Part 2 Anti-Anti-Nazi Barbarian Hordes are Knocking Down ...

[admin]

Veteran Shooter worked for CIA in Afghanistan
by google AI
11/27/25

A shooting near the White House on November 26, 2025, resulted in the death of West Virginia National Guard Specialist Sarah Beckstrom and left Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe critically injured.

The suspect, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, an Afghan national who had worked with the CIA in Afghanistan, was identified as a former member of NDS-03, an elite counterterrorism unit supported by the U.S. intelligence agency.

Lakanwal entered the U.S. in 2021 under Operation Allies Welcome and had his asylum application approved in April 2025.

Lakanwal served in the CIA-backed NDS-03 unit, also known as a "Zero Unit," operating out of Kandahar and conducting high-risk missions against the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

He was vetted multiple times during his journey to the U.S., including through the National Counterterrorism Center database, according to officials.

Despite prior endorsements from U.S. Marines he assisted in combat, investigators are now examining his social media activity, which included anti-Western sentiments and shares of Taliban propaganda, for potential extremist links.

The incident has sparked political debate over refugee vetting processes, with U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro and FBI Director Kash Patel criticizing the Biden administration’s handling of Afghan resettlement, while AfghanEvac, a nonprofit aiding evacuees, called the attack a “tragic outlier” not reflective of broader patterns.

[admin]

SLURRING Trump DISTURBS Troops In Thanksgiving STUNT GONE WRONG!
by Jack Cocchiarella
Jack Cocchiarella Show

'Are You Stupid—Are You A Stupid Person?': Trump Snaps At Reporter In Tirade About Afghan Vetting
Forbes Breaking News
Nov 27, 2025

Speaking to reporters at Mar-a-Lago, President Trump snapped at a reporter who pointed out, "Your DOJ IG just reported this year that there was thorough vetting by DHS and by the FBI of these Afghans who were brought into the U.S.," asking, "so why do you blame the Biden Administration?"

Political commentator Jack Cocchiarella reacts to Donald Trump's Thanksgiving meltdown.



Transcript

Could Donald Trump just shut up for one
day, a singular day? I am back from
Thanksgiving dinner. I have my stretchy
pants on. I have a comfortable
sweatshirt on. And I have to talk about
Donald Trump because once again, he is
disturbing our peace. not just
disturbing the troops who he called in a
Thanksgiving stunt, but disturbing a
reporter who he directly attacked in the
most disgusting way after he was caught
in a lie and a connection to the
shooting in DC yesterday. He has done it
again. We are going to get into it all.
But before we do, if I could quickly ask
you to leave a like on this video and if
you haven't already and you enjoy our
channel to hit that subscribe button
because it goes a long way in supporting
our work. Now, before we get into Trump
attacking a reporter and disturbing our
military members and a special guest at
the end of this video, who you're going
to want to stick around for, I want to
start where Donald Trump did, refusing
to say that he would go to the funeral
for the service members, the National
Guard members who were killed tragically
yesterday.
Stage is obviously here, but do you plan
to attend Sarah's funeral?
I haven't thought about it yet, but it
certainly is something I could conceive
of. I love West Virginia. You know, I
won West Virginia by one of the biggest
margins of any president anywhere. And
it's, you know, these are great people.
I love the people of West Virginia. I
love the people of our country, but uh I
haven't given it any thought, but it
sounds like something I could do. You
know, it's very, it's very raw.
Can he ever not make it about himself
for one singular moment? Two people died
tragically yesterday and Donald Trump
immediately segus into well they love me
in West Virginia and quite frankly I won
by so much and I'm so fantastic and do
you like me me? Can you just can he take
Can he take a day off? Can he take a
singular day off from it all being about
Donald? From us having to deal with the
fact that mommy and daddy never told him
that he was a good boy or that he was he
was special or that he was important or
he was worth their time? Does it have to
be inflicted upon us all the time? Does
his insecurity and anger have to come
out all the time? We're trying to enjoy
Thanksgiving, but thankfully us
thankfully for us, later in this video,
we will see Donald Trump get called out
to his face, but his tirade just
continued a little bit when he decided
to attack Somali,
right?
Yeah, I know this deal. Sorry. Many are
wonderful. Yeah, I'm sure.
I said I said many are here legally
though. What should they think in terms
of their possibility?
Well, they can't be happy. Okay. They
can't be happy because what's taking
place between that, if you look at
Somalia, they're taking over Minnesota
and they are, we got a lot of problems
with the gangs, with all of the things
taking place in Minnesota. We have an
incompetent governor, a dope, we have a
dope governor. Um, they can't be happy
about what's going on. And, uh, if you
talk about the Afghans, you know,
there's a problem because so many bad
ones came in with on the planes. They
just walked on whoever the strongest
people were phys.
This is the new racist fixation of the
administration. Fair warning, you are
about to see this a lot more. Steven
Miller went on Fox to rant about the
Somalia
of America and saying that they're
taking over our culture. And by the way,
Steven Miller, I don't want any American
culture that remotely resembles you in
any way at all. your face, uh, your
bald, gross, ghoulish look, the way your
suits don't fit, your just disgusting,
angry, screaming, snarling voice all the
time. I don't want more Steven Miller.
These guys, they just won't stop
complaining. Like Trump, when he started
talking to our service members, what did
he do? He started complaining about the
words he can't use.
Um, to the Mohawks, that's our squadron
motto. Chop.
Oh, good. I love it. Chop. See, we're
not allowed to do that anymore. You
know, we're not allowed. You're not
allowed to use the word Indian anymore.
The only one that wants you to are the
Indians. All right.
I don't think you should ever.
Might I remind you that Donald Trump
detained one of my classmates and then
shipped him to a prison in Louisiana
while his wife was pregnant and giving
birth to their first child because she
protested a genocidal government. And
Donald Trump is talking about, "Oh, the
words I can't say." These conservatives
are always so caught up in the victim
complex. Oh, they're attacking me.
They're going after me. I can't say
anything. I can't do anything. If you
have a photo of fatfaced JD Vance, that
meme on your phone, they won't let you
back into the country. Yet, they demand
all of the time that they be the victim
and that it's always about them. No
matter what, it has to be about their
victim complex. And it also has to be
about how fantastic and great they are.
Because as Donald Trump should have
spent his time giving thanks to the
people defending our country, what did
he decide to talk about? Joe Biden and
his golf game.
I won one last year. I won a club
championship at a big club, beating a
27y old kid. I said, you know, I'm
decades older than you, but I said, the
fairway doesn't know how old you are as
you walk up the middle and he's in the
rough. And uh I've been a good golfer
over the years. I won when you win. You
know, club championships are our majors.
You know that most people can't play in
them. They won't. We're talking about no
strokes or anything else. So, I'm a very
low handicap and I've won uh 38 of them
legitimately. Everyone legitimately.
It has to be legitimate because you have
a lot of people following you during
club championships as you know. So, I
guess I'm very uh I got to be right
around scratch or better.
This is just disturbing and weird and
uncomfortable for everyone involved. No.
service member wants to take time out of
their Thanksgiving for Donald Trump to
brag about his short game. Yet, this is
what we have to constantly endure it all
being about him and and tearing down the
East Wing to build a monument to how he
has imposed himself on the history of
this country that just the constant
trump of it all. It's all the same. He
wants us to just tire of having to hear
his voice so we stop paying attention.
So, we stop caring. So we stop trying to
hold him accountable. So we just give
up. But now more than ever, it is
important to push back. So after Donald
Trump was done disturbing our troops, he
took some questions from reporters, of
course. And one of them was about how
Donald Trump, the man who is now
attacking Joe Biden for being
responsible for yesterday's shooting,
somehow granted asylum to this suspected
asalent. And of course, Donald Trump's
response was to lash out, to scream, to
attack, to yell. It was just a mess. the
suspect worked very closely with the CIA
in Afghanistan for years that he was
vetted and the vetting came up clean.
He went he went cuckoo. I mean, he went
nuts and that happens, too. It happens
too often with these people. You see
them, but uh look, this is how they come
in. This is how they they're standing on
top of each other and that's an
airplane. There was no vetting or
anything. They came in unvetted and we
have a lot of others in this country.
We're going to get them out, but they go
cuckoo. something happens to him.

Your DOJ IG just reported this year that
there was thorough vetting by DHS and by
the FBI of these Afghans who were
brought into the US. So why do you blame
the Biden administration for this man
did?

Are you stupid? Are you a stupid person?
Because they came into on a plane along
with thousands of other people that
shouldn't be here and you're just asking
questions because you're a stupid
person. And we there's a law passed that
it's almost impossible not to get to get
them out. You can't get them out once
they come in. And they came in and they
were unvetted. They were unchecked.
There were many of them. And they came
in on big planes. And it was
disgraceful. And if you look, you'll see
there was a law passed. It makes it
almost impossible not to let them in,
not to certify them, so to speak, uh
once they come in. And they came in and
they shouldn't have come in. And
frankly, the whole thing was a mess. The
whole Afghanistan situation was a mess.
We shouldn't, it should have never taken
place. If we're going to go out and we
would have gone out because I had
everybody ready to go. We were going to
go out with strength and dignity and
precision. And we would have left from
Bram and we would have kept Bram by the
way because of its very close
relationship to China and where they
make their missiles. But when you let
this is really all he is going to be
doing at this point is lashing out more
and more and more. And I think that we
should take stock and understand that we
have to point out the fact and I've said
this again and again that so much of
this I know he has always been this way
but has to do with his cognitive
decline. He is more radical. He is more
out of control. He is more extreme than
ever because he is mentally
deteriorating. So, of course, he's going
to lash out. He has no other checks on
his brain. There's nothing to balance
him out. He has he has no self-control.
He certainly never did. But his impulses
are out of whack, even more so now. So,
Donald Trump's attacks on reporters, his
ridiculous tweets that affect our
economy every single day as he, you
know, tanks the stock market for
personal gain and for fun. If you hurt
Donald Trump's feelings, by the way,
he'll impose tariffs on your on your
country that'll destroy the economy. But
he doesn't he doesn't really care
because whatever suits Donald's feelings
is what is important. But this is the
president that we have right now. And I
think we again I continue to say have to
take stock and recognize that it does
have to do with his cognitive decline.
And if we don't point that out and if we
don't cover that adequately and we just
let it slip by, well, we just we stop
really caring. We just move on. the
mainstream media covers something else,
it's going to be a real problem because
we should know if our president, who has
always been an idiot and a an
outlandish and angry and a wannabe
strong man and a bully, a weak bully, is
attacking Canada because his brain
doesn't work or because it works in the
same sick twisted way it always has. I
think we should know that. I think
that's important. But on this story, on
the story of Donald Trump's cognitive
decline, one that we have certainly been
talking about for a long time on this
channel and independent media, might as
Todd Bryant, Tyler Cohen, these people
have been covering Donald Trump's
cognitive decline. We have on this on
this show as well. I like to point out
that the New York Times did cover the
story. A little bit too late in my
opinion, but they did talk about it.
They talked about how Donald Trump is
waking up later. He is doing fewer
events. His workday like he does any
work has certainly been shortened. We
have seen that. But I think the
mainstream media will move on. I think
they did their one story. They talked
about it. It was their short
fascination. Now they will move on. I
heard earlier this week Abby Phillip,
CNN host, who I think does a a pretty
good job. I don't love her show. It is
an opportunity to normalize just the
bile spilled by right-wingers and
pretend like their opinions matter or
should be kept in the same space as
actual factual arguments. I don't
believe it. I don't acknowledge it. I do
think a lot of our of our folks, Adam
certainly does a great job on that show.
But Abby Phillip was on a podcast, not
her show, just doing a podcast and she
said she's kind of kind of tired of the
Epstein story. Kind of Epstein, Trump
and Epstein, let's move on. Are you
serious? Are you serious? Are you
serious right now? You're tired of the
Epstein story, the biggest scandal in
presidential history. You're just ready
to move on and move past it. You just
think, you know, it's not Hillary's
emails. It's not Hunter Biden's laptop.
It's not Joe Biden wearing tennis shoes
once in a while. Eh, not fun for me.
Let's just move on. We cannot allow that
to happen. But in my opinion, it is not
going to happen because this Epstein
story, this Epstein coverage, I think
has largely been driven by independent
creators. So on this Thanksgiving, I
want to take the opportunity, if I
haven't enough already in the videos
that I've made, and if you have watched
them today, thank you for welcoming me
into your home. And I said in the last
video,
I could use a slice of pie. You don't
need to. You could I I'll take a I'll
take a plate if you're offering one, but
thank you for letting me into your home.
But I am thankful for this audience, for
this community, for the other incredible
accounts out there. Brian, Tyler, Cohen,
Midas Touch, Breaking Points, The
Majority Report, these other shows that
have built up independent media for so
long, Zateo, The Bull Work, Crooked, who
are giving us this place to actually
push the mainstream press to actually
ask real questions. I think it is so
important and it is only because of
y'all. I am so thankful for your support
today. I started this show a year and a
half ago in my bedroom. I took it to my
dorm. I took it through college. We hit
a million subscribers. I moved to DC. I
am only able to do this because of
y'all. And I am so thankful for that. It
is tough sometimes and I have to cover
Donald Trump uh every day, especially on
Thanksgiving. I think I mentioned the
the stretchy pants that I'm in, but but
I am happy to do so. It is important to
do so because we are the only ones who
are doing so and it is because of you
and that is important and I am so
grateful for it. And I have a special
guest who is as well and I'm going to
have him say thank you as well. My dad
Dave Katerella who is a a watcher of the
show, a viewer of the show, certainly a
supporter of the show
occasionally
is also grateful for your support.
Thank you. And so if you want to make
Dave's day, want to make him smile, as
always, you can hit that subscribe
button, leave a like, drop a blue heart
in the comments for Dave. Keep on
fighting. Don't let him silence you. And
until next time, Dave,
we'll see you next time. We'll see you
said.

[admin]

Trump Staff Rips Him As Questions About His Mental Health Intensify
by David Shuster
The Resistance Report
Nov 27, 2025

Trump Staff Rips Him As Questions About His Mental Health Intensify

• Trump Gets BUSTED Harming Social...

CNBC’s senior economics reporter, Steve Liesman, criticized President Trump’s recent tariff threats against Canada, labeling them as “insane” and expressing concern over potential negative impacts on U.S. assets and foreign investment. David Shuster breaks it down on Rebel HQ.



Transcript

Hello everybody, David Schustster here.
Some of Donald Trump's strongest
supporters are now questioning his
mental health. White House staff and
conservative media figures say the Trump
actions the past two weeks have been
especially troubling and unstable.
I'm going to say this at risk of my job,
Kelly, but what President Trump is doing
is insane. It is absolutely insane.
Steve Leeman on the Trump friendly CNBC
spoke about the US trade war with
Canada. Trump has justified the trade
war and the stock market crashes with a
string of evolving claims. First, Trump
blamed Canada for fentanyl in the United
States, even though less than 1% comes
from Canada. Then, Trump said Canada
doesn't spend enough on border security.
Then, Trump said Canada's military is
getting a free ride from the United
States. Trump followed that with
Canada's trade with US is unfair. Never
mind that the last trade deal with
Canada was negotiated by Trump. And now
Trump is blaming the tariffs on Canada's
refusal to be part of the United States.
It is about the eighth reason we've had
for the tariffs. And now he's saying
he's putting 50% tariffs on Canada
unless they agree to become the 51st
state.
That is insane. There is just no other
way of describing it. And the trouble,
Kelly, is that it shows there are no
bounds around President Trump. This is
very different from the first
administration where there were people
around him who seemed to I don't know
what the the word is but smooth over
some of the edges. Now
this time around instead of smoothing
over Trump's edges and softening White
House policies, Trump's staff are
leaking to the media. Daily Beast
headline, "Trump's advisers are freaking
out about his tariff chaos." Wall Street
Journal Trump's economic message is
spooking some of his own adviserss.
Quote, "Trump's aggressive approach to
tariffs has a nerve some Trump
administration economic officials,
including staff on the National Economic
Council who are concerned that tariffs
and uncertainty over the trade policy
are tanking the stock market and fueling
price increases on everything from
energy to construction materials."
People familiar with the matter said the
president's economic adviserss have
warned him that tariffs could hurt the
market and economic growth, but he has
largely been undeterred. The people said
President Trump has long been obsessed
with the trade policy of one US
presidential predecessor.
President McKinley. William McKinley.
William McKinley.
William McKinley. Highly underrated. He
has not been properly recognized.
William McKinley as an example. He was a
big tariff president.
He was a strong believer in tariffs.
Yes. McKinley was a strong believer in
tariffs in his first term starting in
the 1890s. But by his second term,
McKinley concluded the tariffs had
caused the United States more harm than
good. So McKinley dropped the tariffs
and embraced free trade. 30 years later,
the United States enacted the Smoot
Holly Tariff Act to try and protect US
businesses and farmers. But the act made
the Great Depression worse. If we're
using the McKenley tariff period or the
Smoot Holly period to model economic
policy, that is definitely a suicide
mission. If you look back to the 1890 to
94 period that spans the McKenley
tariff, the labor market failed with the
unemployment rate going from 4 to 18%.
We had two stock market pullbacks. One
was a correction, one was a 30% bare
market. I don't have to go through the
history of the 1930s for you, but the
Smoot Holly tariff, which started to
make its way through Congress in 1929
and was signed in 1930, was obviously
associated with an economic catastrophe
that we refer to as the Great
Depression. Uh, Smoot and Holly were
both run out of office in 1933, forced
to recede an embarrassment uh into
private life.
Those are facts. And Donald Trump has
reportedly been given those facts by
some of his White House staff. And yet
Trump continues to intensify his tariffs
with Canada and Mexico. And when the US
allies hit back with retaliatory
actions, Trump gets insulted and
announces more tariffs. Some days,
President Trump then pulls back only to
reapply the tariffs the next day and
make new threats. Trump's sensitivity to
perceived slights was also on display a
few weeks ago in the Oval Office with
Ukrainian President Zalinski.
Don't tell us what we're going to feel.
We're trying to solve a problem. Don't
tell us what we're going to feel.
I'm not telling you.
Because you're in no position to dictate
that. Remember this. You're in no
position to dictate what we're going to
feel. The Trump outbursts and
instability have caught the attention of
political analyst James Carville.
We know
that boy ain't right. We know that. We
saw it. And we know that even in the
world of Trumpian standards that the
kind of a okay oxymoron to say Trumpian
standards,
but we know this represents a a
significant
deterioration. By deterioration,
Carville means the very thing that
Trump's staff have leaked to the media.
Donald Trump is more unstable and less
rational than just a few months ago.
You know, I'm a guy I like to ask
questions. I like speculate on things.
That's why we have this YouTube channel.
Uh that's why you viewers and listeners,
uh that's why we get along as well as we
do.
And I want to see the possibility
that maybe I had a point
considerably earlier than this when I
pointed out on this very channel
where Trump had red splotches on her
hand on his hand which I was told by any
number of medical professionals that
when you see that condition the first
thing that you suspect is syphilis.
Yes, James Carville is noting Donald
Trump's erratic behavior and questioning
if Trump has syphilis. The sexually
transmitted infection can affect the
central nervous system leading to mood
disturbances, irritability, confusion,
and dementia.
I don't know if it's tertiary or
secondary syphilis. I I I'm really not
schooled enough or all I know could be
gorrhea. I mean, but there's some
possibility
that we are we have watched the effects
of the latent STD, I guess called
sexually transmitted disease.
Carvo believes that Trump's erratic
behavior may be due to other
contributing factors as well.
And it could be a combination
of being a fat slob, which of course he
is. It could be that he's
can't sleep at night because his beached
whale body can't
allow the circulation it needs. I don't
know. I don't know. I'm not a sleep
specialist or medical doc.
But I think we should revisit the
possibility of a syphilis diagnosis. And
I know a lot of people that watch this
channel are some some of you we get we
get any number of of MDs and
professionals that are getting the
comments and some of you just
wellinformed citizens but I I don't
think we can discount the fact that we
always mad. I I'm not going to and by
mad Carville doesn't mean angry. He
means mad as in King George mad or
crazy. Historians believe the king with
soores on his body had syphilis which
caused or contributed to his mental
instability and erratic behavior. All of
this raises the question, is President
Donald Trump engaged in an insane trade
war, as CNBC calls it, and disregarding
his own economic adviserss because Trump
has syphilis?
There are some Democrats who believe
Trump is destabilizing the United States
at the wishes of Russia's Vladimir
Putin. And there are other folks who
think that Trump is deliberately
crashing the US economy so Trump's rich
friends can swoop in and buy a lot of
stuff for cheap. In some ways, it
doesn't really matter what is driving
Donald Trump. The end result is the
same. The United States is facing
economic, political, and societal chaos.
And even some of Donald Trump's staff
and supporters are calling his actions
irrational and unhinged.
By the way, the Trump administration has
now been busted trying to close down
crucial parts of the Social Security
Administration,
which is most of the federal spending is
entitlements. Um, so
that that's that's like the big one to
eliminate is that's the sort of half
trillion maybe six 700 billion a year.
I truly believe that they are trying to
crater this agency and that they are
driving it to a total system collapse
that is going to happen a lot sooner
rather than later. I believe they're
trying to break it so that they can then
turn the public against it and say,
"Look, it didn't work." And then that
allows them to then privatize it and
liquidate it.
You ought to hear something that is so
horrible given the fact that we are the
richest country on earth is that 30,000
Americans die every year waiting for an
understaffed Social Security to approve
disability benefits. today. All right.
Imagine somebody's old, they're on
disability, they can't get the benefits,
they die. Die earlier than they should.
If these cuts go through, the number of
people who die will go up very
significantly. That is not what this
country is about, and we're not going to
allow that to happen.
That video has generated a lot of
comments on YouTube. One of the most
popular from Don who wrote, "When Trump
said, "I don't care about you. I only
want your vote." It was one of the very
rare times he wasn't lying. I hear you.
I look forward to reading your comments
about Donald Trump's own staff and
supporters ripping him and questioning
Trump's mental health.
I'm David Schuster. Thanks for joining
us.

[admin]

CIA Just ATTACKED America: The TRUTH About the National Guard Shooting will SHOCK You
by Danny Haiphong
Nov 28, 2025 #cia #trump #nationalguardattack

The dark truth about the major attack on the National Guard in America's capital is coming out and it's worse than you think. Danny Haiphong breaks down the bloody CIA connections to the alleged attacker and why they're importance go far beyond this tragic event.



Transcript

The chickens have come home to
roost. As you may know, two National
Guardsmen were tragically shot near the
White House by an Afghan national with
ties to the CIA. I'm just going to pull
up the story of what exactly happened
and we're going to go through the CIA
ties together. Afghan nationals in
custody after shooting of two National
Guard members near the White House. An
Afghan national has been accused of
shooting two West Virginia National
Guard members just blocks from the White
House in a brazen act of violence at a
time when the presence of troops in the
nation's capital and other cities around
the country has become a political flash
point. Cash Patel and Mayor Mariel
Bowser of Washington DC said the guard
members were hospitalized and in
critical condition after the shooting.
Now the suspect who's in custody was
also shot in wounds uh that were
believed to be nonlifethreatening
according to law enforcement officials.
Now, the 29-year-old suspect is an
Afghan national entering the US in 2021
under Operation Allies Welcome, which
was a B administration program that
evacuated tens of thousands of Afghans
after the US was withdrawn and had to
leave Afghanistan. Some of these
actually were tied to very nefarious and
ugly activities in Afghanistan. The New
York Times now have admitted, including
Daniel Radcliffe, the current CIA
director under Donald Trump, that there
are CIA backed ties to this suspect. The
CIA and Afghan intelligence officials
said that the shooter had been part of
an Afghan partner force and supported by
the agency in the southern province of
Kandahar. The Afghan man accused of
shooting two members of the National
Guard in Washington DC on Wednesday had
worked with the CIA supported military
units in Afghanistan. The CIA said that
the shooter had been part of a CIA
backed Afghan partner force in Kandahar,
the southern province of Afghanistan, a
stronghold of the Taliban insurgency
during the two decade war. After
American forces withdrew from
Afghanistan in August of 2021 and gave
way to Taliban rule, the suspect was
brought to the United States as part of
a program to evacuate Afghans who had
worked with the agency. According to
John Ratcliffe, and of course, this is
becoming very partisan, right? And in
the wake of the disastrous Biden
withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Biden
administration justified bringing the
alleged shooter to the United States. So
this is being all framed as a Biden
administration problem. However, the
issue with that is many folds. Primarily
that this program, okay, and this war
spanned many administrations and the
CIA, as you all know, is in fact
nonpartisan. And now here are the insane
ties that we have to talk about here of
this shooter. Here he is in the Kandahar
strike force, Mr. Ron Moola. According
to this person, the DC shooter has a
crazier story than previously thought.
He was directly CIA led. He was not just
a collaborator. He was part of a CIA
task force that massacred civilians and
medical workers. Those who know him had
said that he was uh troubled by what he
had done mentally. Well, I'll say that
uh uh to do that to uh uh civilians and
to medical workers will cause you
trouble. There are five militias, says
the Human Rights Watch, that come under
nominal Afghan in uh control, nominal
control of the Afghan intelligence
agency, the NDS, and do not fall under
ordinary chains of command within the
NDS, nor under normal Afghan or US
military chains of command. rather they
are trained, equipped and recruited,
overseen by the CIA.
Human Rights Watch also says that quote
a lack of transpar transparency for
command, control, rules of engagement
and policy framework guided these strike
forces and here's who they are. So this
is the Kandahar strike force what where
he operated in uh during this horrific
war that the United States uh is still
very much involved with even though it
withdrawn it still has forces there
operate. So
the NDS03 Kandahar strike force operated
in Afghanistan in the southern region uh
out of the former compound of the late
Taliban leader Moola Omar commonly
referred to as Moola Omar's house in US
forces as Camp Gecko. The late brother
of former president Hammad Karzai Ahmad
reportedly oversaw the operations until
his assassination in 2011.
And here is more from Human Rights
Watch. The forces that carried out these
attacks, these horrific special forces
raids on medical facilities in 2018 2019
were the Kandahar Strike Force and other
special forces units, all of which are
supported and sometimes accompanied by
US forces. During kill and capture
operations, the forces involved
assaulted in some cases cases killed
medical staff, assaulted or killed
accompanying civilian non-combatant
caregivers and caused damage to
facilities. So this is who this person
was. This is this is very serious. But
it goes even deeper than that because as
you remember
the United States was negotiating
uh uh for peace, right? uh supposedly a
withdrawal from Afghanistan very uh a
long time ago under the first Trump
administration and it failed. We have to
say that that effort failed. But there
was a lot of talk about these kind of
CIA backed militias and what exactly was
going to happen to them because the CIA
had trained these forces to commit the
most heinous attacks in Afghanistan at
the behest of the United States in its
dirty war on the so-called Taliban.
And if cut loose by the CIA says a
report at the time by the cost of war at
Brown University, militias quote may be
reborn as private armies or security
guards in the service of powerful
individuals.
Okay, powerful individuals. How about
powerful intel agencies? What about
those? But let's uh so let's go now to
the uh uh details here about these local
militias. They were first viewed as a
temporary solution, but they eventually
became a permanent fixture of secret CIA
operations in the country, sometimes
acting without knowledge of US diplomats
or Afghan military leaders. Not much is
known about specific groups the CIA
directed at the time. The best known of
which was a coast protection force, not
the Kandahar strike force.
In 2010, journalist Bob Woodward wrote,
"The CIA's army consisted of 3,000
Afghan fighters, but since then, the
number has ballooned. Uh, the cost
forceful alone may number as high as
10,000.
President Donald Trump further expanded,
so this is Donald Trump under his
administration further expanded the
CIA's paramilitary role in Afghanistan
using local militians for militias for
hunt and kill operations. Speaking at a
security conference, Mike Pompeo, who
was a CIA director at the time,
authorized the CIA to take risks that
would make it faster and more
aggressive. And every minute, we have to
be focused on crushing our enemy. So,
CIA link forces have been accused of
numerous abuses, including carrying out
summary executions in torture. An
investigation by the New York Times
documented one case in which CIA backed
forces shot two brothers in view of
their families in the Nangahar province.
The forces handcuffed and hooded two
brothers and after a brief interrogation
as their wives and children watched,
both were dragged away and executed in a
corner of a bedroom. These are the kinds
of people that the United States so just
willingly not only let into the US to
commit this horrific act against uh the
National Guard, but it's obvious that
the United States is CIA, they want to
protect these forces. Uh this has
implications far beyond just what
happened on that day that the National
Guard came under fire. This gentleman
who is accused supposedly drove all the
way from the state of Washington across
the country and brought a revolver that
he ended up firing on a National Guards
person and then killed the person who
tried to help. We have to remember
operation cyclone by the CIA which was
the covert program to arm the muja.
Operation cyclone was its most expensive
the CIA's covert military assistance
program during the cold war and it
lasted for 10 years 1979 to 1989 and it
was had a simple aim. Bleed the Soviet
Union in Afghanistan like the US had
been bled in Vietnam. And this is
exactly what the big new Bjinsky the
national security adviser at the time
said. In 1986, the CIA decided it was
time to enter the Mujahedin the war and
give the Mujahedin a real shot uh to
turn the tide against the Soviet
military, providing FIM92 Stinger
anti-aircraft missiles, which were a
game-changing addition to their arsenal
at the time. They came equipped with
infrared homing guidance systems,
meaning they could seek the heat source
of an aircraft and destroy it while in
the air. Soviet helicopters and jets,
once uncontested rulers in the sky,
found themselves outmatched. And the CIA
didn't cut corners when supplying these
missiles. Each cost 38,000 in the late
1980s with a range of up to uh 8,000
mters in a speed of Mach 2, which was
fast at the time. Although, of course,
we know that Russia and other countries
have uh surpassed uh those kind of
speeds. Uh the CIA wasn't acting alone
in the arms bonanza. You had Saudi
Arabia, you had Pakistan with their
intelligence forces and of course uh
their Wahhabi ideology and extremist
ideologies that were helping to forment
this kind of uprising against the Soviet
Union. From high-tech singer missiles to
intricate financial networks and
calculate political maneuverings,
Operation Cyclone was anything but
simple. It was a carefully orchestrated
play with each country pulling strings
in the shadow uh without an endgame
uh each with its endgame in sight. So uh
again we have to remember that this was
a dirty war. Okay. The final fallout of
which led to a power vacuum. The Soviet
Union indeed had to withdraw from the uh
country of Afghanistan. But what came
afterward was essentially what we still
see in many ways up until uh 2020. It
was the United States who left a power
vacuum there through its covert
operations and the United States
re-entering and reoccupying in the year
2001 uh to essentially quote unquote
finish the job of destroying that
country, plundering it, destabilizing
and leaving in the hands of uh so-called
uh armed groups that it supports. Of
course, that didn't happen because the
US uh uh turned against the Taliban
because the Taliban turned against them
and that's why there is still so much
tension between them. The end of
operation cyclone led to a power vacuum.
The mujaheden didn't dispand. They
splintered into different groups
eventually giving rise to factions like
the Taliban. The operation left
Afghanistan a wash in weapons, some of
which ended up in groups that would
later become al-Qaeda. The US had to
reckon with these unintended
consequences during its Afghanistan
invasion and subsequent counterterror
operations. This is the root of what is
going on here. Of course, this person
has allegedly committed the act too. We
can't even be sure about this. Uh there
needs there of course needs to be an
independent investigator, but what do
you have? You have those who have
perpetrated crimes like the one I just
outlined where the the alleged shooter
participated in the most horrific US
backed CIA backed war crimes and now the
investigation is being done by those who
organized the war crimes and even the
CIA uh Ratcliffe he's admitting that he
was a CIA asset and he committed some of
the most horrific crimes imaginable
during this uh uh 20-year occupation.
Now, we also can't dismiss the fact that
the United States's uh intelligence
apparatus, its military apparatus is
actually not afraid uh mind you, it's
actually not afraid of
going incredibly hard for the purpose of
uh destabilization and for the purpose
of war. it is willing to do exactly what
happened on US soil in order to justify
war. And of course, uh there are
numerous instances of this. Uh let's
talk about Operation Northwoods, shall
we? Let me pull up what that was because
not many people understand that the US
military itself wanted to provoke war
with Cuba by what? Killing innocent
people. In the 1960s, they wanted to
kill innocent people and commit acts of
terrorism in the US to create public
support for a war against Cuba. So, we
have to ask ourselves if the United
States in the 1960s during the Cold War
was willing to sacrifice Americans like
the ones who were sacrificed uh uh
during this horrific incident uh
targeting the National Guard, which has
been used by the Trump administration as
a weapon to conduct a another kind of
war, a war on Americans, which we have
been seeing since before Trump, maybe
more covertly. But now the Trump
administration has outwardly declared
war and has tried to use the National
Guard as a weapon in his own kind of
partisan political game. Now those
chickens have come home to roost in a
big way because this long history which
Donald Trump is now a major party to in
both administrations. This long history
of using these kind of attacks to
justify further interventionism,
militarization. You have thousands now
of military service members in the US on
the streets of Washington DC right now.
It all fits into this overall
program of stifling dissent, suppressing
uh uh people's
uh you know raising fears in order to
suppress people's civil liberties and
then of course to justify war abroad. So
operation northwoods was all about
creating this environment. Uh the plans
reportedly included the possible
assassination of Cuban amigra, sinking
boats of Cuban refugees on the high
seas, hijacking planes, blowing up a US
ship, and even orchestrating violent
terrorism in US cities. Sound familiar?
This just happened in Washington DC. An
act of terrorism was committed in a US
city targeting US National Guards
members who mind you was targeted
supposedly allegedly by somebody who
drove thousands of miles across from
Washington state to here after working
for years, literally years in the CIA
backed operate uh Kandahar strike force
unit, which mind you, this person who
allegedly did this shooting was
recruited at like the age of 14, like a
child soldier. This is how far how how
many lengths the United States's war
apparatus will go to get what it wants.
Uh the military brass in the United
States even contemplated causing US
military casualties, writing, "We could
blow up a ship in Guantanamo Bay and
blame Cuba and casualty list in US
papers would cause a helpful wave of
indagnation."
So uh uh this has all come out. The
truth has come out about these kind of
horrific uh uh operations that were
planned and you know the Bay of Pigs
operation was a major failure at this
time and of course you have the Cuban
missile crisis which almost led us to
World War II. So uh we know that the
United States is no stranger to
literally planning the kind of thing
that happened in Washington. doesn't
mean it did it this time. Doesn't mean
that it was behind it. It just means
that uh this is not something out of the
realm of possibility when it comes to
how this system works. Now,
General Wesley Clark or former General
Wesley Clark, he was supreme commander,
I believe, of NATO at the time when
Donald Rumsfeld under the Bush
administration was looking to invade
Iraq. And this is what he had to say
which is infamous in the sense that we
know that 9/11 the most uh well-known
attacks on US soil
uh that was used to justify basically
every single war inside of this region
West Asia since 2001. So here is uh
Wesley Clark essentially explaining the
exact same concept I just was here
after 911 about 10 days after 911. I
went through the Pentagon and I saw
Secretary Rumsfeld and and Deputy
Secretary Wolfwitz. I went downstairs
just to say hello to some of the people
on the joint staff who had used used to
work for me and one of the generals
called me in. He said, "Sir, you got to
come in. You got to come in and talk to
me a second." I said, "Well, you're too
busy." He said, "No, no." He says, "You,
we've made the decision. We're going to
war with Iraq." This was on or about the
20th of September. I said, "We're going
to war with Iraq. Why?"
He said, "I don't know."
He said, "I guess they don't know what
else to do."
So, uh, I said, "Well, did they find
some information collect connecting
Saddam to Al Qaeda?" He said, "No, no."
He says, "There's nothing new that way.
they've just made the decision to go to
war with Iraq. He said, "I guess it's
like we don't know what to do about
terrorists, but we've got a good
military and we can take down
governments." And um he said, "I guess
if the only tool you have is a hammer,
every problem has to look like a nail."
So I came back to see him a few weeks
later and by that time we were bombing
in Afghanistan. I said, "Are we still
going to war with Iraq?" And he said,
"Oh, it's worse than that." He said, he
reached over on his desk, he picked up a
piece of paper and he said, "I just" He
said, "I just got this down from
upstairs," meaning the Secretary of
Defense's office today. And he said,
"This is a memo that describes how we're
going to take out seven countries in 5
years, starting with Iraq, and then
Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan,
and finishing off Iran."
I said, "Is it classified?" He said,
"Yes, sir." I said, I said, "Well, don't
show it to me.
And I
So there you ha I mean there you have it
that seven countries in five years and
all of those countries have been
destabilized other than Iran. Every
single one of them and every single one
of them had this element to it where
there was the use of these proxies,
these armed groups, these jihadists,
whatever you want to call them, uh they
were used. And now as we've seen over
and over and over again uh this blowback
has uh been a key and critical feature
whether it's and in cases we have to ask
whether it's blowback or whether there
actually might be an operation like
operation northwoods a foot where
there's a justification for war because
we know the United States right now is
thinking about Venezuela. It's uh
thinking about when is Iran going to
come up again. uh the United States has
many many many plans for war. They even
move beyond what Wesley Clark was saying
there. Now uh the United States
political establishment of course this
isn't the United States people US
population has no say over what has
happened here. Uh uh but the US
political establishment the deep state
the elites uh they have a lot to answer
for. You may remember David Petraeus,
the CIA director under George W. Bush,
uh, who was, uh, who was a key member, a
a key figure in the wars in Afghanistan
and Iraq. This is him at the latest UN
General Assembly literally uh uh
essentially rubber stamping and giving
approval to the al-Qaeda bounty uh the
al-Qaeda leader of Syria, Al Golani, who
had a bounty on his head up until he
took power in Syria in 2024. Here is
David Petraeus essentially giving him a
tongue bath at the UN General Assembly.
It's just so fitting that the very
forces the CIA supported, people like
Petraeus are giving them tongue baths in
public and look at the results and look
at the consequences like what happened
in DC.
Uh but but Frank, we're nationalists
certainly yes a degree of political
Islam.
uh but but frankly what you have done uh
since toppling the Bishop Harl acid
regime has validated what it is that I
assessed it and I was criticized by the
way quite considerably.
I just want you to tell you really on
behalf of all the people who are here uh
that this conversation has truly filled
me with enormous hope. Uh it has been
very very heartening and illuminating.
Um your vision is is powerful and clear.
Uh your demeanor itself is is very
impressive as well. And so again on
behalf of all here and all those that
are watching virtually and so forth, we
thank you for sharing your vision today.
We wish you strength and wisdom in the
difficult work ahead. We obviously hope
for your success inshallah because at
the end of the day your success is our
success. Thank you very much Mr.
President.
Look, I mean, he literally said
inshallah to Golani as some kind of
virtue signaling to somebody who was uh
beheading people in the region,
including Muslims uh and Christians and
various ethnic groups in Syria, in Iraq,
uh uh who were literally being directed
by forces that Petraeus was presiding
over at a point in his career.
This is I I I mean this is the state of
US politics from the political
establishment side and this is not even
a secret anymore. This is something that
happens over and over again in the
United States. Even the Australian
Strategic Policy Institute which is an
institution that is funded by both the
US government and it is also funded by
the Australian Defense Department, the
US State Department, the US Defense
Department and many US uh military
contractors like Rathon. all really its
entire purpose is to build up a war
agenda against China using Australia as
one of the vehicles has even admitted
that this is the age of blowback terror
back during the Trump administration's
first reign first goround back in 2017
uh and it talks about the incident in
the UK from Mr. Abidi, 22-year-old
Britishborn son of Libyan immigrants who
carried out a suicide bombing at a
concert of Ariana Grande who is of the
United States. It was the worst
terrorist attack in the United Kingdom
more than a decade and can only be
described as blowback from activities of
the UK and its allies aka the United
States in Libya where external
intervention has given rise to the worst
battle terrorist haven. uh not only
actively aided jihadists in Libya, the
UK did it encouraged foreign fighters
including British Libyans to get
involved in the NATOled operation to
overthrow Mammar Gaddafi. So even this
institution was talking about even this
institution and it does site uh the ASBI
does site it wasn't the first time an
Islamic holy warrior passed jihadism to
a westernborn son. uh uh we it talks
directly about Afghanistan and the US's
activities there uh may be the biggest
single source of blowback terrorism
today. With the help of Pakistan's inter
intelligence service agency and Saudi
Arabia's money, the CIA stage what
remains the largest covert operation in
history, spending $50 million on a jihad
literacy project to inspire Afghans to
fight Soviet infidels.
This is exactly
what is going on here or at least we
have to critically think about this
being a possibility of why something so
tragic like this happens why there is an
attack and it's not just on US National
Guards members that's of course going to
cause an even more intense political
stirring and people are going to of
course have a lot of different emotions
about that on all sides of the political
spectrum. But it really is that these
attacks all across Europe in the United
States in the heartlands of where these
forces were supported. It's these
weapons have been uh both uh they both
come home chickens as chickens coming
home to roost and cause a lot of
problems and as we've seen in multiple
various operations they have been used
over and over and over up until this day
as for in Syria as forces to take power
and then to embrace when they lose like
in Afghanistan and then they start
conducting domestic operations whether
it's on their own or maybe whether there
is actual US involvement especially from
intelligence agencies. We can't forget
Mosa. We can't forget all the forces out
there that really want to capitalize on
uh instability, on terror, on fear in
order to get what they want. This is the
way of the wararmongers. This is what
the US Empire and all of its hangers on
and all of those that are allied with
it, they this is the kind of program
that they pursue. And to put just icing
on the cake here when it comes to just
how brazenly horrific this situation is,
if this DC shooting suspect actually is
the one who did it, it's in large part
because he was a child soldier in
Afghanistan. 29 years old now. 2020. He
was 25 in 2021 when the US was kicked
out. He served over a decade alongside
US troops under CIA control, meaning he
started at 14 and 15. The US is
responsible for what he has become.
They've groomed him. And here are the
receipts that I also went over. And
there's his badge once again. So there
you have it, folks. This is an absolute
I mean, this is an absolute travesty.
And it's going to be used polit, you
know, it's going to the politics are
going to be a big part of this. We're
not going to get down when it comes to
who's investigating this, the US
establishment. They're not going to tell
us exactly what is going on. But it is
an absolute travesty. It is something
that constantly happens in the United
States. There there's in in the west
there are these attacks and they are
used for political purposes to generate
fear to divert our attentions and to of
course cause real damage to real people
and that is what we have here. So we
have to question who's really who's
really behind this? Who is really to
blame? It cannot be as simple as oh
Biden, you know, this is so convenient.
Biden's
war, how he handled the end of
Afghanistan, that's the reason. That's
not good enough. And that's that's a
very basic partisan answer that's going
to get us nowhere. So we have to really
think hard about this, continue to do
our research, ask the right questions,
uh because this is something that really
puts in the rudiments and the roadblocks
and the building blocks for massive
repression of people to justify exactly
what the Trump administration has hinted
at, which is using the military openly
against its own civilian population. And
of course and perhaps more destructively
uh to justify endless wars abroad uh
whether it is in Latin America like
Venezuela or whether it is against Iran
or some other target that comes up at
some point because there always is a
target.

************************

Taliban Peace Talks Must Not Ignore CIA-Funded Afghan Militias, Report Says. “If cut loose by the CIA,” the report notes, militias “may be reborn as private armies or ‘security guards’ in the service of powerful individuals.”
by Alex Emmons
The Intercept
August 21 2019, 6:00 a.m.
https://theintercept.com/2019/08/21/tal ... -militias/

[x]
Members of a CIA-sponsored strike force in the Bati Kot district of Nangarhar, Afghanistan, July 24, 2018. The fighters hold the line in the war's toughest spots, but officials say their brutal tactics are terrorizing the public and undermining the U.S. mission. (Jim Huylebroek/The New York Times)

After 18 years of war, and months of direct talks, the United States appears to be on the brink of reaching an unprecedented peace agreement with the Taliban that would bring about U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan.

A draft agreement was reached in March, and negotiators in Qatar have reportedly been ironing out the details ahead of a September 1 deadline — including exactly when U.S. troops will withdraw and when a permanent ceasefire between the parties will take effect. The U.S. is reportedly also seeking assurances from the Taliban that it won’t harbor foreign terror groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda and will engage in dialogue with the Afghan government after the U.S. military leaves.

It’s the closest the U.S. has come to a diplomatic breakthrough with the Taliban, and foreign policy scholars are cautiously optimistic that it could facilitate a U.S. exit. But a new report from the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute argues that the agreement won’t lead to real peace unless it addresses the elephant in the room: the fate of regional Afghan militias paid and directed by the CIA.

“Militias that operate outside the control of the central state and the chain of command of its armed forces will undermine the process of state formation and the prospects for a sustainable peace,” the report reads.

It is unclear to what extent the fate of the militias has been discussed at all by the U.S. or Taliban negotiators. In July, Zalmay Khalilzad, the chief U.S. negotiator, mentioned the fate of militias while listing topics that needed to be encompassed by a general agreement. But the authors of the report note that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, once director of the CIA, has not.

If the issue goes unaddressed, the report argues, it could lead to the breakdown of a ceasefire or agreement, which would in turn jeopardize Afghanistan’s future. “If violence continues at some level after the agreement is signed,” the report says, “militias will be in much demand in the political market place.”

The use of CIA-backed militias goes back to 2001, when, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the CIA rapidly organized Afghan militias under its payroll to overthrow the Taliban. This allowed the CIA to send Al Qaeda’s fighters fleeing the country with a minimal U.S. footprint.

Initially, these local militias were viewed as a temporary solution, but they eventually became a permanent fixture of secret CIA operations in the country — sometimes acting without the knowledge of U.S. diplomats and Afghan military leaders.

Not much is publicly known about specific groups the CIA directs, the best known of which is the Khost Protection Force. The force has no basis in the Afghan Constitution or law and operates out of the CIA’s Camp Chapman in the province of Khost.

In 2010, journalist Bob Woodward wrote that the CIA’s “army” consisted of about 3,000 Afghan fighters, but since then the number has likely ballooned. According to the New York Times, as of December, the Khost Force alone may number as many as 10,000. (The U.S. currently has approximately 14,000 troops in the country.)

President Donald Trump has further expanded the CIA’s paramilitary role in Afghanistan, using local militias in hunt-and-kill operations. Speaking at a security conference in Texas in 2017, Pompeo, then Trump’s CIA director, said that Trump had authorized the CIA to “take risks” that would make it “faster and more aggressive,” and that “every minute, we have to be focused on crushing our enemies.”

In February, a report by the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan found that in 2018, civilian deaths from search operations — nighttime operations against residential areas — had tripled from the previous year.

CIA-linked forces have been accused of numerous abuses, including carrying out summary executions and torture. The investigation by the New York Times documented one case in which CIA-backed forces shot two brothers in view of their families in Nangarhar Province:

The forces handcuffed and hooded two brothers and, after a brief interrogation as their wives and children watched, both men were dragged away and executed in a corner of a bedroom that was then detonated over their heads, according to relatives and villagers who pulled the bodies out of the rubble.

Antonio De Lauri, an anthropologist based at the Chr. Michelsen Institute in Norway and one of the report’s authors, told The Intercept that the failure to rein in foreign-funded armed groups operating outside central government would be detrimental to the legitimacy of the talks, and long-term peace. “This is something that must be handled quite rapidly, and must be included in the talks,” De Lauri said.

According to the report, the size and power of the CIA’s forces could pose a problem for the Afghan government after the peace talks. For the militias, integration into the regular armed forces could mean a significant pay cut and a loss of the privileged status that has allowed them to operate largely without transparency or legal accountability. “If cut loose by the CIA,” the report notes, “they may be reborn as private armies or ‘security guards’ in the service of powerful individuals, or operate autonomously to prey on civilians and commercial sources.”

****************************

Operation Cyclone: The CIA’s covert program to arm the mujahideen. Operation Cyclone was the CIA's most expensive covert military assistance program during the Cold War.
by Jessica Evans
Updated Jan 17, 2024 1:57 PM PST
https://www.wearethemighty.com/history/ ... ujahideen/

[x]
An Afghan Mujahid demonstrates positioning of a soviet-built SA-7 hand-held surface-to-air missile. DOD photo/public domain. 1988.

Operation Cyclone was the CIA’s most expensive covert military assistance program during the Cold War. Initiated in 1979, the operation lasted until 1989. The aim was simple but strategic — bleed the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, just like the U.S. had been bled in Vietnam.

President Jimmy Carter approved this covert action following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on December 24, 1979. His National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was instrumental in pushing for U.S. involvement. Brzezinski saw the Afghan resistance as a golden opportunity to embroil the Soviets in a quagmire.

Weapons, money and middlemen

When it comes to war, hardware matters. In 1986, the CIA decided it was time to give the mujahideen a real shot at turning the tide against the Soviet military. Enter the FIM-92 Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, a game-changing addition to the resistance’s arsenal. These missiles were far from ordinary; they came equipped with infrared homing guidance systems, meaning they could “seek” the heat source of an aircraft and destroy it in the air. Soviet helicopters and low-flying jets, once the uncontested rulers of the Afghan sky, found themselves outmatched. The CIA didn’t cut corners when supplying these state-of-the-art missiles. Each cost around $38,000 in the late 1980s, with a range of up to 8,000 meters and a speed of Mach 2.2.

But the CIA wasn’t acting alone in this arms bonanza. Saudi Arabia was matching the United States dollar for dollar. The Saudis saw communism as a real threat to the Islamic world. A stable Afghanistan would mean less potential unrest spilling over into their backyard.

Then there’s Pakistan, an indispensable cog in this complicated machine. Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), the country’s powerful intelligence service, acted as the middleman. They took the money and arms from the U.S. and Saudi Arabia and funneled it to the mujahideen. ISI wanted a pro-Pakistan government in Kabul so they backed Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, leader of the Hezb-e Islami faction. Hekmatyar was a hardliner known for his ruthless tactics, Islamist ideology, and staunch anti-Shia stance.

[x]
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, BBC Persian – Sep 28, 2019. Wikimedia Commons

From high-tech Stinger missiles to intricate financial networks and calculated political maneuvering, Operation Cyclone was anything but simple. It was a carefully orchestrated play, with each country pulling strings in the shadows, each with its endgame in sight.

Charlie Wilson’s War

Charlie Wilson, known by the affectionate moniker “Good Time Charlie,” was no ordinary congressman. Representing Texas’s 2nd congressional district, he was a twelve-term Democrat with a flair for the dramatic and an ability to make headlines. But what set him apart was his passionate involvement in Operation Cyclone. Wilson had access to a unique purse — the CIA’s black budget through his seat on the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee.

Wilson didn’t stop at rubber-stamping budgets. He went on what many termed “fact-finding missions,” visiting refugee camps near Peshawar, Pakistan. There, he met with the mujahideen leaders, saw firsthand the devastation caused by Soviet bombings, and listened to tales of valor from injured fighters. These experiences fueled his resolve to channel more funds and advanced weaponry to the Afghan resistance.

Wilson teamed up with Gust Avrakotos, a blunt, no-nonsense CIA operative overseeing the Afghan task force to push his agenda. Together, they lobbied Congress, orchestrated media coverage, and successfully bypassed various bureaucratic hurdles. By the end of the operation, Wilson had managed to boost aid to the mujahideen to an unprecedented level, peaking at around $700 million per year by 1987.

[x]
Tom Hanks portrays Charlie Wilson and Philip Seymore Hoffman portrays Gust Avrakotos in the film “Charlie Wilson’s War.” Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Soviets call it quits

Meanwhile, the Soviets were losing service members and material at an alarming rate. Between 1986 and 1989, their casualties spiked significantly, particularly after the mujahideen received Stinger missiles. Unable to maintain a grip on Afghanistan and facing mounting internal pressures, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev made a pivotal decision. On February 15, 1989, the last Soviet troops crossed the Friendship Bridge back into Uzbekistan. Soviet involvement in Afghanistan had cost them nearly 15,000 lives and a tarnished international reputation.

But this wasn’t a neat ending to the Afghan saga. The mujahideen, now well-armed and well-funded, found themselves in a fractured landscape. Different factions vied to control Kabul and other strategic areas, leading to a brutal civil war. The Afghan conflict devolved into a complex tapestry of tribal rivalries and ideological schisms, further complicated by foreign intervention from neighboring countries.

[x]
Mujahideen prayer in Shultan Valley Kunar, 1987. Photo: Erwin Lux/Wikimedia Commons

The Soviets’ departure created a vacuum filled by competing mujahideen warlords. This chaotic period paved the way for the rise of the Taliban, a radical Islamic movement. By 1996, the Taliban had captured Kabul and imposed a harsh Sharia law. The intricate web of alliances and enmities dating back to the days of Operation Cyclone would later pose new challenges for the United States when it returned to Afghanistan in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

The final fallout

The end of Operation Cyclone led to a power vacuum. The mujahideen didn’t disband. They splintered into different groups, eventually giving rise to factions like the Taliban and complicating the Afghan civil war.

The operation left Afghanistan awash in weapons, some of which ended up in the hands of groups that would later become adversaries of the United States, like al-Qaeda. The U.S. had to reckon with these unintended consequences during the invasion of Afghanistan 2001 and in subsequent counterterrorism operations.

The operation’s success in driving the Soviets out of Afghanistan is indisputable. But its legacy is complex and tinged with irony. It serves as a lesson in the unpredictable outcomes of covert military interventions.

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JUSTIFICATION FOR US MILITARY INTERVENTION IN CUBA (OPERATION NORTHWOODS)
by L.L. Lemnitzer
Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff
March 13, 1962
viewtopic.php?f=58&t=1471



... 3. This plan, incorporating projects selected from the attached suggestions, or from other sources, should be developed to focus all efforts on a specific ultimate objective which would provide adequate justification for US military intervention. Such a plan would enable a logical build-up of incidents to be combined with other seemingly unrelated events to camouflage the ultimate objective and create the necessary impression of Cuban rashness and irresponsibility on a large scale, directed at other countries as well as the United States. The plan would also properly integrate and time phase the courses of action to be pursued. The desired resultant from the execution of this plan would be to place the United States in the apparent position of suffering defensible grievances from a rash and irresponsible government of Cuba and to develop an international image of a Cuban threat to peace in the Western Hemisphere....

a. Incidents to establish a credible attack (not in chronological order):

(1) Start rumors (many). Use clandestine radio.

(2) Land friendly Cubans in uniform "over-the-fence" to stage attack on base.

(3) Capture Cuban (friendly) saboteurs inside the base.

(4) Start riots near the base main gate (friendly Cubans).

(5) Blow up ammunition inside the base; start fires.

(6) Burn aircraft on air base ( sabotage).

(7) Lob mortar shells from outside of base into base. Some damage to installations.

(8) Capture assault teams approaching from the sea or vicinity of Guantanamo City.

(9) Capture militia group which storms the base.

(10) Sabotage ship in harbor; large fires -- napthalene.

(11) Sink ship near harbor entrance. Conduct funerals for mock-victims (may be lieu of (10)).

b. United States would respond by executing offensive operations to secure water and power supplies, destroying artillery and mortar emplacements which threaten the base .

c. Commence large scale United States military operations.

3. A "Remember the Maine" incident could be arranged in several forms:

a. We could blow up a US ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba .

b. We could blow up a drone (unmanned) vessel anywhere in the Cuban waters. We could arrange to cause such incident in the vicinity of Havana or Santiago as a spectacular result of Cuban attack from the air or sea, or both. The presence of Cuban planes or ships merely investigating the intent of the vessel could be fairly compelling evidence that the ship was taken under attack. The nearness to Havana or Santiago would add credibility especially to those people that might have heard the blast or have seen the fire. The US could follow up with an air/sea rescue operation covered by US fighters to "evacuate" remaining members of the non-existent crew. Casualty lists in US newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation.

4. We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington.

The terror campaign could be pointed at Cuban refugees seeking haven in the United States. We could sink a boatload or Cubans enroute to Florida (real or simulated). We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized. Exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots, the arrest of Cuban agents and the release of prepared documents substantiating Cuban involvement also would be helpful in projecting the idea of an irresponsible government.

5. A "Cuban-based, Castro-supported" filibuster could be simulated against a neighboring Caribbean nation (in the vein of the 14th of June invasion of the Dominican Republic.). We know that Castro is backing subversive efforts clandestinely against Haiti, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, and Nicaragua at present and possible others. These efforts can be magnified and additional ones contrived for exposure. For example, advantage can be taken of the sensitivity of the Dominican Air Force to intrusions within their national air space. "Cuban" B-26 or C-46 type aircraft could make cane-burning raids at night. Soviet Bloc incendiaries could be found. This could be coupled with "Cuban" messages to the Communist Underground in the Dominican Republic and "Cuban" shipments of arms which would be found, or intercepted, on the beach.

6. Use of MIG type aircraft by US pilots could provide additional provocation. Harassment of civil air, attacks on surface shipping and destruction of US military drone aircraft by MIG type planes would be useful as complimentary actions. An F-86 properly painted would convince air passengers that they saw a Cuban MIG, especially if the pilot of the transport were to announce such fact. The primary drawback to this suggestion appears to be the security risk inherent in obtaining or modifying an aircraft. However, reasonable copies of the MIG could be produced from US resources in about three months.

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Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump

Any document signed by Sleepy Joe Biden with the Autopen, which was approximately 92% of them, is hereby terminated, and of no further force or effect. The Autopen is not allowed to be used if approval is not specifically given by the President of the United
States. The Radical Left Lunatics circling Biden around the beautiful Resolute Desk in the Oval Office took the Presidency away from him. I am hereby cancelling all Executive Orders, and anything else that was not directly signed by Crooked Joe Biden, because the people who operated the Autopen did so illegally. Joe Biden was not involved in the Autopen process and, if he says he was, he will be brought up on charges of perjury. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

Nov 28, 2025, 12:37 PM

********************************

Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump

A very Happy Thanksgiving salutation to all of our Great American Citizens and Patriots who have been so nice in allowing our Country to be divided, disrupted, carved up, murdered, beaten, mugged, and laughed at, along with certain other foolish countries throughout the World, for being “Politically Correct,” and just plain STUPID, when it comes to Immigration. The official United States Foreign population stands at 53 million people (Census), most of which are on welfare, from failed nations, or from prisons, mental institutions, gangs, or drug cartels. They and their children are supported through massive payments from Patriotic American Citizens who, because of their beautiful hearts, do not want to openly complain or cause trouble in any way, shape, or form. They put up with what has happened to our Country, but it’s eating them alive to do so! A migrant earning $30,000 with a green card will get roughly $50,000 in yearly benefits for their family. The real migrant population is much higher. This refugee burden is the leading cause of social dysfunction in America, something that did not exist after World War II (Failed schools, high crime, urban decay, overcrowded hospitals, housing shortages, and large deficits, etc.). As an example, hundreds of thousands of refugees from Somalia are completely taking over the once great State of Minnesota. Somalian gangs are roving the streets looking for “prey” as our wonderful people stay locked in their apartments and houses hoping against hope that they will be left alone. The seriously retarded Governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, does nothing, either through fear, incompetence, or both, while the worst “Congressman/woman” in our Country, Ilhan Omar, always wrapped in her swaddling hijab, and who probably came into the U.S.A. illegally in that you are not allowed to marry your brother, does nothing but hatefully complain about our Country, its Constitution, and how “badly” she is treated, when her place of origin is a decadent, backward, and crime ridden nation, which is essentially not even a country for lack of Government, Military, Police, schools, etc…

Nov 27, 2025, 9:27 PM

***************************

Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump

…Even as we have progressed technologically, Immigration Policy has eroded those gains and living conditions for many. I will permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries to allow the U.S. system to fully recover, terminate all of the millions of Biden illegal admissions, including those signed by Sleepy Joe Biden’s Autopen, and remove anyone who is not a net asset to the United States, or is incapable of loving our Country, end all Federal benefits and subsidies to noncitizens of our Country, denaturalize migrants who undermine domestic tranquility, and deport any Foreign National who is a public charge, security risk, or non-compatible with Western Civilization. These goals will be pursued with the aim of achieving a major reduction in illegal and disruptive populations, including those admitted through an unauthorized and illegal Autopen approval process. Only REVERSE MIGRATION can fully cure this situation. Other than that, HAPPY THANKSGIVING TO ALL, except those that hate, steal, murder, and destroy everything that America stands for — You won’t be here for long!

Nov 27, 2025, 9:26 PM

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He Killed for the CIA in Afghanistan. Trump Blames Afghan Culture Instead of Langley’s. After the National Guard shooting, the US needs to reckon with how its legacy of global violence inevitably comes home. Stephen Miller wants to do anything but.
by Spencer Ackerman
zeteo
Nov 28, 2025
https://zeteo.com/p/national-guard-shoo ... ump-miller


[x]
Brigadier General Leland D. Blanchard II looks towards pictures of two National Guard members who were shot in Washington, DC, along with a picture of a suspect, Afghan national Rahmanullah Lakanwal, at a press conference on Nov. 27, 2025. Nathan Howard/Reuters

Stephen Miller is not letting the nativist opportunity posed by the murder of Army Spc. Sarah Beckstrom and the shooting of Air Force Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe allegedly by an Afghan refugee go to waste. “At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands,” the White House’s deputy chief of staff and homeland security adviser tweeted in response to the conservative Wall Street Journal editorializing against the collective punishment of Afghans.

Miller, an architect of the Trump administration’s nationwide raids and roundups of perceived migrants, is at the vanguard of the Trump administration’s response to this week’s shocking shootings of the West Virginia National Guardsmen, who were deployed to DC in support of Miller’s crackdown. President Donald Trump is pledging to “pause” all migration from so-called “Third World” countries; to deport not merely “illegal” but “disruptive populations”; and to “denaturalize migrants” who are “non-compatible with Western Civilization.”

But the most sobering fact about Wednesday’s slayings is that the alleged killer, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, was all too compatible with Western Civilization.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe issued an extraordinary statement revealing that the 29-year-old Lakanwal was a “member of a partner force in Kandahar.” While a knowledgeable source with deep experience in Afghanistan cautions that the US sponsored a variety of proxy forces in southern Afghanistan, much additional reporting has identified Lakanwal as a member of the Zero Units, death squads used by the CIA during the US’s longest overseas war.

In other words, contrary to Miller and Trump, Lakanwal’s shooting spree is not the result of importing Afghan culture to America. While much will surely be revealed in Lakanwal’s upcoming trial, it looks more like the result of importing American culture to Afghanistan. The realities of blowback – the violence America experiences as the unintended consequences of the violence of US foreign policy – are what the US needs to examine in the wake of this horrifying murder if it expects to prevent the next one.

Instead, in a manner befitting both nativism and a broader elite political culture that wishes to whitewash and then forget the imperial violence it embraces, the Trump administration is scapegoating the relatively few Afghans admitted to the US after the war’s final 2021 failure. Overwhelmingly, that population served the war effort, and now finds itself part of the long lineage of US allies to be discarded when it suits imperial prerogatives. Or, as the novelist Dur e Aziz Amna messaged me after seeing Miller’s “broken homeland” post, “Bitch, who broke the homeland!!?”

Again, it is important to remember that we do not yet have the full story of Lakanwal and his road to the Farragut West Metro stop, where he allegedly opened fire. FBI Director Kash Patel vowed not to “stop until we interview anyone and everyone associated with the subject, the house and every piece of his life.” But the New York Times reported that Lakanwal’s brother was the deputy commander of the Kandahar-based Zero Unit, known as 03. The first door the FBI should knock on is at CIA Headquarters. The second belongs to Rahmatullah Nabil, the former Afghan intelligence chief who oversaw the units.

Much of the CIA’s Afghan workforce remains shrouded in official secrecy. But what is known about them is their wanton brutality, licensed and materially supported by the United States. A 2019 Human Rights Watch report detailed “extrajudicial executions and enforced disappearances, indiscriminate airstrikes, attacks on medical facilities, and other violations of international humanitarian law, or the laws of war” committed by the Zero Units. The single best piece of American journalism on them, Lynzy Billing’s 2022 expose for ProPublica, is a nonstop document of atrocity. “Far too often,” Billing wrote, “I found the Zero Unit soldiers acted on flawed intelligence and mowed down men, women and children, some as young as 2, who had no discernible connection to terrorist groups.”

The CIA, in its typical rejection of any form of accountability, calls such reporting a calumny and Taliban propaganda. It is understandable why the CIA does so. Lakanwal joined Langley’s proxies “nine years” before the 2021 fall of the US-backed government in Kabul, according to the BBC, which cited “a former military commander who served alongside” him. If true, Lakanwal was around 15 years old when the CIA put a gun in his hand. That would validate the longstanding rumor that the agency used child soldiers in Afghanistan.

There is bound to be immense psychological damage when making someone, particularly a teenager, into a member of a death squad. A childhood friend interviewed by the New York Times reflected that Lakanwal “would tell me and our friends that their military operations were very tough, their job was very difficult, and they were under a lot of pressure.” Shortly before the fall of Kabul, Lakanwal had been smoking marijuana – a common habit amongst US-backed Afghan soldiers – and divorced his wife days into their marriage. “When he saw blood, bodies, and the wounded, he could not tolerate it, and it put a lot of pressure on his mind,” the friend told the paper.

Imperial violence is often shaped by the violence the US inflicts on its own subordinate populations, and comes home just as often. Last month in Chicago, a Customs and Border Protection-led team of federal agents rappelled from a Black Hawk helicopter in the middle of the night to assault an apartment complex and round up its tenants on the pretext that some of them belonged to a Venezuelan gang. Barnett Rubin, a longtime US adviser on the Afghanistan War and one of the Americans most knowledgeable about Afghanistan, immediately identified the assault as a night raid, a characteristic US special-operations tactic during the war – and one that often involved the US military and the CIA’s Afghan proxies.

It is characteristic of the US’s attitude toward its foreign misadventures to shift the blame for its failures onto the local population, and especially onto the local forces it sponsors. The US did so in Vietnam, it did so in Iraq, it did so in Afghanistan – think about how many indignant stories you have read about US-sponsored units that would not fight for Washington’s proxy governments – and it will do so in the future. It shifts this blame so it can continue its extractive, destabilizing imperial policies; preserve the myth of its innocence; and, in the ideological variant of American Exceptionalism that Miller subscribes to, treat the foreigners who must endure US occupation as inferior and unworthy of alleged American beneficence.

It avoids at all costs asking what it owes to the people whose doors the Americans kick in, whose relatives they kill in high-profile airstrikes, and whose children they recruit. In its neglect, it puts its own, now including Beckstrom and Wolfe, at similar risk – and, in this case, exploits one’s death and the other’s wounds to advance the mass deportation of precisely the people who arrived in America once America spent an entire generation making their country too dangerous for them to remain.

Spencer Ackerman is a Pulitzer Prize and National Magazine Award-winning reporter and the author of Reign of Terror: How The 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump. He is also the author of the FOREVER WARS newsletter on Ghost.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Zeteo.

[admin]

The Legacy of The War on Terror Reaches South America. While Trump openly manufactures a war in Venezuela, Israel never stops attacking the Palestinians
by Spencer Ackerman
Edited by Sam Thielman
20 Oct 2025
https://www.forever-wars.com/the-legacy ... h-america/

[x]
U.S. Coast Guard troops aboard a civilian vessel off Acosta, Venezuela in June. Via the Coast Guard

I'D BEEN TRYING to find the words for the rapidly coalescing U.S. assault on Venezuela. President Trump has ordered the CIA to return to its core competency: overthrowing left-wing governments in the Western Hemisphere. Barely an afterthought, and certainly not an impediment, are innocent men like Chad Joseph, whose families are left to petition a disinterested administration for the slightest proof of their slain relative's claimed threat to U.S. national security. The administration has been openly manufacturing a war in a manner so blatant as to recall the Iraq buildup.

Last week, the U.S. Navy even briefly took prisoners. Their brief detention followed the sixth of the U.S.' blatantly illegal lethal strikes on boats full of people whom the Trump administration are attempting to portray as drug smugglers—as if that would justify this naked aggression—connected through manipulated intelligence to Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro. The Navy released its prisoners on Saturday, but during the captives’ time aboard ship, I couldn't help but think of a decade ago, when the U.S.S. Boxer spent weeks as a sea-based detention center for a man named Ahmed Abdelkadir Warsame, all beyond the reach of international law, or what remains of it.

The U.S. military is using Puerto Rico as a staging ground for… we currently know not what. What we do know is that the administration has ordered a substantial sea-air asset buildup, containing not only the expected destroyers but also heavy bombers, drones, F-35s, AC-130 gunship aircraft typically seen (along with A-10s) providing close air support to infantry, and even the 160th Special Operations Air Regiment. I'm struggling to think of a comparably large Western Hemisphere buildup during the past 25 years. Yet the intermittent and bloodless coverage the buildup has received suggests to me that the typical U.S. media indifference to Puerto Rico is in effect.

This entire coercive enterprise might be the beneficiary of several intersecting normalizations. The abrupt and unexplained departure of combatant commander Adm. Alvin Holsey during a military buildup like this would have occasioned sustained coverage in another era. Now it feels already forgotten. After a failed attempt earlier this month to stop the strikes—"unless authorized," in Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA)'s ominous words—Congressional Democrats (and Rand Paul) are left lamenting process concerns and stonewalled requests for information instead of moving to block funding for the buildup. Adopting a stance of unqualified opposition seems out of the question. All Secretary Pete Hegseth has to say is that these fishermen are "the al-Qaeda of the Western Hemisphere" and it seems like the opposition mumbles through its objections, even without anyone, as far as I can tell, believing what the administration says.

All that is to say I felt relieved to read Daniel Larison using words that I hadn't quite been able to find. Larison, a genuine antiwar conservative, wrote today about Trump training his ire on the Colombian President Gustavo Petro, a rare Colombian left-winger achieving state power:

The so-called conflict that the president has invented out of thin air is not restricted to any particular place, nor does it focus on any one particular group. As far as the administration is concerned, they can attack anyone they choose no matter where they are. The administration recognizes no limits on its actions.

Every word here could apply to the War on Terror. After nearly 25 years of the War on Terror, it should not be remotely surprising that an administration would reach for its authorizations and rhetoric. They work too well not to export. It doesn't ultimately matter that whatever the U.S. unleashes upon Venezuela, or now potentially Colombia, will not have a formal connection to the War on Terror. Its template is all the connection necessary, particularly if elite opposition reverts to type and rolls over. As for the GOP, no wonder Larison writes that "Perhaps the last time there was this much mindless support in the party for a Republican president’s aggressive foreign policy was in the darkest days of the Bush era."

Did we ever truly leave those days? If so, we never dismantled the structures built during that era, meaning that returning to them will always be an option.

PERHAPS THIS is a tangent, but seeing the heritage of the War on Terror in South America reminds me of the heritage of the 1980s Dirty Wars on the War on Terror. You can learn a lot of that from Empire's Workshop by the esteemed Greg Grandin; or, for that matter, the memoir Black Ops, penned by the Dirty Wars and War on Terror veteran CIA operator Ric Prado. Similarly, I have a ton of respect for the Pulitzer-winning journalist Tim Weiner—an OG who blurbed REIGN—and one of the cleverest things he does in his recent book The Mission is to connect architects of the CIA's War on Terror like Counterterrorism Center chief Jose Rodriguez to a pre-9/11 shootdown and coverup of a plane in Peru carrying not drugs but American missionaries. Rodriguez would later say that the heated internal investigation taught him "valuable lessons, which I used in the years following 9/11 to try to protect the people who worked for me." By, for example, destroying the evidence.

IF THERE WAS EVER a ceasefire, no one told Israel. Israel has killed at least 80 Palestinians since the announcement of last week's ceasefire, validating UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese's saw "You Cease, I Fire." When Trump claims, as he did yesterday, that the ceasefire is holding, he is permitting Israel to continue. Envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner might signal their dissatisfaction with Israel, but it means as little as when the Biden administration would do the same, particularly when the State Department is preemptively blaming Hamas for violating the ceasefire. Only now Hamas, having delivered its final living hostages in accordance with Witkoff and Kushner's interventions, has no more leverage over the Israelis.

Meanwhile, don't miss FOREVER WARS friend Jasper Nathaniel's harrowing eyewitness/first-hand account of settler violence in the West Bank. The IDF led Nathaniel into an ambush sprung by settlers to assault Palestinian farmers during the olive harvest.

SOME PALESTINIAN HOSTAGES returned to Gaza with accounts of sexual torture the Israelis inflicted upon them. Given the subject of my next book, this has concentrated my imagination. Wartime prisons where impunity reigns tend toward sexual violence. That should also guide our understanding of the sexual torture ICE is inflicting upon queer and trans people in its cages.

NOT THAT IT WOULD BE OK if ICE "only" captured undocumented migrants, but ProPublica tallies at least 170 U.S. citizens who have been detained by ICE.

I HAVEN’T HAD time to read this, to be honest, but I'm glad The New Yorker called attention to the extended ICE detention of Leqaa Kordia. I hope they called attention to the flagrant role in that detention played by NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, the billionaire heiress who appears to desire staying on under Zohran Mamdani.

"CHAT AND I are really close lately,” is a cursed sentence about ChatGPT spoken by Army Maj. Gen. William "Hank" Taylor, the acting commander of U.S. Forces-Korea. DefenseScoop reports that Taylor is "personally leaning on existing and emerging AI capabilities to help influence and shape how he operates as a leader." At least there isn't any international flashpoint on the Korean peninsula where self-entrancement by a U.S. military commander could have tragic repercussions.

JOHN BOLTON NEVER THOUGHT the leopards of the Espionage Act would eat his face when he called for Edward Snowden to "swing from a tall oak tree." Chip Gibbons of Defending Rights & Dissent had what I considered a powerful and well-calibrated response to Bolton's bullshit indictment last week:

John Bolton is an unrepentant war criminal and one of most odious national security hawks in Washington. As part of his antipathy for press freedom, whistleblowers, and anyone who challenges the national security state, he called for both Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden to be executed for exposing abuses of power by our government. Similarly, he called for journalist Julian Assange to get “at least 176 years in jail” for publishing truthful information about U.S. war crimes. Now, Bolton, like Manning, Snowden, and Assange has been indicted under the Espionage Act.

We at Defending Rights & Dissent were one of the leading voices in Washington in support of Manning, Snowden, and Assange. And we remain the leading voice on reforming the Espionage Act so it can no longer be used to prosecute courageous whistleblowers and journalists.

As part of our reform proposal, we advocated the Espionage Act be amended to require the government to prove a defendant intended to harm the national security of the US. Nothing in the indictment of Bolton indicates the government believes Bolton had that level of intent. As a result, we do not believe Bolton should be indicted under the Espionage Act. This is the same position we took regarding Donald Trump, who himself has been responsible for abusing the Espionage Act to silence journalists and whistleblowers.

The Espionage Act is an overly broad, archaic law. As a result, it is ripe for selective, politically motivated enforcement. It is for these reasons that Bolton championed it as a tool for political persecutions against whistleblowers and journalists. And it is for this reason the Trump administration has chosen it as a tool for their petty retaliation against a national security hawk who shares much of their views on the use of the Espionage Act.

Enough is enough. It is well past time to reform the Espionage Act once and for all.

WHO KNEW FINISHING a book was hard? While asking for your indulgence, this is very likely the final FOREVER WARS edition of October. [All this means is that Spencer won’t tell me he’s writing for you until he messages me to say he's filed.—Sam] I am on the cusp of completing my manuscript for my second book. But I'm not there, and if I'm going to reach my goal of wrapping this one by Halloween—and then using the remainder of my pre-deadline time for revisions—I need to step away from this newsletter. I know I always say this and then end up writing more. I may very well do that this time. But rather than making scheduling declarations that I inevitably break, let's say that until THE TORTURE AND DELIVERANCE OF MAJID KHAN is fully drafted, FOREVER WARS will publish on an Augustinian schedule, aiming for abstinence even if we won't truly reach it. [You people are the pear tree in this metaphor.—Sam] Thank you for your continued support.

WALLER VS. WILDSTORM, the superhero spy thriller I co-wrote with my friend Evan Narcisse and which the masterful Jesús Merino illustrated, is available for purchase in a hardcover edition! If you don't have single issues of WVW and you want a four-issue set signed by me, they're going fast at Bulletproof Comics! Bulletproof is also selling signed copies of my IRON MAN run with Julius Ohta, so if you want those, buy them from Flatbush's finest! IRON MAN VOL. 1: THE STARK-ROXXON WAR, the first five issues, is now collected in trade paperback! Signed copies of that are at Bulletproof, too!

No one is prouder of WVW than her older sibling, REIGN OF TERROR: HOW THE 9/11 ERA DESTABILIZED AMERICA AND PRODUCED TRUMP, which is available now in hardcover, softcover, audiobook and Kindle edition. And on the way is a new addition to the family: THE TORTURE AND DELIVERANCE OF MAJID KHAN.

[admin]

Trump Meddles in Honduran Election & Vows to Pardon Ex-President Jailed in U.S. for Drug Trafficking
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
December 01, 2025
Lhttps://www.democracynow.org/2025/12/1 ... transcript

"The Long Honduran Night: Resistance, Terror, and the United States in the Aftermath of the Coup"

President Trump has announced plans to pardon former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who is serving a 45-year sentence for trafficking hundreds of tons of cocaine into the United States. In 2024, Hernández was convicted in New York of drug trafficking and weapons charges. “The evidence from the Southern District of New York was overwhelming,” says Dana Frank, professor of history emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a longtime observer of Honduran politics.

Trump’s announcement came on Friday, and he also threatened to cut off funding if Hondurans did not elect his chosen conservative candidate as they went to the polls Sunday to pick a new president. “He’s almost threatening Honduras that if we don’t do what he is demanding … he will wreak vengeance against Honduras,” says Rodolfo Pastor, former secretary of the presidency under Xiomara Castro in Honduras.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

President Trump has announced plans to pardon former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, serving a 45-year sentence in a U.S. prison for trafficking hundreds of tons of cocaine into the United States. Last year, Hernández was convicted in New York of drug trafficking and weapons charges. He once bragged, quote, “We are going to stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses,” unquote. A trial prosecutor showed how Hernández ran Honduras as a narco-state from 2014 until 2022, accepting millions of dollars in bribes from cocaine traffickers in exchange for protection, including deploying the Honduran National Police to safeguard cocaine loads as they were transported through Honduras. One unnamed Drug Enforcement Administration agent who worked on the case described Trump’s move as, quote, “lunacy.”

Trump’s announcement came on Friday, two days before Hondurans went to the polls Sunday to pick a new president. Ahead of the vote, Trump also endorsed the conservative candidate Nasry “Tito” Asfura, the former mayor of Tegucigalpa. He’s a member of the right-wing National Party, the same party as Juan Orlando Hernández. Asfura has a slim lead in early election results.

Trump wrote on Truth Social, “If Tito Asfura wins for President of Honduras, because the United States has so much confidence in him, his Policies, and what he will do for the Great People of Honduras, we will be very supportive. If he doesn’t win, the United States will not be throwing good money after bad.” Trump continued, “Additionally, I will be granting a Full and Complete Pardon to Former President Juan Orlando Hernandez who has been, according to many people that I greatly respect, treated very harshly and unfairly,” unquote.

This all comes as the Trump administration has been bombing drug boats in the Caribbean and Pacific and has called for the closing of all airspace over Venezuela, saying that Venezuela is involved with drug trafficking.

For more on the possible pardon and the Honduran elections, we’re joined by two guests. Dana Frank is professor of history emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz, author of The Long Honduran Night: Resistance, Terror, and the United States in the Aftermath of the Coup. She attended the trial of Juan Orlando Hernández last year here in New York. And in Honduras, Rodolfo Pastor is with us, the former secretary of the presidency under the current president, Xiomara Castro. He’s also a LIBRE party candidate for city council in San Pedro Sula, where we’re speaking to him right now.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Let’s begin with Rodolfo Pastor in Honduras. Can you talk about the pardoning? Well, it looks like the imminent pardoning of Juan Orlando Hernández, often called JOH, J-O-H, in prison for 45 years for drug trafficking and other charges. The significance of this?

RODOLFO PASTOR: Of course, Amy. Good to be here. Thank you so much for paying attention to Honduras.

We’re waking up to results that are shocking the nation and are, in a degree, at least, a reflection of what President Trump stated a few days before the elections happened. For us, it’s shocking. It’s a blow to Honduran dignity and democracy that a foreign president would, first of all, state publicly what his preferences were. He actually suggested that Hondurans should vote for a specific candidate. And he went even further as to suggest that he would pardon Juan Orlando Hernández.

I think it exposes a very stark contradiction between what he is trying to portray as a justification for what’s happening in the Caribbean Sea and against Venezuela, and at the same time what is going on here in Honduras. I mean, this is, as you very clearly stated, a man who conspired to traffic tons and tons of cocaine and weapons between Honduras and the United States.

He is someone who has been sentenced and convicted for his crimes committed against the United States, but someone who has not been held accountable by Honduran justice. Hondurans are — were, at a first moment, very hopeful that because of what the U.S. had been able to do, what the Southern District of New York and the attorneys there had been able to do, what the court system in the United States had done, was just a partial justice for Honduras, because here in Honduras, there has been no process against Juan Orlando Hernández.

So, for President Trump to be so brazen in intervening, intervening in a sovereign process right before the elections, and also to be so hostile and aggressive in his stance, you know, he’s almost threatening Honduras that if we don’t do what he is demanding that we do, then that he will wreak vengeance against Honduras by sending back someone who’s done so much damage here.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about who the three candidates are? And again, the significance of Trump saying, if he, Asfura, doesn’t win, that the U.S. would be withholding money to Honduras?

RODOLFO PASTOR: Exactly. He’s basically threatening Honduras if we go ahead and make a sovereign decision, right before our elections, right?

And the three candidates, the main party candidates, were, number one, Rixi Moncada, who is the candidate for the official party and who represents, you know, the continuation of what Xiomara Castro, as president, has started, which is a third alternative party that was born from the resistance to the coup back in 2009 and reshaped the electoral and political party system here in Honduras against two traditional, historic parties that had alternated in power for the last century. So, this was a very progressive, reform-oriented project, that has been, as results are coming in, devastatingly defeated.

On the second place, in second place, it would be Nasry “Tito” Asfura, who represents the National Party, which is the same party, as you also stated, that Juan Orlando comes from, and who is surrounded by most of the people who surrounded Juan Orlando during his government.

And in the third place, it would be Nasralla, who is this TV broadcaster who portrayed himself as an outsider, who represents the very traditional, the most historic political party in Honduras, the Liberal Party, and who was perceived as the most probable winner of the elections until Trump came in with his statement.

So, the result that Tito Asfura is now leading the polls, that LIBRE has been sent to a very distant third place in the results, is in many ways a reflection of this very hostile attitude by President Trump, who basically discarded Nasralla as having any possibilities. He accused him of being a socialist in disguise, of having aided Xiomara, because, of course, at one point, we all joined forces to be able to oust Juan Orlando and his very corrupt, very authoritarian, very repressive regime, and for siding with Tito Asfura.

So, basically, President Trump is saying, “We’re going to double — we’re going to bet down on the National Party on being our closest partner, and we do not care if they have very deep, deep links with organized crime and drug trafficking.” So, when you contrast that against what’s going on in Venezuela, it’s just so much hypocrisy on behalf of Trump.

AMY GOODMAN: Rodolfo Pastor, I remember interviewing your dad, Rodolfo Pastor Fasquelle, when I was in Tegucigalpa, flying in with the former president, the ousted president, Mel Zelaya, and his wife, Xiomara Castro, who is president of Honduras now, when they flew back into Honduras after being ousted in a U.S.-backed coup. That was back in what? 2009. And it was under Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. So, this intervention is not new, and that led to the rise of JOH — right? — of Juan Orlando Hernández.

RODOLFO PASTOR: U.S. intervention is nothing new for Honduras, Amy. You know, we are the emblematic banana republic. We’ve been, in so many ways, shaped by U.S. intervention for the last century in our country. And the coup back in 2009 was a shocking reminder of the fact that we’re still subjected to that kind of empire.

What happened after 2009 as a result of the coup was that Juan Orlando was able to make it to power and not only be there for what the constitution allowed him to be president for, a four-year term, he got reelected against the constitution that prohibits that reelection from happening, and with the backing again of the United States. And so, you know, from the beginning, from the get-go, what we started learning was that if the United States knew and understood the links that Juan Orlando had to drug trafficking, the corruption that he was responsible for here, the crimes that he was responsible for here, and would stand for him to be reelected against the constitutional prohibitions, you know, we knew that there was not a lot to do.

We went to elections in 2013, saw him get elected for the first time. We actually — the LIBRE party won those elections. But, you know, through the fraud and through the advantage that drug money gave Juan Orlando Hernández and public money that had been grafted gave Juan Orlando Hernández, we were defeated. We again went to the polls in 2017. We won again in that occasion with Salvador Nasralla as the candidate of the opposition. And yet we were again defeated through fraud and were repressed when we protested against that fraud.

And it was, finally, in 2021 that Xiomara Castro was finally elected as the first woman president of Honduras, and a transition period had started. It’s been a very, very difficult four years for Xiomara Castro. We were confronted with a country that had been destroyed, in so many ways, by the Juan Orlando administration, which, you know, stole enormous amounts of public money, which stopped investing in health, in education, in energy. And so, we were rebuilding the country.

And for this to come to a halt in such a brutal way, as in such an abrupt way again, and also as a result of U.S. intervention — or, should I say, directly as a Trump intervention, because he did so in a very personal way. He did so on his own social media. And I have not seen, as of yet, Amy, any kind of statement coming out of the State Department or the White House or the Department of Justice, that was such an important ally to bring Juan Orlando to justice.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to bring Dana Frank into this discussion, University of California, Santa Cruz, professor of history emerita. You’ve written a book on Honduras, deeply involved with covering what’s going on there. And I last spoke to you when you were going every day to Juan Orlando Hernández’s trial here in New York. This is astounding. Our top news headline is Venezuela has condemned President Trump’s unilateral declaration that all airspace surrounding Venezuela is closed. Trump said the U.S. is poised to launch attacks inside Venezuela itself, because, he says, the president of Venezuela is a drug trafficker. And here he says he’s going to pardon a leading drug trafficker, someone convicted of drug trafficking. By the way, that’s in addition to his brother, Tony Hernández, who’s serving a life sentence here for drug trafficking. Can you talk about the significance of this moment?

DANA FRANK: Well, you know, obviously, this contradiction between Trump’s — Trump’s criminal acts, attacking people of Venezuela, Colombia and other parts of — and Ecuador in the name of fighting drug trafficking, and that, you know, that is a front for regime change in Venezuela and wanting Venezuelan oil. So, all of this is about his rhetoric and really dangerous military acts against against Venezuela in the name of drug — fighting drug trafficking. And at the same time, he pardons one of the — you know, this famous drug trafficker. And, you know, I want to underscore that the evidence from the Southern District of New York was overwhelming, and Juan Orlando has been — Hernández has been sentenced to 45 years in U.S. federal prison.

But, you know, one of the things that’s missing here is that this is not just contradiction in terms of drug war. It’s an outrageous subversion of rule of law in the United States. For the president to just, you know, tweet out on — tweet out or send out on social media that he’s going to pardon a major former president of another country convicted of drug trafficking and other crimes, and just throw the Justice Department conviction of Juan Orlando and all their years and years of many people working on this case impeccably, and to just throw that out the window, is also terrifying for the people of the United States. So, what he’s doing is a threat to democracy in Honduras, outrageously, but also in the United States.

And, of course, we’re used to saying it’s outrageous, but here he is showing criminal — he’s showing overt sympathy to a criminal and saying, “Well, he” — you know, he’s obviously bonding with a criminal, another president who’s a criminal, and, you know, supporting Asfura, who worked closely with Juan Orlando. And, you know, Asfura, the candidate that Trump supports, worked — has himself been charged with stealing a huge amount of public money that was destined for a light rail system in Tegucigalpa.

And Nasralla, the other right-wing candidate, you know, supports, like Asfura, Bukele and Milei and Trump. You know, it’s this authoritarian-right project that Trump is supporting at the point of a gun here. You know, this is a really terrifying act of intervention into the — as Rodolfo pointed out, into another country. It’s not news, but it’s — to so baldly intervene in an election, it’s like blackmail. If you don’t support Asfura, we’re going to — you know, who knows? The gunboats could be out there attacking Honduras if Rixi wins. And I think people know that in Honduras.

And you want to remember about the question of the immigrants in here, because a third or a quarter of the Honduran economy runs on remittances, and Trump is already attacking Honduran immigrants in really dangerous and terrifying ways, and deportations.

AMY GOODMAN: Dana Frank —

DANA FRANK: So, you know, I think we want to be alarmed about all this.

AMY GOODMAN: What surprised you most? I mean, you’ve covered Honduras for decades. You’ve taught about it. You’ve written about it. When you sat in that trial, the extent of Juan Orlando Hernández’s involvement with drug trafficking, with cocaine into the United States, the man who Trump says he’s about to pardon?

DANA FRANK: Well, you know, it was breathtaking. And the evidence was not just — not just about Juan Orlando, about his minister of security, that the U.S. worked with for many years, about his right-hand man, Ebal Díaz, you know, on and on, all sorts of people in his regime and in his party, with which Asfura, the National Party candidate, is affiliated.

And, you know, the other thing in this that, you know, I think people may not be aware is, you know, not only did Obama and Trump and Biden all support Juan Orlando and look the other way at his many crimes, but his crimes, as Rodolfo underscored, are not just about drug trafficking. He supported the coup when he was on a — when he was on a congressional committee. He led the so-called technical coup that overthrew the Supreme Court in 2012 when he was president of Congress. You know, he turned the military and the troops on peaceful protesters in 2017, when he ran, completely illegally, for reelection.

But, you know, I think something people are not aware of is also that the Biden administration did not want Trump to be — excuse me, did not want Hernández to be extradited. You know, two weeks after Xiomara was inaugurated and Juan Orlando was out of office, you know, the Biden administration finally allowed Juan Orlando Hernández to be extradited to the United States. But the Southern District of New York had been working on that for five years and, in the year before, had been trying to indict Juan Orlando, and Biden would not allow it. So, there’s this long history of U.S. military support for Juan Orlando and for his regime and for his many crimes, and so it’s not like even Biden acted heroically. This is a long history of the U.S. supporting Juan Orlando, and Trump is just one more link in that chain.

But, you know, it is shocking, if you saw the amount of evidence in that trial and how impeccable those prosecutors are. It was extremely impressive to watch their work and how careful they are. And to see that thrown out, you feel that in your gut about what happened to the rule of law in the United States in this, as well as the subversion of the rule of law in Honduras.

And why was Juan Orlando not prosecuted in Honduras? Because the U.S. supported the coup and the post-coup regimes, which destroyed the rule of law, and on many fronts. And that’s why the gangs moved into that gap. And that’s why there’s so much mass poverty and why people have had to flee to the United States.

***

“Kill Everybody”: Could Hegseth Face War Crimes Probe for Killing Survivors of U.S. Boat Strike?
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
December 01, 202
https://www.democracynow.org/2025/12/1/ ... transcript

"The Legacy of The War on Terror Reaches South America"

Democracy Now! speaks with journalist Spencer Ackerman about the Trump administration’s deadly, ongoing attacks on alleged “drug boats” amid reports President Trump is preparing to attack Venezuela, with all airspace surrounding Venezuela now closed. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and others are “turning the military into a criminal operation,” says Ackerman. “This shows the moral degeneracy that the 'war on terror' has left as a legacy in the U.S. military.”

Democracy Now! speaks with journalist Spencer Ackerman about the Trump administration’s deadly, ongoing attacks on alleged “drug boats” amid reports President Trump is preparing to attack Venezuela, with all airspace surrounding Venezuela now closed. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and others are “turning the military into a criminal operation,” says Ackerman. “This shows the moral degeneracy that the 'war on terror' has left as a legacy in the U.S. military.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: In addition to historian Dana Frank, we’re joined by Spencer Ackerman, the Pulitzer Prize and National Magazine Award-winning reporter, author of Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump and author of the Forever Wars newsletter. You wrote a very interesting piece, Spencer, “The Legacy of The War on Terror Reaches South America.” As we talked to Rodolfo Pastor and Dana Frank, can you talk about this moment, where President Trump has said he’s going to pardon a major convicted drug trafficker, who was supposed to spend the rest of his life in jail, and the bombing of supposed drug boats in the Caribbean and Pacific and the closing of the airspace over Venezuela, saying he’s about to attack it for drug trafficking, he claims?

SPENCER ACKERMAN: Yes. Thank you. Good morning, Amy.

I think we’re at a really dangerous point in American history right now. Naturally, I don’t need to tell you or your guests the legacy of the American dirty wars in Latin America of the 1980s on the “war on terror.” But now we’ve got the war on terror reflected in the way that the Trump administration is targeting Venezuela, Ecuador, Honduras — I’m sorry, Venezuela, Colombia, Honduras and beyond.

We learned over the weekend that the initial strike on these fishermen boats back in September was a double-tap strike ordered by the Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth himself and executed, with the full approval of the, at the time, Joint Special Operations Command commander, Admiral Mitch Bradley, who is now the commander of U.S. Special Operations Command. This was beyond even many of the illegal actions taken of the war on terror. However, this shows the moral degeneracy that the war on terror has left as a legacy in the U.S. military, not just the tactic of a drone strike, but the willingness to kill civilians.

The double-tap strike, the strike means that that’s a second strike on a target already struck, to ensure no survivors. If those were in fact people with whom the United States is at war with, as the Trump administration claims, then the second strike is a blatant violation of the law of armed conflict. You are supposed to leave survivors and not give no quarter. If we are not in fact at war, as for other purposes the Trump administration’s Office of Legal Counsel says when it’s trying to avoid congressional authorization of these sorts of strikes, then this is simply, like every other strike, that has killed now over 80 people, simply a criminal act of murder.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, you have now Republican-led committees in both the House and the Senate saying they’re going to hold oversight hearings to investigate the Pentagon’s attacks on the boats, particularly that one September 2nd, where two men survived, were hanging onto the boat, and they struck it again. You have President Trump trying to defend Hegseth, who, sources say, was the one who ordered the second strike. And what did he do last night? That’s Secretary of Defense Hegseth. He tweeted out or put on social media a meme of the children’s cartoon character Franklin the Turtle opening fire from a helicopter on boats below. Both the House and Senate, Republicans and Democrats, like Senators Reed and Wicker, calling for an investigation into war crimes here. And this goes together with the senators and — the senator and — Senator Kelly in Arizona and the other congressmembers, former military and intelligence, saying, “Do not follow illegal orders. It doesn’t matter if you are ordered from a superior. You will not be protected if you engage in war crimes.”

SPENCER ACKERMAN: This is a make-or-break moment for American democracy. We need Hegseth impeached. We need Bradley impeached. Obviously, there’s a separate question about Trump, who is ultimately responsible for this. But these men must not be permitted to remain in their jobs. They are turning the military into a criminal operation.

We can have a great historical debate about all of the steps necessary to produce that point, and previous examples of military commanders following illegal orders. But this is unambiguous. This is as bright line a violation as it gets. This turns the military into something that I think even those Republicans on those committees, who have been willing to put up with and have been complicit in so much — as, frankly, have the Democratic members — this is a step too far. But if there is no accountability for this moment, we should expect it to repeat.

AMY GOODMAN: And you also have at this point, in addition to Republicans and Democrats calling for investigation, the top Pentagon lawyers, the military lawyers, who would say to Hegseth, “This is illegal,” he fired them many months ago.

SPENCER ACKERMAN: As well as he fired the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman simply for being Black. This is someone who never should have been anywhere close to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, one of the most powerful offices in the world.

I want to — I want to point out a really important forthcoming date. That’s December 12th. Reportedly, December 12th is the final day that Admiral Alvin Holsey, the SOUTHCOM commander who apparently quit to refuse these criminal orders, is out of his job and out of the military. It’s going to be crucial to bring Holsey in front of congressional hearings to talk about exactly what he did ahead of his decision to quit, what Hegseth ordered him to do, what others inside the secretary of defense’s office ordered him to do, that apparently he was not willing to do. This is going to be a crucial moment of investigation, if we are to recapture any semblance of lawfulness over the U.S. military.

AMY GOODMAN: Spencer Ackerman, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, founder of the Forever Wars newsletter, I want to thank you for being with us and ask you to stay with us, because we want to ask you at the end of the show about a piece you just wrote, “He Killed for the CIA in Afghanistan. Trump Blames Afghan Culture Instead of Langley’s.” We want to ask you about that. But I also want to thank Dana Frank for joining us, professor of history emerita at UC Santa Cruz, speaking to us from California, and Rodolfo Pastor, Honduran politician, former secretary of the presidency under President Xiomara Castro, speaking to us from Honduras.

***

Trump Vows to Pause Migration from “Third World Countries” After Fatal National Guard Shooting
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
December 01, 2025
https://www.democracynow.org/2025/12/1/ ... c_shooting

We look at President Trump’s call to pause all asylum decisions after an Afghan man who once worked for the CIA opened fire near the White House last Wednesday, shooting two National Guard members, killing one. Rahmanullah Lakanwal entered the United States in 2021 through Operation Allies Welcome, a program that saw the U.S. evacuate thousands of Afghans who faced reprisals from the Taliban over their work with the U.S. and the former U.S.-backed government.

Trump has since said that he will “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries.” Afghan refugees have “been stuck in limbo in the United States, and now they’re being targeted by President Trump’s political stunts,” says Shawn VanDiver, founder and president of #AfghanEvac. Laila Ayub, executive director of Project ANAR, says the Trump administration is using the tragedy to “scapegoat and collectively punish an entire community.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

We look now at President Trump’s call to pause all asylum decisions after an Afghan man who once worked for the CIA opened fire near the White House last Wednesday, shooting two National Guard members, killing one. Rahmanullah Lakanwal allegedly killed West Virginia National Guard Specialist Sarah Beckstrom — she was 20 years old — and critically wounded Andrew Wolfe, who is 24.

On Thursday, Trump posted on social media, quote, “I will permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries to allow the U.S. system to fully recover, terminate all of the millions of Biden illegal admissions … Only REVERSE MIGRATION can fully cure this situation. Other than that, HAPPY THANKSGIVING TO ALL, except those that hate, steal, murder, and destroy everything that America stands for — You won’t be here for long!” Trump wrote.

Lakanwal is charged with first-degree murder, will likely face terrorism charges. He previously worked in a CIA-backed Afghan Army unit known as Zero Unit, often called a “death squad” by human rights groups. He entered the United States in 2021 through Operation Allies Welcome, a program that saw the U.S. evacuate thousands of Afghans who faced reprisals from the Taliban over their support of the U.S. occupation. He applied for asylum in 2024 and was granted refugee status last April under the second Trump administration.

Still with us, Spencer Ackerman, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter. We’re also joined in Washington, D.C., by Laila Ayub, the executive director of Project ANAR. And in San Diego, California, we’re going to start with Shawn VanDiver, president and board chair of #AfghanEvac.

Shawn VanDiver, this horror that took place in Washington, the shooting of the two National Guardsmen, one of them now dead, an you talk about Trump’s response?

SHAWN VANDIVER: Sure. Well, thank you so much for having me on this morning.

Look, there’s just no question: This is an absolute tragedy. No family should have to deal with the epidemic of gun violence in our country. And it’s awful that we’ve lost one of these National Guardsmen, Miss [Beckstrom], and that Mr. — and that another one is fighting for his life in D.C.

President Trump’s reaction, though, and Kash Patel’s reaction and Kristi Noem’s and Marco Rubio’s is — and JD Vance’s, is all over the place. It’s off base. They shouldn’t be ascribing — they shouldn’t be leveraging this absolute tragedy as a political cudgel to do whatever they were going to do anyways with our immigration regarding our wartime allies and other refugees and asylum seekers from around the world. It’s an unconscionable tragedy that they would leverage the awful experience, the awful incident that occurred there.

And these folks served with us for 20 years. I can’t — I was on BBC last night, and I called them liars, all of them. They’re lying about that he was — whether or not he was vetted. They’re lying about the fact that they approved his entry. This is a case of a tragic breakdown in our mental health system, not a case of messed-up vetting or anything other than that.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain who the people are, who you’ve been working on to get into this country, you yourself from the military.

SHAWN VANDIVER: Sure. So, I didn’t serve in Afghanistan. I served all over the world, but not in Afghanistan.

As we go around the world and we fight our wars, the U.S. military and our diplomats and other frontline civilians need support from local people who believe in our mission. And in Afghanistan, over our longest war, over the course of 20 years, hundreds of thousands of people stood up for the idea of democracy, believed in our mission and believed us when we told them, “If you stand with us, we’ll stand with you. If you work with us, you can come become an American. You can have your shot at the American dream.” The Trump administration, the Biden administration, the Obama administration, the Bush administration, everybody has let these folks down.

For the very first time in our country’s history, back in 2021, we, the civil society, stood up with the Biden administration. We dragged them to the right place. We got them to build something called Enduring Welcome, which is the safest, most secure immigration policy in our country’s history. And it represents the very first time that our country was actually answering the call for our wartime allies. It was too slow, but it was working. We were getting 5,000 wartime allies and their families out every month from Afghanistan to a third country. They undergo even more security vetting and then come to the United States of America and start their American dream in a durable pathway.

Before we built Enduring Welcome, Operation Allies Welcome brought about 77,000 Afghans here, but they most — many came on a nondurable status. They came as parolees, or they came as they were awaiting an immigration status, like SIV. Many had to apply for asylum once they got here. And it’s that population that’s been really — everybody’s been stuck in limbo, but this population has been stuck in limbo in the United States. And now they’re being targeted by President Trump’s political stunts at immigration court, and, you know, they’re snatching teachers out of the classrooms. These folks have done nothing but believe us and believe in the idea of America, and we’ve really let them down.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to bring Laila Ayub into this conversation, executive director of Project ANAR. If you can talk specifically about women who have come to this country, who have left Afghanistan, and your concerns about President Trump halting all evaluations of people applying for political asylum in the United States, after the 20-year U.S. occupation of Afghanistan and now the Taliban in charge?

LAILA AYUB: Yes. So, this decision to halt or pause all asylum adjudications with USCIS, it is really clearly an extension of this existing agenda that the administration has had towards abandoning the U.S.’s obligations under international and domestic law to offer protection to people. We have been seeing advancements in other countries, particularly for women, for gender-based asylum claims, and earlier this summer, we saw the administration target those kinds of claims.

Now we’re seeing — earlier last week, we saw a directive to reevaluate all of the refugee admissions from under the Biden administration. Now we’re seeing this administration weaponize last week’s tragedy to scapegoat and collectively punish an entire community. First, they made announcements about policies targeting Afghans, including restricting and pausing indefinitely the processing of all immigration applications with USCIS. And then we saw a number of statements that really went beyond that and targeted the 19 countries on the travel ban list, as well as these undefined terms, like “Third World countries,” and broader categories, such as people who are not a net asset to the U.S.

It’s really dehumanizing. It is also illogical and irrational for many reasons, including because refugees and immigrants contribute to this country in so many ways. So, this is an extremely concerning effort to punish all Afghans, all immigrants and people who came here oftentimes as a direct result of U.S. foreign policy and didn’t have really much of a choice left other than to flee their homes.

AMY GOODMAN: Lakanwal has a wife and five children. They’re based in Bellingham, Washington. The suggestion is that they would be deported. Where to, do you think, Laila?

LAILA AYUB: Well, we’re seeing that this administration has been — there’s been a pattern of removing people to Third World — to third countries, not to that undefined term of “Third World,” but to third countries. And there’s also deportations to Afghanistan. So, we don’t know what their plan is with this particular family, but what we do know is that in order to accomplish these efforts of large-scale targeting of not just that family, which is not something that, you know, I am particularly aware of, but the Afghan community in general, the immigrant community in general, it requires surveillance and increased militarism, increased policing. And none of these things really keep us safer in our communities here. They just harm more of our neighbors and more of our loved ones.

***

“Imperial Blowback”: Suspect in D.C. Shooting Was Part of CIA Death Squad in Afghanistan
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
December 01, 2025
journalist and author focused on U.S. military and foreign policy.

"Reign of Terror: How The 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump"
"He Killed for the CIA in Afghanistan. Trump Blames Afghan Culture Instead of Langley's"

Rahmanullah Lakanwal, the man who authorities say shot two National Guardsmen outside the White House, had previously worked in a CIA-backed “Zero Unit” in Afghanistan, often called “death squads” by human rights groups. “The United States made this person into a child soldier, and now is experiencing what I think is one of the most horrifically bright-line cases of imperial blowback that we’ve seen throughout the 'war on terror,'” says Spencer Ackerman, journalist and author focused on U.S. military and foreign policy.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to bring Spencer Ackerman into this conversation. You have a new piece in Zeteo headlined “He Killed for the CIA in Afghanistan. Trump Blames Afghan Culture Instead of Langley’s.” Can you elaborate?

SPENCER ACKERMAN: Yes. Your guests have spoken very eloquently about the betrayal and the dishonor that the collective guilt of Afghan refugees ascribed by the Trump administration for this horrific murder is having.

What we’re focusing on less is that the person — what we’re focusing on less is that the person who committed, allegedly, these crimes, Lakanwal, had a gun put in his hand when he was a child by the CIA. Apparently, when he was 14 or 15, he was brought into the Zero Unit number 03 around Kandahar. Apparently his brother told The New York Times — apparently his brother, The New York Times reported, was a deputy commander of this unit. This unit was a death squad. The United States made this person into a child soldier, and now is experiencing what I think is one of the most horrifically bright-line cases of imperial blowback that we’ve seen throughout the “war on terror.”

If the United States wants to find out whose culture is responsible for this horrific crime, it needs to start by knocking on doors at Langley and, as well, the Afghans who ran the U.S.-backed Afghan intelligence service known as the NDS. It was this culture of violence, of impunity, of murder for political reasons that had a specific role — we’ll find out more at trial — of shaping Lakanwal and his circumstances.

To blame the Afghans who came here as refugees, desperate, overwhelmingly, as your guests said, who worked with the United States, who served the U.S. war effort, is perverse. And it is ultimately a cover for allowing the U.S. to continue to create death squads, to outsource its most murderous and its most despicable wartime actions to locals, who then it can blame them for.

AMY GOODMAN: I was thinking about Timothy McVeigh, who was on the Highway of Death in Iraq.

SPENCER ACKERMAN: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: He comes back from there. He blows up the Oklahoma City building. He kills what? Something like 169 people. No one said then that all white Christian men should be imprisoned, let alone deported. But your thoughts on those kind of comparisons?

SPENCER ACKERMAN: I think what we are really seeing is the horrific consequences of a violent, exploitative and extractive U.S. foreign policy once again — not for the first time, but once again — coming home. If the United States actually cherishes the lives of these West Virginia National Guardsmen, who should not have been in D.C. in the first place to backstop ICE — that’s its own issue — but if the United States values their lives and values the lives of other service members and other Americans, then it has an obligation to, in the first instance, stop creating these death squads, to stop creating the conditions that are warping the people who serve in them to the point where they would commit horrific murders like these. That’s a cherishing of human life that we never see from the United States in its foreign policy missions around the world.

AMY GOODMAN: Spencer Ackerman, I want to thank you very much for being with us. We’ll link to your piece, “He Killed for the CIA in Afghanistan. Trump Blames Afghan Culture Instead of Langley’s.” And we want to thank Shawn VanDiver, president of #AfghanEvac, and Laila Ayub, executive director of Project ANAR.

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Trump Threatens “Hell To Pay” for Honduras After Election Results. Donald Trump is pissed the election hasn’t gone the way he wanted after he intervened.
by Malcolm Ferguson
newrepublic.com
December 2, 2025/9:12 a.m. ET
https://newrepublic.com/post/203832/tru ... on-results

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Donald Trump speaks while sitting in the Oval Office. Win McNamee/Getty Images

President Trump is making baseless claims of fraud in the Honduran election as he continues to publicly meddle in an incredibly close race between his choice—the conservative Tito Asfura—and liberal Salvador Nasralla.

“Looks like Honduras is trying to change the results of their Presidential Election. If they do, there will be hell to pay!” President Trump said Monday night with zero evidence to back it up. “The National Electoral Commission, the official body charged with counting the Votes, abruptly stopped counting at midnight on November 30th. Their count showed a close race between Tito Asfura and Salvador Nasralla with Asfura holding a narrow lead of 500 votes. Their tally was stopped when only 47 percent of the Vote was counted. It is imperative that the Commission finish counting the Votes. Hundreds of thousands of Hondurans must have their Votes counted. Democracy must prevail!”

In reality, this is a very slim election that will take the National Electoral Council, or CNE, an extended period of time to count. Preliminary results on Monday had Asfura ahead of Nasralla by just 515 points.

“Faced with this technical tie, we must remain calm, be patient, and wait for the CNE to finish counting,” said CNE head Ana Paola Hall. “Subsequently, the special counting process will be carried out in order to finalise the general count.”

Trump has already promised to cut off aid to Honduras if Asfura doesn’t win. Now he is further undermining the country’s electoral sovereignty by trying to lie his way into a favorable result. It’s obvious that Trump has his own agenda for Honduras, especially given his pardon of prolific drug trafficker and conservative former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who was sentenced to 45 years in prison on drug-trafficking and weapons charges. The game plan is almost identical to Argentina—meddle in elections, promise funding to guarantee your preferred candidate’s victory, and reap the benefits.

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Top military lawyer raised legal concerns about boat strikes. The lawyer at U.S. Southern Command, which oversees the operations against alleged drug-smuggling boats near Venezuela, disagreed that the strikes are legal and was overruled, according to six sources.
by Gordon Lubold, Courtney Kube and Dan De Luce
NBC News
Nov. 19, 2025
https://archive.ph/JW7e9#selection-1409.0-1409.201

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A boat carrying Venezuelan migrants who gave up on reaching the United States departs Jaqué as it moves south along Panama's Pacific coast on Sept. 19. Matias Delacroix / AP file

WASHINGTON — The senior military lawyer for the combatant command overseeing lethal strikes on alleged drug-smuggling boats near Venezuela disagreed with the Trump administration’s position that the operations are lawful — and his views were sidelined, according to six sources with knowledge of the legal advice.

The lawyer, who serves as the senior judge advocate general, or JAG in military parlance, at U.S. Southern Command in Miami, raised his legal concerns in August before the strikes began in September, according to two senior U.S. officials, two senior congressional aides and two former senior U.S. officials.

His opinion was ultimately overruled by more senior government officials, including officials at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, the six sources said. Other JAGs and military lawyers at various levels of seniority weighed in on the boat strikes, as well. It’s unclear what each of their opinions were, but some of the military lawyers, including civilians and those in uniform, also expressed concerns to senior officials in their commands and at the Defense Department about the legality of the strikes, the two senior congressional aides and one of the senior former U.S. officials said.

The JAG at Southern Command specifically expressed concern that strikes against people on boats in the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific Ocean, whom administration officials call “narco-terrorists,” could amount to extrajudicial killings, the six sources said, and therefore legally expose service members involved in the operations.

The opinion of the top lawyer for the command overseeing a military operation is typically critical to whether or not the operation moves forward. While higher officials can overrule such lawyers, it is rare for operations to move forward without incorporating their advice.
Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said in a statement: “The War Department categorically denies that any Pentagon lawyers, including SOUTHCOM lawyers, with knowledge of these operations have raised concerns to any attorneys in the chain of command regarding the legality of the strikes conducted thus far because they are aware we are on firm legal ground. Our current operations in the Caribbean are lawful under both U.S. and international law, with all actions in complete compliance with the law of armed conflict.”

A spokesperson for Southern Command referred questions to the Defense Department, which the Trump administration calls the War Department. A spokesperson for the White House did not respond to a request for comment.

The JAG is Marine Col. Paul Meagher, according to three people familiar with the matter. Attempts to reach Meagher for comment were unsuccessful.

The strikes on alleged drug boats have drawn support from Republicans, as well as criticism from members of both parties, NBC News has reported. 

The opinion of the Southern Command JAG, which has not been previously reported, adds a new dimension to concerns that lawmakers, retired military officers and legal experts have raised about the administration’s legal justification for striking alleged drug boats.

Those concerns have centered on questions about whether the strikes violate international and U.S. law.

Since Sept. 2, it says, the administration has killed 82 people in 21 strikes on small vessels it says were transporting drugs bound for the United States.

Administration officials have not put forward any specific evidence backing up their claims.

The administration has told members of Congress that President Donald Trump determined the United States is in “armed conflict” with drug cartel members, NBC News has reported. The administration designated some drug cartels in Latin America as foreign terrorist organizations this year.

Trump has argued that drugs from the region pose a significant threat to American citizens. He has linked the boats to fentanyl to argue that the military strikes have saved tens of thousands of American lives, although fentanyl is typically smuggled into the United States by land across the Mexican border. Cocaine, which is most often moved via sea, is considered far less lethal than fentanyl.

JAGs' opinions on possible military operations are usually shared with higher authorities, including the Defense Department’s general counsel, Justice Department officials and ultimately the White House, according to current and former U.S. officials familiar with the process.

JAGs typically play an integral role in defining the legal parameters of any military operation, and often their collective advice would be the primary guiding principle as political leaders decide whether to take such action, according to the current and former U.S. officials familiar with the process.

In the Trump administration’s campaign against alleged drug boats, politically appointed lawyers at senior levels have often defined the legalities of the operations with minimal lower-level legal input, according to the two senior congressional aides and one of the former senior U.S. officials.

There have been other signs of disagreement within the administration over the strikes. The head of Southern Command, Adm. Alvin Holsey, plans to step down after less than a year in a job that typically lasts about three years.

Holsey announced in October that he will depart next month.

In addition to concerns about the legality of the strikes, Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill have complained that the administration has not provided them enough information about the legal rationale or the intelligence used to target the vessels and people the administration purports are bringing drugs into the United States.

“There is no world where this is legal,” said a current JAG, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly.

Congress has not declared war or authorized the use of military force against the drug traffickers, and U.S. law allows the president to take military action without lawmakers’ approval only if there is a national emergency due to an attack on the country or American forces.

Dan Maurer, an associate professor of law at Ohio Northern University and a former Army JAG, argued that the drug cartels’ narcotics smuggling and other actions are crimes but do not qualify as an armed attack on the United States as defined by U.S. and international law.

“These drug cartels may be violent, they may be aggressive, they may be transnational,” Maurer said in an interview. “They may be doing terrible things within their own countries; they may be importing terrible things into our country that have bad consequences. But all of those are crimes, and none of which meets the traditional meanings of an attack or invasion.”

Maurer and other former military lawyers and experts believe the Trump administration’s legal rationale for the strikes is so tenuous it could put commanders and troops in legal peril after Trump leaves office in 2029.

Trump administration officials have defended the legality of the strikes and argued that they have shared ample information about them with members of Congress.

The legal debate about the strikes is likely to intensify if Trump decides to hit targets inside Venezuela, as he has threatened to do. The current legal rationale for strikes on vessels does not apply to any strikes on land, a senior administration official told lawmakers in a closed-door briefing last week, according to two additional congressional aides.

Some of the military’s strikes on boats have killed people who critics of the operations say may be noncombatants or even immigrants who are hitching rides on the vessels and have nothing to do with the drug trade. Two survivors of a strike were captured and repatriated to Colombia and Ecuador rather than taken into U.S. custody, a decision that one of the congressional aides said raises questions about whether there is sufficient evidence to prosecute them for a crime.

The internal differences over the legality of the boat strikes echo a similar debate more than 20 years ago. During President George W. Bush's administration, senior military lawyers for the Army, the Air Force and the Marines raised objections over proposed “enhanced” interrogation techniques in 2003 and later testified to Congress about their concerns. They warned that U.S. courts could find those techniques amounted to torture and were illegal.

John Yoo, the controversial legal architect of Bush’s “war on terror” after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, now argues the Trump administration’s boat strikes risk crossing the line between “crime fighting and war.”

“Americans have died in car wrecks at an annual rate of about 40,000 in recent years; the nation does not wage war on auto companies,” he wrote recently in an op-ed in The Washington Post. “American law instead relies upon the criminal justice or civil tort systems to respond to broad, persistent social harms.”

Gordon Lubold is a national security reporter for NBC News.