Vox Sentences: The US opens up about its role in Argentina’s “dirty war”

Information trickles out about the Brussels bombing; the 40-year anniversary of Argentina's "dirty war"; Republicans in disarray.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

What we know about the Brussels bombers

Carl Court/Getty Image

• Belgian authorities have identified the three suicide bombers involved in yesterday's attacks in Brussels: brothers Ibrahim el-Bakraoui and Khalid el-Bakraoui and Najim Laachraoui. All three were Belgian citizens.

  [Vox / Libby Nelson]

• Laachraoui is suspected to have been the bombmaker for the Paris attacks in November. That makes his suicide unusual: Bombmakers are usually too valuable to a terrorist operation to blow themselves up.

  [Washington Post / Michael Birnbaum and Souad Mekhennet]

• Police officers are still looking for a fourth man, who left his suitcase bomb at the airport (where it was found and detonated safely).

  [Yahoo! News]

• The el-Bakraouis fit a pattern. Sets of brothers were also involved in the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris last year and in last November's attacks, and studies show that the radicalization of family members is the most important factor in whether an individual will become radicalized.

  [NPR / Dina Temple-Raston]

• Of course, the fact that terrorists are often in the same nuclear family makes it difficult to use technology to disrupt their communications.

  [Emptywheel / Marcy Wheeler]

• In this case, though, the point is largely moot. Belgium was looking for the el-Bakraouis before yesterday's attacks.

  [Vox / Libby Nelson]

• It's now facing the awkward truth that its failure to catch them (and its failure to apprehend any of Salah Abdeslam's associates when he was arrested on Friday) might have made this attack possible.

  [WSJ / Matthew Dalton]

A gesture of justice for los desaparecidos

Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images

• During his visit to Argentina Tuesday, President Barack Obama confirmed that his administration will release more diplomatic and military records about the US's role in Argentina's "dirty war" (which lasted from 1976 to 1983).

  [Bloomberg / Angela Grieling Kaine]

• Under the military junta that took power in 1976, up to 30,000 people were killed or "disappeared" — and the country's still struggling to discover exactly what happened and bring justice to the victims.

  [Telegraph / Alfonso Daniels]

• The US's role in the conflict is unclear. A 2002 document release appeared to show Henry Kissinger urging Argentina's foreign minister to crack down on internal dissent "quickly."

  [AP / Peter Prengaman]

• Much of the credit for bringing the dirty war to international attention goes to the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a group that organized to call attention to the government's practice of kidnapping children (some of them the children of imprisoned mothers who would later be disappeared) and giving them up for adoption.

  [New Yorker / Francisco Goldman]

• The Grandmothers and other groups are still active, and have been concerned that the new conservative government of Argentina was going to sweep the dirty war under the rug — fears that appeared to be confirmed when Obama's visit was scheduled to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the junta's coup.

  [Vice / Remi Lehmann]

• Instead, not only will the US be opening up its archives, but so will the Vatican — a decision that's particularly interesting because questions have swirled about the Catholic Church's possible collaboration with the junta, and because Pope Francis was a priest in Argentina at the time.

  [AFP / Kelly Velasquez]

GOP does everything to stop Trump but ask

Win McNamee/Getty Images

• Jeb Bush endorsed Ted Cruz Wednesday, in the clearest sign yet that the Republican establishment is rallying around Cruz in the hopes that he will stop Donald Trump. (He almost certainly won't.)

  [NBC News / Daniel Arkin]

• Bush's endorsement, Dylan says, is a reminder that for all the things Republican elites find distasteful about Trump, his racism is not high on the list.

  [Vox / Dylan Matthews]

• In other futile attempts to regain control of the GOP, Paul Ryan gave a speech on "the state of American politics" today. It was an eloquent denunciation of obstructionism, but it also made absolutely no reference to what's actually going on in the party right now.

  [Time / Ryan Teague Beckwith]

• It wasn't toothless. Ryan repudiated his own use of "makers and takers" rhetoric, for example, and urged the GOP to stop demonizing those in poverty.

  [NYT / Jennifer Steinhauer]

• But even though the speech only made sense as a call to stop Trump, Ryan didn't actually denounce Trump.

  [Vox / Matt Yglesias ]

MISCELLANEOUS

A dancing parrot named Snowball has sparked a new burst of research into the biological roots of rhythm. [Quanta / Ferris Jabr]

• One reason it's hard to lose weight through exercise: Working out might slow down your metabolism.

  [The Atlantic / Olga Khazan]

• Period-tracking apps have a new big fan base: public health researchers.

  [NYT / Jenna Wortham]

• M13 is a simple virus that targets E. coli bacteria. But it holds a surprising amount of promise at treating Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and more.

  [PBS Nova / Jon Palfreman]

• When you're as widely disliked as Ted Cruz, pop culture is a potent way to relate to other people. That makes Cruz's cultural allusions all the more revealing, and kind of poignant.

  [AV Club / Alex McCown]

VERBATIM

"If you listen to [Trump], he’s not isolationist, he’s America first." [Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg to MSNBC / Benjy Sarlin]

• "Regular, straight pop culture has liberally lifted things from gay culture as long as I can remember. And that's fine, because guess what? We have so much more where that comes from."

  [RuPaul to NY Mag / Alex Jung]

• "I got kicked out of school when I was seven years old. I refused to salute the flag because my great uncle had been lynched with the flag wrapped around his body. So I went back to Sacramento and said, 'I'm not saluting the flag.' And teacher went at me and hit me, and I hit back. And then we had a Joe Frazier/Muhammad Ali moment right there in the third grade."

  [Cornel West to CBS News / James Brown]

• "Stars maintain their status as stars by acting out ideologies and understandings of the world that feel right."

  [BuzzFeed / Anne Helen Petersen]

• "They don’t want you to drink at Chipotle, but you should."

  [Elie Ayrouth via AV Club / Joe Blevins]

WATCH THIS

Why ISIS attacked Brussels [YouTube / Johnny Harris and Max Fisher]

Vice / Medyan Dairieh

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