#afghanistan former intelligence chief

[eretzyisrael]

by Asra Q. Nomani

Another troubling example is the “Hands Off Uhuru Fightback Coalition,” whose leaders face charges in a Tampa court in September for allegedly working with Russian intelligence to interfere in U.S. elections. In a statement that rings true today, Matthew G. Olsen, assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s National Security Division prosecuting the Uhuru case, said last year, “Russia’s foreign intelligence service allegedly weaponized our First Amendment rights – freedoms Russia denies its own citizens – to divide Americans and interfere in elections in the United States.” Assistant Attorney General Kenneth A. Polite, Jr. of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division called it “foreign malign influence.”

These groups are not merely focused on domestic issues; they harbor broader, international ambitions, for which they are willing to “disrupt the DNC,” even if it costs Harris votes – and potentially the presidency. Many of them seek to dismantle the current global order, with a particular focus on the Middle East and the destruction of Israel.

At the heart of this coalition lies a shared animosity towards the Democratic Party and, now, Harris. The Atlanta chapter of the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression tells its followers Harris is “funding genocide and ignoring police terror.” “Workers Strike Back” tells Americans to “REJECT the New Warmonger-in-Chief.”

By presenting the protests as “grassroots,” the media has underplayed the powerful forces behind controversial messages, like “HAMAS IS COMING,” during the network’s recent protests in D.C., when the American flag was burnt and replaced by the Palestinian flag. By not dissecting their motives, the media has also given them a powerful bullhorn. These protests are not spontaneous uprisings of concerned citizens. They are carefully orchestrated campaigns designed to subvert U.S. elections and undermine American democracy.

These protestors seek to overthrow the current political order, or as one organizer, “Socialist Action,” says: “Permanent Revolution.” Their demands are absolute, and their tactics are ruthless. Democratic Party leaders must recognize that there is no winning with these groups. Their aim is to tear down what exists and rebuild it in their own intolerant image.

Andrew Fox, a former British military officer who did three tours of duty in Afghanistan, tells me: “These protestors are not just demonstrating; they are fomenting an insurgency designed to destabilize the U.S. and further the interests of foreign actors.”

Democratic Party leaders and Harris would be well served to refuse to be swayed by the loudest voices on the streets, who pledge to “Disrupt the DNC,” as “Workers Strike Back,” supporting “Left Antiwar Independent Candidate” Jill Stein, threatens to do. Firebrand, a self-described “communist organization” and coalition member, has guided its members to avoid playing a game of “lesser evilism” and refuse Harris’s candidacy. 

The fight against disinformation warfare is not easy, but it is necessary. By shining a light on the truth behind the myth of the marching millions, understanding details like who funds protests and rents charter buses to Chicago, we can make wise decisions, not misled by fear and chaos, but rather guided by transparency and facts. 

[mariacallous]

U.S. President Joe Biden’s decision this weekend to step down from the race leaves Vice President Kamala Harris as the almost-certain Democratic candidate. As vice president, Harris has largely focused on domestic issues such as labor rights and gun violence. Since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs vs. Jackson decision, the matter of reproductive rights has emerged as Harris’s signature issue—but her record on international affairs and her use of the office’s power, such as it is, offer important clues as to how she might use her potential role as president.

But what exactly are the criteria for being a good foreign-policy vice president?

Since the late 1970s, when then-President Jimmy Carter and Vice President Walter Mondale reinvented the office so that the vice president could be a governing partner and not just a spare leader in case of disaster, vice presidents have had access to both the policy process and the president. But that vice-presidential power and influence are completely derived from the president’s compliance, without any constitutional or legal force. While serving as vice president, Biden himself once said, “I’m the highest-paid staff officer in the government.”

A good staffer makes their principal more effective, identifying gaps and weaknesses in the administration and filling them. Recent vice presidents have been across-the-board advisors who have balanced policy with politics, acted as surrogates and messengers, and taken charge of critical issues or task forces. Mondale helped Carter with legislative affairs, while his relationships with Israel and U.S. Jewish communities were critical in Carter’s signature foreign-policy achievement, the Camp David Accords.

George H.W. Bush was a utility infielder with a range of administrative experience as vice president, plugging gaps in then-President Ronald Reagan’s chaotic national security process. Vice President Al Gore played a key role in the Clinton administration’s Russia policy as co-chair of the Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission. Vice President Dick Cheney, among other things, was the architect of the post-9/11 domestic intelligence operations. As a former White House chief of staff, member of the House Intelligence Committee, and secretary of defense, Cheney and his staff developed the Terrorist Surveillance Program while keeping it secret from much of Congress and the government. And Biden played “devil’s advocate” during then-President Barack Obama’s Afghanistan policy review process in order to help prevent the president from being boxed in by the Defense Department.

Harris has faced significant barriers to helping Biden. Since the expansion of the vice-presidential role in the late 1970s, most presidents have been outsiders to Washington, D.C. These presidents tended to select experienced D.C.-insider VPs and turned to them for advice and help with Congress and international affairs. Biden, with 36 years in the Senate (during which he focused on foreign affairs) and eight years as vice president, had little need for assistance.

Further, he has a deeply experienced staff, some of whom have worked with him for decades. Harris, meanwhile, was new to D.C. four years ago. She is an experienced politician—but primarily in the context of California and domestic politics, meaning that she had limited opportunities to fill the gaps, few as they were, in Biden’s experience. Nor did she have a deep bench of experienced staffers who knew both her and Washington. The early turmoil on her staff—along with some of her poor public appearances—was the result.

But the turnover in personnel eventually produced a solid and capable team in a town where personnel is policy. Harris’s first national security advisor (VPNSA), former Ambassador to Bulgaria Nancy McEldowney, left the position in March 2022. The deputy VPNSA, Philip Gordon, then took the top spot. Gordon had worked as an assistant secretary of state and a senior National Security Council staffer in the Obama administration—and he had many options to serve in the Biden administration. His choice to remain at the vice president’s office suggests that it is not a policy backwater.

Under Obama, the VPNSA also held the title of deputy assistant to the president (the second tier in the hierarchy of White House staffers). However, Gordon is instead described by the Biden administration as an assistant to the president—the top tier of White House staffers. Gordon’s deputy is Rebecca Lissner, who had previously been the acting senior director for strategic planning on the National Security Council, where she oversaw the development of the Biden administration’s National Security Strategy. Harris also has a speechwriter dedicated specifically to foreign-policy issues as well as a military advisor.

Harris was never cut out of the process, and she had input to major decisions. Members of Biden’s team, many of whom also served under him when he was vice president, have publicly acknowledged the challenges that she faced. Vice presidents, however, are expected to be discreet in advising the president to ensure that there are no damaging leaks, and the Biden White House ran a tight ship—so until memoirs are written and documents are declassified, it is difficult to know the extent of her influence.

The foreign-policy issue that Harris is best known for is immigration and the border. The matter highlights her strengths and weaknesses. Biden assigned her to help mitigate illegal immigration after she offered suggestions for working with Central American countries to address the root causes of immigration. She had not sought the assignment, and when she received it, she tried to distance herself from the related issue of border security.

This did not prevent Republicans from dubbing her the “border czar,” and it led to a disastrous interview with NBC News anchor Lester Holt, in which she tried to avoid talking about the border. Holt pressed Harris about not having visited the southern border, and she replied, “And I haven’t been to Europe. I don’t understand the point you’re making.”

Her efforts to evade being tagged with the border issue only heightened her association with it—and her sometimes maladroit communication skills. But over time, she built relationships with players in Central America that paid dividends. The public-private Partnership for Central America that she led helped generate more than $5.2 billion in private sector commitments to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. These efforts also supported the administration’s successful effort to ensure a peaceful transition of power after a contested election in Guatemala.

Other successes are more far-reaching. Trump reestablished the National Space Council (a traditional vice-presidential assignment) early in his term, and Harris succeeded Vice President Mike Pence as its chair. In that role, she has overseen the highly technical process of developing regulations for space commerce while doing yeoman’s work quintupling the signatories to the Artemis Accords, an agreement that encourages common standards of behavior in space, from the original eight. On April 18, 2022, Harris made a bold diplomatic stroke by announcing a unilateral U.S. commitment to not carry out anti-satellite weapons tests—which create debris that crowds the atmosphere and threatens the use of space. This was a much-lauded move to create norms for space activity, and it places China and Russia, which have not committed to a test ban, on the defensive.

Harris has also represented the U.S abroad. Vice presidents have long been high-level diplomatic envoys—not just seat-warmers at funerals. Almost exactly 45 years ago, for instance, Mondale gave a speech in Geneva that galvanized the world into action to rescue the “boat people” driven out of Vietnam. His vice presidential successor, George H.W. Bush, led the diplomatic efforts to gain European support for new intermediate-range missile deployments.

In November 2021, Harris visited France—officially to commemorate Armistice Day, but also to smooth over tense Franco-American relations. The French were perturbed by a deal between the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia that had ended a lucrative French submarine contract with Australia. While there, Harris enjoyed a good rapport with French President Emmanuel Macron and successfully persuaded the French to sign the Artemis Accords, facilitating collaboration in space. Since then, she has met innumerable foreign leaders abroad and at home, including when she represented the United States in 2022 and 2023 at the Munich Security Conference.

This limited survey of Harris’s foreign-policy work does not indicate a grand strategy or worldview. Instead, her work has been about developing a skill set of policymaking and implementation, as well as learning and using the tools available to her office.

Should Kamala Harris become president, this experience will be critical.

[tomorrowusa]

Trump wants Russia to attack our allies. Is it any wonder why he's Putin's favored candidate for president?

Having an ignoramus pawn of Putin as commander-in-chief is not good for national security or international stability.

Seeking a second presidency as the Republicans’ presumptive 2024 White House nominee, Donald Trump has said he would “encourage” Russia to attack any of the US’s Nato allies whom he considers to have not met their financial obligations. The White House described the remarks as “appalling and unhinged”. Trump made the statement on Saturday during a campaign rally in Conway, South Carolina, ahead of the state’s Republican presidential preference primary on 24 February. The former president has voiced misgivings about aid to Ukraine as it defends itself from the invasion launched by Russia in February 2022 – as well as to the existence of Nato, the 31-nation alliance which the US has committed to defending when necessary.

Being the dumbass he is, Trump doesn't understand that NATO is a mutual defense pact. After 9/11 NATO countries provided logistical aid and even troops when the US overthrew the pro-al-Qaeda régime in Afghanistan and took into custody many of the planners of the 9/11 terror attacks.

Trump’s remarks on Saturday quickly raised alarm among many political pundits in the US. “Sounds as if Trump is kind of encouraging Russia to attack our Nato allies,” David Corn – an MSNBC analyst and the Washington DC bureau chief of Mother Jones – said on X. Meanwhile, conservative political commentator Alyssa Farah Griffin said Trump’s comments were “music” to the ears of Russian leader Vladimir Putin

Something Trump doesn't tell his MAGA zombie followers is that military expenditures of NATO countries have gone way up during the Biden administration.

From last July...

NATO Details Leap in Member Defense Spending Ahead of Summit

Is Trump just butthurt that Biden has had greater success at increasing NATO member defense expenditures? That does make Trump look even more like a loser.

More likely Trump is simply doing Putin's bidding in helping to weaken Europe in order to spread Russian hegemony.

Under Biden, NATO is not only growing in strength but growing in membership. Finland joined NATO last April. Sweden is set to join this year.

Many of our NATO allies have excellent intelligence services. Undoubtedly some of them have picked up "dirt" on Trump over the past dozen or so years. It would be a shame for Trump if some of that dirt somehow became public later this year. Europe should show the same love for Trump which he has been showing them. 🙂

[ivankahasbeentreatedsounfairly]

By The Editorial Board

The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.

Nov. 14, 2024

Donald Trump has demonstrated his lack of fitness for the presidency in countless ways, but one of the clearest is in the company he keeps, surrounding himself with fringe figures, conspiracy theorists and sycophants who put fealty to him above all else. This week, a series of cabinet nominations by Mr. Trump showed the potential dangers posed by his reliance on his inner circle in the starkest way possible.

For three of the nation’s highest-ranking and most vital positions, Mr. Trump said he would appoint loyalists with no discernible qualifications for their jobs, people manifestly inappropriate for crucial positions of leadership in law enforcement and national security.

The most irresponsible was his choice for attorney general. To fill the post of the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, the president-elect said he would nominate Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida.

Yes, that Matt Gaetz.

The one who called for the abolishment of the F.B.I. and the entire Justice Department if they didn’t stop investigating Mr. Trump. The one who was among the loudest congressional voices in denying the results of the 2020 election, who said he was “proud of the work” that he and other deniers did on Jan. 6, 2021, and who praised the Capitol rioters as “patriotic Americans” who had no intention of committing violence. The one whose move to oust Speaker Kevin McCarthy in 2023 paralyzed his own party’s leadership of the House for nearly a month.

Mr. Gaetz, who submitted his letter of resignation from Congress on Wednesday after his nomination was announced, was the target of a yearslong federal sex-trafficking investigation that led to an 11-year prison term for one of his associates, though he denied any involvement. The Justice Department closed that investigation, but the House Ethics Committee is still looking into allegations of sexual misconduct, illicit drug use, improper acceptance of gifts and obstruction of government investigations of his conduct. Kevin McCarthy, the former House speaker, blamed Mr. Gaetz for his ouster, on the grounds that Mr. Gaetz “wanted me to stop an ethics complaint because he slept with a 17-year-old.”

This is the man Mr. Trump has selected to lead the 115,000-person agency that he has called the most important in the federal government, a position whose enforcement role could cause the most trouble for any president with corrupt intent. Even for Mr. Trump, it was a stunning demonstration of his disregard for basic competence and government experience, and of his duty to lead the executive branch in a sober and patriotic way. It will now be up to the Senate to say he has gone too far and reject this nomination.

Mr. Trump’s list of appointments is just getting started but already includes two other unqualified nominations that he announced this week: former Representative Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence, and Pete Hegseth to be secretary of defense.

Ms. Gabbard, who previously represented Hawaii in the House and regularly appears on Fox News, is not only devoid of intelligence experience but has repeatedly taken positions in direct opposition to American foreign policy and national security interests. She has appeared on several occasions to side with strongmen like President Vladimir Putin of Russia and President Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

Mr. Hegseth, a co-host of “Fox & Friends,” is perhaps even more unqualified, given the gravity — not to mention the budget — of the post he would assume. He enjoys some support from enlisted service members and veterans, but outside of serving two tours as an Army infantryman in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as time in Guantánamo Bay, Mr. Hegseth has no experience in government or national defense.

“He’s never run a big institution, much less one of the largest and most hidebound on the planet,” the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal wrote Wednesday. “He has no experience in government outside the military, and no small risk is that the bureaucracy will eat him alive.” The board went on to call Mr. Hegseth a “culture warrior” at a time when there are much bigger security issues for the Pentagon to be focused on.

It’s far from certain Mr. Hegseth could even obtain the security clearances required for the job. He has said he was one of a dozen National Guard members removed from service at President Biden’s inauguration in 2021 because of concerns that he was an extremist — possibly because of a tattoo he wears that is popular among white supremacists.

These are some of the most consequential roles in government, protecting the country from military and terrorist threats, investigating domestic criminal conspiracies, and prosecuting thousands of federal crimes every year. Yet to fill them Mr. Trump has resorted to people whose only eligibility for office is an apparent willingness to say yes to his every demand.

Mr. Gaetz in particular has joined Mr. Trump in expressing a commitment to exacting vengeance against anyone they believe has done them wrong. Mr. Trump began his campaign by saying “I am your retribution,” and Mr. Gaetz broadcasts nothing so much as that. He has no business leading an agency with the role of combating crime, fraud, violations of civil rights and threats to national security, among many other things.

In Mr. Trump’s first term, the department was protected by career prosecutors and other civil servants who understood that their primary obligation was to the dictates of the Constitution, not to the whims of the president. But Mr. Trump has promised to purge people like that from his second administration.

The possibility of extreme appointments like these was the reason the Constitution gives the Senate the right to refuse its consent to a president’s wishes. Last week, Republicans won control of the chamber. Now they will be confronted with an immediate test: Will they stand up for the legislative branch and for the American system of checks and balances? Two Republican senators, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, have already expressed strong skepticism of Mr. Gaetz’s nomination, and others have declined to express their support.

Mr. Trump clearly expects the Senate to simply roll over and ignore its responsibilities. He wants to turn the leaders of major important agencies into his deputies, remaking the federal government into a Trump Inc. organization chart entirely subordinate to him. He recently demanded that the Senate give him the ability to make recess appointments, a way of bypassing the Senate’s consent process when the chamber is adjourned for 10 days or more.

Even Republican senators refused to consent to that demand during his first term, to preserve their constitutional role, and on Wednesday Senate Republicans voted to reject as their leader Rick Scott of Florida, who said he would have no problem allowing recess appointments. Instead they chose John Thune of South Dakota, who is far more likely to uphold his chamber’s right to refuse consent of president nominations.

In Mr. Trump’s second term, senators will immediately be confronted with an extreme set of appointments even worse than those of the first term. That makes all the more important that they preserve the ability to say no.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/14/opinion/editorials/matt-gaetz-nomination-senate.html

[carletes]

What do you think will happen next hibs? What should and can be done? I read somewhere some countries are starting to get more involved, why do we need war hibss there’ll only be more losses than gains 🙃

this is a huge question, but i have a few thoughts on what should/can be done. please note that this is incomplete and i'm of course crunched for time so it's not a robust analysis lol.

End the Apartheid: it's time we all started calling what's happening in Israel, against Israeli Arabs and Palestinians (and even, frequently, non-white Jewish folks) what it is. Several credible organizations have called it apartheid, apartheid as a LEGAL category. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine, B'Tselem (an Israeli human rights organization), and even a former Mossad (Israeli intelligence) chief. Why is it important to call this situation apartheid? Because words matter; and I think it's a lot harder to play the "but what about—" game when the situation is named. Why else does it matter? Because we have seen the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa, and we know the tactics that were used domestically and internationally (including boycotts, divestment, sanctions) to end apartheid. If we all start calling it what it is, hopefully that can result in commensurate action to end apartheid.

Recognize that this is colonialism: I know we like to think colonialism is over, but it's not, and the Israeli occupation of Palestine is fundamentally settler colonialism. This means that Palestinians have a right to self-determination, and they have the right to resist colonization—even through violent means, if necessary. This is especially true if (as many people argue, including many prominent international lawyers and experts) if we agree that Palestine has been occupied by Israel. Under the Fourth Geneva Convention, occupiers have certain obligations towards occupied people, and occupied people have the right to resist their occupation (read this for more). These categorizations are important because they allow us to be clear-eyed about the violations that Israel has committed against Palestinians, and it allows us to be clear-eyed about the legality AND MORALITY of (most) Palestinian resistance.

The law isn't everything, but solidarity can be: This is a moral issue. The law helps us understand, but it won't help free Palestine. The fate of Palestinians is one of the moral questions of our time. We need to extend solidarity towards Palestinians. This includes questioning our leaders when they gleefully advocate for Israel's right to use genocidal, illegal tactics against Palestinians, and even people who paint the issue as "both-sides." It's not; Hamas has done horrible things (it was also created by Israel, fun fact, similar to how the US helped created the Taliban in Afghanistan) but that does not mean Palestinians don't have the right to resist, and it doesn't mean that Palestinians aren't the primary victims here. We need to be consistent in our support for Palestinians, and consistent in being vocally against military support for an apartheid state.

I don't inherently believe in war/violence BUT!!!!!!!!! when the language of the oppressor is violence, how the FUCK is non-violence suppose to help people be free? Like I know the impulse is to be like nooo we want peace but we had several opportunities for a peaceful solution, and it was frequently the Israelis who refused. The only way there will ever be any peace is if both sides are equal, and they simply will not be for as long as Israel is encouraged with weapons and finances. Decolonization doesn't just happen. Decolonization is won. It doesn't feel good to say, and it doesn't feel good to understand that, but not every right is won with non-violence. Also, the only way to really end the violence is to push Israel to the negotiation table again and to disempower their military/other non-military violence, because they're really the ones with the power to dictate how violent the violence is. Palestinians are only really responding. This also limits the intervention of other states, which limits the perpetuation of violence in turn.

Land back: Palestinians worldwide have the right to return to their ancestral homeland. Their ancestral homes should be returned TO them as well. There are ways to have coexistence in Palestine, but I truly think that's not possible under Israel as it currently exists. Any lasting solution NEEDS to give land back to Palestinians. I also think that we need to make sure it doesn't this doesn't turn into yet another mass displacement of Jewish people into a world that still hates them. Jewish people deserve to feel safe, just like Palestinians deserve to feel safe. I don't know what that's going to look like in the future, but I do know what we have right now will not accomplish that goal.

These are incomplete thoughts, and I don't have the space to flesh them out completely. I also know a lot of this is not satisfying. I'm not satisfied either, but I'm also not important here lol. idk i hope this helps somewhat

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

September 24, 2023

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is the nation’s highest-ranking military officer and the principal military advisor to the president, secretary of defense, and national security council. The current chairman, Army General Mark Milley, has served in the military for 44 years, deploying in Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, Panama, Haiti, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Colombia, Somalia, and the Republic of Korea. He holds a degree in political science from Princeton University, a master’s degree in international relations from Columbia University, and a master’s degree from the U.S. Naval War College in national security and strategic studies. 

Former president Trump chose Milley for that position, but on Friday night, Trump posted an attack on Milley, calling him “a Woke train wreck” and accusing him of betraying the nation when, days before the 2020 election, he reassured his Chinese counterpart that the U.S. was not going to attack China in the last days of the Trump administration, as Chinese leaders feared.  

Trump was reacting to a September 21 piece by Jeffrey Goldberg about Milley in The Atlantic, which portrays Milley as an important check on an erratic, uninformed, and dangerous president while also warning that “[i]n the American system, it is the voters, the courts, and Congress that are meant to serve as checks on a president’s behavior, not the generals.” 

Trump posted that Milley “was actually dealing with China to give them a heads up on the thinking of the President of the United States. This was an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH! A war between China and the United States could have been the result of this treasonous act. To be continued!!!”

In fact, the calls were hardly rogue incidents. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, another Trump appointee, endorsed Milley’s October call, and Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller, who replaced Esper when Trump fired him just after the election, gave permission for a similar call Milley made in January 2021. At least ten officials from the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department were on the calls. 

Trump is suggesting that in acting within his role and through proper channels, our highest ranking military officer has committed treason and that such treason in the past would have warranted death, with the inherent suggestion that we should return to such a standard. It seems much of the country has become accustomed to Trump’s outbursts, but this threat should not pass without notice, not least because Representative Paul Gosar (R-AZ) echoed it today in his taxpayer-funded newsletter.

In the letter, Gosar refers to Milley as “the homosexual-promoting-BLM-activist Chairman of the military joint chiefs,” a “deviant” who “was coordinating with Nancy Pelosi to hurt President Trump, and treasonously working behind Trump’s back. In a better society,” he wrote, “quislings like the strange sodomy-promoting General Milley would be hung. He had one boss: President Trump, and instead he was secretly meeting with Pelosi and coordinating with her to hurt Trump.”

Trump chose Milley to chair the Joint Chiefs but turned on him when Milley insisted the military was loyal to the Constitution rather than to any man. Milley had been dragged into participating in Trump’s march across Lafayette Square on June 1, 2020, to threaten Black Lives Matter protesters, although Milley peeled off when he recognized what was happening and later said he thought they were going to review National Guard troops. 

The day after the debacle, Milley wrote a message to the joint force reminding every member that they swore an oath to the Constitution. “This document is founded on the essential principle that all men and women are born free and equal, and should be treated with respect and dignity. It also gives Americans the right to freedom of speech and peaceful assembly…. As members of the Joint Force—comprised of all races, colors, and creeds—you embody the ideals of our Constitution.”

“We all committed our lives to the idea that is America,” he wrote by hand on the memo. “We will stay true to that oath and the American people.” 

Milley’s appearance with Trump as they crossed Lafayette Square drew widespread condemnation from former military leaders, and in the days afterward, Milley spoke to them personally, as well as to congressional leaders, to apologize. Milley also apologized publicly. “I should not have been there,” he said to graduates at National Defense University’s commencement. “My presence in that moment and in that environment created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics.” Milley went on to defend the Black Lives Matter protesters Trump was targeting, and to say that the military must address the systematic racism that has kept people of color from the top ranks. 

Milley’s defense of the U.S. military, 43% of whom are people of color, drew not just Trump’s fury, but also that of the right wing. Then–Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson made a special effort to undermine the man he said was “not just a pig, he’s stupid!” “The Pentagon is now the Yale faculty lounge, but with cruise missiles. That should concern you,” he told his audience. As Carlson berated the military for being “woke,” his followers began to turn against the military they had previously championed. 

Trump has made it clear he intends to weaponize the government against those he perceives to be his enemies, removing those who refuse to do his bidding and replacing them with loyalists. Ominously, according to Goldberg, another area over which Trump and Milley clashed was the military’s tradition of refusing to participate in acts that are clearly immoral or illegal. Trump overrode MIlley’s advice not to intervene in the cases of three men charged with war crimes, later telling his supporters, “I stuck up for three great warriors against the deep state.” 

Goldberg points out that in a second Trump administration packed with loyalists, there will be few guardrails, and he notes that Milley has told friends that if Trump is reelected, “[h]e’ll start throwing people in jail, and I’d be on the top of the list.”

But Milley told Goldberg he does not expect Trump to be reelected. “I have confidence in the American people,” he said. “The United States of America is an extraordinarily resilient country, agile and flexible, and the inherent goodness of the American people is there.” Last week, he told ABC’s Martha Raddatz that he is “confident that the United States and the democracy in this country will prevail and the rule of law will prevail…. These institutions are built to be strong, resilient and to adapt to the times, and I'm 100% confident we'll be fine."

Milley’s statement reflects the increasingly powerful reassertion of democratic values over the past several years. In general, the country seems to be moving beyond former president Trump, who remains locked in his ancient grievances and simmering with fear about his legal troubles—Adam Rawnsley and Asawin Suebsaeng of Rolling Stone recently reported he has been asking confidants about what sort of prison might be in his future—and what he has to say seems so formulaic at this point that it usually doesn’t seem worth repeating. Indeed, much of his frantic posting seems calculated to attract headlines with shock value.

But, for all that, Trump is the current frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination. He has suggested that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the nation’s senior military advisor, has committed treason and that such a crime is associated with execution, and one of his loyalists in government has echoed him. 

And yet, in the face of this attack on one of our key national security institutions, an attack that other nations will certainly notice, Republican leaders remain silent. 

—

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[xtruss]

Exclusive: Imran Khan on His Plan to Return to Power

— By Charlie Campbell | April 3, 2023 | Time Magazine

Former Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan sits for a portrait in his Lahore residence on March 28. Next to Khan are tear gas canisters he says were thrown at his house. Umar Nadeem for Time Magazine

Political leaders often boast of inner steel. Imran Khan can point to three bullets dug out of his right leg. It was in November that a lone gunman opened fire on Khan during a rally, wounding the 70-year-old as well as several supporters, one fatally. “One bullet damaged a nerve so my foot is still recovering,” says the former Pakistani Prime Minister and onetime cricket icon. “I have a problem walking for too long.”

If the wound has slowed Khan, he doesn’t show it in a late-March Zoom interview. There is the same bushy mane, the easy laugh, prayer beads wrapped nonchalantly around his left wrist. But in the five years since our last conversation, something has changed. Power—or perhaps its forfeiture—has left its imprint. Following his ouster in a parliamentary no-confidence vote in April 2022, Khan has mobilized his diehard support base in a “jihad,” as he puts it, to demand snap elections, claiming he was unfairly toppled by a U.S.-sponsored plot. ​​(The State Department has denied the allegations.)

The actual intrigue is purely Pakistani. Khan lost the backing of the country’s all-powerful military after he refused to endorse its choice to lead Pakistan’s intelligence services, known as ISI, because of his close relationship with the incumbent. When Khan belatedly greenlighted the new chief, the opposition sensed weakness and pounced with the no-confidence vote. Khan then took his outrage to the streets, with rallies crisscrossing the nation for months.

Photograph by Umar Nadeem for Time Magazine

“Imran Khan can communicate with all strata of society on their level,” says Shaheena Bhatti, 63, a professor of literature in Rawalpindi. “The other politicians are … not going to do anything for the country because they’re only in it for themselves.”

The November attack on Khan’s life only intensified the burning sense of injustice in members of his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party, or PTI, who have since clashed with police in escalating street battles involving slingshots and tear gas. Although an avowed religious fanatic was arrested for the shooting, Khan continues to accuse an assortment of rival politicians of pulling the strings: incumbent Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif—brother of Khan’s longtime nemesis, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif—as well as Interior Minister Rana Sanaullah and Major General Faisal Naseer. (All have denied the accusation.)

In addition to bullets, Khan has also been hit by charges—143 over the past 11 months, by his count, including corruption, sedition, blasphemy, and terrorism—which he claims have been concocted in an attempt to disqualify him from politics. After Sharif’s cabinet declared on March 20 that the PTI was “a gang of militants” whose “enmity against the state” could not be tolerated, police arrested hundreds of Khan supporters in raids.

“Either Imran Khan exists or we do,” Interior Minister Sanaullah said on March 26.

Pakistan sometimes seems to reside on a precipice. Its current political instability comes amid devastating floods, runaway inflation, and resurgent cross-border terrorist attacks from neighboring Afghanistan that together threaten the fabric of the nation of 230 million. It’s a country where rape and corruption are rife, and the economy hinges on unlocking a stalled IMF bailout, Pakistan’s 22nd since independence in 1947. Inflation soared in March to 47% year-over-year; the prices of staples such as onions rose by 228%, wheat by 120%, and cooking gas by 108%. Over the same period, the rupee has plummeted by 54%.

“Ten years ago, I earned 10,000 rupees a month [$100] and I wasn’t distressed,” says Muhammad Ghazanfer, a groundsman and gardener in Rawalpindi. “With this present wave of inflation, even though I now earn 25,000 [$90 today] I can’t make ends meet.” The world’s fifth most populous country has only $4.6 billion in foreign reserves—$20 per citizen. “If they default, and they can’t get oil, companies go bust, and people don’t have jobs, you would say this is a country ripe for a Bolshevik revolution,” says Cameron Munter, a former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan.

Police fired teargas to disperse the supporters of the former Prime Minister as they tried to arrest Khan in Lahore, Pakistan, on March 14. Hundreds of Tehrik-e-Insaf supporters clashed with riot police as they reached Khan's residence. Rahat Dar—EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

“Our economy has gone into a tailspin,” says Khan. “We now have the worst economic indicators in our history.” The situation threatens to send the nuclear-armed country deeper into China’s orbit. Yet sympathy is slim in a West put off by Khan’s years of anti-American bluster and cozying up to autocrats and extremists, including the Taliban. He calls autocratic Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan “my brother” and visited Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on the eve of the Ukraine invasion, remarking on “so much excitement.” Khan can both repeatedly declare Osama bin Laden a “martyr” and praise Beijing’s confinement of China’s Uighur Muslim minority. He has obsessed on Joe Biden’s failure to call him after entering the White House. “He’s someone that is imbued with this incredibly strong sense of grievance,” says Michael Kugelman, the deputy director of the Asia Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center.

Yet Khan can legitimately claim to have democracy on his side, with poll numbers suggesting he is a shoo-in to return to power if the elections he demands happen. “His popularity has skyrocketed,” says Samina Yasmeen, director of the Centre for Muslim States and Societies at the University of Western Australia. “No matter what he says, even if it’s irrational, the reality is that people are angry and taken by his message.”

“Imran Khan is the best bet we have right now,” says Osama Rehman, 50, a telecommunications engineer in Islamabad. “If [he] is arrested or disqualified, people will come out onto the street.”

The state appears to flirt with the idea. Police raids on Khan’s home in the Punjab province capital of Lahore in early March left him choking on tear gas, he says, as supporters brandishing sticks battled police in riot gear before makeshift barricades of sandbags and iron rods. “This sort of crackdown has never taken place in Pakistan,” says Khan. “I don’t know even if it was as bad under martial law.”

After Khan left his compound to appear in court on March 18, traveling in an armored SUV strewn with flower petals and flanked by bodyguards, the police swooped in while his wife was home, he says, beating up servants and hauling the family cook off to jail. He claims another assassination attempt awaited inside the Islamabad Judicial Complex, which was “taken over by the intelligence agencies and paramilitary.”

Police arrested 61 supporters of former Prime Minister Imran Khan during a search operation near Khan’s residence, in Lahore, Pakistan, on March 18, 2023. K.M. Chaudary—AP

The confrontation could remain in the streets indefinitely. Prime Minister Sharif has rejected Khan’s demand for a snap election, saying polls would be held as scheduled in the fall. But “every narrative is being built up [for the government] to justify postponing the elections,” says Yasmeen. On March 22, Pakistan’s Election Commission delayed local balloting in Punjab, the country’s most populous province, from April 30 until Oct. 8.

“Political stability in Pakistan comes through elections,” Khan points out. “That is the starting point for economic recovery.” From the U.S. perspective, he may be far from the ideal choice to helm an impoverished, insurgency-racked Islamic state. But is he the only person that can hold the country together?

“Never has one man scared the establishment … as much as right now,” says Khan. “They worry about how to keep me out; the people how to get me back in.”

It’s indicative of Pakistan’s malaise that its most popular politician in decades sits barricaded at home. But the nation has always been beyond comparison—a wedge of South Asia that begins in the shimmering Arabian Gulf and ascends to its Himalayan heights. It’s the world’s largest Islamic state, though governed for half its history by men in olive-green uniforms, who continue to act as ultimate arbiters of power.

The only boy of five children, Khan was born Oct. 5, 1952 to an affluent Pashtun family in Lahore. He studied politics, philosophy, and economics at Oxford University, and it was in the U.K. that he first played cricket for Pakistan, at age 18. Britain’s sodden terrain also provided the backdrop to his political awakening.

“When I arrived in England our country had been ruled by a military dictator for 10 years; the powerful had one law, the others were basically not free human beings,” he says. “Rule of law actually liberates human beings, liberates potential. This was what I discovered.”

Khan in his Lahore residence on March 28. Umar Nadeem for Time Magazine

On the cricket pitch, Khan was a talisman who knitted together mercurial talents and journeymen into a cohesive whole, a team that overcame extraordinary odds to famously lift the Cricket World Cup in 1992. There were glimpses of these qualities when Khan rose to become Prime Minister: running on an anti-graft ticket, he fused a disparate band of students and workers, Islamic hard-liners, and the nation’s powerful military to derail the Sharif political juggernaut. His crowning achievement remains the Shaukat Khanum Cancer Hospital in Lahore, which he opened in 1994 in memory of his mother, who succumbed to the disease. It is the largest cancer hospital serving Pakistan’s impoverished, boosting Khan’s administrative credentials.

Khan spent 22 years in the political wilderness before his 2018 election triumph. But once in power, the self-styled bold reformer turned unnervingly divisive. Opposition is easier than government, and Khan found himself bereft of ideas and besieged by unsavory partners, even kowtowing to the now-banned far-right party Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan despite its support for the extrajudicial killing of alleged blasphemers. There were some successes: Pakistan received praise for its handling of the pandemic, with deaths per capita just a third that of neighboring India. His “Ten Billion Tree Tsunami” reforestation drive was popular, as was the 2019 return of international test cricket, the most prestigious form of the game, following a terrorist attack on the Sri Lankan team and a decade-long hiatus.

Khan’s private life has rarely been out of the headlines. His first wife was British journalist and society heiress Jemima Khan, née Goldsmith, a close friend of Diana, Princess of Wales. She converted to Islam for their wedding, though the pair divorced in 2004 after nine years of marriage, and her family’s Jewish heritage was political dynamite. (The couple’s two sons live in London.) Khan’s second marriage to British-Pakistani journalist Reham Khan lasted nine months. According to a 1997 California court ruling, Khan also has one child, a daughter, born out of wedlock, and he’s struggled to quash gossip of several more. In 2018, six months before he took office, he married his current wife, Bushra Bibi Khan, a religious conservative who is believed to be the only Pakistan First Lady to wear the full-face niqab shawl in public.

Khan, left, lifts elder son Suleman while his ex-wife Jemima carries younger son Qasim during a march towards the U.N. offices in Islamabad in 1999. The Khans led some 100 demonstrators in an anti-Russian rally protesting against attacks in Chechnya. Reuters

It all fed Khan’s legend: the debonair playboy who grew devout; the privileged son who rails against the corrupt; the humanist who stands with the bloodthirsty. His youth was spent carousing with supermodels in London’s trendiest nightspots. But his politics has hardened as his handsome features have lined and leathered. He provoked outrage when in August 2021 he said the Taliban had “broken the shackles of slavery” by taking back power (he insists to TIME he was “taken out of context”) and has made various comments criticized as misogynistic. When asked about the drivers of sexual violence in Pakistan, he said, “If a woman is wearing very few clothes, it will have an impact on the men, unless they’re robots.” Khan has refused to condemn Putin’s invasion, insisting, like China, on remaining “neutral” and deflecting uncomfortable questions onto supposed double standards regarding India’s inroads into disputed Kashmir. “Morality in foreign policy is reserved for powerful countries,” he says with a shrug.

Khan in the 1992 Cricket World Cup. Pakistan won under Khan's captaincy this year. Fairfax Media

At the same time, Khan’s ideological flexibility has not stretched to compromises with opponents. He claims it was the military’s unwillingness to go after Pakistan’s influential “two families”—those of Sharif and the Bhutto clan of former Prime Ministers Zulfikar and Benazir—for alleged corruption that caused his relationship with the generals to fray. “If the ruling elite plunders your country and siphons off money, and you cannot hold them accountable, then that means there is no rule of law,” he says.

Yet analysts say that it was Khan’s relentless taunting of the U.S. that torpedoed his relationship with the military, which remains much more interested in retaining good relations with Washington. To journalists and supporters, he has accused the U.S. of imposing a “master-slave” relationship on Pakistan and of using it like “tissue paper.” To TIME, he insists that “criticizing U.S. foreign policy does not make you anti-American.” Still, by 2022, the generals no longer had his back. The common perception among Pakistan watchers is that Khan’s fleeting political success was owed to a Faustian pact with the nation’s military and extremist groups that shepherded his election victory and he is now reaping the whirlwind.

Cricket captain turned politician Imran Khan shakes hands with supporters during a rally in October 2002 in Shadi Khal, Pakistan. Paula Bronstein—Getty Images

He appears to relish in the perceived injustice, the walls closing in. On March 25, Khan addressed thousands of supporters in central Lahore from a bulletproof box above a green-and-red flag with the initials of his PTI emblazoned on a cricket bat—once Khan’s weapon of choice, though now he wields words with similar potency.

“I know you have decided you wouldn’t allow Imran Khan back in power,” he said. “That’s fine with me. But do you have a plan or know how to get the country out of the current crisis?”

If Pakistan’s economic woes are reaching a new nadir, the trajectory was established during Khan’s term. A revolving door of Finance Ministers was compounded by bowing to hardliners. (After appointing renowned Princeton economist Atif Mian as an adviser, Khan fired him just days later owing to a backlash from Islamists because Mian is an Ahmadi, a sect of Islam they consider heretics.) In 2018, Khan pledged not to follow previous administrations’ “begging bowl” tactics of foreign borrowing, in order to end Pakistan’s cycle of debt. But less than a year later, he struck a deal with the IMF to cut social and development spending while raising taxes in exchange for a $6 billion loan. Mismanagement exacerbated global headwinds from the pandemic and soaring oil prices.

Meanwhile, little was done to address Pakistan’s fundamental structural issues: few people pay tax, least of all the feudal landowners who control traditional low-added-value industries like sugar farms, textile mills, and agricultural interests while wielding huge political-patronage networks stemming from their workers’ votes. In 2021, only 2.5 million Pakistanis filed tax returns—less than 1% of the adult population. “People don’t pay tax, especially the rich elite,” says Khan. “They just siphon out money and launder it abroad.”

Instead, Pakistan has relied on foreign money to balance a budget and provide government services. The U.S. funneled nearly $78.3 billion to Pakistan from 1948 to 2016. But in 2018, President Trump ended the $300 million security assistance that the U.S. provided annually. Now Pakistan must shop around for new benefactors—chiefly Saudi Arabia, Russia, and China. When Khan visited Putin last February, it was to arrange cheap oil and wheat imports and discuss the $2.5 billion Pakistan Stream gas pipeline, which Moscow wants to build between Karachi and Kasur. More recently, China has stepped in. In early March, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China approved a $1.3 billion loan rollover—a fiscal bandaid for a gaping wound.

Khan in his Lahore residence on March 28. Umar Nadeem for Time Magazine

But if Khan recognized the problem, he did little to solve it. After his election in 2018, he was in an uncommonly strong position with the backing of the military and progressives, as well as the tolerance of the Islamists. Now, with all the bad blood and open warfare among these factions, even if he claws his way back, “he’ll be in a weaker position to actually effect any reforms,” says Munter, the former U.S. ambassador, “if he had any reforms to begin with.”

When asked for his step-by-step plan to get Pakistan back on track, Khan is light on details. After elections, he says that a “completely new social contract” is required to enshrine power in political institutions, rather than the military. If the army chief “didn’t think corruption was that big a deal, then nothing happened,” Khan complains. “I was helpless.” But the path to this utopia remains murky. Asked how he plans to turn his much trumpeted Islamic Welfare State ideal into a reality, Khan talks about Medina under the Prophet and the social conscience of Northern Europeans. “Scandinavia is probably far closer to the Islamic ideal than any of the Muslim countries.”

But the military looms large in Pakistan partly because national security is a perennial issue. Many assumed that the newly returned Taliban would stamp out all cross-border attacks from Afghanistan. But Pakistan recorded the second largest increase in terrorism-related deaths worldwide in 2022, up 120% year-over-year. “It was Khan who was pushing for talks with [the Taliban] at all costs,” says Kugelman, of the Woodrow Wilson Center. “That embrace is now experiencing significant levels of blowback.”

That Pakistan is moving away from the U.S. and closer to Russia and China is a moot point; the bigger question is who actually wins from embracing Pakistan. The $65 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor was supposed to be the crown jewel in President Xi Jinping’s signature Belt and Road Initiative, linking China via roads, rail and pipeline to the Arabian Sea. But Gwadar Port is rusting and suicide bombers are taking aim at buses filled with Chinese workers. Loans are more regularly defaulted than paid. Today, even Iran looks like a more stable partner.

Ultimately, competition with Beijing defines American foreign policy today, meaning Washington prioritizes relations with Pakistan’s archnemesis India, which is a key partner in the Biden Administration’s Indo-Pacific Strategy to contain China. Toward that imperative, the White House turns a blind eye even to New Delhi’s continued close relationship with Putin. The U.S. kinship with India may mean Pakistan was always destined to move closer to China. But after the U.S. pulled out of Afghanistan, Pakistan is not the strategic lynchpin it once claimed to be—and memories are hardly fond; Pakistan secretly invested heavily in the Taliban. “Lots of Americans in Washington say we lost the war in Afghanistan because the Pakistanis stabbed us in the back,” says Munter.

What happens next? Many in Khan’s PTI suspect the current government may declare their party a terrorist organization or otherwise ban it from politics. Others believe that Pakistan’s escalating economic, political, and security turmoil may be used as grounds to postpone October’s general election. Ultimately, all sides are using the tools at their disposal to prevent their own demise: Khan wields popular protest and the banner of democracy; the government has the courts and security apparatus. Caught between the two, the people flounder. “There are no heroes here,” says Kugelman. “The entire political class and the military are to blame for the very troubled state the country finds itself in now.”

It’s a crisis that Khan still claims can be solved by elections, despite his broken relationship with the military. “The same people who tried to kill me are still sitting in power,” he says. “And they are petrified that if I got back [in] they would be held accountable. So they’re more dangerous.”

—With reporting by Hasan Ali/Islamabad

[exit-babylon]

NATO's NAZI PACT

It is an uncomfortable fact of history that those same powers that gave rise to fascism were never punished at the Nuremburg Trials. Those Wall Street industrialists and financiers that supplied Germany with funding and supplies before and during the war were punished… nor were the British financiers at the Bank of England who ensured that Nazi coffers would be replete with confiscated loot from Austria, Czechoslovakia or Poland.

The post-war age not only saw a vast re-organization of fascist killers in the form of the CIA/NATO managed Operation Gladio and we know that Allan Dulles directly oversaw the re-activation of Hitler’s intelligence chief Reinhard Gehlen into the command structure of West German Intelligence along with his entire network. Ukrainian Nazis like Stefan Bandera and Mikola Lebed were promptly absorbed into this same apparatus with Bandera working with Gehlen from 1956 to his death in 1958 while Lebed was absorbed into American intelligence running a CIA front organization called Prolog.

As Cynthia Chung recently outlined in her Sleepwalking into Fascism that no less than ten high level former Nazis enjoyed vast power within NATO’s command structure during the dark years of Operation Gladio. Cynthia writes: “From 1957 to 1983, NATO had at least one if not several high ranking “former” Nazis in full command of multiple departments within NATO… The position of NATO Commander and Chief of Allied Forces Central Europe (CINCENT Commander in Chief, Allied Forces Central Europe – AFCENT) was a position that was filled SOLELY by “former” Nazis for 16 YEARS STRAIGHT, from 1967-1983.”

During these years, not only did Gladio ‘stay behinds’ arrange a stream of terrorism against the general population of Europe using nominally ‘Marxist’ front groups or carrying out hits of high value targets like Dag Hammarskjold, Enrico Mattei, Aldo Moro or Alfred Herrhausen when needed. Statesmen who did not play by the rules of the Great Game were sadly not long for this world.

NATO’s self-professed image as a harbinger of the ‘liberal rules based international order’ is more than a little superficial when considering the Nazi-riddled alliances which many NATO-philes at the Atlantic Council may wish be forgotten. This history also should cause us to re-evaluate the true causes for the 1949 creation of NATO in the first place which served as a nail in the coffin for Franklin Roosevelt’s vision of a U.S.-Russia-China alliance which he hoped would shape the post-WW2 age.

NATO’s growth around Russia’s perimeter since 1998, and the NATO-led mass atrocities of bombings in Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Libya should also be re-evaluated with this Nazi pedigree in mind.

Why did NATO post images of a Ukrainian soldier clearly brandishing a Thule-society black sun of the occult on her uniform in honor of ‘Women’s’ Day’ this year? Why are active Ukrainian Nazis serving in Azov, and Aidar battalions systemically glossed over by NATO propaganda outlets or mainstream media despite the proven cases of mass atrocities in East Donbass since 2014? Why are Nazi movements seeing a vast revival across East European space- especially within countries that have come under the influence of NATO since the Soviet Union’s collapse?

Is it possible that the war we thought the allies won in 1945 was merely a battle within a larger war for civilization whose outcome yet remains to be seen?

*Extract from:

[higherlearningtvshow]

The Most Banned Movie In America!

Shocks Nation With "T" For Truth Rating

In an unprecedented moment in cinematic history, The Most Banned Movie in America, “Splintering Babylon,” the film the critics won’t watch and politicians will avoid for its radioactive content, has become the first movie to receive the highly controversial ‘T’ for Truth rating from the newly-formed FEMA Rumor Response unit.

The Verdict: SEE IT (If You Can). Limited screenings of The Most Banned Movie in America will be held in undisclosed locations, with showtimes posted in invisible ink. For those unable to attend, worry not—bootlegged digital files are circulating on the black market (but be careful, it’s rumored they’re being tracked

GARY BERTSEN TRANSCRIPT

Gary Berntsen: Hello, my name is Gary Berntsen. I'm a veteran of the United States Air Force and a retired Senior Operations Officer and Chief-of-Station of the Central Intelligence Agency.

For over three decades, I served in the US National Security apparatus, in various capacities.

Shortly after the attacks of 11 September 2001, I entered Afghanistan and commanded CIA paramilitary forces, helping seize the cities of Talaqan and the capital of Afghanistan, Kabul.

I was the driving force and architect of the Battle of Tora Bora. I held the position as Chief of Hezbollah Operation in CIA's Counterterrorism Center for several years and concluded my service in CIA as a Chief-of-Station in Latin America, combating narco-terrorists.

Approximately six years ago, a business associate and I began working together as whistleblowers for the Department of Justice, FBI, DEA and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI). Our target was the largest and most well-funded transnational criminal organization on the planet called the Cartel de los Soles, "Cartel of the Suns".

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The Cartel de los Soles is the Venezuelan government and is led by Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Diosdado Cabello, Minister of Defense Vladimir López Padrino, President of the National Assembly Jorge Rodríguez, and former Directorate General of Military Counterintelligence Hugo Carbajal, who was detained in Spain several years ago and extradited to New York. He is currently awaiting trial for narco-trafficking.

Venezuelan President Maduro has a US indictment and bounty of US $15 million for his capture. Diosdado Cabello has US indictment and a $10 million bounty on his head. At least six other Venezuelan cabinet members and senior officials are indicted.

In the last 20 years, the Cartel de los Soles has stolen $1 trillion US dollars from Venezuela's national oil company, PDVSA, and embezzled $500 billion US dollars from its national treasury. It not only has – but continues to produce and smuggle – 25 to 40 metric tons of cocaine every month, out of its country into the world.

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The Cartel del Sol is a $2 trillion transnational criminal organization and the most well-resourced criminal syndicate in history. Through bribery and investments of its funds, it controls a dozen countries and world leaders. It has massive investments in the US and European financial markets and institutions.

As we conducted investigations against the Cartel de los Soles and presented them, one after another to the US Department of Justice, we noticed and pursued leads from the Cartel's money-laundering operations to the world of non-governmental organizations and election companies.

After witnessing election irregularities associated with the 2020 US Presidential Election, we decided to direct time and resources to Cartel del Sol links to US and global election fraud.

After an exhaustive three-and-a-half-year investigation, it is indisputable: Smartmatic Election Systems was created at the direction of now-deceased Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, and its source code, the basis of its operating system developed jointly by Venezuela's Consejo Nacional Electoral (CNE) and Smartmatic, was designed to allow election results to be altered without the knowledge of voters and the public.

Additionally, the Venezuelan CNE holds ownership of Smartmatic's source code. Each time the Venezuelan CNE and Smartmatic update the source code, a copy of it is stored at the vault at the Venezuelan Central Bank.

In 2005, the European Union Electoral Observation Mission to Venezuela published a report, stating the Venezuelan regime owns Smartmatic's source code. The Venezuelan government signed that report as factual.

Smartmatic's first election in Venezuela was the 2003 Recall Election of Hugo Chavez. The CNE director at the time, Jorge Rodriguez, at the direction of the Cuban Directorate General of Intelligence, DGI, hired three Venezuelan-American computer engineers that were graduates of Simon Bolivar University, a Venezuelan university linked to the US University, MIT.

They had already registered a software company in Delaware and opened an office for it, in Boca Raton. The engineers, Antonio Mugica, Roger Piñate, and Alfredo Anzola, established Smartmatic at the direction of the Venezuelan regime, built the source code, and flew off to Italy to buy lottery machines from Olivetti to serve as election hardware. They succeeded in altering-up votes to ensure Hugo Chavez's victory in the recall election.

Secure in power, President Chavez decided to weaponize this capability beyond Venezuela's border. Smartmatic would enter into the US election market in Cook County, Illinois [aka Chicago] and the state of New Jersey for Democratic Party Primary races in 2006.

In 2005, Smartmatic orchestrated the purchase of Sequoia Voting Systems Inc, a US company. Sequoia was a company that had conducted elections in the US for over 100 years and had a 22% market share of the US electoral market.

Approximately 18 months later, the Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States, CFIUS, began investigating the ownership of Smartmatic, because of Smartmatic's Venezuelan connection.

Smartmatic immediately put its source code in the machines, in the Sequoia machines. Smartmatic tried to conceal its Venezuelan connection by hiring a former US Naval Officer, Jack Blaine, to set up a holding company, SVS Holding, to place its ownership of Sequoia in stock.

In December 2006, Smartmatic entered into an agreement with CFIUS to sell Sequoia in six months.

Antonio Mugica, one of the three original founders, then found a little-known election company in Toronto, Canada, Dominion Election Systems, that had only managed one small local election in Toronto. He arranged for Dominion to purchase Sequoia.

Dominion, owned by John Poulos, with that purchase of Sequoia would inherit the licensing agreement for Smartmatic's source code, the source code owned by the Venezuelan regime, i.e., the Cartel de los Soles.

To be clear, Smartmatic and Dominion would ultimately sign an agreement that provided Dominion with the US market and Smartmatic with the international global market. The only two exceptions are that Smartmatic does elections in Los Angeles County and Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico was an issue they ultimately settled in court.

In Caracas, in a building owned by the CNE, the Concejo Nacional Electoral, more than 100 software engineers, half in the CNE and half in Smartmatic, worked side-by-side. Their effort for more than a decade was to perfect the techniques of altering elections and defeating audit.

In 2018, Smartmatic publicly, and with the approval of the Venezuelan regime, broke with the regime, the Cartel de los Soles, because the Venezuelan CNE's theft of an election was so egregious.

The techniques of the source code and machine operate and conceal a theft of an election when the spread of the candidates is between three to five percentage points.

As sophisticated as the machine is, it can be defeated with significant turnout against it. The recent 2024 election in Venezuela was also so blatantly stolen and the machine could not conceal that massive spread, either.

In its place, a company called Xclay [?] took Smartmatic's place as the election provider in Venezuela. Allowing Smartmatic to exit Venezuela in this fictitious manner allowed the regime to retain its power and influence over the global electoral market.

Smartmatic built a production facility for electronic voting equipment hardware just outside Beijing, China, and then shipped the hardware to a warehouse in Taiwan. In violation of US Law, the hardware was marked as "Manufactured in Taiwan" and shipped to both Smartmatic and Dominion, for use in US elections.

Dominion Voting Systems manages elections in almost all the Swing States in the US, which determines who wins the Presidency. We have evidence and witnesses that can prove the source code operating the election machines of both Smartmatic and Dominion and other election companies are owned by the Venezuelan NARPA regime.

We have evidence and witnesses proving the machines are manufactured in the People's Republic of China.

Every citizen needs to be asking, "Where is the DOJ, FBI, CISA, and where is the CIA? Is anyone in the national security apparatus defending our democracy or enforcing the law?"

And if that isn't enough to convince you there's a major problem, Dominion, in an additional step to conceal its manipulation of US elections, moved its research and development and servers, which store Swing State voting information, to its office in Belgrade, Serbia!

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In the Belgrade office, Venezuelan, Chinese, and Serbian software engineers maintain system administrative status over swing state elections and alter elections, as directed by the Cartel de los Soles, the Cuban DGI, and the Chinese CCP.

The facility and its personnel are protected by Serbia's counterintelligence service. Swing State voter information is saved on Huawei servers in Dominion's Belgrade office. These servers are linked to Huawei servers in Hong Kong, China.

For years, the US National Security apparatus has identified Huawei and its technology as a threat to US National Security.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, CISA, a component of the United States Department of Homeland Security, is responsible for cybersecurity and infrastructure, across all levels of government.

CISA has 3,100 employees and a $2.9 billion budget. In 2020, when faced with calls to address election irregularities, CISA did a conference call with Smartmatic and Dominion, in order to better able to address the public's concerns and assure everyone that there had been "No irregularities".

Yes, it's shocking. CISA decided to consult the criminals in order to respond to the American public's outcry.

In August 2024, three current and former executives of Smartmatic were indicted in Florida, in connection with bribery during the 2016 election in the Philippines. Among those arrested executives is Roger Peñate, one of the three founders and current President of Smartmatic. Roger Peñate paid $8.5 million in bail.

What the public will soon learn is that the bribery paid in the case was not to obtain a contract. The bribery was paid to alter election results.

We have the CNE source code, the source code employed by Smartmatic, Dominion, and others. We will surrender it to appropriate authorities.

Source code, like DNA, can easily be matched with other systems to prove that they are from the same family. In this particular case, it is a family of altering elections.

Two years ago, we briefed a senior FBI agent in Washington, DC. That agent, after seeing our three-hour presentation with corporate ownership documents, engineering specifications, and witness statements, told us to flee Washington, DC, that the FBI would actively work to destroy our efforts and seek ways to prosecute us, in order to stop our investigative efforts. That was a stunning moment, hearing those words from a 20-year veteran of the FBI.

Seven months ago, with our attorney, we briefed a US Attorney and two Assistant US Attorneys, Federal Prosecutors from the Department of Justice. The US Attorney told us he would forward the information to the Office of Public Integrity at the Department of Justice. That US Attorney followed up with us months later, to see if the Office of Public Integrity had contacted us. They never did.

Smartmatic, Dominion, and their media allies will immediately point to the fact that FoxNews settled with Dominion, paying US$787.5 million, and that Newsmax just settled with Smartmatic, this past week in a defamation case as "evidence of Smartmatic and Dominion innocence".

In FoxNews' case against Dominion, we briefed Fox News trial attorneys. Our lawyers were present when we did that. FoxNews corporate officers refused to be briefed directly for that case. They wanted plausible deniability.

FoxNews corporate knew we had significant evidence – and, more importantly, witnesses. When all the facts are known, Fox News executives and Board will have to explain why they went down on their knees for enemies of the US.

We briefed Newsmax's corporate attorney, as well. Though their settlement with Smartmatic is not public, any settlement with either company and their masters, the Cartel de los Soles, the Cuban DGI, and CCP, makes it more difficult for those of us trying to defend the country and our democracy.

I ask everyone to go to the website StolenElectionsFacts.com. Here, you will find articles and original source documents supporting the claim that Smartmatic and Dominion are employing a source code created and owned by the Venezuelan Regime, with hardware manufactured in China that alters election results.

I will follow with other videos and statements to inform and educate others.

Best-selling author, Ralph Pazullo has written the book, 'Stolen Elections, the Plot to Destroy Democracy'. It will be released in late October. Mr Pazullo interviewed my whistleblower associate and I and several of our key witnesses. This is a must-read, to understand one of the greatest crimes ever committed against the United States.

This is an assault on our democracy.

Again, go to the website StolenElectionsFacts.com. Look at the timeline, the documents, and the original sources that are attached. Thank you for your time.

God bless America. We go forward.

Running Time: 16 mins

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[chubbycaucasianchristiancloseted]

O yeah Media Manufactured!

O yeah Media Manufactured! The day after this article was written, 183 people would lose their lives, Including 13 Americans. Did the intelligencer apologize for this article? Did Eric Levitz admit he was 100% wrong? Any idea how many are still left behind?

The Biden Administration told us that the Afghan Government would not fall, however the author plays it up as inevitable and America people should have known better? Remember kids we should always look for the bright spots; always be optimists when it comes to Democrat policies, give them the benefit of the doubt but remember Republicans are bad and pick apart every word they say.

Eric Levitz you seem to be ok with people “presenting editorial judgments as factual ones” when it comes to Trump. You even admit you did the same thing with Bush but it was ok because you could have made reasoned arguments supporting your biases? “Journalism” has been dead for years. Here is my “reasonable argument”, we needed to get out of Afghanistan but leaving hundreds behind, after promising them safety, and the Kabul terrorist attack, due to our troops withdrawing, is not a success.

Direct Quotes:

America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan has yet to cost our nation a single casualty. Evacuations of U.S. citizens and allies from Kabul’s airport are proceeding at a faster pace than the White House had promised, or than its critics had deemed possible.

On the streets of Kabul, “order and quiet” have replaced “rising crime and violence.” Meanwhile, the Taliban is negotiating with former Afghan president Hamid Karzai over the establishment of “an inclusive government acceptable to all Afghans.”

It could have done (and should now do) more to facilitate the mass resettlement of Afghan refugees. But as far as conclusions to multi-decade wars go, America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan is thus far proceeding with relatively little chaos and tragedy.

It has long been apparent that America’s exit from Afghanistan would be tantamount to the Taliban’s victory. U.S. intelligence officials may have been excessively optimistic about the Afghan government’s staying power, but even they thought the government in Kabul would collapse within two years of America’s retreat. Simply put, there is no proud way to lose a war to a cult of heroin-dealing child rapists (especially when your side in that war featured no small number of men who fit a similar description).

Before its collapse, the Afghan government had pressured the United States to limit its evacuation efforts, so as to avoid broadcasting the message that America deemed a Taliban victory inevitable.

Mainstream coverage of Kabul’s fall and its aftermath has been anything but circumspect. Attempts to weigh the benefits of America’s withdrawal against its costs have been rare; attempts to judge Biden’s execution of that withdrawal against rigorous counterfactuals have been rarer still.

This is the sort of commentary one expects from jingoists on right-wing radio, not high-ranking reporters at major networks.

At the same time, CNN’s chief foreign correspondent Clarissa Ward saw fit to present her own pessimistic hunches

The point is merely that he is presenting editorial judgments as factual ones.

Those views may bespeak the biases of a millennial progressive whose formative years were spent gawking at George W. Bush’s war crimes and reading Noam Chomsky’s lectures. I cannot always prevent my ideological commitments from blinkering my vision. But I can be transparent about those commitments, and test my biased intuitions against the rigors of reasoned argument.

One can critically report on concrete failings in the Biden administration’s withdrawal plans. But one cannot presume Biden’s responsibility for every negative consequence that follows from ending a misbegotten war and deserve the title journalist.

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 4.28 (after 1950)

1952 – Dwight D. Eisenhower resigns as Supreme Allied Commander of NATO in order to campaign in the 1952 United States presidential election. 1952 – The Treaty of San Francisco comes into effect, restoring Japanese sovereignty and ending its state of war with most of the Allies of World War II. 1952 – The Sino-Japanese Peace Treaty (Treaty of Taipei) is signed in Taipei, Taiwan between Japan and the Republic of China to officially end the Second Sino-Japanese War. 1965 – United States occupation of the Dominican Republic: American troops land in the Dominican Republic to "forestall establishment of a Communist dictatorship" and to evacuate U.S. Army troops. 1967 – Vietnam War: Boxer Muhammad Ali refuses his induction into the United States Army and is subsequently stripped of his championship and license. 1969 – Charles de Gaulle resigns as President of France. 1970 – Vietnam War: U.S. President Richard Nixon formally authorizes American combat troops to take part in the Cambodian campaign. 1973 – The Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd, recorded in Abbey Road Studios goes to number one on the US Billboard chart, beginning a record-breaking 741-week chart run. 1975 – General Cao Văn Viên, chief of the South Vietnamese military, departs for the US as the North Vietnamese Army closes in on victory. 1977 – The Red Army Faction trial ends, with Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe found guilty of four counts of murder and more than 30 counts of attempted murder. 1978 – The President of Afghanistan, Mohammed Daoud Khan, is overthrown and assassinated in a coup led by pro-communist rebels. 1986 – High levels of radiation resulting from the Chernobyl disaster are detected at a nuclear power plant in Sweden, leading Soviet authorities to publicly announce the accident. 1988 – Near Maui, Hawaii, flight attendant Clarabelle "C.B." Lansing is blown out of Aloha Airlines Flight 243, a Boeing 737, and falls to her death when part of the plane's fuselage rips open in mid-flight. 1994 – Former Central Intelligence Agency counterintelligence officer and analyst Aldrich Ames pleads guilty to giving U.S. secrets to the Soviet Union and later Russia. 1996 – Whitewater controversy: President Bill Clinton gives a 41⁄2 hour videotaped testimony for the defense. 1996 – Port Arthur massacre, Tasmania: A gunman, Martin Bryant, opens fire at the Broad Arrow Cafe in Port Arthur, Tasmania, killing 35 people and wounding 23 others. 2004 – CBS News released evidence of the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse. The photographs show rape and abuse from the American troops over Iraqi detainees.

[daveofclansmiffy]

“Free the Truth”

The Belmarsh Tribunal on Julian Assange & Defending Press Freedom

In a New Year’s Day special broadcast, we air highlights from the Belmarsh Tribunal held last month in Washington, D.C., where journalists, lawyers, activists and other expert witnesses made the case to free Julian Assange from prison in the United Kingdom. The WikiLeaks founder has been jailed at London’s Belmarsh prison since 2019, awaiting possible extradition to the United States on espionage charges for publishing documents that revealed U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Rights groups say the charges threaten freedom of the press and put a chilling effect on the work of investigative journalists who expose government secrets.

The Belmarsh Tribunal, inspired by the Russell-Sartre Tribunals of the Vietnam War, has been convened several times in the U.S., Europe and beyond to press for Assange’s release. The December proceedings were co-chaired by Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman and The Intercept’s Ryan Grim.

Members of the tribunal included:

Ewen MacAskill, journalist and intelligence correspondent (formerly with The Guardian)

*John Kiriakou, former intelligence officer for the CIA

Lina Attalah, co-founder and chief editor of Mada Masr

Abby Martin, journalist and host of The Empire Files

Mark Feldstein, veteran investigative reporter and journalism historian at the University of Maryland

Ben Wizner, lawyer and civil liberties advocate with the ACLU

Trevor Timm, journalist and co-founder of Freedom of the Press Foundation

Rebecca Vincent, director of campaigns, Reporters Without Borders

[newstfionline]

Monday, April 24, 2023

Extreme weather is nearly universal experience: AP-NORC poll (AP) An overwhelming majority of people in the United States say they have recently experienced an extreme weather event, a new poll shows, and most of them attribute that to climate change. Overall, about 8 in 10 U.S. adults say that in the past five years they have personally felt the effects of extreme weather, such as extreme heat or drought, according to the poll. Most of them—54% of the public overall—say what they experienced was at least partly a result of climate change. “It is a reality that regardless of where you are in the country, where you call home, you’ve likely experienced a high impact weather event firsthand,” National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief Rick Spinrad said at a meteorological conference this year, noting that the United States has the most weather disasters that cost $1 billion of any nation in the world.

Unprepared for long war, US Army under gun to make more ammo Scranton, Pa. (AP)—One of the most important munitions of the Ukraine war comes from a historic factory in this city built by coal barons, where tons of steel rods are brought in by train to be forged into the artillery shells Kyiv can’t get enough of—and that the U.S. can’t produce fast enough. The Scranton Army Ammunition Plant is one of just two sites in the U.S. that make the steel bodies for the critical 155 mm howitzer rounds that the U.S. is rushing to Ukraine to help in its grinding fight to repel the Russian invasion in the largest-scale war in Europe since World War II. The invasion of Ukraine revealed that the U.S. stockpile of 155 mm shells and those of European allies were unprepared to support a major and ongoing conventional land war, sending them scrambling to bolster production. The dwindling supply has alarmed U.S. military planners, and the Army now plans to spend billions on munitions plants around the country in what it calls its most significant transformation in 40 years.

France, Baltic states dismayed after China envoy questions Ukraine sovereignty (Reuters) France and the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania expressed dismay after China’s ambassador in Paris questioned the sovereignty of former Soviet countries like Ukraine. Asked about his position on whether Crimea is part of Ukraine or not, Chinese ambassador Lu Shaye said in an interview aired on French television on Friday that historically it was part of Russia and had been offered to Ukraine by former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. “These ex-USSR countries don’t have actual status in international law because there is no international agreement to materialize their sovereign status,” Shaye added. France responded on Sunday by stating its “full solidarity” with all the allied countries affected, which it said had acquired their independence “after decades of oppression”. The three Baltic states, all formerly part of the Soviet Union, reacted along the same lines as France.

Afghanistan has become a terrorism staging ground again, leak reveals (Washington Post) Less than two years after President Biden withdrew U.S. personnel from Afghanistan, the country has become a significant coordination site for the Islamic State as the terrorist group plans attacks across Europe and Asia, and conducts “aspirational plotting” against the United States, according to a classified Pentagon assessment that portrays the threat as a growing security concern. The attack planning, detailed in U.S. intelligence findings leaked on the Discord messaging platform and obtained by The Washington Post, reveal specific efforts to target embassies, churches, business centers and the FIFA World Cup soccer tournament, which drew more than 2 million spectators last summer in Qatar. Pentagon officials were aware in December of nine such plots coordinated by ISIS leaders in Afghanistan, and the number rose to 15 by February, says the assessment, which has not been disclosed previously.

Heat wave in Thailand prompts warning to stay indoors (AP) Extreme heat has sent temperatures soaring in Thailand as authorities warned people to stay indoors. The Meteorological Department’s forecast on Saturday said the highest temperature in the next 24 hours could reach 43 degrees Celsius (107 degrees Fahrenheit) in country’s north and could hit 40 C (104 F) in the capital, Bangkok. The highest temperature on Saturday was in the northern province of Phetchabun at 42.5 C (109 F). People should be wary of extremely high temperatures as well as sudden summer storms until at least next week, the weather department said. A police officer directing traffic in Samut Prakarn, a province just south of Bangkok, collapsed and died of heart stroke, media reported this week.

A deeply divided Israel limps toward its 75th birthday (AP) As Israel turns 75 on Wednesday, it has much to celebrate. But instead of feting its accomplishments as a regional military and economic powerhouse, the nation that arose on the ashes of the Holocaust faces perhaps its gravest existential threat yet—not from foreign enemies but from divisions within. For over three months, tens of thousands of people have rallied in the streets against what they see as an assault by an ultranationalist, religious government threatening a national identity rooted in liberal traditions. Fighter pilots have threatened to stop reporting for duty. The nation’s leaders have openly warned of civil war, and families of fallen soldiers have called on politicians to stay away from the ceremonies. Many Israelis wonder if the deep split can ever heal.

Wagner group surges in Africa as U.S. influence fades, leak reveals (Washington Post) The Wagner group is moving aggressively to establish a “confederation” of anti-Western states in Africa as the Russian mercenaries foment instability while using their paramilitary and disinformation capabilities to bolster Moscow’s allies, according to leaked secret U.S. intelligence documents. The rapid expansion of Russia’s influence in Africa has been a source of growing alarm to U.S. intelligence and military officials, prompting a push over the past year to find ways to hit Wagner’s network of bases and business fronts with strikes, sanctions and cyber operations, according to the documents. At a time when Wagner leader Yevgeniy Prigozhin has been preoccupied with Kremlin infighting over the paramilitary group’s deepening involvement in the war in Ukraine, U.S. officials depict Wagner’s expanding global footprint as a potential vulnerability. The files propose providing targeting information to help Ukraine forces kill Wagner commanders, and cite other allies’ willingness to take similar lethal measures against Wagner nodes in Africa.

When Will I Retire? How About Never (WSJ) Many workers of a certain age are counting down to a long-anticipated retirement date. They relish the opportunity to do things they’ve never had the time for. Or to do nothing. Others are desperate to retire but can’t, as financial circumstances keep them in the workforce while others their age are stepping out. But then there are the folks who dread such a day ever coming, who hope to sidestep it entirely, and plan to never retire. What drives people to keep working long past the age when they could comfortably leave the workforce? What benefits are they gaining that those who retire might miss out on? We reached out to Wall Street Journal readers who fit into that last category to learn about their thinking. Here is what one 65-year-old Franciscan friar and Catholic priest said: “I have no intention of fully retiring. Ideally, the most precious gifts that a priest acquires from his experience in the field are wisdom, compassion and—God willing—holiness. While you may not want to go to a surgeon whose eyes are failing, or hire a musician suffering from debilitating arthritis, assuming a priest is still mentally fit, he can actually get better at what he’s ordained to do well into his golden years. Surveys show that nuns and priests have among the highest satisfaction levels of any profession. Most of us love what we do, and don’t want to stop. And in most parts of this country, and most places around the world, the demand is surely there.”

Rethinking single-family living: Roommates pay bills, create community (Washington Post) Leanne Do’s family has a saying: “Single family homes don’t need to be for single families.” Do, 38, has shared her Seattle home with a rotating cast of 11 roommates since she and her husband, Nathan Friend, 37, bought it in 2012. During that time, they’ve had three children, now 7, 4 and 1. Having renters provides a meaningful source of income for Do and Friend—both of whom hold two part-time jobs in the education and nonprofit sectors—allowing them to work fewer paid hours and devote more time to caregiving. Do says the decision is about more than just savings, though; it enhances their family life. “My children love it,” she said. Many families’ budgets are squeezed amid ongoing inflation. Meanwhile, an affordability crisis in the U.S. housing market has put buying a home out of reach for many. According to a recent report from real estate brokerage Redfin, only about one in five U.S. homes for sale in 2022 was affordable for the typical household—down significantly from 2021. Bringing in roommates can help everyone involved navigate these challenges. Joyce Serido, an associate professor in the Department of Family Social Science at the University of Minnesota, says that while families with children taking on roommates is fairly rare, it may be part of a broader trend toward more multigenerational living.

[creatiview]

[ad_1] CNN  —  The Pakistani Taliban has claimed responsibility for a deadly blast in a mosque in Peshawar on Monday, the latest attack on the city in northwest Pakistan. A powerful explosion killed at least 48 people and left about 157 injured, according to Peshawar Police Chief Mohammad Aijaz Khan. Rescue operations are now underway in the mosque, which is situated inside a police compound and is mostly attended by law enforcement officials. Sarbakaf Mohmand and Omar Mukaram Khurasani – two officials from the Pakistani Taliban, known as Tehreek-e-Taliban (TTP) – put out statements saying the blast was “revenge” for the death of TTP militant Khalid Khorasani last year. The TTP is a US-designated foreign terrorist organization operating in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. CNN cannot independently verify the group’s claims. In a statement to CNN, Khan, the Peshawar police chief, earlier said the incident inside the Police Lines Mosque was “probably a suicide attack,” echoing Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif. “The brutal killing of Muslims prostrating before Allah is against the teachings of the Quran,” Sharif said in a statement, adding that “targeting the House of Allah is proof that the attackers have nothing to do with Islam.” “Terrorists want to create fear by targeting those who perform the duty of defending Pakistan,” the prime minister continued. “Those who fight against Pakistan will be erased from the page.” Sharif added that “the entire nation and institutions are united to end terrorism” and that there’s a “comprehensive strategy” in the works in order to restore law and order in the northwest Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, where Peshawar is located. The prime minister went to Peshawar following the deadly blast and visited Lady Reading Hospital to meet those injured, his office said. “Just returned from Peshawar. The sheer scale of the human tragedy is unimaginable. This is no less than an attack on Pakistan. The nation is overwhelmed by a deep sense of grief. I have no doubt terrorism is our foremost national security challenge,” Sharif posted on Twitter. “My message to the perpetrators of today’s despicable incident is that you can’t underestimate the resolve of our people,” he added. Pakistan’s former leader Imran Khan, whose party Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf holds the provincial government of Khyber Pakhtunkwa, also condemned the blast saying in a tweet that “it is imperative we improve our intelligence gathering & properly equip our police forces to combat the growing threat of terrorism.” The city of Peshawar – which is located at the edge of Pakistan’s tribal districts that border Afghanistan – has frequently been the site of attacks by the TTP and other militant groups. The Islamic State (ISIS) said they were responsible for an attack on a Shia mosque in Peshawar in March 2022. That blast killed at least 61 people and injured another 196. TTP’s central spokesman Muhammad Khurasani is yet to comment on Monday’s attack. [ad_2] Source link

[digimakacademy]

अफगानिस्तान को दीमक की तरह खा रहे हैं पाकिस्तान की ISI के एजेंट्स: पूर्व इंटेलिजेंस चीफ Edited By Shatakshi Asthana | एएनआई | Updated: 26 Jul 2020, 02:16:00 PM IST सांकेतिक तस्वीर

[brotheralyosha]

Every Republican national leader since 9/11 had backed the harshest possible prosecution of the War on Terror. Even Mitt Romney pledged to double Guantanamo. Those relatively few prominent Republicans who did object to the war, like senators Rand Paul and Mike Lee, did so on the respectable grounds that it was costing America freedom and wealth. They were openly disdained by the ascendant McCains of the party. Rand Paul’s father, Ron, sought the presidency on an antiwar platform, but he was even more marginal, despite an enthusiastic following on the far right.

Handling the party’s nativists was a more delicate proposition for GOP leaders. Romney and McCain, uncomfortable fits in nativist circles, compensated by advocating “self-deportation” for undocumented immigrants or releasing “complete the danged fence” ads, to say nothing of proposing that the nativist Sarah Palin should be a heartbeat from the presidency. No Republican since 9/11 had been able to combine nativism with antipathy to the futility of the War on Terror and seize control of the party. It occurred to few to try. Then, in June 2015, Donald Trump descended his escalator at Trump Tower.

In his infamous announcement speech, the one claiming Mexicans were rapists and criminals invading a supine America, Trump demonstrated just how effortlessly 9/11 politics amplified nativism. His great insight was that the jingoistic politics of the War on Terror did not have to be tied to the War on Terror itself. That enabled him to tell a tale of lost greatness: “We don’t win anymore.” Trump was able to safely voice the reality of the war by articulating what about it most offended right-wing exceptionalists: humiliation.

It was a heretical sentiment to hear from someone seeking the GOP nomination. Every major Republican figure had spent the past 15 years explaining away the failures of the war or insisting that it was a noble endeavor. Trump called it dumb. His America was suffering unacceptable civilizational insults. “We have nothing” to show for the war, he said, and certainly not the spoils of war that Trump believed were due America. “Islamic terrorism” had seized “the oil that, when we left Iraq, I said we should have taken.” The war was a glitch in the matrix of American exceptionalism, and Trump offered a reboot.

But except for the Afghanistan war, which he considered particularly stupid, Trump was no abolitionist. “I want to have the strongest military we’ve ever had, and we need it now more than ever,” he stated. He threatened to sink Iranian boat swarms, even as Iran was aligned with the United States against ISIS in Iraq, engaged in the ground combat Obama desperately sought to avoid. Then there was ISIS, at home as well as abroad. Trump pointed specifically to ISIS’s spoils: the 2,300 Humvees they drove out of Mosul. “The enemy took them,” he complained, pledging that “nobody would be tougher on ISIS than Donald Trump.” His latest position on Iraq was that it was dumb to get in, dumb to get out, and now the United States had to win, whatever that ultimately meant.

Trump’s incoherence was less important than what it revealed: a disgust at waging the war on its familiar terms, along with an enthusiasm for voicing its civilizational subtext. The same weakness that made the War on Terror a no-win situation had also yielded the current wave of Central American migration. Trump promised to crash the wave against a giant wall on the southern border for which he would make Mexico pay. The socialist writer and critic Daniel Denvir observed that Trump’s pledge to extort Mexico’s wealth for the wall was effectively a demand for imperial tribute. The analysis applies equally to his claim on Iraq’s oil.

. . .

Fifteen years of brutality as background noise made it easy for many to misinterpret Trump’s position on the War on Terror. Journalists listened to his invective against it and called him antiwar, as if he had not been promising to “bomb the shit” out of millions of people. “Donald the Dove,” Maureen Dowd of The New York Times wrote, “in most cases . . . would rather do the art of the deal than shock and awe.” Such attitudes revealed what elites chose to believe about Trump and what they opted to consider merely an act for the rubes. What they overlooked by focusing on Trump’s criticisms of the ground wars was that he wanted to expand the War on Terror to frontiers it had yet to reach. Most important, they heard Trump describe the enemy as Radical Islamic Terror. For 15 years, nativists, stoked by Fox News, had considered such a definition a prerequisite for winning the war. Elites had never understood why the right was so spun up about the phrase. Trump knew that “Radical Islamic Terror” extracted the precious nativist metal from the husk of the Forever War.

None of this was tolerable to the Security State and its allies. Sean MacFarland, a David Petraeus-favored officer during the Iraq occupation who now commanded the war against ISIS, rejected indiscriminate bombing as “what the Russians have been accused of doing in parts of northwest Syria.” Dozens of Republican-aligned security luminaries signed open letters refusing to serve in a Trump administration, birthing the Never Trump Beltway movement. But the architects, contractors, and validators of the War on Terror were placed in awkward positions. One of the letters decried Trump’s “expansive” embrace of torture, since their own embrace of “enhanced interrogation” foreclosed on a more categorical rejection. Former NSA and CIA Director Mike Hayden, who had lied so extensively about torture that the Senate compiled his falsehoods into a separate annex of the torture report, who secretly constructed a surveillance dragnet around the United States while imploring Congress to set the balance between liberty and security, characterized Trump as “unwilling or unable to separate truth from falsehood.” Nor was there any self-reflection from signatories like Iraq occupation chief Bob Blackwill, who took over as Bush’s personal envoy after Paul Bremer, and who had asserted against “the professional pessimists within parts of the U.S. intelligence community” that “2005 will be a good year in Iraq for President Bush.” None of them seemed to understand that they had created the context for Trump. He was about to show them.