While all of us were preparing for Thanksgiving dinner, the United States was busy preparing an attack on the Yemeni province of Badhya.

The attacks were described as a success in most Western newspapers. The Daily Mail in London highlighted the fact that "10 Al-Qaeda Suspects" were killed in the attacks, as confirmed by government officials.

One minority-ish report by Gulf News Yemen, one of the few on-the-ground sources that covers such attacks, had details of the killings. Quoting an on-the-ground activist, it added:

"The recent US drone strikes have also killed five civilians, displaced residents and caused panic in the two areas."

This fact should surprise no one. The ability to kill by remote control without judicial review was one of the many gifts we bequeathed to Trump prior to his inauguration.

Most of the media obsessed over the particulars of the botched and luridly insensitive phone call Trump made to the family of slain U.S. soldier Sgt. La David Johnson at the end of October.

The La David Johnson story received a lot of attention by members of the media on both sides of the aisle. But very little of it was directed at the question, "What the hell are we doing in Niger?"

Rachel Maddow's analysis, for instance, was that Trump cooked up the fracas with the Johnson family to distract from other military failures.

A few reporters did ask parenthetically what we were doing there - usually by asking Pentagon officials - but even in those cases, there has been virtually zero questioning of the righteousness of the missions.

A few senators asked questions. Republicans John McCain and Lindsey Graham, as well as Democrat Chuck Schumer, expressed surprise at the size of U.S. forces in Africa.

Graham on the campaign trail repeatedly expressed support for a new "Middle East Marshall Plan" that would have invested troops and treasure in a massive effort to unite the region.

But he sounded positively hippie-ish when asked about the surprising (to him) news that we have some 6,000 troops in Africa already, many of them at drone bases.

"I didn't know there was 1,000 troops in Niger," Graham said on Meet the Press. "This is an endless war without boundaries and no limitation on time and geography. ... You've got to tell us more."

Donald Trump is unpopular, and members of both parties will use incidents like this to highlight his genuine lack of leadership, his tasteless interactions with soldiers and his lack of a clue as it pertains to how to stabilize the Middle East.

But the basic premise of his military's presence in this part of the world has consistently gone unchallenged in the U.S. media since January, as it was mostly unchallenged under both Obama and Bush.

The core idea of our presence in places like Niger is to partner with local countries, often ones with monstrous human rights records themselves, to make remote war easier.

These countries often accept massive amounts of military aid and other geopolitical goodies, and repay us in on-the-ground intel about whom to drone-bomb in our ongoing, undeclared, ever-bloodier War on Terror.

Since 9/11, we have gone out of our way to make questioning executive authority difficult or impossible, especially when it comes to matters of national security.

The loosely and apparently interminably defined War on Terror is just one example. Presidents have assumed for themselves powers to make war that were once the province of the legislature.

Similar initiatives to expand surveillance and create and define the parameters of new interrogation tactics were also settled without asking the permission of Congress or, often, the courts.

The same goes with the expanded classification of documents and many other unilateral assumptions of authority.

In the case of drone attacks like the ones that occurred over the weekend, there will be no way to determine what, if any, liability the United States and Trump may hold for the reported deaths of the five civilians, if five is the right number.

We have very recent court precedents that have affirmed the nearly unlimited power of the president.

In 2015, for instance, the families of imam Salem bin Ali Jaber and his police officer nephew, Walid Abdullah bin Ali Jaber, filed a wrongful death suit in Washington against the U.S. and a spate of individuals after the two were unjustly killed in a drone raid in the village of Khashamir, Yemen, on August 29th, 2012.

Salem bin Ali Jaber had preached against terrorism as recently as the week before. As imam, he pushed a line of thinking that argued the Quran did not endorse violence. By all accounts, he was exactly the kind of person we should have been trying to encourage on the ground.

Yemeni engineer Faisal bin Ali Jaber, whose brother-in-law Salem bin Ali Jaber and nephew Walid Abdullah bin Ali Jaber,
were killed in a drone strike in August 2012 2012, speaks at a 2013 press conference in Washington, D.C.

The kill list became known by the Orwellian tag "disposition matrix." Trump critic John Brennan is frequently credited with coming up with the less murderous name.

In any case, five men died that day in a drone attack as soon as the two Ali Jabers took a seat outside next to the condemned men.

When the family of the Ali Jabers filed suit in America, they were told in no uncertain terms by a D.C. circuit court that judges cannot second-guess the judgment of the executive branch.

Instead, the lower court ruled, such calls are up to "the Executive, and not a panel of the D.C. Circuit, who commands our armed forces and determines our nation's foreign policy."

The family appealed. A higher court affirmed the decision. Still, since-retired Judge Janice Rogers Brown, an African-American woman, laid out in a blistering dissent the problem of courts like hers passing the buck in these decisions.

"Our democracy is broken," she wrote.

She noted that in the growing covert war, "the rules of the game are tacitly assumed to be unknown."

In other words, secret operations against secret suspects are conducted according to rules that by simple logic must also be secret.

This reduces the legal foundation for much of post-9/11 military action to, "You have to trust us."

Judges have consistently refused to take on the responsibility of reviewing these matters. They say they lack the expertise and information to decide if an attack is originally militarily justified, even if courts could demonstrate persons or companies were later victimized unfairly.

In the case of the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan, which was wiped out by the U.S. government for allegedly aiding al-Qaeda but seemed instead to be making medicines, a U.S. court ruled it didn't have the chops to decide if the attack had been a mistake.

A court said the case was "nonjusticiable" (say that three times fast) essentially because it lacked the ability to question executive branch wisdom in launching the strike.

This has been the law of the land. Still, in the Ali Jaber case, Brown wrote, "This begs the question: if judges will not check this outsized power, then who will?"

She added, "Congressional oversight is a joke-and a bad one at that."

Brown said mankind had to make a choice, as Thomas More argued to young William Roper in A Man For All Seasons: "What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?"

Brown's suggestion was that "flattening" the law even for an ostensibly good cause would blow back on anyone who tried it.

That exact situation is playing out now. We spent the better part of two decades making presidents unaccountable warlords in order to more easily pursue "terrorists."

But then we elected a man with the brains of an anchovy to the presidency. Now we have to trust he will use that near-absolute power wisely, and early returns suggest he will not.

Hopefully we all had a good Thanksgiving anyway. Most of us probably did. We've mostly decided to close our eyes to these campaigns. But that may blow back on us too, someday. Even Thomas More knew, karma has a long memory.
(c) 2017 Matt Taibbi is Rolling Stone's chief political reporter, Matt Taibbi's predecessors include the likes of journalistic giants Hunter S. Thompson and P.J. O'Rourke. Taibbi's 2004 campaign journal Spanking the Donkey cemented his status as an incisive, irreverent, zero-bullshit reporter. His books include Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History, The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion, Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire.

SUDDENLY, A terrible thought struck me. What if Avi Gabbay really believes what he is saying?

Impossible. He cannot really believe all those things. No, no.

But if he does? Where does that leave us?

AVI GABBAY is the new leader of the Israeli Labor Party. Until recently, he was a founding member of a moderate right-wing party, Kulanu ("We all"). Without ever being elected to the Knesset, he served as a junior minister. He resigned when Avigdor Lieberman, considered by many as a semi-fascist (and the "semi" is far from certain), was allowed to join the government as Minister of Defense, the second most important post.

In a bold move, Gabbay left Kulanu and joined the Labor Party (also known as "the Zionist Camp") and was soon elected its chairman. However, he did not become the official "Leader of the Opposition", because he was not a member of the Knesset. (The formal title remained with his predecessor, the very nice but rather insignificant Yitzhak Herzog.)

One of Gabbay's outstanding qualities is the fact that he is "Oriental", an Eastern Jew. He is the seventh of eight children in a family that immigrated from Morocco in 1964, just three years before his birth.

This is very important. The Labor Party is decried as "Western" (or Ashkenazi), the party of the social elites, estranged from the mass of the Orientals. It must overcome this characterization if it ever wants to attain power again.

In the Likud Party, the situation is the exact opposite. The mass of Likud voters are Orientals, but Binyamin Netanyahu is as Ashkenazi as you can get. The Orientals adore him, as they have never adored any Oriental leader.

BUT GABBAY'S origin is not his only attribute. From his humble beginnings he climbed the heights of economic success. He became the CEO of one of Israel's most important corporations, amassing a personal fortune on the way.

He is not a charismatic leader, not a person to arouse the masses. Indeed, his face is easily forgotten. But he took with him from the business world a sound, logical way of thinking. In politics, logic is a rare commodity. It can be obstructive.

The question now is: where does logic take him?

DURING HIS few months as leader of the Labor Party, Gabbay has deeply shocked many party members. Shocked them to the core.

About once a week, usually on Shabbat, Gabbay lets loose a statement that seemingly contradicts everything the party has stood for during its more than one hundred years of existence.

He once declared that peace does not mean that any of the many dozens of settlements in the occupied territories must be removed. Until then, the party line was that only the "settlement blocs" - located hard on the Green line - could remain, within the framework of an agreed exchange of territories, and that all the others must be removed. Gabbay's announcement caused quite a stir, since it probably makes the "Two-State solution" impossible.

On another occasion, Gabbay announced that he would never set up a coalition with the "United List", the only Arab list in the Knesset. This list consists of three separate - and very different - Arab parties, which were compelled to unite when Lieberman (the same) raised the minimum electoral threshold in order to eliminate them.

It is very difficult (if not impossible) to put together a leftist majority in the Knesset without the Arab list. The Oslo agreement would never have come into being if the Arab members had not given their unwavering support to Yitzhak Rabin (but without joining his government).

To make matters worse, Gabbay announced that the only Arab member of the Labor Party in Parliament - a popular sports commentator - would not be in the next Knesset. His crime: he criticized the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which promised the Jews a national home in Palestine, which at the time was an Arab land.

THE CLIMAX (so far) came last week, To top it all, Gabbay did something that many Labor members found abhorrent.

There are in Israel tens of thousands of non-Jewish African refugees, especially from Sudan and Eritrea. They have been held for several months in an open semi-detention facility, which is vastly superior to conditions at home. Others vegetate in the poor quarters of Tel Aviv, doing occasional jobs and competing with poor inhabitants, making them very angry.

Israel claims to be a "Jewish State". Jews have been persecuted refugees for centuries. But now the government has decided not only to stem the flow, but to pay to dispose of the refugees who are already here: paying the government of Rwanda 5000 dollars for every refugee they accept from us. The refugees themselves will also get 3500 dollars each if they go voluntarily. If they refuse, they will be put in a real prison indefinitely.

Deported? Imprisoned? In a "Jewish" state? Incredible. And here comes Gabbay and calls upon his party to vote for this atrocity!

AS IF all this was not enough, Gabbay said something else incredible. He denounced his party's stand on Judaism.

Years ago, Netanyahu was caught on camera whispering into the ear of a very old rabbi that "the Labor Party has forgotten what it means to be Jewish." Incredibly, Gabbay repeated this accusation, announcing that the Labor Party had indeed "forgotten what it means to be Jewish."

Nothing could be more shocking than that. The party was founded a century ago by convinced atheists, like David Ben-Gurion, who refused to put a kippah on his head even at funerals. (Sometimes even I do so out of courtesy to religious mourners.)

The entire Zionist enterprise started as a rebellion against religion. Almost all the important rabbis of his day condemned Theodor Herzl, the founding father, as a heretic and cursed him in no uncertain terms. God Himself evicted the Jews from their country because of their sins, and only God could send His Messiah to bring them back there, if and when He pleases.

The Zionist Labor Movement has always been profoundly atheistic, except for minuscule religious elements. What Gabbay was saying now amounted to an ideological revolution. (By the way, gabbay is the Hebrew word for the administrator of a synagogue.)

Nobody is quite sure what "to be Jewish" means nowadays. Does Judaism represent a religion, a nation, or both? Does it only mean that one identifies with Jewish history and tradition, or that one believes in a God who has "chosen us from among the peoples?" And who the hell cares?

SO DOES Gabbay really believe all this stuff, or is it just political propaganda?

It may well be the latter.

Gabbay is a seasoned businessman. His logic is that of a businessman. It adds numbers.

There are two ways to view the Israeli political landscape. One is the simple one: adding election results. According to this system, the Right now enjoys a clear majority. Apart from the Likud, it consists of two extreme rightist parties, the "Jewish Home" and "Israel is Our Home", Kulanu and two Orthodox parties. The Left (or "Center-Left" as they like to call themselves these days) consists of Labor, Meretz, Ya'ir Lapid's "There is a Future" and the Arab list.

To change the balance, Labor must win over a considerable number of voters from the moderate Right.

Another way of looking at the picture sees a rightist minority facing a leftist minority, with the great mass of the people in between. The result is the same: the Center-Left must win over enough voters to change the balance.

How? Gabbay's answer seems logical: steal the clothes that the Right hung out to dry, as Churchill once put it. Meaning in practice: adopt the slogans of the right, look religious, act chauvinistic, make it possible for Rightist voters to vote for you.

That seems to be Gabbay's tactic. Can it succeed? In political life, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. If he can attract enough right-wing voters, he may change the balance. If his party loses voters on the left, no problem. They will vote for Meretz, which makes no difference. And if the Arabs are very angry, that makes no difference either: they have no choice but to support a leftist government "from the outside."

Bur what if this approach leads to disaster? Political logic is quite different from business logic. It is not based on a 2 + 2 = 4 equation. In politics the answer may well be 3 or 5.

And then it hit me. What if this is not a political tactic at all? What if Gabbay really believes in all this?

The New York Times last week opened its pages to critics of the U.S. corporate media's obsession with Vladimir Putin's endlessly alleged, but never proven, campaign to subvert "American democracy." After a year of unrelenting anti-Kremlin propaganda, the Times briefly lifted its curtain of censorship to allow a counter-narrative on "Russiagate" -but only for one discreet group: Russian "dissidents." (See "Why Putin's Foes Deplore U.S. Fixation on Election Meddling," November 23.)

These "pro-Western liberals who look to the United States as an exemplar of democratic values and journalistic excellence," as the Times describes them, are dismayed, insulted and angry at the non-stop lunacy churned out by U.S. media. If the Times, the Washington Post, CNN and most of the Democratic Party are to be believed, President Putin is a superman, "an almighty force from a James Bond saga," said Leonid M. Volkov, chief of staff for anti-Putin politician Aleksei A. Navalny. How could the Russian opposition ever hope to overcome such a titan -- a man who can wreck the political order in the world's reigning superpower with the expenditure of only $100,000 on Facebook? "This image is very bad for us," Volkov told the Times. "Putin is not a master geopolitical genius."

Putin has been made to look "invincible," said Michael Idov, a Russian-American screenwriter (the closest the Times got to giving a fellow American the opportunity to challenge the corporate Russiagate obsession).

The New York Times has cultivated a cabal of pro-western Russian politicians ever since Bill Clinton's presidency, when U.S. bankers helped to create the Russian oligarchy with assets stolen from the wreckage of the Soviet state. Vladimir Putin is credited with taming the oligarchs, who nevertheless remain embedded in the nation's infrastructure. The politicians the Times calls "dissidents" hate Putin, but they are also proud to be Russian, and cannot abide U.S. scape-goating of their nation. The Americans sound crazy. "What is happening with 'the investigation into Russian interference,' is not just a disgrace but a collective eclipse of the mind," said Volko.

It is obvious to every politically aware Russian that Donald Trump and his team of incompetents met with hardly any Russians of consequence on his trips to that country -- mostly wannabes and hustlers. But, U.S. audiences can't distinguish one Russian from the other, and know only one Russian face: Putin's.

Journalist Oleg V. Kashin, a Kremlin critic, said: "The image of Putin's Russia constructed by Western and, above all, American media outlets over the past 18 months shocks even the most anti-Putin reader in Russia." Times correspondent Higgins reports that Kashin "complained that the American media has consistently misconstrued the way Russia works, presenting marginal opportunists and self-interested businessmen with no real link to the Kremlin as state-controlled agents working on orders from Mr. Putin."

The New York Times and the Washington Post know their way around Moscow -- and if they don't, the CIA will give them directions. Indeed, their friends, the Russian "dissidents," would have been glad to advise the U.S. media on Russiagate, but that would have made a boring story about small time sleaze in a cold climate. What the U.S. War Party needed was a new cold war to accompany Washington's global military offensive.

U.S. "liberals" and "progressives" hate Trump more than they value peace, and are not nearly as smart as they think they are. Professor of history Ivan I. Kurilla, who specializes in American studies at the European University in St. Petersburg, said anti-Trump Americans want to foist him on Russia -- politically exiling the Orange Menace to somebody else's country. "American liberals are so upset about Trump that they cannot believe he is a real product of American life," said Kurilla. "They try to portray him as something created by Russia. This whole thing is about America, not Russia."

The Times' Russian dissident friends despise RT, the state-supported Russia news agency, but are worried about Washington's demand that RT register as a foreign agent. Until only a few years ago, U.S. NGOs were hyper-active in Russia, spending millions to create and subsidize opposition to Putin's United Russia party, hoping to foment a "color" revolution. Western-oriented political actors in Russia fear that Russiagate will provoke a Kremlin crackdown on activists that are too closely identified with the U.S. The truth is, the "dissidents" interviewed by the New York Times are dependent on western corporate media for legitimacy and visibility. The real opposition in Russia is the Communist Party, which is the second largest party in the country but gets almost no coverage in the U.S. press, while the western-allied opposition hardly shows up in the polls.

Thus, even the nature of "dissent" in Russia is grossly distorted by the U.S media, which commits a similar crime against truth on its home turf. The New York Times went all the way to Moscow and St. Petersburg to solicit critiques of Russiagate coverage ("propaganda" is a better term), but rigidly censors American skeptics.

This is the story of the long progress of humanity from the early days of opposable thumbs to the first farmer, the first builder, the first cured disease, the first literature in its second edition, the first time secondhand information was shared as a means of expanding knowledge, the first time anything was read for the first time by a second person who then passed it on, because they could.

This is about the internet as it exists today.

It began when Bi Sheng invented the first moveable type using materials made of porcelain during the Northern Song dynasty in China around 1040 AD. Some 300 years later, metal print books were created during the Goryeo dynasty in Korea. Less than 100 years later, Johannes Gutenberg invented the moveable-type printing press in Europe using materials that remained standard in the process for more than half a millennium. The Bible he printed, and the machine he used to do it, are widely viewed as the beginning of the Age of Enlightenment, the Renaissance and an explosion of learning that transformed the world.

It was no longer just the priests and wealthy elite who had access to information. The world had the words on a page now, and slowly but surely everything changed, and changed again, and then again. The only requirement for joining this ever-expanding new club was learning how to read. This was, and remains, no insignificant hurdle. Literacy has been power throughout the ages, right up to the modern era: Consider the relatively recent use of literacy tests to bar Black people from voting in the Jim Crow South. Poor people have historically and globally had less access to reading and education, yet another means of control.

Despite this, the flourishing of readily available words has become one of the most transformative forces in history. Want to learn how to build a house, grow crops, make a shirt, preserve food, knock down a fever, study a poem, find out about your ancestors or see what your local leaders have been up to lately? Go read about it. All of it.

Today, 1,000 years since Bi Sheng first made words with porcelain tools, the internet stands at the apex of the technology used to share and store information. It is a truly awe-inspiring machine made from billions of parts spread across the entire world and into the near reaches of space. Within its wires, motherboards and towering servers is the best and worst of us, a raw and undistilled vat of almost everything we are, the near sum of human knowledge that can be accessed by devices no larger than the palm of your hand. Oh, and cats. The internet also has cats.

It is daunting to encompass: The sum of human knowledge, access to more information than could be digested in a million lifetimes, right there in your pocket (if you have money for a phone) or on your desk (if you have money for a computer). It is tempting to call the sudden wide availability of information a step in human evolution, but that gets sticky with the science. Let there be no mistake in this, however: It was a revolution when it began a thousand years ago, it was massive, and it continues.

That revolution is happening today and happening tomorrow, you and I are right there in the thick of it, and it all began with the availability of the words. Every time you crack open some dog-eared paperback or look up a recipe on Pinterest, you are participating in that revolution in a very small but actual way, because you are utilizing an incredibly powerful tool only recently available in the human experience: easily accessed information.

As far as the powerful are concerned, easily accessed information is the single most dangerous thing in the world. Indeed, the lessons abound:

* The distribution of Martin Luther's 95 Theses shattered the Roman Catholic Church's iron hold on Europe;

* Rachel Carson's Silent Spring was a formative pillar of the environmental movement;

* Upton Sinclair changed the very nature of labor and manufacturing in the US with one widely read book;

* The US Constitution and Bill of Rights are themselves the product of a mass-distributed pamphleteering war between the Federalists and Anti-Federalists;

* Anne Frank's reprinted diary forced an unwilling world to confront the true nature of evil.

These lessons are not lost on the powerful. The very first act of any despotic government is the harsh restriction of access to information across the board, be it public or educational. The Nazis burned books, and the Khmer Rouge butchered teachers. It is all of a piece. When you control the information, you control the people.

Today, a small group of wealthy individuals would appear to have come to the conclusion that we're all getting too smart for our own good around here, and they have friends on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Thanks to the FCC, ownership of television -- the internet's older half-brother who talks too much -- is currently being further condensed into the hands of a corporate few who have powerfully authoritarian views on the matters of freedom, democracy and information.

While television is a notoriously muscular -- not to mention devious -- purveyor of information, it is not the massive library/school/newspaper/sounding board/shopping mall the internet has become. Television is a one-way conversation; the internet is people. This is why the FCC's push to fundamentally rewire the internet is so profoundly dangerous. The fact that the FCC has named this brazen power grab "Restoring Internet Freedom" makes it all the more insidious.

Why? Because the internet is wide open to any and all who can gain access to it, and access is as close as the local library. If the FCC overturns net neutrality, huge multinational corporations like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast will essentially be able to decide who gets to see what online, and for an unregulated fee. Worse, Title II of the Telecommunications Act gives the FCC what is called universal service authority, which grants it the power to make sure everyone in the US has access to the network. Remove Title II, which is central to the plan, and that availability will wither with no legal oversight.

For the internet service providers (ISPs), the core of the argument is control. Title II derives its authority from Congress, which first deployed the rule in 1934 to regulate the telephone monopoly enjoyed by AT&T. Title II, in short, labels the internet as a necessary utility (just as it did with the telephone) and makes it subject to the same regulations as other utilities like water and heat. The ISPs hate that the internet has been designated as such, and this push by the FCC to eliminate that designation is taking place at their behest.

Make no mistake: The internet is a utility, one that was built with your taxpayer dollars by your government in one of the most significant public works projects ever undertaken. With this utility, you do not get water when you turn on the spigot; you get words. Information. Freedom. When they own the words, they own you.

As with everything else these days, those who seek these restrictions do so for financial reasons. What is now an open field where every website is treated the same would become, under "Restoring Internet Freedom," a pay-to-play enterprise highly profitable to the ISPs. Indeed, the only "freedom" involved here is their freedom to jack up the fees for what would become a demonstrably inferior product.

There is, however, far more involved here than simple greed. I believe the powerful few who seek this monumental and dangerous change are doing so because a child viewing a photo of a solitary man defying a tank in Tiananmen Square might learn what courage in the face of wanton authority is. They are doing so, in part, because they fear the words, because words provide liberty in dark places. The internet is all the words in one place, for the first time in human history. Such a mighty tool is a threat to those who have so much but want more, and they know it full well.

The net neutrality argument is not only about small business or licensing fees. It is about Sheng and Gutenberg, and all the moments of radical change that came about using the tools they first perfected a millennium ago. It is about what the internet is, and can be, so long as it remains open and free. The sum of human knowledge is our natural birthright; we made it, and should have access to it as we please. Those who believe otherwise are trying to steal our past and our future. They must not be allowed to succeed.