Federal Judge Ruling Orders Trump to Halt Travel Ban

February 3, 2017   |   admintam

(COMMONDREAMS) A federal judge on Friday issued a “first of its kind” ruling showing that President Donald Trump’s travel ban does not apply to legal permanent residents, in a partial victory against the controversial executive order.

U.S. District Judge Victoria Roberts of Detroit reaffirmed that the order, temporarily blocking entry for immigrants and refugees from seven majority-Muslim countries, does not apply to permanent residents, including green card holders—who were among the many travelers caught up in the sweeping executive order that saw immigrants detained at airports across the country last week.

“The court orders that the United States is permanently enjoined from applying Sections 3(c) and 3(e) of the January 27, 2017 executive order against lawful permanent residents of the United States,” Roberts wrote in her decision (pdf).

Trump’s order, signed January 27, blocked entry to the U.S. for immigrants and refugees from Syria, Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Somalia, Libya, and Yemen. It went into effect immediately, prompting massive protests at airports nationwide and swift action by civil and immigrant rights groups.

Nabih Ayad, an attorney with the Arab-American Civil Rights League, who co-filed an emergency lawsuit on Tuesday on behalf of several green card holders blocked from entering the country, told CBS Detroit on Friday, “It’s the first order of its kind across the nation. It makes absolutely certain that legal permanent residents — those with what we call in laypersons terms green card holders — can basically travel and leave the country as they please without hindrance by the executive order ban.”

Among the plaintiffs in the lawsuit were a U.S. citizen whose nine-year-old son was denied a visa to join his family; an immigrant who was issued a visa to enter the country as a lawful permanent resident; and the civil rights league itself, whose members have been “adversely affected” by the executive order.

The victory comes just after the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and other civil and immigrant rights groups filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of tens of thousands of immigrants currently residing legally in the U.S. who have been impacted by the executive order.

“These xenophobic policies do not make us safer,” said Trina Realmuto, litigation director for the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild, on Thursday. “Instead, they undermine American values.”

Jennie Pasquarella, immigrants’ rights director for the ACLU of California and senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Southern California, added, “By freezing Muslim immigrants out of the ability to become U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents, the president’s unconstitutional ban now takes aim at the very system that has made the United States a pluralistic nation.”

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This article (Federal Judge Ruling Orders Trump to Halt Travel Ban) by Nadia Prupis, originally appeared on CommonDreams.org and is licensed Creative Commons 3.0. The Anti-Media radio show airs Monday through Friday @ 11pm Eastern/8pm Pacific. Help us fix our typos: edits@theantimedia.org

Iran Just Officially Ditched the Dollar in Major Blow to US: Here’s Why It Matters

February 1, 2017   |   Alice Salles

(ANTIMEDIA) Following President Donald Trump’s ban on travelers from seven predominantly Muslim countries, the Iranian government announced it would stop using the U.S. dollar “as its currency of choice in its financial and foreign exchange reports,” the local Financial Tribune reported.

Iran governor Valiollah Seif’s central bank announced the decision in a television interview on January 29. The change will take effect on March 21, and it will impact all official financial and foreign exchange reports.

“Iran’s difficulties [in dealing] with the dollar,” Seif said, “were in place from the time of the primary sanctions and this trend is continuing,” but when it comes to other currencies, he added, “we face no limitations.”

In a piece published by Forbes, Dominic Dudley contends that this move is significant “in the light of the recent ‘Muslim ban‘” announced by Trump. Iran nationals were added to the order issued by the current U.S. administration, which prompted the Iranian government to vow to stop issuing visas to U.S. citizens.

Dudley notes that since 1975, “no Americans have been killed in terrorist attacks in the US by the citizens of the countries included in the ban,” while countries such as Saudi Arabia — “home of 15 of the 19 terrorists involved in the 9/11 attacks” — were left out of the list of prohibited countries.

Despite the country’s decision to halt the use of the U.S. dollar as its base currency for exchange with other nations, Iran’s top export is oil. In the global markets, oil is mainly purchased and sold in U.S. dollars. This fiscal year, Iran is expected to earn  $41 billion from oil sales, with countries like the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and China as their top clients. It’s still uncertain how the country will manage to switch currencies without relying on the American currency. The shift, Dudley notes, “will add a degree of currency risk and volatility and is likely to complicate matters for the authorities.”

This matters because predominantly Muslim countries left out of the “Muslim ban” include Saudi Arabia, one of the world’s top oil exporters.

In the 1970s, the Arab nation struck a deal with U.S. President Richard Nixon establishing an alliance that would maintain the dollar as the standard oil exchange currency in exchange for military support from America. The use of the dollar as a standard currency for oil exchange was accepted by Saudi Arabia and the remaining block of Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), which include Iran and 11 other Middle Eastern, African, and South American countries.

OPEC countries account for 42 percent of global oil production, holding 73 percent of the world’s oil reserves. Due to its influence, the use of the U.S. dollar as its standard currency helps to keep demand for the U.S. dollar high, giving the currency the support it requires to remain “the world’s reserve currency” and preventing the effects of inflation from hitting the U.S. consumer.

Iran’s decision to exit this deal might impact the U.S. economy and threaten the dollar, prompting the U.S. government to take stern measures to combat Iran’s actions. After all, Iran holds 13 percent of OPEC’s oil reserves.

This article (Iran Just Officially Ditched the Dollar in Major Blow to US: Here’s Why It Matters) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Alice Salles and theAntiMedia.org. Anti-Media Radio airs weeknights at 11 pm Eastern/8 pm Pacific. If you spot a typo, please email the error and name of the article to edits@theantimedia.org.

Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and What You’re Not Being Told About Trump’s Travel Ban

January 31, 2017   |   Alice Salles

(ANTIMEDIA) President Donald Trump’s decision to bar nationals from seven predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States for 90 days prompted one of the largest protests America has seen since anti-Iraq war sentiment compelled thousands to hit U.S. streets in 2003.

Moved by the ban’s inclusion of green card holders who were suddenly left stranded at U.S. airports, protesters flooded airports nationwide, demanding U.S. officials let foreigners who were lawful residents in. On Sunday evening, Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly declared “the entry of lawful permanent residents to be in the national interest,” making the “lawful permanent residence status” of foreign nationals “a dispositive factor in our case-by-case determinations.”

While many have pointed out that the precedent that allowed Trump to impose the 90-day ban came from a bill signed into law by President Barack Obama, known as the Visa Waiver Program Improvement and Terrorist Travel Prevention Act, others pointed out the list’s omission of countries such as Saudi Arabia, “home of 15 of the 19 terrorists involved in the 9/11 attacks.” But while these same publications claim these countries were spared because of Trump’s business ties, countries listed in the current ban mirror the list of countries present in the bill signed into law by Obama. So why did both Obama and Trump choose to spare travelers from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and United Arab Emirates from extra scrutiny?

The answer may lie somewhere in the past, long before both Obama and Trump were considering running for president.

U.S. presidents are often judged by how the economy fares during their terms, leading many to take credit for sudden upticks while others blame everybody else for downfalls.

In a carefully written piece from 2014, founder, president, and Executive Director of the Carl Menger Center Paul-Martin Foss explains that in 1971, when President Richard Nixon “[closed] the gold window,” unilaterally canceling the convertibility of the U.S. dollar to gold, Saudi Arabia entered the picture.

Striking a deal with the Saudi Kingdom, Nixon established the oil-rich nation as its partner. From then on, Saudi Arabia became the “anchor of the petrodollar system,” making the kingdom’s demise unthinkable if the dollar were to remain a reserve currency.

Fearing the dollar would lose its value due to his economic policies regarding gold reserves, Nixon made the Saudis promise to “denominate oil sales in dollars” in exchange for America’s endless military protection. Being one of the world’s top oil producers and exporters, Saudi Arabia’s promise meant that foreign nations “seeking to purchase oil on international markets needed to purchase dollars and maintain dollar reserves.” By establishing a demand for the dollar “as an international reserve currency that counteracted the desire of countries to move away from the dollar due to the [U.S.] government’s inflationary policies of the 1960s and 1970s,” Nixon was able to protect the value of the U.S. dollar despite the obliteration of the only system that had kept the currency strong all through the years: the gold standard.

Since then, this relationship has kept the U.S. dollar relatively strong despite the U.S. Federal Reserve’s follies, which have accelerated inflation. This adds an extra burden on the poor, who have continued to see the purchasing power of their cash decline over the decades. But who cares about the poor when the U.S. government can keep printing more money without worrying about having the currency lose its power?

Over the years, other oil-rich nations joined the pact, with Gulf Arab countries like the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait maintaining large dollar reserves.

According to a 2016 Bloomberg article, Saudi Arabia still holds $289 billion of U.S. Treasury debt. But aside from that, Foss continues in his piece, “the estimated sizes of the Arab countries’ sovereign wealth funds” totals almost $2.5 trillion. These wealth funds invest their oil revenues across the globe, holding America in a special place in their hearts.

As America’s top U.S. military hardware purchaser, Saudi Arabia also helps keep the U.S. dollar strong through a vibrant war market while benefitting from the 1971 deal with President Nixon.

As a new president takes office, we can only guess what the learning process might look like. We’re not sure who approached Obama to let him know of the U.S. special relationship with the Saudi royals. We’re also not sure how this happened under Trump. All we know is that under Obama’s watch, the Saudis purchased $115 billion worth of weapons from America, totaling “more than any previous administration and were intended to replenish arsenal after war in Yemen.”

In the Yemen files, the database “of more than 500 documents from the United States embassy in Sana’a, Yemen” released by WikiLeaks, the staff at the whistleblower hub writes that “Yemen is of significant strategic interest as [the country] controls a narrow choke-point to the Red Sea and the Suez Canal through which 11% of the world’s petroleum passes each day.” With Saudi Arabia seeking to “control a port in Yemen to avoid the potential constriction of its oil shipments by by Iran along the Strait of Hormuz or by countries, which can control its other oil shipment path along the Red Sea,” it’s suddenly clear why America has been so invested in the Yemen war. The U.S. government must keep the promise made by President Nixon if it wants to keep the dollar strong without reforming or putting an end to the Federal Reserve’s grip on the U.S. dollar.

President Trump has only been in office for a little over a week, and he’s already following the lead of his predecessors.

Understanding the background of the special relationship between America and Saudi Arabia gives us an idea of why economic policies of the past are so entwined with wars being waged today — and why Saudi Arabia and others were left out of the list of countries under the watch of the U.S. government under Obama and Trump.

As over seven million people starve to death in Yemen while America presses on, aiding its number one partner in the region. But this is not because they care about the war itself, but because American presidents care about the strength of the dollar — at least, that’s what it looks like once you analyze the background of this special relationship.

Without oil-rich nations using the U.S. dollar to trade their product — and without the gold standard — there’s nothing keeping the dollar’s worth from crashing. And if that occurs, world markets would feel the boom with only America truly hurting since its currency would lose its worth, boosting other world powers.

Will there ever be a president who will challenge that? If so, reform should start first by ending the Federal Reserve.

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This article (Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and What You’re Not Being Told About Trump’s Travel Ban) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Alice Salles and theAntiMedia.org. Anti-Media Radio airs weeknights at 11 pm Eastern/8 pm Pacific. If you spot a typo, please email the error and name of the article to edits@theantimedia.org.

Donald Trump Is About to Create a Bunch of New Terrorists

January 30, 2017   |   Carey Wedler

(ANTIMEDIA) Amid the chaos that swept airports across the United States over the weekend, families were kept apart and sick, elderly individuals with documentation were turned away. At the same time, terrorists around the world rejoiced as the United States confirmed what they have long asserted: the United States is at war with Islam.

As Stuart Shapiro, professor and director of the Public Policy Program at the Bloustein School at Rutgers University, recently explained in The Hill:

“An organization that was on the run in Syria and Iraq has just been handed an amazing recruiting tool: A written proclamation from the U.S. president that everything they’ve been saying all these years about the United States being at war with Muslims is true.

“This recruiting tool is likely to be effective in messages consumed by individuals like those who perpetrated the awful attacks in Fort Hood, Orlando and San Bernardino. So while we will be keeping out individuals who mean the United States no harm and indeed are in many cases the victims of those who do, we will have handed our enemies an important weapon.”

Shapiro makes two important points: one, that ISIS can now further assert that the United States hates Muslims, driving a wedge between moderate Muslims and the West, and two, that the most recent gruesome terror attacks that have plagued the United States have been committed by natural-born citizens who became radicalized. The shooters at Fort Hood, Orlando, and San Bernardino (with the exception of Syed Rizwan Farook wife, who came from Pakistan) were all American — not individuals who came in via the visa or refugee program. Farook’s wife entered the U.S. with a visa from Pakistan.

A 2013 report by the Heritage Foundation, a right-leaning think tank, further confirms the futility of the ban. They noted that of 154 attempted terror attacks since September 11th, 77 had been perpetrated by U.S. citizens. Thirty-three came from the U.K. The next highest country of origin was Pakistan, which was not included in Trump’s recent executive order ( Barack Obama did exert a great deal of effort drone bombing that country). Though Afghanistan, which was included in the ban, had four nationals who attempted attacks, that country was followed closely by Haiti, Saudi Arabia, and Albania — none of which were banned. Those countries came in ahead of Yemen, Iran, and Iraq, which were banned (though some supporters of the executive order have asserted the list Trump used was crafted by Obama, the language of the legal authority Trump claims to have appears to allow him to include any country he pleases).

The inconsistencies among the banned countries speak for themselves, and ISIS is already using the order as a recruiting tool. The Washington Post notes that jihadists were posting on Telegram, an encrypted messaging platform, that “Trump was fulfilling the prediction of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born leader and preacher who famously said that the ‘West would eventually turn against its Muslim citizens.’” Obama killed al-Awlaki without trial (setting a dangerous precedent for President Trump). He also had his sixteen-year-old son, Abdul Rahman al-Awlaki killed, and just this week, a raid ordered by Trump killed Abdul Rahman’s eight-year-old sister.

One post said the new president’s ban “clearly revealed the truth and harsh reality behind the American government’s hatred toward Muslims.”

But one need not listen to the sentiments of terrorists and the Post, a tried and true establishment outlet. The statements they reported echo previous sentiments from ISIS and Osama bin Laden before them. According to a 2015 essay in Dabiq, the Islamic State’s official magazine, the “grayzone,” wherein Muslims can co-exist peacefully with Westerners, is deteriorating. This makes it easier to recruit jihadists.

“The grayzone is critically endangered, rather on the brink of extinction. Its endangerment began with the blessed operations of September 11th, as these operations manifested two camps before the world for mankind to choose between, a camp of Islam – without the body of Khilāfah to represent it at the time – and a camp of kufr – the crusader coalition,” they wrote. [emphasis added]

Even bin Laden noted this dynamic. “The world today is divided into two camps. Bush spoke the truth when he said, ‘Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.’ Meaning, either you are with the crusade or you are with Islam,” the famous terrorist leader said.

This divide is only further deepened when the United States projects broad disdain for Islam, whether through warfare, after attack by terrorists, or with Trump’s recent ban.

Though many have claimed the ban is based on nationality and “danger” rather than religion, Trump’s indication that Christians will be given priority easily demonstrates the intent is to make it more difficult for Muslims, specifically, to enter the country. This is line with his campaign rhetoric.

But even neoconservative Republican Senator John McCain, who criticized the ban — and in doing so drew the ire of the president himself — admitted the potential effects. “The effect will probably in some areas give ISIS some more propaganda,” he said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

According to Robert Richer, a former chief of the CIA’s Near East division, the ban was a “strategic mistake.”

“This was a win for jihadists and other anti-U.S. forces,” he said. “It fuels the belief out there that Americans are anti-Islam. Otherwise, it accomplishes nothing, because the ones we are most concerned about can still get to the United States.” Considering countries like Saudi Arabia (where the majority of 9/11 hijackers originated), Qatar, and Turkey – which have all been demonstrated to support violent extremism — were left off the list, Richer appears to be right.

And considering Trump has continued air strikes and violence and seeks to expand the already massive U.S. military while provoking Iran — a country included on the ban list that has had more than its share of unwarranted U.S. intervention — this ban is yet more fodder for extremism. Add that to Trump’s fervent support for torture and the effect these practices have on prisoners — and others — and the anti-terror leader is setting the stage for further radicalism and terror attacks.

As Shapiro concluded, “By allegedly trying to decrease the risk of a terrorist attack, we may have increased it.”

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This article (Donald Trump Is About to Create a Bunch of New Terrorists) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Carey Wedler and theAntiMedia.org. Anti-Media Radio airs weeknights at 11 pm Eastern/8 pm Pacific. If you spot a typo, please email the error and name of the article to edits@theantimedia.org.