#2011 Russian Nationals

[sonyaheaneyauthor]

Tulsi Gabbard’s history with Russia is even more concerning than you think

“What happened in Syria is what allowed the Russians to feel that they could do the very same in Ukraine,” he said.

“And what she is doing with Ukraine shows that it goes beyond her maybe misunderstanding one conflict. She is, hook, line and sinker, a Russian puppet.”

In the summer of 2015, three Syrian girls who had narrowly survived an airstrike some weeks earlier stood before Tulsi Gabbard with horrific burns all over their bodies.

Gabbard, then a US congresswoman on a visit to the Syria-Turkey border as part of her duties for the foreign affairs committee, had a question for them.

“How do you know it was Bashar al-Assad or Russia that bombed you, and not Isis?’” she asked, according to Mouaz Moustafa, a Syrian activist who was translating her conversation with the girls.

It was a revealing insight into Gabbard’s conspiratorial views of the conflict, and it shocked Moustafa to silence. He knew, as even the young children did, that Isis did not have jets to launch airstrikes. It was such an absurd question that he chose not to translate it because he didn’t want to upset the girls, the eldest of whom was 12.

“From that point on, I’m sorry to say I was inaccurate in my translations of anything she said,” Moustafa told The Independent. “It was more like: How do I get these girls away from this devil?”

Even before Gabbard left the Democratic Party, ingratiated herself with Donald Trump and secured his nomination to become director of National Intelligence, she was known as a prolific peddler of Russian propaganda.

In almost every foreign conflict in which Russia had a hand, Gabbard backed Moscow and railed against the US. Her past promotion of Kremlin propaganda has provoked significant opposition on both sides of the aisle to her nomination.

Her journey from anti-war Democrat to Moscow-friendly Maga warrior began in Syria. The devastating conflict was sparked by pro-democracy uprisings in 2011, which were brutally crushed by the Assad regime. It descended into a complex web of factions that drew extremist Islamists from around the world and global powers into the fray.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a UK-based monitoring group with a network of sources on the ground, documented the deaths of 503,064 people by March 2023. It said at least 162,390 civilians had died in that same time, with the Syrian government and its allies responsible for 139,609 of those deaths.

But Gabbard, a veteran of the Iraq War, viewed it all as a “regime-change war” fueled by the West and aimed at removing the dictator from power. She saw Assad – and Russia, when it entered the conflict – as legitimate defenders of the state against an extremist uprising.

In 2015, when Russia entered the Syrian war on the side of the dictator Assad, Gabbard expressed support for the move, even as the civilian toll from Moscow’s devastating airstrikes grew into the thousands.

“Al-Qaeda attacked us on 9/11 and must be defeated. Obama won’t bomb them in Syria. Putin did. #neverforget911,” she wrote on Twitter.

It was precisely because of her support for Assad and Russia’s war that Moustafa was keen for her to attend the congressional delegation to southern Turkey to meet the victims of the conflict.

“From experience, everyone that we bring over to the border, and they see the victims, they always come back with a realistic view of what’s happening and who is behind the mass displacement and killing and atrocities and so on, and so that was the objective,” he said. “What was shocking was her lack of empathy. She’ll sacrifice the facts, even when it came to little girls in front of her telling her they got bombed by a plane – it didn’t matter.”

Charles Lister, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute who testified twice on Syria to the House Foreign Affairs Committee when Gabbard was a member, spent years debunking her various conspiracy theories about the war.

“Her consistent denial of the Syrian regime’s crimes is so wildly fringe that her potential appointment as DNI is genuinely alarming,” he told The Independent.

Lister said her views “appear to be driven by a strange fusion of America First isolationism and a belief in the value of autocratic and secular leaders in confronting extremism.”

They included a suggestion that Syrian rebels staged a false-flag chemical weapons attack against their supporters to provoke Western intervention against Assad — something the US intelligence agencies she will soon lead had concluded was false. She declined to call Assad a war criminal when pressed, despite masses of evidence, and used a video of Syrian government bombings to criticize US involvement in the war.

“Her descriptions of the crisis in Syria read like they were composed in Assad’s personal office, or in Tehran or Moscow – not Washington,” Lister added.

Gabbard was not swayed by meeting the victims of Assad’s airstrikes in 2015. In fact, two years later, she went to Damascus to meet the Syrian president in person and came away even more convinced of her opinions.

The congresswoman said her visit to meet Assad – the first by a sitting US lawmaker since the conflict began – was aimed at bringing an end to the war.

“I felt it’s important that if we profess to truly care about the Syrian people, about their suffering, then we’ve got to be able to meet with anyone that we need to if there is a possibility that we could achieve peace,” she told CNN at the time.

Fire rises following a Syrian government airstrike in Aleppo in 2016 (AP)

Gabbard was forced to defend her embrace of Assad and other dictators during her 2020 run for the Democratic presidential nomination. During the Democratic primary debate, she clashed with Kamala Harris, who accused her of being “an apologist for an individual – Assad – who has murdered the people of his country like cockroaches.”

“She has embraced and been an apologist for him in a way that she refuses to call him a war criminal. I can only take what she says and her opinion so seriously and so I’m prepared to move on,” added Harris, who would subsequently drop out of the race and later be selected as Joe Biden’s running mate.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, Gabbard again defended Russian aggression.

“This war and suffering could have easily been avoided if Biden Admin/Nato had simply acknowledged Russia’s legitimate security concerns,” she posted on Twitter in 2022.

Gabbard appeared to fall for various conspiracy theories about the conflict that were promoted by Russia, as she had done in Syria. One of those conspiracy theories was a Russian claim about the existence of dozens of US-funded biolabs in Ukraine that were supposedly producing deadly pathogens.

She later walked back on those remarks, suggesting that there might have been some “miscommunication and misunderstanding.”

Gabbard’s frequent echoing of Kremlin talking points has earned her praise in Russian state media. Indeed, an article published on 15 November in the Russian-state controlled outlet RIA Novosti went so far as to call Gabbard a “superwoman.”

The possibility that Trump would tap someone with Gabbard’s history to be America’s top intelligence official shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who followed the president-elect’s first four years in the White House.

During his 2018 summit with President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, the then-president was asked if he believed the US intelligence community’s assessment, which stated that Russia had interfered in the 2016 presidential election on his behalf.

That assessment was based on analysis of what was determined to have been state-sponsored campaigns of fake social media posts and ersatz news sites to spread false stories about his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, as well as cyberattacks targeting the Democratic National Committee and prominent operatives associated with the Clinton campaign.

But Trump, who’d just spent several hours in a closed-door meeting with Putin, stunned the assembled press and the entire world by declaring that he trusted the Russian leader’s word over that of his own advisers.

​​"President Putin says it’s not Russia. I don’t see any reason why it would be," he replied.

Trump would go on to repeatedly clash with his own intelligence appointees during the remainder of his term. He sacked his first DNI, former Indiana senator Dan Coats, after Coats repeatedly declined to back away from the government’s assessment of what Russia had done during the 2016 presidential race.

Larry Pfeiffer, the director of George Mason University’s Hayden Center for Intelligence, Policy, and International Security, said Gabbard’s apparent susceptibility to foreign disinformation and her affinity for strongmen will give pause to American allies with whom the US routinely shares intelligence on common threats.

Intelligence services, he explained, are notoriously territorial and tight-lipped on sources and methods – particularly when it comes to so-called human intelligence, or Humint, which refers to information collected by and from spies and sources within hostile governments.

Pfeiffer said foreign allies are likely already concerned about how a second Trump administration will handle intelligence, given the president-elect’s record. He also predicted that Gabbard’s confirmation as DNI would cause even more problems among skittish partners.

“I think they wouldn’t feel like they’ve got an American confidant that they can deal with on a mature level,” he said. “I can guarantee you that the foreign intelligence services of Europe, including the Brits, are all having little side conversations right now about … what is this going to mean, and how are we going to operate, and what are we going to do now.”

Gabbard has taken the side of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad as well as the Russian president (AP)

The former US intelligence veteran also said Gabbard’s record of spreading foreign talking points calls into question whether she will be able to carry out the DNI’s important responsibility of briefing the president on threats to the nation.

He told The Independent: “Somebody like Tulsi Gabbard, you look at her long history of statements that seem to come out of the Kremlin’s notebook, her propensity to be influenced by their viewpoint – [it] raises questions as to whether she has the ability to present the intel community’s perspective as it is, or is she going to be one who’s going to want to discount it, influence it, color and change it, or ignore it and just present her own view?

“I think it also raises questions of judgement. You know, here’s an individual who seems very prone to misinformation, prone to conspiracy theory. That should worry anybody who’s worried about America’s national security,” he added.

Trump’s selection of the former Hawaii congresswoman could be a problem for the senators tasked with confirming her, on several different levels. For one, the position is unique among cabinet agencies in that there are strict requirements for who can serve in the director’s role.

The text of the 2004 law which established the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks on New York and Washington and the intelligence community’s failures leading up to the US invasion of Iraq, specifically states that any person who serves in the DNI job “shall have extensive national security expertise.”

The first person to serve as DNI, John Negroponte, was a widely respected foreign service veteran who had served as US ambassador to Iraq, Mexico, Honduras and the Philippines, as the country’s ambassador to the United Nations, and as a deputy national security adviser during the Reagan administration. The next three people to hold the office were flag-rank military officers with significant intelligence experience.

Pfeiffer, a US intelligence veteran of three decades’ standing who once ran the White House Situation Room and served as chief of staff to then-CIA director General Michael Hayden, told The Independent that Gabbard’s experience in the House and her military service, while admirable, do not match the standards envisioned by the authors of the 2004 law which established the office.

“That’s national security experience … but she was a freaking military cop … operating at a largely tactical level, not that strategic, long-term national security perspective that one would expect,” he said.

Gabbard may have left the Syrian conflict behind, but Moustafa still works with its victims every day. And he believes the connection between her views on Syria and Ukraine is clear.

“What happened in Syria is what allowed the Russians to feel that they could do the very same in Ukraine,” he said.

“And what she is doing with Ukraine shows that it goes beyond her maybe misunderstanding one conflict. She is, hook, line and sinker, a Russian puppet.”

[victusinveritas]

From Rebecca Solnit:

"My God. I was out all day today. Bashar Al Assad, the Butcher of Syria, has fled, his infamous prison/death camp/torture center has been freed, and rebels have taken Syria as far as I can tell. What a week. Insurrectionary Georgia. Coup-repelling South Korea. Now this.

The Guardian reports: When Islamist militants swept into her home town of Aleppo little over a week ago, Rama Alhalabi sheltered indoors as fear engulfed her. Forces loyal to president Bashar al-Assad, who had sought to reassure residents that nothing was happening, suddenly deserted the city. But as the insurgency pushed south, rapidly seizing control of the city of Hama on the road to Damascus, Alhalabi’s fears about life under militia rule have slowly ebbed. Instead they have been replaced by fears that her friends in the army will be abandoned by their commanding officers as Assad’s regime loses its grip.

“People in Aleppo are feeling more comfortable now we’re further from the areas under the regime’s control,” said the 29-year-old, while still using a pseudonym in fear Assad could retake the city.

“At the same time, I have many friends serving in the army and I don’t want them to get hurt. People with power inside the regime will protect themselves, and they will leave the poor fighters who were forced to join the army to face their awful fate alone.

“Things changed insanely fast,” she added. “We can barely believe what’s happening.”

As militants spearheaded by the group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) massed outside the city of Homs and rebel forces said they had entered the vast southern suburbs of the capital, rapid change swept across Syria. The Syrian army declared it had “redeployed,” its forces in two restive provinces south of Damascus in the latest thinly-veiled message of retreat, days after they withdrew from Hama. In under a week, five provincial capitals across the country were suddenly no longer under Assad’s control.

“We can hear the bombing nearby, and we are praying, hoping – and waiting,” said Um Ahmad, an elderly native of Homs, sheltering with her husband at home as the fighting drew close enough to be audible.

Assad loyalists fled the city, while people who stayed only have a couple of hours’ electricity each day and what goods are left in the shops are unaffordable. Those remaining in Homs waited to see if this might be the end of Assad’s rule, while an insurgent commander told his regime’s forces inside the city that this was their “last chance to defect before it’s too late”.

Um Ahmad was consumed by a single thought, that she might finally be able to see her sons again after a decade of separation and exile. “Most people are frightened but they fear the regime’s revenge more than anything else,” she said, as Russian and Syrian airstrikes pummelled the countryside around Homs and Hama.

When a popular uprising swept cities across Syria in 2011 calling for Assad to go, it initially looked as if demonstrations could topple another regional autocrat. But the Syrian leader swiftly turned the state’s weapons on his own people to crush dissent. As the uprising slowly morphed into a civil war, Assad freed jihadist prisoners from his fearsome detention system to alter the forces rising up against him, before relying heavily on his allies in Russia and Iran to provide the military muscle he used to reclaim control.

The civil war killed over 300,000 people in 10 years of fighting, with some estimates putting the true toll at twice that number. Tens of thousands remain in detention, including 100,000 believed missing or forcibly disappeared in Assad’s prisons since 2011, and subject to what United Nations monitors have described as systematic torture. Over 12 million people have been displaced.

Assad kept control of Syria’s major cities for years, as battle lines from the country’s years-long proxy war hardened. HTS ruled over a mountainous pocket in the northwest, cut off from the outside world. The group appeared a dim threat to Assad until they suddenly launched an offensive that saw them take control of Aleppo within days.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/dec/07/syria-assad-damascus-hayat-tahrir-al-sham-insurgents

[beardedmrbean]

Adair, Iowa, had a population of 794. So, it seemed suspicious when its three-person police department asked regulators to buy 90 machine guns, including an M134 Gatling-style minigun capable of shooting up to 6,000 rounds of ammunition every minute. 

Federal agents later discovered Adair's police chief, Bradley Wendt, was using his position to acquire weapons and sell them for personal profit. A jury convicted Wendt earlier this year of conspiracy to defraud the United States, lying to federal law enforcement and illegal possession of a machine gun. Wendt is unapologetic and has appealed his conviction. 

"If I'm guilty of this, every cop in the nation's going to jail," Wendt told CBS News just days before a federal judge sentenced him to a 5-year prison term. Wendt's crimes appear to be part of a nationwide pattern.

A CBS News investigation found dozens of law enforcement leaders — sheriffs, captains, lieutenants, chiefs of police — buying and illegally selling firearms, even weapons of war, across 23 U.S. states, Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., from the Deep South to the Midwest, Northeast and California coast. 

A nationwide review of government audits and court records over the last 20 years uncovered at least 50 cases of police illegally selling their weapons online, through dealers, out of their homes or the back of their cars. In many cases, the weapons were sold to gun enthusiasts, often at steep markups as high as 10 times what they were bought for. 

In several cases, the guns wound up in the hands of violent felons and were used to commit crimes including drug trafficking, international arms dealing and, in one case, the fatal shooting of a 14-year-old boy attending a high school football game. 

In 2011, federal agents busted a smuggling ring out of New Mexico involving a police chief, mayor and village trustee who delivered automatic firepower and tactical gear to a Mexican cartel.  

A decade later, prosecutors uncovered a multistate conspiracy linking a sanctioned Russian arms dealer with three police chiefs, one sheriff and a Delta Force veteran who sold machine guns directly to a criminal trafficker. All of them pleaded guilty. An additional alleged co-conspirator, who worked as an intelligence analyst for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, denied wrongdoing and his case is proceeding to trial. 

Nearly 26,000 guns were traced from American crime scenes back to a government agency, law enforcement or the military between 2017 and 2021, the most recently available data, according to a report by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. It isn't known how many of those were lost, stolen or sold. However, when government auditors investigated firearms that law enforcement agencies reported missing over a 15-year period, the General Services Administration Inspector General found that more than two-thirds had not gone missing at all but, rather, were inappropriately sold or traded —including Uzis and grenade launchers that were never recovered.  

Meanwhile, a separate Government Accountability Office audit in 2018 found $100 million worth of guns and ammunition bought by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was unaccounted for. In response, ICE said that it improved how it would keep track of its inventory going forward; there was no follow-up about the weapons that were already missing. ICE did not respond to CBS News' request for comment. 

Of the 58 cases CBS News identified where law enforcement officers were criminally charged with illegally selling their weapons, 56 of them either admitted guilt or were convicted; two have denied wrongdoing in ongoing cases. 

Those cases are just the tip of the iceberg, according to interviews with half a dozen former Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents who worked directly on these investigations. Several career agents shared anecdotes about letting police departments off with warnings after repeatedly finding their service weapons in the hands of private citizens. The agents explained that prosecutors have been generally reluctant to charge these cases, and the bureau stated that "it is our goal to educate, not investigate," according to a 2017 law enforcement memo obtained by CBS News. 

"We're not looking to prosecute fellow law enforcement officers," said Eric Harden, former special agent in charge of the ATF's Los Angeles field division.  

Harden authored the 2017 memo, which flagged a "growing trend" of "officers purchasing and then selling [restricted] firearms...for profit." The memo warned that anyone doing this was functionally acting as a straw purchaser in violation of at least two federal laws.  

Harden told CBS News that if officers persisted after being warned, or if their weapons were traced to a crime, they should be held accountable. "If we don't do this, then it'll be turning a blind eye and saying officers are above the law."  _______________________

Harden wrote the memo after his intelligence unit traced an outlawed pistol seized in a narcotics bust to a recent purchase by a beat cop in Pasadena, California. Now retired, Harden still remembers that officer crying on his shoulder when federal agents showed up to arrest him for illegally selling more than 100 weapons out of his home. The officer argued at the time that he didn't know he was breaking the law, but he later pleaded guilty. He served less than a year in federal prison and paid a $10,000 fine but was allowed to keep his Porsche and Alfa Romeo. 

On the other side of LA County, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer, with secret-level security clearance, was operating an even more egregious gun-running scheme that went on for 20 years. He too eventually pleaded guilty, in 2019, after an undercover agent busted him selling weapons out of the trunk of his car. His stockpile at the time totaled more than 250 firearms, including 41 machine guns and two short-barreled rifles. 

The officer "betrayed his oath to uphold the laws of the United States solely to put more money in his pocket," the U.S. Attorney said in announcing the news of the officer's prison sentence. 

Several cases involved sheriffs and police leadership who used their positions in law enforcement to gain access to military-grade machine guns, short-barreled rifles and explosive devices like grenades, and then sold them in violation of federal law. 

Although the Second Amendment guarantees the right to bear arms, there are limits to the kinds of weapons people are allowed to possess. Post-1986, these weapons — known to the ATF as Class 3/Title II and to the gun industry as "posties"— have been restricted for official government use because of their deadly firepower. Many of them are battlefield weapons used by U.S. and NATO forces in conflict zones. Some ammunition can take out a helicopter or blow straight through an armored tank followed by a concrete building, out the other side, then explode, hitting targets 18 football fields away. These guns can spew hundreds of rounds each minute, faster than the speed of sound. 

"Congress knew almost 100 years ago, in the days of Al Capone, that fully automatic weapons were unusually dangerous," ATF Director Steven Dettelbach said a public address on Feb. 28, 2023. "They have no place in our communities." 

The government loophole, however, has been exploited by opportunists who recruit law enforcement conspirators to help them bypass the American machine gun prohibition, according to law enforcement records and court filings obtained by CBS News that include text messages, videos and wiretapped audio conversations between people who were either convicted of or admitted participation in these schemes. 

CBS News found a trail of activity in social media videos and online web forums frequented by firearm aficionados discussing how to entice law enforcement allies into this illicit trade, which can be highly lucrative. Amid a series of online conversations reviewed by CBS News, one poster suggested that after law enforcement acquired a $10,000 machine gun through the federal approval process, it could be worth $75,000 because it would be free of red tape. Wendt, the Iowa police chief, for example, at times earned more than a 90% profit margin, according to court records. 

"Here is a breakdown of who signs for me," advised another online user, identifying one police chief, one sheriff, one SWAT officer and one deputy sheriff with whom he said he attended high school. 

For police departments to get ahold of such high-powered weaponry, each one needs permission from the ATF. Even though it has been the law for more than three decades, the ATF only started vetting every machine gun application for the first time in January 2023 to confirm that a legitimate government agency was making the request.  

According to interviews with half a dozen longtime ATF officials who worked directly on these cases, the bureau typically does not assess the appropriateness of the weapons for a department or track where they end up. 

"There's no audits," said former Supervisory Special Agent Tim Graden, who worked at the ATF for more than two decades before retiring in 2022. "There was no second-guessing whatsoever. They weren't really — I don't want to use the word concerned, but I can't think of a better one." 

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives declined requests to comment.  

It's unclear how pervasive this is nationwide, but in Iowa alone over the past five years, the ATF did not deny a single law enforcement request for machine guns "based on suitability (or lack thereof)," according to court filings. By 2023, there were more than 1,200 machine guns registered to law enforcement across the state.  

To find out how that compares to other places, CBS News filed a series of Freedom of Information Act requests with the ATF for details about the high-powered arsenal it's granted to public law enforcement over the past decade. However, the bureau denied those requests, stating that it considers that private tax information exempt from public disclosure. Last week, CBS News filed a lawsuit for the information. 

The proliferation of this high-powered weaponry is likely to become increasingly more relevant when President-elect Donald Trump takes office. During his first administration, Trump revoked an Obama-era executive order restricting the transfer of military equipment from the Defense Department to law enforcement nationwide. The Trump transition team did not respond to a request for comment.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Nobody

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

August 2, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Aug 03, 2024

Today, Aaron C. Davis and Carol D. Leonnig of the Washington Post reported that there is reason to believe that when Trump’s 2016 campaign was running low on funds, Trump accepted a $10 million injection of cash from Egypt’s authoritarian leader Abdel Fatah al-Sisi. It is against the law to accept direct or indirect financial support from foreign nationals or foreign governments for a political campaign in the United States.

In early 2017, CIA officials told Justice Department officials that a confidential informant had told them of such a cash exchange, and those officials handed the matter off to Robert Mueller, the special counsel who was already looking at the links between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russian operatives. FBI agents noted that on September 16, Trump had met with Sisi when the Egyptian leader was at the U.N. General Assembly in New York City. 

After the meeting, Trump broke with U.S. policy to praise Sisi, calling him a “fantastic guy.” 

Trump’s campaign had been dogged with a lack of funds, and his advisers had begged him to put some of his own money into it. He refused until October 28, when he loaned the campaign $10 million.

An FBI investigation took years to get records, but Davis and Leonnig reported that in 2019 the FBI learned of a key withdrawal from an Egypt bank. In January 2017, five days before Trump took office, an organization linked to Egypt’s intelligence service asked a manager at a branch of the state-run National Bank of Egypt to “kindly withdraw” $9,998,000 in U.S. currency. The bundles of $100 bills filled two bags and weighed more than 200 pounds. 

Once in office, Trump embraced Sisi and, in a reversal of U.S. policy, invited him to be one of his first guests at the White House. “I just want to let everybody know, in case there was any doubt, that we are very much behind President al-Sissi,” Trump said. 

Mueller had gotten that far in pursuit of the connection between Trump and Sisi when he was winding down his investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. He handed the Egypt investigation off to the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, D C., where it appears then–attorney general William Barr killed it. 

Today, Brian Schwartz of CNBC reported that Elon Musk and other tech executives are putting their money behind a social media ad campaign for Trump and Vance, and are creating targeted ads in swing states by collecting information about voters under false pretenses. According to Schwartz, their America PAC, or political action committee, says it helps viewers register to vote. And, indeed, the ads direct would-be voters in nonswing states to voter registration sites.

But people responding to the ad in swing states are not sent to registration sites. Instead, they are presented with “a highly detailed personal information form [and] prompted to enter their address, cellphone number and age,” handing over “priceless personal data to a political operation” that can then create ads aimed at that person’s demographic and target them personally in door-to-door campaigns. After getting the information, the site simply says, “Thank you,” without directing the viewer toward a registration site.

Forbes estimates Musk’s wealth at more than $235 billion. 

In June the Trump Organization announced a $500 million deal with Saudi real estate developer Dar Global to build a Trump International hotel in Oman. 

In January 2011, when he was director of the FBI, Robert Mueller gave a speech to the Citizens Crime Commission of New York. He explained that globalization and modern technology had changed the nature of organized crime. Rather than being regional networks with a clear structure, he said, organized crime had become international, fluid, and sophisticated and had multibillion-dollar stakes. Its operators were cross-pollinating across countries, religions, and political affiliations, sharing only their greed. They did not care about ideology; they cared about money. They would do anything for a price.

These criminals “may be former members of nation-state governments, security services, or the military,” he said. “They are capitalists and entrepreneurs. But they are also master criminals who move easily between the licit and illicit worlds. And in some cases, these organizations are as forward-leaning as Fortune 500 companies.”

In order to corner international markets, Mueller explained, these criminal enterprises "may infiltrate our businesses. They may provide logistical support to hostile foreign powers. They may try to manipulate those at the highest levels of government. Indeed, these so-called 'iron triangles' of organized criminals, corrupt government officials, and business leaders pose a significant national security threat."

In a new book called Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, journalist Anne Applebaum carries that story forward into the present, examining how today’s autocrats work together to undermine democracy. She says that “the language of the democratic world, meaning rights, laws, rule of law, justice, accountability, [and] transparency…[is]  harmful to them,” especially as those are the words that their internal opposition uses. “And so they need to undermine the people who use it and, if they can, discredit it.” 

Those people, Applebaum says, “believe they are owed power, they deserve power.” When they lose elections, they “come back in a second term and say, right, this time, I'm not going to make that mistake again, and…then change their electoral system, or…change the constitution, change the judicial system, in order to make sure that they never lose.”

Almost exactly a year ago, on August 1, 2023, a grand jury in Washington, D.C., indicted former president Donald J. Trump for conspiring to defraud the United States, conspiring to disenfranchise voters, and conspiring and attempting to obstruct an official proceeding. The charges stemmed from Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election. A grand jury is made up of 23 ordinary citizens who weigh evidence of criminal activity and produce an indictment if 12 or more of them vote in favor. 

The grand jury indicted Trump for “conspiracy to defraud the United States by using dishonesty, fraud, and deceit to impair, obstruct, and defeat the lawful federal government function by which the results of the presidential election are collected, counted, and certified by the government”; “conspiracy to corruptly obstruct and impede the January 6 congressional proceeding at which the collected results of the presidential election are counted and certified”; and “conspiracy against the right to vote and to have one’s vote counted.” 

“Each of these conspiracies,” the indictment reads, “targeted a bedrock function of the United States federal government: the nation’s process of collecting, counting, and certifying the results of the presidential election.” “This federal government function…is foundational to the United States’ democratic process, and until 2021, had operated in a peaceful and orderly manner for more than 130 years.” 

The case of the United States of America v. Donald J. Trump was randomly assigned to Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, who was appointed by President Obama in 2014 and confirmed 95–0 in the Senate. Trump pleaded not guilty on August 3, after which his lawyers repeatedly delayed their pretrial motions until, on December 7, Trump asked the Washington, D.C., Circuit Court of Appeals to decide whether he was immune from prosecution. Chutkan had to put off her initial trial date of March 4, 2024, and said she would not reschedule until the court decided the question of Trump’s immunity. 

In February the appeals court decided he was not immune. Trump appealed to the Supreme Court, which waited until July 1, 2024, to decide that Trump enjoys broad immunity from prosecution for crimes committed as part of his official acts. Today the Washington, D.C., Circuit Court of Appeals sent the case back to Chutkan, almost exactly a year after it was first brought.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[blackpilledkremlintsarina5294]

🇻🇳 Vietnam

The US lied about the Gulf of Tonkin incident to drag the nation into a needless conflict. (1964)

🇰🇼 Kuwait

The US lied about Iraqi soldiers taking babies out of incubators to rally support for a war against Iraq. (1990)

🇷🇸 Serbia

The US lied about Serbian actions in Kosovo to justify NATO bombings and expand Western influence in the Balkans. (1999)

🇦🇫 Afghanistan

The US lied about its reasons for invading, hiding the true objectives related to pipeline politics and opium fields. (2001)

🇮🇶 Iraq

The US lied about Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction to justify a war for oil. (2003)

🇱🇾 Libya

The US lied about Gaddafi's threats to civilians to establish control over North African resources. (2011)

🇸🇾 Syria

The US lied about Assad's use of chemical weapons as an excuse to topple a sovereign regime. (2013)

🇺🇦 Ukraine

The US lied about Russian aggression to further NATO's encroachment on Russian borders. (2014)

Only ignorant fools believe that, this time, the US is telling the whole truth about the Israeli Palestinian conflict....

[welldonekhushi]

Call of Duty OC: Samantha "Scarlet" Wright 🦋

Finally, after ages, I came up with Scarlet's biography sheet! So in case you guys are curious about her, you can go through this post, hope it helps! (⁠◍⁠•⁠ᴗ⁠•⁠◍⁠)⁠✧⁠*⁠。

If you want to see any artwork or fics on her, go to the #samantha scarlet wright tag for her content!

GENERAL

Name: Samantha

Full name: Samantha Wright

Codename: "Scarlet", Hotel Two-Six, Butterfly

Age: 29 years old

Gender: Female

Nationality: British (UK)

Languages spoken: English (native), Arabic (conventionally), Russian (for intelligence purposes)

Date of Birth: March 9, 1984

Place of Birth: Cambridge, England

Sexuality: Heterosexual

Martial Status: Single (married in 2017 to John "Soap" MacTavish, her childhood friend — diverging canon AU)

Occupation: British SAS (Special Air Services), member of the Task Force 141

Status: Active

Rank: Sergeant

Universe: Original timeline (2011-2017), reboot (alternative AU)

Faceclaim: Jenna Coleman

Song: Tangled Up by Caro Emerald (Lokee Remix)

Biography: Samantha Wright, under the codename "Scarlet" followed her dream in joining the most elite forces of the British Army, after hearing about her father's experiences in the military. As her hard work pays off, she finally gets selected for the SAS, and then for the Task Force 141, for her skills and strength. There, she meets a very old friend, that she missed and deeply cared for..

AFFILIATIONS:

Task Force 141

Captain John Price

John "Soap" MacTavish

Kyle "Gaz" Garrick

Simon "Ghost" Riley

Hannah "Sparrow" Clayton (@revnah1406)

Sergeant Annabelle "Kit" Pham (@applbottmjeens)

Charlotte "Jade" La Jardin (@sleepyconfusedpotato)

2nd Commando Regiment (@kaitaiga)

Sergeant Damien Whitlock

Captain Lachlan Jones

Los Vaqueros

Colonel Alejandro Vargas

Rodolfo "Rudy" Parra

Alyssa "Aly" Martinez (@alypink)

SKILLS AND ABILITIES

Weapon induced: M4A1 Carbine, M4A1 Grenadier w/ Red Dot Sight, M14 EBR Scoped

Fighting style: Hand-to-hand-combat, martial arts, a bit of jiu-jitsu

Special skills: Has good agility, wits and strength from intensive physical and mental training.

Talents: Is able to strategise a plan for greater impact.

Shortcomings: Is a bit sensitive and confused when it comes to choosing a decision which leads to life or death.

PERSONALITY

Myers-Briggs Type: ISFP (The Adventurer)

Is a positive presence among everybody: Yes, a soldier sure is a tough-hard individual who is determined to follow their duty, but Scarlet is the opposite. She maintains her duties and also motivates and cheers others up to keep moving and never surrender, as taught by her father. The reason why others notice when Scarlet is present with them, they feel calm and encouraged.

Emotional, but also dangerous: Sure Scarlet looks like she's a sweet presence among everyone, but at the same time, we shall not forget she's SAS-trained. When things get serious, she gets serious. During some missions (1 and 2), she has shown remarkable strength and courage by eliminating enemy soldiers in combat, as if she's a different person. The cheerful presence Scarlet holds among others has another dark side inside that she never reveals, but towards her enemies.

Can indulge with anyone, and is respectful: She'd love to make friends or teammates! It doesn't mean she doesn't give importance to anyone, but she especially bonds a lot with Soap. They two have been childhood friends since the start and everyone notices how close they both are and thinks if they two are a couple. Even if Soap is her best friend and he has a superior rank, she'd still respect him as her Captain. But sure, personally, they two engage like they used to.

Very empathetic: Whether it's a random person or not who is dying in her arms, it breaks her. It happened once when she tried to save a person who was losing their life and in the end they couldn't make it. It makes her want to blame herself a bit, thinking she didn't do her duty right, even if everything wasn't in her power. Also, if she sees anyone in distress, she's able to console and help them in time of need, the reason why Scarlet is able to sympathise and understand others well.

BACKGROUND STORY

Born as Samantha Wright, she lives in a small town in England with her father, Albert Wright, who is a former SAS-soldier under the codename "Bolt", and mother Elizabeth. When Scarlet was a toddler, she used to hear stories from her father about him working in Special Air Services, an elite special forces unit, and retired the day when his one leg was brutally injured that made him unable to walk or run.

Those stories gave Scarlet an idea to also join the SAS like him, but her father chuckled and said that right now she was too young to do so. Sometime later, she met John MacTavish, who recently moved into her neighbourhood from Scotland, but wasn't happy that he shifted away from his homeland. She wanted John to be her friend, and make him familiar with the surroundings so he'll get used to everything and love staying at his new home. And soon, they two grew closer, and became best friends.

They two had a similar goal — to join the defense. And one day, that day had to come between the two, when John had to leave for military school. Bidding her best friend a bittersweet farewell, unsure what future has for them in between, John encouraged her to follow her dreams. Taking that as a motivation, Scarlet kept John close to heart, while continuing her aspiration to join the SAS.

Her father got to know about her plan, saying that it won't be easy, since the SAS had the toughest selection processes. That sure unsettled her for a while, but didn't make her back off from her decision respectively. Instead, she learnt a couple of exercises, tips and tricks on self-defense from him that mentally and physically prepared her fully at the same time.

When she recruited herself in the selection process, it was an absolutely different experience for her. The way her mind drastically changed during the training quite traumatized and scared her, knowing what it feels to be in the SAS. But, keeping her father's words by her side, she didn't let the weakness and fear sink her in and moved on further. At times, she was ridiculed by others that she'd never be able to complete the process, but chuckled it all out instead.

The day came, when her hard work paid off, and she finally became eligible for the special forces. It was a blessed feeling for her, as if luck always stood by her side. And this is where, her journey begins..

[colonna-durruti]

Carlo Rovelli

In 1999, NATO bombed Belgrade for 78 days with the goal of breaking Serbia apart and giving rise to an independent Kosovo, now home to a major NATO base in the Balkans.

In 2001, the US invaded Afghanistan, leading to 200,000 people killed, a country devastated and no political result whatsoever.

In 2002, the US unilaterally withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty over Russia’s strenuous objections, dramatically increasing the nuclear risk.

In 2003, the US and NATO allies repudiated the UN Security Council by going to war in Iraq on false pretenses. Iraq is now devastated, no real political pacification has been achieved and the elected parliament has a pro-Iran majority.

In 2004, betraying engagements, the US continued with NATO enlargement, this time to the Baltic States and countries in the Black Sea region (Bulgaria and Romania) and the Balkans.

In 2008, over Russia’s urgent and strenuous objections, the US pledged to expand NATO to Georgia and Ukraine. �

In 2011, the US tasked the CIA to overthrow Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, an ally of Russia. Syria is devastated by war. No political gain achieved for the US.

In 2011, NATO bombed Libya in order to overthrow Moammar Qaddafi. The country, that was prosperous, peaceful, and stable, is now devastated, in civil war, in ruin.

In 2014, the US conspired with Ukrainian nationalist forces to overthrow Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych. The country is now in a bitter war.

In 2015, the US began to place Aegis anti-ballistic missiles in Eastern Europe (Romania), a short distance from Russia.

In 2016-2020, the US supported Ukraine in undermining the Minsk II agreement, despite its unanimous backing by the UN Security Council. The country is now in a bitter war.

In 2021, the new Biden Administration refused to negotiate with Russia over the question of NATO enlargement to Ukraine, prompting the invasion.

In April 2022, the US called on Ukraine to withdraw from peace negotiations with Russia. The result is the useless prolongation of war, with more territory gained by Russia.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the US sought and until today is seeking, without succeeding, and constantly failing, a unipolar world led by a hegemonic US, in which Russia, China, Iran and other great nations have to be subservient.

In this US-led world order (this is the phrase commonly used in the US), the US and the US alone has determine the utilization of the dollar-based banking system, the placement of overseas US military bases, the extent of NATO membership, and the deployment of US missile systems, without any veto or say by other countries.

This arrogant foreign policy has led to constant war, countries devastated, millions killed, a widening rupture of relations between the US-led bloc of nations -a small minority in the planet and now not even anymore economically dominating- and the rest of the world, a global skyrocketing of military expenses, and is slowly leading us towards WWIII.

The wise, decade-long, European effort to engage Russia and China into a strategical economical and political collaboration, enthusiastically supported by the Russian and Chinese leadership, has been shattered by the ferocious US opposition, worried that this could have undermined the US dominance.

Is this the world we want?

[mariacallous]

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad faces the most substantial threat to his regime in years, after rebels captured Aleppo—one of the country’s largest cities—last week, along with dozens of other towns and villages, in a surprise assault.

The move on Aleppo followed a Nov. 27 offensive by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), an opposition militant group and former al Qaeda affiliate that controls much of Syria’s Idlib province, which borders Aleppo province. Aided by locally manufactured kamikaze drones, HTS appears to have caught Assad’s forces off guard, prompting them to retreat from vast areas that are now under the group’s control. Both sides have already suffered significant losses, with at least 446 combatants and civilians killed since Nov. 27, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

More than 14,000 people have been displaced due to the recent violence, according to local aid group Violet. But, for the first time in eight years, many regime dissidents are returning to towns and villages that are now under HTS control.

The Syrian civil war began in 2011 after Assad’s regime violently repressed pro-democracy protesters, triggering a conflict that has so far claimed more than half a million lives and displaced over 7 million people. Aleppo was a major opposition stronghold until 2016, when a Russian air bombing campaign retook the city for the Assad regime.

HTS leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani has instructed his fighters to protect all civilians, including Christians, as well as Syrian regime soldiers who surrender, according to Idlib-based journalist Fared al-Mahlool. Following its split with al Qaeda around 8 years ago, HTS has sought to rebrand itself as a more moderate force than its erstwhile benefactor. Now, many residents of newly captured areas are uncertain what life under HTS control might entail.

Recent escalations in northwest Syria come as Assad’s main international supporters are preoccupied with their own conflicts. Russia is prioritizing its war in Ukraine, and both Iran and its proxy Hezbollah, in Lebanon, have been significantly weakened in fighting with Israel. Still, Russian and Syrian airstrikes targeted Idlib and Aleppo provinces over the weekend, while Iranian-backed militias from Iraq—including Kataib Hezbollah and Fatemiyoun—recently crossed into Syria, according to Al Arabiya, a Saudi Arabian news channel.

“Since Sunday, the bombings are constant,” Mahlool said. “Several schools and clinics in Idlib province have already been targeted.”

On Dec. 1, an airstrike hit Aleppo University Hospital, killing at least 12 people and injuring dozens more. The strike also damaged one of Violet’s ambulances, said Yemn Sayed Issa, the media and communication coordinator with the aid group. That same day, airstrikes targeted Idlib University Hospital, Ibn Sina Hospital, Idlib’s National Hospital, and the Idlib Health Directorate. And, according to Issa, a Soviet-era warplane struck a camp for displaced people near Ma’arrat Misrin, a town just north of central Idlib, killing at least seven civilians, including five children and two women. Violet’s medical team is responding to the attacks.

“It’s extremely dangerous for everyone. Our medics and ambulances head out daily, but constantly fear being targeted,” Issa said, adding that Aleppo—home to around 2 million people—is now critically short on essentials like bread, water, fuel, and medical supplies, which had previously been shipped from other regime-held areas.

“Everything is coming from Idlib now, but it’s difficult. The humanitarian situation is tragic. People are having to find shelter wherever they can,” Issa said. “In the town of [Darkush], for example, a public swimming pool has been turned into a temporary shelter for people who have fled their villages. Most displaced families have been forced to seek shelter in open fields and farmland, without any proper shelter or basic facilities.”

HTS’s advance means Aleppo is under opposition control for the first time in eight years. The front line had remained frozen since Russia and Turkey brokered a cease-fire deal in 2020. The two countries back opposing sides in Syria.

Russia, along with Iran and Hezbollah, are Assad’s key allies, while Turkey supports the Syrian National Army (SNA), a coalition of opposition groups—excluding HTS—that fights the Assad regime and Kurdish forces such as the People’s Defense Units (YPG) and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Turkey considers the latter two groups to be terrorist organizations.

Since the recent rebel offensive, Assad’s regime has effectively abandoned areas within Aleppo province and left them under Kurdish control. The SNA continues to push the Kurdish groups further east. On Dec. 1, the SNA captured the strategic town of Tel Rifaat, which is located between Aleppo and the Turkish border. For the past eight years, the area had been under YPG and PKK control—a significant national security concern for Turkey.

The relationship between HTS and the SNA has long been tense; HTS has sought control over SNA-held areas and the SNA distrusts HTS for numerous reasons, including ideological differences. But both groups share a common goal.

“The priority is to fight the regime,” said Orwa Ajjoub, a doctoral candidate at Malmo University in Sweden who researches Islamist groups in Syria. “I’ve spoken with people who are sworn enemies of HTS to this day, but now they’re putting their differences aside to fight the regime. HTS is leading these efforts. When the dust settles, we’ll see how these diverse groups manage to resolve their disagreements.”

Turkey has its own troops in Syria, primarily in Idlib, Afrin, and other areas east of the Euphrates River, mainly as part of its operations against the PKK and YPG. Around 900 U.S. troops are also in the country; mostly concentrated in northeastern Syria, they support counter-terrorism operations against the Islamic State.

Analysts have speculated over whether Turkey—which is keen to reduce the power of the PKK and YPG—gave HTS the green light for the operation. Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, however, said that it would be “wrong” to try to chalk the current situation in Syria up to external intervention.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan tried to mend relations with Assad in July, following a deterioration of ties throughout the war. Yet Assad insisted that Turkish forces must fully withdraw from Syria for him to negotiate with Erdogan—a request Turkey is unwilling to meet due to its own national security concerns.

Speaking with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Dec. 1, Fidan stressed that Turkey opposes instability in the region and reiterated the importance of reducing tensions in Syria. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi arrived in Turkey on Dec. 2 to discuss the situation in Syria. “Recent developments show once again that Damascus must reconcile with its own people and the legitimate opposition,” Fidan said at a joint news conference with Araghchi. “Turkey is ready to make all the necessary contribution toward this.”

Whether Turkey knew about it or not, “this operation is definitely a win for Turkey,” Ajjoub said. U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has spoken about potentially withdrawing the remaining U.S. troops in Syria, which could create a power vacuum in the region. “Having more leverage in Syria before Donald Trump takes office could be significant for Turkey,” Ajjoub said.

[justforbooks]

Patriot by Alexei Navalny

The late Russian activist’s memoir is an insightful, sharp, even humorous account of his fight against Putin’s regime – and a warning to the world

Alexei Navalny was watching his favourite cartoon show, Rick and Morty, when he suddenly felt unwell. He was 21 minutes into an episode where Rick turns into a pickle. The late Russian opposition leader was on a flight back to Moscow after campaigning ahead of regional elections in the Siberian city of Tomsk in August 2020. Something was clearly wrong, and Navalny staggered to the bathroom.

There, he recalls, he had the grim realisation: “I’m done for.” He told a sceptical steward that he’d been poisoned and then lay down calmly in the aisle, facing a wall. Life didn’t flash before his eyes. Instead, he compares his experience of death – or near-death, as it turned out – to something from a dark fantasy. It was like being “kissed by a Dementor and a Nazgûl stands nearby”.

He is clear who gave the order to kill him with the nerve agent novichok: Vladimir Putin. Navalny calls Russia’s president a “bribe-taking old man” and a “vengeful runt” who sits on top of a “sinister regime”. The assassins were members of the FSB, the KGB’s successor agency. Navalny spent 18 days in a coma, waking up in hospital in Germany.

It was while recovering in Freiburg that he wrote the first part of his extraordinary memoir, Patriot. The second section consists of letters from prison, following his January 2021 return to Moscow, when he was dramatically arrested at the airport. Navalny says he embarked on an autobiography knowing the Kremlin could finish him off. “If they do finally whack me, this book will be my memorial,” he notes.

It took three years for his gallows humour prophecy to come true. Navalny died in February this year, his likely murder taking place in an Arctic penal colony. He was 47. Prison documents hint he was poisoned and the authorities removed the evidence: clothes, vomit, even snow he had come into contact with.

This is a brave and brilliant book, a luminous account of Navalny’s life and dark times. It is a challenge from beyond the grave to Russia’s murder-addicted rulers. You can hear his voice in the deft translation by Arch Tait and Stephen Dalziel: sharp, playful and lacking in self-pity. Nothing crushes him. Up until the end – his final “polar” entry is on 17 January 2024 – he radiates indomitable good humour.

Patriot includes a manifesto for how the country might be transformed: free elections, a constitutional assembly, decentralisation and a European orientation. Days before his murder, he predicted the Putin regime would crumble, while acknowledging the resilience of autocracies.

Trained as a lawyer, Navalny first attracted attention as a transparency activist. He bought shares in notoriously corrupt oil and gas companies and asked awkward questions at shareholder meetings. The Kremlin controlled TV and most newspapers, so Navalny wrote up his exposés online. In 2011 he founded FBK, an anti-corruption organisation which grew into a grassroots national movement run by volunteers. He expresses pride at the way his campaigns encouraged young Russians to take part in opposition politics. Police detained him for the first time in 2011 when he attended protests against rigged Duma elections. Undaunted, he stood two years later to be mayor of Moscow, coming second, before finding himself in an “endless cycle” of rallies, arrests and spells in custody.

The Kremlin’s response to all this was vicious. His brother Oleg was jailed after a fake trial, a provocateur threw green gunk at Navalny, blinding him in one eye. In 2016 he tried to run for president. His videos – of Putin’s tacky Sochi palace and former president Dmitry Medvedev’s dodgy schemes – attracted millions of views. Navalny writes movingly about his wife, Yulia, – whom he met on holiday in Turkey – as a soulmate throughout this period.

Given his understanding of Putin’s Stalinist methods, why did he return to Moscow? His answer is that the struggle to make Russia a normal state was “my life’s work”. He wasn’t prepared to dump his homeland or his convictions, he says. At first, jail conditions were bearable. Well-wishers sent sacks of letters and a tiramisu cake. In one dispatch, Navalny ponders the “amazing ability of human beings to adapt and derive pleasure from the most trivial things”, such as instant coffee.

Behind bars, he chatted to his cellmates and read. He preferred Maupassant to Flaubert and enjoyed Oliver Twist (though he wonders if Dickens got working-class dialogue right). The FSB spied on him 24/7; his warders wore body cameras and barked commands.

As conditions worsened, he made fewer diary entries. More criminal “convictions” piled up – for insulting a war veteran and for extremism. He was shuffled from one penitentiary to the next. Meanwhile, “perverted” prison staff refused to treat his back pain, prompting a hunger strike. He was categorised as a flight risk and woken throughout the night, put in a tiny punishment cell and denied his wife’s letters.

None of these privations stopped Navalny from denouncing Putin’s all-out invasion of Ukraine as an “unjust war of aggression”. The reason for the war is Putin’s desire to hold on to power at any cost, and an obsession with his “historical legacy”, he writes. Critics regard Navalny as a closet nationalist. But Patriot calls for Russia to withdraw its troops, respect Ukraine’s 1991 borders and pay compensation.

During one of Yulia’s visits, Navalny told her there was a “high probability” he would never get out of prison alive. “They will poison me,” he said. “I know,” she replied. He sketches out what this means – no chance to say goodbye, never meeting his grandchildren, “tasseled mortar boards tossed in the air in my absence”. Maybe an unmarked grave. His philosophy: hope for the best, expect the worst. His death is a terrible loss, for Russia and for all of us.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Joshua Keating at Vox:

The early days of the uprising against Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime — which came to a stunning end this weekend after 13 long years of civil war as rebel forces entered the capital of Damascus and Assad fled into exile — were defined by two famous pieces of graffiti. The first was written by a group of teenage boys on a school wall in early 2011 in the city of Daraa. Inspired by the Arab Spring protests then seemingly sweeping away the old order in longtime dictatorships like Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, they wrote, “You are next, doctor,” referring to Assad, who had trained and worked as an ophthalmologist in London in his early years before returning to take over the family business of ruling Syria with an iron fist. The boys were then arrested and tortured by the regime’s security forces, an event credited by many with sparking the mass protest movement against Assad.

The message proved to be overly optimistic: Assad didn’t flee and he didn’t compromise, instead opting to crush the uprising by force, leading to a civil war that would kill as many as half a million people and displace millions more. The second graffiti message was a slogan scrawled by pro-regime militias throughout the country in the early days of the uprising: “Assad or we burn the country.” The phrase signaled the regime’s complete unwillingness to compromise with its enemies and the lengths it would go to stay in power. Over the past week, even as the rebels took the ancient city of Aleppo on November 30 and began streaming down the highway south toward Damascus, it still seemed far-fetched that the Syrian regime would fall — that a family that had been in power since Bashar’s father Hafez al-Assad carried out a coup 54 years ago and was willing to go so far as to use chemical weapons on its own people and reduce its own cities to rubble to preserve that power would simply crumble in a matter of days.

But that’s exactly what happened: As the rebels advanced, there were numerous reports of government forces simply abandoning their positions and discarding their uniforms. The Russian government says it has offered Assad and his family asylum. US officials say they have not confirmed that Assad is in Russia, but have no reason to doubt it.

[...]

The new rulers

Attention will now turn to Syria’s new rulers and how they will govern. Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, the HTS leader, has said all the right things, calling on its supporters to avoid vengeance against regime supporters. For now, he is leaving Assad-appointed Prime Minister Mohammed Ghazi al-Jalali in place until a transitional government is formed. On Saturday, a few hours before Assad’s overthrow, Vox asked Mouaz Moustafa, executive director of the US-based Syrian Emergency Task Force, what a transitional government could look like. He suggested that UN Resolution 2254, adopted back in 2015 but never implemented, could provide a road map: It calls for a Syrian-led political process facilitated by the United Nations leading to new elections within 18 months.

In the coming months, we’ll see whether Jolani, the former al-Qaeda fighter with a $10 million price on his head from the US government, is really the pragmatic pluralist he now says he is, and assuming he is, whether he’s capable of keeping together an ethnically and religiously diverse country, one awash with weapons, various armed groups, and traumatized by decades of dictatorship and war. A big question mark is how Damascus’s new rulers will contend with the Kurdish-ruled northeast corner of the country, particularly if the incoming Trump administration follows through on plans from his last term to remove US troops from the region. There have already been concerning reports in recent days of clashes between Kurdish forces and the Turkish-backed SNA. On Saturday, Trump posted on Truth Social that the offensive in Syria was “NOT OUR FIGHT” and that America “SHOULD HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH IT.” Beyond these questions, Assad’s fall should be a reminder of some important facts. One, governments and analysts continue to be extremely bad at assessing the strength of non-state militant groups like HTS, their ability to launch major offensives, and the ability of governments to resist them. [...] Over the past few years, the world had all but decided that Assad had won the civil war. Regional governments that had spent years trying to topple him were welcoming him back into the fold, while the US was moving on to other priorities. If the last few days teach us anything, it’s that governments like Assad’s can often be more brittle than they appear from the outside, and it just takes a strong push to knock them over. For all the very justified concern and caution about what lies ahead for Syria, that should be some cause for optimism.

With the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, what will be next for the nation as it charts a post-Bashar course?

[eaglesnick]

“To put political power in the hands of men embittered and degraded by poverty is to tie firebrands to foxes and turn them loose amid the standing corn; it is to put out the eyes of a Samson and to twine his arms around the pillars of national life.” – Henry George

The underlying cause of the current civil unrest on British streets can be summed up in one word – POVERTY.

Poverty and inequality in Britain has been rising since Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979. In an article in The English Historical Review titled, ‘Poverty, Inequality Statistics and Knowledge Politics Under Thatcher', 08/04/22, the author argues:

“Under the premiership of Margaret Thatcher, economic inequality and poverty in the United Kingdom rose dramatically to high levels that have remained one of the lasting legacies of Thatcherism, with far-reaching implications for social cohesion and political culture in Britain.”

Tony Blair, a man who embraced Thatcher’s neo-liberal free-market philosophy claimed that while he was prime minister New Labour

 “...made the UK more equal, more fair and more socially mobile”  (Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, 14/07/2019)

This is not true for the population as a whole. It is true that more was spent on public services, and on pensioners and those poorer working age adults with dependent children, both groups seeing their economic position improve. However:

“By contrast, the incomes of poorer working-age adults without dependent children - the major demographic group not emphasised by Labour as a priority - changed very little over the period. As a result they fell behind the rest of the population and relative poverty levels rose.( Institute For Fiscal Studies: Labours Record on poverty and inequality’, 06/06/2013)

Not only that, but income inequality also continued to rise under Blair as the already wealthy saw ’their incomes increase very substantially.’ (ibid)

We all know that the last 14 years of Tory government have only made matters worse: homelessness up; NHS waiting lists up; income inequality up; public services starved of cash; benefits cut; rents up, mortgages up. I could go on

Ordinary working people are suffering a cost of living crisis. The already poor have been pushed over the brink, especially in the North where the promised “levelling up” was just an empty election slogan to get Boris Johnson elected to power. Describing the neglected North one commentator said:

“Other countries have poor bits. Britain has a poor half”. (The Economist, ‘Why Britain is more geographically unequal than any  other rich country’ , 30/06/20

Poverty led to the UK Food Riots of 1766. Poverty led to the French revolution in 1789. The Swing Riots, caused by rural poverty swept southern England in 1830. Poverty led to the Russian Revolution in 1917.  Poll Tax riots hit the streets of Britain in 1990 and a report on the London riots of 2011 blamed “deprivation".

The point is, poverty causes feelings of hopelessness, abandonment, anger and resentment.  Sometimes the victims of poverty correctly identify the people or class responsible for their plight, sometimes they don’t. The poverty and inequality experienced in  Britain today is not directly the fault of immigrants. It is the result of deliberate policies by previous Conservative and Labour governments, but mass immigration does exacerbate already existing conditions of inequality and poverty.

There are not enough houses, the health system cannot cope with demand, there are not enough teachers or schools, and unemployment is rising, as is the day-to-day cost of living, while the already wealthy become richer still.

The far-right channel the anger that ordinary working people justifiably feel about this situation towards an easily identifiable target – immigrants and the children of immigrants, especially non-whites.

The most obvious example of this cynical political strategy in recent history is Hitler’s rise to power in Germany during the economic crisis of the early 1930’s, which saw runaway inflation, and a cost-of-living crisis. Hitler used the Jews as scapegoats, playing on existing prejudices and turning them into hatred, not only of Jews but of homosexuals, gypsies, black people, those with disabilities, Poles and even some Christian groups.

Our fathers and grandfathers fought against such racial tyranny and we should do the same but we will not be successful in that fight until our governments subscribe to the goal of a fairer and more equal society, a society where poverty is falling rather than rising.

There is a conversation to be had about acceptable immigration levels in relation to the economy and social cohesion, but that cannot be conducted in isolation to the need to raise the general standard of living for ALL our citizens and not just the few at the top. Martin Lewis warned politicians of this in 2022.

“We need to keep people fed. We need to keep them warm. If we get this wrong right now, then we get to the point where we start to risk civil unrest. When breadwinners cannot provide, anger brews and civil unrest brews – and I do not think we are very far off,”  (independent: 10/04/22)

No one listened and now that day has arrived.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

This day in history

On June 20, I'm keynoting the LOCUS AWARDS in OAKLAND.

#20yrsago Kill a stupid Internet patent https://web.archive.org/web/20040612095150/https://www.eff.org/patent/contest/

#15yrsago Stiglitz: America’s double-standard on economic crises infuriates the poor world https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2009/07/third-world-debt200907

#15yrsago Chinese censorware will expose every PC in the nation to malware, ID theft, botnetting https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2009/06/11/chinas-new-mandatory-censorware-creates-big-security-flaws/

#15yrsago Eliot Spitzer explains himself https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2009/07/out-to-lunch-spitzer200907

#15yrsago Network neutrality advocated by…cable operators? https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/06/cable-group-turns-net-neutrality-around-over-isp-access-fees/

#15yrsago Econoblogger explains why Batman villains shouldn’t cooperate https://eco-comics.blogspot.com/2009/06/should-batman-villains-betray-each_2173.html

#10yrsago Armed, masked Russian separatists seize “decadent” hackspace in Donetsk, Ukraine https://www.euronews.com/2014/06/10/in-donetsk-armed-pro-russian-separatists-target-seize-decadent-cultural-centre-

#10yrsago Pensacola newspaper editorial board condemns censorship of Little Brother https://www.pnj.com/story/opinion/editorials/2014/06/11/fear-books/10295745/

#10yrsago Rarity versus the Internet https://medium.com/message/you-need-to-hear-this-extremely-rare-recording-27619411e077

#10yrsago Big Cable fronts fake anti-Net-Neutrality group whose “members” never joined https://www.vice.com/en/article/4w747j/community-groups-were-duped-into-joining-telecom-industrys-anti-net-neutrality-coalition

#10yrsago Join the Fastlane: hypothetical ISP from the cable company fuckery dystopia https://web.archive.org/web/20140614100545/http://jointhefastlane.com/

#10yrsago Happynomics versus econobollocks https://timharford.com/2014/06/the-four-lessons-of-happynomics/

#10yrsago Dada vs Hitler: the anti-Nazi collages of John Heartfield https://web.archive.org/web/20140530122539/http://www.kuriositas.com/2011/06/extraordinary-anti-nazi-photomontages.html

#5yrsago The Church of the Subgenius’s Salvation Pack is the best $35 I ever spent https://memex.craphound.com/2019/06/11/the-church-of-the-subgeniuss-salvation-pack-is-the-best-35-i-ever-spent/

#5yrsago Countries with longer copyright terms have access to fewer books (pay attention, Canada!) https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3401684

#5yrsago Hackers stole a US Customs and Border Patrol facial recognition database https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/06/10/us-customs-border-protection-says-photos-travelers-into-out-country-were-recently-taken-data-breach/

#5yrsago Chrome-derived browsers threaten to fork from Google, refuse to eliminate ad-blocker features https://www.zdnet.com/article/opera-brave-vivaldi-to-ignore-chromes-anti-ad-blocker-changes-despite-shared-codebase/

#5yrsago Detroit charter school salutatorians use their graduation speeches to condemn their school for putting profits before kids https://www.freep.com/story/news/education/2019/06/10/salutatorians-criticize-charter-school-graduation/1381474001/

#5yrsago How fanfic archives lead the world in data organization https://www.wired.com/story/archive-of-our-own-fans-better-than-tech-organizing-information/

#5yrsago The Grand Dark: Richard Kadrey’s headlong rush of noir dieselpunk, so fast and so smart https://memex.craphound.com/2019/06/11/the-grand-dark-richard-kadreys-headlong-rush-of-noir-dieselpunk-so-fast-and-so-smart/

#5yrsago “The Grand Dark”: Kadrey’s latest is a noir, dieselpunk masterpiece that’s timely as hell https://web.archive.org/web/20190612041736/https://www.latimes.com/books/la-ca-jc-review-richard-kadrey-grand-dark-20190611-story.html

#1yrago The Shitty Tech Adoption Curve Has a Business Model https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/11/the-shitty-tech-adoption-curve-has-a-business-model/

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Syria :: David Rowe

"If the United States was still going to be run by the competent next month, we would now be on the verge of destroying Russia as a competitor and letting Xi Jinping know how far he can go, along with ending the Iranian-backed opposition in the Middle East. The “authoritarian alternative to democracy” would be gasping for air. That may not sound “pretty” to political idealists, but since neither Nirvana nor Utopia is likely to be proclaimed in my lifetime, I damn sure prefer us to them.

Literally, the only thing that can now save Putin is the Orange Clusterfuck’s desire to surrender to his tender mercies and tear us apart because his sick, twisted psyche is so damaged by the fact civilized society saw him as the piece of shit he was born to be and left him with his nose pressed to a glass door that was never going to be opened to the likes of him. That we are expected hand this country over to traitors who campaigned on a promise to commit this destruction enrages me beyond my ability to put it in words."

[TCinLA]

+

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

December 8, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Dec 09, 2024

Late last night, the White House said in a statement that “President Biden and his team are closely monitoring the extraordinary events in Syria and staying in constant touch with regional partners.”

Early this morning, the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad fell to armed opposition.

According to Jill Lawless of the Associated Press, the forces that toppled Assad are led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, a coalition of Islamic groups formerly associated with al-Qaeda’s branch in Syria and currently designated a terrorist group by the U.S. and the United Nations, although its leaders have tried to distance themselves from al-Qaeda.

President Bashar al-Assad succeeded his father to the Syrian presidency in July 2000, establishing a totalitarian dictatorship. In 2011, Assad cracked down on protesters who were part of the Arab Spring, sparking a civil war of a number of factions fighting Assad’s troops, which by 2015 relied on support from Russia and Iran.

That war has turned half of Syria’s prewar population of 23 million (a little more than the population of Florida) into refugees and killed more than half a million people. With Russian and Iranian support, Assad managed to regain control of most of the country, with rebels pushed back to the north and northwest.

A stalemate that had lasted for years ended abruptly on November 27.

Iran and Hezbollah have been badly weakened by the ongoing fight of Israel against Iran-backed Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. On November 27, Israel and Lebanon signed a ceasefire agreement that made it clear that Hezbollah had been tied down in Lebanon and that its ability to fight had been severely compromised. At the same time, Russia has been badly weakened by almost three years of war against Ukraine, and the Russian ruble fell sharply again in late November after additional U.S. sanctions targeted Russia’s third-largest bank, creating more economic hardship in Russia and undercutting Putin’s insistence that he is winning against the West.

When opposition forces began an offensive on November 27, they took more than 15 villages in Aleppo province that day. Journalist Lawless recounted a quick history of the next 11 days, recording how the insurgents swept through the country with little resistance, taking Syria’s largest city, Aleppo, on the 29th. The Syrian military launched a counterattack on December 1, but the insurgents continued to gain ground, and by December 7 they had captured Syria’s third-largest city, Homs. They announced they were in the “final stage” of their offensive.

Today, December 8, Assad fled with his family to Moscow, where Russian president Vladimir Putin has offered him asylum. As Nick Paton Walsh of CNN put it, “Without the physical crutches of Russia’s air force and Iran’s proxy muscle Hezbollah, [Assad] toppled when finally pushed.”

In Damascus, crowds are praying and celebrating, and opposition forces have liberated the prisoners held in the notorious Saydnaya military prison. More than 100,000 detainees are unaccounted for, and their families are hoping to find them, or at least to find answers.

Meanwhile, after Assad’s regime fell, the U.S. Air Force struck more than 75 ISIS-related targets in Syria. “ISIS has been trying to reconstitute in this broad area known as the Badiya desert,” a White House senior official told reporters. “We have worked to make sure they cannot do that. So when they try to camp there, when they try to train… we take them out.”

National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan explained at the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California, that the U.S. will work to prevent the resurgence of ISIS. It will also make sure “that our friends in the region, Israel, Jordan, Iraq, others who border Syria, or who would potentially face spillover effects from Syria, are strong and secure.” Finally, he said, the U.S. wants to make sure “that this does not lead to a humanitarian catastrophe.”

Speaking to the nation this afternoon, President Joe Biden announced: "At long last, the Assad regime has fallen. This regime brutalized and tortured and killed literally hundreds of thousands of innocent Syrians." He called the fall of Assad’s regime a “fundamental act of justice” and “a moment of historic opportunity for the long-suffering people of Syria to build a better future for their proud country.”

But it is also “a moment of risk and uncertainty,” the president said. He noted that the U.S. is “mindful” of the security of Americans in Syria, including freelance journalist Austin Tice, who was kidnapped in 2012 and imprisoned by Assad’s regime. “[W]e believe he is alive,” Biden told reporters. “We think we can get him back, but we have no direct evidence of that yet.”

Biden noted that Syria’s main backers, Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia, could not defend “this abhorrent regime in Syria” because they “are far weaker today than when I took office.” He continued: “This is a direct result of the blows that Ukraine [and] Israel” have landed on them “with the unflagging support of the United States.”

In contrast to Biden’s comments, President-elect Donald Trump’s social media accounts took Russia’s side in the Syrian events. Noting that the insurgents looked as if they would throw Assad out, Trump’s account said that “Russia, because they are so tied up in Ukraine, and with the loss there of over 600,000 soldiers, seems incapable of stopping this literal march through Syria, a country they have protected for years.” The account blamed former president Barack Obama for the crisis of 2011 and said that Russia had stepped in then to stop the chaos. The Trump account suggested that Assad’s defeat might be “the best thing that can happen to” Russia, because “[t]here was never much of a benefit in Syria for Russia, other than to make Obama look really stupid.”

“In any event,” the account continued, “Syria is a mess, but is not our friend, & THE UNITED STATES SHOULD HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH IT. THIS IS NOT OUR FIGHT. LET IT PLAY OUT. DO NOT GET INVOLVED!”

In contrast to Trump’s focus on Russia, journalist Anne Applebaum, a scholar of autocracy, took a much broader view of the meaning of Assad’s fall. In dictatorships, she wrote in The Atlantic, “cold, deliberate, well-planned cruelty” like Assad’s “is meant to inspire hopelessness. Ludicrous lies and cynical propaganda campaigns are meant to create apathy and nihilism.” Random arrests create destabilizing waves of refugees that leave those who remain in despair.

Authoritarian regimes seek “to rob people of any ability to plan for a different future, to convince people that their dictatorships are eternal. ‘Our leader forever’” she points out, was the slogan of the Assad dynasty. But soldiers and police officers have relatives who suffer under the regime, and their loyalty is not assured, as Assad has now learned.

The future of Syria is entirely unclear, Applebaum writes, but there is no doubt that “the end of the Assad regime creates something new, and not only in Syria. There is nothing worse than hopelessness, nothing more soul-destroying than pessimism, grief, and despair. The fall of a Russian- and Iranian-backed regime offers, suddenly, the possibility of change. The future might be different. And that possibility will inspire hope all around the world.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[beardedmrbean]

Islamist rebels and their allies were advancing towards the key Syrian city of Hama on Tuesday, according to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR).

Militants with the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group were fighting in what SOHR called the "most violent" clashes with government troops since launching their surprise offensive last week.

Syria and Russia strike Hama region

"Clashes have erupted in the northern Hama countryside, where rebel factions managed to seize several cities and towns in the last few hours," said the monitor, which relies on a large network of sources inside Syria. 

The Associated Press reported that the rebels were just 10 kilometers (6 miles) away from the city.

Syrian government forces were reportedly preparing for a counter-attack, according to the Syrian state news agency SANA.

The SOHR added that "Syrian and Russian air forces carried out dozens of strikes on the area."

Russian President Vladimir Putin has been a longtime ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and has regularly provided material support since Assad's clampdown on protests sparked the Syrian Civil War in 2011.

Russia began intervening directly in 2015 with airstrikes when the extremist "Islamic State" (IS) entered the conflict.

Hama is key link between Aleppo and Damascus

Syrian state news agency SANA also reported air strikes on Hama province and rebel bastion Idlib in the northwest. Hama is considered a strategically important city because it connects Aleppo, which HTS swept into last week, and the capital Damascus. 

The area is home to the Alawite community from which Assad hails, and thus a rebel takeover of Hama would "pose a threat to the regime's popular base," SOHR director Rami Abdel Rahman said.

According to the United Nations, some 50,000 people have been displaced and hundreds, mostly fighters, have been killed since the conflict touched off again in November.

[2oosterr]

capt. ryan 'orca' murdoch

-> Playlist

GENERAL

NAME: Ryan Murdoch

ALIASES: Orca, Oscar Actual

AFFILIATION: United States Navy, OSOD

RANK: Captain

DOB: March 6th, 1978

AGE: 45

GENDER: F

BLOOD TYPE: B NEG

SEXUALITY: Queer unlabeled

HOMETOWN: Rockland, Maine

CURRENT RESIDENCE: Redcorn Airfield, Odessa, Texas

NATIONALITY: USAmerican

EDUCATION HISTORY: K-12 [1983 - 1991]

EMPLOYMENT HISTORY: US Naval Aviator (Commander) [1994 - 2011], PMC Operator (Captain) [2011 - Present]

APPEARANCE

HEIGHT: 182cm (5’9”)

WEIGHT: 170 lbs

EC: Brown

HC: Black, White

BUILD: Athletic, prominent muscle definition

SKILLS

[23/30]

Strength:             ▮▮▮▯▯

Speed:                ▮▮▮▯▯

Intelligence:        ▮▮▮▮▯

Experience:        ▮▮▮▮▮

Perception:         ▮▮▮▮▮

Communication: ▮▮▮▯▯

SPOKEN LANGUAGES: English (Native), Spanish (C1), Russian (B2), ASL

SPECIALISATION: Can pilot almost any aircraft, including helicopters and the C-130.

WEAPONS: Proficient in close combat, hand-to-hand, air-to-air, and air-to-land combat. Long range is a weak point.

RELATIONSHIPS

Alison Murdoch [Mother] [AGE: 66]

Louis Murdoch [Father] [DECEASED]

Aaron Murdoch [Brother] [AGE: 34]

PSYCHOLOGY

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

Anger management issues

Chronic alcoholism

MEDICAL

GSW on right side of face

3rd degree burns on right arm

Dog bite scar on left arm

ENHANCEMENT

[GRADE 4 - Extremely Low Risk]

Individual had demonstrated the ability to walk on liquid. Note that individual can submerge in the same liquid when contact point is not the feet.

PERSONALITY

MBTI type – ISTJ-A; Introverted, observant, thinking, judging, assertive.

Orca is a natural leader despite her introversion. She commands attention, even from those who aren't willing to follow her, unafraid to put such people in their place with harsh words and biting insults. Her introversion leans more to the ambivert side of things, she prefers the quiet of solitude over a loud social function, but socialising is not out of her comfort zone, and she would never be afraid to speak up and voice her opinions.

The ends always justify the means to Orca. She is willing to do risky, and sometimes deplorable, things to complete her objective, leaving some to question her morality, but those close to her trust that she knows where to draw the line. She's self-assured, confident to the point of cockiness at times, because she's good and she knows it. 

The opinions of others mean very little to her, with the exception of the few people she calls her friends – she cares deeply for those select few. It takes a lot for her to trust, and a lot more to consider someone a friend, but once you've proved yourself, her loyalty is fierce. It’s incredibly difficult, but not impossible, to lose her faith.

Even when she was in the Navy, Orca has never been a fan of authority. It takes effort to earn her respect, which many of her commanding officers never did. In a way, this makes her slightly hypocritical, seeing as she demands respect from those around her but doesn't give it so easily.

Although she appears to be a serious, no-nonsense Captain, under the stony facade Orca actually has a strong sense of humour. She's more than willing to indulge in the jokes her soldiers throw around, but she still reserves the ability to take things seriously when the need arises.

FUN FACTS

Orca learned to play the drums as a way to de-stress. She learned in bootcamp from one of the older kids, and kept it up when she could in the Navy.

Her biggest pet peeve is stupid questions. She’s been known to make people run laps until the sun goes down for not using common sense.

The streaks in her hair are due to a bout of Alopecia Areata that she suffered from for most of her childhood, likely stress induced, and when the patches of hair grew back, they were white. She also has a patch of white where her neck meets her skull, but she keeps that one hidden because she doesn’t think it's as cool as the other two.

Her hair is also the reason for her callsign, since it looks vaguely like the markings on a killer whale, especially when she wears it up.

Her favourite colour is red.

She owns an ungodly amount of orca plushies.

On a similar note, she also owns an ungodly amount of model figures of fighter jets.

She’s obsessed with Top Gun. Like, balls to the wall fucking insane about it.

Like, she references it daily.

Yes, it was the reason she joined the navy. She is not immune to propaganda

Orca actually attended the real TOPGUN in Nevada in 2000, and graduated top of her class.

In 2016, she bought a decommissioned F-22 Raptor thanks to an Admiral friend of hers, and has been slowly refurbishing it in her off time. She keeps it in hangar two, and nobody else is even allowed to go in there.

She does all the repairs to the OSODs aircrafts herself.

BACKGROUND

Ryan's fate was decided before she was even born.

Her mother, Alison, was known to carry the gene for a genetic disorder and as a result, when she was pregnant with Ryan, she opted for a genetic screening to see if it would be passed down to her. It wasn't, but it's thanks to this genetic screening that they found out Ryan carried the NLH gene – the enhanced gene.

From the moment she was born, it seemed that her parents had already given up on her. Neglectful would be an understatement, there was no love in the way they cared for her. It was nothing but a chore to them, having to raise their mutant child when all they wanted was a normal baby.

Her father died when she was five. Shipped out to Iraq in ‘83 and never came back. Her mother shut down after that.

Growing up was difficult. Rockland was a small enough town that most, if not all, of the inhabitants knew about the fact that she was enhanced. She spent the majority of her childhood alone, being avoided by her peers and ignored by her mother, and becoming more and more bitter as the years went by.

She was eight when she finally discovered what her enhancement was; the ability to walk on water. It's a cruel joke, that she never even had a fleeting chance at a normal life because of something so insignificant.

When Ryan was eleven, her half-brother Aaron was born, and she got to witness firsthand what it looks like when someone loves you. Her mother was a completely different person once she brought him home, smiling and cooing adoringly at her infant brother. The resentment for both of them would never leave her.

Enhanced individuals, as the official paperwork refers to them, are required to serve in the military whether they like it or not. Mandatory service, starting at sixteen, and ending when you die. There is no choice, not for those who are deemed sub-human because of a genetic mutation completely out of anyone's control.

Despite the unfairness of it all, Ryan was shipped off to bootcamp a few months after her thirteenth birthday. It was easier there, surprisingly; there were other enhanced kids – people like her, for the first time in her life – and the structure and regiment of it all was something she actually found herself enjoying. The one aspect she struggled with was the demanding authority. She has never been with being told what to to, being a follower, especially by people she has no reason to respect apart from their rank. Her commanding officers were just like every other adult that had failed her thus far, and she earned more than a few disciplinaries for the insubordination of her outbursts of anger.

The three years she spent there helped Ryan for some sense of identity. It was strange, and bittersweet in a way, but she thrived in the military – had she not been conscripted, she may have even joined of her own accord.

The only sense of choice people like Ryan are given is the liberty of choosing which branch of the military they go to, so when she finally reached her sixteenth birthday in the March of ‘94, Ryan picked the Navy. She was on the plane to California the next day.

Once again, her entire life and any sense of structure she had was thrown to the wind. The Navy was harder, she was alone again and this time she had no idea if she was the only one of her kind; outing herself as enhanced didn’t seem like the best idea, especially since being a woman already put a target on her head. They looked down on her, endlessly questioned her abilities with an arrogance that made her blood boil, but Ryan was determined. She would be an aviator, and she’d be leagues better than all the people who thought they were above her – no amount of discouragement from them could change her mind.

It was in the academy that she met her first true friend, Michael ‘Berlin’ Addams. He was Ryan’s wingman, her partner in the skies, and the only person in her life to accept her unconditionally and without question. From the moment they met it was like two puzzle pieces clicking into place, his easygoing and humorous nature was the complete opposite of Orca’s quick temper, but they worked incredibly together like two sides of the same coin.

After Orca and Berlin graduated from the academy, placed first and fourth respectively, the two of them quickly rose through the ranks together, thanks to their raw talent for aviation as well as the synergy they had. They were best friends, practically inseparable, and though there were others they got along with, no one else came close to the bond that they had. For the longest time it was just the two of them, but the incident of March 1999 changed that.

While offshore on a deployment, someone found out Orca was enhanced, and word spread around the aircraft carrier faster than she could’ve imagined. She lashed out, broke another pilot's nose, and had to mop the floors for two months as punishment. While she was cleaning she was approached by one of the sailors, Eric Reyton she would come to learn. He extended an olive branch, and almost got his head bitten off before he revealed that he was enhanced too. It was a relief, learning that she wasn’t the only one, she finally had someone who really understood again. Berlin did his best, but he would never truly know what it was like.

From then on, it was the three of them. Orca, Berlin, and Eric – Static, as they took to calling him – and for the first time she actually started to feel like she belonged. The boys were like brothers to her, the family she never had, and life finally felt like it was looking up after all those long, lonely years.

And then Berlin died.

Shot down over land while they were on assignment. He didn't even have time to eject before he hit the ground.

Orca thought she knew pain. Unloved by her own mother, alone for the first sixteen years of her life, rejected by almost everyone she'd ever met, none of it had been easy; but as she watched Berlin's plane disappear into the treeline, nothing could've prepared her for the agony that ripped through her chest.

The rest felt like an out of body experience. She ejected, sparing not a single though for her own plane as it went down too. The landing fractured her ankle but she ran anyway, through the forest towards the blaze. She clambered up the wing of his aircraft, ripping the cockpit open and paying no mind to the way the searing metal burned through her flight suit and then her skin.

She pulled his body from the wreck, collapsing onto the ground with his lifeless body cradled in her arms. That's how the evac team found her, hours later, still sobbing into his cold skin.

His body went back to his family in New Jersey, but Orca kept his tags. She stayed standing over his coffin for hours after everyone else had left, everyone but Eric. Nobody was closer to Berlin than they were. Nobody understood the gaping hole his death left behind.

They were approached, after night had fallen and they were on their way out of the graveyard. The stranger handed Orca a card and introduced herself – Colonel Ellis – telling her to call when they needed a change of scenery. Eric had to restrain her from clawing the Colonel's eyes out for her audacity.

After the funeral, Orca finally understood how her mother felt when her dad didn't come home. There was nothing that could help the pain, the anguish of losing her best friend, so she drank herself into blackout numbness to escape it. Eric tried to help her, but it only ended in her lashing out. It went on like that for months, the only time she wasn't wasted was on the aircraft carrier where she had no choice. In a desperate attempt to help his friend, Eric ended up calling the Colonel to get them both out of California.

They found out on the flight to Texas that the Colonel was starting a PMC solely for the enhanced. The 'Occult Special Operations Division', she called it, a counter-terrorism taskforce. At first Orca was sceptical, the idea of it seemed almost too good to be true, but Colonel Ellis's achievements spoke for themselves. She was a decorated officer, and there was no doubt she had the power and resources to create something like this.

For a year, Orca and Eric served under Colonel Ellis in the OSOD, along with Lieutenant Klaus Green, Corporal Badger, both marines, and Lieutenant Nina ‘Vulture’ Smith, an Air Force pilot and all soldiers Ellis had worked with for a long time. It was better, being surrounded by people like them, and the freedom they had now was infinitely better than what they had in the Navy, but they were still out of their element. While Ellis, Green, Badger were marines and had decades of experience with active combat and its many intricacies, Orca and Eric were just a pilot and a sailor. Still though, Ellis didn't give up on them. They learned surprisingly fast under her mentorship, picking up what she taught them with ease, and though they were still miles behind the marines, their skills were impressive.

In 2011, Ellis was arrested.

The NLH gene is a random mutation, not something that can be isolated and cut out like a genetic disorder. However, if at least one parent carries the NLH gene, then the offspring are guaranteed to be enhanced as well. Starting in the 70s, sterilisation became mandatory for the enhanced, the same as conscription, as another way to control the enhanced population. Colonel Ellis was born in the late 50s, and conscripted in the 60s; in other words, she evaded sterilisation.

It came out that she had a daughter, around Orca's age, and action was taken almost immediately. Colonel Ezikiel Ellis died two months after her incarceration. The details of her death were never released.

Her death was different. It was obvious foul play was involved, but Ellis's death didn't affect her the same way Berlin's devastated her. This time, she got the feeling Ellis had reached her time, that she'd accomplished what she set out to do in her life, and now it was Orca’s duty to carry on her legacy.

She took over the OSOD as Captain as soon as Ellis's death was publicised. Now down to just the three of them, it seemed like a logical course of action to find some new recruits, and it didn't take long to find some. Ellis's daughter, Sergeant Major Arctic, came to Orca shortly after she took over the OSOD, but despite it being her mother's creation, she showed no interest in taking Orca's place. She agreed to work alongside the OSOD, but remained a free agent.

In the same year, they met Sergeants Eastwood and Vantage, marines like Ellis and Green, and most importantly, both enhanced. They were by far the best of their unit and then some, with expertise between them from insertions to engineering. She hired them on the spot.

Orca got the scar in 2012. A mission gone south, an attempt to save a group of hostages, and a crack shot from the enemy. She took a bullet to the face. If she wasn't enhanced, there was no way she would've made it. As luck would have it, if you could call it that, a doctor was among the hostages, and saved Orca's life that night – Honey Rosenheim, an enhanced combat medic who would work with the OSOD for years to come after their unfortunate first encounter.

██████ ██████ ██ █████████ ████ ██████ ███████ █████. █████████ ███████ ██████ █ █████ ████ ██████ ████████. ████ ███████ ███ ██████ █ ██ ██████ █ █████ Badger ███ ███████ █████ █████████ ████ ███████ ██ █████ ██ ██████ █ █████ ██ █████. Badger ███ ████████ M.I.A. ██ ████ 2014.

[CONTENT REDACTED: SEE MISSION REPORT JUNE 11 2014]

It's 2019 by the time Orca meets Captain Price, through Kate Laswell and, surprisingly, their mutual friend, Nikolai. To say he didn't make a good first impression would be an understatement. Perhaps it's because of Orca's natural hostility and standoffish nature, but the two Captains butted heads constantly. Eventually he realised – with gentle nudging from Eric and the lieutenants – that she wasn't just an asshole for the sake of it, and she was actually a proficient leader. She slowly warmed up to him once she didn't have to fight for his respect.

Since the mission in 2018, the OSOD has collaborated with Captain Price, and subsequently Task Force 141, on multiple occasions.

It took significant work, but Orca was an accomplished Captain, with loyal soldiers and the ability to actually make a difference in the world. Her fate may have been decided before she was born, but Ryan is the one who made something for herself. She still has Berlin's picture hanging up in her office.

[usafphantom2]

British F-35Bs Deploy on Air Policing Mission for the First Time

Four F-35Bs of 617 Squadron have deployed to Iceland to begin a NATO Air Policing deployment, the first ever deployment of its type for the F-35 in British service.

Kai Greet

RAF F-35B Air Policing

An F-35B of 617 Squadron, Royal Air Force, taxiing to depart RAF Marham for Iceland to begin a NATO Air Policing deployment. The aircraft is carrying two ASRAAM air-to-air missiles on its external hardpoints. (Image credit: UK Ministry of Defence)

The NATO Icelandic Air Policing mission dates back to 2007, put in place following the end of a permanent U.S. Air Force fighter presence in the country, which does not have its own air force. Various NATO nations have taken turns to deploy fighter aircraft to the joint civilian-military airfield at Keflavik, around 30 miles from the capital city of Reykjavik.

617 Squadron’s F-35Bs have assumed the mission from the U.S. Air Force’s 492nd Fighter Squadron, whose F-15E Strike Eagles have been stationed at the base since June. Prior to this, four F-35As were provided by the Royal Norwegian Air Force.

This makes the UK the second nation to deploy the F-35B variant on the Icelandic Air Policing mission, after Italy augmented its four F-35As with two F-35Bs during their 2022 detachment as the existing support element in place provided an opportunity for cold climate training.

For the UK, the decision to send F-35Bs rather than the more usual Typhoons is a chance to demonstrate the stealth fighter’s multirole abilities. While the aircraft do maintain an air defence role when stationed aboard the Royal Navy’s two aircraft carriers, the UK’s homeland air defence is provided exclusively by Typhoon FGR4s, and these have always been used for prior air policing missions.

The Typhoon fleet inherited this responsibility from Tornado F3s retired in 2011. In comparison, the aircraft replaced, either in full or in part, by the F-35B, like the Harrier GR9 and Tornado GR4, lacked significant air-to-air capabilities and were not ideally suitable for air policing deployments.

F-35B ZM148/014 departing RAF Marham for the deployment to Iceland. Note two ASRAAM fitted to external hardpoints, and radar reflectors fitted to the aircraft’s upper fuselage. (Image credit: UK Ministry of Defence)

The RAF’s most recent deployment to Iceland with Typhoons was in 2019, where 180 practice intercepts were made and 59 training sorties flown. Alongside various air policing deployments, the RAF Typhoon force has also had to maintain a standing deployment to RAF Akrotiri on the island of Cyprus for Operation Shader – the UK’s counter-ISIS effort – since 2015. By making the Lightning force available for air policing missions, some strain on the Typhoon fleet can be lessened.

Speaking in his role as Minister for the Armed Forces, Member of Parliament Luke Pollard said: “The UK is unshakeable in its commitment to NATO. With threats increasing and growing Russian aggression, it is vital that we stand shoulder to shoulder with our allies… …This latest air policing mission in Iceland displays the UK’s ability to operate and deter our adversaries across the alliance’s airspace.”.

Group Captain John Butcher, Commander of the UK’s Lightning Force, which now comprises two frontline squadrons, one training squadron, and one development squadron, further remarked: “This will be the first time that the Lightning Force has deployed to contribute to NATO Air Policing, and will no doubt once again prove the flexibility that this platform offers as it demonstrates its capability to operate from both a land and maritime environment.”

Iceland’s strategic position in the North Atlantic, as part of the Greenland-Iceland-UK (GIUK) gap, makes it a valuable but also vulnerable NATO member state. Airspace incursions by Russian military aircraft following the withdrawal of U.S. Air Force F-15s from Keflavik in 2006 spurred the creation of the NATO air policing mission, and Russian military aircraft continue to be intercepted off the Icelandic coasts.

Keflavik has never been a stranger to military operations, having been constructed during the Second World War for United States military use, though in the post Cold War era there was a lull in its utility. When the permanently based F-15s left much of the US’ other based units did so along with them, putting the US-run base into mothballed status. The airfield, though, did remain open as the base for NATO air policing, and as Reykjavik’s second airport.

It wasn’t until 2015, after the Russian invasion of Crimea and uptick in long range Russian Air Force and Russian Navy operations that the base was fully reactivated. While no permanently based fighters returned to Iceland, it has become a significant hub for NATO maritime patrol aircraft and even, more recently, US strategic bombers. P-8 Poseidons operating from Keflavik monitor not only local waters and GIUK gap, but also the Baltic region and Barents Sea.

On two occasions, in 2021 and 2023, U.S. Air Force B-2 Spirit strategic stealth bombers have forward deployed to Keflavik for Bomber Task Force exercises. These came after a brief stopover by a B-2 in 2019. These deployments are somewhat out of the ordinary for the B-2 force, who usually operate from airfields specifically equipped to care for the stealth aircraft’s delicate radar-absorbent material coating.

While many of the deployments to Iceland are operational ones, the combination of different assets from different nations in one area also presents good opportunities for joint training exercises. B-2s deployed to RAF Fairford, UK, in 2020 flew to Iceland and joined with F-15Cs from RAF Lakenheath and F-35As that were deployed by Norway on the Icelandic air policing mission to conduct integration and interoperability training.

A Royal Air Force Typhoon FGR4 at Keflavik Air Base on a previous air policing deployment in 2019. (Image credit: UK Ministry of Defence)

About Kai Greet

Kai is an aviation enthusiast and freelance photographer and writer based in Cornwall, UK. They are a graduate of BA (Hons) Press & Editorial Photography at Falmouth University. Their photographic work has been featured by a number of nationally and internationally recognised organisations and news publications, and in 2022 they self-published a book focused on the history of Cornwall. They are passionate about all aspects of aviation, alongside military operations/history, international relations, politics, intelligence and space.

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