My Sunday column: No Country For Young Men With AR-15s:https://t.co/madLZI3yGf
— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) February 18, 2018
What started as a training mission of 40, grew to a presence of 800 and ended up killing 4 soldiers in an outrageous chain of tactical & strategic blunders. Incompetence at its worse. https://t.co/LdinVOhfxu— Weddady (@weddady) February 18, 2018
An important - and exclusive - read: Dogged reporting and empathetic writing on the U.S. government’s mistakes that lead to an Oct. 4 ambush in Niger that killed 4 American soldiers. @rcallimachi @helenecooper @EricSchmittNYT @alanblinder @Tmgneff @NYTimes https://t.co/EeFDV8Biyc— Lara Jakes (@jakesNYT) February 18, 2018
KOLLO, Niger — Cut off from their unit, the tiny band of American soldiers was outnumbered and outgunned in the deserts of Niger, fighting to stay alive under a barrage of gunfire from fighters loyal to the Islamic State.More.
Jogging quickly at a crouch, Staff Sgt. Bryan C. Black motioned to the black S.U.V. beside him to keep moving. At the wheel, Staff Sgt. Dustin M. Wright tried to steer while leaning away from the gunfire. But the militants, wielding assault rifles and wearing dark scarves and balaclavas, kept closing in.
Sergeant Black suddenly went down. With one hand, Sergeant Wright dragged his wounded comrade to the precarious shielding of the S.U.V. and took up a defensive position, his M4 carbine braced on his shoulder.
“Black!” yelled a third American soldier, Staff Sgt. Jeremiah W. Johnson, checking for the wounds. Sergeant Black lay on his back, motionless and unresponsive.
Cornered, Sergeant Wright and Sergeant Johnson finally took off, sprinting through the desert under a hail of fire. Sergeant Johnson was hit and went down, still alive.
At that point, Sergeant Wright stopped running. With only the thorny brush for cover, he turned and fired at the militants advancing toward his fallen friend.
These were the last minutes in the lives of three American soldiers killed on Oct. 4 during an ambush in the desert scrub of Niger that was recorded on a military helmet camera. A fourth American, Sgt. La David Johnson, who had gotten separated from the group, also died in the attack — the largest loss of American troops during combat in Africa since the 1993 “Black Hawk Down” debacle in Somalia.
The four men, along with four Nigerien soldiers and an interpreter, were killed in a conflict that few Americans knew anything about, not just the public, but also their families and even some senior American lawmakers.
The deaths set off a political storm in Washington, erupting into a bitter debate over how the families of fallen soldiers should be treated by their commander in chief. In a call with one of the families after the ambush, President Trump was accused of diminishing the loss, telling the soldier’s widow that “he knew what he signed up for.” Mr. Trump angrily disputed the claim, leading to a public feud.
But beyond the rancor, dozens of interviews with current and former officials, soldiers who survived the ambush and villagers who witnessed it point to a series of intelligence failures and strategic miscalculations that left the American soldiers far from base, in hostile territory longer than planned, with no backup or air support, on a mission they had not expected to perform.
They had set out on Oct. 3, prepared for a routine, low-risk patrol with little chance of encountering the enemy. But while they were out in the desert, American intelligence officials caught a break — the possible location of a local terrorist leader who, by some accounts, is linked to the kidnapping of an American citizen. A separate assault team was quickly assembled, ready to swoop in on the terrorist camp by helicopter. But the raid was scrapped at the last minute, and the Americans on patrol were sent in its place.
They didn’t find any militants. Instead, the militants found them. Short on water, the patrol stopped outside a village before heading back to base the next morning. Barely 200 yards from the village, the convoy came under deadly fire.
Four months later, tough questions remain unanswered about the chain of decisions that led to American Special Forces troops being overwhelmed by jihadists in a remote stretch of West Africa.
How did a group of American soldiers — who Defense Department officials insisted were in the country simply to train, advise and assist Niger’s military — suddenly get sent to search a terrorist camp, a much riskier mission than they had planned to carry out? Who ordered the mission, and why were the Americans so lightly equipped, with few heavy weapons and no bulletproof vehicles?
More broadly, the deaths have reignited a longstanding argument in Washington over the sprawling and often opaque war being fought by American troops around the world. It is a war with sometimes murky legal authority, one that began in the embers of the Sept. 11 attacks and traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan. It was expanded to Yemen, Somalia and Libya before arriving in Niger, a place few Americans ever think of, let alone view as a threat.
The ashes of the fallen twin towers were still smoldering on Sept. 14, 2001, when Congress voted overwhelmingly, with virtually no debate, to authorize the American military to hunt down the perpetrators. It was a relatively narrow mandate, written for those specific attacks, but it has become the underpinning of an increasingly broad mission around the globe. For more than 16 years since that vote, American service members have been deployed in a war that has gradually stretched to jihadist groups that did not exist in 2001 and now operate across distant parts of the world.
The result has been an amorphous and contested war that has put Navy SEALs in Somalia and Yemen, Delta Force soldiers in Iraq, and Green Berets in Niger in harm’s way...
Indictment introduction against 13 Russian nationals and 3 Russian entities: "Beginning as early as 2014, defendant began operations to interfere with the U.S. political system, including the 2016 U.S. presidential election." pic.twitter.com/WapdqvxvYg
— NBC News (@NBCNews) February 16, 2018
Breaking News: The special counsel filed the first charges for 2016 election meddling, accusing 13 Russians of using social media to influence U.S. voters https://t.co/hGmaR9yAxA
— The New York Times (@nytimes) February 16, 2018
The papers of Angela Davis, just acquired by Harvard, trace her transformation from an obscure philosophy professor to an icon of the global left https://t.co/YpAetgW11H
— The New York Times (@nytimes) February 13, 2018
Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library has acquired the papers of famed activist Angela Davis https://t.co/tcpAVUZskN cc: @RadInstitute
— Harvard University (@Harvard) February 14, 2018
Shortly after winning gold in the Olympic halfpipe, Chloe Kim was ushered into a tent at the bottom of the hill to face a clutch of international reporters.When she won the Gold, her dad reportedly said "this makes all the sacrifice worth it."
The 5-foot-3 Southern California snowboarder had delivered a stunning performance, doing tricks no other woman in her sport could do, but that wasn't the only reason she has become the breakout star of the 2018 Winter Games.
When a reporter asked a question in Korean, the 17-year-old quickly waved off the interpreter, saying: "I've got that."
Kim is a first-generation Korean American, the daughter of immigrants who settled in the greater Los Angeles area. She speaks both languages and, throughout her life, has made visits to family in this country.
That helps explain why her face has been splashed across local newspapers and television this week.
"It's so cool being here," she said. "Competing in my first Olympics in the country where my parents came from is insane."
This aspect of her Olympic experience has not only boosted her celebrity, it seems to have touched her in a personal way that extends beyond sport, perhaps helping her to reconcile a childhood spent straddling two cultures.
Kim said: "I definitely, when I was younger, struggled a little to understand my identity and who I wanted to be."
Not all the attention here has focused on her, not in a part of the world that has a reputation for producing, among other things, top-notch short-track speedskaters.
It was a big deal when Lim Hyo-jun earned the host nation's first gold medal in a 1,500-meter race last Saturday. But Kim quickly stole the spotlight with a historic performance at Phoenix Snow Park three days later.
In capturing gold, she became the first woman in Olympic history to land consecutive 1080s — two triple rotations. Her near-perfect score of 98.25 outdistanced silver medalist Liu Jiayu of China by almost 10 points.
"I feel like I got to represent both the U.S. and Korea today," she said.
The feeling, apparently, was mutual.
"The media has given her very glowing coverage because they see her as one of their own," said Peter Kim, a New Jersey native who works as an assistant English professor at Kookmin University in Seoul.
In particular, it seems that people here have responded to reports that her father, trained as an engineer, gave up his career to focus on Chloe and her snowboarding...
Blitzkreig Bop - Ramones
02/12/18
9:45 AM
Jimmy Buffett - Margaritaville
Changes In Latitudes, Changes In Attitudes
02/12/18
9:41 AM
Franz Ferdinand - Take Me Out
02/12/18
9:37 AM
ZZ Top - Legs
02/12/18
9:33 AM
Foo Fighters - Everlong
02/12/18
9:22 AM
Rod Stewart - Da Ya Think I'm Sexy?
Da Ya Think I'm Sexy?
02/12/18
9:16 AM
Kings Of Leon - Sex On Fire
02/12/18
9:13 AM
John Mellencamp - Pink Houses
02/12/18
9:08 AM
O.M.D - If You Leave
02/12/18
9:04 AM
Bon Jovi - Wanted Dead Or Alive
02/12/18
8:52 AM
Oasis - Champagne Supernova
02/12/18
8:46 AM
Queen - Fat Bottomed Girls
02/12/18
8:42 AM
The Cars - Just What I Needed
02/12/18
8:38 AM
President Trump is remaking the Republican economic playbook in his own image, abandoning ideological consistency in favor of a debt-busting strategy that will upend how Washington taxes and spends trillions of dollars each year.More.
On Monday, Trump is slated to announce a new budget plan that will no longer seek to eliminate the deficit over the next decade, forfeiting a major Republican goal, according to three people familiar with the document. The plan will call for a range of spending cuts that reduce the growth of the deficit by $3 trillion over 10 years, but it will not attempt to balance the federal budget, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the proposal before its official release.
The decision to relinquish the deficit goal comes after Trump pushed a $1.5 trillion tax cut through Congress late last year and signed a two-year budget deal last week that lifts federal spending limits by $500 billion, suspends for one year the ceiling on the national debt and is expected to lead to $1 trillion annual budget deficits.
The Republican turnaround on economic policy stands in sharp contrast to the party’s opposition to President Barack Obama’s stimulus program during the Great Recession. At that time, Rep. Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), now the speaker of the House, warned of a “debt crisis” and said that “spending is the problem.” Trump’s budget director, Mick Mulvaney, then a congressman from South Carolina, derided Obama’s spending plans as a “joke” and backed a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget.
Now, GOP leaders are largely silent on the two issues that had preoccupied them for the past decade — total spending and the growth of federal entitlements — while Trump has signed legislation that will lavish cash upon both defense and domestic programs far beyond what he had earlier proposed.
On Sunday, amid a backlash from conservative groups, Mulvaney defended the decision, while acknowledging that ballooning deficits are “a very dangerous idea” and that he wouldn’t have voted for the legislation if he were still in Congress. In an interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” he said that his job now is “to get the president’s agenda passed,” which included Pentagon funding that Democrats would allow only if the administration accepted big domestic spending increases.
On the same show, Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), the leader of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, said the bargain was unacceptable. “The swamp won,” he said. “And the American taxpayer lost.”
A month and a half before signing the spending legislation, Trump demonstrated similar ideological flexibility with his tax cut, shelving his campaign promise to focus on the “forgotten men and women” and signing a bill whose biggest benefits flow to corporations and the wealthy.
As Trump turns next to plans to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure and overhaul U.S. trade policy, his disregard for the traditional Republican economic catechism will again be on display Monday with the release of his detailed spending plan...
Progressives need to adopt a course correction. Those who sincerely believe their shrill rhetoric need to get a grip and not succumb to Russia Derangement Syndrome. Those who are cynically using the anti-Russia hysteria as a club with which to beat the Trump administration need to pause and consider how their actions are triggering a second “cold war” with the one power that has the military wherewithal to destroy America. In either case, their current behavior is doing their country a grave disservice.
