#Taliban fighters open fire

[afloweroutofstone]

By all accounts, the Americans virtually ensured their own defeat [in the Waygal Valley of Afghanistan]: They repeatedly bombed their closest supporters here, showing just how little the United States understood about the war it was fighting… The Americans killed and maimed the very people who supported them most, swelling the Taliban’s ranks by turning allies into enemies. Convinced that Nuristan would become a transport hub and hide-out for Al Qaeda and its allies, the Americans built bases and aggressively patrolled an area that, for the better part of a century, had been granted autonomy from its own government… Only the Americans dared to encroach into the region, and in doing so created the very insurgent stronghold they feared most. The United States dropped more than 1,000 bombs in a place it never needed to be. Instead of winning hearts and minds, the Americans unwittingly sowed the seeds of their own demise here in the Waygal Valley — just as it did in much of Afghanistan — then stayed for years to reap the harvest. “You have to know when you are the problem,” said retired Col. William Ostlund, the commanding officer of the men who fought the battle in Want (sometimes referred to as Wanat)... In October 2003, the C.I.A. launched an attack against a suspected terrorist in a mountaintop village, sending a trail of fire and smoke into the ink black sky. Gunships strafed the forests where residents had run for safety. A cluster of wood-frame homes and a mosque were decimated; seven people were killed, some while fleeing. The Americans declared the strike a success, a refrain that would become so common it would lose meaning. In reality, the attacks had failed. Not only was their target not there, but the homes and mosque they struck belonged to a staunch American ally, a former governor of Nuristan named Mawlawi Ghulam Rabbani. Mr. Rabbani’s political party, Jamiat-e-Islami, detested the Taliban — so much so that it had partnered with the Americans to overthrow them. In fact, that very night, Mr. Rabbani was in Kabul as part of a delegation of pro-American forces. The only people sheltering in the mountainside home were his family and friends. Of the seven killed, most were women and children, and they included Mr. Rabbani’s son and daughter… Though the attack barely resonated in Kabul, much less in Washington, it changed the dynamic in the Waygal Valley. If people were not yet ready to give up on the Americans, they no longer saw them as infallible liberators. A creeping sense of resentment, and injustice, opened a crack for the Taliban’s message to grow… Perhaps the only person who stuck by the Americans was [Afghan villager] Rafiullah [Arif]. But his loyalty was growing untenable, and even the money his family was getting increasingly wasn’t worth it. Rafiullah and his family couldn’t even go to their local market without worrying that [Taliban fighter] Mullah Osman’s men would kill them. Now, with the Americans preparing to leave his village, he and his family would be completely unprotected. The Americans were coming under mortar fire for the second day in a row. Rafiullah and his family decided to leave for good. They packed up their belongings and fled in a pair of trucks with other civilians, including several doctors who worked at the local clinic. The fleeing vehicles caught the eye of the Americans, who mistakenly believed the Taliban were marshaling forces for another attack. U.S. officers called in an airstrike, sending a hail of gunfire from two Apache helicopters at the convoy, destroying them and nearly everyone inside. Rafiullah lost his father, mother, brother and nephew, along with his arm, an eye and any semblance of support for the U.S. war in Afghanistan. The Americans, once again, declared the strike a success… “They say they came here to help us, but they wound up killing us,” [Rafiullah] said, squinting into the sun with his good eye. “We supported their mission, and they betrayed us.”

[sgtgrunt0331-3]

U.S. Marines from Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 6th Marines, Lance Corporal Chris Sanderson (rear) and Sergeant Travis Dawson (front) protect an Afghan man and his child after Taliban fighters opened fire in the town of Marjah, in Nad Ali district of Helmand province, February 2010.

(Photo by Goran Tomasevic/REUTERS)

[punkass-diogenes]

If we are to believe the Israeli political and military leadership’s own words — and I think we should — the assault on Gaza was driven, first, by straightforward vengeance.

“You wanted hell, you will get hell,” Maj. Gen. Ghassan Alian of the Israel Defense Forces warned the residents of Gaza, whom he referred to as “human beasts.”

Israel’s minister of strategic affairs, Ron Dermer, declared that Israel would “do whatever we have to do” to send a message.

“Gaza won’t return to what it was before,” Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said. “We will eliminate everything.”

Mass slaughter is immoral, of course, but — making it even more tragic — it also doesn’t work. Quite the opposite. Looking at pictures of the ominous lunar landscapes of bomb-crushed Gazan blocks, I see the birth of a new generation of fighters. Or terrorists, if you like — I don’t see why it matters very much. The children who survive this onslaught will grow even more radicalized and traumatized than the generations who came before.

Palestinian violence is rooted in the political grievance of generations of Palestinians, whose lives are defined by open-ended military occupation. They have no state to call their own, their basic rights are systematically curtailed and the world has given them little reason to anticipate better days. Palestinian political violence is older than Hamas, extends beyond Hamas across society, and will surely outlive Hamas in the absence of a political solution.

Israel knows this. Israel has bombed Gaza pitilessly before, but Hamas is still there. Israel turned parts of southern Lebanon to rubble, but Hezbollah is still there.

As Americans, we too should have learned this lesson over and over again. All the military might of the United States could not defeat the ragtag bands of Taliban or force a nation of conquered Iraqis to accept a U.S. occupation. Maybe we don’t want to understand.

[bllsbailey]

The Story Behind Trump's Second Assassin Took a Strange Turn...And It Involves the Media

Donald Trump was golfing in West Palm Beach, Florida, when Ryan Wesley Routh waited along the green, hoping to assassinate the former president and record it. He left a GoPro and an AK-style rifle mounted with a scope on the scene. He was later apprehended by local police, but not before scurrying when Secret Service agents opened fire on him; they saw the barrel from his gun through the shrubbery. 

Ryan Wesley Routh has a criminal record that spans the Himalayas. We’re waiting to see if he was on the radar for any federal law enforcement agencies vis-à-vis recent threats: the FBI has a terrible track record of being ‘in the know’ concerning future perpetrators of firearm-related crimes nowadays. Yet, in an odd turn, the media had this joker on their radar. They interviewed him. When his name was released, The New York Times must’ve checked their clips because there he was. The publication interviewed him about the ongoing war in Ukraine—Routh appears to have been obsessed with the subject: 

So, isolated nutter is gonna be a harder sell when the NYT was happily quoting him as a sophisticated activist. https://t.co/5iyLLyyyqZ— Mary Katharine Ham (@mkhammer) September 15, 2024

In a telephone interview with The New York Times in 2023, when Mr. Routh was in Washington, he spoke with a self-assuredness of a seasoned diplomat who thought his plans to support Ukraine’s war effort were sure to succeed. But he appeared to have little patience for anyone who got in his way. When an American foreign fighter seemed to talk down to him in a Facebook message he shared with The New York Times, Mr. Routh said, “he needs to be shot.”  In the interview, Mr. Routh said he was in Washington to meet with the U.S. Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, known as the Helsinki Commission “for two hours” to help push for more support for Ukraine. The commission is led by members of Congress and staffed by congressional aides. It is influential on matters of democracy and security and has been vocal in supporting Ukraine.  Mr. Routh also said he was seeking recruits for Ukraine from among Afghan soldiers who had fled the Taliban. He said he planned to move them, in some cases illegally, from Pakistan and Iran to Ukraine. He said dozens had expressed interest.  “We can probably purchase some passports through Pakistan, since it’s such a corrupt country,” he said.  It is not clear whether Mr. Routh followed through, but one former Afghan soldier said he had been contacted and was interested in fighting if it meant leaving Iran, where he was living illegally. 

Semafor also spoke to this man: 

When Ryan Routh spoke to Semafor on March 7, 2023, he was frustrated with the Ukrainian government for which he’d traveled around the world to support.  The Ukrainians, he complained, were being too rigid about admitting foreign soldiers of dubious qualifications, including a group of Afghan commandos who were facing skepticism and bureaucratic roadblocks in Kyiv.  “Ukraine is very often hard to work with. Many foreign soldiers leave after a week in Ukraine or must move from unit to unit to find a place they are respected and appreciated,” he told Semafor. He’d been “yelled at” every time he suggested they tap Afghan commandos. “They’re afraid that anybody and everybody is a Russian spy,” he said with frustration.  […]  When Semafor talked to him, Routh was one of a wave of American volunteers in Ukraine, the self-appointed director of a group he’d started called the International Volunteer Center. He was, even by the standards of that frantic moment, a bit over the top, a Ukrainian involved in the effort told us at the time. But he was also, they said, authentically involved in the efforts to bring in foreign troops, and we quoted him in a story about the Afghan fighters.  On X, he frantically tweeted at President Volodymyr Zelenskyy with his ideas — for instance, “to use Independence Park to create a tent city of all the foreigners here in support to get thousands more foreign civilians to come and support Ukraine.” Zelenskyy did not appear to respond. 

He’s also featured in pro-Ukrainian propaganda. The whole story has now taken a weird turn. Moreover, how long do you think until this story gets suffocated by the media? Look what happened to Thomas Matthew Crooks, who was killed trying to assassinate Trump on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania. Secret Service can’t stonewall anymore, not with two assassination attempts on Trump within the past 65 days. 

Routh was a virulent anti-Trump nutter butter, though I’m sure the media will pitch the usual ‘we don’t know his motives.’ They shouldn’t: enough of his anti-Trump social media posts were screenshotted, and his son said he hates Trump. Gee—what a mystery this is, right?

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) September 16, 2024

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) September 16, 2024

Yet, the Ukraine stuff and these supposed contacts with various government entities add a new layer of intrigue. Did this man ever meet with these top officials?

Second Trump assassin, Ryan Wesley Routh, was connected to Rep Adam Kinzinger through his support of Ukraine. Here he’s being interviewed by Newsweek about his effort to recruit mercenaries to fight in Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/6SnLYFkHv7— @amuse (@amuse) September 15, 2024

There needs to be a full investigation of all the Washington officials and reporters the second would-be Trump assassin has interacted with over the last four years, including Malcom Nance, the entire Vindman clan, and everyone associated with the Helsinki Commission. pic.twitter.com/JErwzeSIzu— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) September 16, 2024

Trending on Townhall Videos

[straubindeutschland]

Memorial Day Murph

1 mile run, 100 pull-ups, 200 push-ups, 300 air squats, 1 mile run

May 28, 2023

Before picture

After picture (too tired to hang)

Liz, a great American, came to visit me! She is active Army and was stationed in a somewhat nearby county. We spent the weekend in France and then did the annual memorial workout for LT. Mike Murphy. His story is below. Amazing man and another great American!!

—————————————————————————

LT. Michael P. Murphy

United States Navy (SEAL)

May 7, 1976 – June 28, 2005

LT. Michael P. Murphy (SEAL) was the officer-in-charge of a four-man SEAL element in support of Operation Red Wings, tasked with finding a key anti-coalition militia commander near Asadabad, Afghanistan. Shortly after inserting into the objective area, the SEALs were spotted by three goat herders who were initially detained and then released. It is believed the goat herders immediately reported the SEALs’ presence to Taliban fighters.

A fierce gun battle ensued on the steep face of the mountain between the SEALs and a much larger enemy force. Despite the intensity of the firefight and suffering grave gunshot wounds himself, Murphy is credited with risking his own life to save the lives of his teammates. Murphy, intent on making contact with headquarters, but realizing this would be impossible in the extreme terrain where they were fighting, unhesitatingly and with complete disregard for his own life moved into the open, where he could gain a better position to transmit a call to get help for his men.

Moving away from the protective mountain rocks, he knowingly exposed himself to increased enemy gunfire. This deliberate and heroic act deprived him of cover and made him a target for the enemy. While continuing to be fired upon, Murphy made contact with the SOF Quick Reaction Force at Bagram Air Base and requested assistance. He calmly provided his unit’s location and the size of the enemy force while requesting immediate support for his team. At one point, he was shot in the back causing him to drop the transmitter. Murphy picked it back up, completed the call and continued firing at the enemy who was closing in. Severely wounded, LT. Murphy returned to his cover position with his men and continued the battle.

LT. Murphy fought on, allowing one member of his team (Marcus Luttrell) to escape, before he was killed. For his selfless actions, LT. Michael Murphy was posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor on October 27, 2007. We honor his sacrifice and memory through The Murph Challenge. Find out more about Michael Murphy at the Memorial Foundation created in his name.

[falloutcrossfit]

New Post has been published on FallOut CrossFit - School of Elite Fitness Tri-cities, WA

New Post has been published on https://falloutcrossfit.com/2023/05/memorial-day-murph-7/

Memorial Day Murph

Workout commences at 9:00 am

BBQ to follow

United States Navy Lieutenant Michael Murphy, of Patchogue, New York, was killed in action in Afghanistan during Operation Red Wings on June 28, 2005.

The Murph Story

Murphy was the commander of a four-man reconnaissance team of Navy SEALs on a mission to kill or capture a top Taliban leader.

Dropped off by helicopter in a remote, mountainous area of eastern Afghanistan, Murphy’s team was surrounded and attacked by Taliban fighters.

Murphy and two members of his team, plus sixteen U.S. military personnel aboard a Chinook helicopter that was shot down during the fight were killed.

Mike Murphy was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for his heroic actions that day, placing himself in the open and exposed to enemy fire in order to make a satellite phone call to get the quick reaction force (QRF) to help save his teammates.

Murph, as he was known to his friends, loved to do this workout, which he called body armor.

[howlofthewolf]

Wolf and Yuki got over to Michi and Asta.

"Keep your heads down!" Wolf said, turning back to open fire as two technicals carrying Taliban fighters rolled in, "Technicals!"

"I'm radioing for help!" Sheik said.

Kandahar military base, Southern Afghanistan, mid 2003

War on Terror

1st Direwolf Battalion, United States Marine Corps

“The Wolfpack”

“I wonder who they’re bringing in this time.” Sheik said as he checked his rifle. Jakobe Wolf, their captain, said nothing, staring at the plane as it landed on the airstrip. He’d been briefed that a media team was being flown in to cover their exploits in this new operation to root out Taliban fighting. He didn’t like that he had to babysit reporters.

“Just keep a lid on it, let Yuki do the talking.” He said curtly, approaching the plane once it landed. He watched as the team of reporters were let off the plane, and was shocked to see who came off with them.

[dbpnews]

The flag had to be waved heavily on the day of independence, many people died in Taliban firing

The flag had to be waved heavily on the day of independence, many people died in Taliban firing

Image Source: AP On Thursday, for the second consecutive day in Afghanistan, Afghans demonstrated with the national flag at isolated places. Kabul: Afghans held demonstrations with the national flag in isolated places in Afghanistan for the second consecutive day on Thursday and the Taliban, facing growing governance challenges, tried to suppress it with violence. According to a report by the…

[centrally-unplanned]

Identity Crisis: Forever War Edition

Of course no one is truly surprised at the collapse of authority in Afghanistan, as the fall of Herat today caps off a 2+ week push by the Taliban that marks their control of about a third of the country at this point (EDIT: Whelp Kabul fell like 2 days later, makes all this particularly apt). The speed of the advance shows exactly how little US forces were doing in the country, not how much - this was a timed advance, waiting for the inevitable US withdraw, and their capacity to maintain strength during that wait shows how ineffective military operations over the past decade have been.

But of course how much strength is needed for such a push is open to debate - reports show towns “falling” to groups of only ten soldiers, and the fall of Herat seems to have begun with government police leaving the city before the attack and the Taliban taking the police station unopposed. For anyone who has been around for this whole sorry affair, it can’t help but bring up memories of the fall of the Taliban 20 years ago: 

(Northern Alliance fighter) Khan captured his first city, Taloqan, without firing a single shot. He did it by persuading the local Taliban leader, a man named Abdullah Gard, to switch sides. Gard was no dummy; he could see the B-52s. I guessed that Khan had probably used a lot of money, but he never allowed me to sit in as he worked the Taliban chieftains on the radio. The day after Taloqan fell, I found Gard in an abandoned house, seated on a blue cushion on the floor, warming himself next to a wood-burning stove. His black Taliban turban was gone, and he had replaced it with a woolen Chitrali cap just like that of Ahmad Shah Massoud. “All along, I was spying on the Taliban,” Gard said, his eyes darting. No one believed him, but no one seemed to care.

(from The Forever War, if you care) Foreigners like Americans and Al-Qaeda care about “the cause” but for the local Afghans like the Taliban its a game of survival, and dying just means losing; when a new wind blows no reason not to bend in its direction.

I don’t want to get into the Afghan side of things too much though, but instead of the interaction of this reality and the US’s operational understanding of its war and aims. America’s adventures in Iraq & Afghanistan have been ruinously expensive, but not in the ways commonly understood. At the peak of “nation building” the US was spending over $100 billion in Afghanistan, but the basic military expenditures in FY2020 amounted to only $17 billion - and there are a lot of luxury items on there still. You will often here statements like “the US can’t afford to be in Afghanistan forever” but at $17 billion they absolutely could. Oh they shouldn’t, they shouldn’t have invaded Afghanistan to begin with, but on terms of practicality its affordable. The idea of a Forever War makes no sense when you are Vietnam-style drafting entire age-cohorts to get shot at in a jungle, but to station a few thousands guy and an air base overseas? Its so doable we even had a word for it: Empire

Which gets at the crux of America’s failure - its steadfast refusal to *be* an Empire, at least self-described (yes yes A.G. Hopkins & co., I hear your howls of rage). If you tell a group of self-interested warlords you are hear to stay, this is going to be a client state and you have the guns to Make It So, so its join up or get blown up, that can...actually work, for a time at least. Its exactly how the British played India - perpetually vastly outnumbered by actual armed Indian troops in the country, but with the locus of power centered on them and local stakeholders in their pocket who were better off with the British than without. If you want to build a lasting regime aligned with your national interest, you need to commit. The British Civil Service in India during the height of the Empire had a minimum service term of 25 years, and about 20,000 British citizens lived more-or-less permanently in the country supporting this mission - that is a wind that keeps on blowing.

Meanwhile the average commander of US operations in Afghanistan over the past decade has served in the post for about 2 years; Americans do deployments, rotate out, live in bases, then leave. We have far more people per capita than the British ever had in Afghanistan, have spent ludicrous sums on development, and yet our actual presence is a ghost - why would any local stakeholder buy into our mission? Why would you pick “our side”? Instead you wait the US out - they are duty-bound to leave.

Thus the contradiction - the US goal was to nation-build. But nations are *built* from stakeholders, people with vested interests in the outcome. The US vision of the future of Afghanistan had no stakeholders, including the US! There was just an unwillingness to admit that this mission was an “Empire” mission, and required the tools of Empire, which as a matter of identity the US is completely unwilling to use, its not “who we are”. 

Which is why it should never have taken on the mission at all, of course. 

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Long story short, sister thinks what's happening in Afghanistan isn't bad and the Taliban actually helps women and aren't extremists

A little help?

During an interview with The New York Times, published on Wednesday, a spokesman for the Taliban said that "music is forbidden in Islam."

Zabihullah Mujahid, who is seen as a likely contender for the new government's culture minister role, told the paper that the Taliban is hoping to "persuade people" not to perform music.

Under the previous period of rule, the Taliban banned all music, apart from some religious chants, according to The Guardian. Cassette tapes were destroyed, musical instruments were forbidden, and even captive songbirds were outlawed, the paper said.

It's not only music that the Taliban intends to crack down on. According to India Today, female voices on TV and radio channels have also been outlawed.

A threat assessment from the United Nations has warned the Taliban is intensifying a search for people who worked with United States and NATO forces and is going “door to door” to find them.

The confidential report – provided by the UN’s threat-assessment consultants and seen by a number of news media – says the group has “priority lists” of individuals it wants to arrest and is threatening to kill or arrest family members if the wanted do not give themselves up.

The new higher education minister has said women and men must be separated at universities, and the historical consequences of services promoted as “separate but equal” within a discriminatory system strongly suggest that women will be pushed out or get a lower quality education.

A labyrinthine new decree to private universities, seen by the Guardian, lays out a long list of prescriptive, and likely expensive, rules to prevent male and female students even glimpsing each other’s faces during years of study.

Women must be provided with transport in buses with covered windows and a curtain separating them from the presumably male driver. They must be confined to a “waiting room” before and between classes, and the decree even details a required clothing colour for female students and teachers (black).

All new classes must be segregated, and in current classes with under 15 women, a “sharia partition” must be erected to keep students of different gender apart. Ideally, teachers will also be separated by gender, the new rules say. “In the future, all universities should provide female teachers for women’s classes. They should also try to use older teachers with a good background,” the letter said.

The claim that restrictions on women’s lives are a temporary necessity is not new to Afghan women. The Taliban made similar claims the last time they controlled Afghanistan, said Heather Barr, the associate director of women’s rights at Human Rights Watch.

“The explanation was that the security was not good, and they were waiting for security to be better, and then women would be able to have more freedom,” she said. “But of course in those years they were in power, that moment never arrived — and I can promise you Afghan women hearing this today are thinking it will never arrive this time either.”

Brian Castner, a senior crisis adviser at Amnesty International who was in Afghanistan until last week, said that if the Taliban intended to treat women better, they would need to retrain their forces. “You can’t have a movement like the Taliban that has operated a certain way for 25 years and then just because you take over a government, all of the fighters and everyone in your organization just does something differently,” he said.

But, Mr. Castner said, there is no indication that the Taliban intend to fulfill that or any other promises of moderation. Amnesty International has received reports of fighters going door to door with lists of names, despite their leaders’ public pledges not to retaliate against Afghans who worked with the previous government.“

The rhetoric and the reality are not matching at all, and I think that the rhetoric is more than just disingenuous,” Mr. Castner said. “If a random Taliban fighter commits a human rights abuse or violation, that’s just kind of random violence, that’s one thing. But if there’s a systematic going to people’s homes and looking for people, that’s not a random fighter that’s untrained — that’s a system working. The rhetoric is a cover for what’s really happening.”

As the insurgency advanced, the first concern of the staff of Women for Afghan Women and others running similar shelters was what the Taliban might do to punish them. As the country’s rulers in the 1990s, the Taliban strenuously opposed women traveling on their own or gathering together.

Relatively recent examples of Taliban conduct have been worrying. When the Taliban briefly took over the city of Kunduz in 2015, the Women for Afghan Women shelter operators and clients all fled as threatening calls flooded in from the insurgents. The shelter director described being actively hunted, and said she was getting calls from the Taliban saying they would capture her and hang her in the village square as an example.

But it is not just fear of the Taliban that has frightened the shelter operators and their clients this time. Taliban fighters have come to some of the shelters in recent weeks. Sometimes they have vandalized the premises and taken over the buildings, but there have been no reports of their harming anyone yet, said Ms. Viswanath, the group’s co-founder.

“None of our staff has been beaten, attacked, killed, as far as I know,” she said.

Much of the concern has come from the waves of prisoners set free during the Taliban advance. Among them were men imprisoned under women’s protections laws that were enacted with Western support over the past 20 years. The former prisoners have a grudge to bear not just against the female relative who spoke out against them and humiliated them publicly, but also against all those who supported that effort — the safe house directors, counselors and lawyers.

In some areas of Afghanistan that fell to Taliban control in recent weeks, the group imposed restrictions on women. Women were banned from leaving the house without a male relative and forced to wear burqas, which cover a woman from head to toe. Some commanders demanded families hand over unmarried women to marry their fighters. In Kabul, images of women outside beauty parlors have been painted over or ripped off. Female teachers were barred from teaching to boys. Female journalists employed by state TV, now under Taliban control, were stopped from going to work.

Meanwhile, the Taliban's assurance of a "safe passage" to the Kabul airport, where thousands have thronged in a desperate bid to be taken out of the country, has also been undermined by a report and photographs by a Los Angeles Times journalist.

In one of the graphic images, a woman and a child are seen with blood on their faces, apparently unconscious.

Hundreds of people were outside the airport Wednesday, The Associated Press reported. It said the Taliban demanded to see documents before they allowed the rare passenger inside. The Taliban fired occasional warning shots to disperse them, the agency said.

Amputations, stonings and executions of criminals could return in Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover, the organisation has admitted.

As its fighters prepared to assume power in Kabul, the militant Islamist group insisted it would protect the rights of women, the media and diplomats.

But, asked about violent punishment of offenders – a hallmark of brutal Taliban rule in the 1990s – a spokesman said: “That is up to the religious followers and the courts. They will decide about the punishment.”

Asked specifically about the chopping off of hands and feet, stonings and state killings, Suhail Shaheen told the BBC: “I can’t say right now. It is up to the courts and the judges and the laws.”

==

Honestly, I think she's lying. Not just to you, but to herself. She's so possessed by Islamophobia-phobia (fear of being seen as "Islamophobic") that she's willing to turn a blind eye to what happens to the people over there in order to alleviate her own discomfort.

And she has the luxury of this lie because she's so far removed from the reality of it.

Force the issue by taking her at her word. Give her two options:

Fly to Afghanistan and spend a week in Kabul. She'll think you're kidding, but spin up a GoFundMe page to raise the money. I'll even link to it on my blog; or

Live for one month based on the rules and restrictions coming from the reports out of the area. She'll need a burqa (hijab is empowering, right?), she'll need to stop listening to music, and she'll need a mahram (male guardian, who must be a relative) to leave the house. Every day, review what's going on as Sharia takes hold, and she has to do it.

If she believes what she's saying - and she doesn't - then prove it. If she won't, then you're entitled to conclude she doesn't really believe it.

==

Also, they're fundamentalists. They're picking up where Muhammad left off.

[newstfionline]

Sunday, September 5, 2021

Lake Tahoe evacuees hope to return home as wildfire slows (AP) Firefighters are making progress on a California wildfire threatening South Lake Tahoe, officials said Saturday, lifting hopes for tens of thousands of residents who are waiting this weekend to return to the resort town. Lighter winds and higher humidity continue to reduce the spread of flames and fire crews were quick to take advantage by doubling down on burning and cutting fire lines around the Caldor Fire. Bulldozers with giant blades, crews armed with shovels and a fleet of aircraft dropping hundreds of thousands of gallons of water and fire retardant helped keep the fire’s advance to a couple of thousand acres—a fraction of its explosive spread last month and the smallest increase in two weeks.

Hurricane Ida evacuees urged to return to New Orleans (AP) With power due back for almost all of New Orleans by next week, Mayor LaToya Cantrell strongly encouraged residents who evacuated because of Hurricane Ida to begin returning home. But outside the city, the prospects of recovery appeared bleaker, with no timeline on power restoration and homes and businesses in tatters. Six days after Hurricane Ida made landfall, hard-hit parts of Louisiana were still struggling to restore any sense of normalcy. Even around New Orleans, a continued lack of power for most residents made a sultry stretch of summer hard to bear and added to woes in the aftermath of Ida.

US expects to admit more than 50,000 evacuated Afghans (AP) At least 50,000 Afghans are expected to be admitted into the United States following the fall of Kabul as part of an “enduring commitment” to help people who aided the American war effort and others who are particularly vulnerable under Taliban rule, the secretary of homeland security said Friday. Tens of thousands of Afghans have already made it through security vetting and arrived in the U.S. to begin the process of resettlement. Exactly how many more will come and how long it will take remain open questions, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said as he outlined the effort.

Biden moves to declassify documents about Sept. 11 attacks (AP) President Joe Biden on Friday directed the declassification of certain documents related to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, a supportive gesture to victims’ families who have long sought the records in hopes of implicating the Saudi government. The order, coming little more than a week before the 20th anniversary of the attacks, is a significant moment in a yearslong tussle between the government and the families over what classified information about the run-up to the attacks could be made public. That conflict was on display last month when many relatives, survivors and first responders came out against Biden’s participation in 9/11 memorial events if the documents remained classified. A long-running lawsuit in federal court in New York aims to hold the Saudi government accountable and alleges that Saudi officials provided significant support to some of the hijackers before the attacks. The lawsuit took a major step forward this year with the questioning under oath of former Saudi officials, and family members have long regarded the disclosure of declassified documents as an important step in making their case.

Spain wants vaccination proof from US tourists (AP) Spain is tweaking its travel entry rules from next week to require vaccination certificates from U.S. tourists, adjusting to recent European Union advice on stricter rules due to growing anxiety over coronavirus contagion in the U.S. Under the rules, U.S. tourists will no longer be admitted from Monday, Sept. 6, unless they can show proof of being fully vaccinated at least 14 days before their trip. Unvaccinated children under 12 traveling with vaccinated adults are also allowed in the country.

Italy could soon make Covid-19 vaccines mandatory, says PM (Guardian) Italy’s prime minister has announced his government could make Covid-19 vaccines mandatory, sparking a row in the country that has seen a recent rise in protests and violence from anti-vaxxers. During a press conference on Thursday, Mario Draghi said all Italians of eligible age could soon be obliged to get a shot, as soon as the European Medicines Agency (EMA) gives its conditional approval for four vaccines. The news sparked protests by anti-vaxxers who, in recent days, have sent death threats to members of the government, virologists, health officials and journalists, because of their pro-vax stances.

Does the European Union need its own army? Afghanistan withdrawal revives an old debate. (Washington Post) The chaotic withdrawal and evacuation from Afghanistan, which has already prompted soul-searching among Western partners, is now reviving a decades-old debate within the European Union: Does the 27-nation club need its own military? The E.U. is in its most idealistic sense a peace project. Economic interdependence was supposed to ward off conflicts between members—and it has created the world’s largest trading bloc. While acknowledging that clout, some of its most prominent politicians have argued for years that to become a true global power, the E.U. needs its own defense force, one that is independent of the U.S.-European NATO alliance and does not rely on the United States. Many experts say the prospect of rolling out a free-standing E.U. military anytime soon is unrealistic. But the clamoring, which subsided somewhat after President Biden’s election, has intensified once more, after Biden rebuffed calls to keep U.S. troops in Afghanistan past the Aug. 31 deadline. European leaders say that left them no choice but to cut short their evacuations, leaving thousands of their citizens and Afghan allies behind.

At least 17 killed in celebratory gunfire in Kabul (Reuters) At least 17 people were killed in celebratory gunfire in Kabul, news agencies said on Saturday, after Taliban sources said their fighters had seized control of Panjshir, the last province in Afghanistan holding out against the Islamist group. Leaders of opposition to the Taliban have denied that the province has fallen. The Shamshad news agency said “aerial shooting” in Kabul on Friday killed 17 people and wounded 41. Tolo news agency gave a similar toll.

Why Madagascar is going hungry (Economist) The people of southern Madagascar are in peril. More than 1.1m of them are going hungry, according to the un. More than 500,000 children under the age of five are at risk of being acutely malnourished. And the suffering is due to increase with the start of the “lean season”, the hungry months before the next harvest. This calamity has several causes. The un emphasises climate change. Man-made climate change has certainly affected the world’s fourth-largest island. Today’s drought is the worst in 40 years. The harvest of cassava, a staple, is expected to be 60-90% less than in normal years. The price of rice is soaring. In addition, covid-19 has made people poorer. The island has all but shut itself off from the outside world, causing its main source of hard currency, tourism, to collapse. At the same time, the disaster should be a wake-up call for Madagascar’s government. If successive regimes had not mismanaged the economy so badly for so long, the Malagasy would be prosperous enough to cope better with shocks. Economic growth makes other problems easier to deal with. Just now, Madagascar’s people need help. In the long run, they need better government.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

If you’ve been watching television footage of the fall of Kabul, you have been watching the Afghanistan war in toto.  As pickup trucks and Humvees filled with Taliban fighters triumphantly drive into the city along streets crowded with Afghan civilians waving to them, sortie after sortie is being flown by American military helicopters from the Embassy compound to the airport, where whoever is on those helicopters will be airlifted out of the country.  By noon on Sunday, it was reported that Taliban fighters had occupied the presidential palace in Kabul and that Afghan President Ashraf Ghani had been flown out of the country bound for Tajikistan.

Please take careful note of the contrast here.  The people who won the war are driving and walking victoriously into Kabul.  The people who lost the war are flying away in defeat, proving that the grand technological and tactical advance that was supposed to be the military helicopter has finally been proved effective for something:  It’s really good at evacuating the losers in a rout.

All day, MSNBC and CNN have been showing footage of U.S. Army Blackhawk and twin-rotor CH-47 Chinook helicopters flying into and out of the American embassy compound.  Perhaps in a day or so – or even later today, the way things are going – we’ll get a new iconic image of that final lift-off from the American Embassy that we all recognize from the day Saigon fell in April of 1975.

Nothing is ever new when it comes to modern American wars because we never learn anything.  The helicopter was supposed to win the war in Vietnam for us.  Instead, military helicopters flew us into one battle after another that we “won” according to the American military but in actuality lost to the North Vietnamese.

The first major engagement between American forces and North Vietnamese regulars took place in November of 1965 in the battle of the Ia Drang Valley.  It was the first time that American “Huey” HU-1 helicopters were used in an entirely new military tactic, to carry troops from the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment in an “airmobile assault” on a force of North Vietnamese regulars that had been detected in the Central Highlands near a Special Forces camp that had recently been overrun.  The battle went on for four days.  Five hundred American soldiers were killed, wounded, or missing.  North Vietnamese forces suffered somewhere between 1500 and 1700 casualties, but nobody really knows. American forces collected the last of their dead and wounded and moved out of the area on the fifth day of the battle and did not return.  The North Vietnamese and their allies among the Viet Cong maintained their forces in the area.  The Central Highlands continued to be the scene of fighting over the next decade.

The battle of Ia Drang was and still is celebrated as the first big victory of the Vietnam war. Another battle with heavy casualties fashioned as a major American victory took place in May of 1969 at what became known as Hamburger Hill in the A Shau Valley near the border with Laos.  The American assault involved five battalions from the 101st Airborne Division and several units of the South Vietnamese army and was conceived initially as another “airmobile assault” intended to “seek and destroy” North Vietnamese army units facilitating resupply of enemy forces via the nearby Ho Chi Minh trail.

The battle went on from May 13 to the 20th.  More than 440 American soldiers were either killed or wounded, 320 of them alone from the 3rd Battalion of the 187th infantry, nicknamed the “Rakkasans,” the unit which over the years became synonymous with the battle.  Less than three weeks after the hill had been taken, it was abandoned by the 101st Airborne Division, which wrapped up its operations in the A Shau Valley and moved on.  The North Vietnamese units they had fought remained where they had been, and resupply of enemy forces continued along the Ho Chi Minh trail.

We had hundreds of helicopters in Vietnam carrying soldiers in “air assaults” all over the place, flying over the jungles and landing on “LZs” or landing zones and depositing troops and then flying them out again.  Down in the jungles, Viet Cong and North Vietnamese military units lurked, with their pouches of rice and their AK-47 rifles and their 60 millimeter mortars and their RPG grenade launchers, and ten years after the battle of the Ia Drang valley which was such a major victory, the last Huey ferried the last American soldier and the American ambassador  out of the Embassy in Saigon and it was over.  The North Vietnamese and the VC had zero helicopters, and who won?  They did.

You see where I’m going with this?  Flash forward to March of 2002 and the first big battle of the war in Afghanistan called Operation Anaconda, which was – wait for it – an attack by “air assault” involving -- are you still waiting? – the “Rakkasans” of the 101st Airborne Division, this time the 1st Battalion of the 187th Infantry.  The battle took place in the Shahi-Kot Valley in Paktia Province, the capital of which fell to the Taliban a few days ago.  The mission was to root out Taliban and al Qaeda fighters who had holed up in a complex of tunnels and caves in mountains surrounding the valley.  The battle went on sporadically over a period of ten days.  Eight American soldiers were killed and 72 were wounded.  Several Chinook helicopters were hit by enemy forces and destroyed and several more were damaged.  Estimates of enemy dead ran from 100 to 1000, depending on who was doing the estimating.

General Tommy Franks, commander of Central Command, declared Operation Anaconda “an unqualified and complete success.”  Reporter Seymour Hersch, writing in the New Yorker, said the operation was "in fact a debacle, plagued by squabbling between the services, bad military planning and avoidable deaths of American soldiers, as well as the escape of key al-Qaeda leaders, likely including Osama bin Laden."

That was 19 years ago.

Today we’re watching the same Chinook and Blackhawk helicopters ferry what we are told are American civilians and what we hope are their loyal Afghan employees to the relative safety of the Kabul airport, from which they will be airlifted by Air Force C-17 cargo jets to greater safety in Germany or whatever friendly country will permit them to land.

Here’s what I find astounding, yet oddly wonderful:  A report I read about the evacuation of Saigon said that American commanders knew that North Vietnamese forces surrounding Saigon were observing their helicopters from the ground yet chose not to shoot them down as they made their way first to the Tan Son Nhut American airbase and from there to ships of the American 7th Fleet offshore.  With armed Taliban fighters now on the ground in Kabul, you can be sure the same “courtesy” is being afforded the helicopters flying from the embassy to the airport.  A burst of fire from a Taliban .50 caliber machine gun or a single warhead from an RPG grenade launcher could take out any of those helicopters and bring an immediate end to the evacuation by air.  That’s how vulnerable are America’s almighty force of military helicopters.

But let me tell you what it feels like to ride in one:  you feel like you’re the king of the world.  I rode around northwest Iraq with the commander of – you guessed it – the “Rakkasans” while I was embedded with the 101st Airborne Division in 2003.  Because he was a Colonel and the commander of the 187th Infantry, he had not one but two Blackhawks, one to ferry him, and the other in convoy behind us as his backup helicopter and gunship.  Wearing headsets and microphones so we could speak to each other over the roar of the Blackhawk’s turbine engines, we sat on seats immediately behind the pilots.  M-240 machine gunners were to either side of us aiming their guns through open doors.  We flew at low altitude up to the border with Turkey and visited a Kurdish outpost that the 187th helped to supply and train. The day was loud and fast and glorious.

I had ridden in another two-helicopter convoy a week or so before with Major General David Petraeus, commander of the 101st, out to visit one of his units south and east of his headquarters in Mosul.  Suddenly it came over the radio that an Apache attack helicopter had been shot down by RPG ground-fire not far from where we were flying.  The pilot ordered the helicopter’s doors closed, pressurized the cabin and started to climb to a higher altitude.

Because another helicopter was shot down about five miles away, suddenly we were flying at 28,000 feet.  That’s how vulnerable the commander of the 101st Airborne Division was in his “command and control” helicopter. (I later discovered that the Blackhawk’s capability to avoid enemy fire by flying at such a high altitude was a military secret.)

I remember years before being herded into an old unused movie theater at Fort Benning, Georgia.  It was August of 1969, and they had a surprise for all of us newly-minted impressionable young lieutenants attending the Infantry School.  Lt. Col. Weldon Honeycutt, who had commanded the 3/187th Infantry battalion at Hamburger Hill was on a publicity tour intended to counter the bad press coverage the battle had been getting.  It seemed that suffering 440 casualties in a single battle and then walking away from the objective you had fought to achieve wasn’t going over very well with the American public, so Honeycutt was out there ringing the victory bell and promoting Nixon’s new policy of “Vietnamization” which he had announced earlier that summer, many said in reaction to the losses suffered in the battle of Hamburger Hill.  Honeycutt had made a special stop at Fort Benning to pump up the troops.

We were crowded into the seats of the World War II era theater, they dimmed the house lights, and there he was spot-lighted on stage, the hero of Hamburger Hill.  A rather squat figure in combat fatigues with a crewcut and a thick neck, Honeycutt strode purposefully to the microphone and began his practiced story of the glorious battle, punctuating his tale with bangs of his fist on the podium.  When he was finished, he stepped away from the podium and stood before us with hands on his hips and loudly barked, “QUESTIONS GENTLEMEN?”

The theater was silent.  It appeared that no one had a question for Lt. Col. Honeycutt. I could see a major in the wings pointing at his watch, signaling that it was time to go.  Then the guy next to me, whose name was Strosher, and who only months before had received a battlefield promotion in Vietnam from Sergeant to First Lieutenant, raised his hand.

“IN THE BACK!” barked the colonel.

Strosher stood up and called out his name and rank and asked, “Sir, where you were during the battle of Hamburger Hill?” He remained standing.

Honeycutt paused, looking momentarily confused, as if that question had never been asked of him before.  “Uhh,” he stammered, “I was in my C & C ship at my assigned altitude.”  He was referring, of course, to his “command and control” helicopter.  “Uhh, 2500 feet as I recall.”

Strosher lifted a hand and said “That’s all I needed to know, sir,” and sat down.

The theater erupted in laughter.  We had all read the coverage of the battle.  We knew it was yet another defeat masquerading as a great victory.  As the laughter died down, the major stepped out of the wings and whispered in Honeycutt’s ear, and guiding him by the elbow, escorted him off the stage.

Strosher, who had served two tours in Vietnam as an enlisted man, knew the answer to his question before he asked it.  He had just stuck a pin in the balloon of the entire war in Vietnam, and Colonel Honeycutt and his helicopter had shown him the way.

That’s why I can say with some certainty that what you’re seeing on your television screens right now is the story of America’s technological military folly in a nutshell. Those helicopters that “won” Operation Anaconda and “won” the battle of Ia Drang and “won” the battle of Hamburger Hill didn’t win the Afghanistan war any more than our remote piloted Predator drones and Air Force attack jets and B-52’s and smart bombs and super-secret satellite surveillance and electronic battlefield simulations and every other doo-dad we came up with. But at least we’ve finally found something we’re good at: air evacuation of the capital cities we lost.

[Lucian Truscott Newsletter]

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 3.2

537 – Siege of Rome: The Ostrogoth army under king Vitiges begins the siege of the capital. Belisarius conducts a delaying action outside the Flaminian Gate; he and a detachment of his bucellarii are almost cut off. 986 – Louis V becomes the last of the Carolingian dynasty to reign in France. 1444 – Skanderbeg organizes a group of Albanian nobles to form the League of Lezhë. 1458 – George of Poděbrady is chosen as the king of Bohemia. 1476 – Burgundian Wars: The Old Swiss Confederacy hands Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, a major defeat in the Battle of Grandson in Canton of Neuchâtel. 1484 – The College of Arms is formally incorporated by Royal Charter signed by King Richard III of England. 1498 – Vasco da Gama's fleet visits the Island of Mozambique. 1657 – Great Fire of Meireki: A fire in Edo (now Tokyo), Japan, caused more than 100,000 deaths; it lasted three days 1776 – American Revolutionary War: Patriot militia units arrest the Royal Governor of Georgia James Wright and attempt to prevent capture of supply ships in the Battle of the Rice Boats. 1791 – Claude Chappe demonstrates the first semaphore line near Paris. 1797 – The Bank of England issues the first one-pound and two-pound banknotes. 1807 – The U.S. Congress passes the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves, disallowing the importation of new slaves into the country. 1811 – Argentine War of Independence: A royalist fleet defeats a small flotilla of revolutionary ships in the Battle of San Nicolás on the River Plate. 1815 – Signing of the Kandyan Convention treaty by British invaders and the leaders of the Kingdom of Kandy. 1836 – Texas Revolution: The Declaration of independence of the Republic of Texas from Mexico is adopted. 1855 – Alexander II becomes Tsar of Russia. 1859 – The two-day Great Slave Auction, the largest such auction in United States history, begins. 1865 – East Cape War: The Völkner Incident in New Zealand. 1867 – The U.S. Congress passes the first Reconstruction Act. 1877 – Just two days before inauguration, the U.S. Congress declares Rutherford B. Hayes the winner of the 1876 U.S. presidential election even though Samuel J. Tilden had won the popular vote. 1882 – Queen Victoria narrowly escapes an assassination attempt by Roderick Maclean in Windsor. 1901 – United States Steel Corporation is founded as a result of a merger between Carnegie Steel Company and Federal Steel Company which became the first corporation in the world with a market capital over $1 billion. 1901 – The U.S. Congress passes the Platt Amendment limiting the autonomy of Cuba, as a condition of the withdrawal of American troops. 1903 – In New York City the Martha Washington Hotel opens, becoming the first hotel exclusively for women. 1917 – The enactment of the Jones–Shafroth Act grants Puerto Ricans United States citizenship. 1919 – The first Communist International meets in Moscow. 1937 – The Steel Workers Organizing Committee signs a collective bargaining agreement with U.S. Steel, leading to unionization of the United States steel industry. 1939 – Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli is elected Pope and takes the name Pius XII. 1941 – World War II: First German military units enter Bulgaria after it joins the Axis Pact. 1943 – World War II: Allied aircraft defeat a Japanese attempt to ship troops to New Guinea. 1949 – Captain James Gallagher lands his B-50 Superfortress Lucky Lady II in Fort Worth, Texas, after completing the first non-stop around-the-world airplane flight in 94 hours and one minute. 1955 – Norodom Sihanouk, king of Cambodia, abdicates the throne in favor of his father, Norodom Suramarit. 1962 – In Burma, the army led by General Ne Win seizes power in a coup d'état. 1962 – Wilt Chamberlain sets the single-game scoring record in the National Basketball Association by scoring 100 points. 1965 – The US and Republic of Vietnam Air Force begin Operation Rolling Thunder, a sustained bombing campaign against North Vietnam. 1968 – Baggeridge Colliery closes marking the end of over 300 years of coal mining in the Black Country. 1969 – In Toulouse, France, the first test flight of the Anglo-French Concorde is conducted. 1970 – Rhodesia declares itself a republic, breaking its last links with the British crown. 1972 – The Pioneer 10 space probe is launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida with a mission to explore the outer planets. 1977 – Libya becomes the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya as the General People's Congress adopted the "Declaration on the Establishment of the Authority of the People". 1978 – Czech Vladimír Remek becomes the first non-Russian or non-American to go into space, when he is launched aboard Soyuz 28. 1983 – Compact discs and players are released for the first time in the United States and other markets. They had previously been available only in Japan. 1989 – Twelve European Community nations agree to ban the production of all chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) by the end of the century. 1990 – Nelson Mandela is elected deputy President of the African National Congress. 1991 – Battle at Rumaila oil field brings an end to the 1991 Gulf War. 1992 – Start of the war in Transnistria. 1992 – Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, San Marino, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, all of which (except San Marino) were former Soviet republics, join the United Nations. 1995 – Researchers at Fermilab announce the discovery of the top quark. 1998 – Data sent from the Galileo spacecraft indicates that Jupiter's moon Europa has a liquid ocean under a thick crust of ice. 2002 – U.S. invasion of Afghanistan: Operation Anaconda begins, (ending on March 19 after killing 500 Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters, with 11 Western troop fatalities). 2004 – War in Iraq: Al-Qaeda carries out the Ashoura Massacre in Iraq, killing 170 and wounding over 500. 2012 – A tornado outbreak occurs over a large section of the Southern United States and into the Ohio Valley region, resulting in 40 tornado-related fatalities. 2017 – The elements Moscovium, Tennessine, and Oganesson are officially added to the periodic table at a conference in Moscow, Russia.

[reading-writing-revolution]

September 2, 2020 (Wednesday)

As I wade through the flood of news today, all of it trying to tilt the playing field toward Trump in the upcoming election, it strikes me there is an elephant in the room that we really need to identify: why is Trump so hell-bent on reelection? He has made it clear he doesn’t particularly like the job. He has no real goals for a second term. He feels victimized by the media and his opponents. He prefers Florida to Washington, D.C., and he really likes to golf. He claims to be wealthy enough to do whatever he wants. So why on earth is he apparently determined to bend our democracy to the point of breaking in order to win reelection to a job he doesn’t seem to want to do?

According to today’s news, Trump's acting Director of the Department of Homeland Security, Chad Wolf, recently buried the release of a bulletin from the Intelligence Community warning that Russians were trying to undermine Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden by saying he is deteriorating mentally. The bulletin was produced for federal, state, and local law enforcement, but DHS Chief of Staff John Gountanis stopped the distribution of the bulletin and referred it to Wolf. It disappeared. Congress will not be able to ask about what happened because on Saturday, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence announced it would no longer brief Congress in person on election security.

A DHS spokesperson said the bulletin had been pulled because it had not met the agency’s standards, but analysts who produced it said they had determined with “high confidence” that the disinformation effort was taking place. Trump, of course, has tried repeatedly to establish the idea that Biden, who stutters, is slipping mentally.

Although the administration tried to bury this intelligence committee report about actual Russian interference in the election, today Attorney General William Barr told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer a fake story. He said that hostile foreign powers could send thousands of mail-in ballots to this year’s election, creating massive voter fraud. When pressed, Barr admitted there was no evidence for such a claim. The U.S. Intelligence Community has no evidence that foreign countries are trying to manipulate mail-in ballots.

Trump is also continuing his attacks on mail-in votes, insisting they will usher in voter fraud despite their widespread previous use that showed no evidence of fraud, and despite the fact that the president himself votes by mail. Today, in North Carolina, he urged people to vote twice in the November election, once by mail and once in person, to test the validity of the election. Voting twice is illegal under federal law. Under North Carolina state law, it is also illegal to induce someone to vote twice.

On Monday, we learned that Barr has recently replaced the head of the Office of Law and Policy, a Justice Department office that oversees the FBI’s intelligence-gathering activities. Barr has removed Deputy Assistant Attorney General Brad Wiegmann, a 23-year career public servant, and replaced him with 36-year-old Kellen Dwyer, a prosecutor who made headlines two years ago when he accidentally revealed that the U.S. government had indicted WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

The timing of this replacement, just before the election, might reflect Barr's planned release of a report of his own on the FBI’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Barr has dispatched his own investigator to counter the findings of the Senate Intelligence Committee. The Senate established that the investigation was legitimate, and that Russia did, in fact, intervene in the 2016 election to bolster Trump.

Remember, that while world leaders are condemning Russia for the recent poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, Trump has still not commented on it. Neither has he addressed the story that Russia offered bounties to Taliban-linked fighters to kill U.S. and allied soldiers in Afghanistan, nor the growing Russian aggression toward U.S. troops in Syria.

There is yet another possible attempt to skew the election on the horizon. Led by Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), federal health officials have told states to get ready to distribute a coronavirus vaccine by November. Vaccine-makers say this timing is impossible, and that they will not know by then if their vaccines, which are currently in development, are safe and effective. The chief of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Stephen Hahn, insists that the agency won’t approve a vaccine simply to help Trump get reelected, but the FDA’s recent authorization of emergency use of convalescent plasma despite concerns about its effectiveness has worried public health experts. In any case, Redfield’s letter suggests the CDC might authorize a vaccine itself through its emergency powers.

Trump is also pushing hard on the idea that Democrats have created a crisis of violence in the country and he is the one advocating “Law & Order,” as he keeps tweeting.

On CNN today, White House Deputy Press Secretary Hogan Gidley blamed Democrats for the shooting a week ago in Kenosha, Wisconsin, that took two lives and wounded a third person. Seventeen-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse allegedly crossed state lines with an AR-15-style gun that was illegally in his possession and, after scuffling with some people, opened fire. Gidley insisted that Rittenhouse acted in self-defense. He blamed Democrats for restraining the police, leading citizens to have to step in. “If you don’t allow police to do their job then the American people have to defend themselves in some way.” While Gidley said he was not defending vigilantes, it sure sounded like he was inciting violence. He noted that “we have a Second Amendment in this country” and warned that Democrats were stripping “cops” of their ability to protect us, leaving American families “in grave danger.”

Of course, protests against police have been driven not by a general disregard for law enforcement, but rather by such horrors as the murder of George Floyd by Milwaukee police officer Derek Chauvin, who casually knelt on Floyd’s neck until he died; the murder of Breonna Taylor of Louisville, Kentucky, shot in her bed by police looking for her ex-boyfriend; and, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, by the shooting of Jacob Blake seven times in the back as he reached for his car door. Leading Democrats, including Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, have called not for getting rid of police departments, but rather for addressing what appears to be deadly racism within some of them. Biden has actually called for increasing funding to help law enforcement officers handle functions outside the normal expectations of a police force.

The suggestion that Democrats are responsible for a young man’s deadly decision to carry a friend’s weapon to a city in another state is a campaign ploy, and today the president made another such ploy when he signed a memo that sets out to restrict federal money from going to what the White House calls “anarchist jurisdictions.” It orders the Office of Management and Budget to examine what federal funding goes to cities where Trump insists—despite their adamant denials—that Democrats want to “defund” police. The memo leaves Trump loyalist Attorney General William Barr in charge of determining which cities fall into this category according to “any… factors the Attorney General deems appropriate.” The memo does spell out certain parameters. A so-called “anarchist jurisdiction” is defined as one that “disempowers or defunds police departments” or one that “unreasonably refuses to accept offers of law enforcement assistance from the Federal Government.” The memo specifically lists Seattle, Washington; Portland, Oregon; Washington, D.C.; and New York City as “anarchist jurisdictions.”

The memo says: “My Administration will not allow Federal tax dollars to fund cities that allow themselves to deteriorate into lawless zones…. It is imperative that the Federal Government review the use of Federal funds by jurisdictions that permit anarchy, violence, and destruction in America’s cities.” “This is a campaign document coming out of the White House,” said Sam Berger, a former OMB official. “Any actual restriction on funding in court will immediately be sued and almost certainly struck down.”

Trump's effort to convince Americans that he is defending law and order does not appear to be working. In Politico, JR Ross, an expert on Wisconsin Politics, noted that Trump’s fearmongering isn’t working because “after such a tense, violent summer, the protesters might look bad, but Trump, and his law-and-order supporters, don’t look much better.”

According to pollster Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight, when asked which candidate would “make you feel more safe or less safe,” 35% of those polled said Trump made them feel more safe, while 50% said less safe. Forty-two percent said Biden made them feel more safe while 40% said he made them feel less safe.

[healtproblems]

Playing with fire.. The story of the global jihad industry

the most strange meeting in the history of the White House is US President Ronald Reagan, 

who meets Afghan Islamic militants whom he described as freedom fighters, likened their struggle to the struggle of America's founding fathers, and earlier honored them with the third trip to space shuttle Colombia, saying that Colombia represents the highest human aspirations for technology, the Afghan struggle represents the highest human aspiration For freedom. A second and third visit is the terrorists themselves who are fighting America today. The difference in time, place, and what powers want How America and Saudi Arabia made the word jihad and then competed for repudiation The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. The Red Army occupies the governmental and military buildings and the presidential palace in Kabul, then it disavects Afghan President Hafiz Allah Amin President Jimmy Carter's administration is monitoring events in Central Asia. Revolution in Iran down the Shah, America's ally, the Communists controlled Afghanistan, and things are out of control The world is changing around Riyadh, too, a regime of a religious rival that takes over power in Iran and rebels who try to control the Holy Mosque by force of weapons under the leadership of Jaiman Al-Otaibi, a region that boils and interests that suddenly come from Washington, the call will be solved Afghanistan your problems and those of us only follow this plan The Afghan jihad industry came to the solution from the ideas of national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski who planned to end the cold war from Afghanistan to turn it into a swan for the Soviets and Muslims The U.S. intelligence launched the operation, a huge program to train and arm Afghan mujahideen in cooperation with Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries. Brzezinski started his shuttle tours from Cairo with the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat to convince him to get the old Soviet weapons he has to hand to the Mujahideen. The next day, Saudi Crown Prince Fahd Bin Abdel Aziz and his brother Sultan met and an agreement was reached on the Saudi role in every dollar Washington pays to arm the Afghans, which will pay Riyadh a dollar. The Saudi religious establishment will play the main role in supporting the Islamic world to the Afghan jihad. Afghan Jihad Hayat and the U.S. intelligence will use Saudi territory as a transit point for arms transfers to Pakistan Carter's flight Ronald Reagan came in 1998 to complete the March, deploy American intelligence officers in Afghanistan, and provide Islamist militants with shoulder-mounted anti-aircraft Stinger missiles. The Saudi government has also been involved in the fight for the Mujahideen, but Saudi Arabia has provided $20 billion in face-to-face money, mostly through the Saudi Relief Committee, which was led by then-Prince Mecca and Saudi King Salman bin Abdul Aziz, and money, the Kingdom has mobilized volunteers to participate in the fighting through the Mujahideen Service Office that he founded Jordanian Palestinian Abdullah Azzam in Peshawar and as a kind of encouragement Saudi Airlines declared 75% discounts for volunteers traveling with more than twenty-five thousand people from 30 countries, half of the Saudis who went to fight in Afghanistan. Among them is a Saudi young man from a wealthy family called Osama Bin Laden who will later become Al Qaeda leader. Bin Laden was close to Saudi intelligence chief Turki al-Faisal, who sent him as an informal envoy on behalf of the royal family to Pakistan. The success of the plan and the end of the jihadist role. The US-Saudi plan, which was based on the withdrawal of the Soviets from Afghanistan in 1989, was fruitful. Two years later, the Soviet Union collapsed just as Brezhnsky wanted, the Afghan mujahideen failed to run the country, and entered a civil war that ended with the Taliban rule in 1906 Bosnia and then to Tajikistan under the Saudi government's control and those who chose to return to his country were met with a very different face Saudi Arabia no longer welcomes them, their role has ended, and they are now a speech that the words of candles are not static, even if they are for them, they have emerged and lived among the living The beginning of enmity, Saddam Hussein, is the invasion of Kuwait King Fahd Bin Abdel Aziz allows the deployment of the US forces in Saudi Arabia. The unofficial religious trend was the rise in the Kingdom, rejecting the US presence in the two Holy Mosques countries. The authorities in Riyadh did not bear the criticisms, detaining religious symbols like Salman Al-Awda Safar Al-Hawaii, and the news of repression and torture were mentioned, and the famous Burida uprising was burned and it was suppressed by force. The repression by the jihadist authorities returning to violence and carrying out a series of bombings targeting the U.S. presence in Saudi Arabia, to which the Kingdom responded by arresting and torturing hundreds of jihadists, who changed the features of the relationship between the Kingdom and the Islamists once and for all, Osama bin Laden left for Sudan, where he laid the first kernel of Al Qaeda and then to Afghanistan The war on the United States to begin the era of global jihad was declared, and neither America nor those living in India would rule out bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, then targeting the Cole on Yemen's coasts, and finally bringing down the two trade towers in the heart of America around the world to a war space open to American interests Washington responded with no Huaidah declared that yesterday, Al-Hurriyah fighters became soldiers of black terrorism and used the explosions as a pretext to satisfy its desire for revenge and invasion, and invaded Afghanistan to destroy Bin Laden's bases and his companions, then invaded Iraq and Al-Qaeda fighters became chases everywhere. Bin Laden decided to allow his Saudi companions to return to their country and finally take revenge on the Kingdom Al-Arabiya correspondent in Riyadh reported that several explosions shook Granada residential compound, God protects and be heathen.