The COVID-19 crisis is hitting India hard. Despite only spending 1.2 percent of GDP on healthcare, Modi is assuring his fellow countrymen that they do not need to worry; that India is equipped with the required infrastructure to cope with the pandemic. This is a blatant lie. The Indian healthcare system was devastated even before COVID-19, and it is certainly no better under the current crisis. With the coronavirus hitting all major towns and villages, the rottenness of the Indian healthcare system is laid bare. Here, we will analyse the situation facing the health system in India, the state’s inability to address the pandemic, the role of the private sector, the limits of Indian 'democracy' and the revolutionary road forward.
Based on officially submitted figures, India ranks 154 among 195 Countries in the Global Healthcare Index in terms of access and quality measures. Counting unofficial figures, it would rank even lower. Official government figures show India's doctor-to-population ratio is 1:1,655. For reference, the WHO recommends 1:1,000. In the government sector, there is one medical doctor per 11,000 people on average. In poor states such as Bihar, this number is 28,391, while in the capital city Delhi, the ratio is one doctor to every 2,203 people. The bed-to-population ratio is 0.5 per 1,000 on average, against the WHO recommendation of 3.5 per 1,000. The situation in rural areas is much grimmer. About 60 percent of the Indian healthcare system is in the hands of private profiteers who are benefitting from people’s illnesses. Disease prevention for poor: a myth
India is not only a country that houses a quarter of the world's poor but also contains the highest numbers of people with chronic hunger: one of the significant factors contributing to disease vulnerability. Prevention of diseases is impossible in India. The Food and Agricultural Organisation estimates that 195 million people in India are undernourished, which is around 14.5 percent of the population. This is the official figure, but the reality is much worse. 70 percent of minor deaths are linked to hunger. More than 50 percent of the population lack access to clean drinking water. Pollution, traditionally considered an urban issue, is now ravaging villages and households in small towns, comprising 68 percent of the total population. While vehicles and uncontrolled industrial emissions are destroying the urban atmosphere, poisonous pesticide spray is doing the same to villages.
If the poor somehow manage to escape hunger, they still are vulnerable to diseases, given the condition of their food. In order to reduce costs and increase profits, dangerous chemicals and additives are introduced to food ingredients and sold to ordinary people by fatcats. This includes adulterations to spices, poisonous pesticide-ridden vegetables, chemically enhanced meat and milk, and oils dangerously high in saturated fats, in addition to a lack of hygiene in street foods. The Centre for Science and Environment Delhi estimates that 2 million deaths every year are caused worldwide by diarrhoea arising from contaminated food and water, 1.5 million of them children, and 700,000 of these in South Asia alone.
Access to quality public healthcare is a class issue in India, with the affluent having access to a clean environment, inside and outside their houses, while poor working-class people are forced to live in densely crowded and often polluted urban areas. The rich can afford to buy organic and pesticide-free, uncontaminated food, while the poor cannot even think of such luxuries. All state laws, regulations and control against food contamination only to help the rich. The poor are forced to eat unregulated and cheaply available, dangerous foods that test the limits of their immune systems.
Rural farmers and their families are exposed to dangerous pesticides on a daily basis. Poisonous sprays and byproducts from factories heavily contaminate rivers from which people obtain water for their daily use. Cancer is rife in rural Punjab and Haryana, considered breadwinner states, caused by poisonous pesticide sprays on farming lands. The irony is that there is no proper cancer treatment hospital in Punjab. The state runs a regular train known as the 'cancer train' through major farming villages across the states, collecting cancer patients and driving them hundreds of miles down to treatment centres in Bikaner Rajasthan.
The Indian government is fully aware of the public health crises, but turns a blind eye, because it is unable and unwilling to do anything under the present capitalist system of private profit production. Sick people are left at the mercy of the rotten healthcare system. Wrecked government-run hospitals
The situation in government hospitals is worse than one could ever imagine. Treatment is free, but people are treated like animals. The buildings of almost all state-run hospitals are crumbling due to corruption in the maintenance funds. Hardly any medical equipment is maintained properly.
In 2017, in Gorakhpur Uttar Pradesh, about 63 children were suffocated to death in front of their helpless parents, because the hospital ran out of liquid oxygen cylinders and the private contractor refused to supply oxygen because of a previous unpaid bill of $107,000. This incident provoked a nationwide protest.
The poor regions in India seldom have any proper functioning healthcare infrastructure. These regions are often infested with deadly disease outbreaks, with children most at risk. 80 percent of Primary Health Centres lack a qualified doctor, if they somehow exist in villages. Patients and their carers have to travel tens to hundreds of miles to reach a hospital with a qualified doctor. This gives rise to chronic overcrowding in state hospitals, which cannot refuse to take in new patients by law. The leeching private hospitals
Private profiteering hospitals and treatment centres fill capacity gaps in the state healthcare system. But they are no better than their state-managed counterparts. In fact, they are much worse. Apart from a few large private hospitals, the majority are located in residential houses and makeshift office spaces. Only 10 percent of the 1 million doctors in India work in the public health sector, the rest are in the private sector. After spending tens of millions of rupees on medical college fees and other living expenses to become a doctor, the potentially lucrative private sector seems an attractive prospect for newly qualified medics, where they can earn high salaries and commissions from pharmaceutical companies. But still, doctors are in limited supply in most of the private hospitals as well. This does not stop private hospitals from regular functioning and performing complicated operations in the absence of doctors. If treatment goes wrong and the patient is near death, they are shifted to a state hospital to avoid liability and a bad reputation.
Bloodthirsty private hospital bosses pursue aggressive marketing tactics. They force their part-time doctors and nurses, who also work in state hospitals, to divert patients from the state hospitals to their private hospitals. Swindlers, con artists and cheats are hired on commission by these private hospitals for this purpose as well. Also, there is a whole fleet of private-run ambulances at the disposal of the swindlers, parked outside of state hospitals, ready to pick up incoming patients and their families, and redirect them to private hospitals.
In a private hospital, a patient gets everything – except proper treatment – at a high cost. Minor illnesses are diagnosed as major ones, and the patient ends up spending days in an expensive ward with daily mounting bills. If patients exhaust their supply of money in the middle of their treatments, they are kicked out of the hospital and/or immediately shifted to a state hospital. Hardly any poor people come out of hospital without colossal debts. Several private hospitals also employ the services of thugs for debt recovery from patients and their families. In a lot of cases, local police officers extend their services as debt collectors on behalf of the private hospitals for a commission.
Private hospitals in rural areas are hotbeds for the illegal human organ trade. The government has formed teams to do surprise checks in PHCs and hospitals for quality control, but due to rampant corruption and political connections, nothing happens to improve private hospitals’ conduct.
Several NGOs and philanthropists are active in healthcare and often provide free or low-cost treatment facilities to the poor. Large Indian capitalists such as Nadar, Ambani, Piramal, Premji, Godrej, Adani and others have opened charity hospitals. But only a tiny percentage of patients are treated free of cost; for the rest of the patients at these facilities, it is a rip-off. Often, charity is used as a vehicle to evade taxes by these big capitalists. Several international charities are linked to pharmaceutical multinationals, who use them as a means to penetrate into Indian markets or for drug trials.
The pharmaceutical industry in India is appalling. International agencies suggest that 20 percent of medicines sold in India are fake, and a lot more are substandard – but the real figure is much higher. The inability of the government to regulate the pharmaceutical sector is encouraging all types of profiteeringmafiosi to venture in the medicine manufacturing business. The poor can only access cheap, adulterated medicines with limited effects. Patients are supposed to get free medicines during their treatment in a state hospital, but due to rampant corruption, there is hardly any stock of free medicines. Patients have to visit pharmacies, which mushroom around hospitals, selling substandard medicines at high prices. Often patients and their families decide to abandon hospital treatment and let the patient suffer or die because they cannot afford the expense. Despite India's considerable exports of medicines to the USA and UK (80 percent of Britain's NHS generic medicines are imported from India), Indians at home are deprived of essential and lifesaving medicines.
The majority of Indians are going to quacks for cheap and unscientific treatments, the market for which is thriving. These snake oil salesmen often use a combination of various herbs with alleged ‘magical’ properties to treat real illness. Their 'treatments' are not only ineffective but often aggravate the illnesses of their patients, who then end up in hospital. The ruling class knows that they cannot provide effective healthcare to the population under capitalism; therefore, they are at the forefront of promoting such an unscientific approach to treatment, and keeping masses ignorant and reliant on 'magic'.
Various kinds of fake medicines are promoted in print and electronic media, including social media. Quacks who make fortunes for themselves also financially support politicians from the ruling parties. Prime Minister Modi himself is a staunch supporter of these ‘magic’ treatments, and regularly promotes fake medicines and regimes to cure serious illness, resulting in more deaths.
A famous multimillionaire quack named Baba Ram Dev is promoting such fake medicinal products in combination with yoga, and has even declared existing products called Coronil and Swasari as medicines to cure COVID-19.
One of the major panaceas churned out by BJP leaders is cow urine, which, according to them, can be used to treat all kinds of diseases, including COVID-19. This unscientific approach also permeates through the medical fraternity and many of them also firmly believe in such miracles, resulting in fatal methods of treatment for the poor patients. Religious leaders from Muslim, Buddhist and other communities also promote similar quackery which only adds to the general level of ignorance, in turn exacerbating unhygienic living and the spread of disease. Hopeless healthcare for Indian women
The lives of women are much worse as they have to endure all of this ignorance and deprivation, in addition to the oppression that comes with being a woman. A large number of women die during childbirth due to unscientific methods of care during delivery. Women’s health is the lowest priority in typical, poor Indian households. The general atmosphere of prejudice and oppression towards women in society forces women to hide their illnesses due to shame, and many even prefer to die rather than disclose their medical problems. The lack of female doctors across the country also worsens their plight as many families will not allow any male doctor to touch their female relatives due to “family honour”.
The development of technology under capitalism has only served to worsen the oppression of women rather than overcome it. The ultrasound machine, which should help the women in pregnancy identify problems with the baby or themselves, has become an instrument for more barbaric oppression towards women. Every year in India, hundreds of thousands of sex-selective abortions are carried out. Female foetuses that are detected early through ultrasound technology are forcefully aborted. The practice has reached such horrific levels that, in some states, like Haryana, the disproportion in population ratio between males and females have reached levels never seen in history. The birth of a female, still seen as stigma and dishonour, results in a lack of interest in their healthcare and wellbeing. This results in a life filled with sickness and disease for most of the women living in poverty.
The option of surrogacy has also become twisted under class society. This technology should be a boon for women who have medical issues and can't bear children, but under capitalism, it is being used by rich women to avoid the pain of childbirth, by hiring poor women to endure the suffering for a meagre sum of money, and then handing over the child to its 'mother'.
A sick and disgusting concept still prevails in India, where menstrual periods are considered impure and therefore, women are not allowed in temples or mosques. In a country where 90-100 women are raped each day – often by strangers – if the lives of these women are spared by their relatives, who accuse them of dishonouring their families, they suffer psychological and mental trauma for the whole of their lives, which goes untreated.
The lack of toilets across India has been an issue discussed frequently in politics, and open defecation is a routine for millions of people across the country. But for women, this is a particular nightmare, as they have to wait for midnight or other odd hours to relieve themselves. Many face sexual assaults even during this process. In this situation, safe and hygienic living has become a luxury for a significant majority of the population. Modi launched a campaign named 'Swachh Bharat Mission' in 2014 to build 90 million toilets in cities and towns, with a budget of $8.7 billion. Since its inception, the project has been riddled with massive corruption, wasteful spending and did not manage to address the sanitation issue at all, as fields and rivers are still being polluted as a result of this project. Rural people are being forced to use these toilets, threatening their electricity connections and public food subsidy entitlements, again disproportionately affecting women.
Given all these circumstances, the Indian healthcare system cannot cope with the COVID-19 crisis. There are insufficient doctors, non-existent care centres, scant hospital beds, a lack of medical equipment such as ventilators and PPE, and preventive medicines are often out of reach of the majority. Given the already chronic overcrowding of state hospitals, the situation is accelerating towards a total collapse, with rising COVID-19 cases. There are reports of two and even three patients sharing a single hospital bed. There isn't enough oxygen available in hospitals. Ventilators and oxygen masks are only given to preferred patients, while the rest are left to suffocate and die. The official figures at the start of July 2020 state that 200,000 COVID-19 patients are under treatment, with 16,000 deaths. However, given the condition of hospitals and lack of data collection, the actual figure is likely much higher. Private hospitals, pharmacies and quacks are making a killing off the crisis out of COVID-19 tests and fake treatments. And even if the life of a poor working-class person is saved through COVID-19 treatments, they will be saddled with crippling debt. Political parties: pouring old wines in a new bottle
The political parties are totally inept at addressing the crisis faced by the Indian healthcare system. The Congress Party continuously put free health in its election manifestos, such as in 2014 and 2019, however, they didn't manage to get significant traction on this. This is because, during the Congress-led governments, massive cuts to healthcare were made and privatisation was encouraged in the sector. For example, Congress promised free healthcare for all in 2009, but after assuming office, it did nothing to fulfil that promise but instead brought the concept of health insurance for low-income families under the name of Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojna (RSBY). It's akin to bringing the American healthcare model and bolting it on to a wrecked Indian healthcare system. This measure only benefited the private insurance industries and providers.
The BJP promised 'health assurance for all' in its 2014 manifesto. But on assuming power, it revamped RSBY with some cosmetic changes, such as the Ayushman Bharat (PMJAY), just before the election season of 2019, which is now being sold to the people as universal healthcare. These schemes, far from providing free and quality healthcare, are just a vehicle to shower masses of public funds on private healthcare profiteers and leeching insurance companies, without any improvements being made. The bankruptcy of the communist parties
The disgusting condition of the communist parties is extremely visible when it comes to healthcare. On the one hand, they oppose the private healthcare system in words; but in reality are seen promoting large corporate-owned hospitals. They aren't calling for a complete nationalisation but talking about extending the same health insurance scheme. Furthermore, they are habitually aligned with right-wing parties, including Congress, and in doing so are continuously compromising and watering down their manifesto and promises. Despite having control of West Bengal and having complete autonomy on healthcare implementation for many decades, the communist parties led a massive privatisation programme, starting from public-private partnerships in healthcare at the behest of the World Bank and DFID. Such betrayals by the Stalinists not only cost them the West Bengal state government but also resulted in a complete wipe-out from the Indian political landscape. People see them as no different from other right-wing parties who are following similar privatisation and anti-worker programmes. The revolutionary way forward
The Indian working-class deserves free healthcare. There are enough resources in the country to fund free healthcare for all. No charity, philanthropy or misplaced faith in right-wing political parties will resolve India’s healthcare crisis. Also, international development organisations and banks are only interested in profits and worker exploitation. One cannot expect the Indian healthcare system to run better under the present decaying capitalist system. Only the complete overthrow of capitalism will enable free healthcare in India. This is not possible through the currently rotten parliamentary politics or adopting the road of Stalinism, but through building a revolutionary organisation in India on Bolshevik lines.
It is the task of Indian youth and workers to overthrow this decaying capitalist system, which cannot be reformed and has not the slightest capacity to improve the lives of masses. Rather, in its death throes, it will murder millions more. The only way forward is to build a genuine Marxist tendency in India that can connect with the ongoing struggles of the workers and students on the basis of correct ideas for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, through the mass action of Indian working class. In the recent period, we have seen historic general strikes in India, which were able to paralyse the whole country. But what we saw also were shameless betrayals of the leaders who cashed on the anger of millions of working-class people to further their careers. The mainstream political parties, including so-called communist parties, criminally defuse the anger of masses with petty reforms and limited demands.
In the coming period, events on a much larger scale will be seen, bringing class struggle to the top of the political agenda, challenging the rule of government and big business who are making fortunes off the suffering and illness of the working-class. Only by overthrowing the bourgeois state and replacing it with a workers’ state, that could nationalise the commanding heights of the economy under the democratic control of workers, will we be able to provide free and scientifically sound healthcare to all people of India. Nothing less than this strategy can solve this burning issue of healthcare. Socialist revolution in India will be only the beginning of a process towards a socialist federation of South Asia and the world.
We condemn without reservation the outrageous decision of the UK High Court to deny Venezuela access to 31 tonnes of gold deposited at the Bank of England. This decision can only be described as daylight robbery and an act of piracy.
The UK High Court ruling on 3 July stated that the UK government “unequivocally recognised opposition leader Juan Guaidó as president,” and therefore the gold deposited in the Bank of England should not be handed over to the Venezuelan Central Bank as its lawyers had requested.
The Bank of England originally took the decision to block access to the gold reserve, worth over US$1bn, which had been deposited in London for safekeeping, in 2018. That decision was taken at the request of the US government as part of its efforts to undermine the Venezuelan government.
At that time Guaidó had not even proclaimed himself “president” and therefore the UK had not recognised him as such. In his recently published book, John Bolton explains how the then British Foreign Minister, Jeremy Hunt, was “delighted to cooperate” with Washington’s “regime change” efforts against Venezuela, specifically mentioning the freezing of Venezuela’s gold reserves at the Bank of England.
The fact that the UK High Court cites the UK government’s recognition of Juan Guaidó as the reason for blocking access to the gold is farcical. The UK government has formally recognised Guaidó as “interim president”, but maintains full consular and diplomatic relations with Venezuela and its legitimate government. There is a Venezuelan ambassador in London and a British ambassador in Caracas.
Furthermore, the Venezuelan government had pledged that proceeds from the repatriation of the gold reserves would only be used, under supervision of the UN Human Development Program, in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic in Venezuela.
By continuing to illegally withhold the Venezuelan gold, the UK is endangering lives in Venezuela.
We call on the labour, trade union and solidarity movement in Britain and across the world to energetically reject and protest this outrageous decision of the UK High Court, which sets a very dangerous precedent.
Military families deserve better than what the Guillen family had to endure and a Congressional investigation into Fort Hood’s response to Guillen’s disappearance and murder is warranted.
Fort Hood, Texas is a dangerous place for women in the military. The murder of Army Specialist (SPC) Vanessa Guillen is the latest tragic evidence of the violence on Fort Hood and other U.S. military bases.
Violence against women in the military and at Fort Hood has been going on for a very long time. Twelve years ago, in 2008, I wrote an article “Is There an Army Cover-Up of Rape and Murder of Women Soldiers?” that detailed violence against women assigned to units from Fort Hood that were then located in Iraq. 8 women soldiers from Fort Hood, six from the Fourth Infantry Division and two from the 1st Armored Cavalry Division, had died of “non-combat related injuries” at Camp Taji, Iraq. Two had been raped immediately before their deaths and another raped prior to arriving in Iraq. Two women For Fort Hood had died of suspicious “non-combat related injuries” on Balad base, Iraq, and one was raped before she died. Four deaths of women assigned to units from Fort Hood had been classified as “suicides,” and families of some of those women disagreed with Fort Hood’s findings.
Now, twelve years later, the Army’s handling of the investigation into SPC Guillen’s disappearance was an affront to Guillen’s family and to military women on Fort Hood. For three months the perpetrator of the murder of SPC Guillen roamed free on Fort Hood, capable of murdering other young women and showing such impunity that according to SPC Guillen’s sister Mayra who had met him during one of her visits to Fort Hood, that “he laughed in my face. I had a very uneasy feeling about him.”
She should have felt uneasy as she was face-to-face to her sister’s brazen murderer who had killed her sister with a hammer in his workplace, dismembered her, attempted to burn her body before burying body parts in three holes covered with concrete on a highway embankment thirty miles from Fort Hood.
SPC Guillen’s family was relentless in attempting to get information from Fort Hood leadership about what happened to her but to no avail. They held press conferences, enlisted the aid of organizations that offered a reward for information that would assist in finding SPC Guillen, called on the Texas congressional delegation for help but the Army was not forthcoming with information that led them to believe that a meaningful investigation into her disappearance was happening.
It wasn’t until ten weeks, after an intervention by U.S. Congresswoman Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D-Tex.) and numerous emotional press conferences by the family, that the family’s lawyer Natalie Khawam finally was briefed by phone for four hours on July 1 by Fort Hood’s Criminal Investigative Division (CID) and told that Guillen’s blood had been found in a neighboring unit’s weapons armory where she had gone on a day off to deliver paperwork on a weapon to a person who should have been an immediate “person of interest” in her disappearance.
Since April 22, when Vanessa Guillen was last seen alive, her disappearance and lack of information from Fort Hood to the family have led to questions of a cover-up. The family suspected that foul play was involved but was getting no information from CID as providing the family with any information about the progress of the investigation would “compromise the integrity of the investigation.” Her disappearance and lack of information about the Army’s investigation resulted in statements from other female soldiers who have gone public with their experiences of sexual harassment and assault in the military and many hashtags on social media to remind the public that Vanessa was missing and the family was getting no information from Fort Hood leadership.
Guillen’s family had been telling Fort Hood authorities and the public that Vanessa had been the target of sexual harassment prior to her disappearance. She told her mother, her friends, and some fellow service members about the harassment. The family’s lawyer Natalie Khawan said Guillen, fearing retaliation, never filed a formal complaint on base.
Ms. Khawam alleged July 1 that the dead suspect was the same man who harassed Guillen. Khawan gave details that Robinson watched her take a shower in a locker room. “She was taking a shower and he walked in on her and sat down. She was creeped out — as one would be.”
Khawam explained during an interview on Democracy Now on July 2, “The person that was harassing her, this Aaron Robinson, this was her sergeant (Note-Robinson was not a sergeant, nor in her chain of command. He was a specialist in a different unit and worked in a comparable position in his unit’s weapons room.) And he had — she was taking a shower one time, and she was in the women’s locker room, and he walked in and sat down and watched her while she was showering. She saw him, and she said, “Please leave. This makes me very uncomfortable.”
Khawam also said, “She didn’t know how to report the incident to military authorities. She told her family and told her friends and other soldiers on base. When they asked, “Why don’t you report it to your commander or sergeants?,” she just said that it wouldn’t work. She was afraid to report it, because she was afraid to lose her job. They would demote her. And she knew of other instances where they did not take those reports seriously, and that would make her life more difficult on the base.”
The family believes there are others involved in Vanessa’s disappearance and murder and they are demanding a Congressional investigation into how the case was handled from the beginning. The family’s lawyer accused the Army of “lying, being disingenuous” in its treatment of Guillen’s family about the disappearance and murder of Guillen. “They lied to us from day one.
Vanessa’s family has accused the Army of a cover-up in her disappearance and they want a Congressional investigation and legislation to change Army policies.
Vanessa’s family drove from Houston to Washington, DC to participate in a press conference on July 1, 2020, with their attorney Khawam and U.S. Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, who is a Major in the U.S. Army Reserves. Family members and attorney Khawan stated during the press conference that the Army had been telling the families “lies.”
The attention from the press conference forced the Fort Hood command to respond with a four-hour briefing to Guillen’s family attorney, Natalie Khawan, a briefing that should have happened weeks before. Guillen’s Body Found And Suspect In Her Murder Commits Suicide
Other events began unfolding rapidly on June 30 and July 1 that caused the Army to have to give details of the investigation to the family. First, about 1:00 pm on June 30, 2020, CID was notified that contractors working on a fence adjacent to the Leon River in Belton, TX, discovered what appeared to be human remains. USACID, along with the FBI, US Marshals Service, County Sheriff’s Office, and Texas Rangers searched the area and identified scattered human remains that appeared to have been placed into a concrete-like substance and buried.
Secondly, about 8:30 pm on 30 June 2020, over three months and one week after Guillen’s disappearance, SPC Robinson’s girlfriend Cecily Aguilar was interviewed again and admitted that SPC Robinson told her that on April 22, 2020, he struck a female soldier in the head with a hammer multiple times at his arms room, killing her on Fort Hood. SPC Robinson then placed her in a box and moved the box to a location near the Leon River in Belton, Texas. Aguilar who had been interviewed earlier by CID finally been convinced by CID to talk by phone to Robinson in which they recorded his comments about killing Guillen, dismembering, and burying her body.
Thirdly, On the evening of June 30, Aguilar assisted law enforcement in locating SPC Robinson who was on foot in Killeen, Texas after he left his barracks. SPC Robinson was approached by law enforcement at 1.17 am on July 1, 2020. Law enforcement officials said he shot himself in the head with a pistol, killing himself.
The next day, on July 1, the discovery of human remains along a highway 30 miles from Fort Hood on June 30 and the suicide in the early morning hours of July 1 of SPC Robinson, left the Army with no choices but to reveal what they had learned over the three-month investigation but had refused to tell the family.
“We believe that her remains were found. We believe that the suspect killed himself in the morning. And that, unfortunately, doesn’t provide us any information about how this happened [or] why a beautiful young soldier is not with us today,” Natalie Khawam, attorney for the Guillen family, said July 1 during a news conference in Washington, D.C. Later in the day on July 1, Khawam was finally briefed by Army investigators, who disclosed that SPC Guillen was attacked by Robinson.
Robinson had used a hammer to attack Guillen, causing “her blood to be splashed all over the armory room,” Khawam said she was told by Army officials. “Robinson enlisted his girlfriend, who was married to someone else, to assist in burying Guillen’s remains that they had dismembered with a machete after they attempted to burn her body.”
At the July 1 press conference in Washington, D.C., Lupe Guillen, sister of Vanessa Guillen asked, “How can this happen on a military base? How can this happen while she’s on duty?”. “How can they let this happen and then just let it go under the rug like it was nothing?” “My sister did not deserve to suffer. My sister did not deserve this. My family did not deserve this,” Vanessa’s sister Lupe accused the Army of a cover-up. “If those criminals are still out there, take my word that we will not rest, we will not stop and we will keep fighting until you are behind bars because you’re a disgrace to humanity.”
Attorney Khawam stated that the Guillen family was calling for a congressional probe into the U.S. military’s response to her disappearance. “This should never have happened, and we will never know what happened — ever — until we get a congressional investigation,” Khawam told reporters. And she called the official response “evasive,” adding: “I don’t know who’s covering up for who, but it doesn’t matter. We lost a beautiful young soldier, and it’s time we fix our system.” Army CID Holds Press Conference But Maintains No Evidence Of Sexual Harassment Of Guillen As A Possible Motive For Her Murder
On July 2, the Army finally released details of their three-month investigation of Guillen’s disappearance. According to Fort Hood’s CID agents, by the time Robinson killed himself, CID had talked to at least 300 persons on Fort Hood. Yet CID had given no indication to the family that they were dealing with anything but a disappearance. CID agents said that there was not yet credible evidence that she was sexually harassed, despite Guillen having told her family and friends at Fort Hood that she had been. From the social media posts from women who had been sexually harassed and assaulted at Fort Hood and other military bases, one suspicions that some of Vanessa’s friends at Fort Hood have told CID that she told them about the harassment.
Speakers at July 2 Fort Hood press conference said that the investigation into her disappearance is ongoing and there has not been a connection made between the sexual assault allegations and Guillen’s disappearance. They said specifically that there was no evidence Robinson sexually harassed Guillen and there has been no information that Guillen was sexually assaulted or harassed. They acknowledge there were no video cameras, and therefore no footage, at the location where Robinson murdered Guillen. They made no comments about the possibility that Robinson killed Guillen to keep her from reporting his harassment of her. CID did not state they had asked Robinson’s girlfriend Aguilar if Robinson told her why he murdered Guillen.
I am including at the end of this article, the narrative is taken from the six-page Criminal Complaint filed on July 2, 2020, at United States District Court Western District of Texas, Waco Division, Case 6:20-mj-00141-JCM. From the criminal complaint, one can determine that the investigation was conducted at a slow pace over three months, an inquiry that should have been conducted at much more quickly to determine what had happened to Guillen.
The Guillen family had been demanding information from the Fort Hood chain of command about their daughter’s disappearance and were stonewalled for three months. With the intervention of Congresswoman Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D-Tex.) in mid-June and the family going to Washington, DC on July 1 to enlist the aid of other Congresspersons including Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI), as highway crew reported finding human remains along a highway, finally the Army was pressured into revealing what they had uncovered during the three months since Guillen’s disappearance. Questions About The Investigative Process Of Fort Hood’s Criminal Investigative Division
There are many questions about the investigative process that Fort Hood’s Criminal Investigative Division (CID) must answer to the give SPC Guillen’s family, the Fort Hood community, and the public any confidence in its work. Among the many questions are: Why did it take CID until April 29, one week after SPC Guillen’s disappearance on April 22 to interview SPC Aaron Robinson, the last person to see SPC Guillen? Why was the phone of SPC Robinson not seized quickly and checked for his location on the evening of her disappearance, since he was the last person to see her? Why did it take CID one month, until May 19, 2020, to search Robinson’s cell phone? Why did CID not follow up on May 19, 2020, on the GPS location of Robinson’s cellphone on the night of April 22, 2020, which would have provided details of where he had gone the night of Guillen’s disappearance? Why was the first interview of Robinson’s girlfriend Cecily Aguilar and who helped dismember, burn and bury Guillen not until when Robinson’s phone record revealed that he had called Aguilar multiple times during the night of SPC Guillen’s disappearance on April 22, 2020, and as late as 03:3Oam on April 23, 2020? Why wasn’t the family’s description of Robinson as the person who walked into a women’s locker room and watched Guillen take a shower given credence as an incident of sexual harassment that he might take retaliatory action against her if she made a formal complaint? Why was the primary “person of interest” SPC Robinson allowed to remain free on the base for almost three months in which time he could have murdered others? Why was the primary “person of interest” SPC Robinson confined to his barracks only late in the investigation (the criminal complaint did not state when Robinson was confined to the barracks) and then on June 30, as he had no supervision, he was able to depart the base and kill himself? Has CID asked Robinson’s girlfriend Aguilar if Robinson told her why he felt he had to murder Guillen? Why was the family not accorded the courtesy of updates from the Army on the investigation? Did the fact that it was a young Latina woman who had disappeared that resulted in the slowness of the investigation? What is the status of the investigation into the August 19, 2019 disappearance and death of another Fort Hood soldier Private Gregory Morales, whose remains were found on June 22, 2020, through an anonymous tip ironically just days before Guillen’s remains were found? Morales was to have been discharged from the Army within days of his disappearance. Investigation Of Fort Hood’s Sexual Harassment/Assault Response And Prevention Program Due To SPC Guillen’s Family’s Strong Public Advocacy
SPC Guillen’s family strong and vocal advocacy for the investigation of sexual harassment as a part of her disappearance, finally, three months later, the Army sent on June 30 a seven-member inspector general team from the U.S. Army Forces Command to Fort Hood at the request of III Corps officials to determine if the Fort Hood’s Sexual Harassment/Assault Response and Prevention Program, or SHARP, was working effectively and properly offering support to soldiers.
Ironically the team arrived at Fort Hood on the day that SPC Guillen’s remains were found, the day that Robinson committed suicide and Robinson’s girlfriend Cecily Aguilar was arrested for her complicity in the dismemberment, burning and burying of Guillen’s body.
The team inspector general group stayed at Fort Hood from June 30 until July 3 and reportedly focused on “how the SHARP program is being implemented on the base; investigating whether the base command climate supports soldiers who report sexual harassment or assault; and identifying any systemic issues with the program, or any places where resources are inadequate.” The team was to brief the Fort Hood command before it departed on July 3, but the results of the investigation have not been released to the public.
Remarkably, in its press conference on July 2, Fort Hood CID agents still maintained at that there was no credible evidence or reports that Robinson or any other person sexually harassed or sexually assaulted Guillen. The CID agent asked that if any person had information to the contrary to contact them, in one way diminishing the value of the family’s plea from the beginning to have sexual harassment investigated as a cause of her disappearance.
The Defense Department’s fiscal year 2019 report on sexual assault in the military that was released on April 30, 2020, revealed that in fiscal year 2019 were 7,825 sexual assault reports involving service members as victims or subjects, a 3% increase compared to 2018. The military received 1,021 formal sexual harassment complaints, a 10% increase from 2018.
Very relevant to Fort Hood and SPC Guillen’s disappearance and murder, the 2019 report focused “unit climate” and underscored that most military sexual assaults happen between service members who work or live nearby, and “when unit climates are tolerant of other forms of misconduct, risk of sexual assault increases.” For active duty women, those who experience sexual harassment had a three times greater risk of sexual assault than those who did not, according to the report. (Author put this sentence from the report in bold.)
The 2019 report reflects feedback from 61 focus groups at eight installations in the United States with over 490 service members and first responders who work with survivors. On unit climate, focus group participants said that service members find it hard to fully define sexual harassment and that male and female service members define it differently. Participants said that when it occurs, it is not always confronted or addressed, and service members believed that was because people don’t want to jeopardize the career of a high-ranking, or better performing service member or their own career. Violence Against Women At Fort Hood – Sex Trafficking, Prostitution And Pimping
Guillen’s family attorney Khawam was alarmed about the violence on Fort Hood. “I don’t know what to say other than that base needs to be looked into. They need a congressional investigation. This young woman, who signed up to serve our country, should not have gone missing. You can’t tell me that there are no cameras, that we couldn’t see what had happened, how he murdered her because there are no cameras. Unacceptable…. They found Gregory Morales, who was another soldier that went missing last year.
“Within the last couple of years, there have been several incidences of soldiers killed on the base, missing on the base. There is major human trafficking going on at that base. There is a ring of sex prostitution rings…I learned so much about Fort Hood, and people contacting me and giving me hints, information, examples, videos, and saying, “I want you to see what goes on on this base.” It’s devastating. It’s devastating to know that our soldiers are on that base and they’re so unsafe.”
In September 2017 thirteen active-duty soldiers from Fort Hood, Texas, were arrested after law enforcement conducted a 16-hour prostitution sting. Twenty men were arrested in all, and the 13 soldiers ranged in rank from private to major. “Our goal is to focus our efforts on sex buyers who are seeking to take advantage of sex trafficking victims,” a member of the Bell County Sheriff’s office said. “We are putting these predators on notice that our Bell County community will not tolerate their behavior.”
In June 2014, one of Fort Hood’s sexual assault prevention officer became part of the sexual assault problem. Fort Hood unit sexual assault prevention officer Sergeant First Class Gregory McQueen was accused by a woman soldier of 21 criminal charges that included pandering, adultery, sexual assault and recruiting cash-strapped female soldiers. Three years later, in April 2017, McQueen, 39, was convicted 0f 15 of 21 charges and was demoted, sentenced to two years in prison and given a dishonorable discharge. With McQueen’s plea deal, he managed to avoid six other charges, including sexual assault that could have sent him to military prison for 40 years.
In the article “Army Soldiers at Fort Hood in Texas Are Dying at Alarming Rates,” the authors list 145 soldiers assigned to Fort Hood who have died in four years since January 2016. 12 died in Afghanistan, Iraq and Korea. 133 have died at Fort Hood including at least one homicide on the post itself-Vanessa Guillen. The article states that 13 homicides of Fort Hood soldiers occurred off post, 7 of which are still unsolved, including that of SPC Gregory Morales who disappeared in August 2019 and whose remains were found due to an anonymous tip in June 2020. Another 20 deaths of Fort Hood soldiers have been ruled as suicides, some of which are problematic when one reads the circumstances of death. The other deaths are listed as from automobile and motorcycle accidents, drownings and military exercise-related.
Unfortunately, the Fort Hood command structure stopped notifying the public of deaths of Fort Hood soldiers in March 2018 making the tracking of violence on the base much more difficult.
The Criminal Complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court of the Western District of Texas, Waco Division quickly on July 2, 2020.
Reading the complaint is very instructive in missed opportunities by CID to resolve the disappearance and murder of SPC Vanessa Guillen.
Military families deserve better than what the Guillen family had to endure and a Congressional investigation into Fort Hood’s response to Guillen’s disappearance and murder is warranted. Narrative Of The 6 Page Criminal Complaint Filed On July 2, 2020, At United States District Court Western District Of Texas, Waco Division, Case 6:20-Mj-00141-JCM.
The Criminal Complaint filed on July 2, 2020, states that on April 23, 2020, U.S. Army Criminal Investigative Division (USACID) at Fort Hood was notified by a Captain in the Regimental Provost Marshal, 3rd Cavalry Regiment, Fort Hood, TX, that Private First Class (PFC) Vanessa Guillen had been reported missing by her unit. A witness stated that PFC Guillen left the arms room where she was working to visit the arms room at another location at Fort Hood, one controlled by Specialist (SPC) Aaron Robinson, in order to confirm serial numbers for weapons and equipment. The witnesses verified that PFC Guillen left the arms room without her US Army identification card, bank card, or car keys with her barracks key attached. The witness stated that her property was still in the arms room when he secured the arms room for the day. A search of PFC Guillen’s phone records revealed the last outgoing text message from her phone was a message to SPC Robinson’s phone. SPC Robinson was the last person known to have seen PFC Guillen.
A week later on April 28, 2020, USACID interviewed SPC Robinson. SPC Robinson stated he texted PFC Guillen on April 22, 2020, to inform her he was in the arms room. He said she read serial numbers for equipment and afterward, he gave her paperwork and the serial number for a .50 caliber machine gun which needed to be serviced. Robinson said she left the arms room and he believed she would have next gone to the motor pool. Witnesses at the motor pool prepared to receive the paperwork from PFC Guillen stated she did not arrive with the papers. Among the things he said concerning his activities on April 22, 2020, SPC Robinson stated that after he finished his work, he went to his off-post residence he shared with his girlfriend Cecily Aguilar and did not leave the rest of the night, except around 6:30 pm when he had to come on post to sign on to a government computer to enroll in training.
Almost one month later, on May 18, 2020, two witnesses were interviewed who stated that on April 22, 2020, they observed SPC Robinson pulling a large “tough box,” with wheels, that appeared very heavy in weight, coming out the arms room, the same room where SPC Robinson worked. The two witnesses observed SPC Robinson load the “tough box” into his vehicle and drive away.
One month after PFC Guillen’s disappearance, on May 19, 2020, SPC Robinson consented to a search of his cellular phone by Universal Forensic Extraction. UFED extraction devices are small, portable computers that extract the entire contents of a cellphone and by bypassing passwords and other security features, they download personal information in seconds. A review of the phone call logs revealed SPC Robinson called his girlfriend Aguilar multiple times during the night of April 22, 2020, and as late as 03:3Oam on April 23, 2020. SPC Robinson also received calls from Aguilar throughout the day. The GPS location of Robinson’s cellphone on the night of April 22, 2020, should have provided details of where he had gone the night of Guillen’s disappearance, but apparently there was no CID follow-up on locations he had visited on April 22 and 23.
According to the Criminal Complaint, it took CID two months after PFC Guillen’s disappearance, to finally interview Robinson’s girlfriend Cecily Aguilar on June 19, 2020. Aguilar stated she was with SPC Robinson all night on April 22, 2020. She was asked why SPC Robinson would call her after midnight if he was at the residence with her. She stated she could not find her phone and had SPC Robinson call the phone to help her find it. This statement, however, was inconsistent with the lengths of the calls. SPC Robinson called Aguilar several times throughout the night and the calls after midnight were for lengths greater than one minute. During a second interview, Aguilar stated that she lied in her previous statement. She stated that she did leave her residence because one of the ways she copes is by taking long drives.
Aguilar stated that she was with SPC Robinson on the night of April 22, 2020 where they took a long drive to a park in Belton, Texas to look at the “stars.” Aguilar stated that after going to the park they returned home. An analysis of phone records (Criminal Complaint did not state the date of the analysis of the phone records) pertaining to SPC Robinson’s telephone was conducted. A review of the location data revealed that at approximately 1:59am, April 23, 2020, SPC Robinson’s cell phone was identified in the vicinity of FM 436 and West Main St, in Belton, TX; specifically, on or around a bridge. SPC Robinson’s cell phone then tracked along the Leon River in a “northward direction.” SPC Robinson’s cell phone remained in the area for approximately 2 hours.
Aguilar’s cellular telephone location data was also analyzed later (no date specified in the Criminal Complaint) and it revealed she and SPC Robinson were near the Leon River together on April 23, 2020 and April 26, 2020. Based upon this data, personnel from USACID, Bell County Sherriff’s Office (BCSO), and Texas Rangers, searched the Leon River site in Belton, Texas on June 21, 2020, three months after Guillen’s disappearance. A burn site with disturbed earth was identified. What appeared to be the burned remains of a plastic tote or tough box were found nearby in an area near where SPC Robinson’s phone pinged. The soil beneath the burn site was remarkably softer and moister than the soil found at similar depths merely feet away and had an odor of decomposition. However, no remains were located.
However, nine days later on June 30, 2020 at bout 1:00pm, CID was notified that contractors working on a fence adjacent to the Leon River in Belton, TX, discovered what appeared to be human remains. CID, along with FBI, Bell County Sheriff’s Office, the US Marshalls Service, and Texas Rangers, searched the area and identified scattered human remains that appeared to have been placed into a concrete-like substance and buried.
The discovery of human remains triggered another interview with Aguilar on June 30, 2020 at about 8:30pm, over three months and one week after Guillen’s disappearance. In this interview Aguilar admitted that SPC Robinson told her that on April 22, 2020, he struck a female soldier in the head with a hammer multiple times at his arms room, killing her on Fort Hood. SPC Robinson then placed her in a box and moved the box to a location near the Leon River in Belton, Texas.
On the evening of April 22, 2020 or the early morning of April 23, 2020, SPC Robinson picked Aguilar up at a gas station she worked at and took her out to a site near the Leon River and near a bridge. A box with wheels and handles was already at this site. SPC Robinson walked Aguilar over to the woods and opened up a box for Aguilar and she saw a dead female inside the box. Aguilar, on a later date, identified the dead female as Vanessa Guillen. To more easily dispose of and to conceal the body of the dead female, SPC Robinson and Aguilar proceeded to dismember the dead female’s body. They used a hatchet or ax and a machete type knife. They removed the limbs and the head from the body. SPC Robinson and Aguilar attempted to burn the body; however, the body would not burn completely. They placed the dead female in three separate holes and covered up the remains.
SPC Robinson and Aguilar returned to the site on a later date, believed to be on April 26, 2020 according to cellular telephone site analysis. Prior to their return, they obtained hairnets and gloves. Aguilar purchased a bag of what she referred to as concrete from someone utilizing Facebook messenger. On that date, SPC Robinson and Aguilar uncovered the remains of the dead female, removed them, and continued the process of breaking down the remains of the dead female. The remains were then burned again along with their gloves and hairnets. SPC Robinson and Aguilar placed the remains back in the three holes with the concrete purchased earlier. SPC Robinson and Aguilar burned their clothes later that night at their residence. SPC Robinson and Aguilar concocted the story about Aguilar and Robinson taking a long drive to a park in Belton as an alibi.
Sometime prior to June 30, 2020, SPC Robinson had been confined to his barracks room on Fort Hood. The Criminal Complaint does not state what date Robinson was confined to his barracks nor why he was not placed under guard as a “person of interest.” Robinson left his Fort Hood barracks sometime during the evening of June 30, 2020.
In the evening of June 30, 2020, at the request of law enforcement, Aguilar, who now was cooperating with law enforcement placed a “controlled” telephone call to SPC Robinson wherein he never denied anything they did to Vanessa Guillen and her body. SPC Robinson texted Aguilar pictures of the news articles advising of recovered human remains. In a later controlled telephone call, SPC Robinson advised, “baby they found pieces, they found pieces”. This was referring to the human remains recovered near the Leon River. Aguilar continued to assist law enforcement with locating SPC Robinson as he was on foot in Killeen, Texas after he left his barracks.
SPC Robinson located and was approached by law enforcement at 1.17 am on July 1, 2020. Law enforcement officials said he brandished a pistol and shot himself in the head, killing himself.
The Story Of The Alleged “Bounty Scheme” Grew Up In The Context Of Top U.S. Brass Blaming Russia For America’s Defeat In Afghanistan.
On the morning of Feb. 27, Beth Sanner, the deputy director of national intelligence for mission integration, arrived at the White House carrying a copy of the Presidential Daily Brief (PDB), a document which, in one form or another, has been made available to every president of the United States since Harry Truman first received what was then known as the “Daily Summary” in February 1946.
The sensitivity of the PDB is without dispute; former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer once called the PBD “the most highly sensitized classified document in the government,” while former Vice President Dick Cheney referred to it as “the family jewels.”
The contents of the PDB are rarely shared with the public, not only because of the highly classified nature of the information it contains, but also because of the intimacy,it reveals about the relationship between the nation’s chief executive and the intelligence community.
“It’s important for the writers of the presidential daily brief to feel comfortable that the documents will never be politicized and/or unnecessarily exposed for public purview,” former President George W. Bush observed after he left office, giving voice to a more blunt assessment put forward by his vice president who warned that any public release of a PDB would make its authors “spend more time worried about how the report’s going to look on the front page of The Washington Post.”
Sanner’s job was the same for those who had carried out this task under previous presidents: find a way to engage a politician whose natural instincts might not incline toward the tedious and often contradictory details contained in many intelligence products. This was especially true for Donald J. Trump, who reportedly disdains detailed written reports, preferring instead oral briefings backed up by graphics.
The end result was a two-phased briefing process, where Sanner would seek to distill critical material to the president orally, leaving the task of picking through the details spelled out in the written product to his senior advisors. This approach was approved beforehand by the director of national intelligence, the director of the CIA, and the president’s national security advisor.
Sanner, a veteran CIA analyst who previously headed up the office responsible for preparing the PDB, served as the DNI’s principal advisor “on all aspects of intelligence,” responsible for creating “a consistent and holistic view of intelligence from collection to analysis” and ensures “the delivery of timely, objective, accurate, and relevant intelligence.”
If there was anyone in the intelligence community capable of sorting out the wheat from the chaff when it came to what information was suited for verbal presentation to the president, it was Sanner.
No copy of the PDB for Feb. 27 has been made available to the public to scrutinize, nor will one likely ever be.
However, based upon information gleaned from media reporting derived from anonymous leaks, a picture emerges of at least one of the items contained in the briefing document, the proverbial “ground zero” for the current crisis surrounding allegations that Russia has paid cash bounties to persons affiliated with the Taliban for the purpose of killing American and coalition military personnel in Afghanistan. Links Between Accounts
Sometime in early January 2020, a combined force of U.S. special operators and Afghan National Intelligence Service (NDS) commandos raided the offices of several businessmen in the northern Afghan city of Konduz and the capital city of Kabul, according to a report in The New York Times. The businessmen were involved in the ancient practice of “Hawala.” It is a traditional system for transferring money in Islamic cultures, involving money paid to an agent who then instructs a remote associate to pay the final recipient.
Afghan security officials claim that the raid had nothing to do with “Russians smuggling money,” but rather was a response to pressure from the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), an international body established in 1989 whose mission is, among other things, to set standards and promote effective implementation of legal, regulatory and operational measures for combating money laundering and terrorist financing.
“If there was anyone in the intelligence community capable of sorting out the wheat from the chaff when it came to what information was suited for verbal presentation to the president, it was Sanner.”
This explanation, however, seems more of a cover story than fact, if for no other reason than that the FATF, in June 2017, formally recognized that Afghanistan had established “the legal and regulatory framework to meet its commitments in its action plan,” noting that Afghanistan was “therefore no longer subject to the FATF’s monitoring process.”
The joint U.S.-Afghan raid, according to the Times, was not a takedown of the Halawa system in Afghanistan—a virtually impossible task—but rather a particular Halawa network run by Rahmatullah Azizi, a one-time low-level Afghan drug smuggler-turned-high profile businessman, along with a colleague named Habib Muradi.
Azizi’s portfolio is alleged by the Times, quoting a “friend,” to include serving as a contractor for U.S. reconstruction programs, managing undefined business dealings in Russia, which supposedly, according to unnamed U.S. intelligence sources quoted by the Times, included face-to-face meetings with officers from Russian Military Intelligence (GRU), and serving as a bagman for a covert money laundering scheme between the Taliban and Russia.
Some thirteen persons, including members of Azizi’s extended family and close associates, were rounded up in the raids. Both Azizi and Muradi, however, eluded capture, believed by Afghan security officials to have fled to Russia.
Based in large part on information derived from the interrogation of the detainees that followed, U.S. intelligence analysts pieced together a picture of Azizi’s Halawa enterprise—described as “layered and complex”, with money transfers “often sliced into smaller amounts that routed through several regional countries before arriving in Afghanistan.”
What made these transactions even more interesting from an intelligence perspective, were the links made by U.S. analysts between Azizi’s Halawa system, an electronic wire transfer, a Taliban-linked account, and a Russian account that some believed was tied to Unit 29155 (a covert GRU activity believed to be involved with, among other activities, assassinations). The transactions had been picked up by the National Security Agency (NSA), the U.S. intelligence agency responsible for monitoring communications and electronic data worldwide.
The discovery of some $500,000 in cash by U.S. special operators at Azizi’s luxury villa in Kabul was the icing on the cake—the final “dot” in a complex and convoluted game of “connect the dots” that comprised the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment of the alleged Russian (GRU)-Taliban-Azizi connection.
The next task for U.S. intelligence analysts was to see where the Russian (GRU)-Taliban-Azizi connection took them. Using information gathered through detainee debriefings, the analysts broke down money Azizi received through his Halawa pipeline into “packets,” some comprising hundreds of thousands of dollars, which were doled out to entities affiliated with, or sympathetic to, the Taliban.
According to Afghan security officials quoted by the Times, at least some of these payments were specifically for the purpose of killing American troops, amounting to a price tag of around $100,000 per dead American.
The game of “connect the dots” continued as the U.S. intelligence analysts linked this “bounty” money to criminal networks in Parwan Province, where Bagram Air Base—the largest U.S. military installation in Afghanistan—is located. According to Afghan security officials, local criminal networks had carried out attacks on behalf of the Taliban in the past in exchange for money. This linkage prompted U.S. intelligence analysts to take a new look at an April 9, 2019 car bomb attack outside of Bagram Air Base which killed three U.S. Marines.
This information was contained in the PDB that was given to Trump on Feb. 27. According to standard procedure, it would have been vetted by at least three intelligence agencies—the CIA, the National Counterterrorism Center (NCC), and the NSA. Both the CIA and NCC had assessed the finding that the GRU had offered bounties to the Taliban with “moderate confidence,” which in the lexicon used by the intelligence community means that the information is interpreted in various ways, that there are alternative views, or that the information is credible and plausible but not corroborated sufficiently to warrant a higher level of confidence.
The NSA, however, assessed the information with “low confidence,” meaning that they viewed the information as scant, questionable, or very fragmented, that it was difficult to make solid analytic inferences, and that there were significant concerns or problems with the sources of information used. Floating In The Bowl
All of this information was contained in the PDB carried into the White House by Sanner. The problem for Sanner was the context and relevance of the information she carried. Just five days prior, on Feb. 22, the U.S. and the Taliban had agreed to a seven-day partial ceasefire as prelude to the conclusion of a peace agreement scheduled to be signed in two days’ time, on Feb. 29.
The U.S. Representative for Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad, was in Doha, Qatar, where he was hammering out the final touches to the agreement with his Taliban counterparts. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was preparing to depart the U.S. for Doha, where he would witness the signing ceremony. The information Sanner carried in the PDB was the proverbial turd in the punchbowl.
The problem was that the intelligence assessment on alleged Russian GRU “bounties” contained zero corroborated information. It was all raw intelligence (characterized by one informed official as an “intelligence collection report”), and there were serious disagreements among the differing analytical communities—in particular the NSA—which took umbrage over what it deemed a misreading of its intercepts and an over reliance on uncorroborated information derived from detainee debriefs.
Moreover, none of the intelligence linking the GRU to the Taliban provided any indication of how far up the Russian chain of command knowledge of the “bounties” went, and whether or not anyone at the Kremlin—let alone President Vladimir Putin—were aware of it.
None of the information contained in the PDB was “actionable.” The president couldn’t very well pick up the phone to complain to Putin based on a case drawn solely from unverified, and in some cases unverifiable, information.
To brief the president about an assessment which, if taken at face value, could unravel a peace agreement that represented a core commitment of the president to his domestic political base—to bring U.S. troops home from endless overseas wars—was the epitome of the politicization of intelligence, especially when there was no consensus among the U.S. intelligence community that the assessment was even correct to begin with.
Ending America’s nearly 19-year misadventure in Afghanistan had always been an objective of President Trump. Like both presidents before him whose tenure witnessed the deaths of American service members in that hard, distant and inhospitable land, Trump found himself confronting a military and national security establishment convinced that “victory” could be achieved, if only sufficient resources, backed by decisive leadership, were thrown at the problem.
His choice for secretary of defense, James “Mad Dog” Mattis, a retired Marine general who commanded Central Command (the geographical combatant command responsible for, among other regions, Afghanistan) pushed Trump for more troops, more equipment, and a freer hand in taking on the enemy.
In November 2018, Trump turned on “Mad Dog”, telling the former Marine General “I gave you what you asked for. Unlimited authority, no holds barred. You’re losing. You’re getting your ass kicked. You failed.”
It was probably the most honest assessment of the War in Afghanistan any American president delivered to his serving secretary of defense. By December 2018 Mattis was out, having resigned in the face of Trump’s decision to cut American losses not only in Afghanistan but also in Syria and Iraq.
That same month, U.S. diplomat Khalilizad began the process of direct peace talks with the Taliban that led to the Feb. 29 peace agreement. It was a dispute over Afghan peace talks that led to the firing of National Security Advisor John Bolton. In September 2019—Trump wanted to invite the Taliban leadership to Camp David for a signing ceremony, something Bolton helped quash. Trump cancelled the “summit”, citing a Taliban attack that took the life of an American service member, but Bolton was gone. Taking On Failure
One doesn’t take on two decades of systemic investment in military failure that had become ingrained in both the psyche and structure of the U.S. military establishment, fire a popular secretary of defense, and then follow that act up with the dismissal of one of the most vindictive bureaucratic infighters in the business without accumulating enemies.
Washington DC has always been a political Peyton Place where no deed goes unpunished. All president’s are confronted by this reality, but Trump’s was a far different case—at no time in America’s history had such a divisive figure won the White House. Trump’s anti-establishment agenda alienated people across all political spectrums, often for cause. But he also came into office bearing a Scarlet Letter which none of his predecessors had to confront—the stigma of a “stolen election” won only through the help of Russian intelligence.
The “Russian interference” mantra was all-pervasive, cited by legions of anti-Trumpers suddenly imbued with a Cold War-era appreciation of global geopolitics, seeing the Russian Bear behind every roadblock encountered, never once pausing to consider that the problem might actually reside closer to home, in the very military establishment Trump sought to challenge.
Afghanistan was no different. Prior to stepping down as the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan in September 2018, Army General John Nicholson sought to deflect responsibility for the reality that, despite receiving the reinforcements and freedom of action requested, his forces were losing the fight for Afghanistan.
Unable or unwilling to shoulder responsibility, Nicholson instead took the safe way out—he blamed Russia. Scapegoating
“We know that Russia is attempting to undercut our military gains and years of military progress in Afghanistan, and make partners question Afghanistan’s stability,” Nicholson wrote in an email to reporters, seemingly oblivious to the history of failure and lies being documented at that moment by Sopko.
In March 2018 Nicholson had accused the Russians of “acting to undermine” U.S. interests in Afghanistan, accusing the Russians of arming the Taliban. But the most telling example of Russian-baiting on the part of the general occurred in February 2017, shortly after President Trump was inaugurated. In an appearance before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Nicholson was confronted by Sen. Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat and ardent supporter of the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan.
“If Russia is cozying up to the Taliban—and that’s a kind word—if they are giving equipment that we have some evidence that the Taliban is getting…and other things that we can’t mention in this unclassified setting? And the Taliban is also associated with al-Qaida? Therefore Russia is indirectly helping al-Qaeda in Afghanistan?” Nelson asked.
“Your logic is absolutely sound, sir,” was Nicholson’s response.
Except it wasn’t.
Russia has a long and complicated history with Afghanistan. The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, and over the course of the next decade fought a long and costly war with Afghan tribes, backed by American money and arms and a legion of Arab jihadis who would later morph into the very al-Qaeda Sen. Nelson alluded to in his question to General Nicholson.
By 1989 the Soviet Empire was winding down, and with it its disastrous Afghan War. In the decade that followed, Russia was at odds with the Taliban government that arose from the ashes of the Afghan civil war that followed in the wake of the withdrawal of Soviet forces.
Moscow threw its support behind the more moderate forces of the so-called Northern Alliance and, after the al-Qaeda terror attacks on the U.S. on Sept. 11, 2001, was supportive of the U.S.-led intervention to defeat the Taliban and bring stability to a nation that bordered the Central Asian Republics of the former Soviet Union, which Russia viewed as especially sensitive to its own national security. Realized US Was Losing The War
CIA bounty leaflet. “You can receive millions of dollars for helping the Anti-Taliban Force catch Al-Qaida and Taliban murderers. This enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life. Pay for livestock and doctors and school books and housing for all your people.” (Wikimedia: This image is a work of a Central Intelligence Agency employee, taken or made as part of that person’s official duties. As a Work of the United States Government, this image or media is in the public domain in the United States.)
Fourteen years later, in September 2015, Russia was confronted by the reality that the U.S. had no strategy for victory in Afghanistan and, left to its own devices, Afghanistan was doomed to collapse into an ungovernable morass of tribal, ethnic and religious interests that would spawn extremism capable of migrating over the border, into the former Soviet Central Asian Republics, and into Russia itself.
“One doesn’t take on two decades of systemic investment in military failure that had become ingrained in both the psyche and structure of the U.S. military establishment, fire a popular secretary of defense, and then follow that act up with the dismissal of one of the most vindictive bureaucratic infighters in the business without accumulating enemies.”
Russia’s concerns were shared by regional countries such as Pakistan and China, both of which faced serious threats in the form of domestic Islamist extremism.
The capture of the northern Afghan city of Konduz, followed by the rise of an even more militant Islamist group in Afghanistan known as the Islamic State-Khorassan (IS-K), both of which occurred in September 2015, led the Russians to conclude that the U.S. was losing its war in Afghanistan, and Russia’s best hope was to work with the prevailing side—the Taliban—in order to defeat the threat from IS-K, and create the conditions for a negotiated peace settlement in Afghanistan.
None of this history was mentioned by either Gen. Nicholson or Sen. Nelson. Instead, Nicholson sought to cast Russia’s involvement in Afghanistan as “malign”, declaring in a Dec. 16, 2016 briefing that:
“Russia has overtly lent legitimacy to the Taliban. And their narrative goes something like this: that the Taliban are the ones fighting Islamic State, not the Afghan government. And of course … the Afghan government and the U.S. counterterrorism effort are the ones achieving the greatest effect against Islamic State. So, this public legitimacy that Russia lends to the Taliban is not based on fact, but it is used as a way to essentially undermine the Afghan government and the NATO effort and bolster the belligerents.”
Absent from Nicholson’s comments is any appreciation surrounding the creation of IS-K, and the impact it had on the Taliban as a whole.
One, representing the mainstream faction of the Taliban most closely linked to Mullah Omar, wanted to continue and expand upon the existing struggle against the Government of Afghanistan and the U.S.-led coalition, which supported and sustained it in an effort to re-establish the Emirate that ruled prior to being evicted from power in the months after the terror attacks of 9/11.
Another, grounded in the ranks of Pakistani Taliban, wanted a more radical approach which sought a regional Emirate beyond the borders of Afghanistan.
A third faction had grown tired of years of fighting and viewed the passing of Mullah Omar as an opportunity for a negotiated peace settlement with the Afghan government. IS-K emerged from the ranks of the second group, and posed a real threat to the viability of the Taliban if it could motivate large numbers of the Taliban’s most fanatic fighters to defect from the ranks of the mainstream Taliban.
For the Russians, who witnessed the growing potency of the Taliban as manifested in its short-lived capture of Konduz, the biggest danger it faced wasn’t a Taliban victory over the U.S.-dominated Afghan government, but rather the emergence of a regionally-minded Islamist extremist movement that could serve as a model and inspiration for Muslim men of combat age to rally around, allowing the violent instability to fester locally and spread regionally for decades to come. he mainstream Taliban were no longer viewed as a force to be confronted but rather contained through co-option. \In a statement before U.S. troops in December 2016, then-President Barack Obama openly admitted that “the U.S. cannot eliminate the Taliban or end violence in that country [Afghanistan].” Russia had reached that conclusion more than a year prior, following the Taliban capture of Konduz.
A year before Obama made this announcement, Zamir Kabulov, Russia’s special representative to Afghanistan, noted that “Taliban interests objectively coincide with ours” when it came to limiting the spread of the Islamic State in Afghanistan, and he acknowledged that Russia had “opened communication channels with the Taliban to exchange information.”
For its part, the Taliban was at first cold to the thought of cooperating with the Russians. A spokesperson declared that they “do not see a need for receiving aid from anyone concerning so-called Daesh [Islamic State] and neither have we contacted nor talked with anyone about this issue.”
Many of the Taliban leadership had a history of fighting against the Soviets in the 1980s and were loath to be seen as working with their old enemies. The rise of IS-K in Afghanistan, however, created a common threat that helped salve old wounds, and while the Taliban balked at any overt relationship, the Russians began a backchannel process of discreet diplomatic engagement. (Kabulov had a history of negotiations with the Taliban dating back to the mid-1990’s).
By November 2018 this effort had matured into what was called the “Moscow Format”, a process of diplomatic engagement between Russia and Afghanistan’s neighbors which resulted in the first-ever dispatch of a Taliban delegation to Moscow for the purpose of discussing the conditions necessary for peace talks to be held about ending the conflict in Afghanistan.
“The mainstream Taliban were no longer viewed as a force to be confronted, but rather contained through co-option.”
When President Trump terminated the U.S.-Taliban peace negotiations in September 2019, it was the “Moscow Format” that kept the peace process alive, with Russia hosting a delegation from the Taliban to discuss the future of the peace process.
The Russian involvement helped keep the window of negotiations with the Taliban open, helping to facilitate the eventual return of the U.S. to the negotiating table this February, and played no small part in the eventual successful conclusion of the Feb. 27, 2020 peace agreement—a fact which no one in the U.S. was willing to publicly acknowledge. Bad Intelligence
The Intelligence Collection Report that found its way into the Feb. 27 PDB did not appear in a vacuum. The singling out of the Hawala network operated by Rahmatullah Azizi was the manifestation of a larger anti-Russian animus that had existed in the intelligence collection priorities of the U.S. military, the CIA and the Afghan NDS since 2015.
This animus can be traced to internal bias that existed in both U.S. Central Command and the CIA against anything Russian, and the impact this bias had on the intelligence cycle as it applied to Afghanistan.
The existence of this kind of bias is the death knell of any professional intelligence effort, as it destroys the objectivity needed to produce effective analysis.
Sherman Kent, the dean of U.S. intelligence analysis (the CIA’s Center for Intelligence Analysis is named after him), warned of this danger, noting that while there was no excuse for policy or political bias, the existence of analytic or cognitive bias was ingrained in the human condition, requiring a continuous effort by those responsible for overseeing analytical tasks to minimize.
Kent urged analysts “to resist the tendency to see what they expect to see in the information,” and “urged special caution when a whole team of analysts immediately agrees on an interpretation of yesterday’s development or a prediction about tomorrow’s.” Part Of A Litany Of Intel Failures
The nexus of theory and reality was rarely if ever, achieved within the U.S. intelligence community. From exaggerated Cold War estimates of Soviet military capability (the “bomber” and “missile” gaps), the underestimation of Viet Cong and North Vietnamese military capability, a failure to accurately predict the need for, and impact of, Gorbachev’s policies of reform in the Soviet Union, the debacle that was Iraqi WMD, a similar misreading of Iran’s nuclear capability and intent, and the two-decade failure that was (and is) the Afghanistan experience, the U.S. intelligence community has a track record of imbuing its analysis with both political and cognitive bias—and getting it very, very wrong about so many things.
The Russian bounty story is no exception. It represents the nexus of two separate analytical streams, both of which were amply imbued with policy bias; one, representing America’s anger at not being able to control the fate of Russia in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the second, America’s total misread of the reality of Afghanistan (and the Taliban) as it related to the Global War on Terror (GWOT).
For the first decade or so, these streams lived separate but equal lives, populated by analytical teams whose work rarely intersected (indeed, if truth be told, the Russian/Eurasian “house” was frequently robbed of its best talent to feed the insatiable appetite for more and better “analysis” driven by the GWOT enterprise.)
The election of Barack Obama, however, changed the intelligence landscape and, in doing so, initiated processes that allow these two heretofore disparate intelligence streams to drift together.
Under President Obama, the U.S. “surged” some 17,000 additional combat troops into Afghanistan in an effort to turn the tide of battle. By September 2012, these troops had been withdrawn; the “surge” was over, with little to show for it besides an additional 1,300 U.S. troops killed and tens of thousands more wounded. The “surge” had failed, but like any failure rooted in Presidential policy, it was instead sold as a success.
That same year the Obama administration suffered another policy failure of similar magnitude. In 2008, Russian President Vladimir Putin swapped places with Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev, and when Obama took office, his team of Russian experts, led by a Stanford professor named Michael McFaul, sold him on the concept of a “reset” of U.S.-Russian relations, which had soured under eight years of the Bush Presidency.
But the “reset” was decidedly one-sided—it placed all of the blame for the bad blood between the two nations on Putin, and none on two successive eight-year presidential administrations, led by Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, which saw the U.S. expand the NATO alliance up to Russia’s borders, abandon foundational arms control agreements, and basically behave like Russia was a defeated foe whose only acceptable posture was one of acquiescence and subservience.
This was a game Russia’s first President, Boris Yeltsin only seemed too happy to play. His hand-picked successor, Vladimir Putin, however, would not.
With Medvedev installed as president, McFaul sought to empower Medvedev politically—in effect, to give him the “Yeltsin” treatment—in hopes that an empowered Medvedev might be able to muscle Putin out of the picture.
For any number of reasons (perhaps most important being Putin had no intention of allowing himself to be so squeezed, and Medvedev was never inclined to do any squeezing), the Russian “reset” failed. Putin was re-elected as president in March 2012. McFaul’s gambit had failed, and from that moment forward, U.S.-Russian relations became a “zero-sum game” for the U.S.—any Russian success was seen as a U.S. failure, and vice versa.
In 2014, after watching a duly elected, pro-Russian Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, removed from office by a popular uprising which, if not U.S. sponsored, was U.S. supported, Putin responded by annexing the Russian-majority Crimean peninsula and supporting pro-Russian secessionists in the breakaway Donbas region of Ukraine.
This action created a schism between Russia and the U.S. and Europe, resulting in the implementation of economic sanctions against Russia by both entities, and the emergence of a new Cold War-like relationship between Russia and NATO.
In 2015 Russia followed up its Ukraine action by dispatching its military into Syria where, at the invitation of the Syria government, it helped turn the tide on the battlefield in favor of Syria’s embattled president, Bashar al-Assad, against an assortment of jihadist groups.
Overnight, the intelligence backwater that had been Russian/European affairs was suddenly thrust front and center on the world stage and, with it, into the heart of American politics. The McFaul school of Putin-phobia suddenly became dogma, and any academic who had published a book or article critical of the Russian president was elevated in status and stature, up to and including a seat at the table in the senior-most decision-making circles of the U.S. intelligence community.
The Russians were suddenly imbued with near super-human capability, up to and including the ability to steal an American presidential election.
After the failure of the Obama surge in Afghanistan, and the withdrawal from Iraq at the end of 2011 of all U.S. combat troops, the mindset throughout the Central Command area of operations was “stability.” This was the command guidance and pity the intelligence analyst who tried to raise a red flag or inject a modicum of reality into the intelligence enterprise whose mission it was to sustain this sense of stability.
Indeed, when the Islamic State roared out of the western deserts of Iraq to establish itself in eastern Syria, dozens of CENTCOM intelligence analysts officially complained that their senior management was purposefully manipulating the analytical product produced by CENTCOM to paint a deliberately misleading “rosy” picture of truth on the ground out of fear of angering the Commanding General and his senior staff.
For anyone who has spent any time in the military, the importance of command guidance, whether written or verbal, when it comes to establishing both priorities and approach, cannot be overstated. In short, what the general wants, the general gets; woe be the junior officer or analyst who didn’t get the memo.
“The Russians were suddenly imbued with near super-human capability, up to and including the ability to steal an American presidential election.”
By 2016, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Gen. Nicholson, wanted to see Russians undermining U.S. policy objectives in Afghanistan. The poisonous culture that existed inside CENTCOM’s intelligence enterprise was only too happy to comply.
The corruption of intelligence at “ground zero” ended up corrupting the entire U.S. intelligence community, especially when there was a systemic desire to transfer blame for the failure of U.S. policy in Afghanistan anywhere other than where it belonged—squarely on the shoulders of U.S. policy makers and the military that did their bidding.
And there was a beefed-up Russia/Eurasia intelligence apparatus looking for opportunities to foist blame on Russia. Blaming Russia for U.S. policy failure in Afghanistan became the law of the land.
The consequences of this political and cognitive bias is subtle, but apparent to those who know what to look for, and are willing to take the time to look.
Following the leak to The New York Times about the Russian “bounty” intelligence, members of Congress demanded answers about the White House’s claim that the information published by the Times (and mimicked by other mainstream media outlets) was “unverified.”
Rep. Jim Banks, who sits on the Armed Services Committee as one of eight Republican lawmakers briefed by the White House on the substance of the intelligence regarding the alleged Russian “bounties”, tweeted shortly after the meeting ended that, “Having served in Afghanistan during the time the alleged bounties were placed, no one is angrier about this than me.”
Bank’s biography notes that, “In 2014 and 2015, he took a leave of absence from the Indiana State Senate to deploy to Afghanistan during Operations Enduring Freedom and Freedom’s Sentinel.”
Banks’ timeline mirrors that offered by a former senior Taliban leader, Mullah Manan Niazi, who told U.S. reporters who interviewed him after the Russian “bounty” story broke that “the Taliban have been paid by Russian intelligence for attacks on U.S. forces—and on ISIS forces—in Afghanistan from 2014 up to the present.”
Niazi has emerged a key figure behind the crafting of the “bounty” narrative, and yet his voice is absent from The New York Times reporting, for good reason—Niazi is a shady character whose acknowledged ties to both the Afghan Intelligence Service (NDS) and the CIA undermine his credibility as a viable source of information.
Officials, speaking anonymously to the media, have stated that “the bounty hunting story was ‘well-known’ among the intelligence community in Afghanistan, including the CIA’s chief of station and other top officials there, like the military commandos hunting the Taliban. The information was distributed in intelligence reports and highlighted in some of them.”
If this is true, and some of this information found its way into the intelligence report referred to by Rep. Banks, then the U.S. intelligence community has been selling the notion of a Russian bounty on U.S. troops since at least 2015—coincidentally, the same time Russia started siding with the Taliban against IS-K.
Seen in this light, claims that Bolton briefed President Trump on the “bounty” story in March of 2019—nearly a full year before the PDB on it was delivered to the White House—don’t seem too far-fetched, except for one small detail: what was the basis of Bolton’s briefing? What intelligence product had been generated at that time which rose to a level sufficient enough to warrant being briefed to the president of the United States by his national security advisor?
The answer is, of course—none. There was nothing; if there was, we would be reading about it with enough corroboration to warrant a White House denial. All we have is a story, a rumor, speculation, a “legend” promoted by CIA-funded Taliban turncoats that had seeped itself into the folklore of Afghanistan enough to be assimilated by other Afghans who, once detained and interrogated by the NDS and CIA, repeated the “legend” with sufficient ardor to be included, without question, in the intelligence collection report that actually did make into a PDB—on Feb. 27, 2020.
“Blaming Russia for U.S. policy failure in Afghanistan became the law of the land.”
There is another aspect of this narrative that fails completely, namely the basic comprehension of what exactly constitutes a “bounty.”
“Afghan officials said prizes of as much as $100,000 per killed soldier were offered for American and coalition targets,” the Times reported. And yet, when Rukmini Callimachi, a member of the reporting team breaking the story, appeared on MSNBC to elaborate further, she noted that “the funds were being sent from Russia regardless of whether the Taliban followed through with killing soldiers or not. There was no report back to the GRU about casualties. The money continued to flow.”
There is just one problem—that’s not how bounties work. Bounties are the quintessential quid pro quo arrangement—a reward for a service tendered. Do the job, collect the reward. Fail to deliver—there is no reward. The idea that the Russian GRU set up a cash pipeline to the Taliban that was not, in fact, contingent on the killing of U.S. and coalition troops, is the antithesis of a bounty system. It sounds more like financial aid, which it was—and is. Any assessment that lacked this observation is simply a product of bad intelligence. The Timing
Whoever leaked the Russian “bounty” story to The New York Times knew that, over time, the basics of the story would not be able to stand up under close scrutiny—there were simply too many holes in the underlying logic, and once the totality of the intelligence leaked out (which, by Friday seemed to be the case), the White House would take control of the narrative.
The timing of the leak hints at its true objective. The main thrust of the story was that the president had been briefed on a threat to U.S. forces in the form of a Russian “bounty,” payable to the Taliban, and yet opted to do nothing. On its own, this story would eventually die out of its own volition.
On June 18, the U.S. fulfilled its obligation under the peace agreement to reduce the number of troops in Afghanistan to 8,600 by July 2020. By June 26, the Trump administration was close to finalizing a decision to withdraw more than 4,000 troops from Afghanistan by the fall, a move which would reduce the number of troops from 8,600 to 4,500 and thus pave the way for the complete withdrawal from U.S. forces from Afghanistan by mid-2021.
Both of these measures were unpopular with a military establishment that had been deluding itself for two decades that it could prevail in the Afghan conflict. Moreover, once the troop level had drop to 4,500, there was no turning back—the total withdrawal of all forces was inevitable, because at that level the U.S. would be unable to defend itself, let alone conduct any sort of meaningful combat operations in support of the Afghan government.
It was at this time that the leaker chose to release his or her information to The New York Times, perfectly timed to create a political furor intended not only to embarrass the president, but more critically, to mobilize Congressional pushback against the Afghan withdrawal.
On Thursday, the House Armed Services Committee voted on an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act which required the Trump administration to issue several certifications before U.S. forces could be further reduced in Afghanistan, including an assessment of whether any “state actors have provided any incentives to the Taliban, their affiliates, or other foreign terrorist organizations for attacks against United States, coalition, or Afghan security forces or civilians in Afghanistan in the last two years, including the details of any attacks believed to have been connected with such incentives”—a direct reference to the Russian “bounty” leak.
The amendment passed 45-11.
This, more than anything else, seems to have been the objective of the leak. The irony of Congress passing legislation designed to prolong the American war in Afghanistan in the name of protecting American troops deployed to Afghanistan should be apparent to all.
The fact that it is not speaks volumes to just how far down the road of political insanity this country has travelled. On a weekend where America is collectively celebrating the birth of the nation, that celebration will be marred by the knowledge that elected representatives voted to sustain a war everyone knows has already been lost. That they did so on the backs of bad intelligence leaked for the purpose of triggering such a vote only makes matters worse.
Thousands of people joined a massive rally and march for Palestine in Brooklyn, New York, as part of the “Day of Rage” against Israeli annexation, colonization and Zionism in Palestine on Wednesday, 1 July. The rally was led by Within our Lifetime • United for Palestine and organized by the NY4Palestine coalition, of which Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network is a member alongside WOL, Al-Awda NY, the Palestine Right to Return Coalition; American Muslims for Palestine – NJ; and several Students for Justice for Palestine chapters throughout New York City.
The rally gathered in Bay Ridge, a major center for the Palestinian and Arab community in New York, at the corner of 5th Avenue and 72nd Street. Over 40 speakers representing a wide range of community organizations and movements, including Dequi Kioni-Sadiki, longtime fighter for the freedom of U.S. political prisoners; representatives of Bayan, the Filipino community organization; a recorded message from political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal; and many more.
Speakers from The Red Nation, Decolonize this Place, Struggle La Lucha, NY Boricua Resistance, Stand With Kashmir, the Party for Socialism and Liberation and many more, as well as the Neturei Karta religious Jewish anti-Zionist organization also participated in the protest.
“Thanks to the initiative of our comrades in the Samidoun Network in occupied Palestine, as well as the hard work of our partners in Within our Lifetime • United for Palestine and the rest of the NY4Palestine coalition, New York held the strongest, most energetic demonstration for Palestine I’ve seen here in years,” said Joe Catron, U.S. coordinator of Samidoun.
Multiple speakers highlighted the necessity of common struggle to fight for Black liberation and the liberation of all oppressed nations and communities alongside the struggle for justice, liberation and return in Palestine. The lead banner of the protest read, “NYPD=KKK=IDF: One Struggle for Liberation.” Indeed, many speakers focused on the centrality of struggling for Black liberation as a necessary condition for the liberation of Palestine.
The rally lasted for nearly two hours as the crowd continued to grow, full of energy and militant spirit to struggle for Palestine. The march was widely attended by young people and by the Palestinian community in New York, and slogans like “Not just annexation – Not just occupation, Palestine won’t take it, Bring the whole thing down!” “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and “There is only one solution! Intifada revolution!” filled the air.
“Yesterday’s action was one of the most militant inspiring actions i have ever been to. It was full of youth and community who thought there could never be this many people in a Palestinian community chanting for full liberation, for all Palestinians’ land, and not just against the occupation. This is the kind of empowerment that makes us and all those who attended believe we will truly free Palestine within our lifetime!” said Nerdeen Kiswani, co-founder and chair of Within our Lifetime • United for Palestine.
After the rally, a lengthy march continued for hours through Brooklyn, with chants for Black lives and Palestinian liberation reverberating through the streets before finally coming to an end in front of Barclays’ Center with dabkeh and chants, the militant mood of the day never faded.
The Day of Rage protest came alongside protests in occupied Palestine, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Toulouse, San Diego, Salt Lake City, Baltimore, Albuquerque, Portland, Boston, Seattle, Philadelphia, Toledo, Columbus, Rancho Cucamonga, Claremont, Halifax, St. Catherines, San Jose, Costa Rica, Oldham, Bedford, Saint-Denis, Amsterdam, The Hague, Frankfurt, Madrid, Berlin, Granada, Valencia, Valladolid, Bilbao, Athens, Sevilla, Istanbul, Johannesburg and Seoul.
Many more were organized the prior weekend and more to come in the following days, including upcoming actions in Berlin, North Bergen, Amman, Toronto, Copenhagen, Mississauga, Dublin, Derry, Lyon, London, Nelson, Auckland, Detroit, Cleveland, Hamilton, Lisbon and more.
