Why? Because one of the above headlines is unlike the others. The first two stories reveal the nature of the Iranian regime—a gang of criminal theocrats that since 1979 has spread chaos and murder throughout the world. The third headline reveals the gullibility of Western politicians and diplomats who, despite never-ending reminders of the Islamic Republic’s aims and capacities, persist in trying to appease it.
Negotiations to revive the Iran nuclear deal have been taking place in Vienna since April 2021. They have gone nowhere. Yet the Biden administration insists on playing a starring role in this diplomatic farce. Nothing that happens in the outside world penetrates the bubble where the diplomats reside.
Some history:
• Iran refused to speak to the United States directly. We obliged. The talks are indirect—a sign of American weakness.
• Ali Khamenei ensured that his potential successor, Ebrahim Raisi, a hardline cleric sanctioned by the United States, was “elected” president last summer. Not only did we continue negotiations. We are also now debating whether to provide Raisi an entry visa so he can spout regime propaganda at the U.N. General Assembly next month.
• America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, one year old this week, seriously undermined our credibility and our security. It weakened our influence in the Greater Middle East. Yet Biden didn’t change his foreign policy. He doubled down on his Iran gambit.
• Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last February was a hinge of history—a moment when, we have been told, “everything” changed. Everything but the Iran negotiations. Russia, despite its outlaw status on the international stage, continues to serve as Iran’s intermediary. Maybe we should take the hint?
All this happened in the months before the Bolton assassination plot and the attack on Rushdie. And those violations of U.S. sovereignty and rule of law are related to Iranian malfeasance. The Justice Department charged a member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) for attempting to hire a hit man who would target the former U.S. national security adviser. Rushdie’s assailant may have been in contact with the IRGC, as well, and was unquestionably inspired by the Islamic Republic of Iran’s first Supreme Ruler, Ayatollah Khomenei, who called for the British-American novelist’s death in 1989.
And what, you ask, does Iran continue to demand of the United States as a condition for reentry into the nuclear deal? In a piece for CNBC headlined, “A renewed Iran nuclear deal appears closer than ever. Here are the final sticking points,” Natasha Turak writes, “Iran wants the Biden administration to remove its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps from its [i.e., America’s] designated terrorist list, which so far Washington seems unwilling to do.”
Imagine that.
Biden would be committing political seppuku if he removes the IRGC from the terror list. Even he can see the danger there. He’d be handing the beleaguered Republicans an issue in the final months before the midterms. It has the potential to taint media coverage of his supposed diplomatic triumph.
The IRGC “sticking point” is politically troubling. Another sticking point is impossible. Iran wants the United States to guarantee that future presidents will abide by the deal. However, the only constitutional way to do this would be to submit the nuclear agreement to the Senate for treaty confirmation. Of course, Biden can’t do that, because the treaty would fail. Leaving Biden at an impasse.
One he refuses to acknowledge. Perhaps the Biden team is now so full of themselves after a string of legislative victories at home that they are ready to make additional concessions to get what they mistakenly believe will be a victory abroad. The press will love this narrative, of Biden going from strength to strength and win to win, no matter the costs to U.S. security and stability in the Persian Gulf and Shiite Crescent.
Another scenario is that, while neither Iran nor America agrees to this latest proposal, the talks continue intermittently because they serve each party’s goals. Iran is using this time to build its nuclear infrastructure. America doesn’t want to face the hard choices that follow from a recognition that diplomacy has failed.
That is why all peace processes or arms control negotiations continue despite the evidence that they achieve nothing. The process itself becomes an end for the West. Meanwhile, the process serves as cover for the West’s enemies.
“We have a miserable, bipartisan track record of not responding to Iranian aggression and terrorism,” Reuel Marc Gerecht of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies observed the other day. Biden has an opportunity to correct the record by demonstrating American strength in response to Iranian outrages. It’s an opportunity he won’t take.
Elite Afghan forces bring U.S. training to Tehran, according to whistleblower interviews
Elite Afghan soldiers trained by the United States fled to Iran with weapons and specialized combat training following the Biden administration’s bungled withdrawal from the country that let the Taliban regain power, according to a report by Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee based on interviews with whistleblowers and internal State Department documents.
“A ‘significant’ number of Afghan special forces and about 3,000 Afghan security forces, including high ranking officers, crossed the border into Iran,” according to the report, which was released on Monday to coincide with the one-year anniversary of the deadly U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan. “Some brought military equipment and vehicles with them. We believe this happened because they were not evacuated by the U.S. or our allies, and therefore had no other option.”
These forces were trained in combat by U.S. special operators, in some cases within the United States, and “could be a serious national security threat to the United States if they are captured or turn,” according to the report. They “know not only our tactics but who these elite [U.S.] military officials are.”
The findings detail months of chaos following the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and indicate that the tumult in the country has provided an opportunity for regional enemies like Iran to regain a foothold in the war-torn country. Details of Iran’s ties to these U.S. trained fighters comes as new threats from Iran are making headlines across America, with the arrest of an Iranian national who’d put a bounty on former White House national security adviser John Bolton’s head, as well as the attempted murder last week of the novelist Salman Rushdie, who has long faced threats from Iran’s clerical regime.
“The recruitment of former Afghan military and intelligence personnel poses a major national security risk due to the fact these Afghan personnel know the U.S. military and intelligence community’s tactics, techniques, and procedures,” the report concludes.
In addition to the weapons and military equipment these special forces brought with them to Iran, they have an intimate knowledge of the U.S. military and its tactics in the region, know-how that is highly sought after by Iran’s terrorist proxy groups and other jihadi militants.
“These commandos are trained, highly trained, on how we do signals intelligence, how we do human intelligence, how we operate,” Rep. Michael Waltz (R., Fla.), a combat veteran, said in the report. “We know that the Taliban are hunting them down. They are seeking to force them through coercion to hand over that information so that they can use it and they can understand how we operate.”
Beyond Iran, Russia and China are also looking to recruit these forces for their inside knowledge about American military tactics.
“It is possible these former Afghan military and other intelligence personnel could be recruited or coerced into working for one of America’s adversaries that maintains a presence in Afghanistan, including Russia, [and] China,” in addition to Iran, according to the report.
The State Department said in October 2021 that it is aware of the threat posed by Afghan soldiers trained by the United States, though it has done little since then to find them and get them to safety.
“Afghans who possess the knowledge specific to security operations, intelligence collection, other aspects of security and defense forces that if it were to fall into terrorists’ hands would pose a national security risk to the United States, those people will have a special category, I think there is just no way around it,” a senior State Department official quoted in the report told Congress.
The Pentagon was to create a list detailing “critical Afghan personnel that would warrant prioritization in being evacuated.” But, as of February 2022, “the Pentagon list had still not been shared with the State Department Task Force, meaning several months of inactivity with regards to evacuation,” the report disclosed.
Afghan military personnel also do not qualify for the U.S. Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) program that has brought in scores of vulnerable Afghans, the report says. The administration is still only evacuating remaining Americans, green card holders, and pre-approved SIV applicants.
It also has not been made clear if Afghan military members would qualify for refugee status, and, if they did, they would be responsible for getting themselves out of the country without American assistance, according to the report.
The number of Americans stranded in Afghanistan after the evacuation also is far higher than the Biden administration admits. While U.S. officials repeatedly said “about 100” Americans were left in the country after the military left, the State Department is known to have evacuated more than 800 American citizens since Aug. 31, 2021—a number that does not include the scores of Americans evacuated by outside groups.
August 15, 2022, marks one year since the Taliban retook the Afghan capital of Kabul following the Biden administration’s catastrophic withdrawal of U.S. troops from the country. In that time, Afghanistan has become “a nation in anguish,” Axiosreported.
The Taliban has banned women from attending school, cracked down on the media, and committed mass executions of civilians. Since the terror group took control, the country’s economy has plummeted more than 60 percent, a World Bank report found. The economy and a drought have resulted in about 20 million Afghans going hungry, a U.N. study found.
Joe Biden’s poll numbers began to plunge after he botched the U.S. withdrawal, resulting in the deaths of 13 American service members. Biden’s administration was unprepared for the Taliban’s rapid conquest of Afghanistan following the withdrawal, the Washington Free Beacon reported, even as the president told the American people that the evacuation went off “as designed.”
While the Taliban swore it would not harbor other terrorists, a U.S. drone strike this month killed al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in Kabul. The Taliban government condemned the strike.
Former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley told the Free Beacon this month that “Afghanistan is once again a safe haven where terrorists operate freely,” blasting Biden’s withdrawal as “a slap in the face” to combat veterans.
Epps admitted to trespassing, directing protesters to go into the Capitol. ‘I wish I could take that back,’ he told agents.
When James Ray Epps Sr. first called the FBI regarding his January 2021 activities in Washington D.C., he didn’t mention how he implored protesters in several locations to go inside the Capitol, but he later told an agent that he expected a bomb would detonate on a side street near the Capitol.
Those are just two of the revelations in a collection of Epps-related material obtained by The Epoch Times, including FBI interview summaries, FBI audio recordings, transcripts, videos, and photographs.
In two interviews with the FBI in 2021, Epps explained his actions on Jan. 5 and Jan. 6. He admitted he was guilty of trespassing on restricted Capitol grounds and confessed to urging protesters to go to—and into—the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Despite the admissions, the FBI never arrested Epps and he was not charged by the U.S. Department of Justice with any Jan. 6 crimes. The non-action has fueled a crop of theories that he might have been working for the FBI or another agency.
Epps, 61, has repeatedly denied those suggestions through his attorney.
Epps recently sold his house and land in Queen Creek, Arizona, because of threats and harassment and moved to Colorado, he told the New York Times in July. According to online records, the Arizona property sold for $2.2 million on April 28, 2022.
Epps at one time was No. 16 on the FBI’s Jan. 6 most-wanted page. His entry was later scrubbed from the list without explanation. He is among a handful of persons of interest to have their photos deleted from the FBI site.
‘Like a Terrorist Act’
In an interview with FBI agents on March 3, 2021, Epps said he brought a first-aid kit in his backpack to Washington because he expected a terror attack.
“Yeah, I thought there might be a problem. That’s why I was there,” Epps told an FBI agent and an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force officer in a meeting at the Phoenix office of Epps’s attorney, John Blischak.
Blischak told The Epoch Times he would comment after reviewing the FBI interview summary, but had not done so by press time.
“I was afraid they were going to set off an explosion on one of the side streets,” Epps said, according to a recording of the interview obtained by The Epoch Times. “So we tried to stay in the middle, tried to get there early, tried to stay away from the sides. And if something like that happened, I had a first-aid kit. I could help out.”
Epps told the agents the possibility of violence weighed heavily on his mind and he originally did not plan to travel to Washington. It was only when learning that his son, James Epps Jr., was going to the Trump rally that the senior Epps decided to go and keep an eye on his son, he said.
Ray Epps is shown at the lower left on an early FBI “wanted” poster. His photo has since been scrubbed from the FBI website. (FBI.gov/Wayback Machine)
“As time went on, I started getting a bad feeling like something’s gonna happen,” said Epps, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran and former Oath Keepers leader in Arizona. “There’s a lot of wackies out there. I thought something would happen in D.C. I thought there might be, what do they call them, EOD, something like that?”
Epps might have been referring to an improvised explosive device (IED), which is a homemade bomb that was a favorite weapon of insurgents in Afghanistan during the United States’ long war there. In military parlance, an EOD refers to an explosive ordnance disposal specialist—someone who defuses and destroys explosives.
An agent asked for clarification: “Oh, you mean like a terrorist act?”
“Right, like a terrorist act,” Epps said.
The agents did not press Epps on what led him to believe there would be an explosion, nor did they ask about the two alleged pipe bombs found outside the Republican and Democrat party headquarters, each just blocks from the Capitol. The RNC pipe bomb was placed near the corner of the Capitol Hill Club facing a side street, similar to the description Epps offered.
The devices did not detonate and the FBI has not arrested anyone in those cases.
Epps told the FBI he regretted the things he said in downtown Washington the night of Jan. 5, 2021. He spoke to internet personality Baked Alaska and video podcaster Villain Report, both of whom recorded their exchanges.
“In fact tomorrow, I don’t even like to say it because I’ll be arrested. …I’ll say it. We need to go into the Capitol,” Epps told Baked Alaska, whose legal name is Anthime Gionet.
Epps shouted a similar theme to the crowd at large: “Tomorrow, we need to go into the Capitol. Into the Capitol. Peacefully,” he said. The crowd then started chanting, “Fed! Fed! Fed! Fed!”
The FBI agents told Epps that his statements on Jan. 5 were problematic. They said they found him often on video and in photographs from Jan. 5 and 6.
Epps replied: “I’m the tallest guy in the crowd, and I stick out, man. They followed me.” Then he joked, “I could never be a bank robber.”
“We said that the same way,” one of the agents said. “We said, ‘It’s a big guy and every photo we find, he’s in it.’ The night before, that video didn’t help.
“…And the video the night before, what you said basically predicted what happened,” the agent said.
“I wish I could take that back,” Epps replied. He called the statements “really stupid.”
On Jan. 6, Epps was filmed near the Washington Monument imploring the crowd, “We are going to the Capitol, where our problems are. It’s that direction. Please spread the word.”
When speaking to a young man in a red and black mackinaw jacket, Epps said, “When we go in, leave this here [pointing to something]. You don’t need to get shot,” according to a video of the exchange.
First Call to FBI on Jan. 8
Epps first called the FBI on Jan. 8, 2021, after his brother-in-law notified Epps’s wife that a photograph of Epps was on the FBI website. That call to the National Threat Operations Center (NTOC) lasted about 27 minutes, according to an audio file of the call obtained by The Epoch Times.
In describing his activities, Epps never mentioned that he urged the crowds on Jan. 5 to go into the Capitol the next day. He said he went down to Black Lives Matter plaza to try to calm things down after people he suspected were Antifa activists were harassing police.
“I tried to calm them down,” Epps told the FBI operator. “I tried to let them know that, you know, that this is not what we’re here for. We’re here because of the Constitution, not the police. Police are on our side.”
Nor did Epps mention getting on a bullhorn on Jan. 6 and encouraging people to go to the Capitol as soon as President Donald Trump was finished speaking. He would comment on those topics nearly two months later when interviewed by FBI agents.
On the January call, Epps insisted his presence on Capitol grounds was to de-escalate when things got violent.
“I am guilty of being there and probably trespassing,” he said. “But I had a reason. I was trying to calm ’em down. I wanted to be there, but I’m trying to calm ’em down. Anything I can do to help. There’s no call for that kind of behavior. I will be your witness.”
Ray Epps at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, shortly before pepper gas is shot into the crowd. “Been a long time,” he said. “Aah, I love it!” (Screen Capture/Rumble)
Epps told the agents he came to Washington to express his concerns about the 2020 presidential election. He said he received five ballots at his Queen Creek address: one each for him and his wife, and three with names he did not recognize.
“We’ve owned the property for 11 years now. I’ve never heard of those three people that came there. I didn’t recognize the names,” he said. “And then when the election went the way it did, I was a little concerned. I mean, how many apartments are there in Arizona, 3 million? And if they’re sending all these ballots to these different apartments. I mean, you know, that’s a concern.”
Epps said he also went to support Trump, although he did not stay at the Ellipse for all of Trump’s speech. He said he followed crowds that left the speech early and walked toward the Capitol.
“People started leaving early after President Trump started speaking. So they were running and it was the same people that was, ‘F Antifa,’ and this and that and the other,” Epps said.
“I believe, just my belief, they were Antifa, the ones that were saying that stuff,” he said. “And they were like running that way and I’m like, ‘Maybe I can calm this down.’ So I went with them.”
Epps said it was his original intention to stay for all of the speeches at the Ellipse.
“I planned on being and word was being passed around that right after he gets done speaking, we’re gonna go to the Capitol. And it was a given,” Epps said. “So spread the word spread the word. So I started spreading the word and I said that to a lot of people there: ‘We’re going to the Capitol right after the president speaks.’”
Perhaps the scene that drew the most attention and speculation about Epps on January 6 was when he appeared at the first breach point of police lines. Some 20 minutes before Trump finished speaking at the Ellipse, an aggressive crowd gathered at a lightly defended barrier on a sidewalk not far from the Peace Monument.
As rioters began yanking at the bicycle-rack barriers, Epps pulled Ryan Samsel back from the front line and spoke in his ear. Seconds after that exchange, Samsel and others knocked down the barrier, causing one officer to fall back and hit her head on the concrete.
“I walked up to him, and I put my arm on him and said, ‘Hey, that’s not why we’re here. Don’t be doing that,’ you know.
“I don’t know who he was. No clue,” Epps said. “I just tried to talk him out of doing what he was doing. And then all of a sudden, it blew up.”
When interviewed by an FBI special agent and a detective on Jan. 30, 2021, Samsel corroborated Epps’s description of their brief verbal exchange, according to a transcript of the session obtained by The Epoch Times. Samsel faces nearly a dozen January 6-related charges in U.S. District Court in Washington.
“Now that guy I talked to,” Samsel said, pointing to a photograph of Epps. “He came up to me and he says, ‘Dude,’ his exact words were, ‘Relax,’ he says, ‘The cops are doing their job.’ That’s exactly what he says to me right there in that picture.”
Inconsistencies in Interviews
Epps’s two interviews with the FBI included some inconsistencies and changed details, according to the recordings and FBI summary documents.
Epps told the FBI on Jan. 8 that his brother-in-law called him to notify him his picture was on the FBI’s January 6 website. During his March 3 interview with FBI agents, Epps said, “Someone contacted me and said, ‘Hey, your picture’s up.’”
When asked about his brother-in-law later in the interview, Epps said, “He didn’t call me, he called my sister.” Then his wife interjected, “That was me. And I can tell you exactly because he sent me a text, actually.”
When asked about who was with him on Jan. 5 and 6, Epps replied, “My son.” A short while later he said, “I think he had a friend there. He did have a friend there. I don’t know his name.”
One of the agents said he recalled that on the Jan. 8 phone call with the FBI, Epps said he went sightseeing on Jan. 7. “No, we did that the day before,” he told the agent. A few minutes later, however, this detail changed. “Oh, you know what? The next day we did, no, we got up that morning and we went to the Vietnam Memorial.”
In both contacts with the FBI, Epps asked if his photo could be removed from the FBI’s Jan. 6 page. In the Jan. 8 call, the FBI operator said she had nothing to do with FBI web content. In the March 3 interview, he was given a more discouraging take.
“That picture is probably still out there, will probably be there forever now,” one of the agents told him.
Epps said the notoriety of being publicly listed as a person of interest had caused problems.
“Well, we’ve felt the repercussions. I mean, we’ve had people come on our business site and try to destroy us,” he said. “I’m an insurrectionist, I’m a traitor. I’ve been called everything in the book, but it’s dying down now—I hope.”
The agents asked Epps if his views had changed since Jan. 6.
“I still have concerns about the election. I do. I mean, I think everybody does,” Epps said. “I think our politicians, some of them need to be in jail. I think you guys need to investigate them. I don’t know. How much of what we get is the truth? I don’t know. Not even worth watching the news anymore. Because they just make it up as they go.”
Epps met twice with the House of Representatives’ Jan. 6 Select Committee, including a transcribed interview in January 2022. Committee members seemed satisfied with what Epps told them. No transcript of the session has been released.
“Mr. Epps informed us that he was not employed by, working with, or acting at the direction of any law enforcement agency on January 5th or 6th or at any other time, and that he has never been an informant for the FBI or any other law enforcement agency,” a spokesman said in January.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) grilled top FBI officials about Epps in a January hearing, but received a repeated refrain: “I can’t answer that.”
The U.S. Army is expected to fall nearly 40,000 troops short of its recruiting goals over the next two years. Fiscal year 2022 is expected to miss the mark by 10,000 troops, while the number in fiscal year 2023 could reach 28,000. These figures mean that this year is on track to be the Army’s worst recruiting year in almost 50 years.
The Army plans to circumvent the problem by offering $1 billion for its recruiting program and placing more emphasis on the use of its reserve units.
The Epoch Times reached out to the U.S. Army Recruiting Command for comment, and Maj. Charles Spears of the Combined Arms Center replied to various inquiries about the state of recruiting. Spears offered several reasons for the Army’s recruiting challenges in the years ahead.
First, he said, “only 23 percent of American youth are qualified to serve without a waiver, [noting that] obesity, addiction, medical, and behavioral health are the top disqualifiers for service.”
The Army is also competing with corporate America, he said, adding that “social media’s virtual public square shapes the values and perceptions of American youth, which is increasingly unfamiliar with the benefits of Army service.”
According to Spears, the American population is “increasingly disconnected” from serving in the Army and military service, Spears said. “Oftentimes, influencers [like parents, teachers, and coaches] do not recommend military service.” He also added that “the share of youth who have seriously considered military service is at a historic low of nine percent.”
Finally, Spears said, “the COVID-19 pandemic severely limited the ability of recruiters to interact with prospects in person, [and] also exacerbated academic and physical fitness challenges, limiting the pool of qualified applicants.” As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, he said, there has been a nine percent decrease in Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) scores as well as increased applicate obesity.
In addition to these factors, servicemembers have expressed other concerns that they say have contributed to the recruitment crisis.
Soldiers with the 82nd Airborne division walk across the tarmac at Green Ramp to deploy to Poland at Fort Bragg, Fayetteville, North Carolina, on Feb. 14, 2022. (Melissa Sue Gerrits/Getty Images)
Army Boots on the Ground
The Epoch Times spoke to an active-duty Army soldier with over 15 years of service on the condition of anonymity, fearing reprisals. He is gravely alarmed about the Army falling short on recruitment numbers.
“In the past,” he said, “the Army targeted a specific demographic of people based on their values, [and these recruits] were patriots and loved America.” In today’s general population, he doesn’t see the same interest in patriotism. “Much of the country doesn’t love America like it use to,” he said. “And with a military no longer upholding the values, the oaths, or the creeds it once did, what kind of new recruits should we expect [to join the Army]?” he asked.
“From a macro perspective, we had a significant breach of trust in the last election.” By oath, he said, the military swears to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” But the U.S. military has said nothing about the previous election, according to the soldier. “I’m not saying there is a final answer, but as defenders of the Constitution, they owed open and transparent conversation to the force and to the American people,” he said.
Instead, he said, “they happily encourage mandated vaccines, back the transgender issue, and speak out in opposition to the Supreme Court of the United States in regard to Roe v. Wade—all of which are very political.”
In his opinion, “we now have a Department of Defense [DoD] that has taken various political positions that are very much opposed to the heart of America.”
All the while, he said, the size of battalions is shrinking. “Some are less than two-thirds of where they need to be,” he said. And many of those who remain are not “usable deployables.”
He said, “Much of America is missing the fact that the Army is intentionally kicking people out in a precarious way that it knows is unnecessary, because the data shows that it’s unnecessary.” He is under the impression that “our military is intentionally being weakened.”
Rather than watching the military “decay,” he said, “military leadership needs to take action for the good of the America people.” But he’s not convinced this will happen, because “for the most part, the higher-ups are cowards and they lack the personal courage to take the actions needed to put an end to this sad state of affairs.”
As recruiting woes mount and solutions appear scant for the U.S. Army, service members of the nation’s other military branches are equally concerned.
A member of the U.S. military receives the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine at Camp Foster in Ginowan, Japan, on April 28, 2021. (Carl Court/Getty Images)
Mishap for the Marines
Maj. Paul Lewis (a pseudonym), a recognized subject matter expert on personnel retention matters within the Marine Corps who previously sounded the alarm on personnel end-strength issues within the DoD, spoke to The Epoch Times once again.
According to Lewis, military readiness has been impacted in the past few years by “a toxic combination of poor leadership and the politicization of the military.” He said there has been “a steady reduction in readiness due primarily to reckless policies that have eroded the trust of the rank and file service-members.
“It really came to light in the wake of COVID when service members began to see that senior leaders chose to put politics ahead of military readiness,” he said. “Senior officers and senior civilian executives have run the military into the ground in the name of career stability and progression instead of keeping faith with Marines and their families.”
Potential recruits are not signing up to serve in the Marine Corps as they have in previous years, and Lewis attributes this to “a rejection of the bureaucratic leadership.” For American citizens to choose to serve in the “all-volunteer force,” he states, “they want to be able to trust that their leadership has their best interest at heart, and that doesn’t appear to be the case anymore.”
According to Lewis, this erosion of trust can be “manifested in the military loss in Afghanistan as well as how COVID vaccine mandates have been enforced in a draconian and illegal manner,” and this according to him has led to “a complete loss of trust and confidence in the leadership.”
In the years ahead, he said, these issues will have an impact on the national security of the United States. “Within the national security apparatus,” Lewis said, “we need a certain number of troops to man the line, this is known as statutory end-strength and is set by Congress, [because] we have defense obligations all over the world with partners and allies.”
“A small gap in readiness, losing 100 or 200 recruits or unplanned departures from the service might be acceptable,” Lewis admitted. “But when you get into the numbers of 40,000 or more in a single year, it’s no longer just a minor blip on how we deploy our military, but it is an unmitigated disaster,” he said. “It will affect every decision made on how we are going to meet our obligations and ultimately we will be increasingly relying on less troops to do the same job.”
In light of losses associated with the mandated vaccine, Lewis said it has become apparent to him that “our leadership is willing to sacrifice military service members, forcing them out the door in the name of financial reprioritization.” He said, “American people need to be aware that the military is using these personnel cost savings to commit additional resources to yet another round of equipment modernization that is lining the defense industries pocket.
“But all the while, they’re losing the individuals qualified to operate these systems,” he said. “For example, you cannot fly an F-35 with a student pilot; you need an experienced pilot with years of operational flight time.
“When the cards are down and we need to face our adversaries, we need experienced warfighters using this equipment,” said Lewis. “Unfortunately, the defense lobby has just about every congressional office enthralled with the idea of higher defense spending with their companies rather than investing in its people.”
According to Lewis, “the American soldier is the country’s most valuable resource, [but] our leadership and our decisionmakers have devalued their people” who serve in the military. “This is sadly exemplified in the dead Marines on the deck in Afghanistan because of poor politically driven leadership.”
If members of the nation’s military were valued, he said, “these same people should be raising legitimate concerns about vaccine efficacy, but they are failing the American people once again.”
Lewis contends that “generational damage” is being done and the core of rank-and-file service members whose families have traditionally served will no longer choose to do so in the future because of the utter betrayal they are facing from their own leaders.
“It’s reckless, like a child playing with fire,” said Lewis. “Do the math: it is impossible to have an all-volunteer force if you don’t have volunteers.” Moving forward, he questions whether the U.S. military will be able to continue to “meet the expectations of the American people and keep the homeland safe.”
U.S. Air Force CH-47 Chinook helicopters are seen landing at the airport in Jasionka near Rzeszow, Poland, on Feb. 16, 2022. (Wojtek Radwanski/AFP/Getty Images)
Air Force Mission Ignored
A master sergeant currently serving in the Air Force has been a recruiter for nearly a decade. As the military vaccine mandate began to be enforced, he was “alienated from the service” for refusing to take the shot. “Many in the Air Force have stood up for freedoms our entire career, but when our freedom is on the line, who’s going to stand up for us?” he asked. He has witnessed junior airmen break down in tears over being coerced and threatened into taking the vaccine.
Air Force Recruiting Service is facing its lowest recruiting numbers since 1999 according to senior leadership’s public statements, he said. “While we lose decades of experience to mandates and poor leadership decisions,” he said, “we will be forced to ease standards just to continue the mission.” He further added, “I see firsthand in recruiting that the sentiment towards joining the military has been negatively impacted over the last year.”
What’s more, he said, “there is an imbalanced focus on diversity over performance when deciding the fate of an airman’s career. We’re focusing on the wrong things instead of the mission, which is protecting and serving the nation,” he said. “Wokeism combined with bad policies are destroying the military and if we don’t course correct soon, it could cause irreparable harm, in my opinion.”
Navy is Getting Weaker
A Navy lieutenant said, “the DoD has forgotten the first rule of holes—and that’s when you get into one, you stop digging.” According to the recruiter, “the Navy has probably alienated the majority of its recruiting base that you could have always counted on historically.”
Mandatory vaccines are an issue, he said. But “social experimentation” within the Department of Defense is also a problem. For example, in the digital signature of Rear Admiral Alexis T. Walker, he said, “he has his own little personal font with a rainbow hue for his pronouns.” Walker is the commander of Navy Recruiting Command.
The Clinton administration’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy was once “a hot button for the military,” he said. “But fast forward nearly 30 years, and transgenders have been normalized.”
To that end, he said, “The fact that you would set a double standard in terms of military readiness where you would claim an unvaccinated service member isn’t ready, but somebody in the middle of a life-changing transition that’s on hormones is ready and is not a threat to readiness, bothers me.”
By his estimation, senior leadership of the military has “bought into a big lie that somehow the population at large wants a military which reflects the population diversity of the country.” He disagreed, stating that “the public simply wants to know that they have a military that’s capable and lethal, and could successfully defend this nation on a moment’s notice.”
Apart from “a few niche areas, like the special warfare communities, military readiness is questionable at best,” he said. “We’ve gone too far into the weeds politically, which has resulted in a weaker, political military force.”
A U.S. Coast Guard vessel docks during an offload of packages of marijuana and cocaine at Port Everglades, in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., on Nov. 22, 2021. (Eva Marie Uzcategui/AFP via Getty Images)
Coast Guard Gone Woke, Too
Continuing to actively serve in the Coast Guard, a “Coastie” with recent experience as a recruiter is very disturbed that he could be “throwing years of dedicated service down the drain” for refusing to take the vaccine. It’s clear that he’s not the only one impacted, as he said, the Coast Guard will fall far short of making recruiting mission this year. While he said it is hard to pinpoint exactly why, the vaccine mandate is a large part of the issue. “There’s definitely been some young folk who said they’re not going to join because they don’t want to get the COVID vaccine,” he explained.
In addition, he said, “The woke culture has bugged some people.” In one example of wokeness infiltrating the Coast Guard, he said, “When writing awards or performance reviews, I can’t even identify myself as a he, [adding that] I can only identify myself by my name, rank, or by they.” He finds it strange that he cannot assume his own gender. Taking diversity and inclusion to this extreme, alongside the vaccine mandate, has hurt retention in his opinion.
The Coast Guardsman strongly believes that “medical and fitness standards that were once non-negotiable are all on the table right now.” When asked about the reason, he goes on to say, “It seems like the average teenager these days has a much higher likelihood of being prescribed antidepressants, asthma inhalers, or attention deficit medications, all of which used to be a hard stop for someone trying to join.”
“But if recruiters can’t make mission and mission execution suffers, eventually something has to give,” he said. “The question that bothers me is how much does race and gender now play into the likelihood of those medical waivers being granted?”
Each anonymous interviewee emphasized that their views do not reflect the views of the Department of Defense (DoD), the Air Force, Army, Marines, Navy, or Coast Guard. The Epoch Times also reached out to the recruiting headquarters for the Air Force, Coast Guard, Marines, and Navy for comment.
Former President Donald Trump released a dramatic political video, hours after the FBI raided his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, in which he laments the “declining” state of America and says it’s “time to start talking about greatness for our country again.”
“We are a nation in decline … We are a nation that in many ways has become a joke,” says Trump over the ominous sounds of thunder and rain in the nearly four-minute video in which he lists the apparent failures of the Biden administration, before promising, “Soon we will have greatness again.”
Trump, who is expected to announce that he will run again for president in 2024, released the video on his Truth Social platform late Tuesday.
In the video, he says that America has the “highest inflation in over 40 years” and “highest energy cost in its history.” He adds that in the two years since Joe Biden took office, America has lost its energy independence and dominance.
“We are a nation that is begging Venezuela and Saudi Arabia for oil,” Trump says. “We are a nation that surrendered in Afghanistan, leaving behind dead soldiers and American citizens and $85 billion worth of the finest military equipment in the world.”
Trump accuses the Biden administration of allowing “Russia to devastate a country, Ukraine, killing hundreds of thousands,” and suggests that “it will only get worse.”
‘Weaponization of the Justice System’
“We are a nation that has weaponized its law enforcement against the opposing political party like never before. We’ve never seen anything like this,” Trump says in his video.
Late on Monday, Trump announced that the FBI was raiding his Palm Beach estate, Mar-a-Lago, calling it evidence of “prosecutorial misconduct” and a “weaponization of the Justice System.”
A member of the Secret Service in front of the home of former President Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., on Aug. 9, 2022. (Giorgio Viera/AFP via Getty Images)
The former president said the raid wasn’t announced and that it was motivated because Democrats do not want him to run again for president in 2024.
“They detest Donald Trump, not just on the Democrat side but the general establishment, because he’s not one of them. Because he doesn’t play their game,” his daughter-in-law Lara Trump told Fox News on Tuesday.
“They are terrified he’s going to announce any day that he’s running for president in 2024. And this is a very convenient way to just throw a little more mud on Donald Trump.”
America ‘No Longer Respected’
In his video, Trump also cites the legacy media as contributing to what he says is a nation in decline, saying America “no longer has a free and fair press. Fake news is about all you get.”
Traditionally, the media acts as a guardian of the public interest and a watchdog on government activities. But Trump has in the past accused legacy outlets of being partisan and colluding with “radical left Democrats … to hide the real facts.”
“We are a nation that is allowing Iran to build a massive nuclear weapon and China to use the trillions and trillions of dollars it’s taken from the United States to build a military to rival our own,” Trump says in the video.
U.S. Air Force loadmasters and pilots assigned to the 816th Expeditionary Airlift Squadron, load people being evacuated from Afghanistan onto a U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemaster III at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Aug. 24, 2021. (Master Sgt. Donald R. Allen/U.S. Air Force via AP)
“We are a nation that over the past years is no longer respected or listened to all around the world. We are a nation that is hostile to liberty and freedom and faith.
“We are a nation whose economy is floundering, whose stores are not stocked, whose deliveries are not coming, and whose educational system is ranked at the bottom of every list,” he says.
“We are a nation that in many ways has become a joke,” says Trump. “But soon we will have greatness again.”
‘Soon We Will Have Greatness Again’
Trump’s political video starts in black and white with only the sounds of rain and thunder underscoring it. This sequence features video representative of the Biden administration’s apparent failures, including oil fields, the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
However, the last third of the video becomes colorized and the musical score uplifting as Trump shifts to speak about his promise of America having “greatness again.”
“It was hard-working patriots like you who built this country. And it is hard-working patriots like you who are going to save our country,” Trumps says in his video.
“There is no mountain we cannot climb. There is no summit we cannot reach. There is no challenge we cannot meet. There is no victory we cannot have.
“We will not bend. We will not break. We will not yield ever, ever, ever. We will never give in, we will never give up, and we will never ever back down. We will never let you down.
“As long as we are confident and united the tyrants we’re fighting do not stand even a little chance. Because we are Americans and Americans kneel to God and God alone. And it is time to start talking about greatness for our country again,” he says.
The video ends on a black screen with the words, “The best is yet to come.”
President Donald Trump said on Aug. 7 that if he returns to the White House in 2025 he’ll rehire the service members who lost their jobs by refusing to take the COVID-19 vaccine.
“I think it’s a disgrace what happened to them,” Trump said, answering a reporter’s question.
Trump was responding to questions from the press before he took the stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Dallas on Saturday.
“I’d let them back. I’d give back pay,” Trump said. “So I would give them their back pay and I would let them back, and they understand that. They know it.”
Back pay is “a common remedy for wage violations” where “the employer makes up the difference between what the employee was paid and the amount he or she should have been paid,” according to the Department of Labor.
Trump’s comments came weeks after the U.S. army announced plans to cut more than 60,000 guards and reserve soldiers for refusing COVID-19 vaccines.
“Soldiers who refuse the vaccination order without an approved or pending exemption request are subject to adverse administrative actions, including flags, bars to service, and official reprimands,” a July 1 statement on the U.S. Army’s website reads.
More than 19,000 U.S. Army personnel have refused to take the COVID-19 vaccine, as of July 14, 2022, according to U.S. Army data. The Army approved a total of 24 medical and 19 religious exemptions from the COVID-19 vaccine.
Jan. 6 Pardons
In response to another question, Trump said he’ll “very strongly” consider pardoning nonviolent political prisoners who have been indicted as a result of participating in the January 6 Capitol breach.
“We’ll certainly be looking at it, and very strongly,” Trump said, adding that he has made previous statements about potentially pardoning January 6 political prisoners.
“I think many people are being treated very unfair … having to do with that. And we will be looking at that very strongly,” Trump said. “I think you know the answer.”
The president hinted strongly at but stopped short of announcing a 2024 run.
“Well, it’s not a long period, regardless, whether you go before or after, certainly not a very long period of time,” the former president said. He raised the same point in an interview with the New Yorker earlier this year, when he said he’s undecided on whether to announce his decision on a 2024 run before or after the midterms.
“It’s coming,” Trump said, “and I think people are going to be very happy.”
“Our country has never been in a position like this. We lost everything. We’ve lost energy independence. We’ve lost our prestige. We’ve lost every single thing you can lose,” Trump said, noting the withdrawal from Afghanistan—which he previously called “the greatest tactical mistake in history“—and the border crisis.
“So we’ll be making an announcement in the not-too-distance future.”
Sen. Josh Hawley grilled FBI Director Christopher Wray on the allegations at a Senate hearing
Two GOP senators have urged the Department of Defense (DoD) to immediately investigate whistleblower allegations that hundreds of Afghan evacuees who appeared on official watchlists were not properly vetted before they were released into the United States.
According to the DoD whistleblower, the Biden administration failed to properly vet 324 Afghan evacuees who appeared on the DoD’s Biometrically Enabled Watchlist (BEWL), which includes known suspected terrorists, said U.S. Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) on Thursday.
The BEWL identifies individuals whose biometrics have been collected and determined by analysts to be threats or potential threats to national security, including known suspected terrorists.
A full flight of 265 people supported by members of the UK Armed Forces on board an evacuation flight out of Kabul airport (MoD)
Hawley and Johnson said the whistleblower also alleges that White House and DoD officials instructed agency personnel to “cut corners” and not conduct full fingerprint tests on the evacuees at staging bases in Europe, “in order to promote the rushed evacuation from Afghanistan.”
Further, the whistleblower alleges that Department of Homeland Security (DHS) staff were authorized to delete old biometric data at their discretion, said the senators, who went on to say that this is a “troubling development that could threaten national security and public safety.”
Whistleblower Allegations Raised in Letter
Hawley and Johnson raised the DoD whistleblower’s allegations with DoD Acting Inspector General Sean O’Donnell in a letter on Thursday (pdf).
“We write to you with concern over new allegations raised by a Department of Defense (DoD) whistleblower. This information may show the Biden Administration’s failure to vet those evacuated from Afghanistan was even worse than the public was led to believe. The following allegations demand an immediate investigation by your office,” the senators wrote.
The DoD has previously admitted in a report that the National Counter-Terrorism Center (NCTC) did not vet all Afghan evacuees “using all DoD data prior to arriving in” the United States.
NEW whistleblower allegations – hundreds of Afghan evacuees who appeared on DOD terror watch list allowed to enter the U.S. @SenRonJohnson and I lay out what we’ve learned pic.twitter.com/zBHlVB0ujE
The DoD earlier this year said that it identified 50 Afghan individuals in the United States whose records indicate they might pose a significant security concern.
Hawley and Johnson said they “understand that number has risen to at least 65,” and declared that the individuals “need to be immediately located, fully vetted, and, if appropriate, deported.”
The senators noted that the 324 Afghan individuals allegedly on the watchlist are in addition to the 50 or 65 already identified.
Answers Sought From DOD
Hawley and Johnson asked O’Donnell to confirm how many BEWL matches were generated by biometric submissions from Afghan evacuees.
Of these matches, if any, the senators asked the DoD acting inspector general to clarify if any were denied entry, admitted entry, or currently in the United States.
The senators also sought information about the allegations that NSC or DoD staff instructed personnel to cut corners in processing the evacuees’ fingerprints, and asked for clarification on the circumstances under which agency personnel may delete biometric data.
Hawley and Johnson also asked O’Donnell to clarify the number of BEWL matches generated by Afghan evacuees after they arrived; what steps have been taken toward identification, vetting, or deportation; and how many were known suspected terrorists.
Additionally, the senators asked if the FBI or other law enforcement were investigating the individuals.
Hawley Grills FBI Director
At a Senate Judiciary Committee Oversight Hearing on Thursday, Hawley confronted FBI Director Christopher Wray about the whistleblower’s allegations.
Wray wasn’t able to give a clear answer about the FBI’s efforts to track down and interview the 324 Afghan evacuees, but noted that “there are a number of individuals, through our joint terrorism task forces, that we are actively trying to investigate.”
The FBI director noted that the agency had disrupted a number of actions related to the evacuees, but did not specify what they were.
Evacuees wait in front of a Royal Air Force C-17 at Kabul airport (LPhot Ben Shread/MoD/PA)
Regarding the allegations of cutting corners, Wray said: “I will say that this was a massive number of people to be vetting in an extraordinarily short period of time and that in my view inevitably raises concerns.”
“Oh, I think you’re absolutely right about that,” Hawley responded. “‘Inevitably raises concerns’ I think is the is the nicest thing that could be said about it.
“We know that the basic procedures were not followed. We know that the screening process was not followed. And now we know that potentially hundreds of people connected to terrorism are loose in this country as a result,” the Missouri senator said before conceding his time.
The Biden administration brought around 77,000 Afghans to the United States during its chaotic military withdrawal last year. The airlifts were for Afghans and their family members who risk Taliban retaliation for helping the United States during its 20-year war. The execution of the withdrawal has been widely panned.
The Afghans were being granted Special Immigrant Visas entitling them to bring their families.
The Epoch Times reached out to the DoD for comment.
Iran and al Qaeda have quietly forged a strategic terror alliance
The man likely to become al Qaeda’s next leader has spent decades using Iran as a base of operations and maintains deep ties to the hardline regime, signaling that two of the globe’s leading terrorist forces could exponentially expand relations in the near future.
Saif al-Adel, al Qaeda’s number two leader and longtime head of its security arm, fled to Iran in the early 2000s, along with other senior leaders, following the September 11 attacks. From there, he helped relay orders from the just-killed al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri and orchestrate terrorist operations that killed dozens of people, including Americans, according to former U.S. officials and information on the Iran-al Qaeda axis published by a watchdog group.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) protected al-Adel during his time in the country, and the regime permitted him to plan deadly terror attacks, including a May 2003 operation in Saudi Arabia that killed eight Americans. “Adel’s suspected presence in Iran has raised further questions regarding Iranian influence on al Qaeda if Adel were to be named leader,” according to United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI), an advocacy group that closely tracks Iran’s regional terror operations.
These ties have only deepened since Joe Biden’s bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan that left the Taliban in power and the country in shambles. Senior leaders in Iran’s Quds Force, an elite IRGC branch, remain in close contact with al Qaeda leaders, “and since the fall of Afghanistan, have provided some al Qaeda leaders with travel documents and safe haven,” according to a European intelligence analysis. The Iran-al Qaeda alliance, former U.S. officials told the Free Beacon, has quietly grown for many years, making the prospect of a new nuclear deal with Iran—which will provide Tehran with billions in cash—beneficial for its allies in al Qaeda.
“When the U.S. government enriches Iranian terrorists through sanctions relief or a lack of enforcement, that money ultimately goes back to support al Qaeda,” Gabriel Noronha, a senior Iran adviser for the State Department during the Trump administration, told the Free Beacon. “We know that Saif al-Adel has not just been living in Iran for most of the past 20 years—he’s been hosted there by the regime along with other al Qaeda operatives. Since 2015, the Iranian regime has allowed al Qaeda to establish an operational headquarters in the country, providing them with documents, passports, funding, and logistical support like safe houses.”
Al-Adel and his network of al Qaeda confidants used their time in Iran to build close “operational coordination” with Tehran’s security forces, including the IRGC. While Iran was once at odds with al Qaeda due to religious differences, that has not been the case for many years now, according to Noronha and other former U.S. officials familiar with these ties.
“These are not totally separate and distinct terrorist groups or even rivals anymore—they are part of an anti-American and anti-Western alliance,” Noronha said.
From his perch in Iran during the mid-2000s, al-Adel “was allowed by Iran to travel to Pakistan and open more contacts with other al Qaeda leaders,” according to UANI’s research, which is based on intelligence and open-source reporting. Iran’s decision to permit al-Adel and other al Qaeda operatives to freely move in the region “opens up speculation that al-Adel could establish a ‘satellite office’ for the group in Iran,” according to a 2011 AP report.
Nathan Sales, former U.S. ambassador-at-large and coordinator for counterterrorism, told the Free Beacon that “contrary to expectations and contrary to conventional wisdom, the Iranian regime and al Qaeda have maintained a mutually beneficial relationship for many years.”
Iran, Sales noted, recently hosted senior al Qaeda leaders and operatives, “which is exactly what we should expect from the world’s worst state sponsor of terrorism.”
The depth of these ties was first unveiled by former secretary of state Mike Pompeo in January 2021, when he disclosed publicly that a U.S. operation killed one of al Qaeda’s top leaders on the streets of Tehran in 2020.
“Al Qaeda has a new home base: the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Pompeo said in a speech at the time, marking one of the first public disclosures about Iran’s deepening relationship with the terror group.
Hans-Jakob Schindler, a senior director at the Counter Extremism Project, which tracks jihadi groups, noted that al-Adel “has become very high value” since al-Zawahiri was killed, “and the Iranians usually take advantage of such situations.”
Al-Adel’s “existence in Iran and his freedom to act while in Iran will solely depend on what the Iranian regime think his value and usefulness for their aims is,” Schindler said.
Joe Biden touted the killing of al-Quaeda leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri as a win for his administration on Monday, but experts said he was ignoring some major facts.
“On Saturday, on my direction, the United States successfully concluded an air strike in Kabul, Afghanistan, that killed the emir of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri,” Biden said on Monday.
“You know, Zawahiri was [Osama] bin Laden’s leader. He was with him all the…whole time. He was his number two man, his deputy, at the time of the terrorist attack on 9/11. He was deeply involved in the planning of 9/11.”
The United States has killed Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of al-Qaeda and one of the world’s most-wanted terrorists, who oversaw the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, alongside the group’s founder, Osama bin Laden, announced Biden. pic.twitter.com/lfX0yY5wDs
Biden went on to tout the killing as the fulfillment of a promise he made to Americans when pulling out of Afghanistan nearly a year ago.
“I made a promise to the American people that we’d continue to conduct effective counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan and beyond,” Biden said. “We’ve done just that.”
“I made a promise to the American people that we’d continue to conduct effective counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan…We’ve done just that,” Biden says on the killing of al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri nearly one year after U.S. troops withdrew from Afghanistan. pic.twitter.com/61fUv6ahZY
While eliminating this terrorist is undoubtedly a positive development for the country, the fact that he was even in Afghanistan highlighted Biden’s previous failures.
In trying to justify his hasty withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan on Aug. 20, 2021, Biden declared al-Qaeda was no longer in Afghanistan.
“Look, let’s put this thing in perspective here,” Biden said according to a White House transcript. “What interest do we have in Afghanistan at this point with al-Qaeda gone?
“We went to Afghanistan for the express purpose of getting rid of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, as well as — as well as getting Osama bin Laden. And we did.”
Of course, Biden’s botched withdrawal ultimately led to the Taliban gaining control in Afghanistan and cost the lives of 13 American soldiers.
Given that the leader al-Quaeda leader was in Afghanistan on Saturday, it seems the group is in the country at this point. This means one of two things, neither of which are good for Biden.
Either Biden was lying when he said al-Quaeda was “gone” from Afghanistan last year, or the group has re-entered the country since Biden’s botched withdrawal. In both scenarios, Biden failed to achieve the stated goal of “getting rid of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.”
As Biden celebrated the killing of Zawahiri, some terrorism experts pointed out this inconvenient fact.
“The killing of Al Qaeda emir Ayman al Zawahiri will be sold as a counterterrorism success,” Long War Journal terrorism analyst Bill Roggio wrote on Twitter. “But that narrative masks the undeniable truth that Taliban-controlled Afghanistan is a safe have for Al Qaeda.”
1) The killing of Al Qaeda emir Ayman al Zawahiri will be sold as a counterterrorism success. But that narrative masks the undeniable truth that Taliban-controlled Afghanistan is a safe have for Al Qaeda. https://t.co/CGc5Fs8oMw
In another tweet from the same thread, Roggio explained the implications of Zawahiri’s presence in Kabul.
“Zawahiri could not operate in Afghanistan — particularly in Kabul — without the consent of the Taliban,” Roggio wrote. “He wasn’t in the remote mountains of Kunar, Nuristan, or Nangarhar, or distant provinces of Ghazni, Helmand, or Kandahar. He was in the Taliban’s capital.”
4) Zawahiri could not operate in Afghanistan – particularly in Kabul – without the consent of the Taliban. He wasn’t in the remote mountains of Kunar, Nuristan, or Nangarhar, or distant provinces of Ghazni, Helmand, or Kandahar. He was in the Taliban’s capital.
International security professor Max Abrahms made a similar point in a tweet of his own.
“Taking out #Zawahiri isn’t the categorical win Biden says,” he wrote. “The Taliban was supposed to prevent Al Qaeda leaders from hiding out there for goodness sake.”
Taking out #Zawahiri isn’t the categorical win Biden says. The Taliban was supposed to prevent Al Qaeda leaders from hiding out there for goodness sake.
Once again, Biden is attempting to take credit for taking steps to solve a problem he created, at least in part. While Zawahiri’s death is a good thing, it is not the end of terrorism problems in Afghanistan, and we have Biden himself to thank for that.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) — Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri has been killed in a CIA drone strike in Afghanistan, U.S. officials told Reuters on Monday, the biggest blow to the militant group since its founder Osama bin Laden was killed in 2011.
One of the officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said a drone strike was carried out by the CIA in the Afghan capital Kabul on Sunday.
In a statement, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid confirmed that a strike took place and strongly condemned it, calling it a violation of “international principles.”
Joe Biden will deliver remarks on Monday at 7:30 p.m. (2330 GMT) on what the White House described as a “successful counter-terrorism operation.”
(Reporting by Idrees Ali. Editing by Leslie Adler and Grant McCool.)
With an expected GOP takeover of the U.S. House of Representatives following November’s midterm elections, Republicans in the chamber are poised to launch a slew of investigations aimed at dialing up the pressure on the Biden administration over a range of issues—from border security to Hunter Biden to the origins of the pandemic.
Domestic concerns faced by everyday Americans—most notably a historic inflation rate—will be key priorities, according to Chair of the House Republican Conference Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.).
House Republicans will take the administration to task on alleged “policy failures that have created an inflation crisis, energy crisis, border crisis, and crime crisis impacting every American family,” Stefanik told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement.
Big Tech’s censorship of conservative voices will also be scrutinized, she added.
On the foreign policy front, the Biden administration’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Chinese Communist Party’s influence in the United States and abroad, and U.S. strategy toward Iran are set to come under focus.
Republicans are already laying the groundwork to take on “an aggressive oversight role” next year by issuing preservation notices and document requests so a potential GOP majority “will be ready to hold the Biden administration accountable from day one,” a House GOP leadership aide told The Epoch Times in an email.
House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik (R-NY) (C) speaks at a press conference, was joined by House Republican Whip Steve Scailse (R-LA) (L) and Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN), following a Republican caucus meeting, at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, on June 8, 2022. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Oversight Committee
Many of the inquiries are expected to be spearheaded by the powerful House Committee on Oversight and Reform, the chamber’s main investigative panel that has broad authority to scrutinize various facets of the administration.
The committee’s ranking member James Comer (R-Ky.), who is poised to take the chair should the Republicans flip the House, foreshadowed an ambitious agenda by a GOP-led panel.
“[W]e will return the House Oversight and Reform Committee to its core mission of rooting out waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement in the federal government and holding the Executive Branch accountable,” Comer told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement.
Another committee member Rep. Michael Cloud (R-Texas) had a clear message for the Biden administration via email to The Epoch Times: “Their days of corruption, fraud, and abuse will no longer be met with blind eyes.”
Hunter Biden, son of U.S. President Joe Biden, attends the ceremony honoring 17 recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, in the East Room of the White House in Washington, on July 7, 2022. (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)
Hunter Biden
Chief among a GOP-led House Oversight Committee’s priorities is an investigation into Hunter Biden and his foreign business dealings.
For more than two years, the president’s son has been at the center of growing controversy over his overseas business activities, including in Ukraine, Russia, and China, conducted while Biden was vice president in the Obama administration.
Hunter is currently the subject of a federal investigation being run out of Delaware and, according to a recent CNN report citing unnamed sources, it is “nearing a critical juncture.”
Hunter has previously denied wrongdoing, and the elder Biden has maintained that he has never discussed Hunter’s business activities with his son.
The president’s son’s extensive financial dealings with foreign individuals and businesses, raise concerns about conflicts of interests, illegal lobbying, and whether his ties influenced U.S. foreign policy during the Obama administration, critics say.
Republicans have honed in on Hunter’s work for Ukrainian gas firm Burisma, while his father was the Obama administration’s point-man on Ukraine, and Hunter’s dealings with several Chinese companies and businessmen with links to the Chinese Communist Party.
“We will continue to conduct oversight of Hunter Biden and the Biden Family’s pattern of peddling access to the highest levels of government to enrich themselves,” Comer said.
“They have racked up over 150 suspicious activity reports for their foreign business deals, which is a national security threat,” the lawmaker said, referring to a CBS report saying that U.S. banks had flagged more than 150 financial transactions involving Hunter or the president’s brother, James, for further review by the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. Some of the transactions involved large wire transfers, the report said.
“We need to know if resident Biden benefited financially from these deals and if he is beholden to the interests of foreign adversaries,” Comer said.
An aerial view shows the P4 laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China’s central Hubei Province on April 17, 2020. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)
COVID-19 Origins
The ranking member highlighted that the committee would continue to investigate the origins of COVID-19, focusing on the possibility that the pandemic was the result of a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China.
“Growing evidence shows COVID-19 likely originated from the Wuhan Lab and the Communist Party of China covered it up,” Comer said.
An array of circumstantial evidence has prompted some officials and scientists to point to the WIV as the most likely source of the pandemic. These include the WIV’s gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses, reports that staff members became sick with symptoms consistent with both seasonal flu and COVID-19 in the fall of 2019, before the Chinese regime acknowledged the outbreak, and that a WIV public database of 22,000 samples and viral sequences was taken offline in September 2019 before the onset of the pandemic.
The Chinese regime’s persistent refusal to allow outside access to the lab and its data has made it nearly impossible to fully investigate the lab leak theory.
Domestically, the potential role of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in aiding WIV’s activities has been viewed with particular alarm by Republicans, who are looking to intensify the inquiry. The NIH has previously funded WIV via New York-based health nonprofit EcoHealth, including one grant that amounted to what experts have described as gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses.
“We will seek to hold U.S. government officials accountable for any wrongdoing, and ensure Americans’ tax dollars aren’t being used on risky research at unsecure labs,” Comer said.
Border Patrol agents apprehend a large group of illegal immigrants near Eagle Pass, Texas, on May 20, 2022. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)
Other Key Priorities
The ongoing struggle by the administration to control the flow of illegal immigration at the U.S.–Mexico border is set to become another focal point for Republicans serving on the House Oversight Committee, and other panels.
“We will also continue our oversight of Biden’s border crisis that has led to historic illegal immigration, a surge of deadly drugs pouring across the border, and mismanagement of taxpayer dollars,” Comer said.
With a GOP-led House Energy and Commerce Committee, Biden’s energy policies amid a deepening global squeeze on oil and gas are expected to come under close scrutiny.
“We will build on our robust oversight over how the administration is censoring conservative speech, shutting down American energy and increasing gas prices, abusing its public health emergency powers, [and] colluding with political allies like teacher’s unions,” a spokesperson for Energy and Commerce Republicans told The Epoch Times in an email.
Meanwhile, a Republican-led House Financial Services Committee would focus on probing regulatory agencies’ alleged efforts to impose a “far-left agenda” on the U.S. financial system, as well as the Biden administration’s implementation of the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 stimulus package known as the American Rescue Plan, said Laura Peavey, communications director for the House Financial Services GOP, in an email to The Epoch Times.
The Epoch Times has reached out to the White House for comment.
Vets on Duty chairman Jason Church is ‘laser-focused’ on ‘advocating for a strong national defense’
A coalition of veterans dedicated to strengthening America’s military has been uniformly slammed as racist by their critics. It’s a surprisingly callous take on a group chaired by a Purple Heart recipient who lost both his legs in Afghanistan.
Jason Church, a retired U.S. Army captain, joined with other veterans of the war on terror to ensure the United States retains military supremacy. Their group, Veterans on Duty, is warning that progressive bureaucrats have taken control of the armed forces and are forcing troops to sit through diversity, equity, and inclusion seminars when they should be training for battle. The newly formed nonprofit aims to reverse this trend by recruiting veterans to leadership roles and supporting lawmakers and policies that will help keep the U.S. military battle-ready.
To mark the group’s launch, Church penned a New York Post op-ed laying out these problems and enumerating Veterans on Duty’s proposed solutions. Critics immediately accused him of racism.
The progressive group VoteVets tweeted that Church “makes the same arguments that were made against integration over 70 years ago.” VoteVets, which is chaired by Jon Soltz, who still has both of his legs, has spent tens of millions of dollars backing Democratic candidates, also slammed Church as a “loser congressional candidate.” Church entered a 2020 special congressional election in Wisconsin in an effort to continue serving his country “even though the Taliban took my legs.”
VoteVets CEO Janessa Goldbeck, who also has both of her legs, struck a similarly harsh note, calling Vets on Duty members “assholes” after saying, “50 years ago these people would have been mad about racial integration. Today they are mad about women and LGBT people in the military.”
At no point in Church’s Post piece does he call for the military to exclude soldiers based on race or sexual orientation. But he isn’t surprised by the reaction to Veterans on Duty’s launch.
“The radical left has long used baseless accusations of bigotry to browbeat dissenters as it bends American institutions to its will,” Church told the Washington Free Beacon. “This tired tactic should be ignored. We are laser-focused on our mission of advocating for a strong national defense and combating progressives’ efforts to corrode the military from within.”
As Church points out, that corrosion couldn’t come at a worse time. In his Post piece, he notes that Iran is close to obtaining nuclear weapons, and the Chinese Navy last year “surpassed our own as the world’s largest,” all while Russia is marching its armies through Ukraine.
Members of the media were also quick to criticize Church’s piece.
“I’m just woke enough to say you … are a fucking idiot,” MSNBC pundit Malcom Nance tweeted at Church. Nance, who tweeted “#DealWithIt” after terrorists killed 13 U.S. soldiers outside Kabul Airport in Afghanistan last summer, called Church “another pro-Trump Summer Soldier begging to be given a public paycheck for exhibiting asshattery & beclownment above and beyond the Call of Duty.”
“Just imagine how all these right-wingers would have reacted with horror if they had been around when Harry Truman desegregated the military,” tweeted Max Boot, a Washington Post columnist who has not served in the military. “Now that was woke!”
Jeremy C. Hunt, a black military veteran who serves on Veterans on Duty’s board, quickly rebuffed Boot’s accusation. “We care about a military that wins,” Hunt wrote. “If you want an example of modern segregation in the military, look no further than the Biden administration’s racist DEI protocols that you defend.”
Those protocols include instructional videos that teach Navy cadets how to use gender pronouns, and “gender identity” training for Green Berets, the Free Beacon originally reported.
Still, Boot tells the Free Beacon that he stands by his claim “that the right-wingers who today decry the supposedly ‘woke’ military would have opposed the integration of the military in 1948.”
“How do I know? Because that was the conservative position back then,” said Boot, adding that “this whole ‘Vets on Duty’ exercise looks to be mere partisan politics designed to bash Democrats—not a serious attempt to protect the military.”
Jay Kramer, executive director of Veterans on Duty, says that politics is precisely what puts the military at risk.
“At a time of growing threats to the United States, progressive ideologues are pushing radical policies that undermine the men and women of our military,” Kramer told the Free Beacon. “While out-of-touch commentators focus more on messaging than substance, we are joining with like-minded veterans nationwide to do the hard work to ensure our military remains lethal and effective.”
VoteVets and Goldbeck did not return Free Beacon requests for comment. Nance could not be reached for comment.
ANALYSIS: Does wearing a fancy top hat indoors to conceal your unsightly bald dome make you dumber?
Washington Post columnist Max Boot wears a fancy top hat—indoors and outdoors—to conceal his freakish bald head. It may or may not be making him dumber, given the profoundly stupid tweet he posted while attempting to insult a group of veterans who actually did serve their country in uniform.
“Just imagine how all these right-wingers would have reacted with horror if they had been around when Harry Truman desegregated the military,” Boot wrote on Twitter, the social networking platform. “Now that was woke!”
Boot’s ridiculous and racially charged comment came in response to a New York Postop-ed written by Jason Church, a retired U.S. Army captain. Church argued that our military should focus more on preparing for armed conflict with bad actors around the world and less on embracing the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” ethos of government bureaucrats.
“The Navy is producing instructional videos on gender pronouns while its poorly maintained ships crash at sea,” wrote Church, citing a Washington Free Beaconreport. He also suggested—quite reasonably—that lowering the military’s physical fitness standards in the name of “inclusivity” was not a good thing. Other changes designed to make the military more “woke,” Church argued, have “weakened training, lowered morale,” and “diminish[ed] the fighting spirit, cohesiveness, and reputation of America’s Armed Forces.”
Boot, who never served in the military but has written several books about war, had responded with the cerebral heft of a Salon commenter, and Church let him know it. “With respect to @MaxBoot, this is beneath you and the Post,” he wrote. “We are right to be worried about politicizing the military and @VeteransOnDuty will voice these concerns. Smugly dismissing this as bigotry is cheap and wrong.”
Church, who joined the Army in 2011 and received a Purple Heart in Afghanistan, is the chairman of Veterans on Duty, a national membership organization dedicated to “exposing how the woke revolution in the services works” and compelling the military to “get back to basics” by electing like-minded policymakers.
Jeremy C. Hunt, a black Army veteran and member of the Veterans on Duty board, also blasted Boot’s smug commentary. “We care about a military that wins,” he wrote in response to Boot’s tweet. “If you want an example of modern segregation in the military, look no further than the Biden administration’s racist [diversity, equity, and inclusion] protocols that you defend.”
Boot attempted to defend himself, once again channeling the intellectual rigor of the Salon comments section. “Diversity makes the military stronger,” he wrote. “Will you criticize Trump as well as Biden?”
Church, Hunt, and their fellow Veterans on Duty members fought for democracy by defending their country against foreign enemies. Boot “fights for democracy” by writing boring columns in the Post.
On Sunday, for example, Boot defended Biden’s meeting with bone-saw dictator Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, whom the president once pledged to make a “pariah” until flip-flopping as soon as rising gas prices threatened Democratic prospects in the midterm elections.
The Biden administration is poised to give Iran “more than a hundred billion dollars” in cash windfalls if it signs a new nuclear deal, according to former ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, who also hinted to a group of pro-Israel activists on Monday that she will run for president in 2024.
With negotiations over a revamped nuclear deal ongoing, Haley warned an audience of pro-Israel activists that the Biden administration is preparing to unload billions of dollars to Tehran—money that “will fund terrorist attacks on Israel and America.”
Biden has “made clear that he’ll do almost anything to get the ayatollahs to sign on the dotted line,” Haley said in a speech before the Christians United for Israel organization during its annual gathering in Washington, D.C. “And do you know who Biden allowed our lead negotiator on the Iran deal to be? Russia.” An advanced transcript of her remarks was obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
Haley said that with Moscow’s help, the Biden administration is laying the groundwork for Iran to obtain “missiles and nukes to destroy both Israel and America.”
Haley’s speech, which focused heavily on Israel and the threats posed by both Iran and Russia, comes amid speculation that she will throw her hat into the ring for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination—rumors that she appeared to confirm in her speech. It also laid the groundwork for a foreign policy approach that would refocus America on countering Iran and its growing alliance with Russia.
“Anything Joe Biden signs [with Iran] will all but guarantee that Iran gets the bomb. No deal is better than a bad deal,” she said. “And if this president signs any sort of deal, I’ll make you a promise. … The next president will shred it—on her first day in office.”
In addition to advocating for increased U.S. military aid to Israel to help it confront Iran, Haley discussed the war in Ukraine and blamed the Biden administration’s failures in Afghanistan for fueling Russian president Vladimir Putin’s invasion.
“If America hadn’t failed so miserably in Afghanistan, there never would have been a war in Ukraine,” she said. “Putin saw the strongest country in history leave Bagram Air Force Base in the middle of the night—without even telling our allies who stood shoulder to shoulder with us for decades.”
The bungled U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is why “Putin made his move. It’s the price we pay for American weakness. And now countless Ukrainians are paying for our mistake with their lives,” Haley said.
Other world dictators learned a similar lesson when the United States ran out of Afghanistan, according to Haley.
“Putin wasn’t the only one who saw a green light in Afghanistan. So did Kim Jong Un in North Korea. So did Xi Jinping in Communist China,” she said. “And last but not least, our surrender in Afghanistan was the gift that keeps on giving for Iran. When Kabul fell, the ayatollahs celebrated.”
Haley also criticized Biden’s recent trip to the Middle East, including Israel, where he announced a $300 million cash infusion to the Palestinian government. The Free Beacon exclusively reported last week that a large portion of this cash is funding the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, known as UNRWA, which has a history of inciting violence against Jews.
“The money has no conditions, no strings, nothing. The Palestinians can keep stoking hatred of Israel,” Haley said of the renewed funding. “They can keep paying the families of terrorists, which encourages more suicide bombings. Basically, the Palestinians can use America’s money to attack America’s ally. It’s a disgrace.”
Resident Joe Biden’s administration has made two major changes to immigration policies by re-interpreting federal law.
Immigrants, many illegal, from certain countries are shielded from deportation and allowed to be legally employed if the secretary of homeland security decides their home country meets certain conditions.
The designation is known as Temporary Protected Status (TPS).
Fifteen countries are currently designated, including Afghanistan, El Salvador, Somalia, Ukraine, and Venezuela. Hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of immigrants from those countries are protected.
Up until July, those protected by TPS had to remain in the country unless they received approval to travel.
If TPS beneficiaries did leave the country and returned, they’d have the same status—illegal or legal—when they returned, based on language from Miscellaneous and Technical Immigration and Naturalization Amendments, even though they could remain temporarily protected by TPS.
But U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), which handles the nation’s legal immigration system, has changed that policy.
Now, all beneficiaries that return will be “inspected and admitted,” a bureaucratic term that means one has entered the country legally. “This is true even if the TPS beneficiary was present without admission or parole when initially granted TPS,” USCIS said in an alert (pdf).
“That basically launders the fact that they came here illegally and that will put them on the path to a green card,” Jessica Vaughan, policy studies director at the Center for Immigration Studies, told The Epoch Times.
“This is an end run on U.S. immigration law, and Congress,” added Emilio Gonzalez, who directed USCIS during the George W. Bush administration. “It really is a left-handed way of legalizing people.”
USCIS said in its alert that the change stemmed from a court decision, guidance from the lawyers at its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, and an evaluation of current and past policy. The agency did not respond to requests for comment.
Supreme Court
The Supreme Court in 2021 ruled that immigrants who receive TPS are not admitted for purposes of obtaining legal permanent residency.
“A grant of TPS does not cure a foreign national’s entry without inspection or constitute an inspection and admission of the foreign national,’” Justice Elena Kagan, an Obama appointee, wrote in the 9–0 decision.
But USCIS seized on a footnote in the ruling, in which the court said it was not expressing a view on whether a parole enables a TPS recipient to become a legal permanent resident. The secretary of homeland security can parole an illegal immigrant, which allows them to enter or remain in the country legally.
The USCIS also cited a decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which said that the law mandates TPS beneficiaries who travel outside the country be inspected and admitted upon returning, and be treated as entering the United States legally, even if they originally entered illegally.
The DHS Office of General Counsel, on the request of USCIS, reviewed the rulings and the law and concluded that USCIS was “well within its authority” to rescind Trump era guidance and allow illegal immigrants to use leaving the country and coming back to become legal.
“This is just a transparent workaround that I believe is illegal, and almost certainly is going to be challenged,” Vaughan said.
Activists and with Temporary Protected Status (TPS) march in Washington on Feb. 23, 2021. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Another Big Change
The Immigration and Nationality Act, says that immigrants who were illegally in the United States and left cannot re-enter for a certain period of time. Illegal immigrants who were in the country for less than one year have to wait three years to be able to re-enter the country; those who were present for one year or more would be inadmissible unless he or she waits 10 years to re-enter.
The immigrants were expected to wait outside the United States, to comply with the law.
USCIS, though, is now saying that an immigrant can be inside the United States, and that will not reset the clock.
“The statutory 3-year or 10-year period begins to run on the day of departure or removal (whichever applies) after accrual of the period of unlawful presence. This statutory period continues to run, without interruption, regardless of whether or how the noncitizen returned to the United States during the 3-year or 10-year period. Thus, it is immaterial whether the noncitizen has spent the applicable statutory 3-year or 10-year period in or out of the United States,” USCIS says in its policy manual.
The change was made on June 24 to be consistent with two recent court rulings and an unpublished Department of Justice Board of Appeals decision, the agency said in an alert on the alteration.
“This is basically an invitation for any deported alien to pay the cartels to smuggle them back into the U.S. while they let the clock run out,” Rob Law, who headed the USCIS policy office during the Trump administration and directs the America First Policy Institute’s Center for Homeland Security and Immigration, told the Washington Times, which first reported on the update.
Court Decisions
The move stemmed from two 2020 rulings.
In the first, a Japanese woman overstayed her nonimmigrant status by five years. She left voluntarily in 2003 but returned just two years later, well before the 10-year period mandated in the law.
While she didn’t follow U.S. immigration law, her lawyer argued she shouldn’t have been denied permanent residency when she applied for it in 2019 because she was married to a United States citizen and because over 10 years had elapsed.
Government lawyers said that aliens to whom the law applies “must remain outside of the country for the entire duration of the inadmissibility period” and, if they do not, they cannot be admitted.
U.S. District Judge Consuelo Marshall, a Carter appointee, ruled for the plaintiff, agreeing on the argument that over 10 years had gone by before Yayomi Kanai asked for residency.
“This policy change would be great for our client. That means she could have been granted adjustment of status by the USCIS and she wouldn’t have had to go through all these problems,” Michael Piston, who represented Kanai, told The Epoch Times.
“It feels very, very good that they’re doing the right thing,” Mario Urizar, a lawyer who represented the man in the other case, told The Epoch Times.
In that case, a Brazilian national overstayed a tourist visa and was ordered deported in 1994. He left the United States in 2000.
Two years later, the man re-entered, even though the 10 years had not elapsed. When he went to adjust his status later, in 2016, authorities noted he violated the law and thus remained inadmissible.
U.S. District Judge Kevin McNulty, an Obama appointee, ruled that the law “is silent” on the time after 10 years elapses. He said imposing what amounted to a lifetime ban from the United States was wrong.
Scholars at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft cut bait
A few years ago, the Koch brothers and George Soros had a dream. What if the anti-war left joined forces with the isolationist right and worked together to bring U.S. foreign policy back to the 1930s?
From this unholy alliance sprung the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. The mission: make America neutral again. Finally appeasers in Washington had a safe space to apologize for Russian oligarchs, Iranian terrorists, and Chinese communists.
Well, all good things must come to an end.
An all-star in the Koch-Soros foreign policy alliance, Joseph Cirincione, announced on Thursday his resignation from the Quincy Institute: “They excuse Russia’s military threats and actions because they believe that they have been provoked by U.S. policies,” he toldPolitico.
Cirincione is not just some disgruntled scholar. He is the former president of Ploughshares, a grant-making organization that was not just a recipient of the Soros organization’s politicized philanthropy, but a gatekeeper and driver of it—deciding which pinkos would prosper and which would starve. Mother Jones reports that Cirincione helped connect Quincy to major donors in its early days.
His change of heart on Quincy is surely a weathervane for other elements of the Soros network. Indeed, Soros himself has been signaling in the last year that he favors a much tougher policy on China than the one offered up by the Quincy crowd, which released a major study in June that found the Chinese military build up was nothing to worry about and has warned of the perils of “threat inflation” when it comes to China’s military expansion.
Soros, by contrast, came very close to endorsing regime change. “It is to be hoped that Xi Jinping may be replaced by someone less repressive at home and more peaceful abroad,” he told an audience at the Hoover Institution in January, calling Xi “the greatest threat that open societies face today.”
Trita Parsi, a co-founder and executive vice president of Quincy, as well as somebody who could be confused for an Iranian agent—at least according to a federal judge—told Mother Jones he’s bewildered that Cirincione would suggest the think tank was avoiding criticism of Russia. But he acknowledges that Quincy is “not going along with the idea that it’s a good thing to change the objectives in Ukraine towards weakening Russia, because we believe that could lead to endless war.”
As the Quincy Institute demonstrated so spectacularly in Afghanistan, one sure fire way to end endless war is to lose the war quickly and all at once.
As for the interpersonal drama that we assume is engulfing the Quincy Institute, and the enmity growing between teams Koch and Soros—may that war truly be endless.
Lawmakers, former officials say change will let Iranian terrorists come to US
The Biden administration altered federal law to make it easier for individuals who have worked with designated terrorist groups to legally enter the United States.
The State and Homeland Security Departments last week amended federal immigration laws to allow foreigners who provided “insignificant material support” to designated terror groups to receive “immigration benefits or other status,” according to the policy published in the Federal Register. Examples of individuals who would fall into the new category, according to the announcement, include individuals who provided “humanitarian assistance” or “routine commercial transactions” to terror groups.
The policy shift is fueling concerns that the Biden administration wants to make it easier for individuals who work with or for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the country’s paramilitary fighting force that has killed hundreds of Americans, to enter the country. Notice of the change came several days before the Biden administration and hardline Iranian government resumed talks aimed at securing a revamped version of the 2015 nuclear deal.
A State Department spokesman said the law was amended to help vulnerable Afghans, who might have inadvertently worked with terror groups, gain refuge in the United States following the Biden administration’s bungled withdrawal that left the Taliban in power. Lawmakers and former U.S. officials, however, say the new regulations are so broadly written that they would apply to organizations like al Qaeda and the IRGC. The policy change is also raising red flags as U.S. officials, including former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, face credible death threats from Iran.
The rule does not specifically mention Afghanistan but is written to cover all U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organizations, such as the IRGC and al Qaeda, experts told the Free Beacon. The Taliban is not designated as a foreign terrorist organization, leaving lawmakers and former U.S. officials concerned the changes extend far beyond vulnerable Afghans and cover those tied to some of the globe’s most violent terror groups.
Gabriel Noronha, a State Department special adviser for Iran during the Trump administration, said that “the Biden administration is claiming this regulation is all about Afghanistan, but they didn’t even mention Afghanistan once in their action, and have made no serious attempt to limit the scope to the situation there.”
“Instead,” said Noronha, who is a fellow with the Jewish Institute for National Security of America think tank, “this looks like a massive watering down of our immigration restrictions against members of terrorist organizations.”
The State Department says the changes are limited to Afghanistan, but would not say why the country is not mentioned once in the new order.
The changes “are an effort to address issues related to Afghanistan,” a State Department spokesman, speaking only on background, told the Free Beacon. “The circumstances between Afghanistan and Iran are very different.” The new rules “are not applicable to people who have received military-type training from [foreign terrorist organizations], including IRGC conscripts.” Rather, the administration is trying to make it easier for those tangentially tied to terrorism to legally enter the country, the official maintained.
When the Free Beacon requested additional information and an explanation as to why the IRGC or similar groups would not be covered by the changes, the State Department declined to answer, saying, “We have no further information or comments to share.” This lack of clarity is fueling concerns about the policy change.
Noronha and others who spoke to the Free Beacon say the broad reference to “foreign terrorist organizations” leaves open the possibility that groups like the IRGC and al Qaeda would benefit from the relaxed immigration guidelines. The revamped guidelines do not specifically include restrictions on either of these groups. “At best this is a horribly written regulation. At worst, it’s an attempt to pull the wool over the eyes of Congress and the American people and make it easier for terrorists to come to America,” Noronha said.
Richard Goldberg, who under Trump served on the White House National Security Council as the director for countering Iranian weapons of mass destruction, said that any effort to loosen restrictions on terror-tied individuals is worrying amid Iran’s threats to kill U.S. leaders.
“Given Iran is actively plotting to kill former American officials, the administration should carefully explain if and how this [rule] might apply to a potential affiliate of the IRGC, and provide a high-level commitment to take all necessary steps to bar any potential IRGC associate from admission to the United States,” Goldberg, a senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank, told the Free Beacon.
Republican lawmakers agree with this assessment. Five Republican foreign policy leaders who spoke to the Free Beacon expressed concerns the administration is trying to quietly grant concessions to Iran as it reenters nuclear talks.
“It’s outrageous that the Biden administration is lifting the blanket ban on individuals who have provided support to terrorists from entering the United States,” Rep. Joe Wilson (R., S.C.), a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told the Free Beacon. “The timing raises concerns coming just a few days before the latest round of Iran talks. Resident Biden should end these failed negotiations once and for all and return to a policy of maximum pressure, rather than continuing to make concessions to the terrorist regime in Iran.”
Rep. Jim Banks (R., Ind.), a member of the House Armed Services Committee, said he and his colleagues worry the Biden administration is attempting to grant concessions to Iran via backdoor changes to American laws.
“What do Americans gain by letting members of Iran’s terrorist army cross our borders?” Banks asked.
Rep. Mike Waltz (R., Fla.), a combat veteran and also a member of the Armed Services Committee, said the change is purely about “appeasing terrorist groups—whether it’s the IRGC, Houthis, or Taliban.”
Reps. Lisa McClain (R., Mich.) and Pat Fallon (R., Texas), both Armed Services Committee members, expressed shock at how broadly written the new regulations are.
“In what world is it an acceptable decision to allow terrorists into our country?” Fallon asked the Free Beacon. “Instead of ending the nuclear talks with Iran all together, Joe Biden has decided to bend over backwards to the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism. Before it is too late, I urge them to immediately reconsider this foolish decision.”
Update June 29, 3:31 p.m.: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that the Biden administration made no formal announcement of the policy change.
The Western world’s “total failure of deterrence” is largely to blame for Russian president Vladimir Putin’s ongoing war in Ukraine, former ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley said in a foreign policy speech Wednesday in London.
The West’s decades-long failure to confront Putin and other malign regimes like China and Iran should serve as a warning that prompts a “fundamental shift in how the West approaches our enemies,” Haley said, according to an early transcript of her remarks obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. She said it is time for the Western world to cut economic ties with Russia and China to send a message to these regimes that their subversion of the international order will no longer be tolerated.
Haley, who is positioning herself as a Republican prospect for the 2024 presidential election, previewed how a future Republican administration would handle the globe’s most pressing foreign policy matters. She harshly criticized the Biden administration’s appeasement of countries like Iran but also said Europe shares blame for the world’s instability—criticism that is usually expressed behind closed doors when a foreign leader travels abroad.
“It was Western weakness that convinced Putin he could get away with attempting to swallow Ukraine,” Haley said. “He saw America as too internally divided and distracted, and Europe as too bureaucratic and soft to stop him. And sadly, I have to say he wasn’t wrong.”
Decades of appeasement—and fears about directly confronting the Russia-China-Iran axis—led to the worst European war in nearly 80 years.
“We should have made crystal clear to Putin the full implications of his actions ahead of time. We didn’t,” Haley said. “And now we have the worst war in Europe since the Second World War. This dereliction of duty was years in the making. For too long, the West wrongly feared provoking Putin, instead of taking the steps needed to prevent him from starting a war in the first place.”
The Biden administration’s recent foreign policy blunders, primarily the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, provided the fuel that sparked Putin’s war machine, Haley said.
“It pains me to say it, but if there had been no Afghanistan disaster, there would likely have been no Ukraine invasion,” she said. “Putin saw our lack of resolve in Kabul and assumed nothing meaningful would happen once his tanks rolled into Kyiv.”
But the conditions that led to Putin’s war weren’t created overnight. The United States and Europe spent decades trying to integrate Russia and China into the global economy while ignoring their totalitarian tendencies and mass military buildup.
“The West’s foolishness was boundless,” Haley said. “Whenever Russia tested us, the West shrugged off the necessary strong response, fearing it would do more harm than good.”
“It is critical that we all understand this central point: Appeasement never satisfies the appetites of tyrants. It only makes them want more,” Haley said. “Trying to be ‘inoffensive’ only emboldens our enemies. It leads to wars—like the one we are now witnessing right now in Ukraine.”
Russia is not the world’s most present threat, however, according to Haley. That distinction goes to China.
There can be “no doubt that China is the biggest national security threat the world faces,” she said.
There is only one solution to reassert Western dominance, Haley said. “We must economically detach from our enemies and rely more heavily on ourselves and our friends.”
“That means breaking the Western addiction to Russian energy,” Haley said. “It means securing strategic supply chains completely free of Chinese control or leverage. It means expecting our businesses to do their part to uphold our interests rather than those of our enemies.”
The belief that “economic interdependence with hostile regimes” would dampen their worst tendencies has been “painfully disproven,” according to Haley. If the West does not abandon these foolish ambitions, “our pain and vulnerability will only increase.”
The Western world stands at an “inflection point,” facing a “set of powerful and fanatical dictators with dreams of conquest. Imperial Russia, Communist China, and Jihadist Iran pose existential threats to us and to free peoples all over the world,” Haley said. “The Western way of life depends on deterring these threats.”
A stalemate, she said, “is not good enough. Victory is required.”
The head of the Brookings Institution resigned in the midst of a federal investigation into whether he lobbied the U.S. government on behalf of Qatar, according to a letter released on June 12.
Retired Marine Gen. John Allen, chief of the influential Washington-based think tank, wrote in his letter (pdf), “While I leave the institution with a heavy heart, I know it is best for all concerned at this moment.”
Allen didn’t provide a direct explanation as to why he was leaving the organization.
A former four-star general who helped lead U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, Allen’s letter comes about a week after new court filings show that the FBI seized his electronic data in the midst of an investigation.
“In all this, I was particularly grateful for the opportunity to lead Brookings as its focus shifted to include an institutional commitment to race, social justice, and equity,” he said, without elaborating.
The Brookings Institution released a June 12 statement thanking Allen for “his contributions to Brookings, including his leadership in successfully guiding the institution during the pandemic, as well as his many years of service and sacrifice for our country,” confirming his resignation.
“Ted Gayer will continue to serve as acting president until his previously announced departure later this summer. Information about arrangements for ongoing interim management—as well as the search for a new president—will be forthcoming,” the group said in its statement.
The think tank also didn’t provide a reason for Allen’s departure.
Court filings allege that Allen engaged in efforts to help the Qatari government influence U.S. policy in 2017 amid a diplomatic crisis between the Gulf monarchy and neighboring countries. An FBI agent wrote in an affidavit in support of a search warrant that there was “substantial evidence” that Allen knew he broke a foreign lobbying law and made false statements.
Allen hasn’t been charged with a crime, and he has previously denied any wrongdoing. He has declined to comment on the recent court filings to The Associated Press and other media outlets.
A spokesperson for Allen, Beau Phillips, told AP that Allen “voluntarily cooperated with the government’s investigation into this matter.”
The recent affidavit alleges that Allen; Richard Olson, former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates; Imaad Zuberi, a U.S. businessman; and Ahmed Al-Rumaihi, a high-ranking Qatari government official set up a plan to “convince the United States to intervene, defuse the possibility of sanctions, and negotiate a resolution favorable to Qatar” amid a diplomatic row between the country, the United Arab Emirates, and other Gulf states after they accused Qatar’s government of allegedly supporting Iran in June 2017.
At about the same time, then-President Donald Trump had posted his support for the other states’ actions against Qatar: “During my recent trip to the Middle East I stated that there can no longer be funding of Radical Ideology. Leaders pointed to Qatar—look!”
Specifically, federal officials say Allen lobbied then-national security adviser H.R. McMaster to have the White House adopt a more Qatar-friendly position. Allen allegedly wrote in a June 9, 2017, email to McMaster that the Qatari government was“asking for some help” and wanted either the Trump administration or State Department to issue a statement to call on other Gulf countries to act in a more restrained manner, AP reported.
Allen didn’t respond to a request for comment by press time.
The FBI is investigating the president of the Brookings Institution for secretly lobbying for the government of Qatar, court documents show.
FBI agents last month executed a search warrant for the email account of John R. Allen, according to documents released Tuesday. Allen, a retired four-star general, in 2017 allegedly lobbied the Trump White House and Congress on behalf of Qatar, an oil-rich Middle Eastern country that has been accused of sponsoring terrorist groups. According to an FBI affidavit, Allen in a 2020 interview lied to the bureau about the nature of his work and failed to turn over “incriminating” emails to investigators, including one where he asked for a “speakers fee” to meet with Qatari officials to discuss their strategy to influence the Trump administration.
According to the FBI affidavit, investigators have “substantial evidence” that Allen and his colleagues intentionally violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act, a law that requires lobbyists to disclose their work for foreign governments.
Brookings announced Wednesday that it had placed Allen on administrative leave.
The investigation marks a stunning development for Allen and Brookings, one of the world’s most influential think tanks. Brookings has long been accused of operating as a shill for Qatar and other foreign governments that fund the think tank. The embassy of Qatar donates hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to Brookings. The Qatari government in 2014 pledged $14.8 million to Brookings to build a satellite campus in Doha.
Allen, who oversaw NATO forces in Afghanistan, was a senior fellow at Brookings at the time of his alleged work for Qatar. He was tapped in October 2017 to lead the think tank.
Details of Allen’s work have become public through a case against Richard G. Olson, who served as ambassador to Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates under former president Barack Obama. Olson pleaded guilty to making false statements in federal ethics paperwork and to illegal lobbying. Court documents show Olson began cooperating with federal prosecutors on August 31, 2020, “with the express goal of assisting them in bringing criminal charges against General Allen.” Allen and Olson worked on behalf of Qatar with Imaad Zuberi, a Pakistani-American businessman convicted in a separate illegal lobbying scheme.
Allen has not been charged in the case. His spokesman said Allen has “voluntarily cooperated” with federal prosecutors.
Allen, who in 2015 retired from the military, played a major role in shaping the Trump White House’s views toward Qatar during a tense 2017 standoff with neighboring Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates, the FBI alleges. Allen on June 9, 2017, asked then-national security adviser H.R. McMaster to issue a statement calling on the nations to ease a blockade against Qatar. Then-secretary of state Rex Tillerson later that day issued a statement along those lines.
In a meeting on June 10, 2017, Allen allegedly advised the Qataris how to influence the White House, as well as how to “own the narrative” in the United States about the blockade. According to notes Olson took in the meeting, Allen told the Qataris they could “shape” then-president Donald Trump’s opinion through McMaster. He also suggested using Al-Udeid Air Base in Doha as “leverage” to force the administration to take a friendly position toward Qatar. Olson’s notes also show Allen suggested that Qatar use “the full spectrum of info. ops,” including “black and white” operations, to advance its messages in the United States. Black ops commonly refer to illegal hacking activity.
Allen received $20,000 to meet with Qatari officials in Doha. He was pursuing business deals in Qatar at the same time on behalf of Spark Cognition, an artificial intelligence company at which he served as a director.
Update 5:31 p.m.: This piece has been updated to note that Brookings has placed John Allen on leave.
It’s time for a comprehensive fact-check on the origins and purposes of the Ukrainian war.
The underlying issue is the ultimate disposition of the 14 republics apart from Russia that seceded from and produced the dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1991. Russia has never acknowledged the legitimacy of those secessions, and they were accomplished abruptly by the governments and legislatures of the jurisdictions involved, without the formality and legitimacy the break-up of countries requires.
As the Soviet Union fell like a soufflé without a shot being fired (after a Cold War in which there were routine reciprocal threats of nuclear annihilation), many promises were made by the major powers, including Russia and the United States, and none of them was kept. When the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, acceded to the reunification of Germany, then-Secretary of State James Baker assured him that NATO would not advance “one inch” to the east of Germany. The president whom he served, George H. W. Bush, famously gave what Nixon speechwriter William Safire called the “Chicken Kiev speech” to the Ukrainian parliament recommending that it remain in union with Russia, in 1991. All of the major powers, including Russia and the United States, promised Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, that their borders would be respected, in exchange for the renunciation in 1994 of the nuclear weapons that they had inherited from the Soviet Union.
Needless to say, all of these solemn promises were forgotten almost as soon as they were made. In the next several years, NATO accepted as members Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria; and Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, which had been constituent republics of the Soviet Union and had been fully integrated into Russia for more than 200 years prior to the end of World War I in 1918. President George W. Bush advocated the eventual admission to NATO of Ukraine and Georgia in 2008, but this was deferred as Russia invaded two largely Russian-speaking provinces of Georgia and intervened heavy-handedly in Ukrainian affairs. Russian meddling enabled the election of an outright puppet of the Kremlin in Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovich, in 2010, and Western counter-meddling achieved his ouster and replacement by Petro Poroshenko in 2014.
It must be admitted that Ukraine has never shown the slightest aptitude for successful self-government until its inspiring performance following the Russian invasion of Ukraine three months ago. It’s an ethnic hodgepodge of Russians, Lithuanians, Poles, and Tatars, and approximately one-sixth of its population of over 40 million is Russian-speaking.
The likeliest explanation for what brought on the present war is that the on-again, off-again Western enticement of NATO membership for Ukraine collided with the ambition of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Russia’s most purposeful leader since Leonid Brezhnev, to assert Russia’s partial authority over its former fellow republics of the USSR.
It isn’t surprising that Putin thought that this was the time to act: The unimaginable shambles of the American flight from Afghanistan and the complete failure of the United States to enunciate any consistent policy about the former Soviet Union could well have convinced him that this was his chance to begin reassembling the involuntary Confederation of ethnicities put together over more than 250 years by Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, some lesser Czars, and Joseph Stalin.
Many readers will remember the inanity of President George W. Bush’s assertions that he looked Putin in the eye, and the reassuring importance that Putin attaches to his cross. President Barack Obama appeased Putin by withholding the promised anti-missile defenses for Poland and the Czech Republic, as if such defensive weapons could remotely be considered a provocation to Russia. The Pentagon has contributed to the present confusion by taking the immense budget granted it by President Donald Trump and failing to keep pace with Russia and China in hypersonic weapons, in providing adequate antimissile defenses for America’s Nimitz class aircraft carriers, and possibly in some areas of artillery as well. This may explain why the United States and NATO generally have been clearly intimidated by Putin’s nonsensical threats to resort to nuclear weapons.
Because of this saber-rattling, which is much less believable and nerve-racking than the antics of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950s, President Joe Biden allowed the Pentagon to repudiate Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s public pledge to facilitate the transfer of Polish warplanes to Ukraine as “escalatory” (what was the Russian invasion?), and has declined to provide high-altitude anti-aircraft missiles and any Ukrainian capability to reply with offensive weapons that would reach inside Russia as a response to the relentless Russian aerial assault on Ukraine’s civil population.
Apart from the Ukrainian government, which has played its hand, militarily and in public relations terms, brilliantly, almost every conceivable blunder has been made by both sides in the present conflict. It’s inconceivable how Putin and his advisers imagined that they could, with only 150,000 trigger-pullers, overrun a country of over 40 million people defended by a trained army and reserve of half a million well-armed men. Ukraine possesses the possibility of a high manpower advantage unless Russia conducts a general mobilization, which would be extremely unpopular, and hideously expensive for a country with a smaller GDP than Canada. Ukraine has the advantage of having most of its war effort paid for by rich NATO countries; in that sense only is there any truth in the Russian government’s claim, echoed by a number of conservative isolationist American commentators, that Russia is at war with all NATO.
But there’s no truth to the claim of those American commentators that Ukraine is of no strategic value to the West. It’s making a bona fide effort to make democracy work and it’s the subject of a brutal and completely illegal and unprovoked attack. The consequence of permitting Russia to succeed in this criminal enterprise would be to provide convincing evidence that the United States is in inexorable decline and that it’s open season on the crumbling Western alliance as the Kremlin took a giant leap toward undoing the West’s epochal strategic victory in the Cold War.
Readers will painfully recall the total defeatism of Biden and the joint chiefs at the outset of the Ukrainian war, when Kyiv was expected to be occupied within a few days and Biden offered to evacuate president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his family, and made sophomoric comments about the Russian ruble becoming “rubble” and the strength of sanctions, which since they’re being ignored by 155 countries in the world are a gigantic Swiss cheese. When the strength of Ukrainian resistance became clear, Biden spoke of Putin being mad and sick and a “war criminal” and that regime change was necessary, even as he backed down before Putin’s juvenile nuclear threats. There has been no clarification of Western war aims and a large quantum of aid is to some extent a substitute for giving Ukraine the weapons they need to provide the Russians an incentive to end the war.
As I have written since before the start of this war, we have the ability in the West to ensure that Ukraine is recognized as a sovereign state as long as we provide the Russians with some recognition of their traditional status in that country—assumedly the autonomy under Russian suzerainty of the Russian-speaking sections of the country but with an iron-clad Russia-NATO guarantee of the security of Ukraine’s modified borders. Zelenskyy cannot expect more; the geopolitical reality is that Putin doesn’t have to settle for less; American isolationists should be given a brief tutorial in geopolitical realities; the entire senior level of the Pentagon should be sacked; and NATO-U.S. will have to provide the weapons necessary to bring the war to a negotiated end. As long as the Russians can kill and terrorize Ukraine’s civilian population from the air with impunity, the war will go on and the tragedy will become greater.
The Biden administration is illegally withholding information about its bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan, including information that could show senior U.S. officials knew prior to the withdrawal that the Taliban would quickly rise to power and trap scores of Americans, according to a nonpartisan advocacy group focused on U.S. national security issues.
The Center to Advance Security in America (CASA) is petitioning a district court in Washington, D.C., to force the State Department to release communications records related to the 2021 Afghanistan evacuation. This would include information “related [to the] vetting of Afghan refugees, and the number of U.S. citizens and lawful residents that were or were not evacuated from Afghanistan,” according to a copy of the lawsuit obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
The Biden administration has yet to provide the American public with a full accounting of those who were left behind in Afghanistan once the Taliban took over and American troops left the country, including the exact number of U.S. citizens and Afghans who aided the American government during the 20-year war. U.S. officials also have evaded congressional investigations into the matter and misled lawmakers for months about the number of Americans trapped in the country once the Taliban cut off access to airports. The Biden administration has thus far rebuffed congressional efforts and those from outside groups to determine how it is vetting scores of Afghan refugees that have been brought into the United States since the withdrawal, including how these individuals are being screened for terrorism ties.
CASA, which attempted to obtain these documents through Freedom of Information Act requests filed in January 2022, argues that “without litigation, [the State Department] will not produce the requested documents,” which are likely to shed light on the chaos that played out behind closed doors within the administration as the evacuation effort spiraled out of control. The State Department “wrongfully withheld agency records requested by CASA by failing to comply with the statutory time limits for making a determination on these FOIA requests, and by withholding from disclosure records responsive to CASA’s FOIA requests to DOS,” the group maintains.
The group wants the State Department to turn over all of the requested documents and stop stonewalling CASA’s FOIA requests, which have sat in administrative limbo for months. In addition to information about vetting and those trapped in Afghanistan, CASA wants the State Department to provide it with internal communications that could detail the administration’s efforts to downplay security concerns.
“The criminal and terrorist networks in Afghanistan are real and they are extensive,” CASA said in a statement about its lawsuit. “Americans have a right to know the people being brought to our country are not tied to them. Yet the U.S. government continues to hide the records surrounding the vetting process of refugees from the country who were admitted to the United States. Nor is State willing to reveal the real number of Americans left behind or if legitimate warnings were brushed aside.”
During and after the evacuation, Biden administration officials claimed for months that the number of Americans stranded behind enemy lines in the country was around 100. Lawmakers from both parties, however, disputed that number and disclosed that they were in contact with thousands who had trouble getting help from the State Department. To this day, it is unclear how many Americans were left behind and if any remain trapped in the country. Nonprofit organizations say at least 78,000 Afghans who worked with the United States were left behind.
The evacuation, CASA argues in the suit, was “conducted in a country controlled by a hostile government previously overthrown by U.S. forces, [and] was marked by chaos and ambiguity regarding who was, and who was not, being evacuated. That ambiguity extended to, for example, how many [U.S.-aligned Afghans]—at risk due to their support of the U.S.— were evacuated; furthermore, it was unclear whether the U.S. was vetting Afghan evacuees to ensure that they did not pose a national security, or other, risk to the U.S.”
Internal communications between the State Department and other agencies are likely to corroborate reports that the Biden administration ordered evacuation flights to be packed with unvetted Afghans.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R., Mo.), disclosed in October 2021 that an internal Biden administration directive ordered officials to overfill flights. “Total inflow to the U.S. must exceed the number of seats available. Err on the side of excess,” an Aug. 16 email stated. “This guidance provides clear discretion and direction to fill seats and to provide special consideration for women and children when we have seats.”
CASA argues in the suit that the State Department has “wrongfully withheld agency records” related to its screening process and failed “to comply with the statutory time limits” for providing the requested documents.
“Americans witnessed the mismanagement and chaos of the withdrawal from Afghanistan,” CASA director Adam Turner said in a statement on the suit. “Yet the State Department is unwilling to reveal what happened around this humiliating episode—were warnings of Afghanistan’s rapid collapse ignored, how many Americans and others we had committed to evacuate were left behind, were those admitted to the United States properly vetted? Americans deserve the answers to these and other questions. State’s lack of transparency is gravely concerning.”
Press Secretary Jen Psaki leaves the Biden White House today after more than a year overseeing a dishonest operation that helped a partisan and malleable press keep the American public in the dark.
Dishonesty was a calling card at Psaki’s briefings. As President Joe Biden hid from the press in an unprecedented fashion, Psaki asserted, “It’s just not accurate to suggest that he isn’t accessible or doesn’t answer questions.” And while pledging to fight “disinformation,” she used her bully pulpit to spoonfeed it to the national media.
She was dishonest as the Biden administration grappled with the pandemic. She pushed for masks in schools amid a growing consensus that it harmed children. She obfuscated the administration’s school reopening strategy, flip-flopping on how much in-person learning would constitute a “reopening.” In March, Psaki claimed “we don’t know” whether COVID is less dangerous to children, even though there has been plenty of evidence it is.
In recent days, Psaki suggested no one could have predicted inflation would soar to record highs, even as liberal economists warned Biden’s policies would create that exact problem. And she claimed the Biden administration had the situation at the southern border under control amid horrific reports of children trapped in facilities at 1600 percent capacity.
But the worst of her deceits came during the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal. Psaki served as the stonewaller-in-chief and shared blatantly dishonest assessments. She waved away criticisms from her own party, claiming the administration had the situation under control as American evacuees were trapped in enemy territory due to a lack of intel.
When journalists asked how many Americans the Biden administration left behind Taliban lines, Psaki leaned on her trademark condescension, dismissing as preposterous the idea that the administration could keep tabs on every American overseas.
Psaki treated Fox News’s Peter Doocy, one of the few White House reporters to challenge her, with hostility and contempt. She wrote off his legitimate questions, likened him to Russian and Chinese propagandists, and said he sounded like “a stupid son of a bitch.”
DOOCY: “Does the White House think 16 cents off a bbq has more of an impact on people’s lives than gas being a dollar more?@PressSec: “I would say if you don’t like hot dogs, you might not care about the reduction of cost.” pic.twitter.com/WYmxekL5FS
Psaki once argued anyone banned from one social media platform for spreading “misinformation” should be banned from all other platforms. Some would see this as a call for Big Tech censorship. But not the media, who fawned over and adored Psaki. Poynter, the media research group that runs PolitiFact, called her “one of the best press secretaries ever.” Our rating: pants on fire.
In her penultimate briefing, Psaki slammed as a “conspiracy theory” the Washington Free Beacon‘s report that the Biden administration was funding a $30 million harm-reduction program that will fund the distribution of free crack pipes in “safe-smoking kits.” With one quip, Psaki insulted a journalist and dismissed deeply sourced reporting that exposed inconvenient facts.
In that respect, her outburst serves as a perfect capstone to her tenure—one that was condescending and dishonest, hostile to the truth and those seeking it.
As the U.S. government diverts military equipment and humanitarian aid to Ukraine, the famine in Afghanistan has become so dire that some people are engaging in organ harvesting and human trafficking to survive, according to the latest quarterly report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR).
The number of people in need of humanitarian assistance increased to 24.4 million this year from 18.4 million a year ago, the April 30 SIGAR report stated.
The United Nations declared a humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan last December. The SIGAR report concurred, adding that the crisis is worsening.
“NGOs have reported some families resorting to selling kidneys or other organs, and even selling their children to survive,” SIGAR said. “Media reports indicate that organ sales have become particularly widespread in Afghanistan, with the price of a human kidney dropping by over half due to high supply since the Taliban seized power.”
The SIGAR report attributed some of the increase in starvation to a historically severe drought.
“The onset of spring traditionally brings relief from food shortages; however, with Afghanistan in the grips of the worst drought in three decades, below-average winter precipitation means the spring harvest is unlikely to improve food security for vulnerable families,” the report said.
SIGAR also partly attributed the war in Ukraine to the worsening crisis in Afghanistan.
“The spillover effects of the war in Ukraine threaten to worsen the crisis in Afghanistan, as food and fuel prices surge and supply chains falter,” the report said. “These disruptions drove a 9-percent increase in the price of fuel in the second week of March alone.”
Additionally, the report said that some humanitarian assistance is being sent to Ukraine instead of Afghanistan.
SIGAR noted that the United Nations requested international donors representing 41 countries to contribute $4.4 billion to Afghanistan, but the U.N. received only $2.44 billion—which included a $204 million pledge from the United States.
“While it is not unusual for donor pledges to fall short of humanitarian appeals, Western officials noted that donor interest at this conference may have been diverted by the war in Ukraine and dampened by distaste for the Taliban’s increasing repression,” the report said.
SIGAR further reported that the Pentagon is taking military equipment initially intended for Afghanistan and rerouting it to Ukraine.
The report said the Department of Defense (DOD) exercised its “dispositional authority” last December to reappropriate equipment that had belonged to the now-defunct Afghan security force, which collapsed last August as the U.S. military withdrew from the country.
In January, the Pentagon developed plans to transfer five former Afghan Mi-17 helicopters that had been undergoing maintenance in Ukraine to the Ukrainian government, the SIGAR report said. Ukraine’s government accepted the transfer in March, the report said.
Additionally, the report said the Biden administration promised last month to send Ukraine 11 additional helicopters originally intended for Afghanistan.
“DOD also transferred 16 million rounds of varied nonstandard munitions, originally procured for Afghanistan, to Ukraine,” the report said.
The former ambassador to Afghanistan under President Barack Obama testified virtually during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Wednesday, calling President Joe Biden’s military withdrawal from the country a “stain” on our national honor.
Ryan Crocker now serves as a non-resident senior fellow of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
“We have accrued a great debt there that extends also to the thousands of Afghans who helped us in their mission. The [special immigrant visa] process has let them down,” Crocker testified.
Ryan Crocker, ambassador to Afghanistan under Obama, calls Biden’s disastrous troop withdrawal “a stain…on our national honor.” pic.twitter.com/cv9JTDoBi0
“A member of the advisory committee for a group called No One Left Behind that has for years sought to move interpreters to safety [said] we left thousands behind. And that I think is a stain, again, on our national honor,” he added.
“So we need to figure out ways to go ahead. It won’t be easy. We gave up the leverage we had. We cannot give up the fight.”
“The list of damage to our national security and our values is long. We have allowed the Taliban and al-Qaida to reunite. The threat this poses to our own security is not theoretical — 9/11 actually happened, brought to us from Afghanistan by these same actors,” he wrote.
“At the same time, our complete withdrawal has degraded our intelligence capabilities. The strike in Kabul on what was supposed to be an Islamic State target but wasn’t foreshadows the future,” he added.
Crocker also said Afghan women and girls will “pay the price” for America’s failures in Afghanistan.
“We urged Afghan women and girls to step forward, into parliament, private enterprise, the classroom and the military. They did. And now they will pay the price for our lack of strategic patience,” he said.
“That has already started. Afghan interpreters and others provided direct assistance to our military and civilian personnel. They were critical to our efforts, and put their lives and those of their families at risk by working with us. … We left thousands behind.”
The former ambassador concluded with a shocking story that encapsulated the changes in Afghanistan under the Taliban.
“One of the projects that had the greatest impact in Afghanistan cost the least amount of money. It was the reconstruction of Ghazi Stadium in Kabul to FIFA standards, meaning that it could host World Cup matches,” he said. “For a soccer mad country, this was huge. But there was a deeper meaning.”
The stadium is now used by the Taliban to “carry out public punishments after Friday prayers, including beheadings and the stoning of women.”
Writing for RealClearPolitics, Professor Andrew E. Busch of Claremont McKenna College finds that “one reason for Americans’ increasing political discomfort—the feeling that politics has become a blood sport in which traditional protections and safety nets are no longer present—is that the nonpartisan insulation protecting the rule of law and consent of the governed has frayed. There is a broad pattern of offices that require political neutrality being converted into offices that are genuinely partisan in their operation.”
What, I wonder, was his first clue?
Understandably, Busch concentrates on the most recent examples of this creeping partisanship in places that are supposed to be non-partisan, since the Biden administration represents a quantum leap in the politicization of everything, but especially of the law.
Attorney General Merrick Garland, he writes, “has already used the Justice Department to advance his own party’s version of the stolen-election story by suing to stop state legislative efforts to enhance ballot security, then threatening to sic the FBI on parents who complain to their local school boards about left-wing political indoctrination in the classroom.”
By contrast, Busch praises the non-partisan spirit of former Attorney General William Barr for resigning rather than supporting President Trump’s demand for a thorough investigation of election irregularities.
But then he can’t help noticing the concerted legal efforts by Democratic Attorneys General in swing states last year to change voting laws in order to create those irregularities—and, with them, the opportunities for cheating.
You can see why Busch wants to be even-handed and pretend that the partisan takeover of supposedly non-partisan institutions is coming from both sides, but he can’t quite obscure the fact that the overwhelmingly majority of these efforts have been made—and successfully made, thanks to the compliant media—on behalf of Democrats.
There is nothing like a Republican equivalent, for example, of the partisan takeover of the FBI under James Comey. “The course of the Russia investigation,” writes Busch, “complete with the obvious biases of Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, and Lisa Page, implied that the bureau had picked sides.”
Implied? Can there be any doubt about which side these and others in the bureau were on? Or which side Robert Mueller and his team were on? If there were any doubt about it, it must have been dispelled by the recent revelations, and indictments, coming out of the John Durham investigation.
Busch might also have mentioned the disparity in federal law-enforcement’s treatment of the Capitol rioters of Jan. 6 as constituting an “insurrection” and its almost complete lack of interest in the hundreds of riots, the billions of dollars in property damage and the many deaths that took place around the country last summer.
You don’t have to be particularly good at spotting “implied” biases to tell that the difference between the two was that the first was in support of Donald Trump, the others opposed to him. And, violently, opposed to the police. But why would we expect the federal police, ostensibly there to uphold the rule of law, to care about that?
Also, as I pointed out last summer in these pages, General Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the nation’s armed forces, traditionally our number one non-partisan institution, along with the judiciary, testified before Congress on behalf of the Democratic talking point by asserting on the basis of zero evidence that the Capitol riot was motivated by “white rage.”
Milley is also charged with weeding out of the services those identified by the extreme left as members of the “extremist right.”
But the perspicacious could have picked up hints of the erosion of the “nonpartisan insulation” of key institutions long before 2016.
The politicization of the judiciary, I would argue, began at least as far back as 1987 when a certain Joseph R. Biden, newly appointed chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, put the kibosh on President Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court for transparently political reasons.
Chief Justice John Roberts, who once said of his fellow judges that “we don’t work as Democrats or Republicans,” has gone to heroic lengths to keep up the pretense of non-partisanship in the judiciary, but then he is also the man who, apparently without irony, once called the U.S. Senate “the world’s greatest deliberative body.”
The politicization of the armed services began even earlier. As the late Colin Powell cheerfully put it in 2007, presumably with reference to his own military career, which started in the Vietnam era, “Anybody who becomes a senior officer had better have some political instincts or you’re going to get ground up. We are a political nation. It is not a dirty word.”
What he meant to say, perhaps, was that it is only a dirty word when applied to constitutionally non-political institutions. Like the military.
I understand that he was talking about the internal politics that are inevitable in any large organization, but in the military, whose most senior officers are appointed by civilian (and political) authority, those politics are always bound up with the other kind.
Under President George W. Bush we learned, at least if we were paying attention, of the politicization of the CIA, which regularly briefed the media (anonymously, of course) against their ostensible commander-in-chief.
Under President Barack Obama we learned, even if we weren’t paying much attention, of the politicization of the Department of Justice and the IRS.
And, as everyone now knows, under President Donald Trump we learned of the politicization not only of the FBI and (again) the Justice Department but also of the State Department. All three, while ostensibly serving the President, were actually undermining him.
It should not be necessary to point out that all of these encroachments of the political onto officially non-political territory have been in one direction and one direction only—leftwards. It’s as if there were some law of political inertia analogous to Robert Conquest’s Second Law of Politics: “Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.”
Maybe this is what the progressives mean by saying that they are “on the right side of history,” If so, it means that the rest of us, who still treasure what we think is our right to be non-political, must be on the wrong side of history.
How much longer can this go on? As we head into the second year of the President Joe Biden “administration,” with the country in a shambles and heading no place good but full speed ahead, it’s time for all real Americans to take stock of our situation and formulate an emergency plan, with no time to spare.
Back in March, I wrote in these pages: “Biden’s Presidency Seems Ready to End.” In fact, Biden’s sham presidency never really began and whatever there was to it is now long over.
But then Brandon—excuse me! Biden!—isn’t really the president, simply the President in Name Only. Sure, he dutifully signs whatever executive order—increasingly authoritarian and blatantly unconstitutional—is put under his nose, which, at least until the next election, has the force of law until a federal court says otherwise. Even should a court block its implementation, as happened over the weekend with the illegal vaccine mandate being imposed on private industries by the Nixon-era excrescence of OSHA, the White House’s advice is to ignore it.
Biden also makes pro forma appearances on the international stage, including a mysteriously long audience with the former Cardinal Bergoglio (who’s every bit as much a pope as Biden is a president) that instantly gave rise to embarrassing rumors. And from time to time he even makes the short walk from West Wing to the Old Executive Office Building in order to stage something for the cameras in a studio-set version of the Oval Office.
But everybody in Washington knows the puppet presidency has no agency of its own, but is instead controlled from Kalorama by Barack Obama and his minions, including Ron Klain, who now serves as Biden’s chief of staff.
Meanwhile, the country he ostensibly leads is going to hell. We’ve gone from energy independence to passing the gasoline begging bowl, even as the forces behind Biden are busy choking off the domestic energy industry. Perhaps you’ve noticed the effects of this malicious policy at the gas pump.
Our long-neglected infrastructure, which is properly defined as roads, bridges, and buildings, remains a national disgrace, and the recent passage of a pork-laden $1.2 trillion “infrastructure” bill—with turncoat Republican help—not only won’t help a bit but will be paid for with imaginary money.
Overseas, right in Biden’s vaunted “foreign policy” wheelhouse, the Chinese are testing advanced missiles and expanding their fleet of aircraft carriers while what’s left of our Defense Department celebrates awarding four stars to a man in a skirt and hailing him as a “historic” female admiral.
A Navy sub’s trio of commanders was recently cashiered when the USS Connecticut struck an underseas mountain its crack officer corps somehow didn’t notice, while in San Diego the amphibious assault ship, Bonhomme Richard, was destroyed by an arsonist and a crew too incompetent to put out the blaze.
Oh yes, and the Marines recently got their tails kicked by the British in a desert-warfare exercise at their base at Twenty-Nine Palms in southern California. (The woke Marine Corps, of course, denies it.)
But the void in the White House is really the least of our problems, most of which we have brought upon ourselves. You get what you vote for and the American people, in rejecting Donald Trump, have voted for anarchy. As former New York City mayor Ed Koch said after being defeated for re-election in 1989, “the people have spoken, and they must be punished.”
Punishment is coming from every angle, principally from the criminal organization masquerading as a political party known as the Democrats. We now know that the vindictive but cunning loser Hillary Clinton set in motion the entire “Russian collusion”—in part with the collaboration of the Russophile leftist think tank, the Brookings Institution, and in part through the medium of a British spy channeling deliberate Soviet-style disinformation.
From the jump, it was obvious that the “Steele dossier” was a farrago of standard ex-KGB dirty tricks—in Russia and in Eastern Europe I’d seen this movie a dozen times—and I said so publicly at the time, practically from the day Buzzfeed published the “dossier.”
The American media deliberately weaponized this disinformation—which they knew at the time was false—against the lawfully elected president of the United States and crippled his presidency over it. And then they awarded themselves Pulitzer Prizes for their “reporting” of something that never happened.
Par for the course for the American version of Pravda. If you don’t think the New York Times hasn’t been in love with its Russian socialist confreres—and often actually been in bed with the KGB, its forebears, and its descendants—for the bulk of the 20th century, you need to wake up. Until the power of the Times is broken, the American Republic-as-founded will never have a moment’s peace.
But the weaponization didn’t and doesn’t stop there. “Former” members of the intelligence community now lie brazenly and openly on some of the “news channels,” such as CNN: the spooks are out of the shadows and in your living room.
The FBI is now investigating the alleged theft of Joe Biden’s daughter’s diary—a document that if genuine offers even more repellent insights into this stunningly dysfunctional family. How this is a federal matter is beyond me, unless the FBI has now become the Biden family’s private police force with a mandate to suppress bad news about the family. And if you don’t believe me, ask Hunter Biden.
Americans, quite properly, sense there’s something “off” about Biden and his crew, which is why his approval ratings continue to crater. But as long as the radical Left holds the media high ground, it’s hard for most people not obsessed by politics to grasp just how malignant these people are. For decades, they’ve made no bones about their desire to replace the United States of the founding with something “progressive.”
They’ve overtly collaborated with the Soviets, infiltrated the civil-rights movement, absorbed the legacy media, corrupted the lawmakers, overpowered academe, seized hold of the education of our children and now, in their moment of triumph, are forcing us to live in a fantasy world of their own psycho-sexual device, while their pet shrinks tell us that we’re the crazy bigots, via the media.
In the wake of the accelerated withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan in September, Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-Mont.) introduced the Secure America Act on Oct. 13 to stop Afghan refugees from being granted “parole status” into the United States with “zero vetting whatsoever.”
In an interview with NTD’s “Capitol Report,” Rosendale said the Biden administration’s accelerated withdrawal from Afghanistan has in fact created “an excuse to bring hundreds of thousands of refugees” into the United States.
In response, the Secure America Act was introduced to let Congress “reclaim authority to how many refugees will come into our country on any given year,” he said.
Furthermore, if refugees are to be sent to specific states, the governor of such a state will direct “Homeland Security and the FBI to create a good, new, thorough vetting system.”
Under the new act, the executive branch will no longer be able to grant refugees entry and the ability to “travel freely” within the country with “zero vetting.”
Rosendale said the new bill ensures “anyone who comes in is vetted for criminal activity.”
The vetting process will also involve checking that incoming refugees do not have “deeply held beliefs or practices that are at odds with our Constitution.”
“That way, we can be assured that they’re going to embrace our culture and our way of life and and contribute to the American dream,” said Rosendale.
Rep. Yvette Herrell (R-N.M.) also warned of a “flawed” Afghan refugee vetting process in an interview with Fox News on Oct. 7.
“We already know there’s weakness in the vetting process and the screenings, and we want to make sure as this continues, we can make sure the American people can feel safe and secure about the entire process,” Herrell said.
Herrell gave the interview shortly after visiting Fort Bliss, Texas, where a female soldier reported being attacked by Afghan refugees.
“We can confirm a female service member supporting Operation Allies Welcome reported being assaulted on Sept. 19 by a small group of male evacuees at the Doña Ana Complex in New Mexico,” Lt. Col. Allie Payne, director of public affairs for Fort Bliss and the 1st Armored Division, told ABC7.
“We take the allegation seriously and appropriately referred the matter to the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” Payne added.
While Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in early September confirmed that people on U.S. watch lists were among the tens of thousands of people airlifted out of Kabul, he denied any allegations of ISIS members making it into the country as Afghan refugees.
“We have a multilayered, multiagency screening and vetting process to make sure that doesn’t happen,” Mayorkas said, according to the The Washington Times.
An official within the Biden administration stated during a Sept. 14 briefing that the government has put in measures to “enhance the screening and vetting operations” without compromising national security.
“The U.S. government’s work includes ensuring evacuees are thoroughly and appropriately vetted prior to arrival in the U.S.,” the official said. “We’ve also made sure that evacuees are thoroughly screened at ports of entry and tested for COVID upon arrival, with less than a 1 percent positive rate thus far.”
Finally!! Someone else seconds my view of the current administration: Idiocracy, the movie, embodied!! [US Patriot]
The heroic sacrifices of U.S. soldiers are being shelved in an effort to erase our humiliating defeat in Afghanistan — a defeat caused by politicians and generals, not the soldiers themselves.
An enormous collection of Afghanistan War footage has been removed from the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service by the Pentagon, according to a report in Task and Purpose. More than 120,000 photos and 17,000 videos have been removed from the DVIDS official record.
Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby said the images that were archived, so Afghans who helped the U.S. in the war will not be put in danger. The problem? A large number of the archived images do not show any Afghan soldiers or civilians.
If you feel like you’re living in “Idiocracy,” you’re not alone.
A significant percent of the archived images are portraits of U.S. service members on patrol and in combat.
In one example, photos showing U.S. Army soldiers in the Kandahar province are no longer on the DVIDS, though they remain in outlets such as the Los Angeles Times. A significant number of the archived images can still be found online.
The DVIDS houses a prodigious amount of public domain material available to the public and the press. It is the place reporters, historians and other interested parties go to to help them construct reliable narratives concerning the Afghan war.
Is the Biden administration attempting to create a reality based on false narratives?
The Taliban, since their victory in August, has targeted and brutalized Afghans, from those who participated in the former government, to female judges to the families of Afghans who worked for the U.S. government. There are many in Afghanistan facing grave danger to this day.
The Defense Department began archiving the imagery in August and September as it was working to get Afghans out of the country, according to Kirby. Are they so foolish as to believe that most if not all relevant DVIDS images of men and women who helped the U.S. in the war had previously been downloaded and stored elsewhere?
And what about all the archived images of U.S. Service members, many of them presumably dead or severely wounded in the war, that have compromised a total of zero Afghan soldiers or civilians? Why are they now missing from the DVIDS?
Kirby claimed his decision was not prompted by a specific security threat but said there was ample reason for the move. He also claimed the archived images will be republished at the “right time.” He didn’t give a hint as to when.
No specific threat? No timeline to republish? Is this just one more colossal blunder of a incredibly inept administration?
Many people wonder if the abrupt and disastrous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan was due to gross negligence. How about erasing American soldiers from the official historical record in an attempt to rewrite a history more favorable to the administration? Is this gross negligence or is it hubris?
It’s not wise to attempt to fool reality by creating false narratives, and there’s far too much of it going on these days. Reality always wins in the end. Always. Count on it.
The Biden administration’s reckless withdrawal from Afghanistan will never be forgotten, no matter what lengths they may go too to erase it.
Men are not gods who can create reality to their liking. To try to do so is an act of hubris.
In a representative republic, elected officials must negotiate reality to the best of their ability, not for themselves, but in the best interest of their constituents.
The U.S. troops who served bravely and with honor in Afghanistan were and are American citizens. They will not be forgotten.
The chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan seems to be the gift that just keeps on giving.
In the midst of the destruction and Taliban takeover, it is actually the Islamic State that is now benefiting greatly from President Joe Biden’s poor planning, and the U.S. is the loser in the grand scheme of it all.
During all the years that the U.S. was present in the country, they were training elite Afghan military units. Now, some of those U.S.-trained officers are joining the Islamic State-Khorasan in defiance of the Taliban.
The Taliban and ISIS-K are bitter enemies, and the war between them in Afghanistan has never ceased. In fact, when the Taliban took over the country, the fighting increased as the groups began targeting each other’s fighters and leaders. But now, ISIS-K could gain the upper hand as they gain elite Afghan officers.
According to an exclusive report from The Wall Street Journal, the group of Afghan defectors to ISIS-K is still small but may be growing.
“Importantly, these new recruits bring to Islamic State critical expertise in intelligence-gathering and warfare techniques, potentially strengthening the extremist organization’s ability to contest Taliban supremacy,” the WSJ reported.
Various Afghan officials told the paper of previous members of the Afghan military and intelligence branches who disappeared and then reappeared as fighters for the Islamic State.
“In some areas, ISIS has become very attractive,” said Rahmatullah Nabil, a former head of Afghanistan’s spy agency, the National Directorate of Security.
Though ISIS-K may appall many, it does make sense that Afghan officers would be joining its ranks. After years of working with Americans to stave off the Taliban, it’s logical that they would then join the only real organized resistance to the Taliban.
Should the U.S. work with the Taliban to fight ISIS-K?
No matter what else ISIS-K is embroiled in or planning, it has set itself up as the main opponent of the Taliban.
Besides just being the resistance to the Taliban, ISIS-K could also provide protection to Afghan officers who previously were allied with the United States. The Taliban promised amnesty to those who worked with Americans, but there seems to be little trust in this promise.
“Hundreds of thousands of former Afghan republic intelligence officers, soldiers and police personnel are unemployed and afraid for their lives despite pledges of amnesty from the Taliban,” The Wall Street Journal reported.
Along with protection from the Taliban, the WSJ also heard reports that ISIS-K is offering significant compensation to new members in Afghanistan.
This whole development is deeply concerning to the U.S., and rightly so. Not only has the government inadvertently funded ISIS-K terrorism as Afghan officers they trained are joining the organization, but the terror of the Islamic State will eventually be directed at America. In a way, the U.S. may have funded an attack against itself.
While ISIS-K may not have the ability to launch an attack on the U.S. immediately, senior Pentagon official Colin Kahl said recently, “We could see ISIS-K generate that capability in somewhere between six or 12 months,” CNN reported.
Originally, it might have been assumed that the Taliban would be able to curb ISIS-K, but Kahl clarified that, though the Taliban are highly motivated to beat down the Islamic State, “their ability to do so, I think, is to be determined,” according to Middle Eastern news site Gandhara.
ISIS-K seems to be showcasing its new surge of power and has already been responsible for several bombings in Afghanistan just in the last few weeks, Human Rights Watch reported.
So it is certainly not helping that now, U.S. trained Afghan officers are strengthening ISIS-K against the Taliban.
In this violent fight between the Taliban and ISIS-K, the U.S. is caught in the middle with hostility coming from both sides. There are simply no winners in this triangle of conflict, and the Biden administration’s decision to withdraw American troops simply brought everything to a head.
Former President Donald Trump released a statement Monday blasting President Joe Biden over his failures in Afghanistan and beyond, claiming world leaders are “laughing at Biden.”
The statement was released following videos of Biden apparently falling asleep during Monday’s COP26 conference in Scotland and later apologizing to world leaders over America leaving the Paris Accord, blaming Trump for “putting us behind the eight ball.”
“It is very interesting that Afghanistan, and our horrible and incompetent withdrawal, losing soldiers and leaving $Billions of military equipment, was when people really began to realize how horrible this Socialism/Communism direction for America has become,” Trump said.
NEW!
“It is very interesting that Afghanistan, and our horrible and incompetent withdrawal, losing soldiers and leaving $Billions of military equipment, was when people really began to realize how horrible this Socialism/Communism direction for America has become… pic.twitter.com/NgFjuHxwT7
Trump also said Biden is being laughed at by world leaders during his time in Europe.
“We have never been thought of so poorly as we are right now, including the fact that the leaders of foreign countries, all of whom are at the top of their game, are laughing at Biden as he makes the rounds in Europe,” the former president said.
“So low and so bad for America,” Trump added. “There has never been a time like it!”
“There has never been a time like it!” – President Donald J. Trump
Biden was criticized across social media after apparently falling asleep during the COP26 Climate Summit opening speeches, closing his eyes at one point for approximately 20 seconds.
Biden traveled to the United Nations climate conference on Monday to support a new legislative framework destined to become the largest in America’s history to address climate change.
As the speaker said, “You are in a position of extraordinary power,” Biden’s eyes closed, with his arms folded while sitting upright in a chair among other attendees.
After the video plays for almost a full minute, an assistant appears at the president’s side to wake him with what was apparently an important message. The speech then ends with Biden and the audience applauding.
President Joe Biden’s administration is withholding information about Afghanistan, Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) John Sopko said during a speech on Friday.
As an example, Sopko said, the Department of Defense (DoD) withheld information on the performance of Afghan security forces, including unit strength, training deficiencies, and casualty data, or, “in essence, nearly all the information you needed to know to determine whether the Afghan security forces were a real fighting force or a house of cards waiting to fall.”
“In light of recent events, it is not surprising that the Afghan government, and likely some in DoD, wanted to keep that information under lock and key,” he added.
Sopko said he was forced to relegate the information into classified appendices of a recent report his office released detailing flaws in the United States’ 20-year war in Afghanistan.
“This information almost certainly would have benefited Congress and the public in assessing whether progress was being made in Afghanistan and, more importantly, whether we should have ended our efforts there earlier,” he said.
“DoD is well aware of the Special Investigator for Afghanistan Reconstruction’s recent report. Its assertions that DoD deliberately withheld information on the Afghan Security Forces lacks context as the department took significant effort to ensure that the availability of data on Afghan forces was treated similarly to how DOD would manage such data on U.S. forces,” Major. Rob Lodewick, a Pentagon spokesman, told The Epoch Times in an email.
The Pentagon maintains that the Afghan government wanted to classify the data and that it recommended against it but “abided by the decision of the original classification authority.” Overall, the department says it has cooperated with SIGAR since the office was created by Congress.
The State Department, meanwhile, wrote to Sopko shortly after U.S.-backed Afghan forces were routed by the Taliban terrorist group as the U.S. moved to fully withdraw from the country.
“Shortly after the fall of Kabul, the State Department wrote to me and other oversight agencies requesting to ‘temporarily suspend access’ to all ‘audit, inspection, and financial audit … reports’ on our website because the Department was afraid that information included in those reports could put Afghan allies at risk,” Sopko said.
While the watchdog believes Afghans at risk should be protected, the State Department was never able to describe any specific threats nor could they explain how removing the reports “could possibly protect anyone since many were years old and already extensively disseminated worldwide.”
Sopko complied reluctantly with the request but became more puzzled when the agency reached out asking for redacting roughly 2,400 items in the reports, including the name of former Afghan President Ashraf Ghani. A review found all but four requests “without merit.”
“In my opinion, the full picture of what happened in August—and all the warning signs that could have predicted the outcome—will only be revealed if the information that the Departments of Defense and State have already restricted from public release is made available,” said Sopko.
The speech was delivered to a conference in Arlington, Virginia.
A State Department spokesperson said in an email that the agency has worked to address challenges SIGAR identified in its report and recognizes the importance of the watchdog’s work.
“Due to safety and security concerns regarding our ongoing evacuation efforts, we requested some reports be temporarily removed to redact identifying information from public records and protect the identities of Afghans and Afghan partner organizations. SIGAR has the authority to restore the reports when it deems appropriate,” the spokesperson said.
“To protect the identities of Afghans and Afghan implementing partner organizations, the Department of State has worked to remove identifying information from multiple public records. The identifying information are the only details intended to be shielded. Because of the volume of information, some entities temporarily removed reports or full datasets,” they added.
Biden’s promises to get Americans out of Afghanistan are proving to be empty lies. Now, a disabled American citizen from Liberty, Kentucky, is finding this out the hard way.
“Any American who wants to come home, we will get you home,” Biden said back in August, according to NPR.
Abdul Samad and his family are desperately wanting to come home, but they can’t. They are in extreme danger, but due to the incompetence that led the American withdrawal, the Samad family is having to hide and beg the American government to bring them home.
Samad is originally from Afghanistan, but after losing his hands and left eye in a landmine explosion when he was a teenager, he came to the United States. The founders of Galilean Children’s Home took Samad in, and he became a citizen, building a life in Kentucky.
In August, however, Samad, along with his wife, four children, and mother-in-law, went back to Afghanistan to visit a sick relative. Then devastation struck when the American troops suddenly withdrew and left Samad behind. Samad’s wife and children are also American citizens, and his mother-in-law has a green card.
“I’m really confused because I don’t know what to do because the airport is closed and the border with Pakistan is closed. So I don’t know how to get out,” Samad told Lex18 News.
It’s been nearly two weeks since Samad has heard from the American embassy. He has twice filled out the re-repatriation request form they asked for, but still has no way out. He has kept his family on the move continually, and they are afraid to sleep in the same place.
“I’ve been moving with family members from place to place to stay with them, so people will not notice we are from the United States,” Samad said.
Should we still have troop in Afghanistan?
The government has miserably failed their own citizens and has put them in harm’s way.
“We are in a very helpless situation because we cannot really say much and we cannot do much unless we found a way that we can really get out safely,” Samad said.
Sadly, Samad’s story of helplessness is just one more piece of incriminating evidence against Biden’s absolute failure in Afghanistan.
Thanks to Biden’s hasty decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, Samad is now having to hide from the Taliban. Just about two months ago he and his family were peacefully living in Kentucky; now, they are suffering for Biden’s foolishness. It is the height of injustice, and Biden is to blame.
Biden’s ample lip-service to the idea of American safety has done nothing.
“The United States stands by its commitment that we’ve made to these people,” Biden said, according to NPR.
Then why is Samad stranded?
When people were hanging from plane wings and nearly killing each other to get on the leaving American planes, Biden acted like it was just business as usual.
“There’s no way we would have been able to leave Afghanistan without there being some of what you’re seeing now,” he said, CNBC reported.
Of course withdrawals are messy. But that doesn’t mean it’s simply fine to ignore the pleas of citizens that are trapped. Biden made promises.
But now Samad is hiding helplessly, and his pleas seem to be falling on deaf ears.
Biden should be utterly appalled and sick that he has done this to Samad — and so many other American citizens.
Take some refugees, please, the Biden administration is now asking veterans and private groups.
With about 55,600 Afghan refugees currently parked at military bases, the Biden administration wants to leapfrog the existing system of refugee resettlement agencies, according to CNN.
It wants to create sponsorship circles of veterans and others who will provide money for refugees to have housing, furniture, silverware and a variety of other expenses — as well as develop a resettlement plan for each refugee.
To hurry up the process, the Biden administration also wants to place refugees beyond the former 100-mile limit from a resettlement office.
Former Democratic Delaware Gov. Jack Markell, who is leading the effort to resettle Afghan refugees, gushed about the plan.
“This is just an amazing opportunity to, frankly, do what our veterans have been asking us to do, which is provide a safe and dignified welcome to Afghans who served by our side in Afghanistan, and who now want to build their own lives here,” he said.
As the Biden administration pushes to resettle those who arrived this summer as fast as possible, Republican Rep. Yvette Herrell of New Mexico said thorough vetting is important, according to KECI-TV.
Herrell has sought information in an assault that took place at Fort Bliss in which refugees are accused of assaulting a female soldier and claims she has been stonewalled.
The incident has led her to call for stronger vetting before Afghan evacuees are plunked down across the country.
Should cities have a say on whether or not migrants will be moved there?
“The data and the vetting is only as good as what you can compare it to. So were they truly able to compare criminal backgrounds, security backgrounds?” she said. “What’s really sad is we already know Afghans made it to the nation who had been deported by Department of Homeland Security earlier on.”
“I think it behooves us to at least leave these Afghan nationals in other nations until we can do a complete analysis and vetting process on each and every one of them, guaranteeing the American people that we do know their criminal background, that they can pass security background checks, that they are actually Special Immigrant Passport Holders,” she continued.
“[W]e just don’t know who’s coming in, and we really don’t have faith in this vetting process, because we know that they have already made mistakes,” Herrell said.
Refugee agencies, which in the past have been funded by splitting the resettlement fee of $2,275 the federal government pays out, said they are just too impoverished to do much.
“We just didn’t have the capacity after the beating we took under the Trump administration,” said Mark Hetfield, president and CEO of HIAS, a refugee resettlement agency, according to CNN. “Necessity is the mother of invention. This is the outcome of that.”
Community Sponsorship Hub, part of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, Inc., is trying to find places to stash refugees.
“It’s providing this opportunity for communities that said they want to stand up, to stand up. That’s the point. It’s to maximize this outpouring of desire to welcome,” said Danielle Grigsby, co-founder and director of external affairs at Community Sponsorship Hub.
Grigsby said sponsors can bring refugees into their homes temporarily as well.
“The housing issue is a challenging one for sure. Every American knows that housing is expensive and in short supply,” Markell said.
Republican and Democrat presidents alike typically get criticized for the amount of time they spend on vacation or the golf course.
Yet say what you will about Presidents Barak Obama and Donald Trump, if they were ever asked publicly about why they hadn’t made a visit to the scene of say, a mass humanitarian crisis of their own making, there was good chance they would have had a lightning-quick answer that could pass for something resembling a valid excuse.
Not so much for President Joe Biden, bless his heart.
No, even when pressed on his failings by CNN’s kid gloves, he couldn’t come up with a reason why he hasn’t made the short trip down south to visit the border where there is, in fact, a mass humanitarian crisis of his own making. He could only come up with the hollow excuse that he’s been “busy.”
Thursday night’s town hall with Anderson Cooper was the predictable fiasco for the awkwardly incoherent Biden, who struggled with a number of issues, such as completing sentences, remembering what he was doing, and standing like a normal human being.
Meanwhile, when Biden was asked about whether he has plans to visit the southern border, which has been experiencing an influx of migrants throughout the whole of his presidency, the president, unsurprisingly, floundered.
“I’ve been there before, I haven’t, I mean, uh, I know it well,” he articulately began.
“I guess I should go down,” he continued (ya think?), “but the whole point of it is I haven’t had a whole hell of a lot of time to get down.”
“I’ve been spending time going around looking at the $900 billion damage done by hurricanes and floods and weather and traveling around the world,” he attempted.
BIDEN ON THE BORDER: “I guess I should go down, but the whole point of it is I haven’t had a whole hell of a lot of time to get down. I’ve been spending time going around looking at the $900 billion damage done by hurricanes and floods and weather and traveling around the world.” pic.twitter.com/mgWLxvf36d
“Now my wife Jill has been down,” Biden continued, brightening. He then gave a general description of Dr. Jill Biden’s visit to the border. FLOTUS saves the day yet again.
Ironically, Biden continued to claim that “you’re not seeing kids with what look like tarps over them,” a rather ironic possible reference to the notorious “kids in cages” photo that lit social media aflame back in 2018, which turned out to have been taken during the Obama — not Trump — administration.
That is, the administration in which Biden served as Vice President.
Is Biden blatantly lying about how he spends his time?
“But there’s much more to be done,” he continued, circling back to the whole reason that he was being asked about the dang border in the first place. Yes, thank you, Mr. President, that’s sort of what the country is looking to you for, and why the guy with the microphone on the stage with the bright lights was asking you about when you’re going to visit said border.
This is, in short, pathetic. A flight to El Paso, Texas, from Washington, D.C., is roughly four hours — not even half a day.
It would take Biden, like, one single day to travel down to a border town, make some comments with local politicians whose name he’d assuredly forget, visit a shelter, talk to reporters for the five seconds his handlers give him to field questions and go home.
He’s the President of the United States, and the crisis is mounting to the point that the mainstream media doesn’t even seem to be willing to cover for him anymore, even with all their fabricated outrage over border agents “whipping” migrants.
Biden doesn’t even have a smart-sounding reason for why he’s supposedly been so busy.
He might have cited his work on the economy, the ongoing negotiations over his Build Back Better agenda or the crisis in Afghanistan, of course, but in perhaps one of the few instances of quick thinking that Biden displayed during the town hall, Biden cited the only examples of work he’s been doing that didn’t draw to mind even more failings on his part.
Here’s the thing: Biden has puttered around the country a bit and has taken exactly one whole entire trip abroad to attend a meeting of the G7 nations in the United Kingdom — where he said he didn’t want to go home when he arrived, mind you — but he’s taken 25 trips to his home in Delaware since taking office.
This is in addition to several vacations.
And yet we’re supposed to believe he’s just entirely too busy to virtue signal interest in the raging border crisis?
According to a Wikipedia list of all of his presidential trips, President Biden has been to California, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, New Jersey, North Carolina, Oklahoma and Texas once each; Connecticut, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana and Wisconsin twice each; New York and Ohio each three times; Michigan four times and Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, respectively, six, nine and ten times.
His home in Delaware by far takes the cake, as NPR noted in August, before he observed the fall of Kabul from his vacation at Camp David.
In June, Biden skipped out on work on a Wednesday to enjoy some time off at his Rehoboth Beach estate, despite ongoing negotiations over the infrastructure bill back in the capital.
“Of the first 29 weekends of his presidency, Biden spent just six at the White House,” NPR reported at the time, explaining that Delaware is where the president feels “grounded,” pointing to his famous daily trips back to his home during his time in the Senate to be with his sons following the tragic death of his wife and daughter in a car accident in 1972.
The outlet noted that Delaware was also where he was headed for his vacation that month — go figure.
Later in the month, he would be criticized for remaining at Camp David as Kabul fell to the Taliban, briefly heading back to Washington D.C. to address the nation and then going back to Camp David before finally cutting his vacation short because — sigh — national crisis and all.
In September, as Americans were still trapped in Afghanistan following the full withdrawal of U.S. troops from the nation, which was completed on Aug. 30, Biden was — where else? — back on vacation in Delaware yet again.
NPR compared Biden’s Delaware weekends to Presidents Bush and Reagan spending time on their Texas and California ranches to unwind from the duties of the presidency.
To be fair, it’s certainly understandable that the president would need to unwind, assuming he does so at a better time than in the midst of a national crisis.
However, in Biden’s case, his penchant for unwinding so frequently gets rather problematic. Even beyond the terrible timing of his vacations, their frequency proves that he is not only perfectly capable of and accustomed to regular travel, but he has had plenty of free time to do so since taking office.
When it comes to giving the impression that he’s been working hard, President Biden has quite an uphill battle to face.
He is regularly shuffled around by his staffers, who angrily shoo away reporters so they can set him up in front of a teleprompter so he can halfway attempt to get through a speech without fumbling or forgetting where he is.
The work being done by Biden’s administration has indeed been fraught with failure, and it’s not just the border crisis: It’s Afghanistan, climbing gas prices and overreaching, authoritarian and dubiously constitutional vaccine mandates that are alienating and demoralizing the American workforce.
Yet we’re supposed to believe that the president who takes weekends off from his job and always seems to have time for a vacation, even in the middle of a complete and utter disaster like the fall of Afghanistan, doesn’t have time to visit the border?
It’s certainly not time that Biden is lacking. It’s the willingness to do his job.
Republicans on the House Committee on Natural Resources held a forum Oct. 22 to discuss how President Biden’s exit from Afghanistan left massive, untapped reserves of rare-earth metals, lithium, and other vital minerals in Taliban hands, potentially opening them up to exploitation by China.
Speakers said the Biden administration has simultaneously worked to hinder key mining projects in the United States, such as Minnesota’s Twin Metals copper-nickel project and Arizona’s Resolution copper mine, which would allow the United States to produce many of those minerals at home, thereby avoiding dependence on the Taliban or the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
“It’s almost like it’s intentional, to stop U.S. production of these critical minerals and elements,” said Ranking Member Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.).
Westerman’s remarks were later echoed by Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-Wis.), who said that some of the environmentalist groups fighting mining “we think are getting money from Russia, China, and other countries that are foes of ours.”
Rep. Pete Stauber (R-Minn.), whose district would include the proposed Twin Metals mine, spoke at length about the economic and security costs of relying on key minerals from abroad.
“For fifteen years, scientists from the USGS [U.S. Geological Survey], at a taxpayer cost of right around $81 million, found [in Afghanistan] massive amounts of lithium, gold, platinum, iron, coal, uranium, and more,” said Stauber.
“We know what happens next. The Taliban’s neighbor to the east, China, will swoop in and shortly thereafter control all of these mineral resources. There is no doubt at our current pace, the United States will have to purchase those minerals from China for our electric cars, our windmills, our iPhones, and our solar panels,” Stauber continued.
“Northern Minnesota has these minerals. We could look to union miners to supply them from my district. We have 95 [percent] of America’s nickel, 88 [percent] of America’s cobalt, and over one-third of America’s copper. It should be easy.”
Discussing the possibility of the imminent Chinese mineral exploitation in Afghanistan, Joe Felter of the Hoover Institute said it was plausible, though not certain.
“It depends. The challenges and calculated risks of mining rare earths and other minerals are significant in Afghanistan, and they could outweigh the opportunities in the near- and medium-term. One notable exception, I think, is China’s interest in getting increased access to lithium,” said Felter, who served in the Pentagon under Trump.
Felter recommended that the United States reduce its reliance on Chinese or Chinese-dominated supply chains.
Pressed by Stauber on where else the United States could source minerals, Felter responded that “almost any other country than China would be a better alternative” before noting that Australia was a U.S. ally with significant mining capacity.
Mary Hutzler, a distinguished fellow at the Institute for Energy Research, described the scale of the United States’ dependence on Chinese mineral resources for its renewable energy infrastructure, which dwarfs our past reliance on foreign oil before the United States achieved energy independence under President Trump.
“Our reliance on China is about 80 [percent] for these minerals right now, where the high for us in 2001 on oil from the Middle East was 23 [percent],” she said. “We’re going to be four times as dependent on China as we were on the Middle East.”
According to Hutzler, China’s competitive advantage in mineral processing and refinement stems in part from its reliance on cheap coal energy, which it is expected to expand.
Hutzler also stated that environmental permitting has stymied many recent mining projects in the United States, with the second proposed lithium mine in the United States, Nevada’s Thacker Pass, currently delayed by lawsuits.
In response to questioning from Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), Hutzler said that Europe’s present reliance on Chinese magnesium for automobile manufacturing offers a cautionary tale.
“With China’s crunch recently, they have closed 35 of their 50 magnesium plants. As a result, they are not exporting magnesium to Europe. Europe has only stockpiles to go through November. As a result, what’s going to happen is their automobile industry will become a standstill industry. That could happen to us because of our dependence on China,” said Hutzler.
Tiffany was among those who focused on the human rights abuses accepted by those who rely on minerals mined or processed in China.
He has introduced legislation aimed at preventing goods made with forced Uyghur labor from entering the U.S. market.
“We [Americans] are freedom-loving people. We do not accept that the Uyghurs should be enslaved,” he said.
“We shouldn’t expect anything different from China than their track record suggests—and it’s a pretty poor track record,” said Felter.
“When you’ve got these foreign-owned businesses run by the state that don’t have the same labor requirements we do, don’t have the same health and safety and environmental requirements, really, the only way I see you stop that is to penalize those imports coming into our country,” said Westerman.
Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) closed the forum by urging members to support his proposed legislation, the Stopping Terrorist Mineral Trade Act, which would prevent the importation of minerals, or mineral-derived products, originating in Afghanistan.
“I know that my colleagues at this forum wish this important topic was something we could approach on a bipartisan basis, grounded in factual discussions focused on solutions. Unfortunately, our Democratic colleagues see all American mining as unnecessary, and are hellbent on seeing that it doesn’t happen,” said Gosar.
“For some reason, they never can see the right mine or the right place in America for mining,” he added.
This might be brutal, but it’s 10000% true – can’t wait for Joe to see it
There’s a hero Republican politician in York County, PA who is putting his money where his mouth is, and he’s doing so by placing some very damning billboards up featuring Joe Biden, all over the county.
ABC 27 News covered the story and said the following: If you’ve driven along Interstate 83 in York County lately, chances are you’ve seen a giant billboard that features President Joe Biden in a military outfit along with the phrase “Making the Taliban Great Again.”
The billboard is operated by advertising company Trone Outdoor Advertising, which provides billboard advertising in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware. The company is responsible for operating and organizing advertisements, but it is not responsible for what is included in the advertisements that are displayed.
“The individual that is responsible for the billboard is (former Pennsylvania State Senator) Scott Wagner. He gave us permission to make it known that he was responsible for the billboard,” Vice President of Trone Outdoor Brian Scott said.
Scott Wagner had one term as Pennsylvania State Senator, elected in 2014. He represented the 28th district in the state, which is a large portion of York County. He resigned in June of 2018 to run for Governor as the Republican nominee, a race in which he lost to Governor Tom Wolf.
“I saw the image (of Joe Biden), I got it from a friend a few weeks ago. The picture tells the story. We pulled out of Afghanistan too quickly, and we left so much of American equipment. Joe Biden has made us look like a fool. I feel so bad, words can’t describe what I would say to someone who was wounded or someone’s family who had a soldier pass away in the country after all this happened,” Scott Wagner said when asked for a comment.
Gee, between this and the F Joe Biden stuff, I don’t think ol’ Bumbling Joe is gonna wanna leave the basement ever again.
And truthfully, that’d be a good thing for the entire country.
In off-the-record call with congressional staff, Biden admin says nearly 400 still stranded
The Biden administration is in touch with nearly 400 Americans who are stranded in Afghanistan, a figure that far exceeds the administration’s claims that about 100 Americans were left in the nation following the United States’ hurried exit from Kabul, according to a senior congressional source who was briefed Thursday by the State Department.
With Afghanistan in the administration’s rear-view mirror, U.S. officials are providing exact figures on the number of Americans who are still stranded and want to leave—although they are doing so in private, off-the-record forums—according to two senior congressional aides, who relayed the contents of the non-public call to the Washington Free Beacon.
The United States is in touch with 363 Americans who are stuck in war-torn Afghanistan and around 176 U.S. permanent residents who are asking to be evacuated immediately, Biden administration officials said on the call with congressional staff, according to the source, who requested anonymity to discuss non-public information. These figures demonstrate that senior Biden administration officials routinely misrepresented the number of stranded Americans to the public and Congress for nearly two months.
The State Department further claims to have airlifted 218 U.S. citizens and 131 long-term permanent residents out of Afghanistan since Aug. 31, when senior Biden administration officials, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken and White House press secretary Jen Psaki, were publicly claiming that “around 100” Americans were still stuck in the nation. Psaki, for instance, said last month that only “a handful of American citizens” were trying to leave Afghanistan after the United States pulled its forces. The figures presented in Thursday’s briefing indicate the administration was citing the “around 100” talking point while privately being aware of nearly 600 Americans still inside Afghanistan.
The information presented in the call stunned participants and fueled accusations that the Biden administration lied about the dire situation in order to avoid public scrutiny of its rushed evacuation from Afghanistan that was widely seen as disastrous and ill-prepared.
“We now know this administration repeatedly lied to the world about the citizens of our country it abandoned in Afghanistan,” Rep. Darrell Issa (R., Calif.), whose office has paved the way for several families to come home, told the Free Beacon. “But it did something even worse: It broke a sacred bond of trust between Americans and their government. This isn’t close to over.”
While members of Congress often challenged the “around 100” figure, the administration stuck to the number and attempted to downplay criticism of its botched retreat.
“Everyone who has said these numbers make no sense got told we were lying, got told we were crazy, got told we were not on the ground,” said a second senior congressional source working on the issue. “The White House has said on the record that they’re turning the page and it becomes clearer all the time why: Every new detail that we find out about the reckless Biden policy in Afghanistan produces only more proof that they lied from day one.”
The State Department did not provide congressional staff with information about how it is coordinating with outside groups to fly trapped Americans out of Afghanistan. Many charter flights have been prevented by the Taliban from leaving Afghanistan. The State Department said it “didn’t have good guidance there for how to get a flight in and out of the country.” There were also “no clear answers” about how Americans board a private flight out of Kabul, where the Taliban controls who gets in and out of the city.
The United States has established a “technical channel” with the Taliban passport office to help stranded Americans get the paperwork needed to flee the country, according to the source who was on the call.
Meanwhile, U.S. lawmakers, including Issa, were informed last week by American military officials that nearly 20 percent of the Afghan evacuees who were brought to the United States—around 12,000 in total—arrived with no paperwork, no identification, and no visa, as the Free Beaconfirst reported.
The Biden administration additionally blocked Issa and other lawmakers from accessing a U.S. holding facility located near Doha, Qatar, where Afghan evacuees are being held prior to being flown into America.
The State Department did not respond to a request for comment on the call or its contents.
For al-Qaida, the war with the West is far from over. The Biden administration has invited the terrorist organization to America and they’re all too happy to take up the offer. Al-Qaida is picking up where they left off, and according to a new report, they could be headed to a neighborhood near you.
Panama Foreign Affairs Minister Erika Mouynes reportedly told Texas GOP Rep. Tony Gonzalez that over 100,000 migrants had crossed through her country on the way to the United States. That’s not the worst of it. Mouynes also told Gonzalez that Panama had apprehended 52 people associated with al-Qaida.
“I asked her one specific question: ‘Have you caught anybody on the terrorist watch list?’” Gonzalez related in an interview on the Real America podcast with Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel. “She goes, ‘Funny you ask that, Tony, because in Panama we do biometrics and we have apprehended 52 people that are associated with al-Qaida.’”
People have speculated about al-Qaida’s eagerness to exploit Biden’s border policy, but Mouynes is the first government official to go on the record saying this is happening in real-time.
Panama uses biometrics to identify possible threats. When asked if she had reported this real threat to the Biden administration, Mouynes reportedly told Gonzalez, “There’s no one home. I’m here talking to you because the administration is absent.”
In January and March, U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents arrested two Yemeni men on a terror watch list as they crossed the border illegally, according to Reuters.
Are Biden’s policies inviting terrorists into the U.S.?
It doesn’t take a lot of terrorists to commit a horrendous amount of murder and mayhem. The tragedy of 9/11 was committed by 19 al-Qaida militants who hijacked four airplanes and killed 2,996 people.
An immigration expert noted that “the reason Haitian migrants discard their Chilean and Brazilian ID cards over here on the Mex side is to obscure from asylum reviewers that they were already safely and prosperously situated for years and years before coming for the American upgrade,” according to The Post Millennial.
If this is true of prosperous migrants, what lengths might terrorists go to carry out jihad against their sworn and lifelong enemy?
In July alone, 213,000 illegal immigrants were apprehended crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. It is estimated that another 1,000 illegal immigrants evaded capture every day, according to The Epoch Times.
By the same formula, over 500 migrants passing through Panama probably went undetected. How many of these were potential al-Qaida operatives, let alone other radicals who seek the ruin of the West?
Nevertheless, that some terrorists are entering the U.S. undetected and with malicious intent is highly probable. In all likelihood, considering the influx of illegal immigrants at the porous southern border, it is more than 19.
Former President Donald Trump has long warned Americans of the dangers of open-border policies, which serve to make the land of the free particularly susceptible to terrorism.
“We have them all the time; we have terrorists from the Middle East coming through our country through the southern border. That was before [the construction of the border wall] … Removing any of these measures would hamstring our workers, endanger our country, and cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars a year,” Trump said in a January speech.
Why is the Biden admiration bent on an open border? Do they, too, seek the demise of the West as they dream of a global utopia?
It is difficult to say. Whatever the case, the Biden administration’s blatant disregard for border security cannot be attributed solely to incompetence, though there is a lot of that going around.
It becomes clearer and clearer each day: Where the border cannot hold, things fall apart. In a fallen world, utopia cannot be created by human means.
Where globalists lead, all hell is sure to follow.
The ominous ripple effects of President Joe Biden’s Afghanistan disaster affirm that his incompetent leadership has emboldened and incentivized more terrorism in the Middle East. This not only jeopardizes the unstable region, but is a direct threat to U.S. national security.
The Taliban’s acting interior minister, Sirajuddin Haqqani, gleefully offered money and plots of land to the relatives of jihadi suicide bombers, according to Twitter photos posted by Qari Saeed Khosty, the spokesman for Afghanistan’s Ministry of Interior Affairs.
Many of the victims of these attacks during the past 20 years have been American soldiers, who have been injured, maimed or murdered by jihadis.
Khosty said Haqqani met with the family members of fallen “fidayeen,” or jihadis who sacrificed their lives to advance radical Islamic terrorism.
He posted photos of the convocation on Twitter, where the Taliban and other terrorists are allowed to maintain massive accounts while former U.S. President Donald Trump is banned.
“Yesterday, H.E Interior Minister Alhaj Mullah Khalifa Sirajuddin Haqqani met the family members of martyred Fidayeen at the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul,” Khosty tweeted Tuesday.
2/3- In his speech, the Interior Minister praised the jihad & sacrifices of Mujahideen & martyrs. He called them heroes of Islam & the country.
H.E told everyone about the memories of the martyred (Fidayeen) their piety & deeds. He called them heroes of the believing nation. pic.twitter.com/Td9Y52kbr0
Haqqani praised the jihadis as valiant martyrs who are the backbone of “the Islamic system,” Khosty tweeted.
Is Biden a bigger threat to national security than the Taliban?
“In his speech, the Interior Minister praised the jihad & sacrifices of Mujahideen & martyrs. He called them heroes of Islam & the country.
“H.E told everyone about the memories of the martyred (Fidayeen) their piety & deeds. He called them heroes of the believing nation.”
At the end of the meeting, according to The Associated Press, Haqqani rewarded the families of the suicide bombers by giving them 10,000 AFN (Afghan afghani, which is roughly $111), clothes and promised a plot of land to the families of every fallen jihadi.
He also exhorted them to “refrain from betraying the aspirations of our martyrs.” Essentially, this means that the jihad must continue unabated.
3/3- H.E Haqqani added: “Now you & I must refrain from betraying the aspirations of our martyrs.”
One Twitter photo showed Haqqani embracing an attendee in a packed auditorium. In a slap in the face to America, his security detail wore what appeared to be U.S. military garb.
At the end of the meeting, he distributed 10,000 AFN & clothes to the families of the martyred Fidayeen & promised a plot for each (martyr’s) family. pic.twitter.com/CBEaW4SACp
The sickening public spectacle of a terrorist organization rewarding suicide bombings underscores that Biden’s chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal has encouraged more radical Islamic terrorism in the already-unstable Middle East.
As we’ve already seen, this terrorism does not contain itself geographically and has spread around the world. Just look at the countless jihadi attacks that have roiled Western Europe, Africa, Southeast Asia and the United States.
While the Biden administration has praised the Taliban as “businesslike and professional,” the terrorist group said it won’t help America defeat ISIS-K, which claimed responsibility for killing 13 U.S. soldiers during a suicide bombing in August.
While the Taliban refuses to cooperate with the United States, the Biden administration is handing out exorbitant amounts of taxpayer money to help Afghanistan.
The U.S. has given $330 million to Afghanistan this fiscal year alone while taking in tens of thousands of Afghan refugees — all while Americans struggle with rocketing consumer prices and a sputtering economy.
Two months after Afghanistan fell to the Taliban, desperation is ravaging the people America left behind.
In White House remarks after the last Americans left Afghanistan, President Joe Biden said it was time to look forward “to a future that’s safer, to a future that’s more secure.”
But to Afghan families spiraling deeper into poverty with every passing day, the future is bleak and desperate.
A report in The Wall Street Journal quoted a woman it named Saleha, who said she sold a 3-year-old daughter to satisfy a $550 debt.
This is heartbreaking.
As Afghanistan Sinks Into Destitution, Some Sell Children to Survive U.N. warns that 95% of Afghans aren’t getting enough to eat as winter approaches. https://t.co/5Ox3Gl79Dd
That child may be the lucky one, said Saleha, 40, who says she earns 70 cents a day and whose husband does not work.
“If life continues to be this awful, I will kill my children and myself,” Saleha said. “I don’t even know what we will eat tonight.”
The Journal report said that it tracked down Khalid Ahmad, who took the girl as payment.
“I also don’t have money. They haven’t paid me back,” he said. “So there is no option but taking the daughter.”
The Journal report is not an isolated incident.
The economic situation of the Afghan people is getting worse every day because there is no work, money, no salary&income, the cold, hard winter is coming, but it does not make any difference to the Taliban, yesterday they destroyed it with suicide, explosion. Today with Poverty. pic.twitter.com/XHZ1NCQ49l
Last month, former police officer Mir Nazir said he was expecting to sell his 4-year-old daughter for $580, according to a report in the New York Post that was originally in the Times of London.
The Biden administration on Thursday blocked a bipartisan delegation of House lawmakers from entering and inspecting a U.S.-run military facility near Doha, Qatar, where thousands of Afghan evacuees are being stationed prior to their possible relocation to America, according to a GOP lawmaker who participated in the visit.
Rep. Darrell Issa (R., Calif.), who was part of a delegation that included House Foreign Affairs Committee members, told the Washington Free Beacon that lawmakers were barred from entering Camp As Sayliyah, an American-controlled compound where thousands of Afghan refugees are still being held since being airlifted to safety.
Issa’s office spent weeks petitioning the Department of Defense for access to these Afghan refugees on behalf of the delegation, but the lawmakers were denied access to the U.S.-controlled site when they arrived Thursday at Al Udeid Air Base in Doha for a scheduled briefing on the American evacuation effort. Camp As Sayliyah is about 40 minutes away from Al Udeid, a joint American-Qatari airbase that serves as headquarters for U.S. Central Command.
U.S. military officials stationed at the base “never let us meet with the 2,300 remaining America-bound refugees, maybe some of whom are American citizens and others who are green card holders,” Issa said from Doha in a telephone interview. “We think the number one classified piece that they were protecting is called embarrassment. Many of these people have stories of the difficulty getting out, the lack of cooperation or help by the State Department, and now they find themselves being artificially held longer in some cases. We think it’s just that they don’t want people telling their stories.”
More than two months after the Biden administration left the country, Issa and lawmakers from both parties have largely been stymied in their efforts to investigate the botched U.S. evacuation from Afghanistan, which left scores of Americans stranded and even more Afghan allies at risk of being killed by the Taliban. Issa said the U.S. military’s refusal to permit lawmakers from carrying out their oversight duties is part of a larger effort by the Biden administration to keep the American public in the dark about exactly what unfolded in the war-torn country.
The White House National Security Council referred the Free Beacon to U.S. Central Command. Central Command told the Free Beacon it did not have any information on what took place. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
“They’re pretty straightforward in denying members of both parties the legitimate oversight opportunities,” Issa said. “We gave them several weeks advance notice.”
Rep. Lou Correa (D., Calif.), also on the trip, was “equally furious” about being denied entry, Issa said. Correa did not respond to a request for comment.
Issa and his colleagues were permitted to receive a briefing from U.S. military leaders at the base, and the information provided was “shocking to a lot of members.”
The lawmakers were informed that more than 20 percent of those who arrived in Doha and were later brought into the United States—around 12,000 individuals—had no identification, paperwork, or visas.
“They came with nothing,” Issa said. “No Afghan I.D., no I.D. of any sorts. Those people were all forwarded on to the U.S., and that’s quite an admission. So many people had no I.D. whatsoever and yet find themselves in the United States today based on what they said.”
Since the Biden administration began permitting Afghan refugees into the United States, there have been numerous reports of refugees having criminal records.
Though Issa and other lawmakers made multiple efforts to gain access to the holding facilities, Central Command ultimately denied their requests.
“You know what they’re hiding? The latest Afghanistan disaster from the Biden administration,” Issa spokesman Jonathan Wilcox told the Free Beacon. “The White House is turning the page and closing the door.”
Illegal migrants from at least eight different nations, including Uzbekistan, crossed the southern border at Yuma, Arizona, on Friday as the migration crisis continues to escalate in the area.
Daily Caller reporter Jorge Ventura shared a video of a family from India illegally entering the U.S. through what is known as “The Gap.”
My first time encountering migrants from India crossing illegally into Yuma at ‘The Gap’. So far I’ve encountered migrants from 8 different countries today in Yuma pic.twitter.com/IujT57ACTu
Group of 80 migrants from Georgia, Venezuela, Brazil, Uzbekistan and El Salvador apprehended by border patrol in the Yuma sector pic.twitter.com/2fsKPqVOJZ
On Tuesday, Ventura reported that illegal Colombian migrants had crossed the border at Yuma.
“‘I didn’t even want to try’ says Colombian migrants that crossed illegally into Yuma, Arizona when I asked if they attempted to come under the Trump administration,” Ventura tweeted.
“I didn’t even want to try” says Colombian migrants that crossed illegally into Yuma, Arizona when I asked if they attempted to come under the Trump administration. I also interviewed Nicaraguan migrants that crossed illegally into Yuma that shared the similar sentiment pic.twitter.com/WMaCI0n2SG
Arizona Republican Rep. Andy Biggs visited abandoned border wall supplies in Yuma, Arizona, on Thursday, demanding in a video that President Joe Biden restart construction “now” to address the surge of illegal immigrants.
Biggs tweeted a video of himself standing beside piles of steel beams intended for a border wall with Mexico.
“Down at the Yuma border. I’m surrounded by millions of dollars worth of wall material that is lying around, unused, because Biden cancelled the wall contracts. The border crisis worsens by the day, we need to start rebuilding, NOW,” Biggs wrote on Thursday.
Down at the Yuma border. I’m surrounded by millions of dollars worth of wall material that is lying around, unused, because Biden cancelled the wall contracts. The border crisis worsens by the day, we need to start rebuilding, NOW. pic.twitter.com/BZbKZdslK5
“This is Biden’s waste pile,” Biggs says in the video.
“This is about $2 million worth of fencing panels just waiting to be installed, but they won’t be installed. We’ll pay the contractors, but we’re not going to install these.”
“Shame on Joe Biden. Shame on [Homeland Security] Secretary Mayorkas. This stuff needs to be done. This fencing needs to be completed,” Biggs says.
In an earlier video, Biggs said he had watched Border Patrol agents apprehend five illegal immigrants as he stood at the border.
Massive amounts of border wall supplies continue to waste away at the southern border after the Biden administration canceled contracts with construction companies slated to build the wall.
Well, the Biden administration may deny that there’s a crisis at the southern border and that its withdrawal from Afghanistan was a horrific failure, but the convergence of those very real issues could soon put American lives at risk.
Rep. Tom McClintock of California, the ranking member of the House Subcommittee on Immigration and Citizenship, is warning that terrorists could try to breach our country at its weakest point thanks to the release of Islamic State prisoners by the Taliban in Afghanistan and our “porous southern border.”
I don’t care what you think about mean tweets and massive egos. I become more convinced with each passing day that former President Donald Trump will be remembered by history as having been absolutely right about the border.
In a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Thursday, McClintock expressed his “grave concern” about “the security risks posed by the release of 7,000 terrorists, including members of the Taliban, ISIS-K, and Al-Qaeda, from Bagram Air Base combined with the porous southern border.
“Shortly after the president ordered the unconditional surrender of Bagram Air Base to the Taliban, Taliban forces took control and released the terrorists that had been in U.S. custody,” he wrote. “Days later 13 U.S. servicemembers were murdered by a suicide bomber at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul.”
The lawmaker noted that the Islamic State Khorasan suicide bomber behind the attack was one of the terrorists released by the Taliban from Bagram Air Base.
“The whereabouts of the [other terrorists] is unknown,” McClintock said. “It is possible, if not likely, that many will attempt to enter our country through Mexico with the purpose of committing similar terrorist attacks.
“In fact, we already know that aliens found in the Terrorist Screening Database have been apprehended on the southern border this year,” he continued. “The release of thousands of terrorists back into Afghanistan and the criminal cartels’ control of human smuggling on the southwest U.S. border, mean the terrorist threat is urgent.”
The Biden administration has confirmed that thousands of terrorists were released from the prison facilities at Bagram in the days leading up to the Kabul bombing, including Islamic State Khorasan fighters known to the U.S. to be dangerous.
The U.S. abandoned Bagram in July without bothering to do a thing about the known terrorists housed there, so when the Taliban swooped in after our hasty departure, what do you think they did?
They released a horde of Islamic extremists who have pledged their lives to waging war against everyone they view as an enemy to their mission to establish an Islamic state — and you’d better believe that includes the United States of America and its citizens.
As we know, it was only days later that one of these terrorists targeted U.S. troops facilitating the escape of American citizens and at-risk Afghans from the clutches of the new Islamic regime.
Nothing — least of all our southern border — will stop these ruthless killers from trying to destroy American lives.
McClintock asked Mayorkas to “help us understand the ongoing terrorism-related threats at the southwest U.S. border and how the Biden administration’s failures in Afghanistan affect border security.”
The Republican congressman gave Mayorkas until Monday to provide his panel with information about foreign nationals encountered at the border this year and the countries they are coming from.
It’s a rather tall order, considering this administration is handling the surge of illegal migrants about as well as it did the Afghanistan withdrawal.
It’s up for debate whether Biden can blame his predecessor for the Afghanistan debacle, but there’s no escaping the fact that he made a point of reversing border policies put in place by Trump within hours of taking office. Now, overwhelmed border officials are bearing the brunt of his disastrous approach to national security and immigration.
The Biden administration has admitted 160,000 illegal aliens into the country since March and released over 94,000 of them into the U.S. interior, a crippling influx that is causing massive logistical and security challenges for communities along the southern border.
Thanks, Joe. No, really — this week, illegal immigrants who had just managed to cross our border personally thanked Biden for their easy entry into the country.
Last week, 30 lawmakers sent a letter to Biden declaring that the American people are “fed up with false reassurances that the border is closed.”
The administration’s word that the border is secure is mud — so how can we possibly trust that it’s prepared for the eventuality that Islamic terrorists waltz across it?
U.S. Marine CorpsJudge Glen Hines has docked Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller $5,000 in pay and ordered a letter of reprimand against the combat veteran for his criticisms about how senior military officials handled the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Hines handed down his sentence Oct. 15, concluding the legal matter. The Secretary of the Navy will decide whether Scheller receives an honorable discharge or a general discharge under honorable conditions.
Defense attorney Timothy Parlatore said he thinks the sentence was fair.
“We were happy with the sentence. I think the judge carefully considered all of the facts and circumstances of this case, and the sentence was an appropriate reflection of what Lt. Col. Scheller did,” he said.
“After hearing what government said and going back and viewing videos, [the judge] found a lot more context to them than the cherry-picked statements the government presented,” Parlatore said.
According to Parlatore, Judge Hines criticized the government’s conduct, including for leaking case documents about Scheller. The judge said it’s not the court’s role to investigate the leak, but that there should be a probe into the matter.
“He commented on the severity of pretrial confinement for a case of this nature,” Parlatore added. “He saw a Marine in pain and in emotional anguish, which is pretty much what we argued.”
Parlatore said Scheller won’t comment on the matter until his discharge is processed. Neither the prosecution nor a Marine Corps spokesperson have responded to queries from The Epoch Times.
Scheller was charged for making statements such as, “Potentially, all of those people did die in vain if we don’t have senior leaders that own up and raise their hand and say we did not do this well in the end.”
At his Oct. 14 trial, the Marine apologized for being disrespectful, but renewed his calls for accountability.
“I believe the General officers have demonstrated that they are unable or unwilling to hold themselves accountable. As a result, I believe fundamental change needs to occur in the military,” he said. “I am being held accountable for my actions. The General officers should be held accountable for their failures.”
Scheller also criticized the Marine Corps for apparently leaking confidential records about him to Task and Purpose.
“I was painted as a violent extremist, fascist, and the journalist even made a connection to Hitler. Obviously, you can understand that I was very angry following the article,” he said. “After everything I’ve been through, I feel it’s reasonable to conclude that the Marine Corps and Task and Purpose were working together in an effort to smear my name.”
The Marine further pointed out that he hasn’t been charged with making false statements “because everything I have said is true.”
“If the Marine Corps could have charged me with it, they would have,” he said.
Some government officials, for their part, accused Scheller of fanning the flames of insurrection. Task and Purpose reported on case documents that purportedly show how Marine Corps officials believe Scheller’s comments about topics such as “revolution” violated Defense Department policy.
Scheller’s case captured the national spotlight, with numerous Republican lawmakers criticizing the prosecution as politically motivated. Reps Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), and Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) testified on Scheller’s behalf at the Oct. 14 hearing.
“It takes great courage to speak out against leaders who lead those under them to failure & to death,” Greene said yesterday after testifying. “It takes even more courage to plead guilty in the face of unknown consequences. Why is Scheller the one on trial?”
Greene said on Steve Bannon’s War Room that she would either hire Scheller or help find him a job.
In the wake of President Joe Biden’s horrific Afghanistan withdrawal, American-made weapons that were abandoned by the Afghan National Security Forces were seized by the Taliban.
This was an $83 billion investment, according to The New York Times, flushed down the toilet because the Biden administration sloppily executed the removal of our troops from the fragile nation.
We trained and trusted the Afghan military to hold the line against the Taliban, which turned out to be a huge mistake.
Those weapons, which could be seen as American secrets in physical form, are now ending up in Afghan gun stores, according to a recent report from the Times.
Weapons dealers in southern Afghanistan told the paper that dealers have been paying off Taliban fighters for the equipment in order to resell it for their own businesses.
In Kandahar, it has now become a lucrative business for Afghans to sell these the matériel, which includes everything from guns to binoculars.
While some of these dealers are selling in the nation, others are reportedly smuggling them to Pakistan as well.
The Pentagon has conceded that American weapons still remained in the country after the bloody end of U.S. involvement in August but said that aircraft had been disabled.
“Since 2005, the U.S. military has provided the Afghan national defense and security forces with many thousands of small arms, ranging from pistols to medium machine guns,” Defense Department spokesman Maj. Rob Lodewick told the Times.
Some in the Taliban, however, vehemently deny that they are selling these weapons in the marketplace.
“I totally deny this; our fighters cannot be that careless,” Taliban spokesman Bilal Karimi told the paper, despite others in the terrorist regime admitting that they are being sold.
“Even a single person cannot sell a bullet in the market or smuggle it.”
The dealers’ customers base was described by the Times as “entrepreneurs and ordinary citizens,” which is presumably not a bad thing.
There are likely thousands of Afghans looking for tools to fight back against the Taliban or defend themselves against other injustices in their communities.
On the flip side, these weapons being out for sale could mean that they get into the hands of extremists (again), which could ultimately bring harm to innocent civilians.
“American-made weapons are in great demand, as they work very well and people know how to use them,” an anonymous merchant told the Times.
Regardless of who will be owning these weapons, it is embarrassing for the United States to have taxpayer-funded equipment become this vulnerable.
The signs of trouble for President Joe Biden keep on building.
But he won’t accept what they mean.
The 46th president proved as much on his trip Tuesday to Howell, Michigan, where his barnstorming for his party’s hideous monstrosity of a spending bill was the target of hundreds of demonstrators who turned out to greet him — and were promptly dismissed by a man who’s clearly convinced of his own popularity.
Biden’s motorcade was greeted by protesters lining both sides of a highway, carrying Donald Trump signs from the 2020 election, Trump signs for the 2024 election, and signs with the obscenity-punctuated message that’s become a virtual staple of large sporting events lately.
But the unifying president — the one whose party holds only a paper-thin majority in the House of Representatives and power in the Senate by virtue of a tie-breaking vote from the vice president — still bragged about his support in the November election.
“I took this agenda to the country,” he said, according to a White House transcript. “They said it was time to build an economy that looks out from Scranton, Pennsylvania — where I grew up as a kid — instead of looking down from Wall Street. An economy that looks out from Howell, Michigan, and towns like it all over America, that brings people from every race, background, religion into the game.
“That’s what — and notwithstanding some of the signs that I saw com- — that’s why 81 million Americans voted for me. The largest number of votes in American history. A clear majority who supported when they supported me.”
The round of applause that greeted that line wouldn’t have compared to the noise after a decent drive off the tee at Augusta, but for a Democrat who spent the 2020 election speaking to crowds that numbered in the handfuls — compared to throngs that turned out for his opponent — it probably came off as a roar.
Social media users saw it differently.
Yet like 6 people clapped for you when you said this …. With a total attendance of 11
For Biden, there’s nothing like the power of belief — or pretending to believe.
Despite an agenda that’s in serious trouble from members of his own party at home, despite humiliating his country with a disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, despite inflation that’s already hitting American workers in their wallets, Biden either believes he has a mandate, or is just comfortable playing on the pretense.
That’s why he can dismiss hundreds of furious protesters with a condescending “notwithstanding some of the signs” comment.
Of course, Trump faced huge crowds of protesters too, but he was also facing a monolithic mainstream media that was attacking his every move.
He was facing a celebrity and entertainment field bent on poisoning the culture against him — not to mention an opposing political party manufacturing hoaxes in an attempt to remove him from office.
Biden has none of these. Even with slavish support from supposed journalists, the backing of leftists in New York and Hollywood, and a political party in control of both houses of Congress, he’s still facing headwind from an American public that, polling shows, is getting increasingly uneasy with where he and his party are taking the country.
Biden saw the signs on Tuesday. Maybe one of his team members will explain them to him.
If not, the results on Nov. 8, 2022, will be unmistakable.
The suicide bomber who killed 13 U.S. military members and dozens of other people outside the Kabul airport in August was released from the Bagram Air Base prison just days earlier, according to a new report.
“We now understand … that Abdul Rehman Al-Loghri, the terrorist who from ISIS-K was responsible for killing 13 American service members and dozens of Afghans civilians trying to get out of the country, that he had been held at Parwan prison in Bagram Air Base,” CNN’s Clarissa Ward reported Wednesday.
“When the Taliban took power on that Sunday, the first thing they did before coming into Kabul was essentially to empty the prisons at Parwan Prison in Bagram and also Pul-e-Charkhi,” she added.
CNN: Kabul airport suicide bomber was released from Bagram Air Base by the Taliban days before the attack that killed 13 U.S. service members. pic.twitter.com/dozG4vzHRm
The Parwan prison housed several hundred members of the Islamic State group when the Taliban took control of the location following the departure of the U.S. military. The Taliban reportedly emptied both prisons, releasing the man responsible for the Kabul suicide bombing on Aug. 26.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said during a Capitol Hill hearing last week that the Pentagon was surprised by the Taliban’s quick rise to power. Yet Austin also confirmed the decision to leave Bagram.
“Retaining Bagram would have required putting as many as five thousand U.S. troops in harm’s way, just to operate and defend it. And it would have contributed little to the mission that we had been assigned, and that was to protect and defend our embassy which was some 30 miles away,” he said.
“Staying at Bagram — even for counterterrorism purposes — meant staying at war in Afghanistan, something that the president made clear that he would not do,” Austin said.
The deadly suicide bombing marked the fourth-deadliest day in terms of U.S. casualties during the 20 years Americans fought in Afghanistan.
On Aug. 6, 2011, the U.S. lost at least 30 service members when a helicopter was shot down. On June 28, 2005, 19 Americans died when another U.S. helicopter was shot down. That was roughly two months after at least 14 Americans died on April 6 of that year when a helicopter crashed.
The Daily Caller News Foundation had reported the Kabul suicide bombing was the third deadliest day in the Afghanistan war. However, the DCNF did not include the April 6 date in its report.
In its summary of the attack, The New York Times, citing U.S. officials as its source, said that the suicide bomber waited until just before he would be searched by U.S. service members to detonate the vest he was wearing.
The man wore a vest estimated to have been 25 pounds, much larger than the normal size of what suicide bombers wear, according to the Times. The bomb was packed with metal pieces that acted as shrapnel to mow down anyone nearby.
Those killed were not only men. Marine Sgts. Nicole Gee and Johanny Rosario Pichardo were killed in the attack, according to the Times.
“She believed in what she was doing, she loved being a Marine,” Gee’s brother-in-law, Gabriel Fuoco, said. “She wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere else.”
Marine First Lt. John Coppola said Rosario’s “service was not only crucial to evacuating thousands of women and children, but epitomizes what it means to be a Marine: putting herself in danger for the protection of American values so that others might enjoy them.”
The ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), is demanding answers from the Biden administration about the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal.
McCaul rallied a group of GOP representatives to send a Resolution of Inquiry (ROI) to the White House, demanding that the administration, including the State Department, turn over all documents, communication, intelligence, and assessments related to ending the war and withdrawing from Afghanistan.
The ROI is one of the ways House members can get information from the executive branch within a two-week period.
“There should be no delay in the investigation into the disastrous events in Afghanistan,” McCaul said. “I and my Republican colleagues are hopeful that this Resolution of Inquiry will be supported by Democrat Leadership in order to hold this administration accountable for the actions that led to the failed withdrawal from Afghanistan and the deadly aftermath.”
During the committee’s hearing on the Afghanistan withdrawal on Tuesday, McCaul criticized the Biden administration’s reason for the deadly withdrawal.
“President Biden and officials in his administration have continued to push the notion that only two options were available in Afghanistan: one, to fully withdraw in this chaotic and bloody way; or two, to keep tens of thousands of troops on the ground indefinitely,” said McCaul, adding, “But I believe this is a false premise.”
McCaul said Biden could have listened to the advice of U.S. military leaders who advised him to retain troops in Afghanistan until after the evacuation of Americans and allies.
“We have abandoned hundreds of American citizens and lawful permanent residents behind enemy lines. And we have left thousands of our Afghan partners behind—all with a bullseye on their backs and all at the mercy of the Taliban. If they are caught, they will surely be executed,” said McCaul.
“In other words, as General Milley said recently, our withdrawal from Afghanistan was a, quote, ‘strategic failure,’” McCaul continued. “So much is left to be uncovered and there are many lessons to be learned from this debacle.”
Chairman of the committee Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.) said the hearing on the Afghanistan withdrawal is for the purpose of preventing such a mistake in the future.
“This committee’s oversight effort isn’t simply to determine whether we should blame the Bush or Obama or Trump or Biden administrations. This committee seeks to understand and learn what went right, what went wrong over the course of 20 years, so that we don’t again repeat the mistakes of the past,” said Meeks.
The White House did not respond to the request to comment on McCaul’s request.
Since the early 1970s, when the Baby Boomer acolytes of George McGovern took control of the Democrat Party, the Left has been telling us that “dissent is the highest form of patriotism.”
That is to say, the more strongly you oppose the policies and moral values of your country, the more you love it. Like a devoted parent disciplining a wayward child, you are only showing it tough love in order to correct its ways, “fundamentally transforming” it (as Barack Obama might say) in order to improve it.
For those of you who did not come of age during the 1960s, this is a sloganized version of Herbert Marcuse’s infamous notion of “Repressive Tolerance”: you must tolerate us when we are powerless but we most certainly will not tolerate you once we have seized power.
Marcuse was perhaps the leading popularizer of Critical Theory, the bastard demon child of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, born of something called the Frankfurt School, imported by the United States in the personages of Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, and other “intellectual” refugees from Hitler’s Germany, and installed at the heart of the American system of higher education.
(For those desiring a philosophical and historical primer on the Frankfurters, my 2017 bestseller, “The Devil’s Pleasure Palace,” tells you all you need to know about this group of cultural sappers and their malign effect upon our country-as-founded.)
And so, for half a century,” dissent” we’ve had—in spades. From the anti-Vietnam protests (which were really anti-draft protests, and ended after Kent State and the abolition of the draft), to the soft Democrat-Media coup that brought down the Nixon White House less than two years after one of the greatest Republican landslides in history, to the protests against Ronald Reagan’s placement of Pershing missiles in Europe, to the stunned CIA silence that greeted the fall of the Berlin Wall—the Agency has always been anti-American—and into the modern era of the cult of Obama and the government-and-media-wide campaign to unhorse Donald Trump no matter how low they had to stoop, the Left has relentlessly assaulted the Republic with an eye to its eventual destruction.
Now—with a tied Senate, a tiny voting majority in the House, and Joe Biden in the White House—they feel their time has come.
The late Robert Conquest’s third law of politics reads: “The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.” This goes double for the federal government under the McGovernite-Democrat Party, which was created by the disaffected, spoiled children of the Sixties, who had just come of voting age, precisely to oppose every aspect of America’s previous political and cultural history.
As the old question goes: if the Democrats really wanted to destroy our constitutional republic, what exactly would they be doing differently? As I dubbed them in my short monograph on the dreary history of this miserable party, they are a criminal organization masquerading as a political party, which at various times has made slavery, segregation, secularism, and sedition planks in their platform.
In the South, they started the Civil War, while their northern brethren relentlessly opposed Abraham Lincoln’s war and Ulysses S. Grant’s relentless prosecution of it, going so far as to run the failed Union general, George McClellan, against Lincoln in 1864 and then assassinate him less than a week after their general, Robert E. Lee, surrendered to Grant at Appomattox. They have been waging war on America ever since.
Which brings us to the Biden administration, whose lawlessness exceeds anything Real America has hitherto experienced. The obvious hinkiness of the last election leveraged the Fauci-induced irrational panic over COVID-19 to effect wholesale, unconstitutional changes in state elector laws and—just barely—deliver the tally to Joe Biden. Its punitive lockdowns destroyed our economy. Its reckless surrender in Afghanistan shamed our nation.
Meanwhile, incompetents have been elevated to senior positions in our armed forces. Our border with Mexico is now essentially undefended, while our boundary with a peaceful neighbor, Canada, which shares (or used to share) our Enlightenment values, has been slammed shut.
Meanwhile, a doddering figurehead commander-in-chief wanders around aimlessly, licking an ice cream cone and plotting the passage of multi-trillion dollar spending bills that will atomize our financial underpinnings and ensure that a Republican or conservative will never again win a national election.
The recent, defensively belligerent admission by General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the unworthiest apparatchik ever to hold that august title, that he did indeed contact the Red Chinese in the waning days of the Trump administration “in order to assure strategic stability” by warning them in advance of any imminent attack should Trump go rogue, was simply astonishing—a prima facie act of betrayal that should have been immediately punished by his firing, reduction in rank, and loss of all pensions and benefits.
But, of course, he’s now a hero.
Forget dissent. Clearly, in Milley’s eyes and in the eyes of the Democrat-Media Complex that greeted his James Comey-like declaration of a “higher loyalty” with orgasmic bliss, treason is now the highest form of patriotism. And, with that principle firmly established, the persecution of traditional patriots is now on.
Both the “pandemic” and the puerile, pointless demonstration at the Capitol on Jan. 6 have provided the Left with all the ammunition it needs to hunt down and repress its political opponents. Via the social-media tech companies, which can shut down opposition without falling afoul of the first amendment, the government is now going after real dissent by branding it “disinformation” and even “domestic terrorism,” especially as a gradually awakening citizenry is becoming aware of just how deep the rot is: from the highest ranks of politics, the military, and corporate America, to the lowliest school boards, Critical Theory and its subversive offshoots have joined with “social justice,” “anti-racism,” and “wokeness” to usher in a new, ugly, Orwellian America.
Back during the John Kerry campaign in 2004, the vice-presidential candidate, John Edwards, often spoke of “two Americas”—essentially (although he couldn’t say so at the time), a rich, mostly white America and a poor, mostly black America.
Now, once again, we have two Americas—but this time the split is far more sinister. On one side, we have traditional Americans of all races, good and decent folks who wish only to live and let live, abhor racism, believe in precepts of the Constitution and in the promise of America, love their country despite her flaws, rally round the flag in times of trouble, and take pride in being citizens of the United States of America.
On the other, we have the Marcusans, children, grandchildren, and soon enough great-grandchildren of central-European red-diaper babies who have majored in deconstructionism at the public’s expense, believe they’re on the “right side of history,” see themselves as heroic “resistance” fighters against right-wing bogeymen of their media-jazzed imaginations, and who really do believe that the ends justify the means.
And by “means” they mean “by any means necessary.”
“Joe Biden just got caught in a lie about Afghanistan,” headlined the Washington Examiner on Sept. 29. I know, I know. So this is news?
What the paper was referring to was of course the testimony of two top-ranking generals and President Biden’s own Secretary of Defense to the effect that they had all recommended to the President leaving 2500 troops in Afghanistan after the American withdrawal. In an interview with George Stephanopoulos, Biden had denied that he had received any such recommendation.
“No. No one said that to me that I can recall,” he said.
Under normal circumstances, that would certainly seem to amount to being caught in a lie—at least if you disregard the perjurer’s life-preserver: “that I can recall.” But even allowing for the possibility of a sudden onset of dementia, I don’t think he can really have forgotten anything as important as that.
Perhaps recognizing that his having forgotten might actually look worse for him than his having lied, the White House press spokesperson, Jen Psaki, tried to explain away the lie by averring that the generals advising the President had been “split” on the question of leaving a residual force behind, and that he had gone with the recommendation of the unnamed and now absent ones who had supposedly advised against leaving such a force.
Why, then, did he not say that to George Stephanopoulos instead of saying that no one had given him such advice? Someone—three someones, as a matter of fact—definitely had.
No, it was unmistakably a lie. And then Psaki told another lie to cover it up.
But I think we have a problem with that little word “caught”—as in “caught in a lie.”
Way back in 1987 when Mr Biden first rose to national prominence, that was because he was caught in a lie.
He had appropriated a self-related episode from the life story of the then-leader of the British Labour Party, Neil Kinnock, also known as the Welsh Windbag, and represented it as his own experience.
Having been caught in the lie, the then-Senator Biden still had enough of a sense of shame to have dropped out of contention in the following year’s Democratic presidential primaries. Not that he would have stood more than the slimmest of chances of winning any of them anyway.
That’s what we mean when we say that someone has been “caught in a lie.” It implies some punishment to follow, or at least some shame felt by the liar on account of his exposure as one.
Does anyone believe that either punishment or shame will follow this lie?
If a tree falls in the forest when no one is there, does it make a sound?
The national (and international) press was certainly there for the big lie of 1987. As the media were then constituted, it would have been impossible for them not to have covered extensively what became known as the Biden “plagiarism” scandal and, therefore, for everyone not to have known about it—and, therefore, for the plagiarist not to have felt sorry, if only for himself.
That’s what it meant to be “caught in a lie.”
That was then.
It’s my belief that the media culture of today, a third of a century later, and the virtual disappearance of shame from our public life—certainly of any shame for being caught in a lie—are closely related phenomena.
Just look at the lie on which Joe Biden last year claimed to have based his whole campaign—the reason, he said, why he ran for president: the lie that Donald Trump had called neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, “very fine people.”
That lie had already been exposed as a lie numerous times. It was an even more obvious lie than the one about a residual American force in Afghanistan, since there was documentary evidence in a transcript of the interview in which Trump had explicitly excluded the Nazis from his designation of the “very fine people” wishing to preserve a statue of Robert E. Lee—as well as those wishing to take it down.
But that tree fell in a part of the new media forest where there was no one around to hear it. The big media, the legacy media, the mainstream media have found that their readers, watchers, and listeners don’t care if they simply ignore news from the right-wing media ghetto that they don’t want to hear.
In other words, they’re never going to catch Joe Biden in a lie. And that means that even when a publication like The Washington Examiner or The Epoch Times does catch him in a lie, it will not resonate with the public at large who, unless they are readers of those publications, will never hear of it.
It’s as if he had never lied at all! There’s nothing for him to be ashamed of, even if he were any longer capable of shame.
Small wonder then that, having gotten away with it for so long, Biden’s lies have now become so shameless that he hardly even bothers to pretend that they aren’t lies.
“My Build Back Better Agenda costs zero dollars,” he tweeted last week. Not, that is, that it would cost the $3.5 trillion that the media were reporting at the time and that the Democrats in Congress were desperately trying to keep at that figure in spite of the doubts of a few “moderates.” Let alone the $5.5 trillion that the Wall Street Journal thought it would cost. But $0.
If ever there were a lie to catch a man in—a lie that a child could catch a man in—it was that lie. And yet the mainstream media were ready to accommodate him.
Even famed Washington Post “fact-checker” Glenn Kessler only gave him two Pinocchios—on the grounds that he must have been communicating with fellow budget-wonks in a language that only they could understand.
I’m afraid we have to accept that, since there is no more any penalty accruing to being “caught in a lie,” nor even any shame in it, there’s no more catching people in lies either—and, therefore, no more lying in our public life, at least as reported by the media. Or, to put it another way, it’s all lies. Every word. Including “and” and “the.”
When President Joe Biden took the podium in Washington on Monday, he probably had no intention of telegraphing to the country just how much contempt he has for Americans.
A president whose short tenure in office has already been marked by a series of domestic gaffes and international humiliations should be determined, or at least coached, to never betray just how little respect he has for the thinking abilities of his countrymen.
But it came out anyway.
During remarks focused on building support for raising the nation’s debt ceiling even while Democrats are enmeshed in their civil war over ruinously expensive spending plans, Biden was informed by a reporter that an off-topic question about Ethiopian policy was in the offing.
Joe Biden says he won’t answer a foreign policy question because it would “confuse the American people” pic.twitter.com/8HP5fqDcwH
“Number one, I’m not answering Ethiopia,” he said. “Let’s stick on the debt so we don’t confuse the American people.”
From the tone and manner, Biden wasn’t speaking lightly. He wasn’t making indirect fun of a question that was likely utterly unrelated to the matter at hand. He was patronizingly referring to the country’s great unwashed, the ones outside a news conference full of coiffured and cologned intelligentsia.
Not in front of the children, he might as well have said.
Biden could have palmed it off with any number of responses — “I’m focused on the matter at hand. It’s too important for distractions” would have worked nicely. Instead, he betrayed both an astonishing lack of self-awareness and his own low opinion of the country he ostensibly leads.
Whatever self-image Biden might have of the Walter Mitty-FDR dreams that no doubt occupy his afternoon naps, a large part of the electorate has serious questions about Biden’s own mental capacity, and for obvious reasons.
For a man like that, with Biden’s barely hidden — and barely hideable — vulnerabilities when it comes to mental acumen, to insult the comprehension abilities of an entire nation is beyond risible.
To the liberal, mainstream media — the kind of bootlicking partisans who mainly staff these affairs — the comment was probably barely noticed.
But when it got out, it wasn’t popular. And the social media responses showed it:
Sad part is, no journalists will have the integrity to call him out on this BS.
This also speaks volumes of his views on the American people and how stupid we are to him.
— Boom Pow Podcast with Nikki and Ozzy (@ozzycorp1976) October 4, 2021
There were plenty of responses along those lines, some more amusing than others. (“Let’s go, Brandon,” put in an appearance, too. That one might have staying power.)
But this one summed it up:
It is indicative of how many in the Democratic Party think. My gosh, they almost all say their constituents are too stupid to follow election security rules. Some say it literally!
It’s been evident for years that Democrats, in their arrogance, consider conservative voters morally and intellectually inferior — Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” was just the most overt smear. But Biden wasn’t just talking about voters who oppose him.
He was talking about the American people as a whole, the nation that elected him but one he clearly considers too intellectually deficient to handle two divergent topics during the same discussion.
Add on his patently inept handling of foreign policy — a disgraceful exit from Afghanistan that will stain this country for generations, kowtowing to China, the only real rival to U.S. power in the world — and it becomes infuriating.
Joe Biden’s off-the-cuff comment made it clear how contemptuous he is of his fellow citizens.
It’s a good bet that in next year’s midterms, he and his Democratic Party are going to find out the feeling is very much mutual.
Chinese “wolf warriors” and their sycophants in China’s state-run media have been crowing for weeks about the strategic defeat suffered by the United States in Afghanistan.
During a telephone call on Aug. 16, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi claimed that the U.S. Secretary of State expressed hope that China would help in “stabilizing Afghanistan.” Here is an agitprop headline from state-run China Daily on Sept. 27 that reinforces the Chinese regime’s goal to replace the United States in world leadership: “US leaving Afghanistan signals accelerating end of its hegemony.” The PLA Daily took its agitprop shot with an article titled, “Why US military interference constantly ends in debacles,” claiming that since the end of World War II, “the US has never stopped invading other countries, fighting ‘proxy wars’ and supporting pro-America regimes.”
Part of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) propaganda offense has been aimed directly at Taiwan by planting seeds of doubt in President Tsai Ing-wen’s inner circle of military and domestic advisers as to whether the United States and its allies would truly come to their aid in the event of a cross-channel kinetic attack by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Toward that end, note this headline from China Military Online, “What US retreat from Afghanistan means for Taiwan.” That article claims that Taiwan is “just a card that can be played”—and as easily discarded—by the United States depending on the situation.
The preceding represent the propaganda associated with the messages that the CCP would have the world believe in support of its geopolitical goals to achieve world economic and military dominance: the United States is in decline, the United States cannot be trusted to live up to its agreements, the United States will bail out on allies when it is convenient to do so, etc. But are those the real “lessons learned” from Afghanistan, or are there some far more important lessons that are in the process of being learned?
As the world’s premier constitutional republic, the United States has been historically able to change courses of action and policies that have failed—through vigorous debate and the reaching of consensus, both within the political class and also among the citizenry at large, about strategic goals and objectives and associated required actions. The Civil War abolished the institution of slavery, with the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and other legislation completing the process of fully integrating black Americans into U.S. society. Long-standing U.S. isolationism was set aside during World War I and World War II to deal with national security threats, with the defeated countries subsequently converted to strong allies through U.S. economic and security investments. South Korea was saved from being overrun by the Chinese military during the Korean War.
But since then, the commitment of the U.S. military to overseas ventures has seemingly gone off the rails for a variety of reasons.
The United Nations Command hosts a repatriation ceremony for the remains of a U.S. soldier killed during the 1950-53 Korean War, at UNC Knight Field in Seoul, South Korea, on Nov. 20, 2018. (Screenshot/Reuters)
Much has been written about the inept withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, and much more will be discerned as Congress interrogates the decision makers who were involved in the debacle. Serious corrective actions are entirely possible, as the root causes are identified and debated. Some of these include the following:
The failure of the policy/political theory that “building democracy” can be easily achieved in countries with no democratic history or without the laying of the long-term foundations necessary over many decades for it to flourish.
The failure to address the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 that divided up the Middle East into arbitrary lines on a map without consideration of the ethnicities and tribal organizations of the indigenous populations, which sowed the seeds of inevitable future wars.
Lack of the political will to use all available means to achieve total victory when U.S. military forces are committed overseas.
The unchecked influence of interests heavily invested in prolonging endless overseas wars, including politicians, allies, military industrialists, U.S. flag and general officers, and others.
The demonstrated ineptitude of senior U.S. military leaders with respect to strategic and operational planning and execution.
The absence of clear-cut mission success and exit criteria that needlessly prolonged the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, as well as shifting rules of engagement that were politically motivated and not focused on achieving victory on the battlefield.
The CCP sees Afghanistan as an inflection point in world history that demonstrates that the balance of geopolitical forces is shifting in favor of its own long-term strategic goals. It would be happy if the United States were to retreat from treaty obligations, the defense of human rights around the world, and international conventions and organizations established in the aftermath of World War II. That’s not going to happen.
If anything, the last year and a half has red-pilled Americans and many other people around the world as to China’s long-term intentions and the aggressive means being used by the CCP in pursuit of those objectives. The CCP’s aggressive tactics include the following:
The lying and obfuscation about the origins of and medical forensic information associated with the CCP virus, commonly known as the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19.
The hoarding of medical supplies during the “pandemic” and selling of those supplies to countries in need.
In light of the above CCP aggression, does the “rest of the world” wish to see the United States replaced as the world leader by communist China? Recent actions would indicate otherwise. As the old idiom goes, “necessity is the mother of invention.”
The aforementioned items have driven neighboring nations into each other’s arms. The following are a few examples:
A Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (the “Quad”) has been formed by the United States, Australia, India, and Japan to improve “security and economic ties as tensions with China rise,” according to the Council on Foreign Relations.
Japan and Vietnam have improved their defense cooperation by signing a new agreement that facilitates the transfer of Japanese defense equipment and technology to Vietnam.
Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States entered into “an enhanced trilateral security partnership known as AUKUS,” according to the BBC, which is aimed at deterring Chinese aggression in the Indo-Pacific region.
The British, French, and German navies have deployed ships to the South China Sea and Taiwan Strait in recent months for freedom of navigation operations and as a deterrent to PLA-Navy aggression in the region.
Chinese J-15 fighter jets on the deck of the Liaoning aircraft carrier during military drills in the South China Sea on Jan. 2, 2017. (STR/AFP via Getty Images)
But what has the United States itself learned in the wake of Afghanistan, and how might the chaotic withdrawal from Kabul serve to reset U.S. foreign and national security policies, especially in the Indo-Pacific in response to continued Chinese aggression?
Republican senators (and others) are pushing the Biden administration for more forceful actions in responding to Chinese statements in the aftermath of the evacuation. They also seek accountability for the disorganized withdrawal and the poor decision making that was involved. Will this pressure result in a change in U.S. policy relating to the commitment and withdrawal of U.S. military forces overseas? The door could finally be opening for achieving consensus on a policy that involves the following key points:
Ensure that there are clearly defined mission success and exit criteria before committing U.S. combat power overseas. Ensure the top-level criteria are publicly debated and endorsed in Congress, and understood by the American people and the forces who are committed to battle.
Hold military leaders personally responsible for the operational planning and execution needed to achieve those criteria and associated objectives. Give those leaders the means and the flexibility to achieve the criteria and objectives.
Delegate the setting of tactical rules of engagement to the lowest possible command level (not to anyone out of theater).
When combat forces are committed overseas, use all means necessary to achieve total victory in the shortest time and with the least U.S. and allied casualties. All other considerations are secondary, including “bad press” (the Achilles heel of the current U.S. political class).
Broadcast the new policy as a deterrent against potential adversaries around the world.
Act decisively to execute the above policy when U.S. interests are threatened abroad, as well as in support of allies, alliances, and signed treaties.
Then, let the chips fall where they may, including in the South China Sea. In naval parlance, the new policy would be a badly needed “shot across the bow”—and decidedly NOT the U.S. lesson learned and corrective action from the Afghanistan disaster that the CCP is seeking.
The Washington Post reported Friday that the Department of Defense was trying to dispel the notion that there was any kind of security risk represented by Afghan refugees hastily airlifted out of the failed state by the U.S. military.
For Karen DeYoung and John Wagner’s piece — headlined “Pentagon seeks to tamp down concern about Afghan refugees as Trump, GOP question vetting” — the chief Pentagon dispeller and concern-tamper-downer was Air Force Gen. Glen D. VanHerck, head of the U.S. Northern Command. He said that among the 53,000 people who have been brought into the United States so far, there have only been what he termed a handful of security incidents.
“For a population of 53,000,” VanHerck said, “what we’re seeing is law enforcement violations on par with and in most cases significantly lower than in similar-sized” American cities.
This is a particularly sanguine way of looking at the aftermath of President Joe Biden’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. It’s also not terribly relevant as a parallel.
Most towns of 53,000 people, for instance, aren’t comprised of refugees on a military base who know they need to be on their best behavior to get permanent residence in America. There also aren’t a whole lot of reports of adult men with child “brides” taking up residence in 53,000-person towns; there have been an undetermined but not insubstantial, if reports are to be believed, number of those among the Afghan refugees.
There typically aren’t 28 people in towns of 53,000 who are flagged as potential national security threats — the same number of flagged national security threats, it must be noted, who had reached U.S. soil by Sept. 10, according to a previous report from the Post.
And in most U.S. cities and towns of 53,000 persons, you don’t routinely have over 700 people simply disappear because they no longer wish to be subject to the town’s jurisdiction.
On Friday, Reuters reported that the number of “independent departures” of Afghan refugees being housed at our military bases has topped 700 and could well be higher, according to sources. Over 300 of those came from Fort Bliss, which straddles the Texas-New Mexico border.
“Independent departure,” for those of you who can’t suss the meaning out, involves people walking off the bases without receiving resettlement services. The wire service reported that “the phenomenon is raising alarms among immigration advocates concerned about the risks to Afghans who give up on what is now an open-ended, complex and completely voluntary resettlement process.”
A Department of Homeland Security representative didn’t comment but said the individuals who had left “generally” had the resources to support themselves and ties to the United States via family and/or friends.
The chief concern of those quoted in Reuters’ article was whether walking off the bases might cost those who did it dearly. According to the wire service, “leaving early could cost other Afghan evacuees critical benefits — like expedited work permits – and create a slew of legal problems down the road, given the complexities of the U.S. immigration system.”
“It’s a giant can of worms,” a Citizenship and Immigration Services official said. “This could lead to years and years of terrible immigration status problems.”
A bigger issue might be the fact there’s no legal authority that the military has to keep the refugees on bases. According to Reuters, by leaving the bases, refugees break no U.S. laws, and there’s no legal authority by which military officials can hold the Afghans against their will.
Apparently, President Joe Biden isn’t willing to do anything to make this more difficult, either.
The news about the refugees walking off of bases, however, comes after a number of assaults at both Fort McCoy in Wisconsin and Fort Bliss.
At Fort McCoy, as the Daily Mail pointed out Friday, one 20-year-old Afghan refugee is charged with three counts of engaging in sex acts with a minor and a 32-year-old man faces charges for assaulting his wife by strangling and suffocating her.
Meanwhile, at Fort Bliss, reports state that a soldier was assaulted by at least three Afghan refugees while she was reporting for duty.
There’s also the question of child brides. Yahoo News reported that a Sept. 5 Department of Homeland Security Office of Intelligence and Analysis report said that “U.S. officials at intake centers in the United Arab Emirates and in Wisconsin have found many incidents in which Afghan girls have been presented to authorities as the wives of much older men.”
The report went on to say “forced or coerced ‘marriages’ are indicative of the level of desperation Afghan families are willing to consider helping loved ones escape the Taliban and qualify for evacuation to Western countries.”
“The concern is, we’re seeing a lot of family units with very young girls. These girls are brought into the U.S. as wives,” an official familiar with the reports told Yahoo News. “It’s not a small number.”
“The reality is, overseas the vetting process sucks — there’s minimal vetting,” the official added. “So now we have a 60-year-old guy with a 12-year-old girl saying, ‘That’s my wife.’”
Sound like your 53,000-resident town?
And yet, when Biden put forth a vaccine mandate last month, part of the reason he gave was this: “My job as president is to protect all Americans.”
We’re supposed to assume that’s anything other than empty rhetoric when poorly vetted refugees can walk off military bases with no legal recourse?
A Gold Star family visiting Washington this week to lay their daughter to rest was attacked by a Politico reporter online after the family members toured the Capitol, and most of them were photographed without wearing masks.
KCRA-TV reported U.S. Marine Corps Sgt. Nicole Gee, who was among the 13 U.S. service members killed by a suicide bomb last month at the Kabul airport in Afghanistan, was laid to rest on Wednesday.
The outlet previously reported that Gee, who was 23-years-old at the time of her death, was honored late last month in a ceremony in California where she was remembered as being passionate about her service.
In an Instagram post just before her death, Gee posted a photo of herself holding a baby.
One of the last Instagram posts from fallen Marine Sgt. Nicole Gee in Kabul, who was killed in the suicide blast. She’s holding a rescued infant.
Gee was taken this week to her final resting place at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. Her family, who had traveled to the Washington area from California, reportedly decided to visit the Capitol while they were in the area this week.
Semper Fidelis
Today, Sergeant Nicole L. Gee was laid to rest during a full honors funeral service at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia.
Republican Rep. Tom McClintock, the representative for the family’s district, had publicly grieved with the family after Gee’s death.
He posted a photo of the fallen soldier on Twitter after she was killed.
23 year old Marine Sergeant Nicole Gee from Roseville is the definition of an American hero. A selfless Marine who put her country before herself was lost in the line of duty while helping evacuate Americans and our allies in Afghanistan. Remember her name. pic.twitter.com/7DOkeYbyCM
McClintock was reportedly the reason Gee’s family was at the Capitol on Wednesday, as he had offered them a tour. This seemed to anger Politico reporter Heather Caygle.
In a since-deleted tweet, Caygle posted an image of the family touring the building.
“Masks requirement in the House,” she wrote to her 50,000 followers. “Tours not allowed… Yet here we are — group of 9, only 2 in masks.”
The tweet was taken down, but an archived version of it is still available online.
Former Republican Sen. Jim DeMint posted a screenshot of Caygle’s tweet and pointed out that after criticizing the grieving Gold Star family, it looked like the reporter gave an image of maskless reporters surrounding Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia her approval.
“Same reporter. Mocks family of fallen marine on small private Capitol tour without masks. 2 hours later celebrates photo of dozens of journalists on top of each other without masks. Vain media thinks of themselves as the true heroes,” DeMint commented.
Same reporter. Mocks family of fallen marine on small private Capitol tour without masks. 2 hours later celebrates photo of dozens of journalists on top of each other without masks. Vain media thinks of themselves as the true heroes. #JournalismIsDeadpic.twitter.com/0MHSeCk4Sw
As of Saturday, Caygle’s Twitter account has either been deactivated or deleted. When attempting to view posts from her account, a message from Twitter reads: “This Tweet is from an account that no longer exists.”
The U.S. Marine who called for accountability after the messy U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is risking a lot for fellow Americans, his parents say.
“He is an American war hero. He has fought for his men and women that follow him. He’s fought on the battlefield for them. I believe he has risked his life for his fellow service people and Americans. He is now risking his livelihood for them. He saw a misjustice happening at the top and he felt that they should be held accountable for it,” Cathy Scheller, Stuart Scheller’s mother, said on NTD’s “The Nation Speaks.”
Stuart Scheller’s father, Stu Scheller Sr., said support from fellow Americans will greatly help his son.
The Marine Corps will “win the battle,” he said. “But America is going to help Stuart win the war.”
Stuart Scheller was dismissed from command after publishing a series of videos calling for U.S. military leaders to step up and own the “obvious mistakes that were made” during the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The United States left over 100 Americans behind in the Middle Eastern country after completing the withdrawal on Aug. 30. Additionally, 13 U.S. service members were killed in a suicide bombing attack on the Kabul airport, which troops were holding for approximately two weeks to facilitate evacuations after the Taliban routed the U.S.-backed Afghan forces.
Military leaders have said they were shocked by how quickly the Taliban captured the country and were caught off guard.
But none have so far resigned and they have by and large painted the evacuation effort as a success, pointing to the over 120,000 people, primarily Afghan nationals, that the United States evacuated or facilitated the evacuation of before pulling out.
Stuart Scheller is suspected of violating four articles outlined in the Uniform Code of Military Justice, including Article 88, which prohibits the use of “contemptuous words” toward superiors, a Marine spokesperson told Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Texas).
Stuart Scheller’s parents are advocating for his release and helping raise funds for his defense. They and the Pipe Hitter Foundation have raised over $2 million so far.
“I do know that he broke rank and I know that he knows that there are consequences for that. But he didn’t hurt anyone. He didn’t do any violent crimes. He spoke up on Facebook. And yes, there is a chain of command and there should be punishment for that,” Cathy Scheller said on NTD.
“But that chain of command that we saw broken, we also just saw broken on the Senate floor. That chain of command was broken. Our son has been given a gag order and thrown in prison and strip searched and thrown in isolation and is facing prison for breaking his chain of command. I’m fine if that’s the exact punishment that is taken out all the way across the board for anyone who breaks command,” she added.
Scheller Sr. said that the congressional hearings this week, which saw Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, and Gen. Kenneth McKenzie questioned sharply by members of Congress and appearing to lie about at least one matter, made evident that senior military leaders “are not accepting responsibility or accountability for their failures.”
“It would be an incredible act of political defiance for a commissioned officer to just resign because my advice wasn’t taken. This country doesn’t want generals figuring what orders we’re going to accept and do or not,” Milley said.
Milley later called the end of the war a “strategic failure” while Austin defended the evacuation effort, noting that it moved many people out of the country.
Over 30 House Republicans on Friday sent a letter to Gen. David Berger demanding the release of Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller Jr. after the Marine was placed in a military brig in North Carolina because he spoke out against the Biden administration’s withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan.
According to The Washington Post, Scheller was relieved of his command shortly after he posted a video on social media that demanded that senior officials be held accountable for the chaotic U.S. withdrawal in August, an evacuation that resulted in the deaths of 13 U.S. service members in an attack in Kabul.
“Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Scheller Jr. should be immediately released from the brig and allowed to voluntarily resign from his post,” the House members wrote to Berger on Friday.
“American service members should not be punished for demanding our military leaders stand up and take ownership of their decisions. Especially when those decisions lead to the tragic deaths of 13 service members.”
Arizona Republican Rep. Andy Biggs also spoke out on Twitter to urge Scheller’s release.
“Today, I sent a letter demanding the release of Lt. Col. Scheller who is currently being confined at Camp Lejeune for speaking out against his military leaders for the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan,” Biggs tweeted.
Today, I sent a letter demanding the release of Lt. Col. Scheller who is currently being confined at Camp Lejeune for speaking out against his military leaders for the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan.
As of Friday afternoon, the amount had reached more than $1.8 million.
“LtCol Scheller is an infantry officer with an exemplary career of five deployments and multiple senior awards including a Bronze Star, Army Commendation with ‘V’ for Valor, 3 Meritorious Service Medals, 3 Navy Commendations.”
“With 17 years in the Corps, Stu was just a few years away from retirement with a pension and benefits awaiting him, but none of that mattered more than doing what is right – demanding accountability,” the fundraising post said.
Scheller’s original video, posted Aug. 26 to Facebook and LinkedIn, questioned military leaders who abandoned Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan.
“I’m not saying we’ve got to be in Afghanistan forever, but I am saying: Did any of you throw your rank on the table and say, ‘Hey, it’s a bad idea to evacuate Bagram Airfield, the strategic airbase, before we evacuate everyone?’” Scheller said.
“Did anyone do that? And when you didn’t think to do that, did anyone raise their hand and say, ‘We completely messed this up?’”
The following day, Scheller posted on Facebook to announce he had been relieved of duty.
Scheller posted to YouTube afterward in a video that challenged military leaders, saying: “Your move.”
Meanwhile, Republican Reps. Nancy Mace of South Carolina and James Comer of Kentucky are demanding the Department of Defense provide information on the Scheller situation, Fox News reported.
A letter sent Thursday to Secretary Lloyd Austin gives the Defense Department until “no later than October 7” to brief the Committee on Oversight and Reform about the punishment of Scheller, which they say might be politically motivated and an attempt to quiet future whistleblowers.
The Biden administration has spent been soft on communist China from the very beginning.
Such examples include rescinding Trump-era executive orders that result in economic benefits to the Chinese regime, appointing pro-Beijing apparatchiks who advocate resetting relations with China, and allowing a de facto “hostage swap” for a Huawei executive awaiting extradition to the United States for financial crimes, including fraud.
Huawei Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou entered into a plea deal (a “deferred prosecution agreement”) with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) on Sept. 24. According to the statement released from the DOJ Office of Public Affairs, Meng “has taken responsibility for her principal role in perpetrating a scheme to defraud a global financial institution.” In admitting her crimes, including knowingly making false statements about Huawei’s operations in Iran (which is under U.S. trade sanctions), she agreed “not to commit other federal, state or local crimes.” If she subsequently commits any of these acts, she would be subject to apprehension and prosecution for the deferred crimes listed in the agreement.
And by the way, the U.S. extradition request to Canada that was initiated by the Trump administration was rescinded, allowing Meng to return in triumph to China in exchange for two Canadians being held there, pending trials on trumped up charges. The DOJ sees no harm and no foul.
Meanwhile, Chinese state-run media, which have been propagandizing for Meng’s release since she was arrested in Canada in December 2018, are crowing about her release and their “vindication” for several days now. On Sept. 26, the Global Times posted an article that featured a picture of Meng “wav[ing] to a cheering crowd as she step[ped] out of a charter plane at Shenzhen Bao’an International Airport in Shenzhen, south China’s Guangdong Province, on Saturday.”
This giving into Beijing’s “hostage diplomacy” is just the latest in an ongoing series of the Biden administration’s giveaways to the Chinese Communists (ChiComs) that began virtually from the first day of Joe Biden’s presidency.
The precedent for future hostage exchanges with the ChiComs has now been set: The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) can secure future releases of Chinese citizens by arresting a few unwitting foreigners in mainland China and using them for trade bait for Chinese spies and others facing prosecution for real crimes committed in the United States.
A Chinese security guard gestures outside the U.S. embassy in Beijing on Sept. 12, 2020. (Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images)
The Biden administration has been seemingly hard at work in granting concessions to China, starting with various executive orders as well as the appointment of China-friendly apparatchiks, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan, to positions from which future giveaways to China can be orchestrated.
The following items are just a few of the Biden administration’s gifts to China since January.
Cancellation of the Keystone XL Pipeline. On his first day in office, Biden signed an executive order that canceled the Keystone XL Pipeline, which would have carried millions of gallons of Canadian oil to refineries in the United States. New regulations in that executive order were also designed to curtail domestic oil and gas production, and since then, the average price of a gallon of gasoline in the United States has increased dramatically, as shown in the chart below.
Canceling the pipeline was a direct economic gift to China because higher energy prices make heavily-subsidized green tech more economically viable, leading to increased demand for Chinese-built electric vehicle batteries and solar panels. Washington’s rejoining the Paris Agreement is also of a piece with increasing China’s future sales of green tech to the United States.
Facilitating ChiCom Involvement in the U.S. Power Grid. Buried in that same executive order that canceled the XL pipeline permit was a provision that rescinded President Donald Trump’s Executive Order 13920 of May 1, 2020 (Securing the United States Bulk-Power System). The purpose of EO 13920 was to “ban, replace, and set new criteria on bulk-power system (BPS) electric equipment coming from a foreign country or national that poses a national security threat.” Envision a future in which Beijing can turn off—or at least disrupt—America’s lights in order to obtain geopolitical or economic advantage!
The “Xenophobia” Memorandum. On Jan. 26, Biden signed a memorandum ostensibly aimed at “combatting racism” titled, “Memorandum Condemning and Combating Racism, Xenophobia, and Intolerance Against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the United States.” A key provision was the direction to federal agencies aimed at “mitigating racially discriminatory language in describing the COVID-19 pandemic.” That meant terminating any U.S. government labeling of SARS-CoV-2 as the “China virus”—a major propaganda coup for the CCP, which has been trying to deflect from the known origins of the virus in China since early 2020.
Arms Sales Frozen to Saudi Arabia and the UAE. On Jan. 27, the Biden administration imposed a “temporary” freeze on arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. As discussed in a previous Epoch Times analysis here, a long-term CCP goal is to oust the United States from the Middle East, and freezing arms sales to U.S. allies in the region plays right into the ChiComs’ strategy.
Support for the ‘One-China’ Policy. Despite Beijing’s forced absorption of Hong Kong and the increasing intimidation of Taiwan by the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) and Air Force, the Biden administration publicly announced continued support for the “one-China” policy. What would Biden do if the Chinese military invaded Taiwan?
Appointment of a Pro-China Ambassador to the United Nations. Biden appointed Linda Thomas-Greenfield as U.N. ambassador. She is on record for praising the CCP’s global Belt and Road Initiative (BRI, also known as “One Belt, One Road”), which uses debt trap diplomacy to capture control of foreign ports and other transportation infrastructure. She was actually paid by the CCP to give that speech at a Confucius Institute event in 2019. Hers words will doubtless be “harsh” when warranted, but real actions aimed at confronting communist China at the U.N. will be few and far between.
Revocation of a Ban on CCP Propaganda in U.S. Universities. As reported here, the Trump-era policy was implemented to “compel primary, secondary, and postsecondary institutions to disclose all contracts and transactions with the Confucius Institute,” with noncompliant schools losing their certification for the Student and Exchange Visitor Program. Biden rescinded that policy on Jan. 26, which reopens the door for continued subversion of American colleges and universities through China’s Confucius Institutes.
Holds on WeChat and TikTok Cases. In February, the DOJ placed holds on two important cases involving Chinese tech companies TikTok and WeChat. The Trump administration had banned the apps for security reasons, including surreptitious collection of user data and “malicious intentions” by Chinese actors/bots. In June, the U.S. Department of Commerce formally rescinded a list of transactions previously prohibited with TikTok and WeChat, opening the door for CCP subversion of Americans using those apps.
A reflection of the U.S. flag is seen on the signs of the WeChat and TikTok apps on Sept. 19, 2020. (Florence Lo/Reuters)
Labeling CCP Genocide a “Cultural Norm.”In late February, Biden publicly called the failure of Xi Jinping to speak on the genocide of Uyghur Muslims part of a “different norm.” He said, “What [Xi] is doing with the Uyghurs in the western mountains of China, Taiwan and one-China policy by making it forceful, and he gets it. Culturally there are different norms in each country and their leaders are expected to follow.” One logical interpretation is that Biden provided diplomatic cover for continued CCP aggression in East Turkestan, Tibet, Southern Mongolia, Hong Kong, and even Taiwan in the future!
CCP Sympathizer Overseeing the Review of Trump-era China Policies. Melanie Hart, Biden’s China Policy Coordinator to the Undersecretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy and the Environment, is leading a team that is reviewing Trump’s “Clean Network” Initiative, which encouraged countries to block Huawei from 5G networks. Except that Hart took a trip to China, which was sponsored by the suspected CCP-front China-United States Exchange Foundation (CUSEF), and contributed to a report by the Center for American Progress that “urged closer financial ties and military collaboration” between both countries. So much for being “tough on China.”
The Debacle in Anchorage. On March 18 and 19, China’s Politburo member Yang Jiechi and Foreign Minister Wang Yi delivered a verbal beatdown to national security adviser Jake Sullivan and Secretary of State Antony Blinken. As expertly summarized by Sinoinsider here, the Chinese side’s “wolf warrior” diplomacy aimed at promoting the rise of Red China across a number of topics discussed, coupled with the decline of the United States and the West in general. And this was on the world stage for all U.S. allies to observe.
Canceling the Sea-Launched Nuclear Cruise Missile. In June, the Biden administration canceled the U.S. Navy’s sea-launched nuclear cruise missile program. This was done despite the rising threat from PLAN ship-launched cruise missiles and hypersonic weapons. The move nips in the bud U.S. efforts to address the Chinese regime’s nuclear and conventional missile superiority in the South China Sea, East China Sea, and the Taiwan Strait.
Dropping Prosecutions of Chinese Nationals Accused of Espionage. In July, the DOJ dropped cases brought by the Trump administration “against five visiting researchers accused of hiding their ties to China’s military, prompting questions about the department’s efforts to combat Chinese national security threats,” according to The New York Times.
Not Backing Restitution for “COVID Damages” From China. In early August, White House press secretary Jen Psaki stated that Biden would not back the Trump administration’s demand for “COVID reparations” from China. The greatest fear of the ChiComs is that world consensus would develop that Beijing be required to pay restitution for economic and personal damages wrought by COVID-19. It seems the current administration let China off the hook in one fell swoop.
The Gift of Afghanistan’s Lithium. This is the greatest gift that the Biden administration has given Xi Jinping so far. The ongoing U.S. evacuation from Afghanistan has left the Taliban in charge of the country. The ChiComs are already planning to exploit Afghanistan’s estimated $1 to $3 trillion in lithium reserves for Chinese production of batteries and other products. This is a perfect economic coup for the ChiComs as the Biden administration pushes green technologies, especially electric vehicles and EV batteries. The debacle was also a major strategic geopolitical defeat for America, demoralizing U.S. allies in the region by the abandonment of Afghan allies.
Conclusion
On issues large and small, the Biden administration is gift-wrapping policies that favor Beijing. There are many other examples in addition to the above list. The giveaways will continue, as the administration has some political appointees who have been corrupted in the past by ChiCom bribery, academic sinecures, and various awards, and who are ready, willing, and able to provide Beijing with a handsome return on their investments.
Pakistan’s support for the Taliban is not surprising. The international community needs to take stock of Pakistan’s moves in the Taliban-led Afghanistan, and to observe how the Pakistan-China nexus will be played out in the war-torn country.
The nexus is already taking root in Afghanistan as witnessed in the coordinated efforts between Islamabad, Beijing, and the Taliban. That is, while Pakistan called the Taliban’s takeover of Kabul “breaking the chains of slavery,” China has endorsed the new “interim government” of the Taliban by calling it a “necessary step” to restore order and “end anarchy.”
Furthermore, on Sept. 8, the Pakistani government led the initiative of organizing a foreign ministers’ meeting on the Afghan issue, which was attended by China, Iran, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. At the meeting, China announced that it would donate 200 million yuan ($31 million) worth of aid, including grains, winter supplies, and COVID-19 vaccines to Afghanistan. Speaking to the G20 foreign ministers via a video link, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi urged for humanitarian assistance to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan without any delay. Besides, Beijing has also expressed its interest in starting investment projects in Afghanistan when the situation becomes conducive.
While China has been quick to make its strategic moves in the war-torn country, it is still too early to gauge how China’s clout will play out in Afghanistan. However, what remains certain is that Afghanistan, under the Taliban, will become the new frontier of the Beijing-Islamabad nexus—further broadening the scope of the ties. This brings the “all-weather friendship” between China and Pakistan into perspective—India’s major concern.
India has always been wary over the “all-weather” ties between China and Pakistan. One of the key factors that bind Beijing and Islamabad is their common interest in the context of sovereignty and territorial dispute with India. This is exemplified by the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), the flagship project of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI, as known as “One Belt, One Road”) that connects the port city of Gwadar in the province of Balochistan with the Chinese city of Kashgar in the landlocked Xinjiang region. The CPEC violates India’s territorial sovereignty as it passes through Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK). However, Beijing dismisses New Delhi’s sovereignty concerns by arguing that the CPEC is an economic project and not aimed at any third country.
With the Taliban back in power in Afghanistan, India will have to face new dimensions of the so-called “two-front” scenario—the Taliban’s ties with China and Pakistan. This situation can be read in three ways. First, the extension of CPEC to Afghanistan will further add to India’s dilemma over Chinese intentions along India’s periphery. Second, China’s increasing affinity with the Taliban will provide a boost to Beijing’s interest to mediate between Afghanistan and Pakistan. And third, if Beijing succeeds in its role, it will try to export the “China model,” which will not be in India’s interest. While Pakistan has always been a concern for India regarding the Taliban, the added China factor will only make matters worse.
Therefore, India’s anxiety over Afghanistan is not just about the Taliban. To quell the risks, India held its first diplomatic talks with the Taliban this month and made it clear that “Afghanistan’s soil should not be used for anti-Indian activities and terrorism in any manner, according to the Ministry of Affairs.
As the uncertainties loom large, New Delhi would have to make difficult and uncomfortable decisions to secure its interests in the Taliban-led Afghanistan. And more specifically, to counter the “all-weather”ties between China and Pakistan as both countries’ interests in Afghanistan have an India quotient.
Three of the U.S. military’s top officials have told Congress that they realized within hours that a botched Aug. 29 drone strike had killed innocent civilians—contradicting earlier military statements about what the government knew in the aftermath of the incident.
“We knew the strike hit civilians within four to five hours after the strike occurred, and U.S. Central Command issued a press release saying that,” Central Command (CENTCOM) Commander Gen. Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie told members of the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) on Sept. 29, in responding to questions from Rep. Trent Kelly (R-Miss.).
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin also said the Pentagon knew about civilian deaths within “several hours” of the strike, as did Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
However, the latter part of McKenzie’s statement is false. CENTCOM statements following the drone strike don’t note civilian deaths.
The first Aug. 29 CENTCOM release regarding the incident said CENTCOM was “assessing the possibilities of civilian casualties, though we have no indications at this time.”
When media reports trickled out later that day about civilian deaths, CENTCOM issued a follow-up statement also failing to acknowledge the deaths.
“We are aware of reports of civilian casualties following our strike on a vehicle in Kabul today,” the second release reads. “It is unclear what may have happened, and we are investigating further.”
The same statements from CENTCOM also note that the drone strike eliminated an “imminent ISIS-K threat” to the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, and that secondary explosions may have occurred—both of which also proved to be untrue.
McKenzie also told HASC members on Sept. 29 that the Pentagon learned “a few days later” that the strike didn’t hit its intended target. But the Pentagon didn’t admit that until Sept. 17.
For weeks, U.S. military leaders repeatedly portrayed the strike as a successful attack, even as family members of the deceased insisted there was no connection between them and the ISIS offshoot.
“At this point, we think that the procedures were correctly followed and it was a righteous strike,” Milley said on Sept. 1, painting the strike as a proper course of action to retaliate against a suicide bombing at the airport in Kabul that killed 13 U.S. service members.
Journalists take photos of a vehicle damaged by a rocket attack in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Aug. 30, 2021. (Khwaja Tawfiq Sediqi/AP Photo)
But after a Sept. 10 New York Times investigation raised doubts about the veracity of the military’s claims, the Department of Defense admitted that the drone strike killed 10 civilians, seven of which were children—and no terrorists.
“We now assess that it is unlikely that the vehicle and those who died were associated with ISIS-K or were a direct threat to U.S. forces,” Milley said Sept. 17. “I offer my profound condolences to the family and friends of those who were killed. This strike was taken in the earnest belief that it would prevent an imminent threat to our forces and the evacuees at the airport.”
Secretary Austin made similar remarks on the same day.
“I offer my deepest condolences to surviving family members of those who were killed, including Mr. Ahmadi, and to the staff of Nutrition and Education International, Mr. Ahmadi’s employer,” he said, referring to Emal Ahmady, who said he translated for a U.S. company for three years starting in 2011.
“We now know that there was no connection between Mr. Ahmadi and ISIS-Khorasan, that his activities on that day were completely harmless and not at all related to the imminent threat we believed we faced, and that Mr. Ahmadi was just as innocent a victim as were the others tragically killed.
“We apologize, and we will endeavor to learn from this horrible mistake.”
CENTCOM didn’t respond by press time to emailed requests for comment on the contradiction between what McKenzie told Congress and what the releases stated. When reached by phone, a public affairs officer told The Epoch Times that no one was available to answer the inquiry.
CENTCOM is conducting an internal investigation of the incident.
McKenzie and the other generals declined to answer other HASC questions about the incident—such as whether they knew a U.S.-registered NGO was in the target area—citing the investigation.
Rep. Trent Kelly (R-Miss.) at a Make America Great Again rally in Southaven, Miss., on Oct. 2, 2018. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)
“There’s a lot of questions I have that have to be in a classified environment, but I hope that you guys know that I also sit on a different committee that has different insight on this, and I think it’s important that we know who authorized this, at what level—and that we hold the right people accountable,” Kelly said.
There’s the “War on Terror” and the “War on Drugs” but the real war our leaders fight with any perspicacity is the “War on Truth,” second only to that even older, perhaps oldest and most crucial of all, wars known colloquially as CYA.
The latter is fought to the bitter end and takes precedence.
We find this on display frequently in Washington, D.C. and Sept 28 was no exception.
During testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, both Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley and U.S. Central Command Gen. Kenneth McKenzie insisted, under oath, they had advised against President Biden’s precipitous and, to be as polite as humanly possible, ill-conceived exit plan from Afghanistan.
Milley said he urged Biden to leave 2,500 troops in place. This would have left enough military to guard Bagram air base and prevent it becoming the staging area for the Chinese air force it likely will become.
They also would have been able to arrange for either the destruction or the recovering of the 80+ billion dollars of U.S. weaponry, much of it high-tech, now in Taliban (and therefore Chinese, Russian and Iranian) hands.
It goes without saying too, most importantly, an operable Bagram could have saved myriad lives, American and Afghan, and would continue to do so.
President Biden denied hearing any of this. Or, more precisely, he didn’t recall hearing this.
The real question is—was he lying? Most likely, yes. From law school onwards he has plagiarized and lied multiple times. Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, as they say.
But there are other possibilities.
One is that President Biden’s cognitive issues are so severe that he couldn’t understand or actually allow himself to hear what the generals were advising. He had been so completely locked into an idée fixe of getting out of Afghanistan on whatever schedule he thought politically useful (Sept. 11?) nothing permeated.
A yet more disturbing alternative is that he was counseled against the generals’ view by some of his own advisors. Normally, that would make little sense, considering the disaster that occurred, but many actions of the Biden administration can be read as being against the long-term interests of the United States, actually weakening it deliberately, and in favor of the globalists or the Chinese communists, assuming they are not, in reality, one and the same.
The recent indictments and leaks from the Durham investigation lend credence to this possibility. Many of the officials in the Biden administration, in the State Department and elsewhere, are holdovers from the Obama administration, just in different positions as if reseated in a game of musical chairs.
How many of these people really want a strong U.S. military in a position to be guardians of the free world as it has been for decades? Wouldn’t they prefer it to fall apart? It’s worth thinking about.
But enough “paranoid” speculation. What about the head man in this CYA fiesta, General Milley?
When Sen. Tom Cotton, among others, asked Milley why he didn’t resign after the Afghanistan debacle, he replied as follows:
“Senator, as a senior military officer, resigning is a really serious thing—it’s a political act—if I’m resigning in protest. My job is to provide advice—my statutory responsibility is to provide legal advice or best military advice to the president, and that’s my legal requirement.”
Perhaps the general has short-term memory loss.
No American general in this century has been more overtly “political” than he.
Has he forgotten that for some time he has been referred to as the “woke” general?
Nothing is more political than “woke.” Indeed, that is its intention, to turn everything in our lives into politics—the food we eat, the air we breath, our educational system, our entertainment, our press, who gets a job, who gets promoted, who appears in a commercial, who goes to a restaurant, what we can say on social media, who’s skin color is best, who’s the biggest victim, what sex we declare ourselves to be, our pronouns and on and on.
Not very long ago, General Milley made a speech sympathetic to that flagship of “woke”—critical race theory. That the chairman of the joint chiefs would do that is astonishing and, in a sense, revolutionary.
He has, in effect, politicized the military that is supposed, for very good reason, including winning wars, to be neutral.
Also with good reason, we could dub him General “Woke.”
But now, of all a sudden, in Senate testimony, he self-righteously claims the military should not be politicized. He would never do such a thing.
Actually his vision of politicization is, in itself, completely politicized. He wouldn’t resign from Biden, no matter what the issue, and the current one is unbelievably extreme, but could well have resigned from Trump.
It wasn’t that long ago that he made a public apology for merely accompanying the then president to the torched St. John’s Church:
“I should not have been there. My presence in that moment and in that environment created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics. As a commissioned uniformed officer, it was a mistake that I have learned from, and I sincerely hope we all can learn from it.”
Learn what exactly? That the chairman of the joint chiefs is a hypocrite? We certainly learned that.
During his questioning by Sen. Marsha Blackburn we also learned Milley is a kind of creepy gossip who likes to make sure the likes of Bob Woodward know the general’s side of the story for the journalist’s forthcoming—is it fiction or non-fiction— best seller. After all, General “Woke’s” legacy is in play.
I’m not going to go into the telephone calls to the Chinese general, interesting as that may be, because I suspect more facts will be coming out.
What I will say is that, as usual “woke”—or in this case General “Woke”—is the opposite of really woke. What business was it of his to supersede the commander-in-chief and telegraph our intentions to the enemy?
Milley seemed to think that was his job, that he was just being internationally “woke.” Many would disagree.
Yes, CYA trumped the War on Truth, as it almost always does, in Washington Tuesday.
The Department of Homeland Security is not allowing an evacuation flight of 117 Americans and Afghan allies to land in the United States, according to Project Dynamo.
Project Dynamo founder Bryan Stern told Reuters that 117 people, including 59 children are waiting at an Abu Dhabi airport to travel to the U.S.
“They will not allow a charter on an international flight into a U.S. port of entry,” Stern said, according to Reuters.
The 117 travelers at the United Arab Emirates capital include 28 American citizens, 83 green card holders and six holding Special Immigration Visas, according to the report.
Among the travelers are 59 children, including 16 under 3 years old.
“Right now we have 59 children sleeping on airport chairs and cold airport floors – not the warm bed with a hot meal that we’d arranged for all of them stateside – because the US Government denied our flight clearance into ALL US ports of entry. All of them. For a plane load of Americans,” the organization posted on Twitter Tuesday night.
“They escaped the regime they were running from only to have the government they were running HOME TO, turn them away. This cannot be what America does to Americans. Bring Dynamo 01 home. Now. Today,” the post added.
The delay was apparently an unforeseen development.
In a news release published only Tuesday, Stern’s organization was praising the State Department.
“We would like to thank the U.S. State Department and the United Arab Emirates’ Ministry of Foreign Affairs for their cooperation in challenging circumstances to secure the safe return of these U.S. citizens, U.S. Legal Permanent Residents, and Afghan allies,” the news release stated.
“We would also like to acknowledge the Taliban for facilitating the departure of the aircraft by allowing those who want to depart Afghanistan to do so peacefully,” it added.
According to Reuters, an administration official interviewed was unfamiliar with the specific situation, but said the typical practice is for the U.S. government to verify the passenger manifest of charter planes before allowing them to land in the U.S.
According to a CNN report, “A State Department official said they ‘are not going to detail our involvement with any specific groups at this time.’
“The evacuation effort has been a monumental task and the U.S. government understands the need to coordinate across agencies, as we have done, but we also appreciate the desire of NGOs and private citizens to assist and have identified a greater need for coordination there,” the official said.
Several days after the fall of Kabul on Aug. 15, President Joe Biden sat for an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. He insisted he had not been advised by his military to leave a small number of troops in Afghanistan to keep the country from falling to the Taliban.
“Your top military advisers warned against withdrawing on this timeline. They wanted you to keep about 2,500 troops,” Stephanopoulos said.
Biden abruptly cut him off. “No they didn’t. It was split. That wasn’t true. That wasn’t true.”
“They didn’t tell you that they wanted troops to stay?” Stephanopoulos asked.
“No, not in terms of whether we were going to get out — in a time frame — all troops. They didn’t argue against that,” the president said.
Stephanopoulos tried again. “Your military advisers did not tell you, ‘No, we should just keep 2,500 troops. It’s been a stable situation for the last several years. We can do that. We can continue to do that’?”
Biden answered: “No. No one said that to me that I can recall.”
FLASHBACK: In August, Biden insisted that “no, no one” advised against his withdrawal timeline.
Today under oath, Generals Milley & McKenzie confirmed they recommended against Biden’s withdrawal timeline and warned him about the impending collapse of the Afghan government. pic.twitter.com/HejzUb5FIf
In addition to the fact that Biden’s remarks didn’t sound particularly convincing, two of his top military advisers contradicted him in testimony before Senate lawmakers on Tuesday morning. And a third testified he was sure the president had “received this input.”
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley and Gen. Frank McKenzie, head of U.S. Central Command, addressed members of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday.
Both Milley and McKenzie said they had recommended leaving 2,500 troops in Afghanistan to prevent the Taliban from taking over the country, according to CNN.
Milley told lawmakers: “In the fall of 2020, my analysis was that an accelerated withdrawal without meeting specific and necessary conditions risks losing the substantial gains made in Afghanistan, damaging US worldwide credibility, and could precipitate a general collapse of the Afghan government, resulting in a complete Taliban takeover or general civil war.”
The Joint Chiefs Chair said his view all along was “that we should keep a steady state of 2,500 and it could bounce up to 3,500, maybe, something like that, in order to move toward a negotiated solution.”
McKenzie echoed Milley. According to Fox News, McKenzie told the committee, “I won’t share my personal recommendation to the president, but I will give you my honest opinion and my honest opinion and view shaped my recommendation. And I recommended that we maintain 2,500 troops in Afghanistan.”
“I also have a view that the withdrawal of those forces would lead inevitably to the collapse of the Afghan military forces and eventually the Afghan government,” he added.
To make things worse for the president, Austin was asked if he was certain Biden “received the input” from Milley and McKenzie. Austin replied, “Their input was received by the president and considered by the president for sure.”
It’s abundantly clear: Joe Biden and Kamala Harris ignored the advice from the military and mislead the American people.
Biden’s botched Afghan withdrawal could have been prevented and American lives could have been saved. https://t.co/wUCd3C0xt0
Milley also told the senators, “I think that our credibility with allies and partners around the world, and with adversaries, is being intensely reviewed by them to see which way this is going to go. And I think that ‘damage’ is one word that could be used.”
I think so too.
Notably, both Milley and Austin blamed the Doha agreement negotiated by the Trump administration with the Taliban in February 2020 for a precipitous drop in the morale and the performance of Afghan troops.
This issue was raised when senators questioned why the Biden administration didn’t have a better sense of the limitations of the Afghan forces, according to CNN.
“It’s my judgment that the Doha Agreement did negatively affect the performance of the Afghan forces in particular by some of the actions the government of Afghanistan was required to take as part of that agreement,” McKenzie said. “[The Doha deal] did affect the morale of the Afghan security forces.”
This is more an excuse for poor judgment than a cause of the debacle. Biden has repeatedly blamed the chaotic U.S. exit on the Trump administration’s peace deal with the Taliban.
In fact, The Associated Press explored the veracity of that claim days after the fall of Kabul and found it lacking in substance. Its fact check determined that Biden was not bound by the Doha, Qatar, agreement. The deal contained an “escape clause.”Do you believe that Biden is responsible for the disaster in Afghanistan?Yes No Completing this poll entitles you to The Western Journal news updates free of charge. You may opt out at anytime. You also agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
“The U.S. could have withdrawn from the accord if Afghan peace talks failed,” the AP wrote. “They did, but Biden chose to stay in it, although he delayed the complete pullout from May to September.”
Former President Donald Trump and his officials were realistic. In defense of the Trump administration’s efforts, it must be said that they were well aware of the forces they were dealing with. They were always clear that the Taliban would be monitored and “conditions on the ground” would determine the path forward.
All along, Trump warned of significant military retaliation if the Taliban reneged on its obligations.
His administration was criticized for giving legitimacy to a terrorist group, but the Taliban is such a dominant force in the country, how could it have been otherwise? The U.S. and the Afghan government could ignore the group at their peril.
Biden was so determined to get out of Afghanistan that he ignored the most important words in the Doha agreement: “conditions on the ground.”
The Doha deal had not been ratified by Congress and it could and should have been changed as conditions changed. Biden had no problem with changing any other policy and program implemented by the Trump administration.
Milley says putting a specific date on withdrawal went against his advice, says conditions-based approaches are superior.
The other excuse offered by the generals was that the collapse happened so quickly. What they believed would take months occurred over 11 days, they claimed.
The report lists the key events since U.S. Central Command began its formal military drawdown on May 1.
Here are the most relevant developments.
June 22: “Taliban seize Sher Khan border crossing to Tajikistan.”
June 23: “General Milley says 81 district centers are under Taliban control.”
Jun 25: “President Biden meets with President Ghani and High Council for National Reconciliation Chairman Abdullah in Washington, DC.”
July 8: “Taliban capture Islam Qala border crossing in Herat Province, key trade route to Iran.”
July 12: “General Austin Miller relinquishes command of U.S. Forces-Afghanistan and NATO Resolute Support Mission.”
July 12 – 15: “Four media outlets publish maps indicating Taliban control majority of Afghan districts, with many taken since May 1.”
July 14: “Taliban capture border crossing at Kandahar Province’s Spin Boldak, connecting Afghanistan and Pakistan.”
July 17: “High-level Afghan delegation meets with Taliban in Doha to expedite stalled peace talks.”
July 21: “General Milley says Taliban control more than 210 districts [out of a total of approximately 400].”
The report indicates the Taliban was executing a preplanned, systematic takeover of the country, that U.S. military leaders were well aware of it and allowed it to continue.
By June 23, 20 percent of the districts in the country were under Taliban control. Milley told Congress about it.
Exactly four weeks later, on July 21, 50 percent of the districts were held by the Taliban. They had also captured at least three border crossings.
It’s likely the Biden administration knew long before June 23 that the takeover had begun. I would be willing to bet the administration was aware of it in real-time.
But even giving them the benefit of the doubt, officials knew about it for nearly two months rather than the 11 days Milley referred to at the Senate hearing.
The bottom line is that contrary to what Biden told Stephanopoulos, his military advisers recommended that he leave 2,500 troops in Afghanistan. The Biden administration could have torn up the Doha agreement at any time. And Biden officials were aware that the Taliban was sweeping through the country, swallowing up districts for far longer than 11 days.
Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller, a 17-year veteran, risked his career and pension when he posted a scathing rebuke of the senior military leaders who failed US servicemen serving in Afghanistan.
Joe Biden’s incompetence and corruption led to the death of 13 US servicemen and 15 more were critically wounded in a blast by a suicide bomber in Kabul on Thursday.
“I want to say this very strongly. I have been fighting for 17 years. I am willing to throw it all away to say to my senior leaders: I demand accountability,” said Scheller.
“I’m not saying we’ve got to be in Afghanistan forever. But I am saying, did any of you throw your rank on the table and say, ‘Hey, it’s a bad idea to evacuate Bagram Airfield, a strategic airbase, before we evacuate everyone’? Did anyone do that? And when you didn’t think to do that, did anyone raise their hand and say, ‘We completely messed this up’?” Scheller added.
“I thought through, if I post this video, what might happen to me — especially if the video picks up traction, if I have the courage to post it,” he said. “But I think what you believe in can only be defined by what you’re willing to risk. If I’m willing to risk my current battalion seat, my retirement, my family’s stability to say some of the things I want to say, I think it gives me some moral high ground to demand the same honesty, integrity, and accountability from my senior leaders.”
Scheller is “currently in pre-trial confinement,” a spokesperson for Training and Education Command said of the officer’s status.
“The time, date, and location of the proceedings have not been determined. Lt. Col. Scheller will be afforded all due process,” the statement continued.
But the elder Scheller defended his son, arguing that he was only asking for “accountability” from the military’s top brass.
“He’s asking for the same accountability that is expected of him and his men,” he said.
“I’ve had Vietnam veterans contacting me applauding him for his courage because they too want to know: Was it all worth it?” he continued. “And by demanding accountability and honesty from his senior leaders, that’s all he was asking. And the way the Marine Corps has dealt with it: They have now put him in jail.”
According to a report from the Washington Times, a man who had been convicted of rape and deported from the U.S. was allowed to board an Afghan evacuation flight and reach the state of Idaho.
Ghader Heydari, a convicted rapist who was deported from the US in 2017, was arrested after catching an Ethiopian Airlines evacuation flight out of Kabul.
According to The Washington Times, Heydari came to the US as a refugee and was even granted a green card in 2000.
Heydari pleaded guilty to rape in Ada County, Idaho, in 2010, and he served more than five years in prison.
Roughly 400 Afghan refugees or more will resettle in Idaho in 2021 according to officials with the International Rescue Committee in Boise.
Over 50,000 Afghans are expected to be admitted to the United States this year under a program called “Operation Allies Welcome.”
The news comes as reports surface describing several attacks committed by the newly arrived Afghan refugees.
A female soldier was recently gang assaulted by several Afghan men brought over during the evacuation. Two other Afghan refugees have been arrested on charges of sexual assaults of minors, and the assault of another woman.
After a short stay at various processing centers, the more than 50,000 refugees will be resettled in states across the country.
According to reports, many of the refugees are being sent to Spokane, WA, Boise ID, Missoula, MT, and parts of Minnesota.
Former President Donald Trump released a statement on Monday attacking the Biden administration for releasing “17,000 illegal immigrants” from Del Rio, Texas, into America as part of a twin debacle alongside failure in Afghanistan, arguing, “Our Country is being destroyed!”
“All 17,000 illegal immigrants who entered our Country from Haiti and other places unknown have now been released into our Country with no vetting, checking, or even minimal understanding of who they are,” Trump began in his statement posted to Twitter by spokeswoman Liz Harrington.
NEW!
President Donald J. Trump:
“All 17,000 illegal immigrants who entered our Country from Haiti and other places unknown have now been released into our Country with no vetting, checking, or even minimal understanding of who they are. pic.twitter.com/BiqEkdthNa
Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas said in a briefing on Friday that approximately 30,000 mostly Haitian migrants had been encountered in Del Rio since Sept. 9, with only about 2,000 deported to Haiti.
Many were given a notice to appear for an asylum hearing and were released after being removed from a camp under the Del Rio International Bridge that included about 15,000 people at its height.
Trump also criticized the Biden administration for releasing the Haitian migrants without COVID-19 testing or other health checks.
“Some are very sick with extremely contagious diseases, even worse than the China Virus. They are not masked or mandated, but just let free to roam all over our Country and affect what was just a year ago, a great Nation,” he said in the statement.
“Some are very sick with extremely contagious diseases, even worse than the China Virus. They are not masked or mandated, but just let free to roam all over our Country and affect what was just a year ago, a great Nation.
The former president argued that the Biden administration’s open border policies have resulted in America being “humiliated like never before.”
In addition to the border crisis, he also noted President Joe Biden’s “embarrassing” withdrawal from Afghanistan.
“Now we are a Nation humiliated like never before, both with the historically embarrassing ‘withdrawal’ from Afghanistan, and our Border where millions of people are pouring in. Our Country is being destroyed!” Trump said.
“Now we are a Nation humiliated like never before, both with the historically embarrassing “withdrawal” from Afghanistan, and our Border where millions of people are pouring in. Our Country is being destroyed!”
The Biden administration withdrew all U.S. military personnel on Aug. 31, leaving hundreds of Americans behind under the rule of the Taliban.
In addition, the military departure included leaving behind vast amounts of military equipment, providing tremendous resources to arm the Islamic extremist group.
Further, 13 U.S. military personnel were killed during a suicide bombing in August outside the Kabul airport.Should Trump run for president in 2024?Yes No Completing this poll entitles you to The Western Journal news updates free of charge. You may opt out at anytime. You also agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
In response, the Biden administration authorized a drone strike, originally reported to have taken out an Islamic State group leader.
A later report revealed the drone strike accidentally hit an innocent target, killing 10 people, including seven children.
An unknown number of Americans and allies remain in Afghanistan nearly a month after the Biden administration’s military departure.
The Taliban could gain control of nuclear weapons as a result of their lightning conquest of Afghanistan and the Biden administration’s hurried abandonment of the county, according to former National Security Advisor John Bolton.
“The Taliban in control of Afghanistan threatens the possibility of terrorists taking control in Pakistan too. … If the whole country gets taken over by terrorists, that means maybe 150 nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists,” Bolton told host John Catsimatidis a WABC-AM interview on Thursday.
Bolton elaborated upon the threat in an Op-Ed in The Washington Post last month in which he said that Pakistan could become an extremist country in the aftermath of the fall of Afghanistan.
“For decades, Islamabad has recklessly pursued nuclear weapons and aided Islamist terrorism — threats that U.S. policymakers have consistently underestimated or mishandled. With Kabul’s fall, the time for neglect or equivocation is over,” he wrote.
The Taliban’s takeover in Afghanistan elevates the risk that Pakistani extremists will increase influence, or threaten to seize control. Pakistan could have well over 100 nuclear weapons, which in the hands of an extremist regime is an unthinkable threat. https://t.co/kueRiCB6zH
“The Taliban’s takeover next door immediately poses the sharply higher risk that Pakistani extremists will increase their already sizable influence in Islamabad, threatening at some point to seize full control,” he wrote.
Bolton said the nuclear threat could be even worse than that from Iran.
“While Iran still aspires only to nuclear weapons, Pakistan already has dozens, perhaps more than 150, according to public sources,” the former national security advisor wrote.Has Joe Biden set back hopes for world peace?Yes No Completing this poll entitles you to The Western Journal news updates free of charge. You may opt out at anytime. You also agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
“Such weapons in the hands of an extremist Pakistan would dramatically imperil India, raising tensions in the region to unprecedented levels, especially given China’s central role in Islamabad’s nuclear and ballistic-missile programs,” he said. “Moreover, the prospect that Pakistan could slip individual warheads to terrorist groups to detonate anywhere in the world would make a new 9/11 incomparably more deadly.”
Bolton said the United States must ensure Pakistan does not become either an ally or a client of the Taliban.
“Acknowledging the enormous uncertainty, given Pakistan’s nuclear capabilities, the United States must now come down hard on Islamabad if it continues supporting the Taliban and other terrorists,” he wrote.
America must also avert a potential disaster, Bolton said.
“Most important, we must devote maximum attention to Pakistan’s nuclear stockpiles and weapons-production facilities. If a future terrorist regime in Islamabad (or even today’s government or like-minded successors) appears ready to transfer nuclear capabilities to terrorists, we should take preventive action,” he wrote.
Bolton, who was national security advisor to former President Donald Trump from April 2018 to September 2019, said during his Sunday interview that President Joe Biden embarrassed himself and the nation with his bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Allies are “wondering if he has a grip on his own administration’s foreign policy,” Bolton said in the Aug. 23 Op-Ed.
He said China is more of a threat than the Biden administration seems to understand.
“China, which already has a lot of influence in Pakistan, is going to increase its influence and put more pressure on India. This is a big development in that part of the world,” Bolton wrote.
“I think the United States must look at China and the threat it poses across the board. They’ve been stealing our intellectual property for decades … They discriminate against foreign companies and investors. They manipulate the World Trade Organization. They are building up their military… And they are very aggressive politically,” he said.
“The United States needs to come to grips with this threat … and needs to be prepared for a long struggle across the full spectrum of potential power — economic, political and military. …
Afghanistan’s justice system is returning to a pre-U.S. form of barbarism as suspected criminals are subject to being strung up in public spaces under the rule of the Taliban.
The Associated Press, citing a witness within the country, reported that in the major city of Herat in western Afghanistan, an alleged kidnapper was killed by gunfire and then hanged from a crane on Saturday.
A man who operates a pharmacy in the city told the AP that the Taliban was responsible for securing a man’s body to the crane and then displaying it in the city’s main square.
Wazir Ahmad Seddiqi said that four men were killed during an attempted kidnapping. He added that one of the men was hanged in the Herat main square.
The other bodies were dragged away to be displayed in other areas of the city, he said.
Such displays were once common under the Taliban’s previous rule over the country. But the 2001 U.S. ground invasion of Afghanistan put hard-line Islamists on the ropes.
Throughout the last two decades, many Afghans have enjoyed a relatively westernized system of justice. But Herat was taken by the Taliban in mid-August, as were many other areas.
With Sharia law in place across the country, or set to be enacted, public and brutal displays are resuming.
A high-ranking Taliban official and the enforcer of its view on justice told the AP on Friday that people accused of crimes will not be subject to a system of due process common in westernized countries.
Public executions, torture and amputations for shoplifters are going to be used, said Mullah Nooruddin Turabi.
Turabi carried out enforcement of the Taliban’s strict interpretation of Sharia law in the 1990s. He brushed off criticism about his use of public spaces to punish accused criminals in the past.
In the 1990s, he and others in power sometimes used a Kabul stadium for executions and amputations, the AP noted.
“Everyone criticized us for the punishments in the stadium, but we have never said anything about their laws and their punishments,” Turabi said during an interview with the AP. “No one will tell us what our laws should be. We will follow Islam and we will make our laws on the Quran.”
The man tasked with enforcing Sharia for the Taliban wants to take the country’s legal system back to where it was before 2001.
“Cutting off of hands is very necessary for security,” he said during his Friday interview. He and other Taliban leaders are currently working to adopt a policy with regard to handling public punishments.
Speaking on amputations in particular, Turabi touted them for their ability to deter crime.
The goal, per Turabi, is to bring back a system of strict punishment while keeping in place some social reforms accomplished during U.S. occupation of the country, such as having female judges.
Fox News on Wednesday ran a scroll listing the many controversies plaguing the Biden administration during its eighth month, and the moment really put things into context.
We’re n deep trouble.
Not that we didn’t already know our country has descended into complete chaos. That much has been obvious for some time. It’s everywhere you go, actually.
Grocery stores, gas stations, airports and the passable portions of the country’s southern border are all reminders of how terrible President Joe Biden has been for America.
Walk by a TV, though, and the larger picture comes into focus.
That was especially true on Fox News when “America Reports” anchors Shannon Bream and John Roberts rolled out a list of the ongoing crises, tragedies and other disasters plaguing the country and its inept leadership.
“It’s been eight whole months, but it looks like the honeymoon is over,” Bream said while Fox viewers were reminded of the many failings of the Biden administration.
A graphic displaying “current controversies” scrolled upward as the pair commented on the 18 different issues the network had keyed in on. Bream declared that not even the “mainstream media can ignore” all the trouble.
Those troubles include reports that thousands of Haitian migrants who have been camped out along the border in Texas are being released into the country. That occurred after the White House assured that no such thing would happen.
Roberts then noted that Biden was “getting called out for not calling out China by name at the United Nations” when he addressed the global body this past week and managed to make no mention of the world’s largest human rights abuser.
Fox’s scrolling Biden crisis graphic reminded viewers that while they face being treated as second-class citizens if they’re not vaccinated against the coronavirus, no such mandates exist for people who are literally breaking the law by being in the country.
It also pointed out Biden’s mixed messaging about COVID-19 booster shots, which are now not being recommended for the general population by the Food and Drug Administration. Biden sure stopped talking about that subject quickly.
The adults are back in charge, right?
The current administration has managed to anger France, the country’s oldest ally, while also moving to leave the Israeli people vulnerable to attacks from Hamas terrorists.
In case anyone had forgotten that the U.S. military surrendered full control of Afghanistan to the Taliban last month, Fox’s crisis meter reminded them.
That’s all going on, and we can expect, any day now, a capitulation to Iran over nuclear weapons. It feels like a matter of time before pallets of cash start landing in Tehran.
There was also present on Fox’s list the fact that not one single person in the White House or the president’s Cabinet has claimed responsibility for a drone strike in Kabul that killed seven children. There has also been no accountability over the fact that the Pentagon left American citizens behind in Afghanistan as troops were ordered out.
Labor shortages, rising prices on basic commodities and high gas prices are all still with us as domestic issues to remind everyone just how bad the Democratic Party’s ideas are.
The opening segment from Bream and Roberts on Wednesday served as a sobering reminder of just how much trouble this country is in. Simultaneously, it somehow also failed to capture the magnitude of the situation.
The good news: There are just under three and a half years left of this madness — if we’re lucky.
China, Russia, Pakistan, and Iran have maintained their embassies in Afghanistan. Taliban representatives also met with those governments, as well as the government of Turkmenistan, before assuming power. India and the United States, by contrast, closed their embassies and recalled their diplomats.
At a recent meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, both Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan, called on the international community to engage with the Taliban, particularly on the subject of antiterrorism. It is estimated that there are between 8,000 and 10,000 foreign terrorists in Afghanistan, roughly 6,000 of whom are from Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan.
The so-called Iron Brotherhood—the relationship between China and Pakistan—has been strengthened by the U.S. pullout from Afghanistan as the two countries find that their policies on the Taliban running Afghanistan broadly align.
Both Pakistan and the Chinese regime welcome the Taliban into power as they hope that the Taliban can help curb terrorism in their respective countries and because a Taliban takeover will complicate decision making for India and the United States. Pakistan applauded the U.S. withdrawal because it meant an end to India’s influence in Kabul.
China and India have had several border clashes, which have resulted in a year-long standoff in the Himalayas. India got on well with the previous Afghanistan government. The Taliban, on the other hand, is likely to become India’s adversary, particularly if it aligns with China. The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) engagement with the Taliban will ensure that India has no influence in Kabul.
An Indian Air Force Hercules military transport plane prepares to land at an airbase in Leh, the joint capital of the union territory of Ladakh bordering China, on Sept. 8, 2020. (Mohd Arhaan Archer/AFP via Getty Images)
The United States has been fighting the Taliban for the better part of two decades and is expected to remain at odds with the terrorist organization. At the same time, the relationship between Beijing and Washington continues to be adversarial in terms of economics, trade, and national defense. Consequently, the CCP and Pakistan strengthening ties with the Taliban has put the United States in a difficult position.
Pakistan sees an opportunity to expand its geo-economic interests, connecting Central Asia with the Arabian Sea at Gwadar Port. These hopes hinge on the assumption that the Taliban could stabilize Afghanistan and that the Taliban could and would prevent terrorist attacks from being launched from Afghanistan into Pakistan, China, and Central Asia. But so far, the U.S. pullout has emboldened terrorists across the region as they see this as a major victory. The Syria-based chapter of the Turkestan Islamic Party issued a congratulatory statement when the Taliban took Kabul.
Although the Taliban has promised to clamp down on foreign terrorists, it has not given any indication of how to do that.
Terrorist attacks on Chinese targets in China are rare, but the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is an obvious, soft target. CPEC projects have come under attack in the past, either because the Pakistan Taliban resented China’s presence in Pakistan or as reprisals for the CCP’s repression against the Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
Pakistani naval personnel stands guard near a ship carrying containers at Gwadar Port, Pakistan, on Oct. 4, 2017. (Amelie Herenstein/AFP via Getty Images)
The Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which is allied with the Taliban in Afghanistan, has increased its attacks in Pakistan, killing seven Pakistani soldiers near the Afghanistan border and in a separate incident, killing 13 civilians on a bus, as well as claiming responsibility for a suicide attack in Quetta, the capital of Balochistan. Consequently, the TTP has been identified as one of the greatest threats to stability in Pakistan.
Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi has offered a pardon to TTP members if they promise not to get involved in terrorist activities, but the offer has been rejected. He has since expressed his hope that the Taliban would help convince TTP members to drop their armed insurgency. Meanwhile, there are reports that TTP fighters were released from Afghanistan prisons when the Taliban took over the country.
The Taliban has said that it would like to join CPEC. While this may seem like a win-win situation, it would require providing additional investment and taking more risks by Beijing. It is possible the Taliban will cooperate with the Chinese regime, in some limited way, preventing terrorist attacks, in exchange for recognition and financial support. But it is unclear if the Taliban would have the power or the willingness to do that.
One motivation for the Taliban to make good on its antiterrorist promises to Beijing is that it is hoping China will extract the $1 trillion to $3 trillion of minerals—including lithium for electric car batteries—that are sitting idle under the earth in Afghanistan. Economic support from China has become even more important for Afghanistan as international financial institutions have frozen bank accounts and other overseas assets, and international donors have stopped sending money.
As there will most likely be no money from the West, the Taliban knows that China may be its only major source of funding. But this does not guarantee the safety of Chinese investments. In the past, Taliban promises of protection for Chinese projects proved ineffective. Meanwhile, in addition to attacks by the Taliban, Chinese investments will be vulnerable to attacks by other militant groups—foreign or anti-Taliban groups.
Even under the relative stability of the U.S. involvement, China had made little progress on its existing investments in Afghanistan and had not even begun the extraction of Afghanistan’s rare earth minerals. On the other hand, Beijing may be encouraged to invest in Afghanistan just to extend the country an economic lifeline. The CCP probably does not need a pariah state, another North Korea, on its border.
Aside from terrorism and security concerns, alignment between the CCP and the Taliban could have economic implications for the domination of Central Asian markets and geopolitics. As the influence of Russia slowly diminishes in the region, India hoped to benefit, filling some of the void. In 2016, the CCP briefly established a military base in Tajikistan to conduct counterterrorism operations against ethnic Uyghur separatists. Through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, Beijing has increased its engagement with and influence over Central Asia, working to counter independence movements by the East Turkestan Islamic Movement from destabilizing China’s Xinjiang region. Chinese investment in the region has already eclipsed Indian investment, and Beijing hopes to widen the gap.
Chinese soldiers stand at attention during Peace Mission-2016 joint military exercises of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in Balykchy, Kyrgyzstan, on Sept. 19, 2016. (Vyacheslav Oseledko/AFP/Getty Images)
The CCP’s propaganda machine is exploiting the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan as a signal of diminishing U.S. hegemony, military, and geopolitical power. Beijing has warned both Taiwan and India that the United States may no longer be a reliable ally. Former Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh similarly said that “Biden had ‘dealt a blow to Indian national security’” and that India-U.S. ties would suffer as a result.
The Times of India, an Indian English-language daily news media, however, has interpreted the U.S. pullout a bit differently, saying that the Taliban has not won a war. It has simply “exploited the flawed policies of a fatigued American president,” rather than the United States itself. Whether Delhi turns away from the United States remains to be seen. India has more than $3 billion in investments in Afghanistan, which it may want to preserve.
It is possible that India and the United States may allow a Taliban-led Afghanistan, as long as it ends regional terrorism. India is also a major economic player. So the Taliban may be willing to engage economically with India as a way of counter-balancing Chinese influence.
President Joe Biden has moved the U.S. foreign policy away from overseas nation-building, instead, focusing on maintaining U.S. primacy, ahead of China and Russia. As such, the United States may be satisfied with a stable Afghanistan and an end to international terrorism, rather than be concerned about Afghanistan’s internal affairs or whether China and Pakistan maintain most of the influence in the country.
In spite of Beijing’s warnings to U.S. allies, there is no reason to believe that the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan signals a lessening of U.S. commitments to its partners and allies, including India. India currently participates in the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, one of the primary U.S.-led strategies to contain Beijing.
The task of creating a functioning economy and a stable civil society in Afghanistan will now fall on Pakistan and China, neither of which has much experience in these areas. It is possible that that task will be an expensive and painful one for them, providing the United States and India more room to plan and maneuver.
Thousands of people are still seeking to flee Afghanistan, including Americans, more than three weeks after the Biden administration pulled U.S. military forces from the Taliban-controlled nation.
“Thousands of people are still trying to flee Taliban-controlled Afghanistan,” Fox News foreign correspondent Trey Yings wrote in a Twitter post on Thursday.
“U.S. Green Card holders. People who live and pay taxes in the United States are trapped.
“We met a man today who runs two businesses in Atlanta. He’s stuck with his family right now in Kabul,” he added.
Thousands of people are still trying to flee Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.
U.S. Green Card holders. People who live and pay taxes in the United States are trapped.
We met a man today who runs two businesses in Atlanta. He’s stuck with his family right now in Kabul.
“We also talked to a group of former U.S. embassy workers,” Yingst added in another tweet.
“They are still in Kabul, despite promises they would be evacuated,” he added.
We also talked to a group of former U.S. embassy workers. They proudly showed me photos inside the embassy, working for the Americans. One had an email from the Deputy Chief of Mission. They are still in Kabul, despite promises they would be evacuated.
Especially concerning was Yingst’s report that U.S. citizens remain trapped in the country.
“There are still U.S. citizens here as well. The daughter of that man from Atlanta has a U.S. passport,” Yingst tweeted.
“We’ve met multiple American passport holders still in Kabul. Some made it out on Qatari flights, others did not,” he said.
There are still U.S. citizens here as well. The daughter of that man from Atlanta has a U.S. passport. We’ve met multiple American passport holders still in Kabul. Some made it out on Qatari flights, others did not.
The report follows news last week of an elderly California couple who is returning home after being trapped in Afghanistan for weeks following the U.S. military’s departure from the country, according to California Republican Rep. Darrell Issa.
“This is a cause for celebration and the result of almost countless hours of work under very difficult conditions,” Issa said in a statement.
“Our team simply would not give up, and today it paid off and we got them home.”
The names of the couple are reportedly being withheld at the family’s request due to fear of violence toward relatives who remain in Afghanistan.
Issa’s office said it has helped 33 Americans and holders of American visas to escape Afghanistan.
“While we have made extraordinary progress, but we’re not stopping until everyone comes home,” Issa said.
House Rules Committee Democrats quietly extended a rule earlier this week in the latest National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that effectively bars Republicans from obtaining information on President Joe Biden’s disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal, say GOP representatives.
The provision was adopted during the Rules panel’s Sept. 20 hearing on the defense bill, and it includes a continuing resolution on spending and a measure designed to nullify state laws limiting abortion access at any time during a pregnancy.
The provision, which has been extended by Democrats multiple times since the original adoption, reads as follows:
“24. Provides that House Resolution 188, agreed to March 8, 2021 (as most recently amended by H. Res. 555, agreed to July 27, 2021), is amended by striking ‘September 22, 2021’ each place it appears and inserting (in each instance) ‘October 27, 2021.’”
The provision continues one of the chief tools House Democrats have used in the rules adopted in January for the 117th Congress to frustrate the ability of Republicans to demand and receive information from the Biden White House and the executive branch using the resolution of inquiry (ROI).
The wording of ROIs “will vary depending on the person to whom the resolution is directed. The House traditionally ‘requests’ the President and ‘directs’ the heads of executive departments to furnish information,” according to the House parliamentary procedures manual.
The Rules panel’s action comes as Republicans on the House Foreign Relations Committee seek an investigation of the administration’s actions in the Afghanistan withdrawal.
The ROI is an effective investigative tool because it puts the authority of a congressional committee behind a legislative request rather than causing representatives of the minority party to rely on letters and telephone calls seeking needed information and data.
It’s much more difficult for executive branch officials to ignore a request backed by an ROI, while telephone calls aren’t returned and letters from lawmakers are easily and often ignored.
The ROI is also more difficult for the majority to defeat because House rules require such a measure to be marked up within two weeks of its introduction or it becomes a privileged motion for the whole House. If the resolution is approved, the ROI then becomes a request of the House, not just a committee.
Rules committee member Rep. Guy Reschenthaler (R-Pa.) offered a motion on Sept. 21 to end the ROI ban, saying that “in light of President Biden’s failed Afghanistan withdrawal and evacuation, it is absolutely imperative that we restore this tool to get to the bottom of this administration’s avoidable debacle.”
Reschenthaler said he was “concerned that the majority maintains this provision simply to shield the administration from addressing the very real concerns that members on both sides of the aisle have” on the Afghanistan situation.
Rules member Rep. Michael Burgess (R-Texas), spoke in favor of Reschenthaler’s motion, telling the panel the ROI ban should be terminated because “we can’t get phone calls answered from the administrative state. This is not right and it needs to change. … I urge the majority to restore minority rights” under the ROI process.
Burgess also seeks the passage of an ROI concerning the Biden administration’s treatment of unaccompanied illegal immigrant children coming across the U.S. border from Mexico.
Reschenthaler’s motion was defeated 9–4, marking the fifth time Democrats, led by Committee Chairman Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), have rejected efforts to restore ROIs. ROIs were first adopted in 1879.
A spokesman for the Rules panel majority didn’t immediately respond to The Epoch Times’ request for comment.
During debate on a previous attempt, Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), the panel’s ranking Republican, said: “The speaker and the Democratic majority have ruled with an iron fist, beginning in earnest at the start of the 117th Congress. In one fell swoop, they eliminated two critical minority tools, motions to recommit and the use of resolutions of inquiry.”
Besides the ROI, Cole was referring to limits during the 117th Congress on the minority’s ability on the House floor to offer motions to recommit bills to committees with instructions to change them rather than having votes on final passage.
Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), the top Republican on the House Foreign Relations Committee, told The Epoch Times the ROI ban has prevented effective legislative oversight on multiple issues.
“Democratic Leadership has suspended a centuries-old House rule that allows for more congressional oversight—all to protect President Biden from scrutiny for the multiple disasters his failed leadership has caused,” McCaul said.
“Whether it’s the deadly catastrophe in Afghanistan or the crisis at our southern border, the American people expect Congress to hold the Executive Branch accountable for their mistakes. The majority needs to lift this indefinite ban on resolutions of inquiry and allow for vigorous oversight.”
Republicans on the foreign relations panel have been frustrated by having to depend on letters to gain needed oversight information on the Biden administration’s lax administration of congressionally mandated sanctions against, for example, Russia’s Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline to Europe.
The Biden administration didn’t answer questions posed by House Republicans in a March 5 letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Questions also went unanswered from an April 22 letter from McCaul to Blinken concerning Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal.
In the April letter, McCaul predicted the withdrawal would “hand the Taliban an undeserved victory, damage U.S. credibility as a counterterrorism partner, and gravely endanger the lives of Americans and Afghans alike.”
A group of Republican congressmen on Tuesday filed articles of impeachment against President Joe Biden over his handling of the border, his surrender to the Taliban in Afghanistan and the eviction moratorium that he said himself might be unconstitutional.
Republican Rep. Bob Gibbs of Ohio sponsored the resolution to impeach Biden. He was joined by three co-sponsors: Reps. Brian Babin and Randy Weber of Texas and Andy Biggs of Arizona.
Gibbs slammed Biden over his mismanagement of the country in an interview with the Washington Examiner.
“I take this seriously. I don’t think it’s haphazard. I’m not trying to get media attention for myself,” Gibbs said. “[Biden has] done so much damage to this country in less than nine months, which is really scary.”
The congressman concluded Biden is not qualified to lead.
“He’s not capable of being commander in chief, and that’s obvious by the actions since Day One when he took the presidency back in January,” he added. “Maybe something like this makes the White House think twice before they do some of this nonsense.”
One article states that Biden “violated his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of President” in his handling of the illegal immigration crisis.
Another article says he violated the separation of powers when he extended the federal eviction moratorium “despite the clear warning from the U.S. Supreme Court” and “with no legislative directive from the U.S. Congress.”
When asked about an extension to the eviction moratorium on Aug. 3, Biden told a reporter: “The bulk of the constitutional scholarship says that it’s not likely to pass constitutional muster. … But there are several key scholars who think that it may and it’s worth the effort. But the present — you could not — the Court has already ruled on the present eviction moratorium.”
A third article of impeachment calls for the president to be removed over his botched exit from Afghanistan. The article states that Biden “failed to act responsibly as Commander in Chief with regard to the withdrawal of United States forces from Afghanistan.”
“Who in their right mind takes troops out before they take out American citizens and our allies?” Gibbs said.
He added that he does not foresee his attempt to impeach Biden going anywhere with Democrats in control of the House, but said he filed the articles in an attempt to hold the president accountable.
“Obviously, it’s not going to go anywhere with Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi,” he said. “It shows that there are some Republicans that think that this president needs to be impeached, he needs to be removed from office one way or another.”
“At some point, they’re gonna be held accountable for their actions, and this is kind of putting them on notice,” Gibbs stated.
The Republican commented on the articles of impeachment on social media on Tuesday and Wednesday.
“It’s clear the President is not up to the job, that his entire administration is willing to thumb its nose at the Constitution,” he tweeted on Tuesday.
“Though Pelosi’s House will not hold [Biden] accountable, it’s incumbent upon House Republicans to call out his egregious violations of his oath of office.”
It’s clear the President is not up to the job, that his entire administration is willing to thumb its nose at the Constitution. Though Pelosi’s House will not hold @POTUS accountable, it’s incumbent upon House Republicans to call out his egregious violations of his oath of office https://t.co/lrQ3xZ75p3
President Biden must be held accountable for clearly unconstitutional actions, including willfully violating the separation of powers in attempting to extend a federal eviction moratorium. https://t.co/8tO4a8Oxfz
“President Biden must be held accountable for clearly unconstitutional actions, including willfully violating the separation of powers in attempting to extend a federal eviction moratorium,” he tweeted Wednesday.
Rep. Tom Malinowski said some inmates should be ‘released to their home countries’
While working as a Washington, D.C., lobbyist, a New Jersey House Democrat lobbied for the closure of Guantanamo Bay, where senior Taliban government leadership were then imprisoned.
Rep. Tom Malinowski led the charge to shut down Guantanamo Bay prison—which holds some of the world’s most dangerous terrorists and criminals—as early as 2007, arguing through lobbying channels and academic journals. As a Human Rights Watch lobbyist Malinowski advocated a Senate measure introduced by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.) that would have closed the facility and released some inmates to their countries of origin.
In 2014, Malinowski joined the Obama administration as assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor. During his tenure there, the Obama administration released five Taliban detainees in exchange for U.S. Army deserter Bowe Bergdahl. Four of the detainees released in the swap have now returned to power in Afghanistan’s newly installed jihadist government. Norullah Noori, Abdul Haq Wasiq, Khairullah Khairkhwa, and Mohammad Fazl all returned to Afghanistan after stints in Guantanamo and will occupy positions in the Taliban government overseeing issues from defense and intelligence to culture and tourism.
Wasiq is the new director of intelligence for Afghanistan. He was in Guantanamo Bay from 2002 to 2014. Noori, the Taliban’s border chief, deputy defense minister Fazl, and information and culture minister Khairkhwa also were imprisoned in Guantanamo during that time. During those years, Malinowski actively worked to close the prison camp.
“Guantanamo should be closed,” Malinowski wrote in 2008. “Most everyone agrees that this could be done quickly by bringing the prisoners to facilities inside the United States, at which point some would be prosecuted and others released to their home countries.”
Malinowski’s liberal record on foreign policy has been used against him during his campaigns. When he first ran for Congress in 2018, Republican outside groups including the Congressional Leadership Fund accused him of “seek[ing] legal protections for terrorists” and “criticiz[ing] America for waging war on al Qaeda.”
Malinowski has also faced scrutiny over his questionable stock trades. The congressman is facing an investigation from the House Ethics Committee into whether he violated a federal law that requires he disclose his stock trades.
The New Jersey Democrat is in a vulnerable position going into the 2022 midterms. His already competitive district could be substantially redrawn this year and see its share of Republican voters increase. Malinowski defeated Republican challenger Thomas Kean by just over 1 percentage point in 2020.
Surgeon Joseph Sakran said Trump could use politics to compromise vaccine’s approval process
Virginia Democratic gubernatorial nominee Terry McAuliffe employed a left-wing doctor who questioned the efficacy of the vaccine during the Trump presidency to portray his GOP opponent as anti-science.
In an ad released Friday, McAuliffe trotted out trauma surgeon Joseph Sakran to argue Youngkin “won’t listen to doctors and scientists.” While the ad presents Sakran as an unbiased expert who merely cites “the science,” Sakran himself sowed doubt about the vaccine during its development and has a long history as a liberal activist and donor.
Sakran in May 2020 questioned a Moderna announcement that touted “promising vaccine results,” suggesting that the company only did so to manipulate its stock price.
“Moderna announced promising vaccine results…..and the executives then sell 30 million in stocks,” Sakran wrote. “Something smells funny!” Months later, he contended that the Trump administration could use “political pressure” to “circumvent” health experts and create “an expedited vaccine making healthy people sick.”
Prominent liberals echoed Sakran’s rhetoric at the time. MSNBC host Joy Reid, for example, asked in September if “anyone at all” will “ever fully trust the CDC again” as “Trumpist nonsense has infected everything.”
“And who on God’s earth would trust a vaccine approved by the FDA?” Reid added. She has since claimed “anybody rational was hesitant” to take the vaccine because “Donald Trump was out there controlling the CDC and controlling the FDA and manipulating them and making them put out falsehoods.” Reid now regularly criticizes those who express vaccine hesitancy.
Sakran, meanwhile, called the vaccine “promising” just weeks after he warned that Trump could use politics to compromise its approval process—and just days after Biden won the November election. In December, he praised the Food and Drug Administration for recommending authorization of the Pfizer vaccine and declared himself “ready to get vaccinated.”
Sakran told the Washington Free Beacon he has “always been clear that vaccines work and ha[s] always encouraged their use” but declined to answer questions about his vaccine rhetoric during the Trump presidency. McAuliffe did not return a request for comment.
In his McAuliffe campaign ad, Sakran also made questionable claims to criticize Youngkin’s positions on coronavirus-related measures. Sakran, for example, said Youngkin “is against requiring masks in schools, even though the science has made clear that’s how we prevent outbreaks in schools.”
That science, however, is far from clear. Many American allies in Europe have exempted children from wearing masks in schools, and the World Health Organization advises against requiring masks for children ages 5 and under.
“Scientists have an obligation to strive for honesty,” hematologist and oncologist Vinay Prasad wrote in September. “And on the question of whether kids should wear masks in schools—particularly preschools and elementary schools—here is what I conclude: The potential educational harms of mandatory-masking policies are much more firmly established, at least at this point, than their possible benefits in stopping the spread of COVID-19 in schools.”
McAuliffe’s embrace of Sakran could also undermine the Democrat’s position as a supporter of Israel. Sakran, a self-identified “Palestinian American,” has referred to Israel as an “apartheid” state and condemned former president Donald Trump’s “reckless” decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. As governor, McAuliffe notably denounced the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement but has since welcomed an endorsement from an activist group that staunchly defends the anti-Israel campaign. Sakran did not respond to a request for comment about his past Israel rhetoric.
Sakran has long supported liberal causes and politicians. He created “Doctors for Hillary” in 2016 and gave nearly $7,000 to support failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign. He went on to launch gun control advocacy groups that caught the attention of Democratic officials—Sakran attended the 2019 State of the Union address with Rep. Mike Thompson (D., Calif.). In addition to his Clinton contributions, Sakran has donated nearly $9,000 to Democrats since 2016, including a $2,800 offering to President Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign.
With Election Day quickly approaching, McAuliffe leads Youngkin by just 3 points, according to a September Washington Postpoll. The pair will square off at the polls on Nov. 2.
When 13 United States service members were killed last month by a suicide bomber in Afghanistan, it was clear the Biden administration’s rushed exit from the country had cost innocent American blood.
New information now suggests the administration is even more culpable than it initially appeared.
According to India’s Firstpost, the ISIS-K suicide bomber has been identified as Abdul Rehman. He was a jihadi who had been in Afghanistan’s Bagram prison for the last four years.
Indian authorities learned Rehman was allegedly part of a plot from ISIS-K to stage suicide bombings in New Delhi, where his father frequently traveled for business. The authorities had him arrested and incarcerated in Bagram prison in 2017, Firstpost reported.
Indian intelligence officials said he was handed over to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency by the Research and Analysis Wing, India’s foreign intelligence agency, in September 2017.
Yet when President Joe Biden began implementing his reckless and ill-planned withdrawal strategy in Afghanistan, chaos ensued. This very chaos allowed thousands of suspected and convicted terrorists to escape Bagram unscathed on Aug. 15, including Rehman.
Just 11 days later, Rehman allegedly carried out the attack that killed 13 American service members and well over 100 civilians.
“America’s disorganized retreat from Afghanistan has led to hundreds of highly competent and highly committed terrorists being set free to rejoin the Islamic State, al-Qaida and other terrorist groups,” an officer who worked on the Rehman case told Firstpost.
“Literally a decade’s work on counterterrorism has been undone by the U.S.’ failure to secure key prisoners in Bagram.”
Those are pretty damming words from an officer who was reportedly involved personally in the counterterrorism effort.
While it may sound dramatic, Rehman’s deadly actions showed just how quickly things can get off track in terms of terrorism. If other prisoners who escaped also end up participating in violence, it will not be that far-fetched to suggest that the Biden administration undid many if not most previous counter-terrorism efforts in the region.
Firstpost reported that Rehman was selected to lead the bombing plot in New Delhi because he was familiar with the area. But after intercepting communications, India’s RAW was able to send in an agent posing as a jihadi.
The agent convinced Rehman he had amassed enough people and explosives to carry out the attack, which led Rehman to communicate with his commanders. The CIA was then able to exploit those conversations and arrest Rehman.
He was sent on a special flight to Kabul, Afghanistan, where the CIA led an investigation. Questioning by the CIA alongside Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security exposed multiple ISIS leaders, whom the U.S. then killed via drone strikes in 2019.
“There’s no clarity on what happened to Abdul Rehman between his escape from Bagram and the suicide attack,” an intelligence official said. “It is possible he wanted revenge, or that he was persuaded by his old jihadist friends to atone for his role in the killings of his associates in this manner.”
Obviously, the path to apprehending Rehman was long and meticulous. All that work was wiped away in a matter of days thanks to the Biden administration’s incompetence.
To make matters worse, Rehman is just one of the thousands of prisoners who escaped Bagram in August. Who’s to say others are not going to be seeking revenge as well?
We already knew that Biden’s incompetence led to horrible conditions at the Kabul airport and ended with thousands of Americans stranded in Afghanistan.
The fact that the administration’s incompetence also led to the escape of thousands of terrorists, at least some of whom are willing to commit suicide bombings and kill civilians, is just the icing on the hugely disappointing cake.
The gut-wrenching reality of what it means to be an American citizen left in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan when the U.S. government will not help was brought home vividly when a woman trying to flee the country shared her story on Fox News.
Jennifer Wilson, the COO of the nonprofit Army Week Association who works with the group Project Dynamo to rescue Americans trapped in Afghanistan, joined Fox News’ Dana Perina on “America’s Newsroom” along with a woman whose name was given as “Julie,” a U.S. citizen trapped in Afghanistan.
“They broke me, you know, the United States broke me because I’m a U.S. citizen,” she said.
“I’ve been through a lot of,” the woman began, until an eruption of misery brought a flood of tears and a halt to her words, “very bad in my life.”
“I just come to get married here to have life with my family and get back there,” she said.
Then came the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, and what she said was her abandonment by the State Department.
“Basically, I’m dying,” she said as time goes by and she remains trapped.
She said that Wilson was her best hope, because the State Department would do nothing for her.
“I call them so many times. I email them. They just take the phone. They say, ‘I’m sorry we can’t do anything for you,’ and that is the answer,” she said.
“And I said, ‘What’s going on with you guys? I’m a U.S. citizen,’” she said, adding that, “And I just lose a lot of family here.”
“What she is not able to tell you at the moment is, she went back to get married. She got the letter from the U.S. Embassy telling her and her family they could get into [Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport] back when it was still open, and they went there and 18 members of her family were killed in the bombing,” Wilson said, apparently referring to the Aug. 26 suicide bomb attacks that killed 13 U.S. service members and an estimated 170 Afghans.
Wilson said that “currently only she and her daughter hold U.S. passports” and Project Dynamo can only bring those two bring out of the country.
“I had to have a conversation with her. Do you want to leave with your daughter and leave the rest of your family because I can’t get them out right now. All I can get out is you and your daughter because you hold the right passport,” Wilson said. according to Fox.
“She will tell you just, all she has left is who is left in her family from the bombing. She can’t leave them. I could not make that decision with a member of any of my family,” she said.
“Being faced with that after losing 18 family members two weeks ago. I am not smart enough and I don’t have the emotional intelligence to know what she is going through,” Wilson said.
Wilson said that she can evacuate “Americans and NATO passport holders. So, my call list is about 500 Americans, NATO and their family members.”
“It was in those vetting calls that I found Julie. I called up, basically just to say ‘are you an American?’ She told me her story and it broke me,” Wilson said, according to Fox News.
“It hit different. I have been doing this for four weeks. I have not felt like that yet. It was awful,” Wilson said.
If the Biden administration had hoped that media coverage of its disastrous exit from Afghanistan would fade anytime soon, new billboards gracing the highways in central Pennsylvania say otherwise.
According to USA Today, Scott Wagner, a Republican former Pennsylvania state senator and 2018 gubernatorial candidate paid for the signs, which show a smiling President Joe Biden dressed in Taliban military garb holding a rocket launcher with the caption: “Making the Taliban Great Again!”
According to the York Daily Record, Wagner purchased the signs for $15,000 through Trone Outdoor Advertising.
Wagner told the media outlet he blames Biden for the situation in Afghanistan which he sees as “an absolute mess and a tragedy.”
He was especially concerned about $85 billion of U.S. military vehicles and equipment left behind. He said, “I was watching an evening news show one night and saw the Taliban in American personnel carriers.”
“It’s like Vietnam, even worse,” he added.
Asked for a comment by WHTM News 27 in Harrisburg — the Pennsylvania capital — Wagner replied: “I saw the image [of Joe Biden]. I got it from a friend a few weeks ago. The picture tells the story.
“We pulled out of Afghanistan too quickly, and we left so much of American equipment. Joe Biden has made us look like a fool. I feel so bad, words can’t describe what I would say to someone who was wounded or someone’s family who had a soldier pass away in the country after all this happened.”
Pennsylvania Department of Transportation spokesman Fritzi Schreffler responded to a WHTM inquiry in a statement that read: “The Department permits such outdoor advertising to private entities through an application process, bound by law and regulation. Specifically, the Outdoor Advertising Control Act of 1971 (Federal Law) and Title 67, PA Code, Chapter 445 (PA Commonwealth Regulation) do not regulate or control billboard advertising content. Generally, advertising content is protected by the First Amendment under the US Constitution.
“Therefore, if the advertising message is legal per State or Federal laws and regulations, recourse is not warranted. While we understand the message on the Interstate 83 billboard may be unpleasant to some, it is our understanding that the message is legal. As such, the Department has no basis to require this message be changed.”
According to PennLive, the billboards have been placed along “the Pennsylvania Turnpike, Interstate 83, and Routes 322, 11-15, and 15.”
They’ve have created quite a stir in the Keystone State, which was one of the keys to Biden’s still-questionable victory in the 2020 election.
Americans are angry about the Biden administration’s handling of the withdrawal from Afghanistan. This sorry episode should not and will not be forgotten. To use Biden’s famous remark to former President Barack Obama after the passage of Obamacare in 2010, “This is a big f***ing deal.”
The fall of Kabul to the Taliban was a tipping point in U.S. history. In a rare moment of responsibility (with some exceptions), the mainstream media actually committed journalism. There really was no choice.
I would go so far as to say it altered the balance of power in the world. The biggest winners are the Taliban and China. The biggest loser, obviously, is the United States, the country Biden is supposed to be leading.
In addition to our nation’s diminished status on the world stage, the Biden administration’s many missteps left 13 U.S. service members and at least 170 Afghans dead. The Biden Pentagon’s “retaliation strike” against the terrorist group ISIS-K ended in the deaths of 10 innocent Afghan civilians including seven children.
I hope to see more billboards highlighting our current president’s profound stupidity pop up across the nation. Biden and his entire administration deserve to be humiliated.
Republicans must continue this messaging as the country moves closer to the 2022 midterms and into the 2024 presidential race.
I suppose the silver lining to the Afghanistan crisis and all of this administration’s other destructive policies is that it will (at least it should) deliver a blow to the progressive cause for years to come.
President Joe Biden is on vacation again this weekend as the crises his administration has created consume a troubled country which he apparently needs a few days to forget about while at the beach.
NBC News chief White House correspondent Kelly O’Donnell shared images on Twitter Friday of Biden landing in Delaware to bask in the sun before the lunch plates had even been washed on the east coast.
President Biden has taken Marine One to a landing zone at Rehoboth Beach where he will spend the weekend at his Delaware beach house. pic.twitter.com/sfwrbVk0rj
Peculiarly, there were no stories headlining Biden’s getaway on the Associated Press home page. That’s odd, because on Dec. 25 last year, the AP printed this: “President Donald Trump spent his Christmas golfing in Florida as a government shutdown looms and COVID relief hangs in the balance.”
Of course, Trump was a Republican president, and few people in the decrepit establishment media view Christmas as anything special. That being noted, it was major news when Trump went home for Christmas.
The AP added in its holiday hit piece, “Trump tweeted that he planned to make ‘a short speech to service members from all over the world’ by video conference Friday to celebrate the holiday…”
Remember what it was like before Big Tech goons colluded with leftists Democrats to censor sitting presidents and other people en masse? Remember when we had a president who was capable of addressing people?
Trump was more present while golfing than Biden is while addressing the country — which is rarely.
Biden was gone from the White House earlier this year when border communities across the southeast were first inundated with COVID-positive illegal immigrants.
The president was also missing in action at Camp David last month as his administration’s decisions in Afghanistan resulted in a humanitarian crisis.
Thirteen U.S. service members were soon after killed by a suicide bomber as Biden’s military leadership surrendered to the Taliban, put troops in a defensive position and gave away weapons and equipment to terrorists as he assumedly still wanted to disarm the American people.
This weekend, as the country is again consumed by a crisis, Biden will be on the beach in Delaware at his Rehoboth Beach resort. The country has entered a full-blown moral crisis and we have no one to lead us through it.
We already don’t know for sure who is really running the White House when Biden is there. We know he definitely won’t be calling the shots until Monday.
Perhaps Gen. Mark Milley, an accused traitor who during the final months and days of Trump’s presidency allegedly betrayed the country’s civilian leader and phoned China, will have his feet up on the Resolute desk all weekend reading Marx as Biden wanders around a beach while avoiding questions about the seven innocent children military leaders like Milley killed last month in Kabul by a drone strike.
Milley inexplicably is still employed, even after he botched Afghanistan, reportedly betrayed his commander-in-chief and called killing foreign kids “righteous.”
A report last week from The New York Times which claimed that a U.S. military drone killed an innocent Afghan aide worker and his family was confirmed by the Pentagon. That confirmation came on Friday. Isn’t that convenient?
Nobody will be around to answer for that all weekend, or for the fact that France, our oldest ally, is walking away from us.
Biden will also have his toes in the sand as an estimated 10,000 reportedly mostly Haitian migrants sleep under a bridge in south Texas. Do you think that campout will be labeled a COVID super spreader? Don’t count on it. The Haitians didn’t vote for Trump.
Biden isn’t concerned, about any of this. He won’t have to answer for the Taliban’s butchers decapitating children as they seek to cleanse Afghanistan of all former American support. He can also avoid any talk of still-rising inflation and totally avoid the fact the country is hopelessly divided along ideological lines and missing its identity.
Remember when he promised to unite us all and then told private companies that they have to tell their employees what they must put into their bodies? He probably doesn’t, either.
The country right now seems like one giant powder keg. The only question for the White House seems to be, who’s tapping the keg in Rehoboth Beach?
CORONA DEL MAR, Calif.—As Americans around the country continue to hold ceremonies in honor of the thirteen fallen soldiers killed during the U.S. retreat from Afghanistan on Aug. 26, members and guests of the Bahia Corinthian Yacht Club (BCYC) held a solemn remembrance on Sept. 15, using time-honored maritime and military traditions.
In the days after the tragedy, BCYC volunteers and staff created a fallen soldier tribute with a reserved sign at one of the seats of the club’s bar, with a framed photo of the thirteen fallen soldiers flanked by a glass of beer at the ready, a traditional gesture symbolizing their loss.
A ceremony was then organized and led by BCYC Port Captain, Mark Jensen, himself a veteran who served in the Navy during the Vietnam War.
Jensen was in Portugal at the time the American warriors were killed, and upon hearing the news, he sent an email to BCYC Vice Commodore Kari Konapelsky to whom he reports, requesting that the club fly the national ensign (American flag) at half staff for the next 13 days to honor the fallen soldiers. He also asked if he could organize a special ceremony during the club’s nightly retiring of the colors on Sept. 15.
“I know that a lot of other military personnel have been lost in that (Afghanistan) war,” Jensen told The Epoch Times. “But nevertheless, these were the last. I felt strongly that we needed to do something to honor these soldiers, because those men and women made the ultimate sacrifice at the end. It didn’t need to happen that way, but it did and they deserve our appreciation and respect for their service.”
Konapelsky responded with a photo of the club’s American flag already at half-staff and a thumbs up approval of the remembrance ceremony when Jensen returned home.
BCYC Commodore, Rhonda Tolar, who attended the tribute, told The Epoch Times, “BCYC has long had a proud history of upholding dearly held American maritime traditions. We felt this was an appropriate tribute, particularly because we are so blessed with the freedoms all Americans enjoy each day, thanks to the service and sacrifice of those who died in the name of our country, like the 13 who perished far from home in Afghanistan on August 23rd.”
The Tradition of Colors
The tradition of colors began with the British Royal navy and has continued with the U.S. Navy. Cannons or guns are fired, or a ship’s bell rung, at sunset when the flag is taken down, as a sign of respect.
In the days when sailing ships were armed with cannons, it could take as long as twenty minutes to load and fire a gun. When a ship fired her guns in salute, she rendered herself powerless for the duration. By emptying their guns, the ship’s crew demonstrated to shore batteries and forts that they were no threat.
Over time, this gesture became a sign of respect, with both shore and ship gun batteries firing volleys.
‘Attention on Deck’
BCYC has observed the time-honored naval tradition of the colors—the daily raising and lowering of the American Flag—ever since the club’s founding in 1958.
Tradition calls for the colors to be hoisted smartly each morning and lowered ceremoniously at dusk. Colors is a tradition observed at many yacht clubs throughout the U.S., and at all military bases throughout the world.
During colors, members of the Armed Forces and veterans who are present but not in uniform may render the military salute, and any service person present in uniform should render a salute.
Each evening at BCYC, as the sun sets over the harbor and the Pacific Ocean, a ship’s bell is rung, and the command “Attention on Deck” is announced to staff, members and their guests. All those on club property in sight of the flag stand and face the flag in silence, with their hands over their hearts, until the flag is fully lowered. Many veterans stand at attention and salute the flag as it is lowered each evening.
At sunset on the 15th, Jensen, with the help of BCYC Tradition’s Committee Chair, Elizabeth Barden, asked members and their guests to rise and silently face the flag. Barden began the remembrance with what is referred to as a death knell, the ringing of a ships bell twice three successive times during the silence.
“This is a solemn occasion for this evening during our colors ceremony,” Jensen told the crowded room after the bells tolled. “Tonight, we remember and honor our 13 fallen American Warriors.”
Jensen then read the names of the fallen soldiers after a single bell toll was rung for each.
“These are the 13: Marine Corps Lance Cpl. David Espinoza, 20 of Rio Bravo, Texas. Marine Corps Sgt. Nicole Gee, 23, of Roseville, California. Marine Corps Staff Sgt. Darin Taylor Hoover, 31, of Utah. Army Staff Sgt. Ryan Knauss, 23, or Corryton, Tennessee. Marine Corps Cpl. Hunter Lopez, 22, of Indio, California. Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Rylee McCollum, 20, of Jackson, Wyoming. Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Dylan R. Merola, 20, of Rancho Cucamunga, California. Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Kareem Nikoui, 20, of Norco, California. Marine Corps Cpl. Daegan William-Tyeler Page, 23, of Omaha, Nebraska. Marine Corps Sgt. Johanny Rosario, 25, of Lawrence, Massachusetts. Marine Corps Cpl. Humberto Sanchez, 22, of Logansport, Indiana. Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Jared Schmitz, 20, of Wentzville, Missouri. Navy Hospital Corpsman and Marine medic Max Soviak, 22, of Berlin Heights, Ohio.”
Jensen finished the brief but moving remembrance. With tears in his eyes and choked voice, “Please remain silent and at attention while the colors are retrieved.”
He then gave the final command concluding the ceremony when the flag is raised from half-staff to full and then brought down. “Raise the colors to full staff. Retrieve the colors,” and a final two ship’s bells rang out among the silent crowd.
Additionally, the strike does not appear to have killed anybody with or linked to the terrorist group ISIS-K, U.S. Gen. Frank McKenzie, commander of the U.S. Central Command, told reporters during a press conference.
The revelations were informed by an investigation directed by McKenzie after the Aug. 29 strike, which was carried out in retaliation for a suicide bombing at the airport in Kabul that killed 13 U.S. service members.
U.S. military leaders had repeatedly portrayed the strike as a successful attack, even as family members of the deceased insisted there was no connection between them and the ISIS offshoot.
“At this point, we think that the procedures were correctly followed and it was a righteous strike,” Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in Washington on Sept. 1.
That stance was shifted on Friday, when McKenzie revealed the results of the probe, which found that as many as 10 civilians, including up to seven children, “were tragically killed in that strike.”
“Moreover, we now assess that it is unlikely that the vehicle and those who died were associated with ISIS-K or were a direct threat to U.S. forces,” he added. “I offer my profound condolences to the family and friends of those who were killed. This strike was taken in the earnest belief that it would prevent an imminent threat to our forces and the evacuees at the airport. But it was a mistake, and I offer my sincere apology. As the combatant commander, I am fully responsible for the strike and this tragic outcome.”
The stunning admission drew criticism from members of Congress, including Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), who highlighted how President Joe Biden was headed to Delaware for a weekend vacation as McKenzie delivered his remarks.
“Biden’s Pentagon admits that they killed 10 innocent people in Kabul, not the targeted ISIS-K terrorists. Meanwhile, Biden is taking a vacation on the beach, shirking off responsibility, holding no one accountable. Biden is a disgrace,” Biggs wrote on Twitter.
“It’s an unbelievable tragedy that 10 civilians including an aid worker & 7 children were killed by a U.S. drone strike in Afghanistan. My heart is with the families. We need more transparency and oversight to ensure this does not happen again,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) added.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Afghan residents and family members of the victims gather next to a damaged vehicle inside a house, a day after a U.S. drone airstrike in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Aug. 30, 2021. (Wakil Kohsar/AFP via Getty Images)
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in a written statement that he was briefed on the findings of the probe on Friday morning.
“On behalf of the men and women of the Department of Defense, I offer my deepest condolences to surviving family members of those who were killed, including Mr. Ahmadi, and to the staff of Nutrition and Education International, Mr. Ahmadi’s employer,” he said, referring to Emal Ahmady, who said he translated for an American company for three years starting in 2011.
“We now know that there was no connection between Mr. Ahmadi and ISIS-Khorasan, that his activities on that day were completely harmless and not at all related to the imminent threat we believed we faced, and that Mr. Ahmadi was just as innocent a victim as were the others tragically killed. We apologize, and we will endeavor to learn from this horrible mistake.”
The strike was rushed because U.S. military officials believed there was an imminent threat to American service members, who at the time were holding Kabul’s airport to facilitate evacuations of U.S. citizens and others out of Afghanistan, according to McKenzie. The strike was based on intelligence conveying a threat from a white Toyota Corolla, but the investigation found the military struck a car that posed no threat.
“We struck under the theory of reasonable certainty. Probably our strikes in Afghanistan going forward will be under a higher standard,” McKenzie said.
Ahmady told news outlets shortly after the strike that five children and five adults among his relatives were killed in the strike.
He said he had been seeking a Special Immigrant Visa, given to those who helped U.S. troops during the decades-long war in Afghanistan but that he is no longer seeking to emigrate to the United States.
“My message for the USA and other countries is that they should try and avoid making mistakes in Afghanistan. Do not try to target civilian people. Because Afghan people like members of their family a lot. And when they lose a father or brother or son [it’s] very difficult for them,” Ahmady, also spelled Ahmadi in some reports, told Euro News.
Photographs and video footage from the scene showed the white Toyota pulverized and a red SUV next to it charred from the explosion.
U.S. Central Command initially said that the strike was followed by other explosions, claiming that “indicat[ed] a large amount of explosive material inside that may have caused additional casualties.”
McKenzie said Friday that it took a while to uncover what had actually happened. He said the investigative report is a classified document that won’t be released at this time.
My career has taken me around the world, including the combat zones in Iraq and Afghanistan to support our troops. These travels have helped me appreciate how fortunate I am to have been born in America—home of the free because of the brave.
On the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States, people across our nation gathered in remembrance of the lives lost and the heroes who selflessly gave their lives to save others. On Sept. 11, 2001, I was in Washington, D.C., and saw the hole in the Pentagon. Later, I traveled to New York City and saw the massive hole where the Twin Towers once stood. Those are images I will never forget.
In 2002, I was recruited into government service to lead necessary change and transformation in the intelligence community (IC), including better integrating our imagery and signals intelligence enterprises—America’s eyes and ears. I was sworn in as a senior executive in defense intelligence and was a civilian peer to general and flag officers. After the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) was established, I was sworn in as the first IC deputy chief information officer at ODNI. In that role, I worked across the 17 agencies that comprise the U.S. IC and regularly met with the leadership of both the IC and the Department of Defense.
Through my 25 years of service in the national security community and study of history, I have become aware of the techniques, tactics, and procedures that our enemies use. Though the Cold War ended 30 years ago, our nation is still in a war that has been brewing for decades—a war for America’s soul.
Nikita Khrushchev, who ran the Soviet Union from 1958 to 1964, openly predicted the destruction of the United States and said that it would happen in the way that every society eventually collapses. He said, “We will take America without firing a shot. We do not have to invade the U.S. We will destroy you from within.” Khrushchev was talking about an entire system of Marxist indoctrination and takeover that they had refined and executed in country after country during the 20th century.
Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov, a former KGB operative, and high-level Russian propagandist, escaped to the West in 1970. He warned America about the KGB tactics used to subvert a nation that he witnessed firsthand in the Soviet Union. This is a planned process of altering the way people think for a particular purpose, which is to affect a regime change. It’s effectively the brainwashing of society—a slow, methodical transformation. Those who conduct this ideological subversion are very patient to employ the tactics over decades.
Ideological subversion has four stages and follows the Hegelian dialectic, a tactic long exploited by Marxists and Fascists to control people.
Stage 1: Demoralization. This is the destruction of faith in the government and society. Believing that society is broken, systems are failing, and patriotism is evil are three key beliefs that are promoted to create guilt. This leads to the acceptance of radical new ideas because the current structure is believed to be harmful. Traditional Judeo-Christian morality, classical education, and American patriotism are discarded.
Stage 2: Destabilization. With the decision-making ability of Americans negatively affected through demoralization, the next step takes a foothold—destabilization of the nation’s foundations. Destabilization causes citizens to believe the worst of what they hear about their nation and form of government. Supporters of traditional values and foundational structures in the nation are ostracized and even demonized.
Stage 3: Crisis. The altered values of Americans cut to the root of the current systems. Upheaval presents opportunities for change. Once a society is destabilized, it begins to collapse into chaos. At this point, citizens want the government to provide stability. We saw this recently as a demoralized and destabilized society responded with fear and panic when a “pandemic” faced our nation. Americans are willingly trading civil rights and freedoms for authoritarianism and overreach that they believe will keep them safe. Messaging in all of this is key. The mainstream media and their tell-a-vision programming play a key role in framing the prescribed narrative as truth.
Stage 4: Normalization. The “new normal” is a term we have heard constantly lately, and it’s an accurate description of what the normalization stage is all about. When the government and societal structures have changed to restrict liberty, citizens are told the radical transformation is “the way it has to be.” Ironically, it’s described as normal when it’s not normal at all. Normalization creates a new baseline for what a nation will accept, value, and promote. The cycle is complete.
These steps are repeated over and over, bringing a greater result with each cycle until there’s a controlled collapse. America could be on the verge of collapse right now unless we collectively wake up to reality and take a stand to stop tyranny.
The Hegelian dialectic is the framework for guiding people’s thoughts and actions into conflicts that lead them to a predetermined solution. The enemies of America are using this tactic to create fear, turn citizen against citizen, and divide our nation. A house divided cannot stand. If people do not understand how the Hegelian dialectic shapes their perceptions of the world, then they do not know how they are helping to implement the agenda, which ultimately is to advance humanity into a dictatorship—whether by the fascists, the communists, or the globalists and their New World Order. We must step outside the dialectic so that we can be released from the limitations of controlled and guided thought.
The most important thing about America is liberty. America is what has stood between power-hungry people and their goals of world domination. The true enemies of America are trying to convince us that we are each other’s enemies and that big government and control of the lives of the many by a few is the solution to cure what ails us. We must all recognize that they are weaponizing the crisis and this narrative is a lie. Government bureaucrats are now labeling anyone who thinks they have overstepped their constitutional bounds as enemies of the state—“patriot terrorists.” What liberty-loving people are now combating is pure evil.
All it takes for evil to prosper is for good people to do nothing. As we reflect back on Sept. 11, 2001, one thing that stands out about that time following the terrorist attacks is that we forgot the things that divide us. We united as Americans. There’s no better example than what we saw in New York City. We were united together in support of one another fighting a common enemy.
So many have sacrificed so much to secure our liberty and preserve it for future generations. Many of us have lost a loved one on a foreign battlefield or from a service-connected illness after they returned, or in the line of duty here at home. How do we honor their sacrifice and that of so many others in our nation’s 245-year history? We stand and fight to uphold liberty and our unalienable rights enshrined in America’s founding documents. If liberty is to be lost, it won’t be on our watch.
Questions are being asked about the Biden administration’s vetting of tens of thousands of Afghans who have been brought into the country after it became known that two men who arrived in the U.S. had been previously deported after committing violent crimes.
One man, a convicted rapist, was deported several years ago and found his way back into the U.S. amid the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan last month.
The Washington Times reported that a second man, who was also deported for a different crime, was found among refugees at Washington Dulles International Airport.
That man, who was not named in the Times story, was previously convicted of aggravated robbery. He had been deported in 2017. The report did not state when it was discovered that a known and violent felon was discovered among refugees by customs agents.
The startling report follows another report of a convicted rapist being allowed into the country after leaving Kabul last month — after having also been deported in 2017.
The Times reported a man named Ghader Heydari, 47, was intercepted at the same airport in Washington on Aug. 26 after arriving from a connecting flight in Germany. The man was among other Afghans who had left Kabul on military flights.
ICE officials sent him to a facility in Virginia while it is determined what to do with him.
According to the Idaho Department of Corrections, Heydari was paroled in 2015 and was under supervision until he was deported. He was convicted of rape in 2011 and had not been scheduled for release until 2028.
The sheriff in Canyon County, Idaho, where Heydari was convicted of rape, slammed the Biden administration for allowing him back in.Should the U.S. spend more time vetting Afghan refugees?
“This guy’s a threat. And the United States — the Biden administration — brought him here,” Sheriff Kieran Donahue told the Times.
“We’re going to pay for this for some time, possibly for decades, and as law enforcement, we’re kind of that first line of defense out here,” Donahue added. “These people are coming into the country without a thorough vetting process, and I don’t believe there is one being done thoroughly. We stand to have a whole bunch of law enforcement respond to tragic events, up to and including terrorist activity, on our soil.”
The fact that two men who were previously deported from this country after committing violent crimes were able to get back in amid the chaotic exit from Kabul is raising questions about how federal officials have vetted tens of thousands of people.
Having already seen felons, as well as a number of individuals with measles make it through the vetting process, @GovLauraKelly must ensure ALL refugees stepping foot in KS have been vetted to the highest degree in a third country to safeguard our national and state’s security. https://t.co/9jjSYYo9Ss
I have advocated that we should try and settle these individuals in other countries around Afghanistan that share their values and culture, especially if we can not ensure proper vetting.
The traditional vetting process for these individuals is a 14-step procedure, that takes well over a year. The mass evacuation of over 100,000 Afghan nationals in a matter of weeks has made proper vetting of these individuals near impossible.
Of course, some have been asking raising questions about terrorism concerns since flights began departing Afghanistan. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas has defended how the Biden administration is vetting Afghan nationals.
Fox News reported Mayorkas last week described the process of vetting tens of thousands of people.
“We have no information to suggest ISIS has come into the United States through the Afghan national population that we have admitted under our legal authorities,” Mayorkas said at a National Press Club event.
“We have a multi-layered, multi-agency screening and vetting process to make sure that doesn’t happen,” he added.
“We screen and vet individuals before they board planes to travel to the United States and that screening and vetting process is an ongoing one and multi-layered.”
Some analysts, according to the Times article, are concerned that the men’s criminal past was not discovered until the two reached U.S. soil, because that “creates a series of rights and erects significant hurdles to getting rid of them again.”
Not only is General Mark Milley “woke,” he also apparently (https://on.rt.com/bgoh) conspired with the CIA, NSA, Nancy Pelosi and even China (!) to undermine President Donald Trump. This is according to a new book by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa – who, it needs to be noted, are sworn members of the anti-Trump #resistance – excerpts of which were leaked to the Media-Democrat Complex today.
Milley denies having done anything improper, mind you. But his actions, as detailed by Woodward and Costa, are pretty damning. While most Republicans are following the white rabbit of Milley calling his counterpart in China to say he’s give them advance warning of any US attack (not that any was in the cards, but consider the implications), far worse to my mind is the whole thing about telling the NSA and CIA to spy on Trump for signs of anything “crazy or illegal” (as defined by Pelosi, apparently). If this isn’t treason, then what is?
Ah, but Orange Man is Bad, which means anything goes. Milley is the Who, Trump is the Whom, and thus the “logic” of moral relativism is satisfied. The aforementioned MDC was marching in lockstep defending his reported actions all day.
Mind you, I think the Woodward/Costa book is spin – they’re reporting what happened, but imputing evil motivations to anything Trump did or may have thought of doing, while ascribing the purest noble motives to anyone working against him. Think of it as a sequel to that Time article about the “fortifiers” of 2020: they want to tell everyone what they did, because in their Narrative, they’re heroes, not villains.
Milley’s actions appear to corroborate my analysis from June 2020, when I found it odd that Biden was so confident the military would be on his side, right after Milley uncharacteristically offered a groveling apology to the woke scolds for doing his job. Today’s revelations also reinforced what I wrote back in January, when I argued that the Resistance and the MDC, in their obsession with ousting Trump, had thoroughly discredited what Darren Beattie would later label the Globalist American Empire (both links are in the piece linked above, don’t want to clutter this post).
You’d think I would be happy about that, but… that might also mean I was right about other things, other patterns I’ve observed and extrapolated from. About things that I think might be coming. Trouble is, they’re not pretty.
TheNebulator, [15.09.21 22:35] [In reply to TheNebulator] Update on Milley: it’s worse than I thought. I had somehow missed that he made two phone calls to China, one on January 8 (amid conspiring with Pelosi) but the other four days prior to the election, suggesting even more strongly that he was part of the “fortification” already. Moreover, he apparently “suggested” PACOM cancel some exercises to reassure China, and they did so. This is according to the Washington Post, mind you.
The Pentagon’s response today was to double down and say Milley did nothing wrong, while the White House praised his commitment to Our Democracy. As I said, it doesn’t matter what is done, only Who is doing it to Whom. I actually went on News Views Hughes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoXB_dsN0-w&list=PLagVUKF7CUTTtjJqFw6JvO14pG6Z1RBmv&index=1&t=94s) today to discuss the whole situation. But it’s bad, folks, really bad.
TheNebulator, [15.09.21 22:43] You get two posts tonight, though, because I simply have to comment on the sheer irony of Onika Tanya Maraj-Petty, far better known as Nicki Minaj, becoming the unlikely hero in the fight for common sense against the Branch Covidian cult (as Eric D. July so memorably calls it).
Everything about that story is just perfect: from the original tall tale of “her cousin’s friend in Trinidad” getting his wedding called off because his testicles swelled up ( the symptom is more commonly associated with some STDs, but that was obvious from the get-go) — to her point that people should make the decision for themselves instead of getting bullied into it, to the shrieking response of everyone from her fandom to pundits to Big Tech and the government of Trinidad…
Is there a better way to expose the sheer absurdity of the System, than a rapper with millions of social media followers not giving a damn? When facts and arguments don’t help, because people offering them get censored or smeared, it’s down to the jesters — and entertainers are the biggest jesters of all, aren’t they?
Years from now, when the Davos set has failed in their attempt at a neo-feudal Great Reset, we’ll look back and try to figure out the exact moment the tide turned. It’s entirely possible this will be it.
TheNebulator, [16.09.21 23:07] So, special counsel John Durham finally indicts someone in his probe of the Trump-Russia probe… and it’s not a nobody, but a partner in the DNC law firm that was behind the Steele Dossier. Michael Sussmann was indicted for lying to the FBI, by telling them he wasn’t representing anyone — while in fact representing a tech executive coordinating with the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s campaign to spread the lie about Alfa Bank being a “secret conduit” for candidate Trump to Russia.
Normally this would be a very big deal, except the DOJ already leaked it to the New York Times earlier today, which pre-shaped the narrative to minimize Sussmann’s culpability… (to be continued)
TheNebulator, [16.09.21 23:26] (continued) What’s the big deal, you might say. Only in that for five years the weaponized FBI, DOJ and the intelligence community went after Trump for alleged “Russian collusion,” bankrupted his aides and allies with legal fees, jailed some for unrelated charges in hopes they’d agree to implicate him, and deterred decent people from taking jobs in his administration while letting neocons and various double agents infiltrate instead. Yet despite the proven, documented wrongdoing of the highest echelons of the FBI and DOJ, CIA and NSA, only one person involved was ever charged — and given a slap on the wrist.
Kevin Clinesmith, who literally falsified evidence to enable the FBI to spy on Trump via Carter Page (by altering a document that said Page was a CIA source to say he wasn’t) got… 12 months’ probation, some community service, and just got his DC bar license back. The regime protects its own, you see.
Earlier this week, we found out that JCS chairman General Mark Milley was back-channeling with China and conspiring with Democrats , CIA and NSA against Trump. But the entire media-political complex came to his defense, calling him a hero. Meanwhile, retired General Michael Flynn was illegally unmasked, charged with lying to the FBI on absolutely zero basis, and dragged through the courts for something like three years — even had his family threatened — before he was eventually pardoned, because the activist federal judge in DC refused to accept the DOJ dropping the case.
That judge, Emmett Sullivan, just ruled this evening that illegal immigrants can’t be sent back to Mexico under a rule intended to protect public health. Get that? Vaccine and muzzle mandates for you, but not for people just walking across. A Fox News crew in Del Rio, Texas has used a drone to film thousands of people (mainly from Haiti) crossing over from Mexico. The regime’s response? Judge Sullivan’s ruling — and a FAA ban on all drone activity. On grounds of “security,” you see.
Even so, some intelligent but apparently still clueless people are harping on the hypocrisy of the What, not realizing that the republic in which it mattered no longer exists. It has been replaced by Our Democracy, in which the only thing that matters is Who/Whom. Do you understand yet?
What happened to the weapons, fuel, drones, planes, and other resources the United States provided to the now-defunct Afghanistan government? What happened to the hundreds of thousands of soldiers and police officers who abandoned their posts? What happened to the Afghan women and girls, and the others who supported the failed nation-building project?
Those are just a few of the questions that Special Inspector General for the Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) John Sopko intends to investigate before his office closes in about a year, he said on Sept. 14.
Sopko and his SIGAR agency are the authors of what has been dubbed the “Afghanistan Papers”—a previously secret history of the war, akin to what the Pentagon Papers were for the Vietnam War. His work revealed in December 2019 that U.S. officials had falsely told the public about alleged progress in Afghanistan for years while acknowledging in private that the nation-building efforts were failing miserably.
Sopko spoke with the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) on Sept. 14, saying his work isn’t finished.
“We have a number of indictments and investigations and audits that we’re finishing up,” Sopko told POGO. “But then there’s other questions we think need to be answered.”
Sopko said that along with the questions mentioned above—“and many more”—he also intends to investigate the future of the Afghan narcotics trade. His 2018 report states that illicit narcotics account for 60 percent of the Taliban’s annual revenue.
“I directed my staff today to investigate what has happened to the narcotics trade since then, and what can we predict is going to happen?” he said. “We spent billions on fighting narcotics, and I think the American people would like to know about that.”
Sopko doesn’t have much time to find the answers to his questions. SIGAR is set to expire along with the Afghanistan reconstruction project, and the inspector general said he thinks he has about a year left to complete the task.
During the wide-ranging interview with POGO, Sopko also spoke about why he thought the Afghanistan reconstruction project was such a dismal failure.
He said U.S. officials were overly optimistic because that’s the way they could advance their careers—“people who made their career on happy talk,” he described it. The special inspector general also said the U.S. government demanded signs of progress on too short of a timeline.
To illustrate his point, Sopko spoke about what he called perhaps the “dumbest” project throughout the 20-year war.
“They brought in sexy white Italian goats to breed with the Afghan goats and improve the wool production. … We talked to the woman who they bought the goats from, who was tearing out her hair over how stupid it was—because they wanted to show success in a year or two,” Sopko said.
“She said, ‘This takes 10 to 20 years to do this!’”
All the Italian goats eventually died, according to Sopko.
“You could not make up some of the programs we had over there,” he said.
POGO Executive Director Danielle Brian asked Sopko why his work has had such an impact on discourse when so many other inspector generals have been relatively ineffective.
“Many IGs are acting under a conflict of interest because the administration dangles an appointment in front of their face, so they kind of lose some of their ardor for oversight,” Sopko said. “And we’ve had too many IGs who are fat, dumb, and happy.”
Sopko didn’t just focus his ire on U.S. security officials or his fellow IGs; he also criticized The Washington Post for trying to ascertain the identities of the Afghans he interviewed for his various reports.
“The Washington Post sued us for not divulging their identities. They said, ‘You have to tell us who your whistleblowers are,’” he said. “Isn’t that ironic? This is the same Washington Post that for 30-some years defended someone’s name and never revealed it. I think the name was ‘Deep Throat’ or something like that.
“You have to defend whistleblowers. Anyone in this town should know that. Especially reporters.”
Republicans concerned aid money was ‘ransom payment’ to get stranded Americans home safe
A coalition of Republican foreign policy leaders in Congress is demanding that the Biden administration turn over all internal documents and communications related to plans to provide the Taliban with cash assets, a move the coalition says would incentivize the terror group’s taking of American hostages.
The Republican Study Committee (RSC), the largest GOP caucus in Congress, is spearheading a probe that requires the Biden administration to disclose if the Taliban has insisted on U.S. financial aid in exchange for allowing Americans stranded in the country to return home. The State Department announced last week that it is sending $64 million in humanitarian aid to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, generating concerns that the Biden administration has agreed to a quid pro quo in which the terrorist group gets aid dollars in exchange for providing safe passage to those still stranded in the country.
“We have serious concerns about negotiations with the Taliban leading to the payment of ransom—whether marketed as humanitarian assistance or sanctions relief—which will give the Taliban resources that could be used to attack the United States or our allies,” a group of 21 RSC lawmakers wrote in a letter exclusively obtained by the Washington Free Beacon and sent Tuesday to the State Department. “The payment of ransom to terrorists, likely including the September 13 announcement of $64 million dollars in humanitarian aid to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan provided without guardrails, will only further place Americans in harm’s way by incentivizing the Taliban, and other terrorist groups, to kidnap more Americans.”
The latest investigation is one of several helmed by Republicans in Congress who want to know why the Biden administration pulled U.S. forces from Afghanistan without a plan to stop the Taliban from regaining control of the country. The Biden administration is under intense criticism for leaving Americans and vulnerable Afghans behind in the country as the Taliban angles to use them as leverage in negotiations with U.S. diplomats. The State Department still “has not presented a plan before Congress illustrating how it will ensure that Americans will not be left behind through diplomatic negotiations,” the RSC wrote in its letter.
The State Department has 10 days to provide Congress with detailed internal information about negotiations with Afghanistan’s recently formed Taliban government that could see economic sanctions on the group lifted, according to a copy of the investigation documents obtained by the Free Beacon. The investigation is backed by 21 GOP lawmakers, including Rep. Tracey Mann (Kan.) and Rep. Jim Banks (Ind.), a member of the House Armed Services Committee.
Banks, the chairman of the RSC, told the Free Beacon that any deal that gives the Taliban access to hard currency will send the message that “holding Americans hostage is an effective way to make money.”
The lawmakers say they want detailed information about any plans the Biden administration has to unfreeze billions of dollars in assets held in U.S. accounts on behalf of the former U.S.-aligned Afghan government. This includes “any sanctions relief, or financial assistance to the Taliban in exchange for providing them safe passage of American citizens or lawful permanent residents out of Afghanistan,” according to the document request letter.
They also want the State Department to provide copies “of all documents and communications” related to the administration’s ongoing dialogue with Taliban leaders regarding frozen funds.
Mann told the Free Beacon that “the American people deserve to know whether the United States has provided any financial assistance to the Taliban in exchange for the release of American citizens, or whether the Taliban has requested such assistance, which amounts to ransom.”
The State Department’s failure to inform Congress about its ongoing discussions with the Taliban has fueled GOP concerns that money will be exchanged for concessions from the Taliban, including the release of Americans and vulnerable Afghans still inside the country.
“The Biden administration’s lack of planning and execution created the conditions for the Taliban to hold Americans and our Afghan allies hostage and allows the Taliban to use them as bargaining chips to unfreeze assets, withdrawing sanctions, or gain international recognition,” Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R., Texas), who signed the letter, told the Free Beacon. “We cannot negotiate with terrorists and we certainly cannot acquiesce to their demands.”
Plenty of people have pointed out what went wrong in Afghanistan, but far too few people have asked who should now be held accountable for this national disgrace.
The debacle in Afghanistan should be setting off alarm bells in Washington. We surrendered the country that we’d been defending to a seventh century tribe, which had endured immense casualties and was unable to defeat the United States on the battlefield. But the Taliban was able to defeat America politically and psychologically.
In a healthy country, the Taliban takeover would be a real crisis—one that causes a fundamental rethinking within the Pentagon, State Department, and intelligence community about how they’ve been operating.
How can we have spent 20 years, thousands of lives, and trillions of dollars and then lose to a band of medieval thugs with no air force? This is the kind of question the generals, diplomats, and analysts should be asking in the halls of government.
It’s troubling how unphased many of our leaders appear to be, especially the principals of the Biden administration. What they don’t seem to understand—or perhaps worse, don’t recognize the importance of—is that what happened in Afghanistan isn’t just about Afghanistan.
China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, other jihadists—they’re all taking note of what’s transpired over the past several weeks. The world now sees America as completely unreliable. We need to show that we’re both reliable and dangerous.
Accountability is absolutely crucial to come to grips with how big a problem this is and to reestablish respect among allies and enemies. The leaders who, through their shameless incompetence, threw away two decades of sacrifice in a matter of days, left Americans behind enemy lines, betrayed our Afghan allies, and left Afghanistan to reemerge as a terrorist haven must be held responsible.
Someone who’s trying to hold these people accountable is retired Maj. Gen. Joseph Arbuckle, a decorated veteran who first entered the Army in 1969. Currently, Arbuckle is the founder and spokesperson of Flag Officers 4 America, an organization of retired military officers dedicated to supporting and defending the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
Flag Officers 4 America just organized an open letter from retired generals and admirals regarding Afghanistan. The letter, signed by Arbuckle and 160-plus retired military leaders, demands accountability for the botched withdrawal and for both Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to resign for their handling of the situation.
Arbuckle told me why he wrote the letter and analyzed the scene in Afghanistan last week on my podcast, “Newt’s World.” As the general explained, this was a difficult decision, but accountability is a foundational principle of the military. President Biden’s military advisers knew the fiasco that would ensue by not extending the Aug. 31 withdrawal deadline. When Biden decided to push ahead with his plan, Arbuckle said, Austin and Milley had two choices: resign in protest or follow the order and take responsibility for the outcome.
Unfortunately, no one is taking responsibility—not Biden, not Austin, not Milley. And the nation will suffer as a result, with its leaders refusing to learn lessons from their failures. This should be unacceptable to the American people.
For those interested, Flag Officers 4 America recently partnered with the Committee to Support and Defend so that civilians and veterans who are non-flag officers can also have a voice and sign onto similar letters to the one organized by Arbuckle.
As Arbuckle and I discuss, with our military leadership focusing on critical race theory rather than warfighting, the country is in trouble. Holding leaders accountable is the first step to getting us back on track—and earning back the respect of the rest of the world that was lost in Afghanistan.
Credit Sen. James Risch (R-Idaho) with posing the critical question during Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s Sept. 14 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
After declaring he was not speaking on a partisan basis and that “there is not enough lipstick in the world to put on this pig (the Afghanistan withdrawal),” Risch asked a nervous Blinken: “Who is responsible? Who made the decisions on this? Was it the president of the United States?”
“Ultimately, the president makes the decisions,” Blinken replied. He quickly added a string of qualifications. “Hundreds and thousands of decisions …,” Blinken opined, “… go into a situation as complex as this one.” The president makes “big strategic decisions,” but “tactical and operational decisions are made by different agencies, agency heads and agency officials.”
Risch is the committee’s ranking minority member. He didn’t need to hear a truism-packed sermon on trickle-down bureaucratic decision-making calculated to appear to take responsibility without really doing so. But that’s what he got.
As I scanned a transcript of his testimony, I noticed Blinken sidestepped discussing decisions (made by unnamed individuals) that on-the-ground action in Afghanistan had proved to be utterly wrongheaded and destructive.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) told Blinken that if he were just reading Blinken’s prepared testimony, then he would think the withdrawal “was a smashing success. But I do read the news, as most Americans do, and we realize this is a complete debacle … what concerns me the most … is the detachment from reality …”
In the Biden administration, political “optics” overrule reality. Blinken repeats, with premeditation, the Biden administration’s most grievous strategic error: focusing on managing political perception instead of executing policy actions that address on-the-ground facts.
On Aug. 31, Reuters confirmed that harsh truth when it published the July 23 telephone exchange between Biden and Afghan then-President Ashraf Ghani. Biden told Ghani that “… the perception around the world and in parts of Afghanistan … is that things aren’t going well in terms of the fight against the Taliban. And there’s a need, whether it is true or not, there is a need to project a different picture.”
Biden knew his poorly planned and incompetently executed withdrawal was failing, but perhaps he could fool the public. Now Blinken continues to wage perception warfare against American citizens, attempting to hide a planning failure that amounts to dereliction of duty.
The debacle’s principal component was a Noncombatant Evacuation Operation (NEO). By U.S. doctrine the State Department serves as the lead agency in a NEO. However, withdrawal from a combat zone requires military forces to maintain security, which means the State and Defense Departments must constantly coordinate with allies in planning the evacuation and in all phases of its execution. Moreover, in a complex situation like Afghanistan, the U.S. president must be willing to send military reinforcements to respond to surprises—like unanticipated enemy attacks.
An experienced planner can sketch a basic NEO plan in 10 minutes, one designed to set conditions favorable to a successful evacuation.
The following are some of the key elements. Identify and secure evacuation corridors. In a landlocked territory (like Afghanistan), secure multiple airports, even if that means temporarily sending in more troops. Stock the air bases with food and medical supplies. Alert and begin staging airlift assets, to include commercial and contract aircraft. State Department consular teams (protected by security units if necessary) seek out American citizens. The State Department surges Special Immigrant Visa processing and arranges for third-country safe havens for SIV and noncitizen evacuees. What processing cannot occur in-country, safe havens can handle.
Many of these suboperations could have begun April 14, the day Biden gave the withdrawal order.
Common-sense advice: Don’t set firm dates for completing the evacuation if you can avoid it—tipping off the enemy is a bad idea. Withdraw security forces based on the threat. As the evacuation nears completion, the military begins to “shrink the perimeter” while maintaining punitive strike-back capability.
The sad thing is the United States has the institutional resources and experience to conduct a successful evacuation. But the tragic results tell us Biden administration senior leaders had no clue how to organize them, much less use them.
Excerpts from the new Bob Woodward book reveal a partisan coup at the heart of the U.S. government.
Through secret backchannels unbeknownst to then-President Donald Trump, General Mark Milley informed leaders from the Chinese Communist Party and Democratic Party that he would not carry out “any kind” of military action ordered by Trump.
The revelations represent a stunning admission of an effective coup d’etat at the top of the U.S. government, with U.S. officials colluding with the Chinese Communist Party in order to limit Donald Trump’s powers.
Backchannels.
General Milley – who controversially defended teaching Marxist “critical race theory” in the military – telephoned his Chinese Communist Party counterpart, General Li Zuocheng, twice in the final months of the Trump administration.
Milley’s calls – according to Bob Woodward’s and Robert Costa’s new book entited Peril – were aimed at restricting the President of the United States’ abilities to wage kinetic war against China. Stunningly, Milley even secretly pledged to inform Beijing ahead of any potential U.S. military action.
On the first call on October 30th, 2020, just four days before the U.S. election, Milley assured his Chinese Communist Party friends that the U.S. would not attack China:
“General Li, I want to assure you that the American government is stable and everything is going to be okay. We are not going to attack or conduct any kinetic operations against you.”
– Gen. Milley
“General Li, you and I have known each other for now five years. If we’re going to attack, I’m going to call you ahead of time. It’s not going to be a surprise,” he added. “Li took the chairman at his word,” The Washington Post notes.
The second call between the two generals, of which Milley did not inform Trump, took place on January 8th, 2021.
“Things may look unsteady,” Milley posited to Li, adding “but that’s the nature of democracy, General Li. We are 100 percent steady. Everything’s fine. But democracy can be sloppy sometimes.” In response, Li suggested that the Chinese Communist Party felt that the United States government was unstable during the hour and a half phone call.
Milley believed that Trump would attempt to create a crisis in an effort to seize power, “similar to Hitler’s exploitation in 1933 of an arson fire at the German Reichstag to help institute emergency powers,” according to The Washington Post.
In reality, it was the anti-Trump establishment that turned a small fracas at the Capitol on January 6th into a full-blown “insurrection” – a framing which an increasing number of Americans now reject.
To address these unfounded fears, Milley spoke to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, informing her that he would prohibit Trump from using “any kind” of military force.”
Later that day, General Milley spoke to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who was growing increasing concerned Mr. Trump would lash out and use military force.
“This is bad, but who knows what he might do?” Ms. Pelosi said. “He’s crazy. You know he’s crazy. He’s been crazy for a long time. So don’t say you don’t know what his state of mind is.”
“Madam Speaker,” General Milley said, “I agree with you on everything.”
General Milley, who as the president’s top military adviser is not in the chain of command, tried to reassure Ms. Pelosi that he could stop Mr. Trump.
“The one thing I can guarantee is that as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, I want you to know that — I want you to know this in you heart of hearts, I can guarantee you 110 percent that the military, use of military power, whether it’s nuclear or a strike in a foreign country of any kind, we’re not going to do anything illegal or crazy,” he said.
“Well,” Ms. Pelosi said, “what do you mean, illegal or crazy?”
“I can give you my word,” General Milley said. “The best I can do is give you my word and I’m going to prevent anything like that in the United States military.”
Afghan Failures.
The report from Peril also reveals Milley’s partisan deference to Joe Biden over the Afghanistan withdrawal, a series of decision that led directly to the deaths of American servicemen, Afghan civilians, and the continued abandonment of hundreds of Americans in the country.
“You’re dealing with a seasoned politician here who has been in Washington, D.C., 50 years, whatever it is,” Milley told the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
That seasoned politician later went on to call the Afghan withdrawal an “extraordinary success,” before openly showing his disdain for dead Americans arriving at Dover.
There are many ways in which to divide humanity—the decent and the indecent, the happy and the unhappy, the cowardly and the courageous, those who lead and those who follow, etc.
Two major divisions that are less often noted but highly consequential are between those who want to control others and those who have little interest in controlling others, and between the related categories of those who are comfortable with being controlled by others and those who detest being controlled by others.
Those who seek to control others and those who seek to be controlled by others would seem to be on opposite ends of the political spectrum. But they are not. Both groups are overwhelmingly populated by individuals on the Left.
They currently dominate four of the five English-speaking countries (the United Kingdom may be the one exception). The ease with which Australians, Canadians, and New Zealanders have accepted the loss of liberty in their respective countries has been the saddest and most frightening development since the rise of totalitarianism in the early 20th century.
Even sadder and more frightening has been the acceptance of authoritarianism by half of the American people. America has been the beacon of liberty in the world. America was the country to which France gave the Statue of Liberty. America has been, as President Abraham Lincoln characterized it, “the last best hope of Earth.” America’s self-image has been that of a “sweet land of liberty” and of “the land of the free and home of the brave.”
Then came a new virus (one with a survival rate in the 99 percent range for nearly all age groups except older adults who are also very sick), and suddenly, in the name of “public health,” no amount of suppression of liberty, no matter how irrational, has been resisted by the majority of Americans or almost any citizens of the other English-speaking countries.
The citizens of Australia’s biggest states are not allowed to leave their homes for more than a few hours a day, not allowed to congregate with other citizens even outdoors, not allowed even to speak with one another outdoors. For more than a year and a half, Australians have not been allowed to leave their country without the express permission of their government, which will decide whether they have a good enough reason. And, of course, church services are forbidden. Australians, Canadians, and New Zealanders, most of whom are thoroughly secular, have only contempt for their compatriots who wish to attend religious services.
In many arenas of life, most Australians have fewer rights than most Soviet citizens did. Like Australians, Soviet citizens could not leave their country without permission, but they were allowed to leave their homes, to speak with people in the street, and to visit dying relatives in hospitals.
Meanwhile, a large percentage of Americans support a president of the United States who offers government and an enormous number of private-entity workers a choice between getting vaccinated—no matter how young they are, and whether they already had COVID-19—or losing their job. In other words, many Americans support firing any unvaccinated fellow citizens who work for the government, the medical professions, or privately owned companies with 100 or more employees.
Half of America supports a president who portrays the other half of America as an enemy, their fellow Americans as people for whom they should have hatred. No American president has ever given as divisive a speech as the one in which President Joe Biden announced his vaccine mandates (something he denied wanting to impose only nine months ago, in December of 2020). Lincoln, despite the Civil War, a war in which more Americans were killed than in all other American wars combined, called on Americans to have “malice toward none.” Biden, as mean-spirited a president as this country has ever had, has called for malice toward 100 million Americans, declaring, “our patience is wearing thin.”
There is a three-pronged left-wing assault on liberty: in the name of public health (COVID-19); in the name of “anti-racism”; and in the name of saving the planet (climate change). By ratcheting up fear and hysteria, the Left is using each to end individual liberty, including freedom of speech, for the first time in American history.
Will the Left succeed?
Unless Americans fight the Left as hard as the Union fought the slave states, the answer is yes.
The announcement comes as DHS continues to respond to the crisis in Afghanistan and the damage caused by Hurricane Ida
Karen Olick, the chief of staff for Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, announced today that she’s leaving her position.
Olick is said to be pursuing a new, unspecified opportunity and will leave the department by the end of the month.
In an email to DHS staffers, Mayorkas said, “We are grateful to Karen for her service during the critical first nine months of the new Administration.”
POLITICO: Department of Homeland Security chief of staff resigns
Olick led the ballot initiative practice for a Democratic strategic communications firm before joining the federal government. Additionally, she worked on political campaigns for Joe Biden and former U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu. She previously served as an aide to Senator Barbara Boxer for over ten years including serving as chief of staff until 2007. On January 20, 2021, Olick was appointed to the chief of staff position with DHS.
In a message to DHS, she wrote, “Though too often underappreciated by our fellow citizens, I am continually struck by how many millions of Americans sleep in safety every night because so many at DHS do not sleep.”
According to Politico, “Employees and senior officials at DHS have also been working non-stop on other crises that their department is taking a lead on including responding to the impacts of Hurricane Ida and helping vet tens of thousands of Afghan refugees who the U.S. evacuated from Kabul in August.”
Earlier this year, Mayorkas was under fire for his handling of the southern border. South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham called on the DHS secretary to change his policies or resign.
In a statement, Graham said the Biden administration has “lost control of the border” and that Mayorkas “doesn’t have either the will or capability to fix the problem.”
During his testimony to a House committee, Mayorkas “admitted his department released illegal immigrants into communities without testing them for the coronavirus. Local officials say up to 25% of the migrants are COVID-positive,” per TheWashington Times.
The chief of staff position will be temporarily filled by Jennifer Higgins, the associate director of Refugee, Asylum, and International Operations at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. She has worked for the federal government for over 20 years.
During a Monday hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, accusations flew from partisans on both sides of the political aisle. Democrats, hoping to defend President Joe Biden’s unpopular handling of the withdrawal, blamed the Trump administration for the catastrophe. Republicans, riding the wave of increased apprehension toward Biden after the fiasco, went on the offensive, blaming Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken for their handling of the situation.
Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.), the chairman of the committee, said in his opening statement that “disentangling ourselves from the war in Afghanistan was never going to be easy.”
He continued: “And for my friends who presume a clean solution for the withdrawal existed, I would welcome hearing what exactly a smooth withdrawal from a messy, chaotic, 20-year war looks like. In fact, I’ve yet to hear the clean withdrawal option, because I don’t believe one exists.”
Meeks accused Biden’s critics, who have come from both major parties since the fall of Afghanistan, of “inject[ing] domestic politics into foreign policy.”
Starting a trend continued throughout the meeting by his Democratic colleagues, Meeks shifted the blame to former President Donald Trump, referencing a 2020 deal that would have fulfilled one of the president’s campaign promises to get the country out of the war.
The former president has been heavily critical of Biden’s handling of the withdrawal. In discussions of the situation, Trump has been open about the deal that he and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made with the Taliban, but has remained insistent that this deal would have been reliant on the Taliban meeting several conditions and that his administration would have handled the situation much differently.
Afterward, ranking minority party member Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) spoke for Republicans in his opening statement, shifting the blame to Biden’s handling of the situation.
He began, “This did not have to happen, but the president refused to listen to his own generals and the intelligence community who warned him what would happen if we withdrew.” The outcome of the situation, he said, was essentially “an unconditional surrender to the Taliban.”
He roasted Blinken and Biden for their “betrayal” of U.S. allies in the region after promising them that they would be evacuated safely. In the wake of this betrayal, McCaul said, “a dark veil of shariah covers Afghanistan,” leaving not only longtime allies to the Taliban’s retribution but also “stripp[ing] away in a matter of weeks” all efforts to bring rights to women and girls in the country.
McCaul said, “We’re here today to better understand how this administration got it so wrong.”
Blinken Defends Biden Administration Handling
In his own opening remarks, Blinken defended the efforts of the administration and downplayed critics’ accusations.
He began by saying that the United States had two main goals in going into Afghanistan in the first place: “bringing justice to Al Qaeda” for its role in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and ensuring that the country could not be used as a launching point for another such terror attack. These goals, said Blinken, were “completed long ago.”
Still, Blinken indicated that the current administration felt forced into conforming with the deal made by Trump with the Taliban. Biden had two choices when he came into office and inherited this deal, Blinken said: “ending the war or escalating it.”
Blinken then pointed to the successes of the administration during the crisis.
He said that in March, just weeks after Biden took office, the State Department was telling Americans to leave the country and offering to help them do so. At the same time, he claimed, the administration worked to speed up the processing of special immigrant visas (SIVs), a usually long and arduous process under standing law; the Trump administration, he added, had done little on this front.
Repeating an often-stated refrain, Blinken said that the rapid decay of the country’s political and military situation defied all predictions. Blinken said that “even the most pessimistic prediction” did not indicate such a quick collapse.
Later, Blinken was asked whether the Trump administration left behind information on Americans in Afghanistan or on its plans for U.S. withdrawal.
Again pushing the blame to Trump, Blinken responded curtly that the administration “inherited a deadline, we did not inherit a plan.”
Democrats, Republicans Hurl Accusations
During a heated part of the debate, Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) accused the president of lying about the situation since it began. Wilson cited claims by the president that there would not be a collapse of the country to the Taliban, that there would not be Vietnam-like scenes of evacuation, and that there would be significant air support for fleeing Americans and Afghans, among others; about each of these, Wilson claimed, Biden lied.
In an equally-heated retort to Wilson, Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) snapped at him and other Republicans, accusing them of being “selective” in their concerns about terrorists, again pointing to the Trump administration’s negotiations with the Taliban.
In another showdown, Blinken was asked a question about a phone call from Biden to the now-former Afghan President Ashraf Ghani obtained by Reuters. In the call, Biden is alleged to have told Ghani to lie about the severity of the situation. Blinken refused to comment, neither confirming nor denying the call’s veracity.
Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) defended the administration’s handling of the crisis. At the height of the evacuation, Sherman said, the Kabul airport was experiencing a constant “stampede.”
“There is simply no way the administration can have an orderly or successful stampede,” Sherman ruled.
Laura Loomer has had street art of Jack Dorsey plastered all around Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco.
The posters feature Dorsey as a member of the Taliban, as they allow them to remain on Twitter while banning conservatives — including Loomer.
The art was designed by Loomer and drawn by Bosch Fawstin, a former Muslim who won the “First Annual Muhammad Art Exhibit and Contest” that was attacked by ISIS in Garland, Texas.https://www.youtube.com/embed/g9jScXWr8BQ?feature=oembed
“For years, I have been raising awareness about Twitter’s alliance with Islamic terrorist organizations and their willingness to platform enemies of America. This is a concept I have referred to as Silicon Sharia, as Twitter has shown they have no problem banning millions of Americans for their constitutionally protected speech, including myself and sitting President Donald Trump during our elections, while they happily provide a platform for recruitment and propaganda for actual terrorists,” Loomer said in a statement provided to the Gateway Pundit.https://www.youtube.com/embed/CQNmpVU4xw0?feature=oembed
“OPERATION TaliBANNED was created to highlight this absurdity and how Big tech tyrants like Jack Dorsey continue to wage digital jihad on free speech in America with widespread bans rooted in the false Left-wing notion that conservatives and Trump supporters are the real terrorists,” Loomer continued. “Twenty years ago, Twitter did not exist, but it would have been unfathomable to every American that someday in America, the leader of one of the most powerful tech companies in the world would aid and avert Islamic terrorists in the digital public sphere. Jack Dorsey has made it clear that thanks to people like him, Americans are less safe than they were 20 years ago.”
Fawstin pointed out that the issue, for him, is not that Twitter bans people — but who they ban and who they don’t.
“The issue with leftist-run tech companies like Twitter is not about whether they have the right to ban people from their platform, it’s about who they consistently target for banning and why, and who they don’t ban, no matter what. They banned a sitting president, Trump, over the lie that he was the leader of an ‘insurrection’, which the FBI now admits there was no proof of,” Fawstin said.
Fawstin said that Twitter acts “in full accordance with Shariah blasphemy laws” by banning critics of Islam from the platform.
“Twitter bans Islam critics like me and Laura, acting in full accordance with shariah blasphemy laws, while allowing Islamic terrorists who murder Americans to spread their propaganda on their platform. That’s evil, whether or not they have the technical ‘right’ to ban whomever they want. And I do wonder that if our government ever were to officially declare war on the Islamic terrorist enemy, if this aiding and abetting of an enemy in a time of war that Twitter engages in would be legally recognized as such.”
Those who wish to contribute to Loomer’s activism can do so here.
President Biden’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan has ruined, perhaps for decades, America’s most important bilateral relationship of this era.
If Washington is going to deter a militant China, it needs the support of democratic India. Unfortunately, India looks like the country most immediately—and perhaps most adversely—affected by the Biden-created debacle. As a result, New Delhi could decide to side not with America but with a Chinese ally, Moscow.
New Delhi was one of the staunchest supporters of the American-backed Afghan government and was working alongside Washington in the war against the Taliban and other insurgents. For instance, Indian intelligence was instrumental in breaking up an Afghan ring of Chinese spies working with the Haqqani Network. The Trump administration believed that the Chinese members of that ring, taken into custody last December, were, among other things, offering cash to kill American troops in-country.
India saw the Afghan government as a friend in blunting extremism in neighboring Pakistan, which has always defined itself as India’s enemy. Islamabad continually foments trouble in India-controlled Kashmir and has continually backed insurgents targeting India. The Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists who attacked targets in Mumbai in November 2008, for instance, came from Pakistan and relied heavily on Pakistani government resources.
The fall of the Afghan government was, therefore, a blow to New Delhi. Worse, the inability of the Biden administration to orchestrate an orderly withdrawal resulted in compounding the damage to Indian interests.
“The U.S. left behind reinvigorated jihadist networks, tens of billions of dollars in weapons and communications systems, critical strategic infrastructure, and even, reportedly, intel not only on who was working with the U.S. but some who were working with India,” Cleo Paskal of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies told Gatestone. “Physically, the closest target for this massively armed and confident jihadist resurgence is India. As a result of decisions taken in Washington, India is dramatically less secure today than it was a few months ago.”
To obtain security, New Delhi had been looking toward the United States. Consequently, Russia’s and China’s friends in Indian policy circles were losing influence, a trend especially evident after the Chinese incursions in Ladakh beginning in May of last year. Russia’s friends were delegitimized by that event because Moscow had assured New Delhi that the movement of Chinese forces in Tibet, which occurred immediately before the invasion, was only a drill.
As a result of Ladakh and other incidents, the government of Narendra Modi had been working fast to build military ties with the United States. In the wake of the fall of Kabul, however, relationships with Washington have been put on ice. “Indian strategists who have been saying that the way forward is working more closely with the U.S. are being openly taunted by those who have a more pro-Moscow bent,” Paskal, also associated with Chatham House, reports.
“There is a reassessment going on,” she added. “One possible outcome is that Delhi works more closely with Tokyo, and possibly Canberra and Taipei.” Japan, Australia, India, and the United States form what is known as the Quad, which up until the fall of Kabul was coming together as an effective grouping. Now, all bets are off.
Another scenario is that New Delhi decides to work more closely with Russia, reviving decades-old ties. Russia, of course, is increasingly aligned with China.
In the wake of the fall of Afghanistan, Taiwan has become the critical test of American resolve, especially as President Biden has justified the withdrawal as a strategic move to counter Russia and China. “The world is changing,” he said to the American people on Aug. 31. “We’re engaged in a serious competition with China. We’re dealing with the challenges on multiple fronts with Russia.”
It is significant, therefore, that on Aug. 27 USS Kidd, an American guided-missile destroyer, and USCG Munro, a Coast Guard cutter, transited the Taiwan Strait. The transits come on the heels of Vice President Kamala Harris’s welcome comments in both Singapore and Hanoi on China’s “bullying” in the South China Sea.
The Biden administration may in fact be willing to defend Taiwan, but that is not all that counts at this crucial time. What also counts are perceptions, and the perceptions that especially count are those in Beijing. Chinese propagandists promoted two narratives as Kabul fell: The United States will not defend Taiwan and an America unable to deal with the Taliban cannot hope to stand up to China.
Those two narratives appear to in fact reflect Chinese thinking, especially because the withdrawal from Afghanistan signaled to Beijing a complete failure of the U.S. intelligence community, the Pentagon, and the White House national security apparatus. Chinese exercises in areas adjacent to Taiwan in August and an Aug. 13 simulated attack on Taiwan with a short-range missile are, in this context, ominous.
The other perceptions that count are those in New Delhi, which had been inching toward closer cooperation with Taiwan. Indian thinkers realized that they needed to challenge China in its peripheral seas as China was challenging India in its nearby waters. India’s close ties with Vietnam are an indication that India perceives its security as dependent on an open South China Sea and even East China Sea. Taiwan, which sits at the intersection of those bodies of water, is essential in keeping sea lanes there open.
America more than ever needs India’s help in ensuring peace in the ring of countries surrounding China and its surrounding waters. Now, however, India could desert America as America has just deserted India. Said Paskal, “To say there is a crisis in trust in current U.S. policymaking in New Delhi is an understatement.”
For 20 years since Sept. 11, 2001, U.S. presidents have been saying their anti-terrorism policies have worked, as evidenced by no new attacks on America. While we should be grateful another attack hasn’t occurred, past performance is no guarantee of future success. Fanatics are nothing but patient, as we have seen in Afghanistan.
Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley has said the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan could lead to civil war and the possible “reconstitution of al Qaeda.” That should come as no surprise as the goals of our enemies in the Middle East have been expressed openly for decades. Their actions have proven a commitment to killing Americans and destabilizing democracies and their economies.
Underestimating one’s enemy is always a fatal error as we saw on 9/11. President Obama once dismissed al-Qaeda as the “JV team.” In fact, they are the varsity. It is difficult to deter or destroy an ideology whose adherents are willing to die for its cause, especially when they believe they are carrying out orders from their god.
In its March 2015 issue, The Atlantic noted a New York Times story about confidential comments made by Major General Michael K. Nagata, at the time the Special Operations commander for the U.S. in the Middle East. Gen. Nagata reportedly admitted he had yet to figure out the appeal of one of many terrorist organizations. About the Islamic State, he said, “We have not defeated the idea. We do not even understand the idea.” Whose fault is that?
With their win in Afghanistan, terrorists by whatever name, can only be further motivated to conduct new attacks. What might those look like? From experience we know they prefer the big event, such as crashing airliners into buildings and blowing up high value targets. There are other options when big targets are not vulnerable.
Lone suicide bomber incidents can also strike fear into a nation, especially if they are sustained and coordinated.
In 2003, Tom Clancy wrote a novel called “The Teeth of the Tiger” about terrorists who sneak across the U.S.-Mexico border and in coordinated attacks shoot up suburban shopping malls. Fear of terrorists slipping over the border is not fiction, but of growing concern.
Small-scale attacks, undetectable in advance, have been occurring since 9/11.
Two recent incidents demonstrate what we’re up against.
On the Sunday before the last American military planes left Kabul, a gunman shot and killed a Lyft driver in Garland, Texas. He then drove to a nearby police station and began shooting at people inside. The gunman was identified as Imran Ali Rasheed. Police killed him.
The FBI said Rasheed “may have been inspired by a foreign terrorist organization to commit these crimes.” Ya think? Suspected terrorists are crossing our southern border at “unprecedented level,” according to the outgoing U.S. Border Patrol chief. In New Zealand, a man named Ahamed Aathill Mohamed Samsudeen stabbed seven people inside a store where he had bought a knife. Police shot and killed him. Authorities drew the obvious conclusion, calling it a “terrorist attack.”
Who knows how many—if any—terrorists are among the thousands of Afghan refugees now pouring into America? The Biden administration claims the vetting system should weed out anyone who means us harm, but there are no guarantees and the radicals can be expected to lie and perhaps even have forged papers.
After turning back German General Erwin Rommel’s forces in what Winston Churchill called “The Battle of Egypt,” Churchill famously said: “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
Given the commitment and resourcefulness of this modern enemy, I’m not sure we are even at the end of the beginning.
“China is considering deploying military personnel and economic development officials to Bagram airfield, perhaps the single-most prominent symbol of the 20-year U.S. military presence in Afghanistan.
“The Chinese military is currently conducting a feasibility study about the effect of sending workers, soldiers and other staff related to its foreign economic investment program known as the Belt and Road Initiative in the coming years to Bagram, according to a source briefed on the study by Chinese military officials, who spoke to U.S. News on the condition of anonymity.”
As Moon Unit Zappa used to say, “Gag me with a spoon!”
Feasibility study? You don’t have to be Nostradamus to figure out how that’s going to turn out, assuming it hasn’t been done already and this is just a masquerade.
Why wouldn’t the Chinese take over Bagram? It’s sitting there.
And no real estate could be more apt for their Belt and Road Initiative (BRI, also known as One Belt, One Road), essentially a large-scale bait-and-switch operation. The Chinese—in reality the Chinese Communist Party—lends the poor country—in this case the impoverished Taliban—money to modernize their infrastructure with the caveat that, if they don’t pay off the loan in a certain amount of time, guess who owns said infrastructure?
Well, we know the answer to that. The Chinese are in essence buying the world with the help, note well, of some of the most prominent American firms (pdf) busy enriching themselves with more money than most of us can compute.
(If you’re interested in how successful the BRI has been, here’s a helpful map from the Council of Foreign Relations.)
What has occurred in recent days is that China has achieved something absolutely free for which the Soviets and the United States wasted decades of personnel (tragically dead or wounded), matériel and trillions of dollars, not to mention ended up by disgracing themselves in the eyes of the world.
Effectively, the Chinese own Afghanistan, the important parts of it anyway—airbases, ports, mineral rights, and so forth—or will shortly.
As for internal Taliban affairs, the Chinese communists aren’t about to lift a finger about the horrifying level of women’s rights or the extensive drug growing and dealing the terror group engages in, especially if they send as much of it as possible to America.
As long as the various Islamic terror organizations leave the Chinese alone, the Chinese will let them do as they wish. Yes, some—al-Qaeda, ISIS-K, one we haven’t heard of yet—may make a fuss about the treatment of the Uyghurs and make their violent presence known, but I would imagine they ultimately see the Chinese forces as much more ruthless than the Americans (now especially) and this will be at best a temporary sideshow of little global importance. Realpolitik will be at play on both Chinese and Taliban (Islamic) sides as they benefit each other, at least for now.
So how did we get here? If this is all so obvious—and it is—wasn’t our State Department and our military aware of how this would, or certainly could, turn out? (Wouldn’t they at least leave a small NATO force guarding Bagram and destroy our weaponry?)
I imagine many of our officials were—how could they not be—aware of this eventuality. And that’s highly disturbing.
Why then did the USA cede Afghanistan—a territory bounded by Iran and Pakistan, among other states, not to mention control of much of the world’s rare earths and other key resources—to the increasingly totalitarian China of Xi Jinping?
For an answer, it’s hard not to think back to those days when, shortly before declaring for the presidency and reversing himself on the topic, our current president told us “The Chinese aren’t our enemies, folks.”
Was he covering up for his own activities and connections that could have been recorded on his son Hunter Biden’s laptop, much of which is as yet unseen? Do the Chinese, in the crudest sense, have something on him? Unfortunately, considering the operations and governance of our FBI and Department of Justice, we may never know.
We can, however, make our own surmises. But whatever they may be, they’re only a part of a more depressing overall zeitgeist.
I have believed for some time—and our extraordinarily rapid and ill-conceived evacuation of Afghanistan, leaving behind not only Bagram but enough U.S. weaponry to make the Taliban’s army nearly equivalent to the Italian’s, not to mention putting our advanced military technology in the hands of the Chinese and the Russians, only underscores this—that a large percentage of our Democratic Party leadership as well as a tragically significant percentage of the Republican have long believed the Chinese regime are winning the battle between China and America for global hegemony. They are therefore, overtly or covertly, consciously or subconsciously, throwing in with the Chinese side for their own economic—and to a lesser extent survival, though the two interact—advantage.
Our globalist-leaning corporations, like the giant law firm linked above, that deal extensively with China are similar. They’re going with what they think is the winning side.
And globalism is not democracy. For the globalist, people voting has been irrelevant, even retrograde, for decades. It’s the one-party state gone world-wide.
So, to be overly colloquial, “bugging out” on Afghanistan to them is no big deal. And China taking over, well, to them it’s just part of the game.
A couple of weeks before the completion of the catastrophe of the American presence in Afghanistan—or, if you believe President Joe Biden, the “extraordinary success” of the American evacuation—a Russo-British comedian named Konstantin Kisin published a brilliantly funny thread on Twitter headed: “You’re struggling to understand why some people are vaccine hesitant. Let me help you.”
The “let me help you” megathread, as he called it, consisted of example after example of so-called “expert” opinions that have turned out to be completely wrong—beginning with the British vote for Brexit and the American vote for President Donald Trump in 2016, both of which elections the top experts at the time confidently assured us would go the other way.
Actually, Kisin’s spiel could be considered as a belated gloss on one of the most famous quotations to come out of the Brexit referendum, that of the Brexiteer and veteran government minister Michael Gove who said: “I think the people of this country have had enough of experts.”
I think that Trump was striking the same responsive chord with Americans when he disparaged what he called “political correctness”—still ravaging the county after four years of his administration—which was also the product of that breed of experts who call themselves “intellectuals.”
If people were fed up with experts in 2016, think how much more reason they have to be so five years later! Kisin does, and he goes ruthlessly through the whole catalog of errors from Russian collusion to “systemic racism” and “white supremacy” to “toxic masculinity” and the abolition of sex in favor of the nebulous idea of “gender.”
And of course we mustn’t leave out the conflicting and often mendacious pronunciamentos of “the Science” on the coronavirus, which have culminated in the distrust, not so much of the vaccines themselves, but of “the experts’” attempts to demonize those who remain skeptical about them.
And all this was before the collapse of the Afghan government and army under the onslaught of the Taliban gave us what may be the best reason ever for thinking that we, too, have had enough of experts in this country.
“Afghanistan: the graveyard of experts,” wrote Tim Black at Spiked Online.
“US ‘experts’ who created Afghanistan mess should be fired for malpractice,” wrote Rebekah Koffler for The New York Post—though of course they won’t be. They never are. They’re the experts.
A writer on Substack named Richard Hanania compared the galaxy of American Ph.D.’s (including the now-deposed president of Afghanistan himself, Ashraf Ghani, who has a Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia) who got us into Afghanistan with the madrassa-educated Taliban and wrote that, “It’s as if Wernher von Braun had been given all the resources in the world to run a space program and had been beaten to the moon by an African witch doctor.”
Unsurprisingly, there were a great many negative comments appended to Kisin’s bonfire of the experts, most of them to the effect that, just because some people have been wrong about some things it doesn’t mean that other people are going to be wrong about other things—especially when those things include vaccines which, as there are sound scientific reasons for believing, can be life-saving.
Nor should we neglect to consider that the lives saved are not only of those who receive the vaccines but also those of the immunosuppressed and other vulnerable people who come in contact with them.
They have a point. But so has Kisin. The latter is certainly right in thinking that the experts, particularly those who write for the partisan media, have taken too little care of their own credibility in the past, instead expecting to be trusted and believed as right, just because of who they are. When they then turn out to be wrong, they have no one but themselves to blame if people don’t believe them the next time.
Some people are always going to be wrong about almost everything, but the case is altered when the people who are wrong have set themselves up in the profession of being right. These are the people we call “experts” solely because they have the recognized credentials of experts—advanced degrees from top universities or awards for their expertise from other experts—whether or not they have any real-world experience or expertise.
Their authority is what the anthropologists call “positional”—like that of the parent who answers a child’s question of why? by replying: “Because I said so!” or “Because I’m your mother.”
The experts treat us all like those children—and then they wonder why they are resented and distrusted.
They are the people who identify themselves with their beliefs to the extent that they can never admit it—and so never learn from their mistakes—when those beliefs turn out to be wrong.
That’s how you get to Biden’s calling an obvious disaster of the first water an “extraordinary success”—with no more than an occasional raised eyebrow from the compliant media.
Much publicity in the last week or so was given to a Reuters report of a conversation between Biden and Ghani in the dying days of the latter’s government, as the Taliban were closing in. What he had to worry about, said the American president to the Afghan one, was the “perception” that he was losing the war, not the fact that he actually was losing it.
All he had to do to get American help, said Biden, was change this perception, “whether it is true or not.”
I think a lot of the criticism of this extraordinary conversation was misdirected. The problem wasn’t that Biden told Ghani to lie. Lying to the enemy has a long and honorable tradition in the history of warfare.
No, the problem was that he was foolish enough to think he could lie in that situation: that he (or Ghani) could get away with spinning the enemy as he himself was used to spinning the American media—as, of course, he would go on to do again with the claim of an “extraordinary success.”
A man whose self-assurance and self-absorption is such that he believes reality can make no claim against him that he can’t pay off with the experts’ counterfeit currency of interpretive ingenuity and rhetorical sleight-of-hand is a man who can only lead his country and himself into more disasters.
One anonymous 4Chan user suggested Afghan refugees might vote for Democrats
Refugees fleeing the Biden-induced human rights catastrophe in Afghanistan are streaming into Washington, D.C., and flowing into the area’s hospitals amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. In response, the district’s emergency management agency has issued a stern warning about the threat of online extremism.
The District of Columbia’s Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency warned law enforcement officials earlier this week that “extremist rhetoric has risen online following the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.” According to an intelligence assessment obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, the agency assessed that “the increase in extremist rhetoric may presage targeted violence against Afghan refugees.” The evidence cited to support that assessment, however, was rather scant—just a handful of examples from “known online forums,” such as 4Chan, Free Republic, BitChute, and the official QAnon Telegram channel.
The report, dated Sept. 7, quotes an anonymous 4Chan user who responded to a series of posts about the resettlement of Afghan refugees. “Hello…don’t yall [sic] see the democratic strategy here?” the anonymous poster posted. “[The refugees] arent [sic] going to strong blue states but the key electoral swing states.” It goes on to note that the deranged North Carolina man who precipitated a standoff with law enforcement outside the U.S. Capitol Building last month had “shared frustration with the US withdrawal from Afghanistan on Facebook.”
Additional evidence includes “open-source comments” on Free Republic containing “implied threats” against President Joe Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.), and a post suggesting Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) wants to bring in “200,000 [evacuees], that is 4000 new terrorists…per state.” The assessment also cites two comments from “identified” BitChute users who referenced “replacement theory” and “white genocide” in response to posts about refugee resettlement, and another from the QAnon Telegram channel describing the resettlement of Afghan refugees as “an enemy invasion.”
There are a couple posts that could realistically be defined as vague threats against refugees, such as one from a QAnon Telegram user who urged Americans to “Arm yourself!…citizens should storm the airports and blow up the runways.”
The report did not elaborate as to whether any (or all) of the posts were written by law enforcement agents and informants, nor did it discuss the amount of taxpayer dollars and government manpower the agency devotes to perusing online forums.
