WASHINGTON: Military leaders are rattled by a list of “woke” senior officers that a conservative group urged Pete Hegseth to dismiss for promoting diversity in the ranks if he is confirmed to lead the Pentagon.
The list compiled by the American Accountability Foundation includes 20 general officers or senior admirals and a disproportionate number of female officers. It has had a chilling effect on the Pentagon’s often frank discussions as leaders try to figure out how to address the potential firings and diversity issues under President-elect Donald Trump.
Those on the list in many cases seem to be targeted for public comments they made either in interviews or at events on diversity, and in some cases for retweeting posts that promote diversity.
Tom Jones, a former aide to Republican senators who leads the foundation, said Friday that those on the list are “pretty egregious” advocates for diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, policies, which he called problematic.
“The nominee has been pretty clear that that has no place in the military,” Jones said of Hegseth.
Hegseth has embraced Trump’s effort to end programs that promote diversity in the ranks and fire those who reflect those values. Other Trump picks, like Kash Patel for FBI director, have suggested targeting those in government who are not aligned with Trump.
But Hegseth has been fighting to save his nomination as he faces allegations of excessive drinking and sexual assault and over his views questioning the role of women in combat. He spent the week on Capitol Hill trying to win the support of Republican senators, who must confirm him to lead the Pentagon, doing a radio interview and penning an opinion column.
Some service members have complained in the past about the Pentagon’s DEI programs, saying they add to an already heavy workload. The Pentagon still has a long way to go in having a general officer corps or specialty occupations such as pilots that have a racial and gender makeup reflective of the country.
A defense official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the list said senior leaders are hoping that once Trump is sworn in, they will be able to discuss the issue further. They are prepared to provide additional context to the incoming administration, the official told The Associated Press, which is not publishing the names to protect service members’ privacy.
Former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Friday that the list would have “considerable, wide and deep consequences.” He said when military members see people singled out, they will start focusing on their own survival rather than the mission or their job.
“You will drive people out,” Hagel said. “It affects morale as widely and deeply as anything — it creates a negative dynamic that will trickle through an organization.”
The list, which was first reported by The New York Post, includes nine Air Force general officers, seven Navy admirals of different ranks and four Army general officers. Eight of those 20 are women even though only 17 percent of the military is female. None are Marines.
One female Navy officer was named because she gave a speech at a 2015 Women’s Equality Day event, where she noted that 80 percent of Congress is male, which affects what bills move forward. The officer also was targeted because she said “diversity is our strength.”
The phrase is a widely distributed talking point that officers across the Pentagon have used for years to talk about the importance of having a military that reflects different educational, geographic, economic, gender and racial backgrounds in the country.
An Air Force colonel, who is white, was called out for an opinion piece he wrote following the death of George Floyd, saying, “Dear white colonel, we must address our blind spots about race.”
A female Air Force officer was targeted because of “multiple woke posts” on her X feed, including a tweet about LGBTQ rights, one about “whiteness” and another about honoring the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on a stamp.
Another female Air Force officer was on the list because she “served as a panelist for a diversity, equity and inclusion” discussion in 2021.
The list names an Army officer who traveled to 14 historically Black colleges to expand the military’s intelligence recruitment efforts, and an Air Force officer partly because he co-chairs the Asian-Pacific Islander subgroup of the service’s diversity task force.
Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for the Trump transition team, said in a statement that “No policy should be deemed official unless it comes directly from President Trump.”
But in an interview Wednesday for Megyn Kelly’s SiriusXM satellite radio show, Hegseth said Trump told him he wanted a “warfighter” who would clean out the “woke crap.”
Hegseth got a boost Friday from Trump, who posted on his social media site that Hegseth “will be a fantastic, high energy, Secretary of Defense.” The president-elect added that “Pete is a WINNER, and there is nothing that can be done to change that!!!”
Jones told the AP in June that his American Accountability Foundation was investigating scores of federal employees suspected of being hostile to Trump’s policies. The work aligns with the Heritage Foundation’s far-reaching Project 2025 blueprint for a conservative administration.
A letter Jones sent to Hegseth containing the list, dated Tuesday, says “purging the woke from the military is imperative.” The letter points to tensions with Iran, Russia and China and says “we cannot afford to have a military distracted and demoralized by leftist ideology. Our nation’s security is at stake.”
Conservatives view the federal workforce as overstepping its role to become a power center that can drive or thwart a president’s agenda. During the first Trump administration, government officials came under attack from the White House and congressional Republicans, as Trump’s own Cabinet often raised objections to some of his more singular or even unlawful proposals.
Military leaders are rattled by a list of ‘woke’ officers that a group urges Hegseth to fire
https://arab.news/4zufq
Military leaders are rattled by a list of ‘woke’ officers that a group urges Hegseth to fire
Columbia University student says his detention is indicative of anti-Palestinian racism in US
- Khalil, in the letter released by his attorney on Tuesday, said “I see in my circumstances similarities to Israel’s use of administrative detention – imprisonment without trial or charge – to strip Palestinians of their rights”
NEW YORK: A Columbia University student arrested and threatened with deportation for his role in campus protests against Israel gave his first public statement Tuesday, saying that his detention is indicative of “anti-Palestinian racism” demonstrated by both the Trump and Biden administrations.
In a letter dictated from a Louisiana immigration lockup and released by his attorney, the student, Mahmoud Khalil, said he is being targeted as part of a larger effort to repress Palestinian voices.
“My unjust detention is indicative of the anti-Palestinian racism that both the Biden and Trump administrations have demonstrated over the past 16 months as the US has continued to supply Israel with weapons to kill Palestinians and prevented international intervention,” he said.
“For decades, anti-Palestinian racism has driven efforts to expand US laws and practices that are used to violently repress Palestinians, Arab Americans, and other communities. That is precisely why I am being targeted.”
Khalil and the federal government have been sparring in court over the Trump administration’s move to ship him halfway across the country to the lockup in Louisiana.
The government says he could not be detained at an immigration facility near where he was originally arrested in part because of a bedbug infestation, so they sent him to Louisiana. Khalil says there was no such discussion of bedbugs and he feared he was being immediately deported.
Khalil said in a declaration filed in Manhattan federal court Monday that while he was held overnight at a detention center in Elizabeth, New Jersey, “I did not hear anyone mention bedbugs.”
In court papers over the weekend, lawyers for the Justice Department also blamed his move on overcrowded facilities in the Northeast.
Khalil made the statement about bedbugs in an exhibit attached to court papers in which his lawyers asked that he be freed on bail while the courts decide whether his arrest violated the First Amendment.
The lawyers have also asked a judge to widen the effect of any order to stop the US government from “arresting, detaining, and removing noncitizens who engage in constitutionally protected expressive activity in the United States in support of Palestinian rights or critical of Israel.”
Khalil said in court records that he was put in a van when he was taken away from the Elizabeth facility and he asked if he was being returned to FBI headquarters in Manhattan, where he was taken immediately after his arrest.
“I was told, ‘no, we are going to JFK Airport.’ I was afraid they were trying to deport me,” he recalled.
Of his time spent at the Elizabeth facility, he wrote: “I was in a waiting room with about ten other people. We slept on the ground. Even though it was cold inside the room, there were no beds, mattresses, or blankets.”
Khalil, in the letter released by his attorney on Tuesday, said “I see in my circumstances similarities to Israel’s use of administrative detention – imprisonment without trial or charge – to strip Palestinians of their rights.”
“For Palestinians, imprisonment without due process is commonplace,” he said.
In the weekend court papers, lawyers for the Justice Department gave a detailed description of Khalil’s March 8 arrest and his transport from Manhattan to Elizabeth and then to Kennedy International Airport in New York the next day for his transfer to Louisiana, where he has been held since.
“Khalil could not be housed at Elizabeth Detention Facility long-term due to a bedbug issue, so he remained there until his flight to Louisiana,” the lawyers wrote. They said he was at the facility from 2:20 a.m. until 11:30 a.m. on March 9.
The lawyers have asked that legal issues be addressed by federal judges in New Jersey or Louisiana rather than New York. A Manhattan federal judge has not yet ruled on the request.
Khalil’s lawyers, who oppose transferring the case, wrote in a submission Monday that the transfer to Louisiana was “predetermined and carried out for improper motives” rather than because of a bedbug infestation.
Despite the bedbug claim, the Elizabeth Detention accepted at least four individuals for detention from March 6 through last Thursday and Khalil himself saw men being processed for detention while he was there, they wrote.
Khalil, in the letter released by his attorney on Tuesday, also referenced a wave of Israeli strikes across Gaza — ending the ceasefire on Monday night — and called it a “moral imperative” to continue push for freedom for Palestinians.
“With January’s ceasefire now broken, parents in Gaza are once again cradling too-small shrouds, and families are forced to weigh starvation and displacement against bombs,” he said. “It is our moral imperative to persist in the struggle for their complete freedom.”
Judge rules DOGE’s USAID dismantling likely violates the Constitution
- Musk’s public statements and social media posts demonstrate that he has “firm control over DOGE,” the judge found pointing to an online post where Musk said he had “fed USAID into the wood chipper”
WASHINGTON: The dismantling of the US Agency for International Development by billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency likely violated the Constitution, a federal judge ruled Tuesday as he indefinitely blocked DOGE from making further cuts to the agency.
The order requires the Trump administration to restore email and computer access to all employees of USAID, including those put on administrative leave, though it appears to stop short of reversing firings or fully resurrecting the agency.
In one of the first DOGE lawsuits against Musk himself, US District Judge Theodore Chuang in Maryland rejected the Trump administration’s position that Musk is merely President Donald Trump’s adviser.
Musk’s public statements and social media posts demonstrate that he has “firm control over DOGE,” the judge found pointing to an online post where Musk said he had “fed USAID into the wood chipper.”
The judge acknowledged that it’s likely that USAID is no longer capable of performing some of its statutorily required functions.
“Taken together, these facts support the conclusion that USAID has been effectively eliminated,” Chuang wrote in the preliminary injunction.
The lawsuit filed by USAID employees and contractors argued that Musk and DOGE are wielding power the Constitution reserves only for those who win elections or are confirmed by the Senate. Their attorneys said the ruling “effectively halts or reverses” many of the steps taken to dismantle the agency.
The administration has said that DOGE is searching for and rooting out waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government, consistent with the campaign message that helped Trump win the 2024 election. The White House and DOGE did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the ruling.
Musk, his team and Trump political appointee Pete Marocco have played a central role in the two-month dismantling of USAID. In one instance in early February, the administration placed the agency’s top security officials on forced leave after they tried to block DOGE workers from accessing USAID’s classified and sensitive documents.
The administration, with Musk’s and DOGE’s support, went on to order all but a fraction of the agency’s staffers off the job through forced leaves and firings, and terminated what the State Department said was at least 83 percent of USAID’s program contracts.
The moves were part of a broader push by Musk and the Trump administration to eradicate the six-decade-old foreign assistance agency and most of its work overseas.
Trump on Inauguration Day issued an executive order directing a freeze of foreign assistance funding and a review of all US aid and development work abroad, charging that much of foreign assistance was wasteful and advanced a liberal agenda.
Democratic lawmakers and other supporters of USAID have argued Trump had no authority to withhold funding that Congress already approved.
Chuang said DOGE’s and Musk’s fast-moving destruction of USAID likely harmed the public interest by depriving elected lawmakers of their “constitutional authority to decide whether, when and how to close down an agency created by Congress.”
The lawsuit was filed by the State Democracy Defenders Fund. Norm Eisen, the nonprofit’s executive chair, said the ruling is a milestone in pushback to DOGE and the first to find that Musk’s actions violate the Constitution’s Appointments Clause, which mandates presidential approval and Senate confirmation for certain public officials.
“They are performing surgery with a chainsaw instead of a scalpel, harming not just the people USAID serves but the majority of Americans who count on the stability of our government,” he said in a statement.
Oxfam America’s Abby Maxman in a statement urged all staffing and funding to be reinstated. “The funding freeze and program cuts are already having life or death consequences for millions around the world,” said the chief executive of the humanitarian group.
UK welcomes ‘progress’ by Trump toward Russia-Ukraine ceasefire
- “This process must lead to a just and lasting peace for Ukraine,” a spokesperson said
LONDON: The British government on Tuesday welcomed the “progress” made by US President Donald Trump toward negotiating a ceasefire in Ukraine following a call with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin.
“This process must lead to a just and lasting peace for Ukraine,” a spokesperson for Prime Minister Keir Starmer said after Trump spoke Putin about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“We will stand with Ukraine for as long as it takes to ensure Russia can never launch an illegal invasion again.”
Fear at Antarctica base as researcher assaults colleague and makes threats
- ‘His behavior has escalated to a point that is deeply disturbing,’ said an email sent to South Africa’s Sunday Times newspaper
CAPE TOWN: A member of a South African research team that is confined for more than a year at an isolated Antarctica base was put under psychological evaluation there after he allegedly assaulted and sexually harassed colleagues, government officials said.
The problems at the SANAE IV base were first reported by South Africa’s Sunday Times newspaper, which said it had seen an email from a team member to authorities last month claiming the man had attacked the base leader and made threats.
The email pleaded for help.
“His behavior has escalated to a point that is deeply disturbing,” the email said, according to The Sunday Times. “I remain deeply concerned about my own safety, constantly wondering if I might become the next victim.” The report said the man allegedly made a death threat.
South Africa’s Ministry of Environment, which oversees the research missions, said in a statement that the alleged assault on the base leader was reported on Feb. 27, and officials and counselors intervened remotely “to mediate and restore relationships at the base.” They were speaking with team members almost daily, it said.
“The alleged perpetrator has willingly participated in further psychological evaluation, has shown remorse and is willingly cooperative,” the ministry said, adding that he had written a formal apology to the victim of the alleged assault. It said the allegations were being investigated. No one was identified.
The nine-member team, which includes scientists, a doctor and engineers, is expected to stay at the base for about 13 months until next year, authorities said, living in close quarters through the hostile Antarctic winter, whose six months of darkness begin in June.
The base is on a cliff in Queen Maud Land and is surrounded by a glacial ice sheet, more than 4,000 km, from South Africa.
The next planned visit by a supply ship is in December, according to the South African National Antarctic Program. It takes the ship around 10 days to travel from Cape Town.
Authorities said they had decided not to evacuate anyone from SANAE IV, where the onset of unpredictable weather conditions meant the team was now confined to the base.
The ministry said all team members had undergone evaluations ahead of the trip to ensure they can cope with the “extreme nature of the environment in Antarctica” and the isolation and confinement, and no problems were identified.
“It is not uncommon that once individuals arrive at the extremely remote areas where the scientific bases are located, an initial adjustment to the environment is required,” it said.
Previous problems have been reported at another of South Africa’s remote research bases on Marion Island, a South African territory near Antarctica.
In 2017, a member of a research team there smashed a colleague’s room with an ax over an apparent love triangle, according to a report to South Africa’s parliament. Lawmakers said it appeared the researchers were living in highly stressful conditions.
The National Science Foundation, the federal agency that oversees the US Antarctic Program, published a report in 2022 in which 59 percent of women in the US program said they’d experienced harassment or assault while on research trips in Antarctica.
Ukraine would back ceasefire on energy attacks, Zelensky says
- “Our side (would) support this,” Zelensky told reporters
- Zelensky said he would back any proposal that led to a “stable and just peace“
KYIV: President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Tuesday Ukraine would support a US proposal to stop its attacks on Russian energy infrastructure, but warned that Russia was trying to delay the US-led negotiations and weaken Kyiv by making new demands.
The White House said earlier that Russian President Vladimir Putin had agreed to US President Donald Trump’s proposal for a month-long halt on strikes against Ukrainian energy infrastructure, as the two leaders spoke by phone on Tuesday.
“Our side (would) support this,” Zelensky told reporters during a quickly-organized online briefing, when asked about the idea of a moratorium on energy strikes.
Ukraine has used long-range combat drones to pound Russian oil infrastructure such as refineries in an effort to hurt its much larger foe, which has rained down missiles and drones far behind the front lines in Ukraine since the February 2022 full-scale invasion.
In particular, Russian strikes have hammered Ukrainian power stations, causing large-scale blackouts, and more recently also natural gas production sites.
Zelensky said he would back any proposal that led to a “stable and just peace.”
Moscow stopped short of giving Washington the full unconditional 30-day ceasefire it had sought.
Zelensky said he believed Russia was clearly opposed to the proposal, which Kyiv agreed to in principle at last week’s talks with US officials in Jeddah.
Zelensky told reporters that Russia had launched more than 1,300 guided bombs, eight missiles and nearly 600 long-range strike drones at Ukraine since the talks in Saudi Arabia.
Ukraine itself proposed the idea of ceasefire on energy infrastructure during the talks, he added.
“This was part of our proposal for the sky and for the sea. With the mediation of the American side, if they are the guarantors of control over the implementation of this ceasefire,” he said.
PHONE CALL DIPLOMACY
Zelensky said after the Putin-Trump phone call he spoke by telephone with French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, both key European allies.
“I think it will be right that we will have a conversation with President Trump and we will know in detail what the Russians offered the Americans or what the Americans offered the Russians,” he said.
He also told reporters that he hoped Kyiv’s partners would not cut vital military assistance for Ukraine.
“We are in constant communication. I am confident that there will be no betrayal from our partners and that the assistance will continue,” he said.
He made the remark when asked about an earlier comment by Putin, who emphasized that any resolution of the conflict would require an end to all military and intelligence assistance to Ukraine.
Zelensky said the demand by Putin, as well as another seeking to curtail Ukraine’s campaign to draft civilians into the armed forces, looked aimed at weakening Ukraine.
