number of areas, of course. The threat is what populist leaders do with all this.Populists see themselves as sole moral representatives of the true people,Princeton Universitys Jan-Werner Muellersays. Media, courts, even universities can be viewed as enemies of the people.

None of this will go away easily, or soon. In French elections, Marine Le Pen may end up losing in second-round voting in May. But her populist National Front would almost certainly gain more support than last time. Germanys Alternative for Germany party is down to 8 percent in polls compared with 15 percent earlier this year. The right-wing populists nevertheless now hold seats in 10 of Germanys 16 state parliamentsand will almost certainly enter the Bundestag throughnational elections in September.

The sky is not falling yet. But were todays E.U. to break apart, expect a surge of protectionism, illiberal nationalism and anti-American sentimentin pockets across the continent. Count on even greater Russian assertiveness in Europe in backing anti-democratic forces. Moscow is the source of none of these unfortunate trends, but it has shown itself eager to support and promote all of them.

* * * * * * * *

ScholarsRoberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk have recently challenged the establishedviewinpolitical sciencethat democracy in economically developed countries cannot be reversed.In academic jargon, countries that havealternated powerpeacefully through electionsa couple of timesor moreand have surpassed a certain income level are deemed to be consolidated democracies. Never has such a country slid back to authoritarianism.But Foa and Mounk have adduced a range of surveys showing that publics in Europe and the United Statesare registering an unprecedented loss ofattachment to, even disillusionment with, democratic norms. They ask whether democracy in some of these countries might be in the process of becoming deconsolidated.

In our eyes, American democracy is sturdy enough to withstandthis trend and even the rise ofan erratic, megalomaniacal president. The questionthat troubles us moreis whethertheglobalanti-democratic trends of the past decade will be accelerated byAmericas abandonment ofits historic role asmodel andchampion of democracy. Already Trumps egregious behavior has weakened Americas impact as an exemplar. At this moment, much of the world looks at us astonished or aghast rather than in admiration.The further issue is whether our actions in the realms of diplomacy, commerce and foreign aid will count democracy as an important value or will they all be guided by the pursuit of the deal and of ego gratification. The presidents impulses to destabilize Mexico, appease Russia and congratulate Turkey do not bode well in this regard.

[In Venezuela, we couldnt stop Chvez. Dont make the same mistakes we did.]

The withdrawal ofAmerican supportfordemocracy couldcompoundthe various anti-democratic trends we have described and lead to the fall of Huntingtons third wave. Thatcrashmight carry away many of the newly minted democracies of the developing world and of the former Soviet empireand might even send tremors through other parts of Europe.

So what? Trump says he wants to put only America first. So why care how democracy is faring elsewhere? The answer is that a less democratic world will be a less stable world, more rife with conflict, more fertile with terrorism and less friendly to the United States. The members of Team Trump are not the first Americans to dream of avoiding foreign wars, but time and again we have found ourselves drawn in, however reluctantly.

A range of developmentsmake this a dangerous time. Americas abdication ofleadership, of its devotiontoideals and practice of generosity in favor of a policy of narrow and short-term self-interest will only make this time more dangerous, not least for America itself.

Read the original here:
This is what the beginning of the end of democracy looks like - Washington Post

Last December, when the United States and the rest of the world were distracted, absorbing the shock of an unexpected presidential win by Donald J. Trump, something quite remarkable was unfolding in West Africa.

A constitutional crisis, triggered by an incumbent president unwilling to accept electoral defeat, ended peacefully. Civil conflict was averted. Democracy restored. It was an outcome driven by a populations readiness to risk-it-all to make their votes count, and defended by regional diplomacy and international law.

Heres what happened.

On Dec. 1, 2016, opposition leader Adama Barrow defeated long-time Gambian ruler, Yahyah Jammeh, who had come to power in 1994 through a military coup. Jammeh had managed, until that day, to manipulate the States institutions for 23 years to maintain his grip. The Gambia is a tiny sliver of a country on the western belly of the continent almost swallowed entirely by Senegal, with the exception of 80 kilometer coastline on the Atlantic Ocean.

Initially, Jammeh accepted his defeat, in what the UN called a peaceful, free and fair election. And, initially, Gambians took to the streets to jubilate.

But days later, for reasons only known to him, the Gambian president changed his mind. There were serious and unacceptable abnormalities in the election, he claimed. And with those words, he moved to Plan B, diverting to the courts to overturn the ruling of the electoral commission.

Jammeh must have presumed that his plan B would play out like Zimbabwe in 2013, when 92 year-old President Robert Mugabe, in power for three decades, withstood pressure to step aside after a disputed election, with the blessing of the Southern African Development Community (SADC). Or like Burundi, in 2015, when the sitting president, Pierre Nkurunziza, ran for a third-term despite, constitutional limits on the presidency. When the opposition boycotted the vote, he won. Civil chaos unfolded, but the East African Community (EAC) gave Nkurunziza a pass.

But the 14 member-State Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), led by President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the president of the Republic of Liberia, the first woman democratically elected to lead an African nation, wasnt having it. And neither were the other 12 democratically elected heads of states of ECOWAS, many of whom defeated entrenched incumbents in their own countries. Jammeh would not be afforded the political space to hold on to power.

The case under international law was made. On Dec. 12, with ECOWAS in the lead, followed by the Africa Union (AU), and the United Nations, a unified international community called on the government of The Gambia to abide by its constitutional responsibilities and international obligations, demanding it was fundamental that the verdict of the ballots should be respected.

Then on Dec 21 the UN passed Resolution 2337, which authorized an African peace operation, the Economic Community of West African States in Gambia (ECOMIG), made up of troops from Ghana, Nigeria and Senegal.

The ECOWAS heads of state shuttled back and forth to The Gambias capital, Banjul, pressuring their colleague to leave peacefully. The group included Ghanaian President John Mahama, who just days earlier had lost his re-election bid to opposition candidate Nana Afufo-Addo. His mere presence in the group signaling to the besieged Gambian president, this is what we do in a democracy when we lose. We accept the will of our people.

But it would take the relentless defiance of the people of The Gambia, and diplomacy, backed by lethal force, to dislodge Jammeh.

ECOMIG mobilized on The Gambias eastern border and Jammeh was given an ultimatum to leave. On January 21, he signed a political agreement setting out the terms of his departure. Jammeh jetted off to exile. Adama Barrow took his rightful place as president of The Gambia. And the Gambian people returned to their jubilation.

Many are now studying The Gambia example, looking at the factors that enabled a peaceful resolution so soon after a flash point. Some, like associate Professor of International Affairs at George Washington University Daniel Williams, who examines the legal basis for the ECOMIG intervention, concludes that the Gambia conflict-resolution success was an anomaly, its small size, unique geography, universally hated leader could offer no real resistance to a unified regional response.

But for me, The Gambia is no anomaly, but indicative of an emerging Africa. Here are the takeaways.

First, democracy begets democracy. The ECOWAS heads of state were all democratically elected. Several of the ECOWAS nations, Liberia, Guinea, Cote d Ivoire, Sierra Leone, are still recovering from cross-border conflict and civil wars, and are raising their first generation of children in peacetime. West Africa has paid a steep price for their young constitutional democracies. Jammeh staying in power would have been more than a threat to regional stability, it would have signified a betrayal by each of these presidents to their own constituents.

Second, The Gambia reaffirms the value of the investment in soft power that the U.S., and other bilateral and multilateral donors have made in Africa. The U.S. did not move battle ships offshore in The Gambia, nor dispatch special operation units to protect or evacuate U.S. citizens and foreign nationals from a country exploding in civil conflict. These are actions the U.S. was forced to take in the region, repeatedly, barely a decade earlier and at tremendous cost to the military and U.S. taxpayers.

The crisis was managed by Africans themselves, in part, because we had invested in the long-game building capacity and strengthening democratic institutions.

In the recent past, across Republican and Democratic administrations, the U.S. has provided assistance to support national electoral commissions, strengthen education and healthcare systems, build civil society institutions, train investigative journalists, fortify regional organizations, insist on performance-based foreign assistance, streamline government procurement processes, stand-up anti-corruption commissions, and encourage people-to-people exchanges. And the Ghanaian, Nigerian and Senegalese forces contributing to ECOMIG received some level of US assistance over the years in the form of logistics expertise, training, engineering support, and through joint exercises with the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM).

Third, The Gambia reaffirms that the greatest export of the United States to the world is still its foundational values of freedom and democracy.

And fourth, and finally, The Gambia example reveals the thirst for participatory democracy in Africa, and the coming-of-age of a population ready to hold their leaders accountable.

Today, former president Jammeh is living in exile in Equatorial Guinea, where President Theodoro Obiang, another entrenched leader, has been in power since 1979, long past his expiration date. But his time will come too. History is marching on.

K. Riva Levinson is President and CEO of KRL International LLC a D.C.-based consultancy that works in the worlds emerging markets, and author of "Choosing the Hero: My Improbable Journey and the Rise of Africa's First Woman President" (Kiwai Media, June 2016), Silver Medal winner Independent Book Publishers Award, Finalist, Forward ReviewsINDIES Book of the Year Awards.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.

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Africa's example: How democracy begets democracy - The Hill (blog)

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How Autocrats Can Triumph in Democratic Countries New York Times Today, the most common way for a democracy to collapse is through the actions of an elected incumbent, not a coup or revolution. Hugo Chvez, elected to four terms as president of Venezuela, used his time in office to dismantle the institutions of ...

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How Autocrats Can Triumph in Democratic Countries - New York Times

The Republican war on local democracy is a top-down effort to prevent Americans from voting where they live to protect the environment, preserve their communities, promote public safety, respect civil liberties, organize fair elections, raise wages, guarantee family and medical leave for workers, and welcome immigrants.

While the Trump administration's assault on sanctuary cities as part of the aggressive anti-immigrant agenda promoted by the president and Attorney General Jeff Sessions gets a good deal of attention, the federal and state pre-emption of local ordinances and local processes that ensure voters have a voice has accelerated as President Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan have taken power in D.C. and Trump-style governors and Ryan-style legislators have placed their imprints on Republican-controlled states across the country.

Encouraged by groups such as the American Legislative Exchange Council, with an authoritarian agenda dictated by corporate-allied funders such as billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, the top-down politicians in states across the country have attacked local democracy at the county, city, village and town levels of government. And in few states has the gubernatorial and legislative overreach been so extreme as in Scott Walker's Wisconsin.

But voters are starting to push back by pushing out politicians who go along with top-down and anti-democratic policies.

In Wisconsin, resistance came about recently after a bill was introduced in the Legislature that proponents said would streamline the process for towns to withdraw from countywide zoning. As originally written, the legislation would have made any vote by town residents on opting out advisory rather than binding, taking the decision out of the hands of voters and giving it to the town board.

As the Republican-controlled Legislature advanced the legislation, residents of the town of Middleton in Dane County caught wind of what was happening. They wanted to send a clear signal that the town should protect the right of residents to have a say. Dissatisfied with what they saw as failures of focus and advocacy on the part of the town chairman and a key Town Board member, challengers stepped forward to highlight the local democracy issues that came into play as the state Assembly was considering the zoning bill in March.

But the April 4 election was only a few weeks away, and the filing deadline to get on the ballot had passed. So the local-democracy candidates had to mount write-in bids.

We just decided the way to win this was to knock on every door in the town of Middleton that was physically possible, said Cynthia Richson, a town plan commission member, who took on the incumbent town chairman. Former Town Board member Richard Oberle challenged an incumbent board member who,as The Capital Times reported, had pushed for a zoning opt-out law that was signed in 2016 and had also backed the bill that "would have relegated resident votes to advisory, as opposed to binding.

Both Richson and Oberle won their write-in bidsin a result that shocked local political observers and made news well beyond Dane County.

Rightly so, as the town of Middleton election was about more than local issues. It was about defending local democracy at a time when too many politicians in Madison and Washington are attacking it.

The challengers were opposed to opting out of Dane County zoning. But the primary focus of their campaigning was the right of citizens to have a say when big decisions are being made. Number one, explained Oberle, is to make sure the citizens are allowed to have a vote on this opt-out issue and get informed about it so they can make a good decision.

The opt-out bill, which is still pending, was eventually changed to restore a vote by town residents, and the wranglingover zoning has continued. Different sentiments have been heard in the town of Middleton and in towns across Dane County. But this is about more than zoning and land use. This is about democracy.

When you cut the people you are elected to represent out of the process, thats going to haunt you, said Dane County Executive Joe Parisi, a critic of the zoning opt-out bill. People in our community overwhelmingly want us to manage our growth in a manner that maintains the quality of life and the character of our community. And people want to have a voice in how we grow.

There are voters in Dane County towns who have agreed with Parisi, just as there are voters who have disagreed.

Whats essential is that the process remain open and transparent, that barriers to civic participation be removed, and that voting is easy, inclusive and definitional.

Thats something conservative Republicans in the Legislature do not understand.

They have little respect for local democracy especially when local democracy might trip up the plans of development interests that make substantial campaign donations.

If write-in candidates mounting last-minute bids on behalf of local democracy can win in the town of Middleton, they can win in other places as well. And a new generation of contenders can take on the Republican legislators who so frequently disrespect and disregard the will of the people who live in Wisconsin towns, villages and cities.

Newly elected town of Middleton Chair Cynthia Richson got it right when she said after her write-in win: I would hope that it would be a reminder and perhaps a wake-up call to other representatives who may be deciding that once they get elected that they can pursue any agenda they personally want to as opposed to reaching out to their electors and taking public input.

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Editorial: Rejecting the Republican war on local democracy ... - Madison.com