Last Call For Twenty-Two Years Later

As the country marks the 22nd anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks, NYC officials are confirming that the total number of first responders who have died to 9/11 related illnesses has now equaled the number of FDNY firefighters who were lost that day.

 

The number of first responders who have died from 9/11-related illnesses now almost equals the number of firefighters who died during the terror attacks themselves.

A total of 341 New York City Fire Department firefighters, paramedics and civilian support staff who died from post-911 illnesses are now memorialized at the FDNY World Trade Center Memorial Wall, according to the Uniformed Firefighters Association. The memorial commemorates both first responders who died during the attacks and those who died from related illnesses in the years since.

That count almost equals the 343 New York firefighters who died during the 2001 attacks.

The fire department added 43 names to the memorial on September 6, according to a news release.

“As we approach the 22nd anniversary of 9/11, the FDNY continues to feel the impact of that day. Each year, this memorial wall grows as we honor of those who gave their lives in service of others,” said Fire Commissioner Laura Kavanagh in the release. “These brave men and women showed up that day, and in the days and months following the attacks to participate in the rescue and recovery efforts at the World Trade Center site. We will never forget them.”

Exposure to the dust at the World Trade Center has been tied to heightened risk of cardiovascular disease among firefighters who responded to the scene. Additionally, respiratory disease and thousands of cancer diagnoses have been linked to the toxic pollutants released during the attacks.

More than 71,000 people are currently enrolled in the World Trade Center Health Registry, a long-term study seeking to understand the physical and mental health effects of the terror attacks. In addition to first responders, the attacks have left lasting health impacts on workers in the World Trade Center who evacuated their workplaces, passersby, residents of the surrounding buildings and volunteers who spent time at Ground Zero in the weeks after.

Lt. Joseph Brosi was one of the dozens of firefighters added to the memorial last week. The FDNY veteran died in February after a long battle with lung cancer.

His son Jim Brosi said not a day has gone by where he has not thought about his father.

“We just miss him,” he told CNN. “He was just always present in everything we did.”

 

As with everything 9/11 related, it's all complex and complicated. 9/11 was one of the watershed moments in global history, one that shifted the axis of billions over the last two-plus decades. But there are those who have lost their lives as a direct result of the attack even now, and that list continues to grow.

Another year passes, and more are lost. Maybe an entire country lost their way, too. I know many of you have been around for far longer, and that like many of my generation, you remember exactly where you were when the towers fell.

Everything changed after that, and very little of it for the better.

 

Sunday Long Read: Af-Gone-Istan Chronicles

Our Sunday Long Read is Franklin Foer's account of the Biden Administration's "withdrawal" from Afghanistan in The Atlantic, two years after the White House figured that leaving the country we had occupied for two decades was somehow going to go smoothly in any way, and not turn into one of the biggest clusterfuck codas in the history of US foreign policy.

 

August is the month when oppressive humidity causes the mass evacuation of official Washington. In 2021, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki piled her family into the car for a week at the beach. Secretary of State Antony Blinken headed to the Hamptons to visit his elderly father. Their boss left for the leafy sanctuary of Camp David.

They knew that when they returned, their attention would shift to a date circled at the end of the month. On August 31, the United States would officially complete its withdrawal from Afghanistan, concluding the longest war in American history.

The State Department didn’t expect to solve Afghanistan’s problems by that date. But if everything went well, there was a chance to wheedle the two warring sides into some sort of agreement that would culminate in the nation’s president, Ashraf Ghani, resigning from office, beginning an orderly transfer of power to a governing coalition that included the Taliban. There was even discussion of Blinken flying out, most likely to Doha, Qatar, to preside over the signing of an accord.

It would be an ending, but not the end. Within the State Department there was a strongly held belief: Even after August 31, the embassy in Kabul would remain open. It wouldn’t be as robustly staffed, but some aid programs would continue; visas would still be issued. The United States—at least not the State Department—wasn’t going to abandon the country.

There were plans for catastrophic scenarios, which had been practiced in tabletop simulations, but no one anticipated that they would be needed. Intelligence assessments asserted that the Afghan military would be able to hold off the Taliban for months, though the number of months kept dwindling as the Taliban conquered terrain more quickly than the analysts had predicted. But as August began, the grim future of Afghanistan seemed to exist in the distance, beyond the end of the month, not on America’s watch.

That grim future arrived disastrously ahead of schedule. What follows is an intimate history of that excruciating month of withdrawal, as narrated by its participants, based on dozens of interviews conducted shortly after the fact, when memories were fresh and emotions raw. At times, as I spoke with these participants, I felt as if I was their confessor. Their failings were so apparent that they had a desperate need to explain themselves, but also an impulse to relive moments of drama and pain more intense than any they had experienced in their career.

During those fraught days, foreign policy, so often debated in the abstract, or conducted from the sanitized remove of the Situation Room, became horrifyingly vivid. President Joe Biden and his aides found themselves staring hard at the consequences of their decisions.

Even in the thick of the crisis, as the details of a mass evacuation swallowed them, the members of Biden’s inner circle could see that the legacy of the month would stalk them into the next election—and perhaps into their obituaries. Though it was a moment when their shortcomings were on obvious display, they also believed it evinced resilience and improvisational skill.

And amid the crisis, a crisis that taxed his character and managerial acumen, the president revealed himself. For a man long caricatured as a political weather vane, Biden exhibited determination, even stubbornness, despite furious criticism from the establishment figures whose approval he usually craved. For a man vaunted for his empathy, he could be detached, even icy, when confronted with the prospect of human suffering.

When it came to foreign policy, Joe Biden possessed a swaggering faith in himself. He liked to knock the diplomats and pundits who would pontificate at the Council on Foreign Relations and the Munich Security Conference. He called them risk-averse, beholden to institutions, lazy in their thinking. Listening to these complaints, a friend once posed the obvious question: If you have such negative things to say about these confabs, then why attend so many of them? Biden replied, “If I don’t go, they’re going to get stale as hell.”

From 12 years as the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—and then eight years as the vice president—Biden had acquired a sense that he could scythe through conventional wisdom. He distrusted mandarins, even those he had hired for his staff. They were always muddying things with theories. One aide recalled that he would say, “You foreign-policy guys, you think this is all pretty complicated. But it’s just like family dynamics.” Foreign affairs was sometimes painful, often futile, but really it was emotional intelligence applied to people with names that were difficult to pronounce. Diplomacy, in Biden’s view, was akin to persuading a pain-in-the-ass uncle to stop drinking so much.

One subject seemed to provoke his contrarian side above all others: the war in Afghanistan. His strong opinions were grounded in experience. Soon after the United States invaded, in late 2001, Biden began visiting the country. He traveled with a sleeping bag; he stood in line alongside Marines, wrapped in a towel, waiting for his turn to shower.

On his first trip, in 2002, Biden met with Interior Minister Yunus Qanuni in his Kabul office, a shell of a building. Qanuni, an old mujahideen fighter, told him: We really appreciate that you have come here. But Americans have a long history of making promises and then breaking them. And if that happens again, the Afghan people are going to be disappointed.

Biden was jet-lagged and irritable. Qanuni’s comments set him off: Let me tell you, if you even think of threatening us … Biden’s aides struggled to calm him down.

In Biden’s moral code, ingratitude is a grievous sin. The United States had evicted the Taliban from power; it had sent young men to die in the nation’s mountains; it would give the new government billions in aid. But throughout the long conflict, Afghan officials kept telling him that the U.S. hadn’t done enough.

The frustration stuck with him, and it clarified his thinking. He began to draw unsentimental conclusions about the war. He could see that the Afghan government was a failed enterprise. He could see that a nation-building campaign of this scale was beyond American capacity.

As vice president, Biden also watched as the military pressured Barack Obama into sending thousands of additional troops to salvage a doomed cause. In his 2020 memoir, A Promised Land, Obama recalled that as he agonized over his Afghan policy, Biden pulled him aside and told him, “Listen to me, boss. Maybe I’ve been around this town for too long, but one thing I know is when these generals are trying to box in a new president.” He drew close and whispered, “Don’t let them jam you.”

Biden developed a theory of how he would succeed where Obama had failed. He wasn’t going to let anyone jam him.

 

The rest, as they say, is history.

 

I don't 100% blame Biden, he was dealing with two decades of US foreign policy fuckups and got enough cans kicked at him by Dubya, Obama and Trump that he could have opened a recycling plant.  But the hubris displayed here is shocking, even for someone who has documented almost daily the abundant US foreign policy disasters in 13 of those 20 years on this blog.

Frankly, this was never going to end any other way. "We never should have been there in the first place" is easy to say, and that's because it's 100% true.

Last Call For The Warren Terrah Continues

Warren Terrah is now old enough to buy booze and AR-15s.

 

President Joe Biden marked the 21st anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, laying a wreath at the Pentagon in a somber commemoration held under a steady rain and paying tribute to “extraordinary Americans” who gave their lives on one of the nation’s darkest days.

Sunday’s ceremony occurred a little more than a year after Biden ended the long and costly war in Afghanistan that the U.S. and allies launched in response to the terror attacks.


Biden noted that even after the United States left Afghanistan that his administration continues to pursue those responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Last month, Biden announced the U.S. had killed Ayman al-Zawahri, the Al-Qaida leader who helped plot the Sept. 11 attacks, in a clandestine operation.

We will never forget, we will never give up,” Biden said. “Our commitment to preventing another attack on the United States is without end.”

The president was joined by family members of the fallen, first responders who had been at the Pentagon on the day of the attack, as well as Defense Department leadership for the annual moment of tribute carried out in New York City, the Pentagon and Somerset County, Pennsylvania.

“We owe you an incredible, incredible debt,” Biden said.

In ending the Afghanistan war, the Democratic president followed through on a campaign pledge to bring home U.S. troops from the country’s longest conflict. But the war concluded chaotically in August 2021, when the U.S.-backed Afghan government collapsed, a grisly bombing killed 170 Afghans and 13 U.S. troops at Kabul’s airport, and thousands of desperate Afghans gathered in hopes of escape before the final U.S. cargo planes departed over the Hindu Kush. 

 

The Afghanistan phase of Warren Terrah is over, the Bipartisan Forever Wherever Terrah May Be War Phase is basically getting underway for the next two decades. I wonder what we would have done with the $8 trillion we spent?

 

Becoming a global leader in the 21st century, instead of Bush wrecking everything and leaving it to Obama, who stayed another 8 years and gave it to Trump.  

Oh, what could have been.

Thanks Scalia!

 

Sunday Long Read: Af-Gone-Istan

Afghan journalist and writer Bushra Seddique details her escape from Afghanistan one year ago in The Atlantic in today's Sunday Long Read, as she recounts leaving her parents and best friend behind in order to leave the country with her sister during the fall of Kabul to the Taliban.

The text message came a little before 5 p.m. It was August 26, 2021. Eleven days earlier, the Taliban had overthrown the Afghan government. My friend—a German writer and academic—had been trying to help my family flee the country. Now she told me she had gotten my two younger sisters and me on the list for a flight to Frankfurt, a last-minute evacuation negotiated by the German government and a nonprofit group.

“What about my mom?” I asked. She didn’t reply for a moment. “I was not able to get her on this flight,” she answered. Please, I begged her: “My brothers are gone and my father is living with his second wife. She just has us, no one else, for God’s sake please do something.”

But there was nothing she could do. “These are the names that they offered me,” she wrote. “I know it’s a terrible choice.”

She said we had 20 minutes to decide whether to stay or go. We would need to pack, then take a taxi to a secret location, where we’d meet the buses that would drive the evacuees to the airport.

Just a few weeks earlier, my life had been relatively normal. We knew the Afghan National Army was getting weaker—on the battlefield, scores of soldiers were dying—and the front lines kept getting closer to Kabul. And yet, inside the city, schools, offices, and cafés were still open. People were going out to sing and dance; music played in restaurants and taxis. I was 21 and had recently started working for a newspaper, which had me traveling around the city reporting. I loved writing about people, especially the poor, whose voices were rarely heard. I wrote about how they lived, the problems they faced, the joy they experienced regardless.

My father is from Tolak, a remote district in Ghor province, where, even after the fall of the Taliban 20 years ago, women were still flogged and stoned to death. As far as I know, there has never been a journalist from Tolak, certainly not a female one. I knew that the life I was living would not have been possible if my father hadn’t worked hard to bring our family to Kabul. I knew it would not have been possible if the Taliban had remained in power.

But now the Taliban were back. On August 15, the government collapsed, the security forces disintegrated, and the president, Ashraf Ghani, fled. Once he’d left his people behind, Europe and the United States abandoned us too. If I could meet Ghani today, I would have nothing to say to him. I would silently stare into his eyes so that he could feel the homelessness of a young woman.

I had heard about the Taliban all my life. But I had never actually seen a Talib before. Suddenly they were everywhere, patrolling the streets of Kabul. My family gathered in my mother’s apartment, near the U.S. embassy: me, my younger sisters, and our mother, as well as our father and stepmother and their five kids. When the government disappeared, my job at the newspaper disappeared too. It wasn’t safe to commute to work anymore, anyway; none of us left the apartment except to go to the food shop just downstairs. The apartment was crowded. But we were together.

Now, suddenly, I had to choose between my loved ones. How could I leave my mother alone? If one of us girls stayed behind, which one should it be? What if the sister who stayed was killed? What if the sister who tried to escape was killed?

We sat on the floor of my small bedroom with its red-and-white curtains and tried to talk about what to do—me; our mom; my youngest sister, Sara; and another sister, Asman. I knew that my family would be targeted—I had two older brothers who had worked for the Americans and had already been evacuated, and I was a woman with a job. But I didn’t want to leave, especially when I looked at my mother’s face, at the lines across her forehead, her white hair that made her look older than her five decades—proof of how hard the life of an Afghan wife and mother is.

In the end, she decided for all of us. “You and Sara go,” she said to me. “Asman and I will stay.”

Sara was only 16 then—she’s a dreamy girl who likes adventure and wants to be a pilot when she grows up. My mother felt she wasn’t brave enough to adapt to the oppressions of life under the Taliban. Asman was 19. She is the quietest of us sisters but also the kindest. We’re two years apart but grew up like twins. She’s more than a sister to me—my all-time secret keeper. My mother knew she would be strong enough to withstand whatever came next. It was the best choice she could have made.

But what about me? I didn’t know how I would take care of Sara on my own. And how could I leave my best friend? (Asman, for the record, is a pseudonym; because she remains in Afghanistan, it is not safe to use her real name here.)

Sara and I packed a bag each, and my mother handed us some snacks—cakes and cookies—and water. We put on long black dresses and veils over our hair. I couldn’t look Asman in the eye. I didn’t have the courage to tell her goodbye. All of us were crying. As Sara and I walked out the door, my mother sprinkled water on our backs—an Afghan tradition to wish someone a safe trip. It all happened so fast. My father was sleeping in the other room. Instead of waking him, I just opened the door and looked at him—this brave man who had worked for years in the most dangerous provinces to support us and make it possible for us to go to school and have a better life. And then we were gone.

 

America's choices in Afghanistan over four administrations had real-world consequences for millions of people over two decades. It was never just a series of anodyne, clinical decisions made in the halls of power or on the campaign trail. Real lives were always at stake, millions of them.

Most of America just washed our hands of it, and we moved on to the next big conflict in Ukraine.

Not everyone had that luxury.

Some Twenty Years Gone

We've been told for two decades to Never Forget, but it seems we haven't learned a damn thing from 20 years ago, either.

When President Biden told an exhausted nation on Aug. 31 that the last C-17 cargo plane had left Taliban-controlled Kabul, ending two decades of American military misadventure in Afghanistan, he defended the frantic, bloodstained exit with a simple statement: “I was not going to extend this forever war.”

And yet the war grinds on.

As Mr. Biden drew the curtain on Afghanistan, the C.I.A. was quietly expanding a secret base deep in the Sahara, from which it runs drone flights to monitor Al Qaeda and Islamic State militants in Libya, as well as extremists in Niger, Chad and Mali. The military’s Africa Command resumed drone strikes against the Shabab, a Qaeda-linked group in Somalia. The Pentagon is weighing whether to send dozens of Special Forces trainers back into Somalia to help local troops fight the militants.

Even in Kabul itself, a fiery drone strike on men believed to be Islamic State plotters targeting the airport portended a future of military operations there. The attack, which the Pentagon called a “righteous strike” to avert another deadly suicide bombing, showcased America’s “over the horizon” abilities, to use a phrase favored by Mr. Biden. Family members denied that the men being targeted were militants and said the strike killed 10 people, seven of them children.

Twenty years after the terrorist attacks of September 2001, the so-called war on terror shows no sign of winding down. It waxes and wanes, largely in the shadows and out of the headlines — less an epochal clash than a low-grade condition, one that flares up occasionally, as in 2017, when Islamic State militants ambushed American and local soldiers outside a village in Niger, killing four Americans.

Taking stock of this war is difficult because it is inseparable from the twin calamities of Afghanistan and Iraq. In those countries, the United States reached beyond the tactics of counterterrorism for a more ambitious, ill-fated project to remake fractured, tribal societies into American-style democracies.

Those failures are etched in the shameful images of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq or of desperate Afghans falling from the belly of an American plane. They are documented in the deaths of more than 7,000 American service members, hundreds of thousands of civilians and trillions of squandered American dollars.

The counterterrorism war, much of it waged covertly, defies such metrics. More and more of it involves partners. Large parts of it occur in distant places like the Sahel or the Horn of Africa. American casualties, for the most part, are limited. And success is measured not by capturing a capital or destroying an enemy’s army, but by breaking up groups before they have a chance to strike the American homeland or overseas assets like embassies and military bases.

By that yardstick, say counterterrorism experts, the war on terror has been an undisputed success.

“If you had said on 9/12 that we’d have only 100 people killed by jihadi terrorism and only one foreign terrorist attack in the United States over the next 20 years, you’d have been laughed out of the room,” said Daniel Benjamin, the State Department’s coordinator for counterterrorism in the Obama administration.

 

Well, nobody's flown another plane into a skyscraper, but we have plenty of terrorism, and plenty of people dying weekly, if not daily, to it.

Police in West Texas this week arrested Joseph Angel Alvarez, 38, who allegedly targeted a couple - killing the wife in the process - because they voted for Biden, and had a Biden flag and “a doll of Trump hanging” outside their home.

Alvarez, arrested September 8 nearly a year after the murder, is being held at the El Paso County Detention Center. He was jailed on a $2 million bond for the murder of Georgette Kaufmann, 50, and on a $500,000 bond for the aggravated assault of the woman’s husband, Daniel Kaufmann.

The couple was targeted on November 14, 2020, shortly after the U.S. presidential election, at their home in the 3000 block of Copper Avenue in Central El Paso.

 

The lesson we exported to the world was "deadly political violence works."

Af-Gone-Istan, Con't

Kabul, and with it Afghanistan as a whole, has all but fallen to the Taliban over the weekend as the last US personnel out of the US embassy there has turned out the lights.

 

Afghanistan’s embattled president left the country Sunday, joining his fellow citizens and foreigners in a stampede fleeing the advancing Taliban and signaling the end of a 20-year Western experiment aimed at remaking Afghanistan.

The Taliban entered the capital earlier in the day, and an official with the militant group said it would soon announce the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan from the presidential palace — a return rich in symbolism to the name of the country under the Taliban government ousted by U.S.-led forces after the 9/11 attacks. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to brief the media.

The insurgents pushed through a city gripped by panic, where helicopters raced overhead throughout the day to evacuate personnel from the U.S. Embassy. Smoke rose near the compound as staff destroyed important documents, and the American flag was lowered. Several other Western missions also prepared to pull their people out.

Afghans fearing that the Taliban could reimpose the kind of brutal rule that all but eliminated women’s rights rushed to leave the country, lining up at cash machines to withdraw their life savings. The desperately poor — who had left homes in the countryside for the presumed safety of the capital — remained in their thousands in parks and open spaces throughout the city.

Though the Taliban had promised a peaceful transition, the U.S. Embassy suspended operations and warned Americans late in the day to shelter in place and not try to get to the airport.

Commercial flights were later suspended after sporadic gunfire erupted at the airport, according to two senior U.S. military officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing operations. Evacuations continued on military flights, but the halt to commercial traffic closed off one of the last routes available for Afghans fleeing the country.

Still, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken rejected comparisons to the U.S. pullout from Vietnam, as many watched in disbelief at the sight of helicopters landing in the embassy compound to take diplomats to a new outpost at Kabul International Airport.

“This is manifestly not Saigon,” he said on ABC’s “This Week.”

The American ambassador was among those evacuated, said officials who spoke condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss ongoing military operations. He was asking to return to the embassy, but it was not clear if he would be allowed to.

As the insurgents closed in Sunday, President Ashraf Ghani flew out of the country.

“The former president of Afghanistan left Afghanistan, leaving the country in this difficult situation,” said Abdullah Abdullah, the head of the Afghan National Reconciliation Council. “God should hold him accountable.”

As night fell, Taliban fighters deployed across Kabul, taking over abandoned police posts and pledging to maintain law and order during the transition. Residents reported looting in parts of the city, including in the upscale diplomatic district, and messages circulating on social media advised people to stay inside and lock their gates.

In a stunning rout, the Taliban seized nearly all of Afghanistan in just over a week, despite the billions of dollars spent by the U.S. and NATO over nearly two decades to build up Afghan security forces. Just days earlier, an American military assessment estimated it would be a month before the capital would come under insurgent pressure.

 

Understand that Afghanistan fell in a week because the US and NATO got 99.99% of things wrong from day one, nearly twenty years ago. We never should have been there in the first place, and we should have gotten out ten years ago when I said we should have.

The breakneck speed at which Afghanistan has fallen is only proof that the nation-building exercise of a Middle East democracy in Kabul was always an arrogant American dream. We were always going to be propping up the army and the government until that day we stopped, and the day we stopped everything fell apart like a balsa wood house in a hurricane.

This last piece of Unfinished Bush Business is coming to a close, and we'll finally witness the disaster over the rest of the year that we only delayed for two decades. Republicans are loudly blaming Biden, as if somehow that Trump didn't want to do the same thing to the point of inviting the Taliban to Camp David before scrapping peace talks entirely two years ago.

And as usual, the real victims over the last two decades have been the Afghan people, who died by the hundreds of thousands and will only suffer more under the Taliban.

So it goes.

Af-Gone-Istan, Con't

The timetable on the fall of Kabul to the Taliban has moved up to the "days" mark from "weeks", as the remaining 3,000 US troops in Kabul desperately try to buy enough time to evacuate remaining US personnel from the embassy in Kabul.

The Biden administration is preparing for the fall of Kabul and a retreat from any U.S. diplomatic presence in Afghanistan — a stunning reversal of expectations. It's looking increasingly likely to high-ranking aides to President Biden that the U.S. will have no enduring diplomatic presence in Afghanistan beyond Aug. 31 — the date Biden has promised the full troop withdrawal will be complete.

Why it matters: It's a major reversal from even a few weeks ago. The working assumption in Biden’s inner circle had been that Kabul could hold for the short term, allowing the U.S. to stay diplomatically engaged and help Afghan women secure their rights beyond the U.S. withdrawal. The 3,000 Marines and soldiers going in to help with the evacuation will also be gone by Aug. 31, we're told.

Between the lines: Biden is at Camp David this weekend, not at his Delaware beach house. He can relax there, but also has full comms. People can come and go without detection, and he avoids the optics of a beach vacation amid a mass evacuation.

The big picture: The U.S. embassy in Kabul wasn’t just a diplomatic building. It also was a major intelligence center with paper records and equipment there that the U.S. will remove or destroy. Protocols are in place for just such an emergency. Unlike Tehran in 1979, when the Iranian fundamentalists gained access to some sensitive material, the U.S. staff still in Kabul will ensure there’s nothing to gain. American diplomats at the embassy have been instructed to destroy important papers and desktop computers before they leave, according to a memo obtained by NPR.

Despite the efforts to secure intelligence and safeguard U.S. personnel and their Afghan supporters, Biden must brace for the symbolic defeat of seeing the Taliban overrun the space that housed the embassy. That includes the ambassador's residence — and the landmark "Duck and Cover" bar frequented by generations of troops, diplomats and journalists.

The major moment to come: Lowering the American flag that flies over what is essentially sovereign U.S. territory. That's typically done by the Marine Security Guard detachment that's always on post. It's a point of honor for the ambassador or chargé d'affaires to take custody of the flag and bring it back to State or a safe haven.

 

I wasn't around for the fall of Saigon, and I don't remember the fall of Tehran, is was a toddler, but this one I'm going to get to put into context for a long time. We've been in Afghanistan for 20 years, effectively my entire adult life, and it's come to nothing, I guess.

Reports out of the surrounding Afghan cities indicate that the Taliban has captured significant amounts of US weapons, vehicles, and helicopters as well.

It's going to be bad in Afghanistan very soon, folks, but the mission never could have ended any other way.

Going, Going, Af-Gone-Istan

Well, the US and its coalition allies really are pulling out of Afghanistan, and there's no bigger symbol of that long, looooooooong overdue withdrawal than the US military unceremoniously leaving Bagram AFB in Kabul, the center of US operations in the country for the last twenty goddamn years.

 

American troops and their Western allies have departed the U.S. military base that coordinated the sprawling war in Afghanistan, officials said on Friday, effectively ending major U.S. military operations in the country after nearly two decades. 

For generations of American service members, the military hub, Bagram Air Base, was a gateway to and from a war that cut across constant changes on the battlefield and in presidential administrations. But the final withdrawal overnight on Thursday occurred with little fanfare and no public ceremony, and in an atmosphere of grave concern over the Afghan security forces’ ability to hold off Taliban advances across the country.

The American exit was completed quickly enough that some looters managed to get into the base before being arrested, Afghan officials said.

The quiet leave-taking from the base weeks before the planned withdrawal of American troops in mid July, and months ahead of President’s Biden announced Sept. 11 departure, highlights Washington’s efforts to signal two different messages: one to the U.S. public that its longest foreign war is ending, and another to the Afghan government that the United States is not abandoning the country in the middle of a Taliban offensive, and would retain some ability to conduct airstrikes if need be.

“We are on track, exactly where we expected to be,” Mr. Biden told reporters at the White House Friday of the withdrawal. 

Bagram was operating at full capacity until the end on Thursday. Fighter jets, cargo planes and surveillance aircraft relied on the twin runways until it was no longer feasible to keep them in the country.

Now, air support for the Afghan forces and overhead surveillance will be flown in from outside the country, from bases in Qatar or the United Arab Emirates, or from an aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea. A contingent of 650 troops will remain to protect the American Embassy in Kabul, the capital. How long that type of support will continue is unclear, but the Pentagon has until Sept. 11 — when the American military mission is supposed to formally conclude — to decide.

The departure comes at a perilous time for Afghanistan.

Some U.S. intelligence estimates predict that the Afghan government could fall to its rivals, the Taliban, in from six months to two years after the Americans complete their withdrawal. The Taliban are inching closer to Kabul after having taken about a quarter of the country’s districts in the past two months.

Hundreds of members of the Afghan security forces have surrendered in recent weeks, while their counterattacks have taken back little territory from the Taliban. And as the Afghan forces fracture, regional militias have appeared with renewed prominence, in an echo of the country’s path toward civil war in the 1990s.

“Civil war is certainly a path that can be visualized,” the top American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Austin S. Miller, told reporters on Tuesday.

Early Friday morning, looters entered the base, grabbing gas canisters and some laptops, said Darwaish Raufi, a district administrator for Bagram, adding that some were arrested by the police.

Mr. Raufi said the Americans had failed to coordinate their departure with the Afghan forces, leaving a gap in security at the base. But Col. Sonny Leggett, a spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan, said the transfer of the base had been “closely coordinated.”

 

I'll be the first to say that there has been no greater single example of bipartisanship in the US than the two decades, trillions of dollars, and hundreds of thousands of military and civilian casualties in Afghanistan all lost completely thanks to the efforts of both Republicans and Democrats during my adult lifetime.

Having said that, Trump really wanted credit for getting us out, and fully expected to have taken a second term to take a victory lap. Instead, Biden is the one completing the withdrawal. Remember that.

 

The Law Of The Lone Star

Texas Attorney General Dan Patrick is facing possible disbarment as the state's Bar Association is investigating whether Paxton's Supreme Court lawsuit to block Joe Biden's presidency was unethical.

The Texas bar association is investigating whether state Attorney General Ken Paxton’s failed efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election based on bogus claims of fraud amounted to professional misconduct.

The State Bar of Texas initially declined to take up a Democratic Party activist’s complaint that Paxton’s petitioning of the U.S. Supreme Court to block Joe Biden’s victory was frivolous and unethical. But a tribunal that oversees grievances against lawyers overturned that decision late last month and ordered the bar to look into the accusations against the Republican official.

The investigation is yet another liability for the embattled attorney general, who is facing a years-old criminal case, a separate, newer FBI investigation, and a Republican primary opponent who is seeking to make electoral hay of the various controversies. It also makes Paxton one of the highest profile lawyers to face professional blowback over their roles in Donald Trump’s effort to delegitimize his defeat.

A spokesman for the attorney general’s office did not respond to requests for comment. Paxton’s defense lawyer, Philip Hilder, declined to comment.

Kevin Moran, the 71-year-old president of the Galveston Island Democrats, shared his complaint with The Associated Press along with letters from the State Bar of Texas and the Board of Disciplinary Appeals that confirm the investigation. He said Paxton’s efforts to dismiss other states’ election results was a wasteful embarrassment for which the attorney general should lose his law license.

“He wanted to disenfranchise the voters in four other states,” said Moran. “It’s just crazy.”

Texas’ top appeals lawyer, who would usually argue the state’s cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, notably did not join Paxton in bringing the election suit. The high court threw it out.

Paxton has less than a month to reply to Moran’s claim that the lawsuit to overturn the results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin was misleading and brought in bad faith, according to a June 3 letter from the bar. All four of the battleground states voted for Biden in November.

From there, bar staff will take up the case in a proceeding that resembles the grand jury stage of a criminal investigation. Bar investigators are empowered to question witnesses, hold hearings and issue subpoenas to determine whether a lawyer likely committed misconduct. That finding then launches a disciplinary process that could ultimately result in disbarment, suspension or a lesser punishments. A lawyer also could be found to have done nothing wrong.

The bar dismisses thousands of grievances each year and the Board of Disciplinary Appeals, 12 independent lawyers appointed by the Texas Supreme Court, overwhelmingly uphold those decisions. Reversals like that of Moran’s complaint happened less than 7% of the time last year, according to the bar’s annual report.

Claire Reynolds, a spokeswoman and lawyer for the bar, said state law prohibits the agency from commenting on complaints unless they result is public sanctions or a court action.

The bar’s investigation is confidential and likely to take months. But it draws renewed attention to Paxton’s divisive defense of Trump as he and Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush vie for the former president’s endorsement in the Republican primary to run for attorney general in 2022.

 

While Jeb!'s son is definitely gunning for the job his uncle had in Texas and in Washington and needs Paxton out of the way, I don't see how he's going to be able to take advantage of this bar investigation in any way. Anything short of complete agreement with whatever Paxton's position is, being martyred in Trump's "noble" defense, is the end of Potted Plant's career and he knows it. 

Granted, an AG being disbarred from practicing law in the state where he resides kind of makes it impossible to do the job, but there's nothing he can do other than stay out of the way of this hurtling trainwreck.

A Pence-ive Escape Plan

Mike Pence, doomed to be the final traitorous villain in Trump's downfall, is hoping that if he runs away in the final two weeks of his term that the Trump cultists will forget who he is.

On Jan. 6, Vice President Mike Pence will oversee final confirmation of President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.

Then he’ll likely skip town.

As vice president, Pence has the awkward but unavoidable duty of presiding over the session of Congress that will formalize Biden’s Electoral College victory — a development that is likely to expose him and other Republicans to the wrath of GOP voters who believe President Donald Trump’s false claim that the election was stolen from him.

But Pence could dodge their ire by leaving Washington immediately for the Middle East and Europe. According to three U.S. officials familiar with the planning, the vice president is eyeing a foreign trip that would take him overseas for nearly a week, starting on Jan. 6.

Though Pence aides declined to confirm details of the trip, which remains tentative, a U.S. government document seen by POLITICO shows the vice president is due to travel to Bahrain, Israel and Poland, with the possibility of more stops being added. A pre-advance team of Pence aides and other U.S. officials left earlier this week to visit the planned stops in preparation for the multicountry tour, which would be Pence’s first trip abroad since last January, when he traveled to Rome and Jerusalem on a whirlwind two-day sojourn.

On the surface, the trip is part of a push to underscore the Trump administration’s role in brokering a series of diplomatic agreements to normalize relations between Israel and a handful of Arab countries, including Bahrain. But for Pence, visiting these countries is also a way to bolster already-strong credentials with the Christian right, which strongly supports Israel. And it allows Pence — once again — to put distance between himself and Trump’s complaints about the election outcome that are likely to intensify after Congress affirms Biden’s win.

It’s a tactic Pence has used to navigate the final days of Trump’s presidency: stay out of the spotlight and insulate himself from his boss’s baseless election-fraud crusade, all while still finding ways to burnish his own credentials and technically toe the party line.

Pence has promoted Trump in his work as head of the government’s coronavirus task force and while boosting two GOP Senate candidates facing runoff races in Georgia. But he’s declined to publicize his minimal involvement in the president’s election-fraud strategy. And while he has privately assisted the Trump campaign when asked — joining donor calls and lending his signature to fundraising pleas — his public comments since the election have almost all centered on other topics, including hosting an event focused on the Trump administration's anti-abortion policy at the White House on Wednesday.

“I suspect the timing is anything but coincidental,” one Pence ally said of his tentative travel plans.

 

I have no sympathy for the guy, and I'm actually glad to see that like the previous two Republican Veeps we've had, his political career is essentially over and he has no shot at the Oval Office. Granted, both Quayle and Cheney are making bank in the private sector these days, and I'm sure Pence will go back to Indiana and join a legal firm or stay in DC as a venture capital outfit lobbyist, but what I'd like to see is Pence end up in Leavenworth instead.

What he won't do is run for office again.  He'll be primaried out of existence if the tries, and he knows it. Trump's boundless capacity for retribution will see to that.

Couldn't happen to a more deserving guy.

 

Getting The Band Back Together

The GOP is absolutely up to their old voter suppression tricks on a national level, and they've been attacking the integrity of the vote since it became obvious that COVID-19 was going to make voting by mail easier.They've been coordinating a national bag of dirty tricks for months, and the effort is being spearheaded by our old friend, Dubya-era voter suppression expert Hans von Spakovski and his merry crew of assholes over at the Heritage Foundation.

Starting in early spring, as the coronavirus took hold, a conservative lawyer at the forefront of raising alarms about voting by mail held multiple private briefings exclusively for Republican state election officials, according to previously unreported public records.

The lawyer, the Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky, is a leading purveyor of the notion that voter fraud is rampant, claims that have been largely discredited.

Among the participants in these meetings has been an official from the office of Georgia’s secretary of state; the secretary, Brad Raffensperger, recently elevated concerns about voter fraud by contending that 1,000 Georgians had voted twice in elections this year.

GOP congressional staffers and a Trump administration appointee have also joined in these meetings, which were open to officials from states across the country, including Missouri and Nevada, the records show. No Democratic state election officials appear to have been invited.
The “goal” of the meetings, held remotely, is to “gather the chief state election officials together to strategize on advancing their shared goal of ensuring the integrity of the elections they administer in their home states,” an invitation to an early August event reads.

Most of the states declined to comment on the meetings, and it’s not clear what specifically was discussed. Von Spakovsky is highly influential in conservative circles. He has sent invitees copies of his published essays pushing for in-person voting and culling voter rolls as absentee balloting expands amid the pandemic, a situation that von Spakovsky argued will “make fraud far easier.”

The meetings come as voting access has become one of the central flashpoints of the upcoming presidential election. More Americans are expected to vote by mail this year than ever before because of the health risks posed by COVID-19. President Donald Trump has repeatedly and baselessly asserted that mail-in voting is rife with problems. Echoing von Spakovsky, he asserted on Twitter in July that the upcoming presidential vote will be the “most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history.”
Experts have said voting by mail carries little risk of fraud. Since it is widely believed that more Democractic voters will vote by mail than Republicans, von Spakovsky’s proposals, if adopted, could suppress Democratic turnout in one of the most consequential presidential elections in a generation.

Secretaries of state, who oversee statewide voting and work with county election officials, have broad leeway to act in ways that can limit or expand the franchise. While most are partisan elected officials, they are expected to carry out policies that benefit everyone.

The Heritage Foundation did not make von Spakovsky available for an interview and didn’t address detailed questions about the meetings. In a statement, the nonprofit’s media director, Greg Scott, said election security was “crucial to our country’s future.”

“The Heritage Foundation is committed to making sure elections are free and fair,” he said. “Every eligible voter’s vote should be counted and not canceled out by fraudulent acts.”

So now we know where Trump is getting his bad info on "rampant voter fraud" from, the same Dubya/Nameless One jackasses who were doing the same 15 years ago.

They're definitely up to no good.

Sunday Long Read: The Forever War

After three years of fighting with the Trump regime over FOIA requests, Washington Post reporter Craig Whitlock has put together an indispensable (and Pulitzer-worthy) series on America's massive 18-year failure in Afghanistan.

In the interviews, more than 400 insiders offered unrestrained criticism of what went wrong in Afghanistan and how the United States became mired in nearly two decades of warfare.

With a bluntness rarely expressed in public, the interviews lay bare pent-up complaints, frustrations and confessions, along with second-guessing and backbiting.

“We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing,” Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told government interviewers in 2015. He added: “What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.”

“If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction . . . 2,400 lives lost,” Lute added, blaming the deaths of U.S. military personnel on bureaucratic breakdowns among Congress, the Pentagon and the State Department. “Who will say this was in vain?”

Since 2001, more than 775,000 U.S. troops have deployed to Afghanistan, many repeatedly. Of those, 2,300 died there and 20,589 were wounded in action, according to Defense Department figures.

The interviews, through an extensive array of voices, bring into sharp relief the core failings of the war that persist to this day. They underscore how three presidents — George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump — and their military commanders have been unable to deliver on their promises to prevail in Afghanistan.

With most speaking on the assumption that their remarks would not become public, U.S. officials acknowledged that their warfighting strategies were fatally flawed and that Washington wasted enormous sums of money trying to remake Afghanistan into a modern nation.

The interviews also highlight the U.S. government’s botched attempts to curtail runaway corruption, build a competent Afghan army and police force, and put a dent in Afghanistan’s thriving opium trade.

The U.S. government has not carried out a comprehensive accounting of how much it has spent on the war in Afghanistan, but the costs are staggering.

Since 2001, the Defense Department, State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development have spent or appropriated between $934 billion and $978 billion, according to an inflation-adjusted estimate calculated by Neta Crawford, a political science professor and co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University.

Those figures do not include money spent by other agencies such as the CIA and the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is responsible for medical care for wounded veterans.

“What did we get for this $1 trillion effort? Was it worth $1 trillion?” Jeffrey Eggers, a retired Navy SEAL and White House staffer for Bush and Obama, told government interviewers. He added, “After the killing of Osama bin Laden, I said that Osama was probably laughing in his watery grave considering how much we have spent on Afghanistan.”

The documents also contradict a long chorus of public statements from U.S. presidents, military commanders and diplomats who assured Americans year after year that they were making progress in Afghanistan and the war was worth fighting. 

Several of those interviewed described explicit and sustained efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public. They said it was common at military headquarters in Kabul — and at the White House — to distort statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case.

“Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,” Bob Crowley, an Army colonel who served as a senior counterinsurgency adviser to U.S. military commanders in 2013 and 2014, told government interviewers. “Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone.”

John Sopko, the head of the federal agency that conducted the interviews, acknowledged to The Post that the documents show “the American people have constantly been lied to.”

Part 2 of the series is here, taking a look at the fundamental flaws in America's warfighting strategy from day one.

Afghanistan has been the pervasive American military disaster for my generation and younger.  I know several people who went out into the Sandbox over the years and while all of them came back, they were far from being all there when they returned.  And this entire mess was one huge lie.

It always was, but now we know everyone knew, including and especially our own government, a trillion dollar puppet show that destroyed our credibility and is still ongoing.

Sunday Long Read: Judge, Jury, And Executioner

In Texas, county judges are in charge of the machinery of public defender cases. Texas Republicans will tell you that it's the most efficient way to handle people who can't afford their own lawyers and the Supreme Court's ruling that one has to be appointed for them. Judicial reform activists will tell you that the inherent conflict of interest means poor Texans are getting railroaded into prison so judges can get reelected for being tough on crime.  And yes, the man behind this mess was Texas's governor at the time George W. Bush.

Indigent defense in the U.S. is in crisis. More than twenty lawsuits filed in the past decade on behalf of poor plaintiffs—in California, Louisiana, Georgia, and other states—point to this predicament, which has been acknowledged at the highest levels: in 2013, in a speech marking the fiftieth anniversary of Gideon v. Wainwright,then–U.S. attorney general Eric Holder bemoaned the number of unjust convictions and sentences borne by the poor. “This is unacceptable,” he declared, “and unworthy of a legal system that stands as an example to all the world.”

The main reason for this crisis is funding. Because the Supreme Court did not, in its 1963 ruling, specify how states should pay for counsel, local policymakers facing other costs—for schools, roads, law enforcement—consistently shortchange indigent defense. This is why public defender’s offices are chronically understaffed. It’s also why court-appointed private lawyers are overloaded: the fees they’re paid are often so low that they are forced to take on a multitude of cases just to make a living. Some overburdened lawyers, in turn, contribute to so-called plea mills, in which, critics say, they encourage defendants to plead guilty because they are either too swamped to investigate claims or incentivized not to (in Travis County, for instance, court-appointed lawyers are paid $600 for a felony case whether they secure a plea deal or get the charge dismissed).

The problem of funding is especially acute in Texas. Since 2001, when the state legislature passed the Fair Defense Act—a law that aimed to overhaul and standardize how the state’s poor received counsel—total spending on indigent defense has increased significantly, from some $91 million in 2001 to roughly $273 million in 2018. But Texas ranks among the states that spend the least per capita: its counties, which shoulder most of the costs, are some of the fastest growing in the country, and what little the Legislature chips in to help—some $30 million last year—does not match demand. This creates a woeful game of numbers on the ground. In 2017, for example, the average court-appointed lawyer in Texas made only $247 per misdemeanor case and $598 per felony.

However, the problem goes beyond money. In Texas, the crisis is exacerbated by a key structural flaw: indigent defense is largely overseen by judges. Contrary to the American Bar Association’s principles of public defense, which call for defense lawyers to be independent of the judiciary, judges in most Texas counties decide which lawyers get cases, how much they are paid, and whether their motions—say, to reduce bail or test DNA—have merit. (Counties do have fee schedules for lawyers, but judges set the schedules and retain discretion over payment.)

Given that judges are elected based, in part, on the efficiency of their courts, this is an inherent conflict of interest. “Whatever the judge wants to do, it’s probably not acquit your client,” said Charlie Gerstein, a lawyer for Civil Rights Corps, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit that has spent the past several years challenging criminal justice abuses around the country. “The judge wants to move the docket. The judge wants to get reelected.” (Civil Rights Corps filed the class-action lawsuitagainst the bail system of Harris County in 2016.) Lawyers trying to work a case properly—by devoting more time or requesting an investigator—face a quandary: Why make the effort if a judge can retaliate by appointing them to fewer cases or cutting their pay?

In 1999 Houston Democrat and then–state senator Rodney Ellis introduced a bill that would, among other things, transfer oversight of indigent defense attorneys from judges to county officials. The Lege approved the measure, but judges, lawyers, and prosecutors resisted, writing more than three hundred letters to then-governor George W. Bush. (“The bill inappropriately takes appointment authority away from judges, who are better able to assess the quality of legal representation,” said Bush in his veto proclamation.) Two years later, Ellis helped muscle through the Fair Defense Act, which provided, for the first time, some funding and oversight by the state, in the form of an agency now known as the Texas Indigent Defense Commission. The TIDC was tasked with administering funds, enforcing standards, and responding to violations. But the law was also clear: “Only the judges . . . or the judges’ designee” was allowed “to appoint counsel for indigent defendants in the county.”

For a long time, the combined effect of this judicial control and lack of funding—heavy caseloads, underserved defendants—was hard to quantify. But a surprisingly trailblazing move by the Legislature in 2013 gave Texas something almost no other state that relies on private attorneys has: comprehensive data. That year, lawmakers ordered every county to start reporting to the TIDC the number of indigent cases, and fees, given to lawyers in every court. They also instructed the TIDC to conduct a study on appropriate caseloads, the first of its kind mandated by a state government.

In 2015 the study’s results were released: in any given year, researchers found, a Texas lawyer could reasonably handle 128 felonies or 226 misdemeanors, or a weighted combination of the two. This set a benchmark against which to understand the growing database, which showed lawyers juggling two, three, or even four times that load. Even the director of the TIDC at the time, Jim Bethke, said he hadn’t known “the magnitude of people who were getting run through the system on a super mass conveyor belt.”

Today, the TIDC database is staggering in its reach. With just a few clicks, anyone can look up lawyers by name and see how many indigent cases they took, and in what court, and for how much. Finding the highest-earning attorney, or the most overloaded, takes minutes. Consider just a few names: In Harris County, in fiscal 2017, James Barr earned more than $131,000 for work on 433 indigent felony cases, which all came from the court of Judge Jim Wallace. In the Panhandle, Artie Aguilar won a contract in fiscal 2018 to handle all indigent felony cases in Dawson, Gaines, Garza, and Lynn counties—a total of 322 cases, for a payment of $75,000. T. D. Hammons, who takes cases around Amarillo, was paid $99,450 in fiscal 2017 for work on 129 felonies and dozens of misdemeanors. He reported that these took up less than 60 percent of his time, meaning that the rest of his time was devoted to additional clients.

Astonishingly, few judges—or lawyers or lawmakers—seem to be aware of these figures. Those who are will sometimes argue that caseload limits are unrealistic; it’s too arbitrary, they say, to impose a number when situations vary from county to county, or when judges are faced with too many defendants and too few defense lawyers. But as Texas grows and funding continues to lag, these figures offer a place to start—and one thing they show is that judicial oversight of an indigent defendant’s right to a lawyer is becoming untenable.

The system is broken because it's designed that way.  Nobody wants to grow up and be a public defender in Texas with four times the caseload, working for chump change, when the system rewards speed and not accuracy.  And with Texas, we can see exactly how broken criminal justice in America is.

Tanks For The Memories

Dear Leader Trump wants a military parade with tanks and jets just like the other dictators do, and he's apparently cajoled, whined at, and threatened the Pentagon and DC city officials to the point where they have to put on a show for the orange little prince of darkness.

Tanks for President Donald Trump’s “Salute to America” Fourth of July celebration were seen arriving in Washington on Tuesday morning, just days before the event is scheduled to take place.

NBC News captured video of the tanks — two Bradley and two Abrams tanks — purportedly en route to the National Mall for Thursday’s event. Also in transport are support vehicles, including an M88, used to help recover heavy armored vehicles.
A photographer for the Associated Press also spotted two M1A1 Abrams tanks along with four other military vehicles on a freight train in southeast D.C. on Monday night.

On Monday, Trump told reporters that tanks would be stationed outside of the Fourth of July celebration, but gave no further details.

The Federal Aviation Administration also confirmed that it would suspend operations at the Ronald Reagan National Airport, the closest commercial airport to D.C., from 6:15 p.m. to 7:45 p.m. ET due to the flyovers from Air Force One and other military planes. Operations at the airport will also be impacted from 9:00 p.m. to 9:45 p.m. ET, during the fireworks show.

Trump has spoken about hosting an event here in Washington that would display military prowess since he attended a similar event in Paris in 2017. Previous plans were scratched after concerns were raised about the cost and infrastructure impact, with critics raising similar concerns about his plans for this week's holiday event.

Local officials and residents have pointed to the damage such massive military equipment could cause to area roads. And Democrats in Congress have criticized the president for putting on an unusually large production at taxpayer expense.

But Trump whined and cried until he got his Fourth of July parade with his generals and tanks, and as Steve M says, if you think this is bad, wait until the billions of dollars of taxpayer money spent on this farce in an election year next July.

Believe me, he'll try. A year from now, an election will be four months away. There's a good chance Trump will be trailing in the polls. Of course he'll try. And this time he'll insist that the damn tanks have to roll down Pennsylvania Avenue, no matter how much damage they do to the roads.

As bad as this year's event will be, next year's will be much worse. Every Trump whim will be indulged.

This is 100% a Trump election rally held with taxpayer money, specifically $2.5 million Trump stole from the National Park Service.  The RNC will make sure that only Trump supporters are in the audience, because Republicans got free tickets, and Democrats weren't invited at all. And it will only be worse as we head into the 2020 election season.

That is if we still have elections, and aren't deep into a shooting war with Iran by then, which most likely we will be. This is almost certainly a test run for the coming "If you question what we're doing with our military, you're not a patriot" era of Dubya's post 9/11 excesses, only on a Trumpian scale, complete with Trumpian levels of violence and fear. America was pretty quick to shame people back in 2001, but in 2019, when, and not if we go to war, it's going to get brutal for the concept of dissent and soon.  Next year's Fourth of July Trump Parade will be mandatory, citizen.

Autocrats have military parades.  Autocrats also have bloody crackdowns on critics.

Blackmail At The Speed Of Light

Companies still refuse to take cybersecurity seriously heading into 2019, and the results are exactly what you'd expect to happen.

On Monday, New Year’s Eve, a hacker group announced it had breached a law firm handling cases related to the September 11 attacks, and threatened to publicly release a large cache of related internal files unless their ransom demands were met.

The news is the latest public extortion attempt from the group known as The Dark Overlord, which has previously targeted a production studio working for Netflix, as well as a host of medical centres and private businessesacross the United States. The announcement also signals a slight evolution in The Dark Overlord’s strategy, which has expanded on leveraging the mediato exert pressure on victims, to now distributing its threats and stolen data in a wider fashion.

In its announcement published on Pastebin, The Dark Overlord points to several different insurers and legal firms, claiming specifically that it hacked Hiscox Syndicates Ltd, Lloyds of London, and Silverstein Properties.

“Hiscox Syndicates Ltd and Lloyds of London are some of the biggest insurers on the planet insuring everything from the smallest policies to some of the largest policies on the planet, and who even insured structures such as the World Trade Centers,” the announcement reads.

It is unclear what exact files the group has stolen, but it is trying to capitalize on conspiracy theories around the 9/11 attacks.

“We'll be providing many answers about 9.11 conspiracies through our 18.000 secret documents leak,” the group tweeted on Monday.

If there's one thing the Trump era has taught us, it's that the lawyers know everything, so if you need blackmail material, they're always a good place to start.

The hacking group published a small set of letters, emails and other documents that mention various law firms, as well as the Transport Security Administration (TSA) and Federal Aviation Administration (The TSA could not provide a statement in time for publication, and the FAA told Motherboard in an email it was investigating.) Those documents themselves appear to be fairly innocuous, but the group says it may release more.

In its extortion note, The Dark Overlord included a link for a 10GB archive of files it allegedly stole. The group also provided a link to this archive to Motherboard before publishing its announcement. The cache is encrypted, but the hackers are threatening to release the relevant decryption keys, unlocking different sets of files at a time, unless the victims pay the hackers an undisclosed ransom fee in Bitcoin.

“Pay the fuck up, or we're going to bury you with this. If you continue to fail us, we'll escalate these releases by releasing the keys, each time a Layer is opened, a new wave of liability will fall upon you,” the extortion note reads.

The Dark Overlord is also claiming to be offering to sell the data on a dark web hacking forum, and is attempting to blackmail individuals who may be included in the documents themselves.

“If you're one of the dozens of solicitor firms who was involved in the litigation, a politician who was involved in the case, a law enforcement agency who was involved in the investigations, a property management firm, an investment bank, a client of a client, a reference of a reference, a global insurer, or whoever else, you're welcome to contact our e-mail below and make a request to formally have your documents and materials withdrawn from any eventual public release of the materials. However, you'll be paying us,” the group’s post reads.

Good luck catching them, too.   Nothing has made internet crime more viable than the rise of cryptocurrency over the last five years.  Frankly, anyone enabling the spread of it basically deserves what will happen next.

Last Call For Goodbye Poppy

Former Presidents, Vice Presidents, First Ladies, lawmakers, and dignitaries both foreign and domestic assembled at the National Cathedral for the funeral of George H.W. Bush on Wednesday.  It was a somber affair, certainly worthy of the funerals of America's great leaders, and then an orange elephant showed up and managed to basically ruin everything.

Fox News anchor Chris Wallace said he was "struck" by the reception of President Trump and first lady Melania Trump upon their arrival at the funeral for George H.W. Bush on Wednesday, saying "a chill had descended" on the front row that included the Clintons, Obamas and Carters.

“I have to say I was struck when President Trump and Melania Trump came to the front row, that it was as if a chill had descended on that front row," Wallace said on Fox's "America's Newsroom" during live coverage of the Bush state funeral at Washington National Cathedral.

"You had seen a lot of chatty talk between the Clintons and the Obamas, the Carters. But when Donald Trump sat down, the greeting that he was given by Barack Obama and Michelle Obama was about as cool as it could have been.”

Trump and the first lady greeted the Obamas and shook hands when sitting down next to them in the front row of the service for Bush, who passed away last Friday at the age of 94. There was no greeting between the Trumps and Clintons, who sat farther down the row.

Hillary Clinton, Trump's rival during the 2016 presidential election, turned when Melania Trump entered the area but did not appear to turn to acknowledge President Trump's arrival. Her husband, former President Clinton, and former President Carter turned their direction when Trump greeted the Obamas.

Trump managed to not soil himself in front of the planet, although it was close.

Watch Trump's face. pic.twitter.com/irLhFxqS0C

— Caroline Orr (@RVAwonk) December 5, 2018

Dubya said some nice stuff about his dad and then everyone avoided Donald Trump like a family reunion with the drunk racist uncle that just got out of Scientology. 

But in the end, a bunch of men whose decisions helped millions of lives, ruined millions of lives, and took millions of lives over the last 40 years all got together to bury one of their own.

That was really about it.  The rest of us press on, one day at a time.

Sunday Long Read: Greasing Palms

Biofuels were supposed to be the cheap, sustainable power source of the future for a greening world.  Nothing however could have been further from the truth.  The problem is that it took more energy to produce biofuels than sustain them, leading the mass clearing of forests to create plantations, and over the last decade they have become a major source of carbon dioxide making the planet hotter.

The last thing anyone expected from President George W. Bush’s 2007 State of the Union address was a proposal for the largest-ever cut in the nation’s use of gasoline. The president was no climate champion — he had backed out of the Kyoto Protocol shortly after taking office in 2001 — but he did favor what he called “energy independence.” He had declared the United States “addicted” to foreign oil, yet dependence on Middle Eastern fuel continued. Hurricane Katrina, and the lingering damage it did to oil pipelines and refineries, had pushed up gas prices, renewed fears of global warming and kept a firm thumb on the economy.

Now, Bush proposed, homegrown energy could be drawn from the rural places most in need of an economic boost. Clean-coal initiatives would generate the electricity of the future, but it was biofuels — in particular ethanol, which is largely distilled from corn, and biodiesel, made with vegetable oil — that would power the vehicles of the future. Within 10 years, the country would replace 35 billion gallons of petroleum, or one-fifth of all the gas and diesel burned, with fuel made from plants. The measure, as he put it, would confront “the serious challenge of global climate change.” Unsaid, but clear to anyone paying attention, was that it would also please America’s agriculture industry, which had been lobbying for ethanol and advanced biofuel research for years. The House chamber erupted in applause.

On the night of the president’s address, Timothy Searchinger sat on his couch in Takoma Park, Md., just a few miles from the Capitol, and watched on television, struck by what seemed to him a glaring lapse in logic. “Oh, my God, what the hell is happening here?” he recalls wondering aloud.

Searchinger wasn’t a scientist; he was a lawyer, working with the Environmental Defense Fund. But he saw a serious flaw in the claim that the president’s proposal would ameliorate climate change. Searchinger knew that cropland had already consumed virtually every arable acre across the Midwest. Quintupling biofuel production would require a huge amount of additional arable land, far more than existed in the United States. Unless Americans planned to eat less, that meant displacing food production to some other country with unused land — and he knew that when forests are cut, or new land is opened for farming, substantial new amounts of carbon can be released into the atmosphere. Forests hold as much as 45 percent of the planet’s carbon stored on land, and old-growth trees in particular hold a great deal of that carbon, typically far more than any of the crops that replace them. When the trees are cut down, most of that carbon is released.

Scientists and lawyers who study environmental impact often deploy “carbon-life-cycle analysis” to determine just how much carbon a given product is removing from, or introducing to, the environment over the course of its production and consumption. When a truck burns biodiesel, the carbon emissions that come from its tailpipe aren’t much different from those of a truck burning petroleum. But a part of the biodiesel emissions aren’t counted, because — in theory — they have been balanced out: Plants absorb carbon from the atmosphere when they grow, and fuel experts subtract that sequestered carbon from the tailpipe emission, completing a transaction that they say balances at zero.

In ideal circumstances — unvegetated land planted for the first time — this balancing out really happens. When corn grows, it soaks up carbon, and when it is consumed (whether as food or fuel), it releases that carbon back into the air. But the analysis breaks down when faced with the reality of land use. Almost everywhere in the world, planting more corn or soy for biofuel would involve creating more farmland, which in turn would involve cutting down whatever was already growing on that land. And that would mean releasing a huge amount of carbon into the air, with nothing to balance the books. As Searchinger watched Bush’s call for an unprecedented increase in biofuel production, his hunch was that the biofuel balance sheet would turn out to be tragically shortsighted.

Representative Henry A. Waxman, at the time a powerful 16-term Democrat from California who had presided over several failed efforts to pass climate legislation, was also skeptical about Bush’s plan. But he knew that one of the most vexing aspects of global emissions reduction was the question of how to replace transportation fuels. It was hard enough to upgrade several thousand electrical power plants to draw on wind or solar or even nuclear power. That would take years. But transforming the more than 100 million cars and trucks on America’s roads would take far longer, decades even, and in the meantime those vehicles were producing 28 percent of carbon emissions in the United States. Waxman thought a biofuel requirement could be a turning point in climate legislation, a moment when Washington stopped pretending.

Within months of Bush’s speech, the House and the Senate were reconciling a draft of a sprawling omnibus bill that would eventually be called the Energy Independence and Security Act, or EISA. In addition to requiring carmakers to improve fuel standards, a longtime priority for Democrats, the bill updated and expanded renewable-fuel standards, requiring fuel producers to mix in soy, palm and other kinds of vegetable oil with diesel fuel and to use ethanol from corn and sugar in gasoline. The bill also set tough standards for how much cleaner, in terms of carbon, each of those categories of fuel had to become — 50 percent for diesel, 20 percent for gas — and empowered the Environmental Protection Agency to judge what qualified.

The expected gains were enormous. The switch to biofuels, the E.P.A. would later calculate, promised to stop the release of 4.5 billion tons of carbon over three decades, the equivalent of parking every single American automobile for more than seven years. Before the bill passed in December 2007, Speaker Nancy Pelosi called it “the shot heard round the world for energy independence.”

The law had a profound effect. Biodiesel production in the United States would jump from 250 million gallons in 2006 to more than 1.5 billion gallons in 2016. Imports of biodiesel to the United States surged from near zero to more than 100 million gallons a month. As fuel markets snatched up every ounce of domestic soy oil to meet the American fuel mandate, the food industry also replaced the soy it had used with something cheaper and just as good: palm oil, largely from Malaysia and Indonesia, which are the sources of nearly 90 percent of the global supply. Lawmakers never anticipated that their well-intentioned plan — to help the climate by helping American farmers — might instead transform Indonesia and present one of the greatest threats to the planet’s tropical rain forests. But as Indonesian palm oil began to flood Western markets, that is exactly what began to happen.

“We saw great promise,” Waxman told me recently, sitting in a glass conference room at Waxman Strategies, the Washington lobbying firm of which he is chairman. But he is no longer so hopeful. He is now also the chairman of the environmental organization Mighty Earth, which lobbies food and agriculture companies to deploy more climate-friendly production methods. In 2007, he and other lawmakers were focused on the benefits of biofuels and the bridge they promised to even greener technologies. Now the soft-spoken Waxman is far more concerned about the other side of the equation. “We didn’t think we were going to pay such a heavy price,” he said.

Bush knew exactly what he was doing, creating a new US fuel industry that didn't have to depend on digging holes in the ground, rather that it used massive amounts of farmland and meant the stripping of forests, and whoever controlled that land was going to be ridiculously wealthy.

And all that greed destroyed millions of acres of rain forest, accelerating our path to climate catastrophe that will render the earth unfit to sustain life. "We did this to ourselves" is what our descendants will say a century from now, that is if there are any human beings left.

Last Call For Missing What We Had

A new Pew Research poll finds Americans greatly miss the last guy in the Oval Office, because you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone.

When asked which president has done the best job in their lifetimes, more Americans name Barack Obama than any other president. More than four-in-ten (44%) say Obama is the best or second best president of their lifetimes, compared with about a third who mention Bill Clinton (33%) or Ronald Reagan (32%).

Not yet halfway through his term, 19% say Donald Trump has done the best or second best job of any president of their lifetimes. That is comparable with the share who viewed Obama as one of the best presidents in 2011 (20%).

The survey by Pew Research Center, conducted June 5-12 among 2,002 adults, asks people in an open-ended format which president has done the best job in their lifetimes. The analysis is based on their first and second choices.

About one-in-ten adults (12%) say John F. Kennedy did the best job in office during their lifetimes. But Kennedy is named as the best or second best president by about a quarter of those who were alive during his presidency: 24% of Baby Boomers and 25% of those in the Silent Generation.

People’s views of the best president of their lifetimes are partly tied to their ages. Millennials, who are currently ages 22 to 37, are far more likely than older generations to name Obama as one of the best presidents in their lifetimes: About six-in-ten Millennials (62%) view Obama as one of the top two, with nearly half, 46%, naming him the best president.

Older generations are much more likely than Millennials to name Reagan as one of the best presidents. Reagan was president before most Millennials were born.

Gen Xers (ages 38 to 53) are divided in their assessments: 45% of Gen Xers name Reagan, while nearly as many mention Obama (41%) or Clinton (39%).

As a young Gen Xer, Obama/Clinton is an easy one-two for me, but the sentimentality for Ronald Reagan is something I just don't get at all even though he's the first president I actually remember.  You can draw a straight line from Reagan to Trump today, the GOP has been a bunch of racist, bigoted, corporate dickbags my entire lifetime.

It's good to see that we miss Obama, but the people who think Trump's been the best president in their lifetimes are really hideous.

The Irreverent Revenant Is Resurgently Relevant

All this talk of Trump's CIA head pick, former 9/11-era torture maven Gina Haspel, and her disastrous confirmation hearing yesterday (so bad in fact that John McCain has turned on her) has had the effect of re-engaging the "debate" of whether or not torturing people is a good idea, and by "debate" I mean the Nameless One has risen from the Void and hungers once more.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney said the U.S. should restart its enhanced interrogation techniques — often considered torture — after the issue was thrust to the forefront during Gina Haspel’s confirmation fight to become CIA director.

Yeah, that first sentence is a piece of work by the way.  Thanks, Politico.

 

“If it were my call, I would not discontinue those programs,” he said in an interview that aired Thursday morning on Fox Business. “I’d have them active and ready to go, and I’d go back and study them and learn.”

And feed on their souuuuuuuls.

Cheney has long defended the post-9/11 tactics even as the national climate shifted over the years. Congress has since banned them. 

“I think the techniques we used were not torture. A lot of people try to call it that, but it wasn’t deemed torture at the time,” he told Maria Bartiromo. “People want to go back and try to rewrite history, but if it were my call, I’d do it again.”

Just a friendly reminder that the GOP was awful and repugnant well before Trump, and white people put them back in power anyway.

Haspel, the acting director, faced a barrage of Democratic questions on the morality of techniques like waterboarding at her Senate Intelligence Committee confirmation hearing Wednesday. She oversaw a secret CIA facility in Thailand where two suspected terrorists were subject to them — one on her watch — in 2002 and later pushed for the destruction of tapes of the interrogations.

That should have been the end of Haspel's career.  Alas, it was not.

“I think she’d be a great CIA director,” Cheney said. “I think she’s done a great job in terms of the career she’s built, and the people I know at the agency are very enthusiastic about having one of their own, so to speak, in the driver’s seat at the CIA.”

I bet they are.  Hey listen, "Dick Cheney thinks this is a good idea" should be a pretty big disqualifier for everything, but in the Trump era it's a bonus!

By my math, McCain and Manchin are trading places, so Haspel will still get 51 votes and probably more.  If I'm Rand Paul, I'm calling Susan Collins and seeing what I can get out of the White House while I can.