MARCH 25, 2018 – PART II
NEWS AND VIEWS


ANOTHER SPANISH CIVIL WAR?

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-43532217
Carles Puigdemont, former Catalan president, detained in Germany
March 25, 2018 2 hours ago

Video -- Why is there a Catalan crisis? The answer is in its past, as Europe correspondent Gavin Lee explains. Lee’s summary of Catalan and Spanish history is very interesting, and not well-known to most Americans.
Photograph -- Independence supporters have gathered in Barcelona to protest against the arrest
Video – Liberal minister speaks on the imprisonment of people for their political views.
Video -- http://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-europe-43523810/spain-catalonia-protesters-clash-with-police-after-court-ruling

Catalonia's ex-leader Carles Puigdemont has been detained by German police acting on a European arrest warrant.

Mr Puigdemont, who is wanted in Spain for sedition and rebellion, was held crossing from Denmark on the way to Belgium, his lawyer said.

Mr Puigdemont will appear before a German judge on Monday.

The ex-leader's supporters gathered in Barcelona to protest against his arrest. The charges he faces in Spain could result in 30 years in prison.

Mr Puigdemont has been living in self-imposed exile in Belgium since Catalonia's parliament unilaterally declared independence from Spain in October.


He was visiting Finland last week when the arrest warrant against him was reissued.

He evaded Finnish authorities by slipping out of the country on Friday before they could arrest him.

His court appearance on Monday will be a formality to confirm his identity.

The man who wants to break up Spain
Catalan crisis in 300 words

"The president was going to Belgium to put himself, as always, at the disposal of Belgian justice," his spokesman Joan Maria Pique said.

German police said that Mr Puigdemont was detained by a highway patrol in the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein, which borders Denmark.

After the news of his arrest broke on Sunday, thousands of demonstrators poured on to the streets of Barcelona.

Image copyrightAFP
Image caption
Scuffles break out between police and protesters in Barcelona

They chanted "Freedom for the political prisoners" and "This Europe is shameful!" as they headed to the offices of the European Commission.

A smaller protest was held in Girona, where Mr Puigdemont once served as mayor.

Tensions in Catalonia are very high and its separatist leaders abandoned plans to name a new president following the arrest of the latest candidate, Jordi Turull, on Friday.

Protesters clashed with police in Barcelona on Friday night after Spain's Supreme Court ruled 25 Catalan leaders should be tried for rebellion, embezzlement or disobeying the state. Mr Turull was among five people taken into custody in fresh arrests.

The rulings were considered the most serious challenge to date to the Catalan independence movement. Almost the entire leadership now faces a major legal fight.

Media caption Police clashed with protesters in Barcelona on Friday

Following the referendum, the central government in Madrid sacked the Catalan regional government, imposed direct rule and called new elections but pro-independence parties returned with a slim majority.

International warrants for Mr Puigdemont and other Catalan leaders were withdrawn in December by a Spanish judge, who said they had shown a willingness to return to the country.

The warrants were reissued on Friday, surprising Mr Puigdemont, who had been in Finland to give a university lecture.

Among those also wanted is Catalonia's former education minister, Clara Ponsati. She is in Scotland, where she has a position at the University of St Andrews, and says she is willing to hand herself in.

Who is Carles Puigdemont?
Image copyrightEPA
Image caption

Mr Puigdemont is wanted in Spain on charges of rebellion and sedition
Carles Puigdemont, 55, is a former journalist who worked for pro-independence media in Catalonia and headed the Catalan News Agency.

After moving to politics, he became an MP and later mayor of Girona, north-east of Barcelona.

In 2016, he became leader of Catalonia and led the region to the referendum the following year.

During his self-imposed exile following the resulting crisis, Mr Puigdemont told Belgian TV he was not hiding from "real justice" but from the "clearly politicised" Spanish legal system.

1 October 2017: The independence referendum takes place in Catalonia; it is deemed illegal by Spain and boycotted by many potential voters

27 October: Catalonia's leaders declare independence, which leads to the Spanish government imposing direct rule on the region and dissolving its parliament

30 October: Charges of rebellion, sedition and misuse of public funds are brought against various sacked members of the Catalan government, including Mr Puigdemont

2 November: Several former Catalan ministers are taken into custody in Spain

3 November: European Arrest Warrants are issued against Mr Puigdemont and four of his allies, who have all fled to Belgium

5 December: A Spanish judge withdraws the European arrest warrants but says the group still face possible charges for sedition and rebellion

21 December: Carles Puigdemont is re-elected to parliament during Catalan's regional elections - which Spanish PM Mariano Rajoy had called to "restore democracy"

1 March 2018: Mr Puigdemont says he is stepping aside and he backs detained activist Jordi Sanchez to run as Catalonia's president

21 March: Mr Sanchez drops his leadership bid and instead the candidacy is passed to Jordi Turull, who the following day is rejected by hardline separatists

23 March: Mr Turull and various others are arrested in Spain, and the European arrest warrants are reissued

Related Topics
Catalonia Spain

Carles Puigdemont: The man who wants to break up Spain
22 December 2017
. . . .Catalonia's bid for independence from Spain explained
31 January 2018


http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-29478415
Catalonia's bid for independence from Spain explained
31 January 2018

Carles Puigdemont rallies separatists via videolink from Brussels
Related Topics Catalonia independence vote 2017



GLOBAL ENGAGEMENT CENTER -- OUR PROTECTORS FROM FOREIGN INTERFERENCE IN OUR INTERNAL AFFAIRS -- DYING AN UNNATURAL DEATH?

President Obama created the Global Engagement Center with an executive order in March of 2016. Its initial purpose was to track terrorist propaganda and disinformation online, to work across government agencies to craft coherent anti-terrorist messaging, and work with other governments and grassroots organizations to fight information warfare abroad. Much of the work focused on non-state threats, like ISIS, but the 2016 election demonstrated that state-sponsored disinformation, particularly from Russia, could have calamitous effects on democracies as well.

In July of last year, Republican senator Rob Portman and Democratic senator Chris Murphy introduced the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act, which created a second mission for the GEC: attacking state-sponsored propaganda. Even though the US government was aware of Russian meddling in the presidential election earlier, it wasn't until December, when President Obama signed the bill into law as part of the National Defense Authorization Act, that responding to this new threat fell under the GEC's purview.

'Countering terrorist messaging is a much different challenge than countering state sponsored propaganda.'

ROMESH RATNESAR, FORMER CHIEF OF STAFF FOR UNDER SECRETARY FOR PUBLIC DIPLOMACY AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS

Initially, State Department officials expressed some skepticism that the GEC, essentially an 80-person startup within the State Department, could handle this new mission, says Romesh Ratnesar, former chief of staff in the office of the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. "There was definitely concern that this was more than what the GEC could handle," he says. "Countering terrorist messaging is a much different challenge than countering state sponsored propaganda."

But Younis and other members of the team believed the key to understanding both threats was understanding how people are persuaded into beliefs online, and knowing how to counter those messages in speeches, on social media, and on the ground, with help from grassroots organizations. He also believed the GEC could act as the connective tissue between government agencies—from the Department of Defense to the State Department—that had already confronted the issue.

When President Trump took office, appointing former Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson to be Secretary of State, Younis anticipated the usual bureaucratic hurdles that accompany any new administration. But the hurdles his team faced in the first year of Trump’s tenure were higher than anyone expected.

Under the Trump administration, Younis says, the coordinated plan to fight Russian disinformation and propaganda has failed to launch. The GEC has languished in the face of ongoing budget debates, a State Department-wide hiring freeze, and inconsistent views over how, exactly, the United States ought to engage with Russia.

Trumped

The Trump team took a—well-documented—bare-bones approach to the presidential transition, forgoing the customary in-depth briefings with their predecessors in the outgoing administration. According to Ratnesar, he and the Under Secretary of State met with two members of the Trump transition team, neither of whom currently work in the administration, for just an hour. "We were prepared to talk about the GEC in some detail, and we were surprised they didn't ask us about it," Ratnesar says.

After the inauguration, the central challenge was securing the budget President Obama approved for the GEC, which set aside up to $60 million per year for two years to fight state-sponsored propaganda. That money was to be transferred from the Department of Defense to the Department of State, but initiating that transfer was entirely up to the Secretary of State's discretion. Younis says his team spent months demonstrating how the money would be allocated and why the anti-state sponsored propaganda work was indeed valuable, to no avail.

“We did not get the sense we were getting through to Secretary Tillerson,” he says. “You’re in this holding pattern where you’re designing and building, but unable to implement, because the money has not arrived."

Asked what parts of the Russia mission his team was able to execute on, Younis replied: "Nothing. Nothing. Nothing."

According to a State Department official, the GEC's entire operating budget for 2017—about $36 million—went toward its original counterterrorism mission. It wasn't until August that Tillerson approved a $40 million transfer from the Pentagon to the GEC, money that won't kick in until January 2018. At that point, the official said, the GEC plans to launch a series of pilot projects related to state-sponsored propaganda. "The decision to request the DoD funds came after a review and then realignment of GEC programs to match national security priorities and to ensure that this funding will be used as effectively as possible in the effort to counter state-sponsored disinformation," the official said.

'You’re in this holding pattern where you’re designing and building, but unable to implement, because the money has not arrived.'

FORMER GEC STAFFER AHMED YOUNIS

Reports have suggested that the Tillerson-led State Department is avoiding any moves that might anger Moscow. President Trump has, after all, made clear his intention to improve US relations with Russia, in part to jointly combat the spread of ISIS in Syria. But Younis says he never heard any such politically motivated arguments against fighting Russian propaganda. Instead, he says, the mission suffered from a lack of a coherent policy about how to engage with Russia at all.

“You didn’t get the sense that everyone was singing from the same sheet of music,” Younis says, noting that often, he got a clearer view about State Department policy from reading Twitter and watching the news than he did speaking with Tillersons’ own staff.

“It was passive aggressively, bureaucratically being ignored,” says the other former State Department employee.

No Direction

That many of President Trump’s appointees aren’t subject matter experts in the areas they were chosen to oversee complicates matters further. It led to an environment, Younis says, in which he and his team often had to educate senior appointees about the fundamentals of counterterrorism strategy—or, as he describes it, “teaching people how to drive stick shift.” One such debate involved the use of the terms “Islamic terrorism" or “Islamist terrorism,” or whether terrorism ought to be rhetorically associated with Islam at all. Most researchers know where they stand on the issue, Younis says, but “in the political realm, everything’s up for grabs.”

That type of confusion resulted a year of inaction by the GEC regarding Russia's disinformation campaign, which Republican representative Will Hurd, a former CIA agent, recently referred to as the "greatest covert action campaign in the history of Mother Russia."

The former GEC staffers at least find some comfort in the efforts of other State Department groups, which fund and support media and civil society organizations in former Soviet countries, and US intelligence agencies, which continue to monitor Russian efforts to hack American electoral infrastructure and spread its influence on social media.

"The GEC is only one part of the broader story," says Ratnesar. "More could and should be done in a more strategic way, but I wouldn’t say nothing is happening."

Younis agrees. "The men and women of government who are subject matter experts and career officers will always do the work they were trained and hired to do," he says. "That work will continue."

Even so, he stresses the need for a central unifying body that ensures all government agencies are presenting a unified front against this threat. Today, more than a year after the election that helped illustrate its severity, the people whose mission it is to address that threat are still awaiting direction.





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END OF MR 25, INSTALLMENT 2