Good morning. It is February 5th. It's a dry day at ground level in New York, but cloudy overhead. The weather box on the front of the New York Times says “cold clouds and a little dim sun. High 33.” Overnight we're due for the worst kind of wintry mix. Snow warming up into ice, warming up into slush, warming up into rain. And this is your indignity morning podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca taking a look at the day and the news. 

Speaking of the weather, The Guardian reports that Elon Musk's minions pushed their way past security to start interfering with operations at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Meanwhile, for the head of NOAA, Trump has nominated Neil Jacobs, best known for pressuring scientists under the first Trump administration, NPR notes, to change the forecast for Hurricane Dorian after Donald Trump wrongly said it was heading for Alabama, in the episode where Trump ended up showing the press a map with a fake extension of the hurricane forecast zone drawn on in Sharpie. 

Trump's fantasies have become substantially more dangerous and more frighteningly empowered since then, to the point that the Times made room on the front page for news that only developed in the evening yesterday, namely two columns wide, “TRUMP PROPOSING TAKEOVER OF GAZA AS U.S. TERRITORY / Brazen Plan to Relocate All Palestinians
and Rebuild War-Torn Enclave.” Not only did they get the news in the paper, they got the revision of the news in the paper. Since the first draft they published online described the president's wholehearted commitment of the United States to a genocidal imperialist land grab as “audacious.”

“Brazen” is still not much better, but the Times still hasn't worked its way around to conceding that “outrageous” might be the most accurate word to describe the news. What is there to say? The plan would be to take on first-hand responsibility for the immense war crimes that the United States has already been party to through its indiscriminate military and political support for Israel's slaughter in Gaza and compound that by deploying US military forces to directly carry out a colonial invasion and ethnic cleansing in a region where US interventions by force have an undisputed record of strategic failure and have precipitated horrific, uncontrollable and further destabilizing violence. In Vietnam, once the general contours of combat and the course of the war had been clearly established, there was a thing that used to happen, to lieutenants who tried to make their units do things that the rank and file knew were stupid and pointlessly dangerous. 

What happens when the commander in chief tells the entire army to go carry out a mission doomed to brutality and failure? I guess we'll learn. Anyway, as the Times writes it, “while the president framed the matter as a humanitarian imperative and an economic development opportunity, he effectively reopened a geopolitical Pandora's box with far reaching implications for the Middle East. Control over Gaza has been one of the major flashpoints of the Arab-Israeli conflict going back decades. And the idea of relocating its Palestinian residents recalls an era when Western great powers redrew the maps of the region and moved around populations without regard to local autonomy.” The Times continues, “the notion of the United States taking over sovereign territory in the Middle East would be a dramatic reversal for Mr. Trump who first ran for office in 2016, vowing to extract America from the region following the Iraq war and decried the nation building of his predecessors. In unveiling the plan, Mr. Trump did not cite any legal authority giving him the right to take over the territory, nor did he address the fact that forcible removal of the population violates international law.” 

Speaking of international law, not in the New York Times is the news that yesterday the Trump administration sent a military flight with 10 migrants to Guantanamo Bay as the first installment of prisoners in what's intended to become a concentration camp with a capacity of 30,000. CNN writes, “as tents went up in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba to hold migrants, attorneys at the Department of Homeland Security and Pentagon were still trying to determine whether it was legal to take the unprecedented step of flying migrants from the US southern border to the facility, according to two US officials and a person familiar with the planning.” The story explains, “while Guantanamo Bay hosts a migrant processing center, it has largely been used for migrants interdicted at sea, not brought from the United States. ‘They'd be pushing the limits of where the Immigration and Nationality Act applies,’ said a former Homeland Security official. Immigration law applies to the United States, and it's unclear what would happen to those moved out of the country, only to be held in detention elsewhere. The source familiar with the plan said questions like how long the migrants can legally be held there, and what their rights would be while detained are still unanswered. It is also unclear whether the migrants will have any access to legal or social services while detained at the base.” That's quite a picture of the plan then. The sort of plan that doesn't really involve any advanced planning. Who else was it who opened a bunch of concentration camps and then gradually worked out over time exactly what was going to happen in them? 

Meanwhile, as cruel and barbarous as the administration's policies are. It's helpful not to lose sight of the fact that they are also occasions for waste and looting. As the Wall Street Journal writes in its story about the Guantanamo transfer, “the flight Tuesday to Guantanamo Bay was on a C-17 military jet. The Trump administration has been using military aircraft to carry out routine deportations from the border, mostly to Guatemala and other countries in Latin America. The administration used a C-17 this week to deport roughly 100 Indian migrants back to India, according to the Homeland Security Department. It costs $28,500 an hour to fly a C-17, compared with $8,500 an hour for a standard U.S. immigration and Customs Enforcement flight, according to government figures. The flights to Guantanamo take roughly five hours. It isn't clear why officials used a military plane rather than one in the fleet already on contract with ICE.” That would make a tidy $100,000 in overage on the Guantanamo flight, even as Elon Musk smashes the civil service in the name of saving money. 

Beyond the NOAA incursion, the morning paper reports that Musk's squad is in the Education department. The story focuses on the news that the Musk people are targeting the civil rights office. But the Washington Post also reports that Musk's staffers “have gained access to multiple sensitive internal systems including a financial aid data set that contains the personal information for millions of students enrolled in the federal student aid program.” Just an endless rolling data breach of everyone's most personal information. 

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Trump administration's extralegal buyout offers to force out government workers have now been extended to the entire workforce of the Central Intelligence Agency. Lest anyone get excited about Trump crushing or even curbing the clandestine state. The Journal reports that the offers are meant to winnow out the workforce, so the agency is focused on Trump's priorities. Trump's CIA, the Journal writes, “will have a greater focus on the Western hemisphere, targeting countries not traditionally considered adversaries of the US.” That's according to an aid to newly confirmed CIA director John Ratcliffe. “For example,” the journal writes, “the CIA will use espionage to give Trump extra leverage in his trade negotiations, potentially spying on Mexico's government amid the ongoing trade spat, the aide said. The CIA will also take on a significant role fighting Mexican drug cartels, the aide said, which Trump designated as terror groups on his first day in office.” There's that Trump isolationism, hard at work, teeing up counterinsurgency wars in Mexico and Gaza simultaneously. 

What else? Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard seem comfortably in line for Senate approval as Secretary of Health and Human Services and Director of National Intelligence, respectively. It's hard to really object to their ignorance, conspiracism, corruption, and conflict of interest, given that most of the government is effectively, if not lawfully, in the hands of Elon Musk. 

And, with Donald Trump planning to attend the Super Bowl, between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles in New Orleans. The NFL is removing the END RACISM message from the back line of the end zone. Instead, the message will be CHOOSE LOVE. 

That is the news. Thank you for listening. The indignity morning podcast is edited by Joe MacLeod. The theme song is composed and performed by Mack Scocca-Ho. You, the listeners, keep our podcasting going through your paid subscriptions and tips, so please continue that if you can. And if nothing too logistically unforeseen happens, we'll talk again tomorrow.