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One of the many privileges of American citizens is supposed to be that if you find yourself in conflict with a foreign government, you will find that the most powerful superpower in the world protects you.
But this is apparently no longer the case in the Trump era, according to two explosive allegations made by New York Times editor AG Sulzberger in a speech at Brown University and reconverted as an editorial published Monday night. . Sulzberger details a series of challenges faced by journalists around the world, both old and new, but also an extremely specific case of the US government's failure to fulfill its obligations to a US citizen arrested in Egypt.
The conceptual link between the misconduct alleged by Sulzberger and the president is very clear: Trump called the free press "false news" and "enemy of the people" and succeeded, from a way or from another, to look at the American model that has closed the eyes for decades. The human rights violations committed by our Middle East allies have made politics even more blinding. But the precise facts described by Sulzberger do not directly involve the president or any other senior official beyond the embassy in Cairo.
This is the classic case of a situation for which a rigorous surveillance investigation is necessary. Congress should know whether these are cases where dishonest officials misinterpret the signals from above, or whether it is really true that the Secretary of State, the President or other senior officials have ordered the embassies to stop fighting for the rights of Americans. journalists abroad. It seems that Trump is about to be indicted for another set of fouls. But the chair is a big job and it is entirely possible to investigate misconduct on other fronts.
Two arrests of Times reporters in Egypt
Sulzberger details two separate stories about Times police reporters with legal problems in Egypt.
The first, which seemed to attract the most media attention on Twitter Monday night, was about Declan Walsh. A representative of the US Embassy warned the Times that the Egyptian government was planning to arrest Walsh and that they should attempt to get him out of the country. According to Sulzberger, such warnings have been mentioned many times over the years, but this time it was different because "the official was passing on this warning without the knowledge or permission of the Trump administration, "which he said would refuse to help.
"The official feared to be punished for warning us of the danger," but fortunately the Times found a workaround. As Walsh was born in Ireland, the Times went to the Irish government for help and his embassy was able to extract it.
It's a disturbing account. But from this single story, it is at least possible that the official in question was mistaken. He was anticipating hypothetical misconduct on the part of the administration, which in all respects was probably the obvious choice, but it also meant that no misconduct occurred. had taken place.
The second story has less drama, but a model of more precise facts. David Kirkpatrick was arrested in Egypt without good reason and the government simply refused to protest the arrest:
Eighteen months later, another of our journalists, David Kirkpatrick, arrived in Egypt. He was arrested and expelled in apparent retaliation for revealing embarrassing information to the Egyptian government. When we protested against this decision, a senior official at the US Embassy in Cairo openly expressed the cynical world view behind the Trump administration's tolerance of this crackdown. "What did you think it was going to happen to him?" He said. "His reports made the government look bad."
Sulzberger does not go into the details, but I think it's obvious that any American should expect what would happen to him: that the US government should defend the rights of US citizens.
The United States has a limited ability to influence foreign governments. And some countries are too powerful (China, Russia) or too hostile (North Korea, Cuba) for the US government to be a very effective advocate for the ability of US journalists to visit and report without being worried.
But Egypt is not a great world power and is not a geopolitical antagonist of the United States. This is part of the US alliance system in the Middle East, with a government that should at least partially respond to US concerns. But Trump has completely upset the region's core client-client relationship, including repeated indifference to journalism and journalists.
The moment when Saudi Arabia assassinated a Washington Post editorialist
In November 2018, of course, members of the Saudi government acting on the apparent order of the crown prince of the country murdered Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi while he was in Turkey.
Khashoggi was not a US citizen, but he was a legal permanent resident in the United States and therefore operated under the protection of the US government. In an ideal world, not only do we want foreign governments to avoid murdering US citizens, we would also like governments to avoid actions, even if close to those.
To agree to the murder of legal permanent residents in the United States would be an invitation to push the boundaries and get as close as possible to the killing of American citizens. In addition, three of Khashoggi's children are US citizens. Beyond the fundamental interest of protecting American citizens against murder, the United States has a strong interest in protecting American citizens against the orphan.
The assassination rightly provoked an uproar in the United States Congress, but Trump refused to do anything, absurdly citing the importance for the United States of exporting military equipment to Saudi Arabia. The truth is exactly the opposite: a close defense relationship with the United States is valuable to the Middle East governments. The United States is supposed to be the leader in these relations and foreign governments are not supposed to kill and detain Americans with impunity. Yet they do, and Congress has the real obligation to know why.
The troubled relationship of Trump and the Gulf
In his op-ed, Sulzberger links the administration's indulgence with Egypt's desire to silence American journalists and Trump's ideological hostility to journalism. In my previous article on the Khashoggi issue, I tended to focus on the obscure – but apparently quite real and lucrative – financial connections between Trump's opaque network of commercial interests and Gulf money. Persian. Of course, the Egyptian government is not as rich as the oil monarchies of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, but it does not have to be a rich country to pay bribes, and Egypt is perfectly aligned geopolitically with Saudi Arabia. and the Emirati leaders.
Specifically, we learn with Trump that these things can be both / and rather than one or the other situation.
The essence of the Ukrainian scandal lies in the fact that Trump has blocked the appropriate congressional aid to the Ukrainian government, apparently to try to put pressure on officials to make mud on the former vice president Joe Biden. This is mainly because Trump wants to beat Biden in an election. But this is not unrelated to the fact that Trump is ideologically hostile to the underlying concept of Ukraine's assistance because of his well-known, though still unexplained, affection for Vladimir Putin and his curious sympathy for the geopolitical goals of Russia.
Similarly, it is a false choice to ask if the problem in Egypt is Trump's disdain for journalism or his strange affection for Arab autocrats – it seems to be both.
But what the public has the right to know – and Congress has an obligation to know – is whether this extraordinary negligence of the government's responsibility towards the people who are supposed to be under its protection is a decision that was commissioned from the summit and was involved. .
These allegations were publicly disclosed the same evening that the dam appeared to break with the House Democrats' interest in preventing Trump from indicting a whole range of wrongdoing, but the implications are incredibly serious and deserve a lot of attention. thorough investigation.
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