Features
Election Interference Now Comes From Inside the ‘White House’ Itself!

DONALD TRUMP BACK AT WORKING THE BLIND SIDE . . .
by Selvam Canagaratna
“An American presidential campaign resembles a forced march through enemy territory.”
– Lewis Lapham,
Imperial Masquerade, 1990.
In 2016, Russian hackers attacked the Democratic National Committee and other high-profile Democratic targets. This year, the government that’s interfering most aggressively in the 2020 US election isn’t Vladimir Putin’s — it’s Trump’s very own!
The most infamous example until now of Trump’s use of the powers of state for electoral ends was his attempted shakedown of the Ukrainian government — for which Trump was ultimately impeached.
Just a few weeks after he was acquitted in the Senate, Trump hired Richard Grenell, a longtime Republican operative who also served as Ambassador to Germany, to serve as acting Director of National Intelligence. Grenell’s main accomplishment in that position was stoking the conspiracy Trump has dubbed ‘Obamagate’.
Democrats warned that if Trump wasn’t taught a lesson by way of impeachment, he would simply be emboldened to keep abusing his office for political purposes. And he has!
Using his rarefied government perch, Grenell selectively declassified intelligence in order to suggest that Biden had illegally spied on Trump’s campaign in 2016 — part of an effort to turn the actual misdeeds of Trump’s inner circle into a conspiracy theory about his opponent — an electoral disinformation campaign run by the United States government!
“I think you’ll go down as the all-time great ‘Acting’ ever, at any position,” Trump told Grenell admiringly as he exited the DNI role. Grenell promptly took a job with the Republican National Committee.
Meanwhile, Attorney General Bill Barr has suggested he might soon release the “Durham Report,” the Justice Department’s investigation of Russia’s intervention in the 2016 election. The Attorney General has made no secret about the timing. “I’ve said there are going to be developments, significant developments, before the election,” he said in an interview on Fox News last month.
Despite public pressure from Trump, Barr has said that he doesn’t expect the Durham Report to lead to any criminal investigations of Biden or former President Barack Obama, and has lamented “increasing attempts to use the criminal justice system as a political weapon.” But in late August — in the middle of the Republican National Convention that was itself held, in part, at the White House — the Justice Department announced it was requesting more information from four Democratic governors on their handling of the Coronavirus pandemic, while “evaluating whether to initiate investigations.” They included the governors of Michigan and Pennsylvania, two swing states at the centre of Trump’s re-election strategy. “This really does smell,” a former DOJ official told HuffPost.
Barr, meanwhile, has used his position as the nation’s chief law enforcement official to spread false information about voter fraud, in an attempt to influence the conduct of the election itself. On CNN, in an effort to impugn the legitimacy of mail-in voting, he invented a story about a Texas man who voted 1,700 times in one election — something his office later conceded never happened!
On Tuesday, in a move the New York Times called “highly unusual,” the Justice Department intervened in defense of Trump in an ongoing defamation lawsuit brought by the writer E. Jean Carroll, who has alleged that Trump raped her in the 1990s. Trump denied the charge and claimed she had fabricated the story because she was “selling a new book.” The government’s official position is that when Trump said Carroll was “not my type”, he “was acting within the scope of his office or employment at the time,” according to the department’s court filing.
It’s a major assist to Trump, who was facing mounting legal bills from the case. He faces the prospect of having to provide DNA evidence and testify under oath in the coming months. As the Times put it, “The motion also effectively protects Mr. Trump from any embarrassing disclosures in the middle of his campaign for re-election.” In 2016, Trump had Michael Cohen to hush up damaging personal revelations. Now he has the DOJ.
Some synergy between policy and politics is to be expected — and it’s natural that someone who violated the Fair Housing Act as a businessman would continue to undermine it as President! In the Trump administration, in 2020, it is impossible to tell where the government ends and the campaign begins.
The same holds true at the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, which held a citizenship ceremony at the White House during the recent convention as part of a stunt to soften the President’s image. At the same time, the agency was poised to disenfranchise between 200,000 and 300,000 citizens-in-waiting by delaying their naturalization process.
“The absence of these hundreds of thousands of ‘missing voters’, many of whom live in swing states,” argued the Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell, “could be sufficient to sway the election.”
Rarely has the government interference been as explicit as it was in August, when Trump bragged that he was starving the United States Postal Service of bailout funds it had requested in the hopes of sabotaging mail-in balloting in the presidential election. “They need that money in order to have the post office work so it can take these millions and millions of ballots,” Trump said. “But if they don’t get those two items…that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting, because they’re not equipped to have it.”
Trump, after botching the government’s response to the pandemic that has killed nearly 200,000 Americans, has also tried to exploit the crisis. He has repeatedly floated the prospect of making a Covid-19 vaccine available before the election — perhaps, he said last Friday, as early as October. Thankfully public health officials, at least so far, sound more reluctant to get involved in Trump’s election schemes.
Although Food and Drug Administration officials have insisted their vaccine approval process will not be influenced by the campaign, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent a memo to states last week instructing them to be prepared to distribute a vaccine by November 1 — two days before Trump’s self-imposed election deadline. The problem with a President who uses public policy for personal ends is you can never really tell when one becomes another.
Last month, Politico reported that the Department of Health and Human Services is considering spending up to $250 million on a media blitz to “defeat despair and inspire hope” on the pandemic in the coming months. While public-service announcements are hardly unusual, the spending blitz prompted a concerned letter to HHS Secretary Alex Azar from Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), wondering if it was “a thinly-veiled effort to use taxpayer dollars on a propaganda campaign to support the President’s re-election effort.”
And this summer Trump deployed federal law enforcement agencies and in some cases the military to American cities to suppress protests — in an attempt to reshape the narrative around which his national campaign is unfolding, which is the notion that Americans won’t be safe in Biden’s America. On Wednesday, a whistleblower at the Department of Homeland Security alleged that top officials at the agency used their power to manipulate intelligence reports in order “to ensure they matched up with the public comments by Trump on the subject of ANTIFA and ‘anarchist’ groups” — in other words, they cooked up the justification for Trump’s campaign attacks against Biden. DHS was simultaneously squelching information about Russian interference because it would reflect poorly on the President. Covering up election interference is also a form of election interference.
Remember, just days before the 2018 midterms, Trump sent 5,000 troops to the US-Mexican border in a barely-concealed gambit to force Democrats on the defensive.
The 2018 ploy was, of course, a failure. And therein lies the silver lining for Democrats. Trump has demonstrated practically every day the fragility of political norms; the separation of campaigning and governance exists more or less on the honour system. It turns out it’s incredibly easy to cynically treat the federal bureaucracy like an arm of the RNC. But when you’re doing it all in plain sight, sometimes that itself becomes the story!
Features
First leftist Mayor after NM: SJB, UNP beaten at their own game

What’s in a vote? That which we call a show of hands could still be as concealed as a secret vote. The newly elected Colombo Municipal Council has chosen the NPP’s Vraie Cally Balthazaar as the City’s new Mayor, but on a secret vote and not in an open show of hands. The secret vote route appears to have caused much consternation among the SJB-UNP opposition forces at the Town Hall. The latter openly preferred an open show and are blaming the secret vote for the defeat of their candidate Riza Zarook.
On the face of it, the NPP with 49 of the 117 Councillors has a more legitimate claim to have one of own as Mayor rather than the SJB with 29 Councillors. In what has been described as a “desperate move”, the SJB forged a mayoral united front by fusing its 29 members with the UNP’s 13, the SLPP’s five and the singular member of the People’s Alliance (whoever the PA now is).
The beefed up SJB mayoral front total of 48 was close enough to the NPP’s 49 for claims of legitimacy, and both sides needed the support at least another 11 or 10 from the remaining 20 members to get the required majority of 59 votes. In the secret vote, the NPP’s candidate presumably got 12 of the non-allied votes to get 61 votes in total. The SJB mayoral front got only six for a total 54 votes. Two votes, there’s no certainty as to whose, were rejected.
Would the result have gone the other way if this municipal conclave had decided on an open show instead of papal secrecy? You do not need supernatural powers to determine that. Let alone a clairvoyant like Gota’s Gnanaka! The commonplace supposition would be that a secret vote may have allowed secret transactions to secure support with hidden hands.
But no one is accusing the JVP-NPP of resorting to such time-(dis)honoured tactics perfected for over 75 years by the UNP and later copied by all others, and most vigorously by the Rajapaksas. If I remember right or not mistaken, the Sunday Times Political Editor made the point after the May LG elections that there was no hanky-panky meddling in the elections by the NPP government – unlike (this is my parentheses) all previous governments in all previous elections.
As well, we may turn the question around and ask about the insistence on an open show of hands as against a secret vote. Is it because the SJB is now all for keeping its hands clean and asking others to show their hands of support in the open without receiving undue incentives? OR is it because the SJB and its allies wanted to see in the open which of the NPP councillors, who may have been beneficiaries of earlier incentives, would now betray them and support the NPP candidate?
Put another way, was it a stratagem to ask for a show of hands to see the breach of loyalty in the open in spite of past IOUs? The latter hypothesis has greater credibility because of the blessings given to the SJB alliance by two former presidents representing two fallen political houses.
No matter what happened secretly and how, the eventual victory of Ms. Balthazar as NPP Mayor chalks up a rare non-UNP victory in the history of Colombo Town Hall politics. After independence there have been only two non-UNP Mayors in Colombo. The first came as a progressive breakthrough when NM Perera became Mayor in 1954. The second came as a comical farce in 2006, when Uvais Mohamed Imitiyas, the leader of an independent group put up by the UNP after its botched up list of candidates had been rejected by the Election Commissioner. Ms. Balthazar is also the City’s second female mayor in quick succession after Rosy Senanayake herself an old school UNPer.
In NM’s Footsteps
News commentaries on Ms. Balthazar’s victory have made mention of the fact that she is the first leftist Mayor of Colombo in 70 years. The first and the last leftist Mayor so far has been Dr. NM Perera, the LSSP leader. NM had been a CMC member from July 1948 and became Mayor on 13 August 1954 after the municipal election on 24 July 1954. A New York Times news report called him the world’s first Trotskyite Mayor, a tongue-in-cheek shot that was characteristic of the Cold War era.
An era that the world badly misses now with an unstoppable Netanyahu and TACO (Trump always chickens out) Trump running amok. In this instance, with Middle East burning, Trump has chickened out to the war schemes of Netanyahu.
Back to Colombo of the 1950s, the LSSP fared well in the LG elections of 1954 including Colombo, a number of Urban Councils and many village councils. In Colombo, NM was accompanied by a strong LSSP contingent that included stalwarts like Bernard Soysa Osmund Jayaratne and a well known architect of the era, J. E. Devapura. Some years ago, Stanley Abeynaike recounted the saga of NM’s Mayorship in the Sunday Observer. Last week, Nandana Weerarathne (Nandana Substack) has recalled the old NM story in the current context.
The initiatives that NM spearheaded as Mayor are worthy of emulation even today. The first order of business was ridding Town Hall of bribery and corruption and implementing a purposeful budget. He took on the private omnibus system within Colombo, replacing it by a public trolley-bus service; and started planning a public bus service for the city and suburban travellers in collaboration with the local authorities of Kolonnawa, Wattala, Dehiwela, Mount-Lavinia and Kotte. City cleanup, slum clearance, small housing schemes, upkeep of rental housing neglected by landlords, and transferring ownership of rental housing to tenants after 30 years of occupancy – were among the progressive measures that were rapidly rolled out during NM’s methodical mayorship.
But all those initiatives of NM riled up the landlords and the private bus owners, and through them the entire UNP government of Prime Minister Kotelawala. Sir John and his cabal were not going to let NM to be the Mayor of Colombo’s even as the country was heading to the general election in 1956. A conspiracy was hatched, and a resolution was passed at an emergency UNP meeting at Sri Kotha, the UNP headquarters, “to remove the Colombo Mayor, Dr. NM Perera.” Even the courts got in on the act to facilitate a resolution at Council against NM as Mayor.
When the resolution to remove NM as Mayor finally came to the floor, Bernard Soysa, Osmund Jayaratne and JE Devapura took turns speaking for hours on end against the resolution. They were hoping to run the clock until the Supreme Court ruling came. But to no avail, and the resolution was passed on October 1st, 1955 by a majority of two votes. One of them was the Communist Party’s Kotahena Member Anthony Marcellus who was brought over to the UNP to vote against NM. Orchestrating the moves was R. Premadasa (father of the current SJB leader) who was brought from outside to oversee matters inside, replacing then Deputy Mayor T. Rudra, who was obliged to resign. All of that in time for the April 1956 election that the UNP lost anyway.
Even the 2006 election of Uvais Mohamed Imitiyas, a political nondescript, as mayor, was the result of the backfiring of a UNP plan to prevent Vasudeva Nanayakkara, another LSSPer, from becoming Mayor. The UNP even got the better of Milinda Moragoda, one time Wickremesinghe confidant, when he chose to make a run for the Mayorship with the support of the Rajapaksas in 2011. UNP fielded its own candidate, AJM Muzammil, who defeated Moragoda and stayed on as Mayor until Rosie Senanayake succeeded him as the next, and now likely the last, UNP Mayor.
So, one can imagine the consternation of Ranil Wickremesinghe in seeing even the last bastion of the UNP’s power legacy being taken away by the upstart NPP. After 1977, through constitutional chicanery and electoral subterfuge the UNP established its supremacy at all levels of government and in all elections. After Chandrika Kumaratunga’s spectacular victories in 1994, the UNP’s electoral superstructure has been steadily dismantled and the only elected body that has survived this debacle is the Colombo Municipality. Until now, that is.
And all of this has been on Ranil Wickremesinghe’s watch. He has been quintessentially a Colombo politician, albeit with an elitist base like JR Jayewardene, unlike the likes of Pieter Keuneman, Bernard Soysa or R. Premadasa who reached out to a broader cross-section of people in the City. Losing Colombo would be the bitterest pill to swallow.
If you are inclined to feel sorry for Mr. Wickremesinghe, save yourself some space to feel good about the future of the City and even the country. Leaving Colombo in the hands of an opportunistically cobbled up SJB-UNP-SLPP alliance would have been both an insult and an injury. The NPP deserved to have one from its ranks as Mayor and it has beaten the UNP in its own game to seal its victory. But having won to govern, will the NPP govern to win – again? That is the question.
by Rajan Philips ✍️
Features
Criminalise war and work tirelessly for peace: Dr. Mahathir Mohamad

Soon to be 100-years ( July 10 th 1925) the two times former Prime Minister of Malaysia’s advice to the world is to “Criminalize War” and work tirelessly for peace.
Q: What is the secret to your healthy happy life?
A: People ask me that question all the time and I say I think its just my good luck. If I have suffered from some kind of fatal disease like cancer, of course life would be different.
I have had heart attacks, and both times I had open heart surgery, but nowadays they don’t open your heart. They use stents. I survived and I recovered and I was able to function. After that I am more careful with what I eat. I keep my weight steady. I do not increase my weight.
In this world, food is the problem. On the one hand you have people who are obese and on the other hand, we have a world that is starving. So, I avoid being obese and eat only very little every day.
Q: What is your advice to the younger generation?
A: My advice is to be active. Active means not only physically active. The brain is an amazing muscle. You need to use it every single day. If you see weight lifters, they have big muscles because they do exercise, You must not become sedentary. Brain must be constantly exercised.
Q: Now that you have retired, what is your day like?
A: I want to take it easy, but most of the time, I come to work almost daily. Usually, people try to retire at 55 or 56. But they must not do that. I keep my body and mind active all the time. I still read, write and do whatever is needed of me.
Q: About the world and with all that is going on around us, what would your advice be to all nations, specially to the nations that are at war?
A: When I stepped down from being Prime Minister, I started a movement to ‘Criminalize War” to make war a crime. There was some support, it took a long time. I believe that any conflict should be resolved. Not through killing each other. You should resolve conflicts through peaceful means like negotiations. That is what we practice here. We are a multinational country, normally there would be many conflicts, but we do not have war in Malaysia. We sit down and talk.
Q: If you had one more opportunity to be Prime Minister of Malaysia, what would you do differently this time?
A: When I stepped down after 22 years, there was still a lot of things to be done. These 22 years were a time of very high tension that came from developed countries. So, at that time, I had to know how things should be done and when things should be done. When I stepped down, unfortunately, my successors were focused on other things. In fact, making money became their priority, so the focus on the country, diminished.
Q: What is the one thing you would like to see happen in your country or in the world as a whole?
A: There are developed countries and there are under developed countries. We want to be a developed country. Developed countries have many assets. For example, economically our people have a fairly good life, our people are involved in activities that contribute to the wellbeing of each other and to other nations. Countries need to help each other, for example in the sciences. There are many areas of research that still need to be done. I would like to see developed countries, reach out to developing countries and form healthy alliances to make each other prosperous.
I have lived a fruitful life. I am happy and I wish to see all nations prosperous and live in peace.
Anusha Rayen, Freenlance Journalist (Formerly ‘The Island Newspaper’ staff member & Parliament reporter) sits for an exclusive interview with former PM of Malaysia Dr. Mahathir Mohamad in Puthrajaya.
Features
Price of Netanyahu’s Iran Offensive

That was brutal, and predicated on years of fabricated deceit. But that is how power operates. Netanyahu is not acting in isolation; he was ushered into this calamity with calculated endorsement from the West. For both Iran and Israel, this is a zero-sum confrontation—a tragic entanglement where ancient antagonisms, contemporary geopolitics, and enduring colonial residues violently intersect. What is most intellectually arresting is the glaring paradox Western powers routinely embrace. When Netanyahu launches a premeditated and unlawful assault on Iran, it is euphemistically labelled as a measure of self-defence. Yet when Vladimir Putin deploys forces into Ukraine, the West decries it as an unprovoked invasion. This hypocrisy in moral reasoning illustrates the incoherence of Western ethical frameworks—marked by selective outrage, selective jurisprudence, and selective memory.
Netanyahu is actively courting American bombardment of Tehran, even venturing so far as to suggest the types of ordnance most suitable for maximum devastation. Trump, meanwhile, hesitates—not over Iran’s fate, but because the ensuing ramifications will inevitably encircle him. This cynical arithmetic typifies the geopolitical stage on which empires perform their cruelties. A week has now passed since Netanyahu’s incursion into Iran—a deliberate campaign tacitly sanctioned by the United States and its constellation of affluent allies, whose modern prosperity is inseparable from centuries of extraction and systemic plunder. War, whether desirable or not, remains the central mechanism by which empires assert dominion, redraw territories, and dismantle resistance. Israel’s open defiance of international law—manifest in its missile barrage on Iranian soil—lays bare an unsettling truth: if global powers truly revered international legal norms, Netanyahu’s actions would face unequivocal denunciation. Instead, one could argue—chillingly—that he affirms history’s most ominous prophecies.
Western media, complicit in sanitising this act of aggression, frames it as an “unprecedented” strike—yet again resorting to euphemism to mask illegality. This was not an improvisational operation; it was the culmination of extensive clandestine preparation by Netanyahu and his ultranationalist Orthodox coalition. Israel’s intelligence apparatus has, over decades, embedded itself within the architecture of Iranian society, executing key figures and orchestrating strategic assassinations. The latest Friday strikes were not merely military engagements—they constituted a coordinated political decapitation, targeting senior officials central to the Iranian state.
Iranian society today endures compounded crises. Their tenacity and national pride remain steadfast, yet they are economically suffocated by Western sanctions, which have induced runaway inflation and scarcity. From first-hand experience in Tehran, Iranians are not consumed by a siege mentality; rather, they display a cautious hospitality that, once trust is earned, transforms into deep generosity—qualities starkly misrepresented in Western discourse. In contrast, Israelis are socialised into a perpetual state of existential fear. “Security” is not merely policy—it is a psychological infrastructure, permeating every aspect of public and private life. Israel’s economy thrives not only through sanctioned trade but through its robust arms industry and cyber-warfare enterprises, often exported under the guise of national expertise. This divergence in societal conditioning is critical: it reflects distinct historical wounds and geopolitical compulsions.
To grasp Israel’s war on Iran, one must situate it within the long arc of Western imperial entrenchment in West Asia. This history is punctuated by covert operations, artificial borders, and a strategy of managed chaos. The 1953 CIA-backed coup in Iran—toppling the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh and reinstating the autocratic Shah—is emblematic of this trajectory. For decades, Western powers suppressed indigenous sovereignty while installing compliant strongmen. The 1979 Islamic Revolution was not merely theological upheaval; it was a radical assertion of national agency forged in the crucible of sustained foreign domination. In the revolution’s wake, Iranian society was reconstituted through a deep-rooted collectivism and assertive nationalism that continues to shape its resistance against external coercion.
Viewed through this prism, Netanyahu’s tenure may be remembered as one of the most corrosive in Israel’s history. By fusing religious chauvinism with militaristic expansionism, he has eviscerated Israel’s democratic ethos, transforming “security” into a tool of territorial expropriation and systemic Palestinian disenfranchisement. His escalation against Iran is not merely a tactical error; it is an incitement to regional disintegration. Framed as a crusade for “unconditional surrender,” his belligerence risks igniting a broader conflagration whose consequences will inevitably recoil upon Israel itself. Netanyahu, then, appears less as a strategist than as a provocateur, recklessly agitating the region’s deepest historical and sectarian fissures.
According to Haaretz, an independent Israeli media outlet operating despite a severely censored and often propagandistic Israeli media environment, several prominent progressive Jewish groups were notably absent from the so-called “joint unity statement” backing Israel’s strikes on Iran. These groups contend that while Iran should not acquire nuclear weapons, military action will at best delay the threat and more likely strengthen hardliners. They argue that diplomacy, not bombs, has proven effective in preventing nuclear proliferation—revealing significant divisions within the Jewish community over Netanyahu’s war.
Meanwhile, a report in the Financial Times captures the civil dimension of this confrontation. Despite sustained bombardment, millions of Iranians remain in Tehran. “Trump and Netanyahu say ‘evacuate’ as if they care about our health. How can a city of 10 million evacuate? My husband and I are not going to pave the ground for them. Let them kill us,” Shirin, a private sector employee told the newspaper. Their refusal to flee is not naïveté—it is a visceral affirmation of identity and resistance. The Iranian public consciousness, hardened by decades of war, sanctions, and subterfuge, manifests a collective defiance often misread in the West. The state’s nationalist discourse resonates beyond clerical authority; it channels a cultural memory of resistance against imperial intrusion.
Moreover, the disproportionate risk to civilians is staggering. Israeli operations ostensibly targeting senior military personnel inevitably endanger entire urban populations, as these individuals live and operate within densely populated civilian zones. The echoes of Israel’s operations in Lebanon—where missile strikes against Hezbollah figures claimed high civilian casualties—are unmistakable. The Iranian Health Ministry’s figure of nearly 1,500 casualties reveals the raw human cost beneath the rhetoric of strategic necessity.
This episode also exposes the profound hypocrisy embedded in Western narratives on nuclear proliferation. The International Atomic Energy Agency has repeatedly found no conclusive evidence that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapon systematically. Yet, Western powers wield this unverified threat as a pretext for military aggression. The contradictory statements from US officials—from intelligence directors denying Iran’s weaponisation efforts to presidents asserting Tehran is “very close” to the bomb—reflect a politicisation of intelligence designed to justify interventionism.
History has shown the futility of liberal interventionist fantasies: that democracy can be air-dropped or imposed through market restructuring. The Arab Spring, once heralded as a democratic revival, instead expedited the collapse of fragile states and exacerbated regional instability. The supposed liberal order in West Asia has devolved into a transactional, militarised regime wherein peace is manufactured, not cultivated.
Netanyahu’s war on Iran is not an anomaly—it is the terminal result of accumulated imperial failures, ideological rigidity, and historical amnesia. It confirms a grim axiom: when utopias collapse, it is always the powerless who bleed. His offensive, cloaked in the pieties of national security, belongs to a longer, darker chronicle—one whose conclusion will define the fate of West Asia and the very contours of justice in our century.
by Nilantha Ilangamuwa ✍️
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