Ben Carson Defends Story of West Point Scholarship Offer

Carson is facing heat for his 1992 autobiography Gifted Hands

Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson has long maintained that he was “offered a full scholarship to West Point,” while a high school student in Detroit. His campaign said on Friday that the offer was made informally by his high school ROTC leader, and that he never applied to attend the military school.

“He was introduced to folks from West Point by his ROTC Supervisors,” Doug Watts, Carson’s communications director said in a statement. “They told him they could help him get an appointment based on his grades and performance in ROTC. He considered it but in the end did not seek admission.”

The campaign statement was made in response to a story by Politicoscrutinizing past statements by Carson. In his autobiography, Gifted Hands, Carson writes that he as introduced “to General Westmoreland, and I had dinner with him and the Congressional Medal winners. Later I was offered a full scholarship to West Point.”

He does not write in the book that he applied to the school. Students who are accepted to West Point, a U.S. Military Academy, do not pay tuition. The Politico story claimed that Carson had “fabricated” his “application and acceptance” into the U.S. Military Academy. [Hours after the initial publication Friday, Politico updated its story to remove the claim that Carson had fabricated his application and acceptance into West Point.]

“The Politico story is an outright lie,” Watts wrote in a statement. “Dr. Carson as the leading ROTC student in Detroit was told by his commanders that he could get an Appointment at the academy. He never said he was admitted or even applied.”

Rival Republican candidate Donald Trump has already chimed in on Twitter.

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Read More: How Ben Carson Went from Folk Hero to Conservative Rock Star

This story has been updated with a response from the Carson campaign and to reflect the change in the Politico story.

Burma’s Ethnic Minorities Seek Equality and Greater Autonomy in Landmark Elections

            "The Burmese look at ethnic people as second-class citizens"

The Shan Hills, rising from the Burmese lowlands toward China, are crammed with ethnic groups that have long chafed against any centralized authority: among them, the Pa’O, the Wa, the Ta’ang, the Intha, the Akha, the Danu, the Lisu, the Lahu, the Kayah, the Kachin, the Kokang, plus the Shan themselves, who give their name to a state that occupies nearly one-quarter of Burma’s geography.

In Burma’s landmark nationwide elections on Nov. 8, a cacophony of ethnic parties are contesting the vote, each vowing to give voice in parliament to their particular people. For decades, the Burmese state, long run by a military regime dominated by the Bamar majority, has battled ethnic armed groups in Shan state, as well as in other ethnic regions. For the villagers caught between the Burmese army and various ethnic militias, the threat of war — not to mention rape, forced labor and litany of other abuses — has precluded any sense of security. “True peace is my priority,” says Brang Di, an ethnic Kachin candidate from the northern Shan city of Lashio.

In much of the heartland of Burma, known officially as Myammar, political fealty is paid to opposition leader Aung Saan Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate whose National League for Democracy (NLD) is considered the frontrunner in Sunday’s ballot — despite a lack of reliable pre-election polling. After all, a quarter-century ago, the NLD won a landslide victory in nationwide elections. The country’s military rulers ignored that result, however, and locked up Suu Kyi for most of two decades until her release in late 2010. A victory for the NLD on Sunday could help absolve the sins of history.

But in Burma’s vast ethnic frontier — at least one-third of its population is not from the Bamar majority — Suu Kyi’s allure is less compelling. In 1990, the NLD may have triumphed but the party with the second-largest number of votes was the Shan Nationalities League for Democracy (SNLD).

This time around, many leaders of ethnic parties are upset that the NLD is running candidates in ethnic strongholds, potentially cleaving the opposition vote. Suu Kyi has argued that her party is a nationwide force for democracy and needs to compete head-to-head with the ruling Union Solidary and Development Party (USDP), the military’s proxy, which is contesting seats across the country. The USDP prevailed in 2010 polls that the NLD boycotted because they were clearly rigged in the military’s favor. (The SNLD also declined to take part since its leader was in jail, having been sentenced to 93 years’ imprisonment; he was released in an amnesty in 2012.) Suu Kyi’s message is direct: vote for the NLD so we can form a government and then change the country.

Many ethnic parties are skeptical. “The NLD’s priority is democracy,” says Sai Lynn Myat, southern Shan state secretary for the SNLD in the state capital, Taunggyi. “Our priority is equality. The Burmese look at ethnic people as second-class citizens.” Part of the reverence accorded to Suu Kyi comes from her long years of house arrest; she could have left for exile but chose to remain in Burma. Her reputation also depends on family legacy: Suu Kyi’s father, General Aung San, is considered the nation’s independence hero. In early 1947, Aung San convened representatives from some of modern-day Burma’s biggest ethnic groups in the Shan hilltown of Panglong and promised a federal union upon liberation from Britain. The Federated Shan States — as a collection of 34 principalities were known — were even give the right to secede in a decade, should the union not prove to its liking. But months later, when his daughter was just two years old, Aung San was assassinated. The dream of federalism died with the Bamar chauvinist soldiers who later commandeered the country.

When Suu Kyi was released from house arrest, she spoke about holding another Panglong Conference in order to address the needs of Burma’s ethnic groups. But such a meeting never happened. Although the junta and its quasi-military successor government signed ceasefires with many ethnic militias, including a much-touted agreement last month, fighting still flares in Shan and Kachin states. The UNHCR estimates that around half a million refugees, mostly from ethnic groups, are still outside the country, many in neighboring Thailand. In addition, Burma’s population of internally displaced and stateless people is nearly 1.2 million strong, according to the UNHCR. Among them are the Rohingya, a Muslim ethnic group from far western Burma that has been disenfranchised in this election.

The NLD may well perform strongly in some ethnic areas, especially in cities where no one ethnic group predominates. “There’s no other party that can try to bring democracy to our whole country,” says Tin Maung Toe, an NLD candidate in Taunggyi, who spent eight years in jail for his political activities. “We respect the ethnic opposition parties but we need enough seats to form a government.” Suu Kyi’s campaigning in ethnic regions, including Shan, attracted ecstatic crowds. But ethnic allegiance and distrust of the Bamar, who many ethnic people simply refer to as “Burmese,” run deep. “Local people say the USDP is Burmese and the NLD is also Burmese,” says Hkun Soe Myint, general secretary of the Union PaO National Organization, which represents the Pa’O people, and who spent years fighting in the jungle with an ethnic armed group. “They are from the same source.”

If the NLD wins in a landslide, it must contend with a parliament in which one-quarter of seats are reserved for members of the military. The junta may have introduced some political reforms but it also has retained significant power for the top brass. Suu Kyi is constitutionally barred from the presidency, although she has said that she will fill a position “above the President,” should her party prove victorious.

In another scenario, should the NLD not win enough seats to form a government, it could form alliances with democracy-minded ethnic parties. Some, despite their frustration with the NLD for contesting seats in ethnic areas, will join her camp. But they will surely try to extract promises of true federalism from Suu Kyi, who they feel doesn’t have the commitment to such a political system that her father did. “We want to work together [with the NLD],” says Aung Maung, president of the Rakhine National Party, which represents the ethnic Rakhine of western Burma. “We don’t want to work under their supervision.”

Other ethnic parties have made de-facto accords with the USDP, and if the military-linked party does better than expected — possibly with the help of the voting irregularities that have already concerned election monitors — it could potentially cobble together enough representation in parliament to rule. (The USDP also is fielding ethnic candidates: one of the country’s current vice presidents is Shan.)

Either way, ethnic parties may well serve as kingmakers during the wheeling and dealing that will follow the vote. “Whoever wins will come running to us,” says Hla Yeir Htut, a Shan who is running in Sunday’s elections as a member of the Federal Union Party, a coalition of various ethnic parties. “We hold the power.”

Leaders of China and Taiwan Meet for the First Time

The landmark dialogue was greeted by protests in Taiwan's capital Taipei

The handshake was robust, postures ramrod straight, and then Chinese President Xi Jinping and Taiwan’s President Ma Ying-jeou strode smiling toward the conference room — the first face-to-face meeting between leaders of these states since their split at the end of China’s civil war in 1949.

“No force can pull us apart,” said Xi at the opening of the talks. “We are one family.”

Ma responded by saying: “Even though this is the first meeting, we feel like old friends.”

The event, held Saturday at Singapore’s opulent Shangri-La Hotel, was meticulously choreographed. As the heads of two governments that still claim sovereignty over their combined territory, each leader simply addressed the other as “mister” rather than “president,” a term that would infer legitimacy. There was no joint statement or agreement of any kind. Even the cost of hiring the meeting room and the subsequent banquet was split between the parties, so neither could be accused of hosting the other.

“It’s historical, it’s a milestone, but the purpose is not to quicken the pace of unification or get some peace agreement or anything,” says George W. Tsai, professor at Taiwan’s Chinese Culture University. “It is a political signal.”

That need for that signal stems from Taiwan’s national elections on Jan. 16. Ma’s Party, the Kuomintang (KMT), is expected to lose badly to the Beijing-skeptic Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), led by U.S.- and U.K.-educated lawyer Tsai Ing-wen. Xi wants to cement cordial ties with China’s “renegade province” to put pressure on any new administration to maintain the status quo, while Ma — who is ineligible for reelection having already served two terms — likely has eyes on securing his personal legacy.

“The concern for independence advocates in Taiwan will always be whether this meeting will erode claims of sovereignty,” says Prof. Megan Greene, director of Kansas University’s Center for East Asian Studies. “Obviously President Ma doesn’t have that concern, but not everyone agrees with him.”

The question of sovereignty has deep historical roots. The last time Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and KMT leaders met was at the end of World War II, when “Great Helmsman” Mao Zedong and “Generalissimo” Chiang Kai-shek toasted the vanquishing of imperial Japan. Four years later, following the resumption of hostilities between these tenuous wartime allies, a routed Chiang fled across the Strait to Taiwan. Today, the island-state is not recognised by the majority of international government yet remains the only truly democratic place in the Chinese world, whose historically icy relations with Beijing have warmed considerably over the last eight years of KMT rule, burnished by thriving business ties.

Public opinion has not followed suit, though, and more than 1,000 peopleprotested the Ma-Xi meeting in Taiwan’s capital Taipei on Saturday. Many of Taiwan’s 23 million citizens remain fearful that economic integration hides the Trojan horse of soft colonization. This anxiety manifested itself in the storming and occupying of Taiwan’s national parliament in March last year after President Ma signed a raft of trade agreements with the mainland. The KMT’s position is that Taiwan’s close ties to the world’s second-biggest economy can help its own, which is sluggish.

But much as many in Taiwan are averse to the KMT’s perceived cozying to Beijing, the idea of independence, as previously championed by the DPP, is equally unpalatable. Polls suggest that most of Taiwan’s citizens favor the status quo, which is governed by the 1992 Consensus that there is “one China,” even if both the KMT and the CCP squabble over who has legitimate authority. The DPP’s constitution does not recognize the 1992 Consensus, opening the possibility of a formal break from the mainland, even outright independence. Although Tsai has previously articulated such sentiments she has remaining pointedly ambiguous on this issue during her current campaign. The Xi-Ma meeting has made this position tougher to maintain, though, “bringing cross-Straits relations back to the spotlight in the election once again,” says Prof. Tsai.

Watching from the wings will be the U.S., whose overriding priority is peace and stability across the Strait. “Normalized cross-Strait diplomacy will increase stability in the relationship, and therefore the security situation in the Asia-Pacific,” says Dan Blumenthal, director of Asian Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

Washington was clearly irked by some of the more provocative statements by former DPP President Chen Shui-bian, whose advocating of formal independence was met by threats of invasion and the firing of missiles into the Strait by China. However, “The DPP has matured since then; and perhaps even more importantly, Beijing’s attitude toward the DPP has also become more sophisticated,” says David Yang, a China expert for the IHS analysis firm.

Even so, this is unlikely to translate into a lasting accord between the neighbors. If China was really serious about repairing relations, says Blumenthal, it “should have frozen its program of military coercion against Taiwan and stopped its policy of isolating Taiwan by blocking its participation in regional and international forums.”

Nevertheless, it was a bold move by Xi to meet Ma, who has less than two months in office and an approval rating that barely reaches double-digits. The CCP’s Taiwan Affairs Office is unlikely to have sanctioned the Chinese President meeting such an unpopular figure, says Prof. Tsai, meaning Xi must have pushed for the meeting himself.

“It show’s Xi Jinping’s strong leadership style as he’s different from his ‘caretaker’ [predecessors] like Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin,” says Prof. Tsai. “He’s decisive and is willing to take the risk to meet Ma at this very difficult moment.”