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"If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon’s, but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition, and ignorance on the other."
- U.S. Grant
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- David Schwartz
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-John F. Kennedy
1. How the U.S. Hid an Airstrike That Killed Dozens of Civilians in Syria
2. ‘BE PREPARED’: Boss of China’s media mouthpiece issues thinly-veiled warning to Australia
3. Beijing urges US businesses to lobby against China-related bills in Congress
4. Joe Biden Should Cancel His Virtual Summit with China by Gordon Chang
5. Abandoned Afghan Commandos may turn to terror outfits if not evacuated: Ex-US official
6. Opinion | The Taliban Is Vulnerable. Here’s How to Seize the Moment
7. Hackers sent spam emails from FBI accounts, agency confirms
8. The paradox of American power: Even when we're losing, we're winning
9. 'Inconceivable' Australia would not join U.S. to defend Taiwan - Australian defence minister
10. Psychologists have found that triggering large prediction errors helps to change false beliefs
11. This Is The State Where The Most People Serve In The Military
12. The Truth Shall Make You Free: Catholicism and the CIA - Los Angeles Review of Books
13. Inside the clandestine rebellion against Myanmar’s junta
14. 1 Battle Proved That Nothing Can Stop the US Army's Green Berets
15. Historian Timothy Snyder: ‘It turns out that people really like democracy’
1. How the U.S. Hid an Airstrike That Killed Dozens of Civilians in Syria
The hits just keep on coming. Another tragic and terrible incident, not only the strike itself but also the alleged cover-up (if the reports are accurate). One thing that has always made me proud is our willingness to investigate based on self reporting of potential violations. It does not appear to have happened in this case. Another stain on our military though it appears there were some military personnel trying to do the right thing. It is especially troubling if units were using the right of self defense as a way to circumvent the approval process. And of course the blow back from this is that troops in contact who actually need and request support for self defense could get second guessed in the future.
Excerpts:
The Defense Department’s independent inspector general began an inquiry, but the report containing its findings was stalled and stripped of any mention of the strike.
“Leadership just seemed so set on burying this. No one wanted anything to do with it,” said Gene Tate, an evaluator who worked on the case for the inspector general’s office and agreed to discuss the aspects that were not classified. “It makes you lose faith in the system when people are trying to do what’s right but no one in positions of leadership wants to hear it.”
...
At the end of the grinding fight, airstrikes corralled the last Islamic State fighters in a scrap of farmland against the Euphrates River near Baghuz. Coalition air power forced thousands to surrender, sparing the lives of untold numbers of Kurdish and Arab allies.
On the ground, Task Force 9 coordinated offensives and airstrikes. The unit included soldiers from the 5th Special Forces Group and the Army’s elite commando team Delta Force, several officials said.
Over time, some officials overseeing the air campaign began to believe that the task force was systematically circumventing the safeguards created to limit civilian deaths.
The process was supposed to run through several checks and balances. Drones with high-definition cameras studied potential targets, sometimes for days or weeks. Analysts pored over intelligence data to differentiate combatants from civilians. And military lawyers were embedded with strike teams to ensure that targeting complied with the law of armed conflict. In combat situations, the process might take only minutes, but even then the rules required teams to identify military targets and minimize civilian harm. At times, when the task force failed to meet those requirements, commanders in Qatar and elsewhere denied permission to strike.
But there was a quick and easy way to skip much of that oversight: claiming imminent danger.
The law of armed conflict — the rule book that lays out the military’s legal conduct in war — allows troops in life-threatening situations to sidestep the strike team lawyers, analysts and other bureaucracy and call in strikes directly from aircraft under what military regulations call an “inherent right of self-defense.”
Task Force 9 typically played only an advisory role in Syria, and its soldiers were usually well behind the front lines. Even so, by late 2018, about 80 percent of all airstrikes it was calling in claimed self-defense, according to an Air Force officer who reviewed the strikes.
How the U.S. Hid an Airstrike That Killed Dozens of Civilians in Syria
The military never conducted an independent investigation into a 2019 bombing on the last bastion of the Islamic State, despite concerns about a secretive commando force.
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Fleeing heavy bombardment in Baghuz, Syria — the Islamic State’s last holdout — on March 18, 2019.
Nov. 13, 2021
In the last days of the battle against the Islamic State in Syria, when members of the once-fierce caliphate were cornered in a dirt field next to a town called Baghuz, a U.S. military drone circled high overhead, hunting for military targets. But it saw only a large crowd of women and children huddled against a river bank.
Without warning, an American F-15E attack jet streaked across the drone’s high-definition field of vision and dropped a 500-pound bomb on the crowd, swallowing it in a shuddering blast. As the smoke cleared, a few people stumbled away in search of cover. Then a jet tracking them dropped one 2,000-pound bomb, then another, killing most of the survivors.
It was March 18, 2019. At the U.S. military’s busy Combined Air Operations Center at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, uniformed personnel watching the live drone footage looked on in stunned disbelief, according to one officer who was there.
“Who dropped that?” a confused analyst typed on a secure chat system being used by those monitoring the drone, two people who reviewed the chat log recalled. Another responded, “We just dropped on 50 women and children.”
An initial battle damage assessment quickly found that the number of dead was actually about 70.
The Baghuz strike was one of the largest civilian casualty incidents of the war against the Islamic State, but it has never been publicly acknowledged by the U.S. military. The details, reported here for the first time, show that the death toll was almost immediately apparent to military officials. A legal officer flagged the strike as a possible war crime that required an investigation. But at nearly every step, the military made moves that concealed the catastrophic strike. The death toll was downplayed. Reports were delayed, sanitized and classified. United States-led coalition forces bulldozed the blast site. And top leaders were not notified.
The Defense Department’s independent inspector general began an inquiry, but the report containing its findings was stalled and stripped of any mention of the strike.
“Leadership just seemed so set on burying this. No one wanted anything to do with it,” said Gene Tate, an evaluator who worked on the case for the inspector general’s office and agreed to discuss the aspects that were not classified. “It makes you lose faith in the system when people are trying to do what’s right but no one in positions of leadership wants to hear it.”
Mr. Tate, a former Navy officer who had worked for years as a civilian analyst with the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Counterterrorism Center before moving to the inspector general’s office, said he criticized the lack of action and was eventually forced out of his job.
The details of the strikes were pieced together by The New York Times over months from confidential documents and descriptions of classified reports, as well as interviews with personnel directly involved, and officials with top secret security clearances who discussed the incident on the condition that they not be named.
The Times investigation found that the bombing had been called in by a classified American special operations unit, Task Force 9, which was in charge of ground operations in Syria. The task force operated in such secrecy that at times it did not inform even its own military partners of its actions. In the case of the Baghuz bombing, the American Air Force command in Qatar had no idea the strike was coming, an officer who served at the command center said.
In the minutes after the strike, an alarmed Air Force intelligence officer in the operations center called over an Air Force lawyer in charge of determining the legality of strikes. The lawyer ordered the F-15E squadron and the drone crew to preserve all video and other evidence, according to documents obtained by The Times. He went upstairs and reported the strike to his chain of command, saying it was a possible violation of the law of armed conflict — a war crime — and regulations required a thorough, independent investigation.
But a thorough, independent investigation never happened.
This week, after The New York Times sent its findings to U.S. Central Command, which oversaw the air war in Syria, the command acknowledged the strikes for the first time, saying 80 people were killed but the airstrikes were justified. It said the bombs killed 16 fighters and four civilians. As for the other 60 people killed, the statement said it was not clear that they were civilians, in part because women and children in the Islamic State sometimes took up arms.
“We abhor the loss of innocent life and take all possible measures to prevent them,” Capt. Bill Urban, the chief spokesman for the command, said in the statement. “In this case, we self-reported and investigated the strike according to our own evidence and take full responsibility for the unintended loss of life.”
The only assessment done immediately after the strike was performed by the same ground unit that ordered the strike. It determined that the bombing was lawful because it killed only a small number of civilians while targeting Islamic State fighters in an attempt to protect coalition forces, the command said. Therefore no formal war crime notification, criminal investigation or disciplinary action was warranted, it said, adding that the other deaths were accidental.
But the Air Force lawyer, Lt. Col. Dean W. Korsak, believed he had witnessed possible war crimes and repeatedly pressed his leadership and Air Force criminal investigators to act. When they did not, he alerted the Defense Department’s independent inspector general. Two years after the strike, seeing no evidence that the watchdog agency was taking action, Colonel Korsak emailed the Senate Armed Services Committee, telling its staff that he had top secret material to discuss and adding, “I’m putting myself at great risk of military retaliation for sending this.”
“Senior ranking U.S. military officials intentionally and systematically circumvented the deliberate strike process,” he wrote in the email, which was obtained by The Times. Much of the material was classified and would need to be discussed through secure communications, he said. He wrote that a unit had intentionally entered false strike log entries, “clearly seeking to cover up the incidents.” Calling the classified death toll “shockingly high,” he said the military did not follow its own requirements to report and investigate the strike.
There was a good chance, he wrote, that “the highest levels of government remained unaware of what was happening on the ground.”
Colonel Korsak did not respond to requests for comment.
Undercounted Tolls
The United States portrayed the air war against the Islamic State as the most precise and humane bombing campaign in its history. The military said every report of civilian casualties was investigated and the findings reported publicly, creating what the military called a model of accountability.
But the strikes on Baghuz tell a different story.
The details suggest that while the military put strict rules in place to protect civilians, the Special Operations task force repeatedly used other rules to skirt them. The military teams counting casualties rarely had the time, resources or incentive to do accurate work. And troops rarely faced repercussions when they caused civilian deaths.
A member of the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces assists a group of people leaving Baghuz, Syria — the last Islamic State-controlled area — in March 2019.
Even in the extraordinary case of Baghuz — which would rank third on the military’s worst civilian casualty events in Syria if 64 civilian deaths were acknowledged — regulations for reporting and investigating the potential crime were not followed, and no one was held accountable.
The military recently admitted that a botched strike in Kabul, Afghanistan, in August killed 10 civilians, including seven children. But that kind of public reckoning is unusual, observers say. More often, civilian deaths are undercounted even in classified reports. Nearly 1,000 strikes hit targets in Syria and Iraq in 2019, using 4,729 bombs and missiles. The official military tally of civilian dead for that entire year is only 22, and the strikes from March 18 are nowhere on the list.
A Secret Task Force
The battle at Baghuz represented the end of a nearly five-year United States-led campaign to defeat the Islamic State in Syria and was a foreign policy triumph for President Donald J. Trump.
At the height of its rule in 2014, the Islamic State controlled an area of Syria and Iraq about the size of Tennessee. A fleet of coalition drones, jets, attack helicopters and heavy bombers hit enemy positions with about 35,000 strikes over the next five years, plowing a path for local Kurdish and Arab militias to reclaim ground.
At the end of the grinding fight, airstrikes corralled the last Islamic State fighters in a scrap of farmland against the Euphrates River near Baghuz. Coalition air power forced thousands to surrender, sparing the lives of untold numbers of Kurdish and Arab allies.
On the ground, Task Force 9 coordinated offensives and airstrikes. The unit included soldiers from the 5th Special Forces Group and the Army’s elite commando team Delta Force, several officials said.
Over time, some officials overseeing the air campaign began to believe that the task force was systematically circumventing the safeguards created to limit civilian deaths.
The process was supposed to run through several checks and balances. Drones with high-definition cameras studied potential targets, sometimes for days or weeks. Analysts pored over intelligence data to differentiate combatants from civilians. And military lawyers were embedded with strike teams to ensure that targeting complied with the law of armed conflict. In combat situations, the process might take only minutes, but even then the rules required teams to identify military targets and minimize civilian harm. At times, when the task force failed to meet those requirements, commanders in Qatar and elsewhere denied permission to strike.
But there was a quick and easy way to skip much of that oversight: claiming imminent danger.
The law of armed conflict — the rule book that lays out the military’s legal conduct in war — allows troops in life-threatening situations to sidestep the strike team lawyers, analysts and other bureaucracy and call in strikes directly from aircraft under what military regulations call an “inherent right of self-defense.”
Task Force 9 typically played only an advisory role in Syria, and its soldiers were usually well behind the front lines. Even so, by late 2018, about 80 percent of all airstrikes it was calling in claimed self-defense, according to an Air Force officer who reviewed the strikes.
The rules allowed U.S. troops and local allies to invoke it when facing not just direct enemy fire, but anyone displaying “hostile intent,” according to a former officer who deployed with the unit numerous times. Under that definition, something as mundane as a car driving miles from friendly forces could in some cases be targeted. The task force interpreted the rules broadly, the former officer said.
Raqqa, Syria, endured withering coalition airstrikes and fighting between the Islamic State and the Syrian Democratic Forces. Credit...Ivor Prickett for The New York Times
Publicly, the coalition insisted the numbers were much lower. Privately, it became overwhelmed by the volume of civilian casualty claims reported by locals, humanitarian groups and the news media, and a backlog of civilian casualty assessment reports sat unexamined for months, two people who compiled the reports said.
But even when completed, the military teams making those assessments were not equipped to make an accurate count, the former task force officer said, because the personnel doing the counting did not investigate on the ground and often based their findings on how many dead civilians they could definitively identify from aerial footage of the rubble.
Mr. Tate, who wrote a classified report on the shortcomings of the process, said the assessment teams at times lacked training and some did not have security clearances to even view the evidence.
The assessments of the strike process were also flawed, three officials said, because they were done by the units that called in the strikes, meaning the task force was grading its own performance. Rarely did it find problems.
Alarm at the C.I.A.
Human rights groups were not the only ones sounding the alarm. C.I.A. officers working in Syria grew so alarmed over the task force’s strikes that agents reported their concern to the Department of Defense inspector general, which investigated the claims and produced a report. The results of that report are top secret, but the former task force officer, who reviewed the report, said the C.I.A. officers alleged that in about 10 incidents, the secretive task force hit targets knowing civilians would be killed.
The former officer said the report determined that all the strikes were legal.
The inspector general declined to release the report or discuss its findings.
Staff in the operations center in Qatar, who oversaw the air war, also became concerned with task force strikes. Air Force lawyers started keeping a spreadsheet, recording the self-defense justifications the task force used to call strikes, then comparing them with drone footage and other evidence, according to one officer who viewed the data. The evidence appeared to show that the task force was adding details that would legally justify a strike, such as seeing a man with a gun, even when those details were not visible in the footage.
Though a number of officers in the operations center suspected that the task force was including misleading information in the logs to justify strikes, they did not feel they had enough evidence to press the issue, the officer said. That changed on March 18, 2019.
A Fatal Strike
The camp at Baghuz was effectively the Islamic State’s Alamo — a last stand where hard-core militants vowed to fight to the death. For more than a month, they had been trapped in one square mile of burned-over farm fields. Among the makeshift tents, bullet-pocked vehicles and hand-dug bunkers were tens of thousands of women and children. Some were there willingly; some were not.
Only a small sliver of land remained of the Islamic State caliphate in March 2019.Credit...Satellite image: © 2021 Maxar Technologies. Data: Jane’s Conflict Monitor.
The coalition had laid siege, hoping to starve the fighters out. In six weeks, 29,000 people, most of them women and children, surrendered. On March 18, drone footage showed the camp still harbored large numbers of people suspected of being fighters and their families.
Coalition drones had scoured the camp 24 hours a day for weeks and knew nearly every inch, officers said, including the daily movements of groups of women and children who gathered to eat, pray and sleep near a steep river bank that provided cover.
What happened on the morning of March 18 is in dispute.
That day Islamic State fighters trapped in the camp launched a predawn counteroffensive, according to Central Command, which oversaw Task Force 9. It said hundreds of Islamic State fighters started firing rifles and grenade launchers and sending forward fighters with suicide vests. The coalition pummeled the fighters with airstrikes — so many that by midmorning the coalition had used all the missiles on its drones. Only one American drone, controlled by the task force, was left in the area, and it was unarmed.
At about 10 a.m., local Syrian forces reported they were under fire and in danger of being overrun, and called for an airstrike, Central Command said. The task force drone tracked a group of fighters as they made their way through the camp to the area where the women and children sheltered.
A 5th Special Forces Group officer in the task force looked at the drone footage and didn’t see any civilians, a task force officer said. But the drone he relied on had only a standard-definition camera. Central Command said there were no high-definition drones in the area that could get a better view of the target.
The Special Forces officer gave the order to fire. With no precision missiles left, the command said, the ground commander called in 500- and 2,000-pound bombs. The strike log classified the strike as self-defense.
In fact, a high-definition drone was available. The task force did not use it. Circling above, it was streaming footage of the same patch of ground to the operations center in Qatar. Because the task force operated at a high level of secrecy, two officers said, the people in Qatar watching the high-definition drone were not aware the task force was about to call in a strike.
Central Command said the task force did not know that the better drone was overhead.
The high-definition drone recorded a very different scene from what was described by Central Command this past week, three people who viewed the footage said. In it, two or three men — not 16 — wander through the frame near the crowd. They have rifles but do not appear to be maneuvering, engaging coalition forces or acting in a way that would seem to justify a self-defense strike with 2,000-pound bombs. A chat log used by analysts who were watching the footage noted the presence of women, children and a man with a gun, but did not mention any active combat, two people who viewed the log said.
The Visual Investigations team at The Times reviewed hundreds of photos, videos and satellite images of the Islamic State camp in Baghuz. The reported strike point lies between two aqueducts, which the team used as reference features to pinpoint the location.
A photograph taken the previous day shows several makeshift tents in the area.
Makeshift tents are visible in the reported strike location one day earlier on March 17, 2019.
What is not in dispute is that moments after the task force called in the strike, an F-15E attack plane hit the spot with a 500-pound bomb. Five minutes later, when ground forces saw people fleeing the blast site, the F-15E dropped two 2,000-pound bombs on the survivors. The entire attack took 12 minutes.
Key Findings From the Baghuz Airstrike Investigation
Card 1 of 5
Uncovering the truth. Over several months, The New York Times pieced together the details of a 2019 airstrike in Baghuz, Syria, one of the largest civilian casualty incidents of the war against the Islamic State. Here are the key findings from the investigation:
The U.S. military carried out the attack. Task Force 9, the secretive special operations unit in charge of ground operations in Syria, called in the attack. The strike began when an F-15E attack jet hit Baghuz with a 500-pound bomb. Five minutes later, the F-15E dropped two 2,000-pound bombs.
The death toll was downplayed. The U.S. Central Command recently acknowledged that 80 people, including civilians, were killed in the airstrike. Though the death toll was almost immediately apparent to military officials, regulations for investigating the potential crime were not followed.
Reports were delayed, sanitized and classified. The Defense Department’s independent inspector general began an inquiry, but the report containing its findings was stalled and stripped of any mention of the strike.
American-led coalition forces bulldozed the blast site. Civilian observers who came to the area of the strike the next day described finding piles of dead women and children. In the days following the bombing, coalition forces overran the site, which was quickly bulldozed.
A Syrian videographer, Gihad Darwish, captured airstrikes in the area matching that description as he filmed from a rocky bluff above the camp. The footage shows that ground troops may not have been able to see the group of civilians.
An airstrike that matches the area and timing of the reported airstrike on March 18.Credit...The New York Times. Video: Gihad Darwish/AFP
A Failed Investigation
Defense Department regulations require any “possible, suspected or alleged” violation of the law of armed conflict to be reported immediately to the combatant commander in charge, as well as criminal investigators, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the secretary of defense and the secretary of the Army.
After viewing the footage, the Air Force lawyer, Colonel Korsak, ordered the units involved to preserve nine pieces of evidence, including video, and reported the strike to his chain of command, according to the email he later sent to the Senate Armed Services Committee staff. He also notified the command of concerns that the unit appeared to be covering up the alleged war crimes violations by adding details to the strike log that would justify a self-defense strike.
He told the committee staff that commanders did not take action.
Coalition forces overran the camp that day and defeated the Islamic State a few days later. The yearslong air war was hailed as a triumph. The commander of the operations center in Qatar authorized all personnel to have four drinks at the base bar, lifting the normal three-drink limit.
Civilian observers who came to the area of the strike the next day found piles of dead women and children. The human rights organization Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently posted photos of the bodies, calling it a “terrible massacre.”
Satellite images from four days later show the sheltered bank and area around it, which were in the control of the coalition, appeared to have been bulldozed.
David Eubank, a former U.S. Army Special Forces soldier who now runs the humanitarian organization Free Burma Rangers, walked through the area about a week later. “The place had been pulverized by airstrikes,” he said in an interview. “There was a lot of freshly bulldozed earth and the stink of bodies underneath, a lot of bodies.”
Concerned that details of the airstrike would be buried as well, Colonel Korsak alerted the Air Force’s version of the F.B.I., the Office of Special Investigations. In an email Colonel Korsak shared with the Senate Armed Services Committee, a major responded that agents probably would not look into it, saying the office typically investigated civilian casualty reports only when there was “potential for high media attention, concern with outcry from local community/government, concern sensitive images may get out.”
The Air Force Office of Special Investigations declined to comment.
Colonel Korsak again pressed his chain of command to act, informing his command’s chief legal officer in a memo in May 2019 that regulations required an investigation. He later told the Senate committee’s staff that his superiors did not open an investigation.
“The topic and incidents were dead on arrival,” he wrote. “My supervisor refused to discuss the matter with me.”
The chief legal officer, Colonel Matthew P. Stoffel, did not respond to requests for comment.
The task force finished up a civilian casualty report on the strike that month and determined that four civilians were killed. But two and a half years later, on the military’s website for its campaign against the Islamic State, known as Operation Inherent Resolve, the military still publicly lists the case as “open.”
A Report Buried
Unwilling to let the issue drop, Colonel Korsak filed a hotline complaint with the inspector general’s office in August 2019.
A four-person team in the office was already looking into shortcomings in the civilian casualty reporting processes in Syria and quickly set up an interview in a secure setting. After reviewing the high-definition footage and interviewing Colonel Korsak, the team, which included Mr. Tate, told superiors in the inspector general’s office that the allegation of a war crime was “extremely credible.”
“When he came to us, he wanted to make it very clear he had tried everything else first,” Mr. Tate said. “He felt that the I.G. hotline was the only option remaining.”
But like the Air Force lawyer’s earlier effort, Mr. Tate’s team soon hit roadblocks. Central Command was slow to turn over evidence, he said. Mr. Tate obtained video from several drones flying over Baghuz that day, but could not locate the footage from the task force drone that called in the strike.
The inspector general’s office received a second complaint on the hotline about the strike, a spokeswoman said, but Mr. Tate said his team was never told.
Mr. Tate studied the task force’s casualty report, but it didn’t match what he saw on video. The civilian deaths stated in the report were “an impossibly small number,” he said.
The final section of the casualty report was reserved for the legal opinion. In one version of the report that Mr. Tate was sent by the staff at Operation Inherent Resolve, the Baghdad-based military command overseeing operations in Iraq and Syria, a task force lawyer and an operations officer wrote that a violation of the law of armed conflict may have taken place. In another copy that came from Central Command, he said, that opinion had been removed.
Mr. Tate could find no evidence that the Joint Chiefs, the defense secretary or criminal investigators had been alerted, as required.
Within days of interviewing Colonel Korsak, Mr. Tate’s team took their findings to supervisors and told them the office was required to alert those officials and criminal investigation agencies. Mr. Tate said his supervisors took no action. The team pressed leaders numerous times over the next several months, and in January 2020, Mr. Tate’s team leader drafted a memo that would formally alert authorities. It only needed to be signed by the deputy inspector general overseeing the team. Mr. Tate said the supervisor did not sign it.
A Syrian Democratic Forces soldier at the Baghuz camp one day after the American-led coalition announced the defeat of the Islamic State caliphate.
In the months that followed in 2020, the team finished its report on broader issues in the civilian casualty reporting process, but as it went through the editing and approval process, which included comments from Central Command, all mentions of the Baghuz strike were cut.
Mr. Tate became increasingly pointed in criticizing the leadership of the inspector general’s office. In October 2020, he said he was forced out of his position and escorted from the building by security.
The inspector general report on civilian casualties was formally released this spring to select members of Congress and the military with the proper security clearances. The office refused to release a public copy or discuss the classified findings, but acknowledged it did not mention Baghuz.
A spokeswoman for the inspector general’s office disputed Mr. Tate’s account. She said that it alerted the proper authorities at Central Command shortly after receiving the first hotline complaint in 2019. The spokeswoman said the office also notified criminal investigators about the strike in October 2020, 14 months after receiving the hotline call — around the time that Mr. Tate was terminated.
A spokeswoman for the office said a new evaluation of Special Operations Command’s adherence to the law of war was expected be completed this month, and that it would include the Baghuz strike. That report will also be classified.
After leaving the office, Mr. Tate refused to give up. He contacted the Senate Armed Services Committee in May and sent a 10-page letter describing the strike and what he viewed as a “systematic failure” on civilian casualty reporting. The committee then contacted Colonel Korsak, who replied with a detailed email.
When asked by The Times about the March 2019 strike, Chip Unruh, a spokesman for Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island and the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, declined to comment on details of the incident, about which the Central Command has briefed the committee.
He did, however, provide a broader assessment: “When tragic errors occur on the battlefield, the United States, as the leader of the free world, has an obligation to be transparent, take responsibility, and do everything we can to learn from and prevent future mistakes.”
Mr. Tate waited for months for the committee to call back and give him an indication that it was actively looking at the case. This week, he said with a sigh that he was still waiting.
Azmat Khan, Christoph Koettl and Haley Willis contributed reporting. Drew Jordan contributed production.
2. ‘BE PREPARED’: Boss of China’s media mouthpiece issues thinly-veiled warning to Australia
No subtlety in this Chinese propaganda.
‘BE PREPARED’: Boss of China’s media mouthpiece issues thinly-veiled warning to Australia
The editor-in-chief of China’s media mouthpiece has explicitly warned that Australia would face a “heavy attack” if it came to the defence of Taiwan.
Hu Xijin, the head of The Global Times, tweeted the pointed threat on Saturday night.
“If Australian troops come to fight in the Taiwan Straits, it is unimaginable that China won’t carry out a heavy attack on them and the Australian military facilities that support them,” he wrote.
“So Australia better be prepared to sacrifice for Taiwan island and the US.”
He ended the message with a thumbs-up emoji.
The thinly-veiled warning comes amid deteriorating relations between Australia and China.
Defence Minister Peter Dutton, in an interview with The Australian, hinted that Australia would assist the United States, should the latter intervene in the Chinese takeover of Taiwan.
“It would be inconceivable that we wouldn’t support the US in an action if the US chose to take that action,” he said.
“And again, I think we should be very frank and honest about that, look at all of the facts and circumstances without pre-committing, and maybe there are circumstances where we wouldn’t take up that option. I can’t conceive of those circumstances.”
Hu Xijin. Credit: South China Morning Post via Getty Images
Former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, acting on his own accord and not on official business, last month visited Taiwan.
Abbott has been vocal in his support of Taiwan remaining a democratically run island in the face of what he calls China’s “challenges”.
The Global Times in that instance warned Australia was a “chess piece” in the US’ “anti-China strategy”.
“Many are worried that Australia might imprudently follow the lead of some European countries to take injudicious actions,” an editorial read.
“After all, Abbott is not visiting Taipei in an official capacity.
“But should a member of the Australian parliament or even an incumbent cabinet minister visit Taiwan in an official capacity, or should Canberra allow the change of the name of ‘Taipei Economic and Cultural Office’ into something that violates the one-China principle, the bilateral relations between China and Australia would suffer irreparable damages.”
Taiwan says it is an independent country and will defend itself if China attacks.
Australia was previously warned its economic recovery from the pandemic could be derailed if trade tensions with China intensify.
“Once the economy reopens and the recovery resumes, the focus should turn to reforms to revive productivity growth, lift living standards and strengthen resilience, according to a new OECD report,” it says.
It warns that Australia could be left “vulnerable” if the trade relationship with China continues to sour.
“Australia’s strengthened trade relationship with a rapidly-industrialising China has brought benefits for business, household and government incomes over recent decades.
The new trilateral AUKUS pact comes in the context of China's increasing power in the Indo-Pacific. Credit: AAP
“Nonetheless, the increased concentration of export flows makes Australia more vulnerable to a future shock in the Chinese economy or import restrictions being imposed on additional commodities, such as iron ore.
“An acceleration in vaccine rollout could enable a faster reopening and a rapid pick-up of household consumption, given the stock of excess savings.
“On the other hand, were significant COVID-19 outbreaks to occur in other states, then the economic shock could deepen.
The report further suggested that “any ratcheting up of tensions with China could further weaken trade activity”.
3. Beijing urges US businesses to lobby against China-related bills in Congress
These businesses should be afraid, very afraid. Being a useful idiot is no defense for FARA.
On the other hand I wonder if China's motive for this is not really to generate lobbying support from US businesses but instead drive the US government to start FARA investigations to create tension, friction, and conflict between the business community and the government. This can undermine the legitimacy of both US businesses and the US government.
Excerpts:
The sources said China’s request also left some individuals who received a letter concerned that they could be seen as violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act (Fara) if they lobbied lawmakers on similar issues in the future.
As a result, none of the sources wanted to be identified as having received or seen the letter.
Beijing urges US businesses to lobby against China-related bills in Congress
Letters to and meetings with business community have left some fearful of being seen as violating law on foreign agents
China has been pushing US executives, companies and business groups in recent weeks to fight against China-related bills in the US Congress, four sources familiar with the initiative told Reuters, in letters to and meetings with a wide range of actors in the business community.
Letters from China’s embassy in Washington have pressed executives to urge members of Congress to alter or drop specific bills that seek to enhance US competitiveness, according to the sources and the text of a letter sent by the embassy’s economic and commercial office seen by Reuters.
Chinese officials warned companies they would risk losing market share or revenue in China if the legislation becomes law, according to the text of the letter.
The Chinese embassy and the head of its economic and commercial office did not return separate requests for comment.
The sources said China’s request also left some individuals who received a letter concerned that they could be seen as violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act (Fara) if they lobbied lawmakers on similar issues in the future.
As a result, none of the sources wanted to be identified as having received or seen the letter.
Sweeping legislation to boost US competition with China and fund much-needed semiconductor production, known as the US Innovation and Competition Act (Usica), passed the Senate with bipartisan support in June. A related bill in the House of Representatives called the Eagle Act, which is more strictly policy-focused, has stalled as Congress has been preoccupied with other domestic initiatives.
The language in the letters, which Reuters determined were sent separately to a wide number of people, explicitly asks companies to oppose Usica and the Eagle Act.
Beijing sees the measures, which take a hard line toward China on human rights and trade issues, as part of a US effort to counter the country’s growing economic and geopolitical might.
“We sincerely hope you ... will play a positive role in urging members of Congress to abandon the zero-sum mindset and ideological prejudice, stop touting negative China-related bills, delete negative provisions, so as to create favorable conditions for bilateral economic and trade cooperation before it is too late,” the Chinese embassy said in one letter sent in early November.
Reuters confirmed the shared language of the letter with the four sources.
“The result of those China-related bills with negative impacts will not be that the interests of US companies will be protected while those of Chinese companies will suffer. It is only going to hurt everyone,” it said.
“Promoting a China-free supply chain will inevitably result in a decline in China’s demand for US products and American companies loss of market share and revenue in China,” it said.
Two of the sources said similar messages were conveyed in meetings with staff of China’s embassy.
“It’s an outright ask by a foreign government,” one of the sources said, highlighting the implications for Fara, which requires persons acting on behalf of a foreign power or political party to disclose those relations to the Department of Justice.
A second source said the approach appeared geared at getting companies to delay the legislative process rather than block the bills entirely.
4. Joe Biden Should Cancel His Virtual Summit with China by Gordon Chang
Excerpts:
Xi, showing disdain for the United States and the international community, chose not to attend the G20 Rome Summit or COP26, the Glasgow climate conference. So if Xi was not interested in talking to Biden then, why should Biden be interested in talking to Xi now?
Biden seeking to meet with Xi Jinping bolsters Xi’s position at home. That is absolutely the last thing a beleaguered America should be doing.
“This virtual summit is ill-timed and sends all the wrong messages,” Stephen Yates of DC International Advisory told 1945. “There is nothing that Biden will ask for that Xi will deliver, and there is nothing that Xi will ask for that Biden should deliver.”
It’s time, therefore, to impose great costs on China, not delay action by arranging conversations that cannot produce favorable outcomes.
Biden, therefore, should call the meeting off, before even more damage is done.
Joe Biden Should Cancel His Virtual Summit with China
The two leaders have not met face-to-face since Biden took office. Instead, they have held two long phone calls, on February 10 and September 9. Not much is publicly known about either conversation although it is apparent that neither conversation accomplished much from America’s point of view.
Not much will be accomplished Monday either, at least according to the Biden administration. “This is not about seeking specific deliverables or outcomes,” said one “White House official” to CNBC. “This is about setting the terms of an effective competition where we are in the position to defend our values and interests and those of our allies and partners.”
After decades of intense American engagement of China, the White House comments sound unambitious.
Biden, hoping to fix boundaries, is setting a low bar for success. “We believe when such terms—or guardrails—are established, we can sustain a vigorous competition,” the official explained.
There are two fundamental misconceptions embedded in these Biden administration statements. First, the U.S. is not engaged in a “competition” with China. Second, talking is not the best way, at this point, in “guardrailing” the relationship.
On the first point, Beijing characterizes the nature of the U.S.-China relationship as “war,” as in “people’s war.” In May 2019, People’s Daily, the most authoritative publication in China, carried a piece declaring the relationship to be such.
Most Americans, including their president, have chosen not to see the Chinese regime’s hatred for their country. Those noticing are undoubtedly perplexed by the overheated rhetoric.
Why should Americans be concerned? The Communist Party, with its strident anti-Americanism, is establishing a justification to strike America.
As James Lilley, the late U.S. ambassador to Beijing, once said, the Chinese regime always telegraphs its punches.
China’s regime is already punching. It is, among other things, stealing hundreds of billions of dollars of U.S. intellectual property each year, backing Chinese fentanyl gangs, continuing to kill Americans by coronavirus, and using the U.S. banking system to become the world’s leading money launderer. Especially last year, the Communist Party fomented violence on American streets, an act of war.
“Intense competition requires intense diplomacy,”the administration official told CNBC. “As President Biden has made clear, he welcomes the stiff competition, but does not want conflict.”
Unfortunately, “competition” does not begin to describe the nature of the struggle between China and the United States. There is already “conflict,” “Unrestricted Warfare,” as Chinese analysts put it.
On the second point, setting boundaries for the People’s Republic would, at first glance, seem sensible. Yet every U.S. administration since Nixon’s has tried to do that, and all of them have failed, miserably.
American presidents have talked to their counterparts in China for decades, and while they talked the regime continued its unrelenting assault on America. Chinese leaders are ruthlessly pragmatic. They see the American desire to discuss as a sign of feebleness and therefore press the advantage.
Xi, showing disdain for the United States and the international community, chose not to attend the G20 Rome Summit or COP26, the Glasgow climate conference. So if Xi was not interested in talking to Biden then, why should Biden be interested in talking to Xi now?
Biden seeking to meet with Xi Jinping bolsters Xi’s position at home. That is absolutely the last thing a beleaguered America should be doing.
“This virtual summit is ill-timed and sends all the wrong messages,” Stephen Yates of DC International Advisory told 1945. “There is nothing that Biden will ask for that Xi will deliver, and there is nothing that Xi will ask for that Biden should deliver.”
It’s time, therefore, to impose great costs on China, not delay action by arranging conversations that cannot produce favorable outcomes.
Biden, therefore, should call the meeting off, before even more damage is done.
Now a 1945 Contributing Editor, Gordon G. Chang is the author of The Coming Collapse of China and The Great U.S.-China Tech War. Follow him on Twitter @GordonGChang.
5. Abandoned Afghan Commandos may turn to terror outfits if not evacuated: Ex-US official
This is not helpful. Using this "threat" as a rationale to evacuate Afghan commandos could blow up in our faces. People may now argue if they are inclined to join terrorist organizations they should not be allowed to enter the US. There will likely be resistance to evacuating them. People may begin to believe they cannot be trusted and should not be able to pass the vetting process. And no longer will the word of US veterans in the vetting process be acceptable. And those who have been evacuated might now not be trusted because there will not be the permenent perception that these commandos are merecency and vulnerbale to working for the highest bidder and therefore will be suspected of possibly conribuing to terrorism in the US.
Abandoned Afghan Commandos may turn to terror outfits if not evacuated: Ex-US official
Last Updated: 13th November, 2021 21:28 IST
Abandoned Afghan Commandos May Turn To Terror Outfits If Not Evacuated: Ex-US Official
Glenn Pangelinan has warned that if Washington does not evacuate thousands of Afghan commandos from Afghanistan, they will turn to ISIS-K: Ex US Navy Official.
Written By
Image: AP
Former US Navy Special Warfare Intelligence Chief Glenn Pangelinan has warned that if Washington does not evacuate thousands of Afghan commandos from Afghanistan, they will turn to ISIS-K. During the Fox News interview, the former Navy intelligence chief stated unequivocally that if Afghan commandos realise they will not be evacuated, they may sell their skills to Daesh or the Taliban. Pango, a Guam native, recently returned from an island fact-finding mission to learn how the US territory could become a safe haven for thousands of Afghan allies and their families who have yet to be evacuated from the country.
While many senior Afghan military officers were able to flee Kabul, less senior non-commissioned officers were left behind. The Taliban's hunter squads are on the lookout for the commandos and torturing those they find. Because the commandos were under Afghan command, they were forced to rely on humanitarian parole applications to be evacuated. According to media reports, some commandos may be coerced into joining the Taliban's ranks in the future. Perhaps that is their only option for saving their families. If this occurs, a terrorist organisation will have access to highly trained special operations forces. Forces that understand how the US military operates.
Pangelinan spoke after Republican Mike Waltz urged Congress to pass legislation that would make it easier for the Biden administration to evacuate the vetted allies. Waltz stated that these commandos have received extensive training in signal intelligence, human intelligence, and operations. We're well aware that the Taliban are on the lookout for them. They're attempting to coerce them into handing over that information so that they can use it and gain a better understanding of how we work, according to Fox News.
US evacuated 1,000 Afghan commandos in August
This was preceded by a New York Times investigation, which revealed that in August, the US staged a covert operation in Afghanistan to evacuate hundreds of American nationals and at least 1,000 allied Afghan commandos from the country via a secret Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) compound outside Kabul. The inquiry claimed that Eagle Base, which housed the Salt Pit prison until 2004, was used between August 15 and 27 to assist with evacuation efforts following the Taliban's takeover of power in Afghanistan on August 15. The Pentagon confirmed on August 30 that America's nearly two-decade presence in Afghanistan came to an end when the final Boeing C-17 aircraft took off from Kabul's Hamid Karzai International Airport. The US troop withdrawal occurred in the midst of the Taliban's rapid offensive in Afghanistan, which resulted in the militant group seizing power in the country on August 15 after taking over the capital Kabul without a fight.
(With inputs from Agencies)
Image: AP
6. Opinion | The Taliban Is Vulnerable. Here’s How to Seize the Moment
Interesting argument. Note that Robert Komer is invoked.
Excerpts:
But strangely, though the Taliban has inflicted more damage to our countries’ national interests than either Iran or the USSR, I haven’t seen any list of conditions that might be attached to assistance or the legitimacy that would be conferred by an E.U. mission, nor a discussion of timelines and benchmarks for negotiations to expand the government beyond the ranks of Taliban commanders. I have not heard any intention to field monitoring missions to ensure compliance with such conditions, or to impose consequences in case of failure to do so.
Humanitarian assistance should be tailored to serve humanitarian purposes exclusively. And whatever rights, values and national interests the West sought to establish and protect in Afghanistan should now be required from the Taliban in return for saving them from themselves. Independent verification measures should be part of any agreement, and should be rigorously enforced.
Let’s not let a squabbling gang of war criminals maneuver us into begging them to let us bail them out — and sacrificing the Afghan people yet again, as well as the labor and lives of our own citizens, in the process.
Opinion | The Taliban Is Vulnerable. Here’s How to Seize the Moment
Opinion by SARAH CHAYES
Politico · by On Corruption in America—And What Is at Stake
Magazine
Opinion | The Taliban Is Vulnerable. Here’s How to Seize the Moment
The Taliban is tottering; Afghanistan is in chaos. This offers the West unprecedented leverage over a foe it couldn’t beat on the battlefield.
A Taliban soldier stands guard at the gate of Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan in September 2021. | AP Photo/Wali Sabawoon
Opinion by SARAH CHAYES
11/13/2021 07:01 AM EST
Sarah Chayes lived and worked in Afghanistan from 2001-2011 and is the author, most recently, of .
You can win the war but lose the peace. That’s a lesson Americans have been taught (not for the first time) by the conflict in Afghanistan. It’s a lesson the Taliban is being taught today. With no cash reserves and no idea how to govern, with the country’s spectacular fruit crops rotting in transport trucks lined up at closed borders, and the population struggling just to survive, Taliban rule is already tottering. That comedown gives the U.S. and its former coalition partners leverage over the group — leverage of a kind we have never enjoyed before.
I know what it looks like to lose the peace. For the best part of a decade, I watched us do it, squandering a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for that beleaguered country. I saw the disintegration from the Afghan perspective, living as I did amongst ordinary people in the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar. I arrived in 2001 as a reporter for National Public Radio, then stayed, launching a manufacturing cooperative that made fragrant body-care products from the region’s legendary horticulture. By 2010, I was on the staff of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, offering Adm. Mike Mullen an on-the-ground view he was not getting otherwise.
Today, that on-the-ground view is at odds with the idea of an unstoppable Taliban that swept the U.S. and its Western allies out of the country in a matter of weeks.
“They come door to door, for something to eat,” says the woman I’ve reached via Skype on her cellphone. A widow, she worked in my Kandahar cooperative, cracking almonds by the gunnysack and adding vegetable dyes to our soaps and molding them to look like glossy river-worn cobbles. She’s talking about Taliban fighters, who comb through her neighborhood, begging. “I tell them, ‘Look around, man! You think I’ve got something to give you?’”
Others I’ve reached say some of these unemployed fighters are joining ISIS-K, lured by the same combination of pay and the promise of good things to come if they’re “martyred” that the Taliban served up to recruit young men. “War for a paycheck,” said a former police officer. Last month, right there in the Taliban’s original stronghold, an explosion a few blocks away from our workshop killed nearly 50 people at Friday prayers. ISIS-K claimed the butchery.
So now it’s the Taliban who find themselves mired in a counterinsurgency.
Internally, Afghanistan’s new rulers are locked in a fight over who gets which position in their non-functioning government, according to another Kandahar friend, Pashtoon Atif, a former minister who fled the country but is in constant touch with contacts close to power in Kabul.
And what are the plum jobs within this embryonic Islamic Emirate? Are ideological moderates and hardliners, as we’ve heard them called, quarreling over the ministry of Religious Affairs?
“Are you kidding?” scoffs Atif. “They want the positions where there’s money — like the Finance Ministry. These aren’t the Taliban of the 1990s. They’ve watched their cousins and former neighbors rake in millions for the past 20 years. They want some of that.” All of his interlocutors, says Atif, both pro- and anti-Taliban, doubt the regime will last a year.
For the 40 million or so Afghans who were unable to crowd onto those planes taking off in the wake of Kabul’s collapse, the result of this chaos is unspeakable. According to the United Nation’s World Food Program, as much as half the population, or more than 22 million people, won’t have enough to eat in the coming year. More than 675,000 are internally displaced. That’s as many people as live in my hometown of Boston.
And there is no sign that Afghanistan’s new rulers are taking steps to address the catastrophes their victory has wrought.
Heartless as it may sound, this state of affairs offers the West unprecedented leverage over a foe it could not beat on the battlefield. Adding to that leverage is the fact that the Taliban leadership includes at least one sanctioned terrorist, and several notorious narcotics kingpins.
U.S. and European leaders should not squander this unexpected advantage. They should not allow the Taliban to turn the Afghan population into hostages, brandishing their suffering to extract financial assistance and international legitimacy with no strings attached.
The dimensions of the looming crisis, as well as perhaps a lingering sense of guilt, make the pressure to do so almost irresistible. Especially for Europeans, the specter of a mass exodus of Afghan refugees, and the potentially explosive political repercussions at home, can contribute to the sort of panic-revved thinking that does not lend itself to good policy. Humanitarian agencies, motivated by concern for Afghans, but perhaps also their own bottom lines, are doubling down on the pressure for immediate action.
Washington and its NATO allies should resist it. Instead, they should use their leverage to attach conditions to the provision of any financial or humanitarian assistance, and exploit the Taliban’s desperation to enforce some of the terms of the 2020 Doha Agreement that the group promiscuously violated when it was winning the war.
Does the West want the Taliban to refrain from trucking with international terrorism or trying to expand their Islamic Emirate beyond Afghanistan’s borders? Do we think an Afghan government that represents the spectrum of people who make up the nation would be more stable than one run by a narrow — and largely detested — authoritarian faction? Do we want the half of the population that has two X chromosomes to enjoy comparable human rights to their male counterparts, such as the right to learn, teach, or practice medicine? Do we believe Afghans deserve freedom of motion and expression?
Those are some of the conditions the West can and should place on any assistance to its erstwhile enemy.
Using this kind of leverage might seem like an obvious diplomatic tool, but oddly, the United States has never been skillful at wielding it. In his landmark 1973 study of the Vietnam War, Robert W. Komer examines what he calls a “fixed feature of U.S. relations with other countries:” a “notable reluctance” to pressure client governments — through conditions on military and civilian assistance, for example — to conform to minimum standards of behavior toward their citizens. The government of Vietnam, he judges, “used its weakness as leverage on us far more effectively than we used our strength to lever it.”
Komer might as well have been writing about Afghanistan. When then-General David Petraeus was in command of international troops in 2010, I pleaded with him to find ways of imposing consequences on senior Afghan army officers — and even on civilian leaders with whom he worked — if they were caught perpetrating serious acts of corruption. Failing to do so, I warned him, would lose the war.
I don’t think we have much leverage, Petraeus countered. I could feel my eyes widening. Really? American taxpayers were underwriting the salaries of every Afghan soldier and officer — not to mention those of the president, and his personal staff, and hundreds of other Afghan officials. International forces contracted with companies run by the sons and cousins of members of the government. Westerners’ visible presence side by side with corrupt officials allowed them to lord it over their communities. No leverage?
(When called for comment, Petraeus told POLITICO he did indeed believe in leverage and found ways to remove Afghan commanders for corruption on numerous occasions.)
The European Union was no more sophisticated in dealing with Afghan counterparts back then. And now it is apparently on the verge of opening a diplomatic mission in Kabul — in effect, recognizing the Taliban government that violates its every stated value.
Western countries should not move too fast. Just because we’ve failed to use our leverage in the past doesn’t mean we shouldn’t start now.
One way of thinking about the fraught matter of placing conditions on humanitarian assistance is to consider any offer to provide it as the equivalent of a treaty with a hostile foreign power. The nuclear deals with the USSR and Iran included not only conditions, but intrusive verification procedures. That’s the model that should be applied here.
But strangely, though the Taliban has inflicted more damage to our countries’ national interests than either Iran or the USSR, I haven’t seen any list of conditions that might be attached to assistance or the legitimacy that would be conferred by an E.U. mission, nor a discussion of timelines and benchmarks for negotiations to expand the government beyond the ranks of Taliban commanders. I have not heard any intention to field monitoring missions to ensure compliance with such conditions, or to impose consequences in case of failure to do so.
Humanitarian assistance should be tailored to serve humanitarian purposes exclusively. And whatever rights, values and national interests the West sought to establish and protect in Afghanistan should now be required from the Taliban in return for saving them from themselves. Independent verification measures should be part of any agreement, and should be rigorously enforced.
Let’s not let a squabbling gang of war criminals maneuver us into begging them to let us bail them out — and sacrificing the Afghan people yet again, as well as the labor and lives of our own citizens, in the process.
Politico · by On Corruption in America—And What Is at Stake
7. Hackers sent spam emails from FBI accounts, agency confirms
Hackers sent spam emails from FBI accounts, agency confirms
NPR · by Catherine Whelan · November 13, 2021
The FBI acknowledges that fake emails came from FBI email addresses. Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is acknowledging that hackers compromised its email servers on Saturday and sent spam messages.
The fake emails appeared to be from a legitimate FBI email address ending in @ic.fbi.gov, the FBI said in a statement. The agency described it as an "ongoing situation." The hardware impacted by the incident "was taken offline quickly upon discovery of the issue," the FBI said.
The spam emails went to 100,000 people, according to NBC News, and warned recipients of a cyberattack on their systems. The FBI and Department of Homeland Security routinely send legitimate emails to companies warning them about cyber threats. This is the first known instance of hackers using that same system to send spam messages to a large group of people, NBC reports.
The Spamhaus Project, a threat-tracking organization, posted on Twitter what it said was a copy of one such email. It showed a subject line of "Urgent: Threat actor in systems" and appeared to end with a sign-off from the Department of Homeland Security.
Both the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency are aware of the incident, the FBI statement said.
NPR · by Catherine Whelan · November 13, 2021
8. The paradox of American power: Even when we're losing, we're winning
I don't always agree with O'Hanlon (especially on Korean and OPCON transition) but I do here.
Excerpts:
A more serious answer would however have to examine our structural strengths – the nation’s size and economic fundamentals, its geography within generally safe North American borders (yet close enough to east Asia and western Europe to build strong military alliances with partners in those regions), our democratic model of government (however flawed). It would appear that we are powerful and resilient enough to be able to absorb numerous setbacks.
It also helps greatly that, at least beyond North America (more or less), we have not been a hyper-expansionist power in our history. Other countries may at times dislike us but they tend not to fear us – and in many cases, they find it advantageous to be allied with the United States.
The paradox of American power: Even when we're losing, we're winning
USA Today · by Michael O'Hanlon | Opinion columnist
Despite our inefficiencies in wielding it, our system of alliances and global leadership is strong enough to withstand setbacks without crumbling.
Show Caption
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Afghan economy crumbles amid insecurity
The World Food Program (WFP) has begun distributing money to the poor in Afghanistan as economy struggles
AP
With the American and allied withdrawal from Afghanistan, resulting in what was recently described by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley as a “strategic failure,” we have now again witnessed the post-World War II paradox of U.S. foreign policy: We often fail to win wars, yet at the same time we sustain the most successful grand strategy of any power in the history of the planet.
In 1950, after practically green-lighting a North Korean invasion of South Korea by declaring the latter outside our perimeter of strategic concern, the United States put together a military coalition that was twice driven back below the 38th parallel, twice losing Seoul in the process – once at the hands of North Korean troops and once due to Chinese intervention.
Oscillating success of military ventures
Viewing the whole thing together, in the four big conflicts of Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, it would appear that we created expensive stalemates in Korea and Iraq, and failed in our missions in Vietnam and Afghanistan. Put crudely, that looks like a record of 0-2-2. Or, if we view the Iraq experience from 1990 to the present as two separate wars, perhaps 1-2-2. This despite having the world’s best military throughout that entire post-1945 period, with very brave and dedicated troops.
Yet the United States still leads a coalition of allies collectively wielding two-thirds of all global GDP, and accounting for two-thirds of all worldwide defense spending. There has been no great-power war on the planet since at least 1953 (depending on how one defines the Korean War). How could we be so successful while failing so miserably so often?
Does God favor the United States?
A more serious answer would however have to examine our structural strengths – the nation’s size and economic fundamentals, its geography within generally safe North American borders (yet close enough to east Asia and western Europe to build strong military alliances with partners in those regions), our democratic model of government (however flawed). It would appear that we are powerful and resilient enough to be able to absorb numerous setbacks.
It also helps greatly that, at least beyond North America (more or less), we have not been a hyper-expansionist power in our history. Other countries may at times dislike us but they tend not to fear us – and in many cases, they find it advantageous to be allied with the United States.
The Iraq war did not produce a shining example of Arab democracy – but things may be looking up ever so slightly there, and at least the murderous Hussein family is no longer in charge, plotting its next dastardly act (don’t forget that behind Saddam there were his now-deceased sons Uday and Qusay).
That brings us to Afghanistan, and Milley’s purported “strategic failure.” At one level, the chairman’s bluntness is commendable, as is his acknowledgement that we (all of us) must learn lessons from that difficult and ultimately unsuccessful saga. It is true that we failed to build up a resilient democratic Afghan state, even after two decades of effort.
But at another level, perhaps there is even a silver lining in Afghanistan – beyond the important fact that we did not again suffer a big terrorist attack emanating from Afghan soil after 9/11. The Taliban seem not to want another fight with us. They helped us evacuate some 120,000 westerners in August, and are not engaging in systemic retaliatory bloodbaths against westerners or even our former Afghan partners despite being firmly ensconced in power. It is doubtful they will choose to join hands with al-Qaida in planning new attacks against the West (though the Biden administration will have to work hard to be sure). Beyond wanting to avoid military confrontation with the United States, they desire diplomatic recognition, access to Afghanistan’s bank accounts abroad, and some degree of future assistance as well.
None of this will produce the government or society we would have wanted in Afghanistan, and none of it will redeems President Joe Biden’s decision to pull out so abruptly this year. But together these factors provide considerable potential leverage in trying to help forge a system of governance in Afghanistan that we can live with.
The paradox of American power is that, while we may not be that good at wielding it, the system of alliances and global leadership itself is so well conceived that it can absorb a number of blows without crumbling. None of this is to excuse complacency about future challenges and threats. But we should address them with a certain underlying confidence about the strength of our position.
USA Today · by Michael O'Hanlon | Opinion columnist
9. 'Inconceivable' Australia would not join U.S. to defend Taiwan - Australian defence minister
In response to Chinese threats and propaganda.
'Inconceivable' Australia would not join U.S. to defend Taiwan - Australian defence minister
1/2
Soldiers march to position during an anti-invasion drill on the beach during the annual Han Kuang military drill in Tainan, Taiwan, September 14, 2021. REUTERS/Ann Wang/File Photo
MELBOURNE, Nov 13 (Reuters) - It would be "inconceivable" for Australia not to join the United States should Washington take action to defend Taiwan, Australian Defence Minister Peter Dutton said on Saturday.
On Wednesday, U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said the United States and its allies would take unspecified "action" if China were to use force to alter the status quo over Taiwan.
"It would be inconceivable that we wouldn't support the U.S. in an action if the U.S. chose to take that action," Dutton told The Australian newspaper in an interview.
"And, again, I think we should be very frank and honest about that, look at all of the facts and circumstances without pre-committing, and maybe there are circumstances where we wouldn't take up that option, (but) I can't conceive of those circumstances."
China's military said on Tuesday it conducted a combat readiness patrol in the direction of the Taiwan Strait, after its Defence Ministry condemned a visit by a U.S. congressional delegation to Taiwan, the democratically governed island claimed by Beijing.
"(China's) been very clear about their intent to go into Taiwan and we need to make sure that there is a high level of preparedness, a greater sense of deterrence by our capability, and that is how I think we put our country in a position of strength," Dutton told the newspaper.
China has not ruled out using force to bring Taiwan under its control, but has played down the notion that war is imminent.
Reporting by Lidia Kelly; Editing by Lincoln Feast.
10. Psychologists have found that triggering large prediction errors helps to change false beliefs
Interesting research. If the theory is in fact true how could this be operationalized to help debunk disinformation and conspiracy theories? Could we use this research to influence better critical thought?
Psychologists have found that triggering large prediction errors helps to change false beliefs
New research in Psychological Science provides evidence that belief updating is proportional to the magnitude of prediction error. In other words, people are more likely to update their beliefs after learning that there is a large gap between what they (falsely) thought was true and what is in fact true, but are relatively less likely to update their beliefs when the gap is small. The findings suggest that the element of surprise could play a role in reducing the spread of misinformation.
“Designing and testing belief change strategies is a research direction I became interested in after several large-scale misinformation campaigns were deployed around the world, with long-term disastrous consequences. In our work, my collaborators and I are looking for tools policy makers can use to fight misinformation by changing false beliefs in vulnerable communities,” explained Madalina Vlasceanu, a postdoctoral research fellow at New York University and the corresponding author of the new study.
In two experiments, which included 1,777 individuals in total, the researchers exposed participants to statistical evidence about ideologically-neutral topics (such as shark attacks) and ideologically-charged topics (such as gun control and abortion.) The participants first viewed a set of 36 statements and were asked to indicate the degree to which they believed each statement was accurate.
The participants were then randomly assigned to one of two conditions: In the experimental condition, the participants made predictions about the evidence associated with those statements and were then immediately given the correct answer. In the control condition, the participants were presented with the evidence alone. Finally, participants in both groups were instructed to rate the believability of the initial 36 statements again.
The researchers found that participants who engaged in predictions were more likely to update their beliefs, especially if they had made large errors, compared to those who were just presented with evidence. These effects were similar for both Democrats and Republicans, and for ideologically-neutral and ideologically-charged topics.
“Our minds constantly make predictions about the future. In this study, we used this fundamental property of the cognitive system to change people’s false beliefs by presenting relevant evidence in a prediction-then-feedback format,” Vlasceanu explained.
“For example, to change someone’s false belief that ‘The US justice system is fair to racial minorities,’ you should first ask them to predict ‘How many times is an African American more likely to be imprisoned compared to a White American for a similar crime?’ After the guess, you should give them the correct answer, in this case, ‘An African American is 5 times more likely to be imprisoned compared to a White American for a similar crime.'”
“If the difference between the person’s prediction and the correct answer is significant, our research shows the person is likely to update their original belief by incorporating the new information received,” Vlasceanu told PsyPost. “What’s more, the degree to which they will update their belief is a function of the size of their error. In other words, someone who predicted ‘twice as likely’ will update their belief more than someone who predicted ‘four times as likely.'”
As far as limitations go, Vlasceanu noted that “this belief change intervention was tested in a controlled, lab environment. In future work we are interested in assessing its impact in more ecologically valid contexts.”
11. This Is The State Where The Most People Serve In The Military
Spoiler alert: I would not have guessed it was Hawaii.
This Is The State Where The Most People Serve In The Military – 24/7 Wall St.
247wallst.com · by Douglas A. McIntyre November 13, 2021 11:16 am
Services
This Is The State Where The Most People Serve In The Military
According to the Council On Foreign Relations, the U.S. military has 1.3 million active-duty personnel. That is down from 1.9 million in 1973. Of the current figure, 35% are in the Army, 24% in the Navy, and 24% in the Air Force.
India’s military is about the same size as America’s. Russia’s is larger at 1.5 million. China has the largest military at 2.8 million.
The number of military personnel varies widely by state. Much of this is due to the fact that huge military bases may house tens of thousands of people.
To determine the state that has the most active-duty military personnel, 24/7 Wall St. used military personnel data from the Department of Defense, current as of June 2021 and adjusted per 100,000 total state population. We based our ranking on active-duty personnel only — men and women serving in either the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, or Coast Guard on a full-time basis.
By our methodology, The number of active-duty service members is very different from state to state. In some, there are fewer than 10 service members per 100,000 residents. In others, there are over 1,000 per 100,000.
These same data show that states with high concentrations of military members tend to have a handful of very large bases with tens of thousands of service members. These troops, along with their spouses, children, and other dependent relatives, make up a large share of the populations in these areas and often serve the backbone of local economies.
The state with the most people serving in the military is Hawaii. Here are the details:
> Active-duty personnel: 3,002.2 per 100,000 people (total: 42,508)
> Largest base: Schofield Barracks (15,057 active duty personnel)
> Per capita defense spending: $5,280 (3rd highest)
Methodology: To determine the state that has the most active-duty military personnel, 24/7 Wall St. used military personnel data from the Department of Defense, current as of June 2021 and adjusted per 100,000 total state population. We based our decision on active-duty personnel only — men and women serving in either the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, or Coast Guard on a full-time basis.
Data on the largest base by personnel in each state came from the “2019 Demographics Report,” compiled by Defense Department contractor Military OneSource. Total base personnel counts only include servicemen and servicewomen.
Per capita Department of Defense spending figures by state came from the Office of Local Defense Community Cooperation and are for fiscal 2019, the most recent available year.
Total state population is one-year estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2019 American Community Survey.
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247wallst.com · by Douglas A. McIntyre November 13, 2021 11:16 am
12. The Truth Shall Make You Free: Catholicism and the CIA - Los Angeles Review of Books
Hmmm.....
Excerpts:
When the CIA was founded in 1947, Catholicism was still out of the mainstream, even foreign: it was, as Graziano shows, something to be studied. But in an irony that Wild Bill Donovan would relish, the CIA has had so many Catholic (or once Catholic) directors since the 1970s — William Casey, Leon Panetta, Michael Hayden, and John Brennan — that today it is sometimes called the “Catholic Intelligence Agency.”
More broadly, in the last 25 years, even as its percentage of the population has changed little, Catholicism has become much more central to American public life. But the Catholicism in ascendancy is no longer JFK and Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi’s old-fashioned Northeastern urban and ethnic variety. Instead, a hard-edged, reactionary, pre–Vatican II strain has achieved unprecedented influence and power through the right-wing bishops appointed by Popes John Paul II and Benedict; through political figures like Paul Ryan, Sam Brownback, Newt Gingrich, and Steve Bannon; and, most importantly, through their outright majority on the Supreme Court (John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett). Leftist, social-justice Catholics like Agee no longer pose any danger to the CIA.
The recent threats have come and likely will come from the top — from people who embody the post-Trump Trumpist movement’s imperviousness to facts, evidence, and analysis. These, of course, are the very things that the Agency — with the Biblical quote “Ye shall know the truth and the truth will make you free” carved into the wall at its headquarters, only yards from the Memorial Wall — claims to venerate.
The Truth Shall Make You Free: Catholicism and the CIA - Los Angeles Review of Books
NOVEMBER 13, 2021
ON HIS FIRST day in office, the newly inaugurated President Donald Trump came to the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency to give what most mainstream news outlets described as an “unconventional” speech, one intended to reassure the spy agency of his support but that “veered off course to attack the ‘dishonest media.’”
Some CIA staff in the audience feasted on Trump’s red meat. Others, though, complained the speech was inappropriate given its venue: in front of the CIA Memorial Wall, with its stars representing 137 officers killed in the line of duty. Former Director of Central Intelligence John Brennan issued a statement saying that he was “deeply saddened and angered at Trump’s despicable display of self-aggrandizement.”
What was also notable was the almost universally reverent tone used to describe this wall: it is a “shrine,” a “sanctuary” commemorating those who “sacrificed” for the nation, a place to which one makes a “pilgrimage.” By crapping on this sanctimony, Trump performed (if only inadvertently) the service of highlighting how the mainstream news media is willing to extend its reverence for the military to spies as well.
The intrusion of sanctified rhetoric into discussions of espionage might seem jarring. But as two recent books on the CIA show, religion — in particular, Roman Catholicism — colored the Agency from its earliest days to its greatest crisis, the spectacular 1970s revelations that it had tricked and lied to the public.
In his Errand into the Wilderness of Mirrors, Michael Graziano goes back to the CIA’s predecessor agency, the World War II–era Office of Strategic Services, to look at how Catholicism “became the model through which the intelligence community could understand and manipulate other world religions,” and thus how its flawed understanding of Catholicism led to some of its greatest debacles, including the failure to see the rise of Islamic fundamentalism.
Jonathan Stevenson, on the other hand, focuses not on the institution but on a person: the Agency’s most reviled turncoat, Philip Agee, whose faith in part spurred him to repudiate his former employer and, for decades, crusade against US foreign policy and seek to destroy the CIA. Taken as two prongs of a thesis, these books argue that an overly simple conception of Catholicism, later taken to be congruent with all religions, led to many of the Agency’s blunders; while a deeply felt, liberation theology–influenced Catholicism brought about the worst damage to its public image and, in some cases, even its operations.
It wasn’t that the Agency itself was a redoubt of Catholicism, even though its founder, Office of Strategic Services (OSS) Director “Wild Bill” Donovan, was an Irish Catholic from Buffalo. Quite the opposite: Ivy League WASPs dominated the early Agency, while the older FBI was the middle- and working-class Catholic half of the intelligence dyad. The FBI resented how aristocratic CIA officers condescended to the “Fordham Catholics” of J. Edgar Hoover’s agency.
Instead, Graziano argues, the CIA’s early approach to intelligence-gathering drew upon a burgeoning scholarly field of the 1940s and 1950s: the academic and anthropological study of “world religions,” which was developing symbiotically with the area studies that American universities and foundations were underwriting to prepare the United States for world leadership. The OSS was full of academics such as Yale’s Norman Holmes Pearson (whose biography I am currently writing) and the Harvard Americanist Perry Miller, whose 1956 study of the Puritans, Errand into the Wilderness, lends Graziano’s book its title.
The first such institution to be studied was the Vatican itself, which was, in Graziano’s words, “foreign enough to be worthy of study but familiar enough to be interpretable.” Operating under the cover of the deep persuasive power of the Church, the OSS mobilized European populations against their Nazi (and later Soviet) occupiers. The agency also collaborated with the Catholic International Press, through Belgian priest Felix Morlion, in what it called “Operation Pilgrim’s Progress.”
American spies sincerely and naïvely saw themselves in league with the priests because “American analysts often assumed that Catholic interests — and the Vatican’s more specifically — squared neatly with US aims.” In fact, once the Agency began encountering other world religions over the course of the Cold War — Shintoism in Japan, Buddhism in Southeast Asia, and especially Islam in Iran — it took for granted that “the United States and the world’s religions [were] natural allies” in the struggle against atheistic communism. They were not always right, especially in Iran, where they suspected communism, not Islam, was the force trying to topple the Shah.
Central to the CIA’s use of Catholicism was a man named Tom Dooley. Though the name is largely obscure today, in 1961 he placed third in Gallup’s “Most Esteemed” man in the world poll. Dooley was a Navy doctor who provided care for South Vietnamese refugees fleeing the chaos after the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. His 1956 best seller Deliver Us from Evil, as well as countless articles and media appearances afterward, “justified American intervention in Vietnam and presented Vietnamese Catholics as sympathetic subjects.” He was a central-casting missionary, and the persecuted Vietnamese were precisely the kinds of people Christ charged Catholics to serve. But he was writing CIA-sponsored propaganda to build domestic support for Vietnam, and his stories weren’t “strictly speaking, true.”
One of the young men Dooley inspired to help was young Philip Agee of Tampa, Florida, and the University of Notre Dame, whose saga Jonathan Stevenson recounts in A Drop of Treason. After serving in the Air Force from 1957 to 1960, Agee joined the CIA, where he was posted to Ecuador, Uruguay, and Mexico City. In Uruguay in 1965, he overheard, from the next room, the torture of communist leader Oscar Bonaudi, who had been sucked up in a joint CIA–Montevideo Police Department operation called AVENGEFUL. This unpleasant experience made him doubt American intentions abroad and especially the justice of its collaboration with repressive governments.
But the Tlatelolco student massacre in Mexico City in 1968, in which he felt the CIA was complicit, was his Damascene moment. Agee had begun to immerse himself in the leftist Catholic liberation theology movement sweeping Latin America: “I became the servant of the capitalism I rejected. I became one of its secret policemen. The CIA, after all, is nothing more than the secret police of American capitalism.”
Agee didn’t just quit. He moved to Cuba for a time to do “research,” and then, from his residence in the United Kingdom, wrote and published Inside the Company (1975), one of the first books by a former officer to air the CIA’s dirty laundry. But, controversially, he went further: in the book, Agee actually revealed the names of hundreds of active CIA officers and agents. “One way to neutralize the CIA’s support to repression,” he wrote at the time, “is to expose its officers so that their presence in foreign countries becomes untenable.”
Untenable, certainly; perilous, quite likely. While the CIA was “determined to maintain a façade of institutional cool” in the face of Agee’s revelations, individual CIA figures and other writers savaged him for putting his former colleagues in what they claimed was mortal danger. Even Barbara Bush called Agee a potential accessory to murder; in response, Agee sued Bush and received a public apology. For the rest of his life, from his home in Hamburg, Germany, Agee taught and wrote against American interventionism, often traveling on a Nicaraguan passport, as the United States had revoked his.
Stevenson’s book is an equivocal portrait of Agee, who comes across as a zealot with a worrisome willingness to cross the line between denunciation of the United States and collaboration with its adversaries. He casts doubt on, but does not dismiss entirely, the widespread suspicion that Agee actually worked as a Soviet spy. Stevenson tips his hand a bit when he refers to Agee’s work in Cuba as his “original sin,” but his book makes it clear that the CIA has been the much greater sinner, even if its sins were merely looking the other way while its partners did the bloody work. Writing from the perspective of the Trump years, Stevenson reservedly approves of the kind of “principled and acceptable rejection of the US government,” the “ruthless candor” that Agee embodied, while still entirely rejecting Agee’s unmasking of his colleagues.
In 1954, President Eisenhower asked his national security team to find a “Joan of Arc” for Vietnam — someone who could unite the country against communism by appealing to spirituality and religion. The CIA and the nation, though, seem to have found their own Joan in Agee — not the Joan who united her people against a foreign invader but the implacable Joan driven by “ruthless candor” and a compulsion to self-sacrifice in service of God’s will. Perhaps if the Agency had been more open to such candor in its early years, less willing to allow American exceptionalism to occlude the reality of other nations and religions and peoples, it would not have produced an Agee who would feel compelled to expose its sins to the world.
When the CIA was founded in 1947, Catholicism was still out of the mainstream, even foreign: it was, as Graziano shows, something to be studied. But in an irony that Wild Bill Donovan would relish, the CIA has had so many Catholic (or once Catholic) directors since the 1970s — William Casey, Leon Panetta, Michael Hayden, and John Brennan — that today it is sometimes called the “Catholic Intelligence Agency.”
More broadly, in the last 25 years, even as its percentage of the population has changed little, Catholicism has become much more central to American public life. But the Catholicism in ascendancy is no longer JFK and Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi’s old-fashioned Northeastern urban and ethnic variety. Instead, a hard-edged, reactionary, pre–Vatican II strain has achieved unprecedented influence and power through the right-wing bishops appointed by Popes John Paul II and Benedict; through political figures like Paul Ryan, Sam Brownback, Newt Gingrich, and Steve Bannon; and, most importantly, through their outright majority on the Supreme Court (John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett). Leftist, social-justice Catholics like Agee no longer pose any danger to the CIA.
The recent threats have come and likely will come from the top — from people who embody the post-Trump Trumpist movement’s imperviousness to facts, evidence, and analysis. These, of course, are the very things that the Agency — with the Biblical quote “Ye shall know the truth and the truth will make you free” carved into the wall at its headquarters, only yards from the Memorial Wall — claims to venerate.
¤
13. Inside the clandestine rebellion against Myanmar’s junta
Resistance. Is anyone from the outside supporting it?
Inside the clandestine rebellion against Myanmar’s junta
Reuters · by POPPY MCPHERSON and SHOON NAING
The knife that carved through Gue Gue’s abdomen wasn’t exactly meant for pulling out her inflamed appendix. But it was the only one available in the sweltering jungle clinic, a bumpy ride over mountainous terrain from her guerrilla training camp.
There was no option for general anesthesia to put her under, so Gue Gue was conscious for the operation. The former tour guide, a stylish 26-year-old who listed her interests on Facebook as “Traveling, Adaptive Hiking, Dance, Writing, Gymnastics, Fashion Photography, Listening to Music, and Reading,” tried to keep her mind focused on all the work she had yet to do and not the surgery. “They were cutting the muscle like we are chopping pork,” said a friend who was there.
Gue Gue had no regrets, she said later, except about the jagged red mark left behind. “I really don’t want any scars!” she said, laughing. “After the revolution, I’ll go and remove my scar with a laser.”
Only a few weeks earlier, on an April evening, Gue Gue had slipped out of her family home in Mandalay, an ancient royal city careening into the 21st century, with shiny new malls, snappily dressed students and hipster cafes. Carrying a single change of clothes, she left behind the home where she had lived with her parents as the baby, the youngest daughter, well-loved and comfortable.
Gue Gue once listed her interests on Facebook as “Traveling, Adaptive Hiking, Dance, Writing, Gymnastics, Fashion Photography, Listening to Music, and Reading.” Source: via Facebook
She was going to fight the junta, and not just with words.
Since Myanmar’s military seized power in a coup on Feb. 1, toppling the civilian government, Gue Gue had seen many of her peers killed by troops on the streets of her hometown as they chanted democracy slogans. Hopes that the international community would respond to the military’s mounting brutality with practical action had fizzled. For her, and thousands like her, the only option was force.
“I have family. I have dreams. I have things that I want to achieve. I want to travel. I want to write. I want to study,” Gue Gue said a few weeks before her operation in the jungle, in the first of a series of interviews over several months. Two other people, and video and photo footage shared with Reuters, confirmed the outline and many of the details of her story.
Because she still hasn’t healed from her ad hoc surgery, she hasn’t yet been involved in any fighting. But she says she is ready. “I sacrificed all this and joined this training with only one ambition: that we must win.”
Two faces of the resistance
The men and women rebelling against Myanmar’s junta vow to be the last generation to live under the boot of the country’s military. This, they say, is the “final battle” to root out the army, which has been the most powerful institution in the country since it became an independent nation in 1948. The military has withstood popular uprisings and civil war for decades, including the mass uprising in 1988 that led to the emergence of Aung San Suu Kyi as a human rights icon.
It is a fight that has in a few short months made guerrilla fighters of university lecturers, day laborers, I.T. workers, students and artists and forced countless young men and women into a life on the run.
Some, like Gue Gue, who had never considered herself particularly political until the bloodbath on the streets in the wake of the coup, are in clandestine rebel training camps. Hundreds of armed outfits have popped up across the country, according to an October report by the International Crisis Group, many calling themselves People’s Defense Forces (PDFs). A famous poet formed one. Beauty queens and actresses who were wanted by the authorities for supporting the protests re-emerged on social media in areas controlled by armed groups, posting pictures with rifles slung over their shoulders.
Others, like a skinny 32-year-old librarian named Tayzar San, have been hiding in cities, organizing clandestine demonstrations, funneling money to striking workers and strategizing. A young man who once spent his spare time buried in books – as often Burmese romance novels as nonfiction political tracts – he now lives out of a backpack, moving from apartment to apartment to evade the authorities who have put a $5,600 bounty on his head. By September, he said, he hadn’t seen his wife and daughter in seven months.
The utterly changed worlds of Gue Gue and Tayzar San paint a portrait of sacrifice and resolve in a young Burmese generation who, unlike their parents, grew up in a world of smartphones and greater political freedoms. Many are willing to pay any price, including their lives, to overthrow a junta that they say threatens to take them back to a darker past.
Speaking in October, army chief and coup leader Min Aung Hlaing said the junta, which has vowed to hold elections within two years, was working on a five-point plan to reach a “true union based on democracy and federalism.” He said the leadership was working to “change the country peacefully.” In a message to Reuters responding to detailed questions, the junta’s “True News” information unit said, “We have no plan to answer meaningless questions.”
At stake is the fate of a country of 55 million people that once looked to be on its way to becoming Asia’s newest semi-democratic state, a nation on the crossroads of India and China rich with natural resources, considered a frontier market for foreign investors and a keystone in U.S-led efforts to counter Chinese power in Southeast Asia.
It is one of the bloodiest chapters yet in a decades-long struggle to shrug off a series of military dictators who have waged some of the world’s longest-running civil wars, displaced millions of people and consigned multiple generations to poverty and dashed dreams.
Since Myanmar, then Burma, won independence from colonial Britain seven decades ago, it has known less than 25 years of civilian governance. Successive juntas ruled the country from 1962 until 2011, when Gen. Than Shwe appeared to step back and hand limited powers to a civilian government.
It was a managed process that reserved vast political influence under the constitution for the military. Aung San Suu Kyi, who had been imprisoned in her home for 15 years, was freed to participate in elections and, in 2015, won them.
Myanmar’s army chief, Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, ousted the elected government in a coup in February. REUTERS/Stringer/File Photo
In the early hours of February 1, Aung San Suu Kyi and her leadership were arrested and a junta declared a direct return to military rule, sparking mass street protests. REUTERS/Soe Zeya Tun
In the years following, Suu Kyi drew criticism for standing by the military as they carried out what the United Nations termed a genocidal campaign against the Rohingya Muslim minority. Testifying in the Hague, where Myanmar faces charges at the International Criminal Court, she admitted that war crimes may have been committed but denied genocide, saying Rohingya had “exaggerated” the extent of abuses against them.
But her government made some steps toward weakening military power and attracting foreign investment. The Myanmar kyat became Asia’s best-performing currency, and the World Bank was predicting economic growth in the country despite the COVID-19 pandemic.
That all came to an end in the early hours of February 1, when Min Aung Hlaing had Suu Kyi and her leadership arrested and declared a direct return to military rule, sparking mass street protests.
More than 1,200 people are now dead after brutal crackdowns by junta troops, according to the rights group Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, or AAPP, which has been monitoring casualties. Hundreds have also been killed by the resistance, according to the junta and local media reports, with fledgling guerrilla outfits assassinating suspected informers and troops and bombing infrastructure of the regime. Towns and villages across the country, including the formerly peaceful central heartlands, have become battlegrounds between soldiers and resistance fighters.
A group of elected lawmakers was sworn into parliament, remotely, while on the run days after the coup, and a parallel civilian government was formed in April.
In an interview with Reuters in October, junta finance minister Aung Naing Oo said the army was “upholding peace and security despite attempts to escalate violence. … Our security forces have a job to do. They cannot sacrifice the safety of the majority for the violence and destruction of those who wish to destroy Myanmar.” He said the government was working well and “the worst is behind us… we will surely succeed as a united country.”
Longtime activists like Bo Kyi, a co-founder of the AAPP, believe the regime is ripe to be toppled. He spent seven years in prison for his role in the 1988 protests. Back then, there were no mobile phones, no social media or free local media outlets. People were arrested for handing out pamphlets. The uprising was brutally crushed, like every attempt to overthrow the military in its history.
But the new generation at the forefront of the uprising today has grown up in a different world, Bo Kyi said. They have creative ideas and sophisticated political understanding. They are trying to forge unity between the country’s myriad ethnic groups. Smartphones and internet access have made it harder for the military to hide its actions. On social media, acts of brutality go viral in minutes, although internet shutdowns and retaliation by troops on citizen journalists have reduced the quantity of footage getting out.
Nonetheless, citizens have filmed troops looting homes and businesses, taking potshots at protesters and dragging their bodies through the streets. They filmed the tiny body of one of the youngest victims, 6-year-old Khin Myo Chit, blood seeping through her Mickey Mouse shorts as she died in her father’s arms. For the first time, there have been hundreds of defections from the armed forces. Dozens of diplomats stationed at embassies across the world have refused to represent the junta, and it has been unable to gain representation at the U.N.
“All this did not happen before,” Bo Kyi said. “This can be the last fight of the people who have suffered for so long against the military.”
Others fear a descent into further bloodletting and all-out civil war. The People’s Defense Forces, a loose coalition of anti-coup armed groups with only a nascent overarching leadership structure and limited resources, are waging asymmetric warfare against a 300,000-strong military armed by China and Russia.
Smartphones and internet access have made it harder for the military to hide its actions. On social media, acts of brutality go viral in minutes, although internet shutdowns and retaliation by troops on citizen journalists have reduced the quantity of footage getting out. REUTERS/Stringer/File Photo
The librarian
On the morning of the coup, Tayzar San, seeing the internet had been shut down, went out and bought a radio. He was prepared. He had been reading the signs of political strife, and they augured badly. Several days earlier, he had asked in a Facebook post if the country was cursed.
“No matter what, we must overcome it all,” he wrote.
Born in 1988 in a remote village in Myanmar’s Sagaing Division, smack in the center of the country, Tayzar San grew up watching his father covertly listening to radio programs by foreign broadcasters, one of the only sources of reliable news, as the ruling military tightly controlled the local media. His father, a schoolteacher, had taken part in anti-junta protests as a young monk, and their home was filled with books about the country’s politics and history.
Tayzar San developed an early love for reading. His dream was to become a librarian, he said. But he went to study medicine at a university in Mandalay, the nearest major city.
A young man who once spent his spare time buried in books – as often Burmese romance novels as nonfiction political tracts – Tayzar San now lives out of a backpack, moving from apartment to apartment to evade the authorities. Source: via Facebook
He graduated with a medical degree three years into the military’s reforms. After university, he married Aye Aye Mon, a classmate with a thick black bob and glasses, drawn to her by their shared love of reading. They had a baby girl, Lone Ma Lay. Opportunities were open to him that would have been impossible for his parents’ generation. With friends in Mandalay, he opened a free library. As executive director, he hosted political talks and organized training for civil society groups on democratic institutions, federalism and the country’s complicated peace process.
The morning of Feb. 1, Tayzar San and his friends spontaneously converged on the library. They commiserated. Some wept. “We said we could not let this just happen. We have to do what we can,” he said.
They pulled together a statement from 53 civil society groups, most of them Mandalay-based, condemning the coup. The next day, doctors walked out of government-run hospitals, refusing to work under the military. It was the start of the civil disobedience movement, a country-wide refusal of hundreds of thousands of people to work for the military, from railway workers to immigration officials.
Three days after the coup, Tayzar San and his friends gathered outside the medical university holding signs reading “Protect democracy,” “People’s protest against military rule” and “Respect the people’s votes.” They dispersed quickly, but minutes later police grabbed four of the young men, Tayzar San’s close friends. They were later charged under three sections including a colonial-era law criminalizing causing “public alarm” and face several years in prison.
Three days after the coup, Tayzar San and his friends gathered outside the medical university in Mandalay holding signs protesting the coup. REUTERS/Stringer
Their defiance helped set off a wave of protests across the country.
Tayzar San realized he had to split up from his family, in case the military went after him, and, a few days later, said goodbye to his wife and baby daughter. He began to organize daily protests. Often at the front of the crowd and shouting into the megaphone, he cut a distinctive figure with his skinny frame, huge thick-rimmed glasses and broad grin.
On Facebook, where he had quickly grown a massive following, he wrote gentle, encouraging messages, calling on people to take to the streets, “Don’t look for a leader, don’t wait… All the people in the community, please come out.” During interviews he projected an easy calm, as quick to laugh at the military as condemn it.
The defiance of Tayzar San and his colleagues in Mandalay helped set off a wave of protests across the country. REUTERS/Stringer
He came close to arrest more than once. Fleeing a crackdown on a street protest in early March, he took refuge in a hotel but was almost caught when soldiers from the 99th Light Infantry Division surrounded the building. With a small group, he went up to the roof and climbed onto neighboring buildings to escape, balancing on air-conditioning units and clinging to water pipes, even as soldiers opened fire from below, he said later. It was like something out of “the action movies,” he said. He made it to safety after residents hid them in an apartment. Efforts by Reuters to reach the unit’s commander via the military weren’t successful.
By mid-April, a poster was circulating in Mandalay and online advertising a $5,600 reward for Tayzar San’s capture and handover to authorities. He continued to lead demonstrations, but more rarely, appearing every few days and then slipping back into the maze of Mandalay apartments.
“Don’t look for a leader, don’t wait… All the people in the community, please go out.”
Tayzar San on Facebook
Between his constant moves and the internet shutdown, it was hard to reach him. But interviewed over a shaky connection from a safehouse in April, he spoke with the same unwavering optimism of his protest rhetoric, peppering his speech with hopeful aphorisms – “It is never darker than at midnight” – and downplaying the magnitude of his difficulties with giggles.
Asked about how security forces appeared to be targeting him personally, he said: “It is fine. I will do what I have to do. They have tried to put fear in us. … We will just continue what we want to do.”
A week and a half later, he said, security forces turned up outside his home in Mandalay. He was long gone, and his wife and daughter weren’t home. But soldiers and police broke down the locked door and demolished the place, including his book collection.
The jungle
Since its independence from Britain, Myanmar has not known a year of peace. A multitude of armed groups, ranging from powerful organizations controlling semi-autonomous areas in ethnic regions to government-backed militias and traditional people’s armies, have been active for decades.
The military has long justified its power by casting itself as the sole unifying force able to hold the disparate nation together. In recent years, several areas of fighting had subsided. But they flared up again after the coup as some of the most powerful outfits, including the Karen National Union, one of the country’s oldest and biggest ethnic armed groups, expressed solidarity with the protesters and allowed thousands to seek shelter in their territories. Some offered military training.
Some of the new armed outfits emerged from neighborhood security teams formed during the protest crackdowns. They sought to arm themselves in response to attacks, a move justified by the ousted civilian leadership in a March 14 statement that broke with a long tradition of nonviolence made famous by Suu Kyi. The statement called the military a “terrorist organization” and said all citizens had the “right to retaliate in self-defense.” Under detention, Suu Kyi hasn’t commented on the repudiation of nonviolence, but she said she would never go against the will of the people.
The parallel civilian government said it aimed to unite the armed units into a single force, but had limited control over the ground operations. “It’s impractical for us to say to those villages, communities, ‘Defend like that, defend like that,’” Dr. Sasa, a spokesman for the government, said in an interview. “We are not there physically.”
“Even though I am having a rough time out there, I’m still happy and trying my best for my country.”
Gue Gue, posting on Facebook
Sasa, who fled the capital in the days after the coup, has become a high-profile leader with a millions-strong following on social media. Daily, he posts photos of himself – meeting international officials, or in camouflage from his jungle hideout – along with statements and inspirational messages.
The parallel government is walking a tightrope between domestic and foreign audiences. Democratic nations sympathetic to the anti-coup movement such as Britain and the United States have called for a peaceful solution to the crisis. The parallel government’s call has complicated its diplomatic efforts, the International Crisis Group think tank said in its October report.
The military has termed both the parallel government and the resistance fighters “terrorists” and threatened people who contact them with imprisonment.
In April, after the long overnight bus ride from Mandalay, Gue Gue and her friends were shepherded by their contacts to an old school in a village close to the jungle. They slept on top of school desks while they waited to be taken to what they were told was a nearby training ground. One of the friends, who is also from Mandalay and asked not to be named for fear of reprisal, said Gue Gue was the first woman to go for the training there.
“They told me that they don’t accept women, because they haven’t prepared anything,” Gue Gue said. “‘It will be so tiring,’ they said. I told them: ‘I don’t care whether it is tiring. I must join.’”
From there, they traveled to the training camp, the location of which Reuters is not disclosing for security reasons. Dozens of people were already there, Gue Gue said, and more kept arriving, including several more women. One roomed with Gue Gue and they became close friends. Together, they built up the camp. Even the toilets had to be made from scratch. They drank the water from a local river. Food was bland – mostly boiled rice and instant noodles.
On the phone, she said she realized she had never done anything truly difficult in her life before. “I never dreamed that I would be sleeping in a roofless shelter or using a makeshift toilet,” she said.
In late May, she posted a picture on Facebook. “Even though I am having a rough time out there, I’m still happy and trying my best for my country,” she wrote. “But I do cry sometimes when I miss my friends and family… (PS – the following photo is me sitting on the toilet that I built by my own for the very first time in my life).”
“I never dreamed that I would be sleeping in a roofless shelter or using a makeshift toilet,” said Gue Gue, shown at the toilet she helped build. Source: courtesy of Gue Gue
The days in the rebel training camp were long and tiring. Wake-up was at 4 a.m., followed by 10 laps of the football field, more exercises, a breakfast of instant noodles or rice, and training in military strategy, how to handle guns and how to forage for food in the jungle. Source: courtesy of Gue Gue
The days were long and tiring. Wake-up was at 4 a.m., followed by 10 laps of the football field, more exercises, a breakfast of instant noodles or rice, and training in military strategy, how to handle guns and how to forage for food in the jungle. It was a test for urbanites used to opening the fridge and tucking into “fancy snacks” at will, her friend said. But the new recruits built up an easy camaraderie, sharing stories of how their lives had been “turned upside down” by the coup, watching sunsets by the river and playing guitar in the evenings.
After her surgery, Gue Gue was in pain and could barely walk, her friend said. She had been charged with managing four groups, a total of 40 people, she said, and given a new title, roughly equivalent to the rank of lieutenant, but she mostly oversaw office and logistical work. Some of her comrades were volunteering to go to the front lines. A friend named Aung said Gue Gue video-called him. She showed him some of the weapons in the camp but lamented that there were so few.
Then, in mid-August, she fell out of contact. Messages and calls from Reuters went unanswered. The internet connection in the region came and went. But fighting between junta troops and PDF forces like hers had intensified. There were reports of dozens of deaths on both sides.
Sacrifice
After raiding Tayzar San’s home in Mandalay, troops began, in June, targeting the remote village where he was born, a cluster of about 100 houses in Wetlet township on the plains of the Mu River. It was a quiet and peaceful place where Tayzar San’s relatives had rice farms and banana plantations.
In one raid, more than 100 soldiers pulled up in trucks, arriving first at the farms on the outskirts and detaining five people to use as human shields, local media reported. The troops made them walk in front as they marched into the village, bound for Tayzar San’s parents’ house, the local media reported. One man who tried to run away was shot but survived.
“They came to my village about six times in one week,” Tayzar San said. “They came looking for me.” He said the soldiers took motorbikes from the village and money and clothes from his family’s house but didn’t find his parents, who had also gone into hiding. Talking to him later, he said, his parents told him, “Don’t worry about us, you just continue to do what you’re doing.”
At first, he said, he was wracked with guilt over the raids. But he tried not to let the crackdown dent his defiance. “The villagers are not scared. They run away when the raid happens, but then they come back once they are gone. … We should not be scared of this. This is the true face of the junta. We need to know that and continue our resolution.”
But the isolation was taking a toll. He stopped going out or seeing people beyond a small and trusted circle. It was becoming impossible to attend protests. At one demonstration in June, he tried to disguise himself so as not to attract attention, taking off his trademark glasses and shaving his head. It didn’t work; he was mobbed.
Confined indoors, he spent most of his time on Zoom meetings, speaking to other activists, helping organize protests. When he had time, he said, he listened to songs on his phone, mostly Myanmar traditional folk music heavy on xylophones and gongs.
He longed for his family. “They are so many miles away from me now,” he said quietly in September.
“The main thing is that we will never calm down or back off in this revolution for any reason. I might have to sacrifice my life, my freedom and my family.”
Tayzar San
Both of his parents and his wife had survived bouts of COVID-19 in the months since the coup. His wife fell severely ill – she needed an oxygen cylinder and friends struggled to find one. She found one and survived, but Tayzar San said he had to fight the urge to leave his hiding place to be with her.
His daughter, who turned 2 in his absence, was at that stage of babyhood where she was learning new things every day. He was missing it all.
Aye Aye Mon said she and their daughter watched Tayzar San’s video interviews. “My kid says: ‘Daddy is only living inside the TV. Why hasn’t he come out yet? He should come out,’” she said. Aye Aye Mon added: “I don’t blame him at all... I will try to keep myself safe and we will meet again in a better situation.”
Each day has brought more news of arrests. Often, the authorities detained relatives of protest leaders, including children. Tayzar San said he had imagined all the worst possible outcomes.
“The main thing is that we will never calm down or back off in this revolution for any reason,” he said. “I might have to sacrifice my life, my freedom and my family.”
Tayzar San shows his defiance of the junta, but he longs for his family. “They are so many miles away from me now,” he said. Source: via Facebook
“Our camp is moving”
After weeks of silence, in early September Gue Gue sent a short message to Reuters. “Currently I am so busy as our camp is moving.” The fighters had heard news that the military was searching for their base and left in a hurry at the end of August.
“The situation has become worse,” she said over the phone a few days later, as the line cut in and out and monsoon rain hammered in the background.
It was painful to leave all they had built behind, she said. The fighters didn’t have enough guns to defend the camp from attack.
“We were kind of scared and can’t wait to fight them back,” Gue Gue’s friend said. “We prepared everything; we said goodbye to our closest friends, just in case I’m killed or something.”
“I don’t want the people to forget about the young people who are sacrificing their lives on the ground. We’re still here.”
Gue Gue
Gue Gue’s wound from the surgery has been slow to heal. The doctors told her it was slightly infected. If the situation improved, she said, she would go to a proper hospital to have it looked at. In the meantime, she was taking painkillers.
Two of the people from her training group had been killed in a clash with junta troops, Gue Gue said, while another had his leg amputated. Though she had a gun, she was still waiting to fight because of her injury. Her friend said Gue Gue isn’t likely to go to the front lines until she has recovered.
Like Tayzar San, she worries about sympathy for the anti-coup movement fading or the public being forced into submission as the long fight grinds on. But, like him, she is resolute. When she feels low, she said, she runs in the fields in the rain or listens to music, anthems of peace, freedom and homecoming.
In October, she watched from the camp as people posted pictures on social media of Thadingyut, the festival of lights at which Burmese light candles and lanterns under the full moon and celebrate at pagodas.
“I don’t want the people to forget about the young people who are sacrificing their lives on the ground,” Gue Gue said by phone. “We’re still here.”
Gue Gue worries about sympathy for the anti-coup movement fading or the public being forced into submission as the long fight grinds on. But she is resolute. Source: courtesy of Gue Gue
“The Final Battle”
By Poppy McPherson and Shoon Naing
Photo editing and art direction: John Emerson
Edited by Kari Howard
- Follow Reuters Investigates
Reuters · by POPPY MCPHERSON and SHOON NAING
14. 1 Battle Proved That Nothing Can Stop the US Army's Green Berets
Some Green Beret history.
1 Battle Proved That Nothing Can Stop the US Army's Green Berets
Ashley joined the Army in 1950. After finishing boot camp and Advanced Infantry Training, Ashley went to Germany. When the Korean War broke out in 1953, Ashley deployed in Korea with the 187th Regimental Combat Team. Then, for a brief period, Ashley got out of the Army and was placed in the Inactive Reserves. A few months later, he reenlisted and was assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division. Up to that point, Ashley had trained in numerous military occupational specialties, including as an infantryman, ambulance driver, anti-aircraft ammunition handler, heavy weapons specialist, and parachute rigger; he had also held leadership positions at the squad and company level.
In 1966 he decided to make the jump to Special Forces and graduated from the Special Forces Qualification Course (SFQC) a year later. Upon completion of training, Ashley was assigned first to the 7th Special Forces Group and later to the 3rd Special Forces Group. In 1968, he deployed to the Republic of Vietnam with Charlie Company, 5th Special Forces Group.
Ashley’s arrival to Vietnam coincided with the Tet Offensive, which began in January 1968 and would last till September. During Tet, the NVA and Vietcong took US and South Vietnamese forces by surprise and attacked several large cities throughout South Vietnam, including the capital Saigon where they briefly penetrated the US Embassy.
Once in country, Ashley found his way to the large Marine Corps base at Khe Sanh, which was under siege by the North Vietnamese. Although the majority of the NVA and Vietcong attacks during the Tet Offensive were quickly dealt with, the siege of Khe Sanh continued for months. Carrying morbid similarities with the Siege of Dien Bien Phu, where the French were defeated by the Vietminh in 1954 and were forced out of Indochina, the fighting at Khe Sanh drew international attention.
Close to Khe Sanh was the Lang Vei Special Forces Camp, which was just a mile-and-a-half from the border with Laos. Green Berets stationed in Lang Vei were no foreigners to NVA attacks. Artillery and sniper fire was a pretty common occurrence even before the Tet Offensive. But what was coming next was not common at all.
On the night of February 6, the NVA launched a tank assault on the Special Forces base. Radioing Khe Sanh for assistance, the Marines there couldn’t believe that NVA armor was within the Lang Vei perimeter—this was the first time the NVA had used tanks in force. During the initial hours of the battle, Ashley coordinated airstrikes and mortar and artillery fire in support of his fellow Green Berets in the camp. Then, seeing that reinforcements from Khe Sanh weren’t going to reach the overran camp in time, Ashley and other Green Berets took matters into their own hands.
Ashley hastily organized a relief force comprised of Special Forces operators and partner forces and led them to the nearby camp. In the ensuing hours, Ashley would lead five assaults against NVA tanks and heavy infantry. Time after time, Ashley led by example and destroyed numerous enemy positions. The fifth assault, however, would be his last.
Sergeant First Class Eugene Ashley Jr. He would end up getting the Medal of Honor for his actions during on the fiercest battles of the Vietnam War (US Army Special Operations Command).
Ashley’s arrival to Vietnam coincided with the Tet Offensive, which began in January 1968 and would last till September. During Tet, the NVA and Vietcong took US and South Vietnamese forces by surprise and attacked several large cities throughout South Vietnam, including the capital Saigon where they briefly penetrated the US Embassy.
Once in country, Ashley found his way to the large Marine Corps base at Khe Sanh, which was under siege by the North Vietnamese. Although the majority of the NVA and Vietcong attacks during the Tet Offensive were quickly dealt with, the siege of Khe Sanh continued for months. Carrying morbid similarities with the Siege of Dien Bien Phu, where the French were defeated by the Vietminh in 1954 and were forced out of Indochina, the fighting at Khe Sanh drew international attention.
Close to Khe Sanh was the Lang Vei Special Forces Camp, which was just a mile-and-a-half from the border with Laos. Green Berets stationed in Lang Vei were no foreigners to NVA attacks. Artillery and sniper fire was a pretty common occurrence even before the Tet Offensive. But what was coming next was not common at all.
On the night of February 6, the NVA launched a tank assault on the Special Forces base. Radioing Khe Sanh for assistance, the Marines there couldn’t believe that NVA armor was within the Lang Vei perimeter—this was the first time the NVA had used tanks in force. During the initial hours of the battle, Ashley coordinated airstrikes and mortar and artillery fire in support of his fellow Green Berets in the camp. Then, seeing that reinforcements from Khe Sanh weren’t going to reach the overran camp in time, Ashley and other Green Berets took matters into their own hands.
Ashley hastily organized a relief force comprised of Special Forces operators and partner forces and led them to the nearby camp. In the ensuing hours, Ashley would lead five assaults against NVA tanks and heavy infantry. Time after time, Ashley led by example and destroyed numerous enemy positions. The fifth assault, however, would be his last.
Ashley’s Medal of Honor citation offers a glimpse of his actions on that fateful night.
“During his fifth and final assault, he adjusted airstrikes nearly on top of his assault element, forcing the enemy to withdraw and resulting in friendly control of the summit of the hill. While exposing himself to intense enemy fire, he was seriously wounded by machinegun fire but continued his mission without regard for his personal safety. After the fifth assault he lost consciousness and was carried from the summit by his comrades only to suffer a fatal wound when an enemy artillery round landed in his area. Sergeant Ashley displayed extraordinary heroism in risking his life in an attempt to save the lives of his entrapped comrades and commanding officer. His total disregard for his own personal safety while exposed to enemy observation and automatic weapons fire was an inspiration to all men committed to the assault. The resolute valor with which he led five gallant charges placed critical diversionary pressure on the attacking enemy and his valiant efforts carved a channel in the overpowering enemy forces and weapons positions through which the survivors of Camp Lang Vei eventually escaped to freedom. Sergeant Ashley’s conspicuous gallantry at the cost of his own life was in the highest traditions of the military service, and reflects great credit upon himself, his unit and the United States Army.”
To be sure, the Vietnam War offered plenty of opportunities for moments of unfathomable bravery, and Ashley’s actions on that fateful night 53 years ago make up for just one story of valor.
In 2012, Sergeant First Class Eugene Ashley Jr. was inducted into the Special Forces Regiment’s Hall of Fame as a Distinguished Member.
Stavros Atlamazoglou is a Greek Army veteran (National service with 575th Marines Battalion and Army HQ). You will usually find him on the top of a mountain admiring the view and wondering how he got there. This first appeared in Sandboxx News.
15. Historian Timothy Snyder: ‘It turns out that people really like democracy’
It is good to hear that people really like democracy!
Excerpts:
One of your antidotes to that is “read books”; who have been the writers that you’ve turned to most in the past five years?
I always go back to Roger Penrose, the physicist. He is important to me because he has a view about unpredictability in quantum mechanics, which has implications for politics. And then some of the people who confronted these questions in the last century in different ways: Hannah Arendt, Václav Havel, Victor Klemperer. In addition to that, it’s really important to me to read novels, because they prepare you for scenes in the real world you haven’t yet confronted. I’ve just started rereading Les Liaisons Dangerouses. But I also get excited when I hear Julian Barnes has a new novel out.
It seems to me that the opposite of tyranny is not freedom, but something more active: creativity, engagement. Do you think artists and writers have lately stepped up to that challenge?
I think it’s true that freedom cannot be the opposite of anything. But I’m not going to criticise artists and writers – the main problem is often the way that their work has trouble getting viewed. One of our big problems at the moment is that we find it hard to imagine a viable future. Art and literature enable us to flex those imaginative muscles.
Where do you place your optimism?
I prefer hope to optimism. One thing is, it turns out that people really like democracy. It has been heartening to see that so many people care enough about democracy to take personal risks to defend it.
Historian Timothy Snyder: ‘It turns out that people really like democracy’
The author of On Tyranny on the lack of historical literacy, how local news has been replaced by Facebook, and why novels matter to him
Timothy Snyder is a professor of history at Yale University and the author of books about the 20th-century history of central Europe, including Bloodlands, which examined the devastating consequence of Hitler and Stalin’s simultaneous reign of terror over civilian populations, and won the 2013 Hannah Arendt prize for political thought. In 2016, after the election of Donald Trump, Snyder wrote a short book, On Tyranny, which provided 20 brief lessons – “Defend Institutions”, “Remember Professional Ethics”, “Read Books” – from the 20th century that might help readers protect democracy against dictatorship. It topped the New York Times bestseller list for nonfiction in 2017. A new edition of the book, with illustrations by the German-American Nora Krug, whose graphic memoir Belonging confronted Germany’s Nazi past, has just been published.
What prompted you to want to make this graphic version of On Tyranny?
It came out originally in this extremely simple, accessible form. I always had the idea that it could take a different form, but that only became concrete once I read Nora Krug’s Belonging. I cold-called her and said: “Could you please do this?” Part of it was also to renew it. I changed the text a little bit, removed some of the stuff that was specific to 2016 and added some lines that recall what happened in 2020.
You wrote the original in the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s inauguration. Was it intended as a call to arms for yourself as well as to others?
Yes, it was like something snapped in me where I thought we should all do the things that we can. In writing the book I was putting myself out there, so it was something I had to live by. I’m glad I did that. As a writer, you have to make yourself vulnerable sometimes.
'It is never enough to accept the world as it is and just comment on it'
Looking back, it seemed important to say that being outraged on social media about Trump probably wasn’t going to be enough?
Exactly. I think the lesson that maybe people reacted to the most is number 12: “make eye contact and talk to people” in the corporeal world. And then number 13, which was to actively get involved in politics, to get our physical bodies into unfamiliar situations. The book is a frontal attack on that idea that it is never enough to accept the world as it is and just comment on it.
One of the things that the book is alarmed by is a lack of historical literacy. The fact that terms such as “America first” or, in the UK, “enemies of the people” could be employed with so few alarm bells ringing among people about their history in fascism. Do you still see that kind of illiteracy even in some of your students?
History has been seriously devalued in the US, I would say, since 1989 and that very unfortunate idea [“the end of history”] that history was now over. “America first” and “enemies of the people” are words that are consciously applied by people who wish to destroy democracy. If people don’t know how those words have been applied in the past, then that is dangerous. Part of the backwash of the Trump coup attempt is all of these laws in various states are designed to make history uncontroversial – which, let’s be clear, means: uncontroversial for white people.
At the time you wrote the book, people were being criticised for making comparisons with what was happening in 2016 and the 1930s. Did you feel any trepidation about doing that?
I don’t remember having that feeling. When people refuse to make comparisons with events that have happened before, what they are really saying is: “I don’t want to look at either the past or the present.”
You grew up in Dayton, Ohio. How much did that firsthand knowledge of the midwest and those declining industrial heartlands inform your understanding of the forces that produced Trump?
It certainly affected it. In 2016, I spent some time going door to door there and talking to people about the forthcoming presidential election. That helped me to see how important social media was. I asked one guy a question and he went back and checked Facebook before answering. Where my parents are from and still live had become entirely Trumpland.
I think a lack of local news may be the single greatest source of the problem. Most American counties are now news deserts; they have no reporters covering local politicians at all. People have no way of being active citizens; they go on reading but the stuff they read drives them upwards to national politics, into obsession and conspiracy. They bring the trust they had for local news to Facebook.
One of your antidotes to that is “read books”; who have been the writers that you’ve turned to most in the past five years?
I always go back to Roger Penrose, the physicist. He is important to me because he has a view about unpredictability in quantum mechanics, which has implications for politics. And then some of the people who confronted these questions in the last century in different ways: Hannah Arendt, Václav Havel, Victor Klemperer. In addition to that, it’s really important to me to read novels, because they prepare you for scenes in the real world you haven’t yet confronted. I’ve just started rereading Les Liaisons Dangerouses. But I also get excited when I hear Julian Barnes has a new novel out.
It seems to me that the opposite of tyranny is not freedom, but something more active: creativity, engagement. Do you think artists and writers have lately stepped up to that challenge?
I think it’s true that freedom cannot be the opposite of anything. But I’m not going to criticise artists and writers – the main problem is often the way that their work has trouble getting viewed. One of our big problems at the moment is that we find it hard to imagine a viable future. Art and literature enable us to flex those imaginative muscles.
Where do you place your optimism?
I prefer hope to optimism. One thing is, it turns out that people really like democracy. It has been heartening to see that so many people care enough about democracy to take personal risks to defend it.
On Tyranny Graphic Edition by Timothy Snyder, illustrated by Nora Krug, is published by Vintage (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
