Tag: somalia
The 'Catastrophic' Order That Proves Trump Knew He Lost In 2020

The 'Catastrophic' Order That Proves Trump Knew He Lost In 2020

Details, details, details and even more details. That’s what we got from the House Select Committee’s final hearing yesterday. Members of the committee were called on, one by one, to give opening statements essentially summing up what we have learned so far. Each member explored a different aspect of the committee’s long investigation, at times adding new information developed since its last hearing.

All the stuff committee members reminded us about today was based on testimony by witnesses and other evidence the committee had been able to gather. They really drilled down on testimony given by White House and campaign aides who had told Trump repeatedly that he lost the election way back in November of 2020; some aides even testified that Trump appeared to acknowledge that fact, although none were able to present documentary evidence because of Trump’s life-long allergy to saying anything in texts, emails, or in writing that could later get him in trouble.

This was part of the committee’s effort to show that throughout the months of November and December of 2020, right up until January 6 itself, Trump had known he was lying about the election having been stolen from him -- thus all his attempts to overturn the results of the election were nothing but a naked grab at power. He knew he lost, but he wanted to remain as president anyway. But as before, the committee lacked a so-called smoking gun proving it.

They’ve got one now, however. It turns out there is a document proving that Trump knew he lost the election.

It is in the form of a memo Trump signed on November 11, just eight days after the election, ordering the withdrawal of all American forces from Afghanistan and Somalia by January 15, six days before Joe Biden would take the oath as the next president of the United States.

Axios reported last year that two Trump loyalists who had nothing to do with the Department of Defense and were nowhere near being in the military chain of command drafted the memo: John McEntee, Trump’s so-called “body man;” and Douglas Macgregor, a retired lieutenant colonel once described by Washington Post columnist Max Boot as "a racist crackpot who is pro-Russia, anti-Merkel, anti-Muslim and anti-Mexican." Macgregor was nominated by Trump to be ambassador to Germany in July, 2020, but the outrage was so loud, the nomination was quickly withdrawn.

Back to the memo: Trump had promised as long ago as the primary campaign in 2016 that he would end the war in Afghanistan and withdraw all our troops engaged in conflicts overseas. He had been steadily dissuaded from doing so throughout his presidency, but not this time. Trump had been claiming he was the winner since the night of the election on November 3 and would continue his utterly unsupported claim that he had won by a landslide for the next two months.

But on November 11, 2020, exactly four days after the networks called the election for Joe Biden, obviously realizing that he had lost, Trump threw a temper tantrum and called on two untested aides to draw up his order ending our military engagements in Somalia and Afghanistan. McEntee and Macgregor were so unfamiliar with such orders, they had to consult the National Security Council to get the wording right. “Memorandum for the Acting Secretary of Defense: Withdrawal from Somalia and Afghanistan,” the memo began. “I hereby direct you to withdraw all US forces from the Federal Republic of Somalia no later than 31 December 2020 and from the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan no later than 15 January 2021. Inform all allied and partner forces of the directives. Please confirm receipt of this order.”

Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, who uncovered the existence of the memo while researching their book Peril, reported that when Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley and the newly appointed acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller saw the memo, Milley blew a gasket. “This is really fucked up and I’m going to see the President. I’m heading over. You guys can come or not,” Peril quotes Milley as telling Miller and Kash Patel, who had just been appointed chief of staff to the defense secretary. The two joined Milley at the White House, where they confronted National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien and showed him the president’s order. “How did this happen?” Milley asked O’Brien, according to Peril. “Was there any process here at all? How does a president do this?”

“I have no idea,” O’Brien replied.

After Milley and Miller expressed more outrage and even discussed whether the order could be a forgery, O’Brien took the memo to the Oval Office and told Trump he had to involve “the principals” and speak to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the secretary of defense, at which point, Trump withdrew the order.

The committee today played testimony by Milley calling the order “odd…it is nonstandard. It is potentially dangerous. I personally thought it was militarily not feasible nor wise.” The former national security adviser to Vice President Pence, General Keith Kellogg, told the committee the memo was “catastrophic…a debacle,” referring to the consequences of Trump’s order if it had been carried out.

About 8,000 U.S. troops were still serving in a combat capacity in Afghanistan, and about 1,000 were engaged in sporadic contact with rebel forces in Somalia at the time Trump “wrote” his memo ordering all U.S. forces out of both countries. We shouldn’t be surprised that Trump would risk the lives of American soldiers, sailors, and airmen and women by ordering them to abruptly quit their stations overseas in service of his own dreams of glory, and it may be true as many military experts have observed that there is no good way to end a war you have failed to win, but still…

Woodward and Costa reproduced the memo in their book, Peril, so we know Trump’s order to pull completely out of Afghanistan and Somalia exists on paper. It’s real. It happened. At the hearing today, they even showed a witness they asked if Trump had really signed it, or had it been signed by an auto-pen. The witness had been in the Oval Office and watched Trump sign it himself.

Trump had told aides he wanted to go down in history as the president who ended the war in Afghanistan and got us out of overseas conflicts. On November 11, 2020, he knew he had a little over two months left as president, so he stomped his feet and he waved his hands and he called into the Oval Office a couple of nincompoop amateurs who had never seen a memo to the secretary of defense in their lives, and he did it. He ordered the withdrawal from Afghanistan Joe Biden would later accomplish – and for which he would be excoriated by Trump and the entire Republican Party to this day.

Although the 1/6 Committee didn’t show the memo today at its final hearing, it’s right there in black and white, all the evidence we need that Trump knew he had lost the election as early as November 11, 2020, when he threw his tantrum and signed his order.

Then he proceeded with his lies about the election, the most recent of which he bellowed at an adoring crowd of MAGA loons in Nevada four days ago. Now we can wait to see if Trump will agree to testify before the committee, where he would be under oath and doubtlessly be asked about his legion of lies, that an election was stolen from him he knew he had lost almost two years ago.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter

Soldiers in Karkhiv, Ukraine

Is It Really Racist To Help Ukraine — And Ukrainians?

"Many in Mideast See Hypocrisy in Western Embrace of Ukraine," read an Associated Press headline this week. Salon asked: "Whose Lives Really Matter?" and answered its own question in the next breath — "How Racism Colors Coverage of the Crisis in Ukraine."

On social media, a tweet by Ayo Sogunro, a Nigerian human rights lawyer, has been shared tens of thousands of times: "Can't get it out of my head that Europe cried about a 'migrant crisis' in 2015 against 1.4 million refugees fleeing war in Syria and yet quickly absorbed some two million Ukrainians within days, complete with flags and piano music. Europe never had a migrant crisis. It has a racism crisis."

I beg to differ. In fact, Americans and Europeans have expended quite a lot of blood and treasure over the past several decades to defend or help non-whites and non-Christians. The most directly analogous case to Russia's invasion of Ukraine was Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait. The coverage of Kuwait's suffering at the time was heartrending, including stories about hospitals being plundered and civilians imprisoned, raped and tortured. Far from countenancing this assault on a non-white nation, the U.S. assembled an international coalition of 35 nations to drive Iraq out of Kuwait in what became the First Gulf War.

In 1992 and 1993, a civil war had devastated Somalia. A U.N. relief operation had run aground. President George H.W. Bush offered to send 25,000 U.S. troops to keep order so that the humanitarian aid could be distributed. What followed under the Clinton administration was the infamous "Black Hawk Down" episode in which 19 Americans were killed and 70 injured by al-Qaida-trained militants.

The U.S. took military action on behalf of Muslims six times in the past 30 years — in Kuwait, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, and participated (if only from behind) in the military operation that removed Moammar Gadhafi from power when he seemed poised to destroy the city of Benghazi. So call it seven. Say what you will about the wisdom of the Iraq invasion (or the other interventions), there is no doubt that they were undertaken with the goal of freeing people from a dictator, not imposing one. Those who make facile comparisons between our wars and the Russian invasion might want to reflect that no Ukrainians are mobbing the Russian embassy in hopes of visas and no Ukrainians are hanging onto Russian jets. You don't have to agree that the Iraq war was good policy or the long occupation of Afghanistan a wise use of resources to concede that we tried awfully hard to help both countries.

As for the different treatment of Ukrainian versus Mideast refugees, let's remember that Europe accepted more than 1 million refugees from Syria and the U.S. accepted several thousand, despite non-trivial fears that ISIS and al-Qaida elements might be among those asking for asylum. Arguably, the strain those immigrants placed on European societies — because they did include some terrorists — led directly to the rise of far-right parties. And while we're thinking of Syria, let's not forget that Russia also intervened in the conflict — on the side of Bashar al-Assad, helping to reduce Aleppo and other cities to rubble and further immiserating that nation.

"Whose Lives Really Matter?" asks Salon. Well, African lives do. That's why the United States launched PEPFAR under George W. Bush's presidency, the largest commitment by any nation to fight a disease in history. The fund has already spent $100 billion and saved an estimated 20 million lives that would have been lost to HIV/AIDS.

So what has triggered this rash of commentary about Ukraine proving the racism of the West? On the BBC, a former Ukrainian official confessed that "It's very emotional for me because I see European people with blue eyes and blond hair ... being killed every day." An Al Jazeera anchor said, "These are not obviously refugees trying to get away from areas in the Middle East."

Those comments were stupid, but the reason I recited the history above is that you can't write whole nations off for the stray remarks of a few. In fact, identification with those most like us — in appearance, culture, religion, nation, whatever — is part of human nature, and no one of any color is completely immune. Arabs are more concerned about Palestinians than about the Rohingya or Sudanese. That's not racism, it's just fellow feeling.

Europeans and Americans have responded to Ukraine's plight with empathy and anger and admiration and love. And so have Kenyans and Japanese and Mexicans and Egyptians and billions more. We all have our tribal tendencies and must strive to recognize that all God's children are of equal moral worth. But looking at our recent history, we've done pretty well on that score. So let's not tar this moment of moral clarity with the racism brush.

Mona Charen is policy editor of The Bulwark and host of the "Beg to Differ" podcast. Her most recent book is Sex Matters: How Modern Feminism Lost Touch with Science, Love, and Common Sense. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

7 U.N. Workers Dead As Bomb Blast Rocks Somalia’s Puntland

7 U.N. Workers Dead As Bomb Blast Rocks Somalia’s Puntland

By Mohamed Odowa and Kristin Palitza, dpa (TNS)

MOGADISHU — Seven U.N. workers were killed when Islamist militants planted a bomb in a U.N. Children’s Fund bus in Somalia’s Puntland state, local police said by phone on Monday.

Somali authorities suspected the attack was caused by a suicide bomber traveling inside the bus in Garowe, the capital of Puntland, a semi-autonomous region of Somalia with a government that works largely independently of the central administration.

Initially, authorities had reported 10 deaths but later corrected the number to seven.

“It took us time to know the exact number of people who were traveling in the bus,” said police officer Mohamed Ali.

Among the victims were three U.N. staff members from Somalia, two from Kenya and one each from Uganda and Afghanistan, according to the hospital in Garowe.

“We believe that the person who blew himself up inside the U.N. bus was an al-Shabab insider who was also working for U.N. here in Garowe,” said Garowe police chief Ahmed Abdullahi Samatar Layli.

However, sources within Puntland’s intelligence agency, who asked not to be identified, said that the bomb was planted under the seat of a UNICEF bus and detonated by remote control.

The blast occurred as the bus was entering the headquarters of the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization, said police.

Police also reported 10 people wounded in the blast.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon condemned the attack and called for security for humanitarian workers and accountability for the perpetrators.

“The men and women who bring humanitarian action to light are an inspiration to us all,” Ban said. “Targeting such brave and dedicated individuals for violence is an attack on us all.”

The U.N. Security Council said it was “outraged” by “this appalling act” and reiterated its commitment to fighting terrorism in all its forms.

“The horrific attack on our UNICEF colleagues today in northern Somalia is an assault not only on them but on the people they served,” UNICEF executive director Anthony Lake said in a statement.

“Our continuing work for the most vulnerable children and their families in Somalia will be a fitting tribute to those we have lost,” said Lake.

“I condemn (the) attack this morning on U.N. in Garowe. Shocked and appalled by loss of life,” U.N. special representative for Somalia, Nick Kay, said on Twitter.

Puntland police initially suspected the attack to be a suicide car bombing that was targeting a U.N. building.

Al-Shabab claimed responsibility for the bombing, according to pro-militant website somalimemo.net, citing an unnamed al-Shabab official.

The terrorist group regularly stages attacks against government and international agencies.

(c)2015 Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH (Hamburg, Germany), Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC

AFP Photo/Jacques Demarthon

Somali-American Fights Militant Islamist Recruiters In U.S. Heartland

Somali-American Fights Militant Islamist Recruiters In U.S. Heartland

MINNEAPOLIS — For seven years, youth leader Abdirizak Bihi has waged a personal battle against an elusive foe: religious extremists using sophisticated online tactics to lure young Somali Americans abroad as militant foot soldiers and suicide bombers.
Many of those idealistic volunteers are dead now, including Bihi’s nephew.
Burhan Hassan was 17 in 2008, when he was lured by a recruiter he met in a Minneapolis mosque to go to Somalia to join the militant Islamist group al-Shabab. The skinny teenager, who had planned to apply to Harvard, was killed under mysterious circumstances as his family made a desperate attempt to bring him home.
Bihi suspects that Burhan was killed by his al-Shabab allies because he wanted to leave Somalia. But he will never know for sure.
Burhan is one of more than two dozen Somalis between the ages of 17 and 35 who abandoned their lives in the Twin Cities to join Islamic radicals across the Middle East and North Africa. The latest is a St. Paul teenager who left her family in August for Syria to assist the Islamic State.
For thousands of Somali parents here, all of this has created a pervasive and escalating fear of government, law enforcement, the media, and especially of losing their sons and daughters to outsiders bent on waging holy war.
For Bihi, the blow of losing his close relative to this troubling trend has hardened his resolve to combat the presence of distant Islamist battles in the heart of the American Plains.
“He was just a good kid,” Bihi said. “He wanted to be a doctor like many of his cousins. He was our future.”
At 49, the slender, bespectacled father of five is used to a good fight. He fled Somalia as a young man with his father, a businessman and political activist who became a government target. “He had a big mouth and so do I,” he said. “We speak our minds.”
Bihi works from a cramped cinder-block office in a community center that serves the needs of a Somali neighborhood called Cedar-Riverside — where working-class families pack into crowded high-rises, where women in bright African prints and colorful scarves shop at the many Somali-owned businesses, and rent the latest movies from Mogadishu.
His homegrown mission against militant Islam centers on helping young people play sports as a way to resist savvy recruiters whose appeals have become sophisticated. They flood Twitter and smartphone apps that take conversations offline. “The concept is to create a positive alternative to these extremists,” Bihi said. “I’m in competition with these recruiters. They want my kids.”
The task isn’t easy: The region’s 50,000-member Somali community faces high unemployment, with few after-school programs. Bihi says that his neighborhood center has one after-class program for a community of 7,500 Somalis — with more refugees arriving every day.

Local Somali activist Omar Jamal says few outsiders have paid attention to the growing exodus of young Somalis, leaving the community to tend to its own emotional wounds. “People were in denial about our crisis,” said the director of the American Friends of Somalia. “It seemed so farfetched that kids would drop their schoolbooks to go fight for extremists abroad. But nobody is denying the problem now.”
Bihi says the government’s help is long overdue.
Since 2007, Bihi has gone door to door for donations to buy used equipment and uniforms, and to rent soccer fields and basketball courts, often without success. “For years, I’ve told these kids that help will come, but they say, ‘You’re a good guy, but people don’t care about us. We’re just a bunch of poor Somali kids.'”
He and a few other center organizers work without pay. Bihi, who is two months behind on his rent, does translation work to help support his family. But most of his time is spent in his tiny office, dreaming up ways to help vulnerable Somali youths here.
Every week, he says, he has to prevent one of the coaches he works with from quitting because of a lack of resources. Pointing to a punctured soccer ball on the floor, Bihi tells of how he even went online last month to appeal for funds. His response was met with just over $500, money he has already spent.
His neighborhood’s plight demonstrates the cultural challenges as officials try to protect often-isolated ethnic communities like Minnesota’s Somalis. Experts say that officials face challenges in connecting with Somali residents who fled their unstable homeland, carrying with them the emotional scars of war.

Some Somalis here, as distrustful of government as they are of the media, see conflicting signals from U.S. officials. While agencies promote dialogue with the community, a bill proposed by Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn. seeks to revoke passports and reentry privileges of Americans suspected of fighting overseas for Islamic militants.
Somali families fear that such a law would mean they might never again see their missing children. And many are reluctant to report disappearances to the FBI, fearing that they themselves would become the subjects of criminal investigations.
As the FBI investigates the recruitment pipeline, several Somalis — including parents of missing teenagers — have been subpoenaed to appear before a federal grand jury, activists say.
“Parents live in fear of that scenario,” said Bob Fletcher, a former Ramsey County sheriff who fosters youth mentoring and parent coaching in the Somali community. “If a child disappears, the last people they want to call are the FBI.”
Kyle Loven, a chief division counsel for the FBI in Minneapolis, said the bureau had worked hard to foster relations with Somalis. “There are always going to be trust issues,” he said.

Bihi has been approached by numerous Somali mothers who are petrified about their children’s welfare. “Their kids have dropped out of sports and changed their behavior,” he said, responding to a cellphone that won’t stop ringing. “The parents don’t know who to trust.”
Even mosques are suspect. Several Somalis who fled Minnesota for the Middle East or North Africa attended a Bloomington mosque, which in June banned a man who had preached extremism. In a statement, the Al Farooq Youth and Family Center said it “vigorously opposes the recruitment of any persons to participate in violent or extremist activities.”
On Nov. 4, 2008, Bihi’s sister, a single mother of four, called to say that her third-eldest son was missing. Hours later, Bihi’s phone rang again. “This time my sister said, ‘He’s gone,'” he said. The nephew, who didn’t speak Somali and had showed little interest in politics since arriving in the U.S. at the age of 4, had taken his passport and computer.

MCT Photo/John M. Glionna

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