Tag: Pentagon Papers

The Story: Mike Gravel, a former US Senator who was for much of this year waging a long-shot campaign for the Democratic Party's nomination for...

The Story: Michael Gravel, who is a former Senator (D) from Alaska and at 89 years something of a blast from the political past, is...

After the Trump administration asked the supreme court to issue an unusually quick ruling on the Pentagon’s policy of restricting military service by transgender people, critics said the request was likely only to complicate a deteriorating relationship between the president and the federal judiciary. The Trump administration is “forcing [the court] into a minefield that many justices would almost surely prefer to avoid”, Matz said. Administration officials also asked the high court to stop a trial in a climate change lawsuit and to intervene in a lawsuit over the administration’s decision to add a question on citizenship to the 2020 census. The supreme court almost always waits to get involved in a case until both a trial and appeals court have ruled. One famous past example is when the Nixon administration went to court to try to prohibit the publication of the Pentagon Papers, the secret history of US involvement in the Vietnam war. The appeals court has since ruled but the administration’s request that the court hear the case stands. Trump dismisses Roberts rebuke and blames judges for 'bedlam and chaos' Read more In the military case, the administration argued that the supreme court should step in before an appeals court rules because the case “involves an issue of imperative public importance: the authority of the US military to determine who may serve in the Nation’s armed forces”. Trump revisited that policy, the president issuing an order banning most transgender troops from serving except under limited circumstances. Still ongoing in lower courts are the census and climate change cases. The court will hear arguments in the census question case in February.

A giant leap for mankind or purely an American achievement? “The American people paid for that mission, on rockets built by Americans, with American technology & carrying American astronauts. Inevitably, the news was relayed to Donald Trump, whose response raised the affair to full-on culture-war level. “When you think of Neil Armstrong and when you think of the landing on the moon, you think about the American flag. Chazelle’s omission of the flag-planting was deliberate, but not politically motivated, the director said in response. “My goal with this movie was to share with audiences the unseen, unknown aspects of America’s mission to the moon – particularly Neil Armstrong’s personal saga and what he may have been thinking and feeling during those famous few hours … This film is about one of the most extraordinary accomplishments not only in American history, but in human history.” Chazelle was supported by Armstrong’s sons and James R Hansen, author of the nonfiction book First Man, from which the movie was adapted. Historically, space has been overwhelmingly white, male and American, in real life and in film, as seen in “serious” space films like The Right Stuff, Apollo 13 and Clint Eastwood’s Space Cowboys. Fifty-six years ago, in his famous Rice University speech that sought to persuade Americans to go to the moon, John F Kennedy told the US: “The eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond, and we have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace.” Hollywood has been steadily de-Americanising space, from Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity to Ridley Scott's The Martian That flag was always envisaged as being the stars and stripes – and it has always been a bit of both: part “flag of conquest”, part “banner of freedom and peace”. That was our priority.” What would Armstrong have said about all this? Armstrong was unimpeachably a patriot who loved and served his country, but he was also tight-lipped.