PRESS ROOM

Ben Freeman discusses "The Qatar Lobby in Washington" on radio show "A Neighbor's Choice."

[The Trump] administration seems poised to abandon the last vestige of U.S.-Russian nuclear arms control, the New START treaty. A new report by Women’s Action for New Directions underlines exactly what a terrible idea that would be.

Politicians are using China’s malicious influence operations as a bait-and-switch to justify massive increases in Pentagon spending that have little, if any, chance of helping the US win this information war.

Trump has no stronger loyalist in the House of Representatives than Ratcliffe, who was particularly hostile to Robert Mueller, the former special counsel, during hearings in July 2019, and very aggressive in defending Trump in this year’s impeachment process.

The announcement of the package comes the day after a new report by the Center for International Policy called for a re-look into whether military aid to Egypt is in the best interests of America. Egypt receives significant foreign military financing — dollars from the U.S. that must then be sent on U.S. built defense equipment — every year, sitting at around $1.3 billion since fiscal year 2014.

For too long, Cairo and Washington have treated U.S. security assistance to Egypt as if it were an entitlement program, to be provided regardless of the conduct of the Egyptian government.

North Korea is “at the epicentre of an extremely tense security crisis”, involving “a nuclear standoff where tens of millions of lives are at stake,” Henri Feron, Senior Fellow at the US Center for International Policy, told AFP.

While the official military budget is $738 billion, if one pulls all U.S. defense related spending together, the actual cost for taxpayers is $1.25 trillion a year, according to William Hartung of the Center for International Policy. Half that amount would go a long way toward providing not only adequate medical support during the Covid-19 crisis — it would also pay jobless Americans a salary.

According to the publication, which was prepared by Seth Binder from Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED) and William D. Hartung from the Centre for International Policy (CIP), Al-Sisi expects to continue receiving significant payments in military aid from the US, even though “instead of using the assistance to develop the military’s capabilities and advance shared national security interests, the Egyptian government has misused the aid for patronage and prestige.”

A group of fifty-one organizations led by Demand Progress sent a letter on Monday listing “key” foreign policy priorities of the progressive movement for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.

Speaking of foreign arms sales, a new Center for International Policy and Project on Middle East Democracy joint report by William Hartung and Seth Binder recommends the U.S. cut $300 million in military aid to Egypt. “A significant reduction in military aid will signal to the Egyptians that U.S. assistance is not an entitlement, but rather is dependent on their conduct. The $300 million should be repurposed as humanitarian assistance for the global effort to overcome the COVID-19 pandemic.”

The report comes a day after two Washington-based think-tanks described Egypt's counterterrorism efforts as "ineffective."
The Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED) and the Center for International Policy (CIP) quoted Congressman Tom Malinowski, one of the leading critics of Cairo in Washington, as saying that the Egyptian military is "utterly, disastrously incompetent".