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bountyofbeads · 4 years

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https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-06/soleimani-killing-leaves-trump-s-middle-east-strategy-in-tatters?srnd=premium

Qassem Soleimani Killing Leaves Trump’s Middle East Strategy in Tatters

By Nick Wadhams and David Wariner | Published January 6, 2020, 12:01 AM EST Updated on January 6, 2020, 6:15 AM EST | Bloomberg Politics | Posted Jan. 6, 2020 |

Iraq calls for U.S. troops to leave while strike unites Iran

Trump has sent more than 17,000 new troops to region since May

U.S. President Donald Trump and his top aides spent the weekend arguing that the killing of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani would deter future attacks and make the Middle East safer.

Instead, U.S. policy in the region seems to be going in the opposite direction of what Trump has long promised -- with more U.S. troops going in, not fewer; an Iran defiant, not cowed and broken by sanctions; and regional allies giving only lukewarm support to Trump’s airstrike instead of rallying around it.

Economic costs of the strike are also mounting: oil surged above $70 a barrel on Monday and equities around the world extended losses. Havens climbed, with gold rising to the highest in more than six years.

The political backlash came quickly, as the U.S.-led coalition against Islamic State was forced to suspend operations and Iraq’s parliament on Sunday called for U.S. troops to withdraw. Trump responded by saying Iraq could face sanctions and would have to “reimburse” America. Iran said it would abandon limits on uranium enrichment put in place as part of a 2015 nuclear agreement that Trump abandoned in 2018.

U.S actions have “made an already volatile situation much more dangerous,” said retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis, a senior fellow at Defense Priorities who favors a U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq. “If you paid any attention to Iran in the last 40 years you know they will never buckle to that kind of pressure. It’s just the opposite.”

The strike on Soleimani appeared to unite Iranians after months of protests against their own government, with hundreds of thousands turning out to mourn a military chief who had made their nation -- battered by U.S. economic sanctions -- appear strong by giving Tehran leverage in conflicts from Syria to Yemen. Iran has vowed revenge, and allies including Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah warned that they’d now seek to drive out the more than 50,000 U.S. troops from the region.

“It united most political forces in Iraq against the U.S.,” said Fawaz Gerges, a professor of international relations at the London School of Economics. “The Trump administration monstrously miscalculated by playing into Iran’s hands.”

The fight against Islamic State was immediately hampered, with the U.S.-led coalition saying it would suspend operations in Iraq to focus on protecting bases that have come under attack. Threats from Iran-backed militias have previously forced staff drawdowns in U.S. diplomatic missions across the country.

Iraq serves as the home base for operations against Islamic State. Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One late Sunday that the U.S. wouldn’t leave unless it got paid back for the “billions” spent on an air base there.

“If they do ask us to leave, if we don’t do it in a very friendly basis, we will charge them sanctions like they’ve never seen before ever,” he said. “It’ll make Iranian sanctions look somewhat tame.”

The escalating tensions hit markets starting Friday and continuing through Monday. Oil futures jumped an additional 3% on Monday after the State Department warned of a “heightened risk” of missile attacks near military and energy facilities in Saudi Arabia. Japanese, Hong Kong and South Korean equities fell, and U.S. and European futures retreated.

After Trump and Iranian officials traded public threats about future reprisals, the U.S. leader will now face questions from lawmakers returning to Washington from the end-of-year break ready to take up a bitter debate over the president’s impeachment by the Democratic-led House and a coming trial in the Republican-controlled Senate.

Read More: Trump Vows Sanctions on Ally Iraq, Toughens Rhetoric on Iran

In the U.S., reaction to the raid has fallen mostly along party lines, with Republicans hailing the elimination of a leader responsible for terror attacks and Democrats questioning the administration’s assertion that Soleimani presented an “imminent threat.” They’re also asking whether Trump has a broader strategy or plan to deal with the aftermath.

U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, sent a letter to the chamber’s lawmakers announcing a vote this week on a resolution that would limit Trump’s power in any potential military actions regarding Iran.

Nancy Pelosi✔@SpeakerPelosi

President Trump’s classified War Powers Act notification raises more questions than it answers about the timing, manner and justification of the decision to engage in hostilities against Iran.

Secretary of State Michael Pompeo argued the administration’s case on Sunday news shows after more than a dozen calls with foreign counterparts from China to Saudi Arabia.

He said there were no doubts about the intelligence behind the decision to kill Soleimani, and that any moves taken against Tehran will be “lawful.” That was a response to concerns about Trump’s threat on Saturday to hit “52 Iranian sites” including cultural targets if Tehran retaliates. Trump’s comment raised concerns because attacks against cultural property are prohibited under the Geneva Convention and the U.S. Defense Department’s rules of engagement.

Despite Pompeo’s international outreach, there were few signs of strong support among key U.S. allies beyond Israel, while the NATO alliance planned an emergency meeting Monday to discuss growing tensions in the region. U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson summed up European reaction to the strike on Soleimani, saying “we will not lament his death,” but “we are in close contact with all sides to encourage de-escalation.”

How Qassem Soleimani Helped Shape the Modern Mideast: QuickTake

Working to the U.S. advantage is Iran’s dire economic situation following increasingly tight U.S. sanctions that have largely wiped out the country’s ability to sell oil abroad and cut it off from most trade partners. And some analysts said the political tensions in Iran will only be briefly masked by Soleimani’s death.

“The killing of a general who wasted a lot of Iran’s resources on Arab civil wars is unlikely to trigger support for the government,” said Ray Takeyh, a senior fellow for Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Pompeo seemed to minimize the significance of Iraq’s parliament calling for a withdrawal of U.S. forces, suggesting that outgoing Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi -- who said he was due to meet with Soleimani the morning he was killed about de-escalation efforts between Iran and Saudi Arabia -- was acting under enormous pressure from Tehran.

Pompeo said the U.S. was a force for good in Iraq, 17 years after it invaded to oust Saddam Hussein. But the overthrow of the Sunni dictator in 2003 provided an opening that Iran has steadily exploited since, deepening its influence over Shia-majority Iraq. The parliament vote fell along sectarian and ethnic lines, with Sunni and Kurdish lawmakers abstaining.

Read More: Trump’s Iran Strike Planned Swiftly With Tight Circle of Aides

It’s unlikely U.S. troops will leave Iraq anytime soon, but Sunday’s vote was damning for Trump and U.S. plans for the region. The diplomatic compound in Baghdad was constructed after the 2003 invasion to be the biggest American embassy in the world, designed to essentially serve as a forward operating base and a listening post in the Middle East.

With his latest deployment of about 3,500 troops to Kuwait, Trump has bolstered American forces by about 17,000 personnel since May, undermining his vow to get the country out of “endless wars.”

"Rarely has any single tactical move, untethered from any long-range thinking, produced so many potential strategically negative consequences for the U.S.,” said Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “In one single decision you’ve undermined 17 years of a U.S. mission, fraught though it may be.”

— With assistance by Robert Hutton, Josh Wingrove, Glen Carey, and Derek Wallbank

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Iran’s Cyber Attack on Billionaire Adelson Provides Lesson on Strategy

By Alyza SEBENIUS, Kartikay Mehrotra, and William Turton | Published January 5, 2020, 9:15 AM EST Updated on January 5, 2020, 12:58 PM EST | Bloomberg | Posted January 6, 2020 |

Digital warfare likely among Iran’s options for retribution

Cyberfeud between Iran and U.S. dates back more than a decade

As the U.S. awaits possible retribution over a recent airstrike that killed a top general, there’s at least one American businessman who can attest, in detail, to what happened after he provoked Iran.

In October 2013, Sheldon Adelson, the casino magnate and prominent supporter of conservative politicians and Israel, appeared on a panel in New York in which he suggested that the U.S. could send a message to Iran, regarding its nuclear ambitions, by detonating an American warhead in the middle of the Iranian desert.

“You want to be wiped out? Go ahead and take a tough position,” said Adelson, who later became a major supporter of President Donald Trump. His comments infuriated Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who two weeks later said America “should slap these prating people in the mouth.”

Months later, in February 2014, hackers inserted malware into the computer networks of Adelson’s Las Vegas casino. The withering cyber-attack laid waste to about three quarters of the company’s Las Vegas servers; the cost of recovering data and building new systems cost $40 million or more.

A year after the attack, the top U.S. intelligence official confirmed that Iran was behind it.

Now, as Iran vows revenge for the airstrike, the U.S. faces an aggressive adversary in which digital warfare may be among its best options to strike directly at the American population. In the years since the Sands incident, Iranian hackers have continued their attacks, targeting a U.S. presidential campaign, universities, journalists, and even a dam in suburban New York.

“I’m sure the Iranians are asking their hackers for a list of options,” said James Lewis, senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, who oversees the policy research group’s cybersecurity program. “Cyber-attacks can be tempting if they can find the right American target.”

Milan Patel, former chief technological officer of the FBI’s cyber division, said he was worried about what may come next since Iran has shown interest in targeting critical infrastructure. “Power generation like hydro and electric, that’s where they can cause the most real world damage,” said Patel, now the chief client officer at the cybersecurity firm BlueVoyant.

A representative for Las Vegas Sands Corp. didn’t return a message seeking comment.

Iran is hardly the only U.S. cyber adversary. China has allegedly stolen so much intellectual property from U.S. companies, including by hacking, that FBI Director Christopher Wray accused the country of trying to “steal their way up the economic ladder at our expense.”

But cyber-attacks can also be used to create disruptive effects that can impact millions. In a computer-dependent world, hackers can clog ports, shut down transportation networks, and open dams.

Iran has shown a willingness to use those types of digital attacks -- targeting some of the U.S.’s biggest banks, the world’s top oil producer, and Adelson’s casino empire.

DESTRUCTIVE ATTACKS

Cyber adversaries, including Iran, have generally aimed attacks at targets unlikely to fully draw a response from the U.S.’s own potent cyberwarfare arsenal.

Evidence of possible retaliation of the American drone strike emerged late on Jan. 4 when the website for the little-known U.S. Federal Depository Library Program was hacked and defaced with “pro-Iranian, anti-U.S. messaging,” confirmed a spokesman for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. The site has since been taken down.

“At this time, there is no confirmation that this was the action of Iranian state-sponsored actors,” reads a statement issued by CISA, part of the Department of Homeland Security.

The FDLP is a government entity created to make federal publications available to the public for free.

TIT-FOR-TAT FEARS

Given the heightened tensions, a major digital strike by Iran could trigger the kind of escalating, tit-for-tat strikes that fling the two sides toward the brink of war. The U.S. is widely believed to have the ability to shut down power grids, interrupt air travel and create chaos at ports through digital strikes alone. Iran’s hackers and digital arms are less sophisticated, cybersecurity experts say, but the number of U.S.-related targets available to them is huge.

The digital feud between the U.S. and Iran dates back more than a decade, to when a devastating digital worm called Stuxnet crippled an Iranian uranium processing facility. That attack has been attributed by multiple media outlets to the U.S. and Israel.

Partly in response, Iranian hackers launched attacks starting in 2011 that overwhelmed the websites of Bank of America Corp., Wells Fargo & Co. and others over a period of months. The attacks eventually proved little more than an inconvenience for online customers, but financial institutions spent millions of dollars to keep their websites up and running over the period of the attacks.

LEARNING PERIOD

Those early Iranian attacks are now seen as part of a learning period, as the country’s hackers worked to catch up with the sophistication of other cyberpowers before beginning to target physical infrastructure like pipelines and dams.

In 2013, Iranian hackers breached the control system of a small dam in Rye, New York, according to a federal indictment. While the hackers were successful in gaining access to the dam’s systems, which allowed them to see information like water levels and the dam’s settings, they were unable to operate the gate that controls water levels because it had been manually disconnected for maintenance. It isn’t known if the Iranian hackers intended to release water from the dam.

More recently, Iranian government-linked hackers tried to infiltrate email accounts of a U.S. presidential candidate, current and former U.S. officials and journalists, Microsoft Corp. reported last year. The New York Times and Reuters reported that President Trump’s re-election campaign had been targeted.

While the presidential campaign wasn’t among those compromised, that attempted breach, and the many others, has provided experience to a group of hackers that may now be assigned with seeking revenge on the U.S.

Norman Roule, a former CIA official who also served as national intelligence manager for Iran, said cyber-attacks “will almost certainly increase” in the coming months. Iran’s cyber strategy will likely seek to accomplish three goals: punishing the U.S., deterring the U.S. from future attacks and allowing Iran to save face, he said.

Lewis, from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said if the Iranians decide to retaliate with a cyber-attack, they will likely “want something dramatic” in choosing a target.

“The big question is: will they do something symbolic, like the bank attacks?” he said. “Or try for both symbolic and disruptive, as they did with Sands?”

— With assistance by Ryan Gallagher

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xtruss · 3 years

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Afghanistan and the Haunting Questions of Blame

In Senate testimony, the generals acknowledged America’s “strategic failure” in its longest war, and their differences with Biden.

— By Robin Wright | September 30, 2021

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin at the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on the end of the war in Afghanistan.Photograph by Patrick Semansky / Getty

After the First World War, a conspiracy theory dubbed Dolchstosslegende—or “being stabbed in the back”— was popularized in Germany to explain its historic military defeat. The myth claimed that the war had actually been lost by weak civilians who had caved to the enemy, signed an armistice, and stabbed in the back a brave German military that would otherwise have won.

“There were echoes of that after the war in Vietnam,” Stephen Biddle, a Columbia University professor and the author of “Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle,” told me this week, as top U.S. military leaders testified about America’s defeat in its longest war. “The loss in Vietnam was all President Lyndon Johnson and the feckless civilians who wouldn’t let us do it right.” Donald Trump invoked the same conspiratorial idea to explain just about everything that went wrong during his Administration, including his election loss. “Stab-in-the-back myths can be poisonous in all sorts of ways,” Biddle warned.

A month after the Biden Administration completed the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, Washington is struggling to understand how its vast human, military, financial, and diplomatic investment, made over two decades, simply collapsed, with the Taliban sweeping back into power and the United States scrambling to get out. The rancorous debate over blame threatens to further divide the nation. In two days of testy and occasionally snarky questions, members of the Senate and House challenged the three men who oversaw the war’s end to explain it. They were painfully candid. And there were plenty of mea culpas.

“We helped build a state,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told a Senate panel on Tuesday. “But we could not forge a nation.” He questioned whether the United States ever even had the right strategy—or, over two decades, whether it had “perhaps too many strategies?” The United States now has to acknowledge uncomfortable truths, he said. “The fact that the Afghan Army that we and our partners trained simply melted away—in many cases without firing a shot—took us all by surprise. And it would be dishonest to claim otherwise.” General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and America’s most senior military officer, bluntly conceded failure at an “incredible” cost. “Strategically the war was lost,” he told the Senate Armed Services Committee. “The enemy is in Kabul.”

The testimony revealed a chasm between what President Biden claimed came out of a lengthy consultation with his generals and what the Pentagon advised. The military recommended keeping a residual force of twenty-five hundred U.S. troops in Afghanistan, General Kenneth (Frank) McKenzie, Jr., the head of Central Command, testified. The goal was to prop up—psychologically even more than militarily—President Ashraf Ghani’s fragile government and Afghan security forces to allow more time for elected leaders in Kabul to negotiate with the Taliban on the makeup of a transitional government. The rivals had been talking since last September, and the Taliban had refused to make major concessions. Under the plan, U.S.-led nato forces would have been able to hold Bagram (a strategic air base that provided air support to Afghan forces; it was abandoned during the U.S troop drawdown). The timing of a future withdrawal would then depend on conditions, such as a successfully brokered peace, and not tied to an arbitrary date.

The sworn testimony was in stark contrast to the version Biden has offered the American public. Last month, the President claimed that the military never advised him to stay. In an interview, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos asked him, “So no one told—your military advisers did not tell you, ‘No, we should just keep twenty-five hundred troops. It’s been a stable situation for the last several years. We can do that. We can continue to do that’?” Biden replied, “No. No one said that to me that I can recall.” The White House has been scrambling to rectify the discrepancies. “These conversations don’t happen in black-and-white, like you’re in the middle of a movie,” the White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters. Pressed by Republicans about their conversations with Biden, the Pentagon leaders declined to criticize him. “I was present when that discussion occurred and I am confident that the President heard all the recommendations and listened to them very thoughtfully,” McKenzie testified. “That’s all any commander can ask.”

Other themes emerged from the testimony that may prove more important in understanding the scope and consequences of an epic failure by the world’s most powerful nation against a guerrilla insurgency that lacked both armor and air power. The fallout will extend well beyond South Asia. “Our credibility with allies and partners around the world, and with adversaries, is being intensely reviewed by them to see which way this is going to go,” Milley told the Senate committee. “I think that ‘damage’ is one word that could be used, yes.”

A deeper assessment of America’s mistakes, which were many, is still to come. “This is a twenty-year war,” Milley told the House committee on Wednesday. “It wasn’t lost in the last twenty days, or even twenty months, for that matter. There is a cumulative effect to a series of strategic decisions that go way back.”

Milley cited many decisive factors and pivots: he noted the problem of Pakistan offering sanctuary (There were NO SANCTUARIES. These people live on the both sides of the borders. IT’S ALL BULLSHIT. They cross borders freely without any restrictions.) —for decades, and continuing to this day—to the Taliban’s fighters and leadership. The U.S. military was just a thousand metres from Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Tora Bora in the first two months of the U.S. intervention in 2001; the Al Qaeda leader slipped away into Pakistan, where he hid for another decade.The general didn’t get into politics or diplomacy, but none of the four Presidents who waged the war was able to get Pakistan, a nuclear power which sees the Taliban as an ally against its archrival, India, to contain the extremist movement. Did he know why? Because Fascist Terrorist India is an ally of the US now to contain China. It’s quite sure that both India and the United States can’t F*** with China. China will beat the S*** of them and that’s for sure. US abandoned it’s old ally Pakistan because of India. The Pentagon leaders admitted to other mistakes: poor U.S. intelligence; endemic Afghan corruption exacerbated as the U.S. poured billions of dollars into the country; the Doha agreement negotiated between the Trump Administration and the Taliban that excluded the elected Afghan government; and especially the U.S. military’s fundamental misreading of the Afghan military’s lack of leadership, morale, and will. Here Braindead General failed to mention the hidden agendas and dirty tricks of the United States’ “FAKE WAR ON TERRORISM” in the region. Well equipped with modern warfare machineries, WAR CRIMINAL United States and its War Criminal puppets, UK, FRANCE, GERMANY, ITALY, AUSTRALIA and the WEST still got the well deserved deep f*** by the native WARRIORS, THE TALIBAN, and YET BLAMING PAKISTAN for their failure of NON WINNABLE FAKE WAR ON TERRORISM. WTF? Pakistan absolutely did the right thing to take care of it’s own interest first. Pakistan don’t give a damn f*** to the ‘Invader War Criminal United States’ and or to it’s ‘War Criminal Puppet Allies’ when it’s comes to the SOVEREIGNTY of PAKISTAN.

Austin, a former four-star general who served in Afghanistan, was explicit in a stream-of-consciousness list of the mistakes the U.S. made in simply misunderstanding Afghanistan. “That we did not fully comprehend the depth of corruption and poor leadership in their senior ranks,” he said, “that we did not grasp the damaging effect of frequent and unexplained rotations by President Ghani of his commanders, that we did not anticipate the snowball effect caused by the deals that Taliban commanders struck with local leaders in the wake of the Doha agreement, that the Doha agreement itself had a demoralizing effect on Afghan soldiers, and that we failed to fully grasp that there was only so much for which—and for whom—many of the Afghan forces would fight.” A fatal flaw in U.S. strategy, the Pentagon officials said, was trying to create a military that was a “mirror image” of the sophisticated U.S. military in a poor South Asian nation with limited literacy. It was costliest for Afghans. Somewhere between sixty thousand and seventy thousand members of the Afghan security forces died in the twenty-year war, compared to more than twenty-four hundred U.S. service members. An estimated forty-six thousand Afghan civilians perished, too. The United States had the technology to track the Afghan military in its fight with the Taliban, Milley said, but failed to grasp how its pullout would affect Afghan morale. “You can’t measure the human heart with a machine,” he said.

Given past claims by both Republican and Democratic Administrations, the testimony was chilling and will offer fodder for historians for decades. The Pentagon spent eighty-three billion dollars to train and outfit the Afghan security forces. Eight hundred thousand Americans in various branches of the U.S. military rotated in and out of Afghanistan, some multiple times. For two decades, top generals repeatedly reported that progress was being made. This week, they acknowledged that it had not. “You wish you’d seen that kind of candor during the war,” Christine Fair, a professor of security studies at Georgetown University, told me. “Why were you wrong about ninety-nine things if you’re honest about the hundredth?” McKenzie acknowledged that U.S. military leaders may not have listened to warnings from more junior U.S. service members working day to day with Afghan forces. “I think that’s a reasonable criticism,” he testified. “I’ll be very candid with you.”

The most alarming conclusions from the hearings were about the future of the jihadist threat broadly and Al Qaeda specifically. On the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Milley acknowledged, jihadism got a “shot of adrenaline” from the U.S. withdrawal and the Taliban’s return to power. American credibility was badly damaged. “It’s a big morale boost,” he said. The prospect of a future attack is “a very real possibility.” One of the seven conditions that the Taliban never met, as part of its deal with the Trump Administration, was to renounce Al Qaeda. Under the Taliban, Al Qaeda may be able to reconstitute in as little as six to twelve months and then, again, threaten the U.S. homeland, the Pentagon officials warned. Without U.S. troops on the ground or in neighboring countries, it will now be far harder to track Al Qaeda, isis-Khorasan, or other extremist cells in Afghanistan.

The most unnerving aspect of the two-day hearing, though, was the rank partisan politicizing of a war waged by two Republican and two Democratic Presidents with the goal, in theory, of safeguarding all Americans. Republicans on both the Senate and House committees called on Milley, who was stoic and stone-faced throughout, to resign. “This country doesn’t want generals figuring out what orders we are going to accept and do or not,” Milley shot back at the Republican Senator Tom Cotton, of Arkansas. The Republican tirades were often ill-informed and politically self-serving. In the House, Representative Liz Cheney, of Wyoming, called the criticism of the military by opportunistic fellow-Republicans “despicable.”

The testimony appeared to signify that the long de-facto alignment between Republicans and the U.S. military is over, Biddle told me: “The Republican Party is turning on them. That’s a tectonic shift.” As the U.S. looks ahead, the threats to national security and democracy will be the rise of hyper-partisanship and the erosion of public trust in government institutions, a trend exacerbated during the Trump Presidency. “The military may be the next institution that gets the rug pulled out from under them,” Biddle said. The Pentagon leaders’ testimony this week—which at times bordered on being a confessional—was striking, but may not be enough, Michael O’Hanlon, a military expert at the Brookings Institution, told me. “At some level, it’s inspiring, but anyone who is fair-minded would have to say the ending was catastrophic,” he said. “We’re all still in a state of shock about what happened.” Defeat is defeat. And the judgments and relentless pursuit of political advantage are only beginning.

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littleorphan-ani · 6 years

Text

Solitary Style

Pairing: Freard, Ryden (mentioned)

Characters: Gerard Way, Frank Iero

Warnings: War, gay smut, mention of suicide, mention of death, cursing

Summary:

The American Revolution began with a small spark of defiance flourishing into a flame and a thirst for freedom soon to result in a flood of dedication.

With both fire and water, the Patriots were destined to win the war.

Gerard had believed this from the start, hanging up his pitchfork and ditching his life on the farm in favor of carrying a musket and the colonist's trust on his shoulders.

Frank, coming from a better off family, didn't believe the Patriots could win nor did he stand for what they did. Regardless, he followed his teenaged sweetheart to keep him safe.

Six year, they served side by side, six years. And in six years, people change.

The bond between Frank and Gerard only grew stronger, Frank relying more and more on his lover.

Now in Yorktown, Virginia, the last day of fighting would occur. The Patriots would win and declare their freedom.

But what did freedom mean to Gerard and Frank?

Gerard would return to his home and would marry a woman while Frank would return to his posh life where he was destined to marry a fine rich lady he could never love.

Frank couldn't stand the thought of it so he would cherish his last night with Gerard and hold it in his thoughts forever.

October 16, 1781

My only piece of advice for fighting in a battle is not to let your gaze rest on Gerard Way for too long.

In former battles, he'd fight to my right, always to my right. He was graceful, a small smirk across his lips with every shot he fired. With the way his body moved when the gun recoiled and the way his eyes lit up when they drew near with bayonets daring us to fight, it was hardly my fault that I could never look away.

Gerard admitted that he was only fighting for freedom, but I could tell that he was addicted to the adrenaline rush he got from killing and fighting.

He couldn't go on forever though, I could see the energy draining from him before my eyes. His genuine smiles were now far and few between, replaced with a smirk that could drive a man to madness.

It was driving me to madness and once, it had almost driven me to death.

I had been studying him so intently then that I completely disregarded the blood bath before me and the red coat drawing near.

Gerard had looked over at me a moment later, eyes widening as he stabbed the oncoming soldier in the stomach and another comrade of ours finished him by shooting him in the head.

Blood splashed onto my pants and I shivered, eyes still on Gerard.

"Be careful, stop looking at me because there will not be a tonight if you do not survive today."

So I survived and he survived and he spent the night in my arms, shaking because he had thought he was going to lose me to the monster known as warfare.

That had been quite awhile ago, at the beginning of the revolution even. We had been here for a long time, it was a miracle that we have even survived this long.

But it was almost over, the plan was to win tomorrow.

The fateful town of Yorktown, Virginia would host a long battle in which we would conquer their base and win freedom.

Our attack had started three weeks previously to the date but it would all end tomorrow.

We were resting for the night, all of us sitting around a fire as we nibbled on the bit of food we had. Some nights, there had been silence, but not tonight. Tonight, despite all our friends who had fallen, we were alive.

Gerard was by my side, sitting on the dirt to my right, a piece of meat in his hand as he greedily chewed on it. We were shoulder to shoulder, his bright eyes looking over at me as I laughed at a joke another had told.

We were impersonating the British leaders, some men even standing up to complete the act.

At one impersonation of General Cornwallis, who was impersonated by someone I don't know the name of and never would, I clutched my stomach as my insides felt like they were about to burst.

"Kill, kill, kill! Kill the pesky Patriots so I shall be favored by our king."

Gerard was laughing so hard that he burst into tears, leaning his head onto my shoulder as his body shook with laughter. It was the first genuine laugh I had seen escape from his lips in ages. I had almost forgotten how beautiful it was, how beautiful he was.

I supposed everyone either knew about us and didn't care or didn't suspect a thing because no one commented on the fact that we were closer than socially acceptable of two men.

It could go either way because two much more well-known people were tainting in an affair I had no part of and never would.

No one would question the intentions of Alexander Hamilton so why would they with the love of my life and me?

I think they just didn't care, because none of us really did.

When we entered the war and sold our souls to the musket, we became General Washington's bitches and did the dirty work without an argument.

We froze to icicles in the winter, we held our tongues. We hadn't eaten in a few days, we held our tongues. We lost our best friend during a battle, we held our tongues.

We fought until we couldn't fight any longer, and then they patched us up so we could fight some more.

But during this, I didn't learn a name of a single one of my comrades.

I knew their faces, the look of pure terror when their trembling fingers twisted the rosaries around their necks, and happy moments like these in which their lips twitched upwards to form grins brighter than the moon that shone above our heads that night.

I didn't know their last names, but I knew every curve of their faces. I would never know their wives, but I knew how they screamed in battle.

I didn't know a single thing about anyone other than Gerard, but I knew the deepest part of every one of them. What did it matter nowadays if they had a dog?

Gerard even had dreams, vivid hallucinations of the war. But they weren't battles that happened or would ever come to pass. His subconscious just knew our comrades so well in battle that his mind manipulated them to fit their characteristics so disturbingly accurate and have them fight.

He'd wake up screaming in my arms, crying silently into my chest so he wouldn't wake me or anyone else up. But that was a side of him he didn't let anyone see and I only saw on the occasion he'd accidentally whimper too loud; it wasn't too often.

It was a side even Mikey hadn't seen before Gerard left, because he hadn't been like this. Even if he had, Gerard cared so much about other people that he wouldn't let his emotions show if it caused anyone to worry about him.

But I love him enough to know, I love him more than any other could know.

"Frank," he purrs into my ear, whispering as if intoxicated but I knew it was just the high of the dark and the blood of those he had slain and shot only hours before, "shall we retire for the night?"

I felt a steady, calloused hand brush down my spine and my breath hitches. The answer was yes, always yes. What else could I say to him?

I nod, feeling incapable of forming words when he distracted me with his touches. Fire coursed through my veins and it was burning but it proved just how alive I was. I'll do anything to feel alive, especially if it's with him.

With those hazel eyes peering down at me, we both rose and waved everyone off. We start heading towards our sleeping quarters but when we we're out of sight, we take a sharp turn and walked down our usual path.

There's a tree, a tree that was built high with sturdy branches and a thick trunk.

That's where we go every night, where I go to have my way with him.

Once our tree is in sight, I feel his hand slip to the back of my neck. I turn ever so slightly to look at him and am unable to even react to him kissing me at first.

It's not with the fire and passion it normally contains, it was a blissful, sweet kiss. It catches me off guard but I love the man enough to adjust.

My fingers slip under his jaw, tilting his head down as our lips graze gently.

But I want more, the fire in my veins needed fuel.

So I stumble to the tree, dragging him with me before pushing him up against it.

I then bring my lips to his, kissing rough and with passion buried from the depths of my soul. The fire is erupting from my mouth and it must have scorched his because he pulled away, taking a breath before laughing.

"Where did all this love come from? Have you been holding back this whole time?"

"Watch your tongue, you must know better than to question my undying love for you."

He just smirks, rolling his eyes as he leans his head against the tree.

"So," he prompts, "tell me then why you are kissing me as if my lips were the last spring in your sight and you were dying of thirst."

"Because, fair gentleman, tonight," I whisper, "is the last night I shall be able to love you as I do."

"But I shall forever love you."

"And I you, but I continue to crave your body against mine; however, it is treason and we shall be discovered once we disband."

He thinks about this for a moment, one arm wrapping around my neck while the other rested on the dead space of my chest.

"A problem for another day, if you ask me."

"That day shall be tomorrow."

"Then we shall worry about it then. Let us have this night to ourselves," Gerard says after pulling me closer by my neck, whispering into the shell of my ear as his forefinger twirled a strand of my hair.

"Tonight is ours then," I whisper, crashing our lips back together as I press against him forcefully. No questions until tomorrow? Fine, but Gerard better hope his throat isn't too sore from moaning so he'll be able to form a sentence.

I keep him pinned as my mouth works its way down his jaw, lingering over his neck to trace his Adam's apple. I hear a soft intake of breath and my confidence rises.

I have him wrapped around my finger and I have barely done anything at all to provoke him. I know him too well but yet, I will never tire of getting this reaction out of him.

Trailing down his neck, I make sure to avoid leaving any visible marks that would raise questions. He keeps his mouth away from my neck so I return the favor. But his body is so goddamn beautiful and I can't help but press gentle kisses against it.

When I make it to his collarbones, however, I am allowed to get as messy as I please. Tonight, I feel as though I am a wolf eating away at the first meal he's had in weeks. I know Gerard must think so too by the sound of his sexual gasps of pleasure.

I am hungry and craving this, even if we had done this a few nights before. I am thirsty for him, I need him. I always do but I can't go long without having him. He's a basic necessity of mine; I need food, water, and Gerard.

To romanticize it, he's my lifeline and I know that as long as he lives by my side, I will live as well.

Of course he needs me as much as I him, but tonight, I'll finally show him how much that really is.

Biting beneath his collarbone, I look at the colorful array of red bruises from previous bite marks lined up like soldiers. I count them; there are eight, six of which haven't healed from our last time.

He may have been the artist but I am the musician who knows exactly how to play him.

His moans urge me to continue, desperation lingering in each and every one of them.

So I do, eyes sweeping over his body and with sturdy fingers, I pop the buttons off his uniform. It's filthy, washed very rarely and more often than not, we lie down atop of our clothes to watch the stars in the sky after sex.

I fell in love with him like that, and I continue to fall in love with him every day ever since.

Yes, I had known him before but that was different. It was a crush, a hopeless crush of a teenager that would draw my eyes towards him when he walked by.

Now, it's different. My love for him has matured and just like water, it will never fade.

He's always by my side, to my right side, and I am always watching him. His laugh churns my stomach like it was butter, letting butterflies with broken wings flutter about, and I can hardly breathe when he smiles my way.

I don't just like him; him being away tormented me. That's what love is, I guess.

How will I be able to handle us parting after tonight?

"I-if you do not continue...I shall take over," he whispers in my ear, having caught me staring at his chest but not in awe. I was staring into space and my eyes just happened to latch onto the most beautiful thing they could find.

"You?" I almost laugh, letting my previous thoughts escape through my pores like beads of sweat. He has my attention again and he doesn't plan on losing it. That much was obvious.

"Now I need to prove myself."

"That is not necessary for you are staying against this godforsaken tree until you are left trembling against me and the only thing you can say is my name."

That had been far more dirty than I had intended for it to be but it seemed to work because he rolled his bottom lip between his teeth to silence himself. Good, submit yourself to me, my love, I'll make you feel good.

I can't help but smirk, letting my tongue slide over the array of bruises before finding myself in the most awkward position imaginable.

One of Gerard's legs was still around my waist to pull us together, but now I had to somewhat crouch to be level with his chest. He didn't mind, he would do anything to be pleasured that greedy bastard.

Bucking his hips towards mine, I have to press one hand to his side to hold him still and forcefully remove his leg from my waist. I am the one in control and he needs to know that, even if a bit of me shrivels up at the small loss of contact.

My lips brushes the crevice of his muscular chest, mouth trailing to his right side as my hand crept to the opposing.

My lips find their target and I take him in my mouth, tongue swiping around teasingly before I am pressing my mouth firmly against him.

His moans ring high into the air but they turn into whimpers as I keep his hips down. He craves my touch and my skin but I won't provide that for him. Not yet at least, because I crave him too.

My right hand fumbles with the opposing side of his chest, scratching and pulling before brushing lightly with my thumb.

His nipples are erect and hard, something that surprisingly doesn't just happen to women when they're turned on.

Not that I have ever done it with a woman, but Gerard had as an experiment. We talked about it briefly and I teased him, asking if the woman found a piece of bread to shove up his ass. I still can't picture him being able to do that to anyone, but he had and he never ceases to amaze me.

I finally move down his chest, hungry kisses permitting me to leave marks on his toned abdomen. From the war, we had become extremely in shape; our bodies are hot and our stamina is high, the perfect mixture for something like this.

I am soon on my knees, eye level with his crotch. I let his pants drop to his mid-thigh, not going any lower for the sake of him needing to quickly pull them back up if one were to stumble across us.

It had happened once before and luckily as it so happens, Ross had just wanted to fuck Urie.

So I guess I did learn the names of two others but the very next day, they had died hand in hand in battle so it hadn't mattered. I hadn't known them but I couldn't say my first thought had not been 'What if this had been Gerard and I?' The thought made me shiver and despite it having been three years ago, I will never forget the way Ross' bright hazel eyes had darkened and how the next night, we found them lifeless as he had strung himself from an old dying tree.

Love conquers all, and love's troops had stormed the skinny man's body until they had left him hopelessly in love. He hadn't been able to live without his lover as I would not be able to live without Gerard.

Tears prick my eyes as I think of the scenario being different, if it had been us. So I simply shake the thought away and figure that the beautiful man before me can be used to make me forget.

"Baby," I whisper while removing my hands from his body. I lift myself from my knees in favor of a low crouch, placing my elbow on my thighs as I cup my cheeks to rest my head on my hands.

"W-why aren't you touching me?"

"Baby," I repeat again.

"Yes?" he asks quickly in order to avoid stuttering.

"I want you to..." I trail off, looking up at him as I seductively lick my fingers.

"Myself?" he almost whined, the thought of getting himself off unattractive to him when his prime source of pleasure was right before him, eye level with his crotch.

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because I'd like to see it at least once."

He huffs, quickly shoving three fingers into his mouth. When they were nearly dripping with saliva, he moved them down his body. He parts his ass slightly, brushing against his hole. Biting on his bottom lip, he inserted a single digit.

He moans through gritted teeth, continuing at a slow pace until he was used to how he was squeezed around his finger. When he is able to move faster, another was inserted, then another.

He rocks his hips into his hand, knuckles deep in his own ass before I take him in my mouth.

He stops suddenly, breath hitching.

I pull away, looking up at him, "That was enough for a lifetime, but keep going, this is going to be the best night of your life."

Gerard whimpers again before slowly continuing. I lick his length, slipping my tongue underneath and teasingly licking his fingers. He shivers but doesn't stop, moving faster as I feel his throbbing cock above me. I move back, tongue swirling around the head before I take him again.

After a collection of probably hours on my knees before him, I had gotten pretty good and learned what Gerard liked.

I scrape him with my teeth before taking him all, my nose pressing into his pelvis.

He's trembling beneath me, begging for more. Of course, I happily oblige to his wishes and remove my mouth with a rather loud popping sound.

I am still attached to him by strings of saliva, which he stares at and what causes him to shiver again.

I stand up, my small frame not doing much to intimidate but regardless, he watches me with desire and almost a fear of how I am going to torture him next.

But I don't plan to, he had done a good job tolerating me. I tug my own pants down slightly, revealing my own hard cock and I shiver slightly as the cool air surrounds me.

I don't waste much time, wrapping his legs around my waist and lining myself up. When I'm in, he bites down on my shoulder to contain his cry.

My hands are soon against the tree, body against Gerard's to hold his weight as I move inside of him. He'a already panting, hands scratching down my back before he begins to place kisses all around my neck. He's strong, strong enough to pleasure me while being mercilessly pounded into. He makes me moan as he moans in return.

God, how much I love Gerard.

We don't finish quickly, we never do, and hours seem to pass.

We both finish relatively around the same time and we kiss softly when I remove myself from him.

We pull our clothes back on and use the inside of our shirts to clean ourselves up before lacing the sides back together. Finally when we could take standing no more, we collapsed side by side.

My arm is beneath his waist and his head is on my shoulder. I'm still trying to catch my breath and Gerard is practically wheezing as he squeezes his eyes shut so he could bury his head further into the crook of my neck. He is on his side and pressed against me.

I run my fingers through his hair, sighing as I begin to think. Thinking leads to dangerous topics for me and it is something I really try to avoid but find myself doing even during intercourse with the man that makes my world spin.

But the night sky is beautiful when I look up and as Gerard's breathing slows, I am lulled into the back of my own brain from the peacefulness of the setting.

I think of two dead bodies, pale boys with similar features as us buried. Seeds are sprinkled over their graves and crosses were dug into the piles of dirt.

I hold Gerard closer and question our fate. Tonight is our last together, that much is certain.

Why had it been decided that we were to never end up together? Why can't I keep him? If I die tomorrow, would it be better than living a full life without him?

As if knowing what I am thinking, which he probably is, he glances up at me and places a hand over my square jaw.

"Thoughts for tomorrow, I promise you it will all work out."

After that, I nod and let my eyes close for a brief time of rest.

We had made our way to the camp not much later, everyone in their small cabins still asleep.

Gerard and I creep in, him hoisting me up to the upper bunk before he slips into the bottom one. They're hardly beds, more like hard slabs of wood mocking a comforter, but we have grown accustomed in our three years.

I stare at the ceiling, not sleeping anymore than I already had because I am too caught up in my thoughts.

Guns firing. Death. Victory. Separation. No Gerard. No Gerard.

No, I can't allow this, but what I can I do to prevent it? Nothing, there's nothing to be done.

Soon enough, it is morning.

I grab my musket, biting the inside of my cheek as I lay it against the wall so I can clean up my appearance. It may not be too important in the midst of battle but this would be the last Gerard would see of me. It was vain, sure, but I want him to remember me better than what I really am.

Grabbing it again, we all head out for the final battle.

Men are practically bouncing around excitedly and were actually smiling; I almost never see their smiles, but I couldn't join them, not when the man on my right will slip from my tight hold of him.

We share a look before heading out to our last day of battle and it took all of my strength not to reach for his hand.

We wore them down, their troops broken in defeat when they finally surrendered. They had been under siege for three weeks so it was amazing how they had lasted nearly a month, but we won, that's all that mattered.

Hats are victoriously tossed into the air as cries of excitement escape lips.

Gerard is grinning and despite that it was my last time being with him, I find myself grinning along.

I would have kissed him, I would have, instead, he just drops his musket and wraps his long fingers around my wrist. His long, delicate fingers that had- but my thoughts of the previous night were cut short as I am suddenly being dragged into the woods.

"We don't get to celebrate?" I inquire, glancing as he grabs two packs which I assume were for both of us.

"Oh we do, we'll celebrate tonight."

I smirk and upon seeing the look, he merely rolls his eyes, "I didn't mean it like that."

"Then how did you mean it?"

He's silent, not in a mischievous way but he can't drop the smile that's across his lips.

"Gerard...how are you planning to spend your first day of freedom?"

"I'd like it to start as the first day of the rest of my life with you."

Color rushes to my cheeks as he continues.

"To be held in your arms, to hold you in mine, and to know you're not in the arms of another. To explore the west but not too far away. To build a cabin and live happily with the man I love. Marrying you would be treason but if we create our own land, we can create our own laws."

I watch the man I love drop onto a knee without the purpose of sucking me off.

"I dare ask you to marry me."

He held out a ring forged from a small twig, a small circle that must have taken time to create. It was simply the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.

Of course, I let him slip it into my finger.

"To freedom."

#frerard #frank iero #gerard way #gerard way x frank iero #frank iero x gerard way #my chemical romance #my chem #mcr #holy trinity #fanfic #fanfiction #bxb #blb #gay boys #gay #american revolution

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words-writ-in-starlight · 6 years

Note

Jake Berenson

Jesus, my poor boy, yeah, okay.

Send me a character and I’ll write 10 headcanons!

Jake is surprised to discover it, but he genuinely likes history. Not so much the context he’s studying it in--thinking God, okay, if I’d known that a year ago then the Yeerk pool would have gone differently or Okay, if we had to hold our ground then this would be a good reference--but it’s satisfying, being able to see all of it laid out neatly in front of him.

Relatedly, most history nerds have favorite and least favorite periods of history. Jake doesn’t really have the luxury of that, but the wars he learns about the most are WWII and Vietnam, for obvious reasons. One went down in history as a case of obvious moral wrong with massive civilian casualties, the other as a relatively small force turning back a far larger, more heavily armed, and generally more formidable tide. Jake doesn’t need to be a genius to gather that those wars are going to have helpful reference points for him. He also reads a lot about the American Revolution, because he recognizes some of the Animorphs’ own tactics in the Continental Army.

If Jake were fighting the war today, after Hamilton was released, his tactical byline would be outrun, outlast, hit ‘em quick, get out fast, because there’s just no other way to stay alive.

Jake’s least favorite war to read about is World War I. It’s so senseless. He can never read about it without thinking about the battle for the Iskoort. An entire species on the line and for what? A game? Someone’s pride? And in order to win, they forced the execution of the Howlers, put every Howlers’ life on the line with Crayak. On a bigger scale, their war is nothing if not trench warfare, and Jake feels a kind of sick fascination reading about chemical weapons (oat-freaking-meal) and no man’s land (the untouchable Sharing members) and the innocents caught in the line of fire (Tom, Tom, Jake’s brother the prisoner).

Be the end of the second year of the war, history is the only class Jake has higher than a C in. He’s only maintaining that C in algebra because Ax does his homework. His grades in everything else (except things like art or gym, where you get credit for showing up) are flat out terrible. He’s permanently grounded by his parents, and he sits and listens to the lectures and does what he has to do.

Jake has nightmares about that first Sario Rip. He has nightmares a lot, these days. It’s usually about people dying, about his people dying, and there’s something indefinably worse about the Sario Rip dreams, because they’re not dreams. They’re memories.

Jake doesn’t do it on purpose, but it has to be done--he learns to sleep through his nightmares and wake up silently. Those first few weeks and months of the war, Jake woke up maybe three nights a week screaming. Once the paranoia gets bad enough, he stops screaming. His parents, at the time, think it’s an improvement, these strange night terrors that Jake can’t remember stopping and disappearing. Later, they remember the way that Jake seemed to age overnight, a time lapse of a teenager turning into a general.

Jake used to be terrified of horror movies, which he knew because Tom loved horror movies and liked to make his little brother watch them. Tom--the Yeerk in Tom’s head--keeps up the illusion and needles Jake into watching one with him, some six months after the start of the war, and Jake sees the serial killer on the screen, and he laughs. It’s not a happy laugh, it’s cold and a little ragged, like someone trying not to cry, but it bursts out of him before he can stop it.

“Finally got over it?” the Yeerk asks with Tom’s mouth, making just the right smirk with Tom’s eyes.

“Dunno,” Jake says once he stops laughing. “I guess there are scarier things in the world than some guy with a chainsaw, you know?”

Jake goes to school one day, a year and change into the war, and one of his old friends, one of the guys who tried out for the basketball team with him, comes up and hesitantly starts talking to him. Jake wonders, for a moment, why the guy seems so tentative, and then--and then Jake realizes he can’t remember the last time they spoke. He can’t even remember the guy’s name.

Jake and Rachel attend Saddler’s funeral. Their families make them go, but don’t question it when the two of them stand side-by-side in silence the entire time. They spend the entire service staring at the coffin like they’re waiting for him to rise from the dead. Hard for someone who was thrown down an elevator shaft to manage it, though, or so Jake thinks to himself when he finally slips away to throw up.

After it all. After everything. Jake goes to his aunt and uncle and sits down quietly at their dining room table. He tells them everything. He tells them how their son was a casualty in his war, and how their miracle was an attempt to take his team out of commission, and how their son’s murderer was a child not much older, and how that child died at the hands of his dead cousin, his bruiser, his enforcer, his weapon.

They never speak to Jake again. This does not surprise him.

#jake berenson #prince jake #animorphs #headcanon meme #ask meme #LITERALLY NO ONE ELSE MAKES MORE THAN A ONE-SENTENCE APPEARANCE HERE #i THINK tom gets mentioned twice #talk to me for infinity about jake and his thing for history #about jake having to have THAT conversation with his aunt and uncle #cassie might take it upon herself to talk to david's parents (out of responsibility) or even marco (because he's ruthless enough to do it)#but jake would have the one with saddler's parents #his family was killed and his family became a killer and it was HIS CALL (a vote but still his call) to bring david into the fold #this is his duty #he burns that bridge himself #idiot teenagers with a queue #anonymous #asked and answered

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albinostorm · 4 years

Text

Read a short excerpt from Learning Earth's Deathly History.

"June, 1700 hours Eastern Seaboard Time: The nose of the U.S. Navy’s Virginia-class, nuclear-powered, fast-attack submarine USS Texas (SSN 775) opens a dark void in the Arabian Sea. She is covertly traveling at twenty-eight knots, near 12° latitude and 64° longitude, at a depth of 850 feet. Inside the hunter killer’s advanced command and control room is an array of computers and other sophisticated electronics with navigation, sonar, weapons and diagnostic information displayed on over forty monitors. The complicated equipment is installed to maximize space. Multicolored lights from the ever-changing imagery on the dozens of displays can be seen dancing on the walls and ceiling of the ultramodern hub. Near the center of the operations center, standing bent over the edge of a table, is the lethal submarine’s Captain. He is actively studying nautical charts and satellite imageries showing on high-definition flat screens mounted flush in the table’s top. Standing next to him is his executive officer (XO), who is keeping watch over the crew of specialized technicians and officers seated working at their stations. All the underwater sailors are dressed in wrinkle-free tan or dark-blue U.S. Navy uniforms. There are naval pins and patches on their shirts including the Submarine Warfare Insignia breast pins that are either gold (officer) or silver (enlisted) dolphins.

Though commissioned into service in 2006, the USS Texas remains a state-of-the-art combat submarine of the U.S. Navy. She displaces 7,800 long tons, and her 337-foot long hull, which is constructed of HY-100 high-pressure structural steel, is the strongest ever built. She carries twelve Tomahawk cruise missiles, Mk-48 torpedoes, and was recently loaded with a few of the cutting-edge supercavitating Barracuda torpedoes. The sea warrior has earned the respect of anyone who has ever sailed on her. Her slogan, “Don’t Mess with Texas,” was adopted from the proud state after which she was named—and the slogan couldn’t be truer! When not running lone wolf on top-secret missions, or sailing under standard operational patrol, the Texas is at times an unseen escort protecting aircraft carriers and other U.S. naval ships traveling to and from their theaters of operation.

The Texas’s Commanding Officer, Captain William Norton, is fifty-six years old. He’s an experienced veteran of war, who graduated with top honors from the United States Naval Academy and Naval War College. Captain Norton is a polished man with a rigid stature. He stands board straight using all five-feet and seven-inches of his aging form. His short, graying hair is parted on one side, and thin-rim glasses correct his sea-blue eyes. Fleshy cheeks, thick eyebrows, and a wrinkled forehead complete his commanding appearance. Though he may be over-the-hill, it’s obvious that he takes exceptional care of himself, since he is quite fit. The intrepid naval commander, who is wholly admired and respected by his crew, is an avid reader of history, especially historical naval warfare. Full of grit, Captain Norton is a tenacious leader with unparalleled knowledge of his submarine, and he has spent the last twenty-seven years of his naval career onboard nuclear-powered submarines.

Over the course of his silent service, Captain Norton has led countless missions stalking and shadowing numerous Russian and Chinese submarines as well as other adversarial fighting ships. While on those cat-and-mouse hunts he and his highly skilled crew of submariners were perpetually ready, if so ordered, to sink-and-destroy an enemy vessel on a moment’s notice. Furthermore, he has led several covert operations spying on the sea trials of new Russian and Chinese ships of war to learn their strengths and weaknesses. Captain Norton has even presided over missions to salvage technology and military secrets from ocean floors deposited there by rival missile tests, or from naval ships sunk by calamity. In years past, he was the Captain of an Ohio-class submarine armed with Trident II ballistic missiles tipped with thermonuclear warheads. Then, he and his stealthy submariners secretly patrolled the coastlines of rival nations. Captain Norton and his regimented men sat under the cloak of the sea, ready to launch a nuclear first strike if ever so ordered.

Captain Norton wanted command of the Texas ever since he first saw her keel being laid in 2002 at a Virginia shipyard. Of note, the Captain was personally instrumental in working on silencing the Virginia-class submarine’s acoustical signatures. He did so when he worked with engineers at the Navy’s Acoustic Research Department (ARD), located on Lake Pend Oreille in Northern Idaho. They used 1/8th scale remote controlled models of Virginia-class submarines for doing their research. That aside, three years ago the Captain’s dream was realized when he replaced the Texas’s aging commander, whose long life at sea ended with his retirement. Captain Norton’s love for the Texas may be partly due to the fact that he was born and raised on his family farm in the Lone Star State where his ancestral roots stretch back several generations.

Currently, the fearsome sea hunter and her formidable crew are deployed on a top-secret mission. Having just finished scrutinizing sonar screens as well as satellite imagery, all in the course of looking for any nearby threats, Captain Norton gives the order, “Reel in the communication buoy; we’ll reconnect to FORCEnet when we surface.” (FORCEnet is a Naval Network Warfare Command networking communication link that allows decision-makers and others to be aware of current missions, so they can share information in real time that might prove vital to the success of an active operation.)

“Take us to periscope depth. Ten knots low ’n slow,” further orders the Captain.

“Aye, Captain. Reel in the buoy. Take us to periscope depth. Ten knots low ’n slow,” responds the XO as he relays the Captain’s commands to the communications and diving officers.

“Aye, docking the buoy,” answers the communications officer.

“Aye, periscope depth, zero degrees rear rudder, ten degrees up all planes, ten knots low ’n slow,” answers the diving officer while passing the command to the pilot.

“Aye, periscope depth, zero degrees rear rudder, ten degrees up all planes, ten knots low ’n slow,” answers the pilot while moving the single joystick that maneuvers the massive submarine. A whistle sounds, followed by a short ringing noise as yellow lights begin flashing at two of the control room’s stations. The Texas answers the helm without delay and begins ascending. Any standing submariners lean toward her nose as she planes upward. The diving officer calls out their depth every 100 feet, 50 feet, and lastly 10 feet as the fast-attack submarine rises silently from the depths of the Arabian Sea until trimming out at periscope depth.

“Raise the masts,” orders Captain Norton.

“Aye, Captain. Raise the masts,” repeats the XO as he passes the orders to the photonics technician on deck.

“Aye, raising the masts,” promptly answers the young sailor. The moment he types on the touch screen in front of him, a pair of masts, topped with special instruments, begin rising stealthily from the top of the submarine’s sail. (A submarine sail is also called a fairwater. In earlier generation subs, the sail was called the conning tower because that’s where the con was located.)

The telescoping poles’ heads quickly puncture through the wavy sea surface and immediately begin relaying information to computers in the control room. Monitors come to life with high-resolution infrared and video imagery with rangefinder data. The imagery covers a 360° view of the surface from the submarine’s position. Other screens in the command center display information round-the-clock. They are littered with colored dots fed to them by the sub’s sonar as well as government satellites when they can connect to them. (The sub’s sonar features are so sensitive that a sonar officer or technician can hear a ship sailing 1000 miles away, and even hear shrimp eating.) The colors of the dots differentiate countries. Moving a cursor over one of the dots makes the ship or aircraft’s point of origin, destination, friend or foe status, and cargo immediately appear on screen. The crew can also send and receive information using ELF or VLF low radio frequencies when at depth. The submariners endlessly watch sea and sky, so they are always aware of what surrounds them.

Captain Norton studies the live thermal and video images for a moment before giving the con to his XO. He orders him to maintain speed at periscope depth, for exactly twenty minutes, before diving to 800 feet and proceeding full speed ahead to their mission destination. The Captain exits the command and control room just as the steel orca surreptitiously enters the Gulf of Oman.

Inside the wardroom of the USS Texas are eight men from SEAL Team Fourteen, “Fury and Company.” This is no ordinary group of the elite fighters. The members of this special SEAL Team were handpicked by the U.S. Naval Special Warfare Development Group (NSWDG) to be on this tier-one black-ops unit. They are a special missions and counter-terrorism SEAL Team. Only two such secret squads exist. The seas were heavy when the sailors transferred onto the USS Texas with their tactical gear when she surfaced temporarily in the Indian Ocean, less than twenty-four hours ago. The men boarded by rappelling from a HH-60 Sea Hawk helicopter that flew them from the deck of the USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78) aircraft carrier deployed in the Atlantic Ocean. They had landed on the aircraft carrier after flying from Joint Expeditionary Base—Little Creek, located in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

The SEALs have just finished listening to Lieutenant (Lt.) Brock Barnette, the Officer in Charge (OIC), give instructional orders he received from U.S. Naval Forces Central Command. All eight warfighters are seated body tight on three sides of a table with bench seats. There is a large sealed envelope bearing the official seal of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) placed conspicuously on the center of the table. A notepad and pencil are placed in front of each man. All the men are dressed in black shorts and t-shirts with the SEAL Trident insignia embroidered on them in gold. Attentive, their eyes are fixed on a large flat screen that is attached to a wall. A video camera mounted above the screen is pointed toward them. Captain Norton has just entered the room.

“Captain on deck,” announces Lt. Barnette as he starts to stand with his men to acknowledge the Commander.

“At ease, sailors. Stay seated. We have a very short window of opportunity, so let gets this show on the road,” orders Captain Norton, who is now standing beside the table facing the camera.

The imagery showing on the screen is split into two views. On the left side is the Director of National Intelligence, Brian Erikson. He and CIA agents are seated around a large conference table at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. On the right side is Secretary of Defense, General Douglas Wheeler. He is sitting behind an ornate cherry desk in his office at the Pentagon. The live video feeds appear via a secure satellite link to FORCEnet.

“Everyone, I’ll be brief. You have nineteen minutes to conclude this meeting before my sub is diving and we lose the satellite link. So I suggest you use this time wisely,” informs Captain Norton.

“Captain Norton, I understand completely. Okay men, no time to waste! Welcome Lieutenants Barnette and Storm, Senior Chief Petty Officer Knight, Chief Petty Officer Hernandez, and Petty Officers Mancinelli, Van Dyke, Brooks, and Goldberg to this most important briefing. On behalf of America, we give our utmost gratitude for your bold service to this great country as we ask you once more to go into harm’s way. Lieutenant Storm, I’m glad to see you’re back on active duty,” remarks Secretary of Defense General Douglas Wheeler

“Thanks, General,” reply all the men.

“Men, this mission is extremely critical for two reasons. First, we need to know why a wealthy jihadist arms dealer, who is an al-Qaeda sympathizer and devoted ISIS supporter, is meeting with a Chinese nuclear physicist, Iranian rocket engineer, and a Russian nuclear submarine expert on his yacht. Secondly, we know from information-sharing amongst the CIA, British Secret Intelligence Services, and other allied security agencies that a well-financed secret society has formed with global roots. We are referring to this new synergetic group of evil as the DOOMS-TEAM, which stands for the ‘Dark Order Of Maligned Seeking To Eradicate AMerica.’ We believe the members of this malevolent alliance are from China, Russia, North Korea, the Middle East, and other parts of our world. It’s very likely that the DOOMS-TEAM has their people embedded in England as well as other allied countries. Their demented collaborators are no doubt hidden here in America, too.

“DOOMS-TEAM is hell-bent on destroying the Western way of life, for ideological or perverse religious reasons. They seek to obtain and use weapons of mass destruction to destroy America, or, at minimum, to create great devastation, panic, and economic collapse. It’s believed that all the men meeting on this yacht are DOOMS-TEAM members. We desperately need solid intelligence, such as video, photographs, written documentation..."

To continue reading simply download Part Two: Learning Earth's Deathly History now for just .99¢

https://www.amazon.com/Knowledge-one-second-Learning-Deathly-History-ebook/dp/B082S4GYBY

#usnavy #navyseals #virginiaclass #seals #sealteam #navywarfare #thegreatshipofknowledge #submarine #submarinewarfare

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nigeiadigitalmarketingcompany · 5 years

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Links 8/3/19

Digital Elixir Links 8/3/19

California: Bees drop dead around 5G towers Express (furzy)

A Single Male Cat’s Reign of Terror Atlantic (guurst). 2 million feral cats??? And for the record, all my cats have been indoor only cats.

Satellites Reveal ‘Hot Lightning’ Strikes Are Most Likely To Start Wildfires IEEE

3 killed as cliff collapses on popular California beach Associated Press (David L). The headline was “1” when I first put the link up

‘Forever chemicals’ have been found in bottled water brands sold at Whole Foods and CVS, and it’s part of a larger contamination problem Business Insider (David L)

How Mosquitoes Changed Everything New Yorker (resilc)

World’s first human-monkey hybrid created in China, scientists reveal Independent

Colorectal Cancer Rises Among Younger Adults New York Times (UserFriendly)

Study Finds Living Near Trees, Not Just Green Space, Improves Wellbeing CityLab

China?

A battle for supremacy between China and the US Asia Times (Kevin W)

Good for Google, Bad for America – New York Times. UserFriendly: “Peter Thiel explains how trade works and why China and Google are evil….” Even if Thiel as a Facebook board member thinks calling out Google somehow helps Facebook, this seems awfully naive. In the minds of a lot of the public and increasing numbers of regulators, Big Tech is evil. Amplifying that message can’t be helpful to Facebook. But these squillionaires aren’t big on getting advice.

EU looks past ASEAN for deals and pacts Asia Times (Kevin W)

Brexit

Mark Carney warns of instant shock from no-deal Brexit BBC

Tory rebels threaten Boris Johnson after majority cut to one Guardian (Kevin W)

Tax on tech giants will rule out trade deal, US warns Britain Telegraph

New Cold War

US pulls out of decades-long nuclear missile pact with Russia claiming they violated treaty abc.net.au (Kevin W)

U.S. Imposes More Sanctions on Russia for Chemical Agent Use Bloomberg

Blockading Venezuela Would Be Illegal and Wrong American Conservative (resilc)

Imperial Collapse Watch

The ‘Special Relationship’ Is Collapsing… and That’s a Good Thing Strategic Culture Watch. Chuck L: “Hard to categorize. How about Revisionist History of the UK/USA “Special Relationship?” Also a Must Read candidate.”

Big Brother is Watching You Watch

Pentagon testing mass surveillance balloons across the US Guardian (Kevin W)

US Cities Are Helping People Buy Amazon Surveillance Cameras Using Taxpayer Money Vice

Trump Transition

Federal judge rules against Trump asylum policy The Hill

Trump scuttles plan to nominate Ratcliffe as top intelligence official NBC (furzy)

Hacked Emails Show GOP Demands on Border Security Were Crafted by Industry Lobbyists Intercept (Chuck L, resilc)

Saikat Chakrabarti to leave Ocasio-Cortez’s office Washington Post. UserFriendly: “Pissed she folded to Pelosi.”

TSA seizes rocket launcher in Baltimore — for second time this week New York Post. Resilc: “They have big rats, you need firepower.”

Solitary Confinement Caused “Complete Mental and Physical Collapse” of Man in Virginia Prison, Lawsuit Contends Solitary Watch (Chuck L). Horrible.

Health Care

Listen to @DrDooleyMD. Patients don’t “love” their costly health insurance plans. They need Medicare for All now. pic.twitter.com/ELQ0QNhmWJ

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) August 2, 2019

Congressional Moves on Drug-Pricing and Competition National Conference of State Legislatures (UserFriendly)

Glad this is getting traction:

If you get hit with a huge surprise bill well in excess of what the procedure should cost that is NOT your insurance company gouging you. That is the PROVIDER GOUGING YOU. Private equity firm are buying up doc group to gouge people hoping reporter will mistaking blame insurers 1/ https://t.co/gjiPtihOFX

— Jon Walker (@JonWalkerDC) August 2, 2019

2020

Biden holds two-to-one lead over Sanders in post-debate poll The Hill

Biden, Inc.: How ‘Middle Class’ Joe’s family cashed in on the family name Politico. UserFriendly: “Biden’s family; horribly corrupt! Must read.

Obama Looms over the Primary in Invisible Ways Talking Points Memo and ‘Stay away from Barack’: Dems seethe over criticism of Obama Politico. UserFriendly: “Dems morphing into the Catholic Church, Obama = infalible, now where are all the raped kids?”

UserFriendly: “I don’t know how well sharing ‘moments’ on Twitter works [neither does your humble blogger]… but dear God, literally no one understands what nuclear first use is. Shoot me.” This is the “moment”; here’s a comment:

To no one’s surprise, @RepLizCheney has it completely wrong. First use of nuclear weapons is suicidal. A recent @globalzero study found that 21.6 million Americans would die in a Russian counterattack. That’s 30% of the total population of America’s top 145 most populated cities. https://t.co/geOdCrDomx

— Derek Johnson (@derekjGZ) August 2, 2019

Bernie Sanders Dominates as Analyses of Fundraising Data Show Vermont Senator With Widespread Support Across Nation Common Dreams (furzy). More on that heat map….

Gabbard reaches donor threshold for September debate The Hill

Tulsi Gabbard Thinks We’re Doomed New York Times (resilc)

The 2019 DSA Convention: Showdown at the Caucus Corral Current Affairs (UserFriendly)

Our Famously Free Press

CNN’s Industry Spin Shows Need for Independent Debates Common Dreams (furzy)

Police State Watch

Eric Garner: Chokehold cop ‘should be fired’, says US judge BBC

Woman, 65, tasered by police after fleeing then kicking officer who stopped her over broken light: ‘You’re not placing me under no arrest’ Independent. Resilc: “If she was black she would have been gunned down.” Moi: Yes, but if she had been black, she would have presumably figured out long ago not to carry on like that with cops, particularly over a ticket they were entitled to issue.

Puerto Rico

When people ask why Puerto Rico is in turmoil, I try to emphasize 2 things:

1) The Great Recession in the US lasted 18 months. Puerto Rico has been in a recession for *13 years*

2) PR has lost ~15% of its population to outmigration since 2008, more than any country not at war

— Jeff Stein (@JStein_WaPo) August 3, 2019

Newly stringent FAA tests spur a fundamental software redesign of Boeing’s 737 MAX flight controls Seattle Times (barrisj)

Local pension costs grew in California at nearly six times national rate, new data show Sacramento Bee. Loath to sound like I am defending CalPERS, but CalPERS didn’t set the benefit levels. However, CalPERS can be criticized for keeping its return assumptions too high for too long, forcing plan sponsors to play catchup now that it is using better assumptions.

How Trump’s Political Appointees Overruled Tougher Settlements With Big Banks — ProPublica. UserFriendly: “For Fuck Sake!!!! I never would have thought it was possible to go easier on the banks that caused the recession than Obama did, but…. ” Moi: But the stakes and the total $ involved were way higher post crisis than now

How the Fed Should Fight Climate Change Atlantic (resilc)

Mr. Market Has a Sad

US-China trade tensions hit global markets Financial Times

Here’s the real reason U.S. stocks are losing so much ground after their long bullish run MarketWatch

It Was the Week Trade Wars Went From Uncomfortable to Scary Bloomberg

Class Warfare

One Opioid Patient Worth $200,000 a Year to Purdue, State Says Bloomberg

Antidote du jour. MGL: “A hummingbird makes the rounds at the Jensen-Olson Arboretum on June 30, 2019. (Courtesy Photo | Janice Gorle)”

And a bonus from guurst:

Ocelot gets a scritch scratch scrotch! pic.twitter.com/PxirG49Vub

— Mr. Meowgi (@Mr_Meowwwgi) August 1, 2019

See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.

Links 8/3/19

from WordPress https://ift.tt/2KrqbwT via IFTTT

#Digital Marketing #SEO #Social Media Marketing #Nigeria Digital Marketing Company #Lead Generation

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gyrlversion · 5 years

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ISIS fighter reveals he was one of SEVEN students to join terror group

An ISIS fighter has revealed that he is among seven former students from a single London university to have joined the terror group.

In 2014, Zakariyya Elogbani abandoned his business management degree at the University of Westminster to join the jihadis.

From his detention cell in Syria he has now told the BBC that he was one of seven Westminster students to fight for the Islamist group.

The BBC has identified an eighth person who was studying there while on a terror protection order which was made less restrictive by a judge.

University of Westminster said it takes its safeguarding duty ‘very seriously’.

Zakariyya Elogbani (right), pictured with fellow former Westminster student, Ishak Mostefaoui, now also detained in Syria

Mohammed Emwazi – Jihadi John – was also a Westminster student. He appeared in videos in which he killed Western hostages before being killed in an airstrike

This is not the first time the institution has been linked with young men who turned to violent extremism. Ten years ago Mohammed Emwazi, the ISIS fighter dubbed Jihadi John who decapitated Western hostages on film, studied there.

Elogbani, from east London, was captured by Kurdish forces in Syria last summer.

He told the BBC: ‘Obviously we came here intending to fight. That’s the honest truth. But I don’t think it was a love for blood.’

In a likely reference to Jihadi John, he said Westminster students who had joined ISIS in Syria before he joined the university had ‘kind of opened the way’.

The first Westminster IS fighter: Jihadi John studied at the university in 2009

Mohammed Emwazi – who rose to notoriety as an English-accented ISIS executioner dubbed Jihadi John – was a University of Westminster student in 2009 before he left for Syria in 2013.

Arriving in Britain when he was six years old, Kuwaiti-born Mohammed Emwazi appeared to embrace British life, playing football in the affluent streets of West London while supporting Manchester United.

Emwazi (front row, second from left) pictured with classmates at the St Mary Magdalene C of E primary school in London

Neighbours recalled a polite, quietly spoken boy who was studious at his Church of England school, where he was the only Muslim pupil in his class.

As a radicalised young man in London he was was on a terror watch list, but managed to flee to Syria despite being banned from leaving Britain.

Jihadi John became an ISIS executioner

He featured in the execution videos of American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff, aid workers Alan Hennings and David Haines, 22 Syrian soldiers and Japanese journalist Kenji Goto.

Emwazi was killed in a missile strike in November 2015.

Jihadi John – Mohammed Emwazi – studied information systems at Westminster but left for Syria in 2013. He became infamous after appearing in videos in which he killed Western hostages. He was killed in a missile strike in November 2015.

Elogbani said he had never met Emwazi, but said he had seen another of the so called ‘Beatles’ – Brits who joined ISIS – in Syria.

The BBC found Elogbani travelled with fellow Westminster student Ishak Mostefaoui.

Ishak’s father Abderrahmane said his family came to London when Ishak was five and that the household opposed extremism.

Ishak was a popular, football-loving boy radicalised, his father believes, by people at University of Westminster in around 2013.

In April 2014, Mostefaoui said he was going to Amsterdam for a few days. Then they heard nothing for a month before he called to say he was in Syria. His father ‘collapsed’ when he heard the news.

Mostefaoui is among those ISIS fighters to have had his citizenship removed. Three months ago his wife and young son died, and he was badly injured, when his house was bombed. He is now being held in detention.

Elogbani told the BBC another three fellow students left around the same time as him and have since been killed.

He claims Ibrahim was killed in the siege of Raqqa, Abu Talha ‘died in the desert of Anbar’ and Abu Ubaydah was killed in Tikrit, Iraq.

The BBC has not confirmed all three identities but one is understood to be Qasim Abukar, a hardened jihadist who previously fought with a militant group in Somalia.

Abukar, who has been known to the security services for years, enrolled at Westminster in September 2012. Elogbani’s friends, spekaing on condition of anonymity, said Abukar had played a key role in radicalising Elogbani.

Abukar fled Britain for Somalia during a 2009 trial in which he was accused of attempting to travel to Afghanistan for terrorism. He was acquitted in his absence.

A separate High Court appeal heard that in Somalia, Abukar was ‘involved in fighting’ alongside the militant group al-Shabaab and tried to recruit fighters in the UK for overseas operations. The court was told he was ‘potentially involved in attack planning’ against Western interests.

MI5 had warned that allowing Qasim Abukar more contact with fellow students would increase the risk he posed but a judge relaxed the terms of his control. Although suspected of jihadi warfare for al-Shabaab, al-Qaeda and ISIS he has never been convicted of a crime

Qasim’a brother Makhzumi Abukar was jailed for seven years after pleading guilty in 2016 to a million-pound fraud. Scotland Yard believes the money was destined for ISIS in Syria

He was jailed in Somalia but returned to the UK in 2011 claiming he had been mistreated with the knowledge of the British state. Never having been found guilty by a court of terrorism offences, he was placed on a control order and a Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measure (TPIM) to restrict his movements.

TPIMs can be imposed on terror suspects, who officials decide can neither be charged nor deported, but who are nevertheless assessed to be potentially involved in terrorist-related activities.

Despite being described in court as having played a ‘substantial role’ in his extremist network, Abukar began studying at University of Westminster a year later.

Because he had ‘a track record of absconding’, he had to report daily to a local police station and wear an electronic tag.

But in April 2013 he won an appeal to reduce one of the restrictions on his movements when a High Court judge permitted him to interact more with fellow students, despite warnings from MI5 that it would mean ‘the risk of him engaging in terrorism-related activity’.

At this time people close to Elogbani and Mostefaoui noticed their views were becoming extreme. Several sources told the BBC that Abukar was one of the people involved in radicalising them.

Abukar’s brother Makhzumi was another jihadi Westminster student, involved in procuring funds for the terror cell.

He was jailed for seven years after pleading guilty in 2016 to a million-pound fraud to steal the savings of pensioners. Scotland Yard believes the money was destined for extremists in Syria.

Court documents, seen by the BBC, reveal that when his home was searched in July 2014, only weeks after Elogbani and Mostefaoui had left the UK, notes found in his jacket recorded a series of financial transfers to a town on the Turkish/Syrian border known as ISIS International, because of its popularity as a handover point for foreign jihadists.

Another former University of Westminster student who went to Syria was Akram Sabah, a recruitment consultant who left the university in 2011 with a degree in biomedical sciences.

He and his older brother Mohammed were killed in fighting in September 2013.

Akram Sabah (r), pictured with his brother Mohammed, finished his Westminster University degree in 2011. Both brothers died in the fighting

The university of Westminster, from which as many as nine students may have joined the Islamist terror group, said an independent report had found no evidence it was a ‘breeding ground’ for extremism

Mohamed Jakir, a jihadi killed in Syria in 2014 after seven weeks in country, was also reportedly a Westminster University student, reading law.

That remains unconfirmed by the BBC. If true, it would take the overall number of fighters from the university to at least eight.

In 2015 the university commissioned a report after Jihadi John’s links to the institution became public. Fiyaz Mughal, one of its authors, said: ‘The university failed to understand its duty of care around confronting and countering extremist views.

‘But more importantly it didn’t even understand its duty of care and didn’t understand the concept of things like Islamism and extremism.’

Mughal was concerned that the Islamic Society at the university, in which Elogbani was active, was ‘allowed to run its own fiefdom’ where women and LGBT students were treated with hostility.

Former members denied a culture of extremism existed.

A University of Westminster spokeswoman told MailOnline: ‘The University takes its responsibility in relation to safeguarding and to the development of positive global citizens very seriously.

She said the report noted that: ‘Most of what the Panel heard and saw was most heartening. Like the Security Services, the Panel found no evidence at all to support journalistic claims that the University of Westminster was a breeding-ground for extremism’.

She added where the panel did highlight points for action, the University took steps to address these in line with its ‘absolute priority to safeguard its community’.

She said: ‘As a University which has wellbeing at its heart, Westminster has a strong pastoral and interfaith focus providing care and support to its community of 20,000 students from more than 150 countries.’

In Syria Elogbani, who lost his legs in a missile attack in 2015 and his British citizenship after that, told the BBC: ‘I committed a crime by coming here. I guess I need to be punished.

‘Anyone that’s still immersed by Islamic State methodology is wrong.

‘It’s a gang. A lot of people are tricked. Don’t fall into the same trick.’

In a statement, the Home Office said it did not comment on individual cases but pointed out that TPIMs provide some of the most restrictive measures available in the democratic world.

The post ISIS fighter reveals he was one of SEVEN students to join terror group appeared first on Gyrlversion.

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#Entertainment News

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ecommercewebdevelopment · 5 years

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No technical experience, you don't have to know anything about how to build a website, no programming knowledge needed at all.

Let’s get into what really is driving with force in 2018, with its business tactics and tricks.

1. Cybersecurity

- Cybersecurity threat is on the rise and is on a drastic increase. The reason being, many internet devices are insecure the tools are quick to find and use, anyone, can access the web and hack or use malware codes and perform other affordable practices. This is going to result in enterprises to invest in dedicated cybersecurity centers as a way to discover and erase cyber risks. Many will equip themselves with such offerings including customers.

What exactly is Cybersecurity?

- It refers to a set of different types of techniques used to protect the integrity of networks, programs, and data from attack, damage or unauthorized access.

Why is it required?

- It involves protecting information and system from major cyber-threats.

- These cyber-threats take many forms like malware, ransomware, phishing, exploit kits.

- Cyber-terrorism, Cyber-warfare, Cyber-espionage.

2. Competition with Social Advertising

- Many large companies have embraced Facebook and have made increase advertisers at a high pace. With this type of rising with advertising, the number of advertisers will accelerate and the cost of advertising will rise also, there will be an expectation of more jumping on to the Facebook ad bandwagon.

How does Social Advertising help?

- It helps in setting a goal that will help you see throughout the buyer's journey. It gains your customer's attention into earning for their and as well your benefit. It helps you in creating ads, without even putting many efforts into your profile.

Best platforms to explore Social Media?

Six different sites, that offer you a great return for most business.

- Facebook

- Instagram

- Twitter

- Pinterest

- LinkedIn

- Snapchat

3. Technology and Economy Sharing

- A rise with sharing economy and digitization will disrupt more industries. a few of the major industrial giants like Amazon, Uber, Google have experienced disruption. Today customers have accepted a collaborative model, and have shifted their heads according to what the trend lies and take them around with. The recent success and growth of shared-business solutions demonstrate the shared-economy will emerge truly beyond 2018.

For example, the most prominent industry of Uber where millennial's can often travel while enjoying personalized and authentic services.

4. E-commerce will make a remarkable change

- According to a study by Accenture, 90% of B2B business across the world have stated that their customer/ user experience is the most important driving force among all their other customers. Nearly 25% of them are able to deliver a remarkable user experience. On the other hand, data is what eventually becomes knowledge and brings success to the business. B2B eCommerce web development company are going to focus on data have driven marketing and will get leads while offering an amazing user experience.

5. Use Of WordPress

- To talk about the growing popularity of people using WordPress, it makes it very obvious to know that the platform is going to boom in the year 2019 with, 65% consisting of the global market, 25% occupied with websites in the world and 76.5 billion blogs sites.

WordPress website development has been a source to get into the depth of innovation and customization with websites worldwide with, 50,000 websites being launched daily, 409+ million people view more than 19.6 billion pages, 24.7 million files are uploaded to WordPress.com and 130,496,012 free theme downloads since 2015.

With the increasing number of people around the world using this platform, we also provide you with reasons why they prefer using WordPress for their websites.

1. WordPress is free and open source software that is free to use, edit and redistribute. You can easily find its original source codes publicly available. It comes with unlimited validity and you can download the free software from its official sites as well.

2. You can create your own and desired website, that serves several eCommerce themes offered by the theme companies. WordPress is powered by eCommerce plugins like WooCommerce and WP eCommerce, which helps in making the platform a complete eCommerce solution.

3. It is 99% SEO friendly, according to Google. Showing definite rank with the platform depended upon the predefined parameters, you get to receive ranks for your own website as well with WordPress. The news that will steal all the hearts is that the platform takes in all the SEO responsibilities that a CMS is to be fulfilled with.

Few of the CMS requirements are;

Loading speed - The speed of your website is influenced by your CMS, making WordPress already optimized for good speed.

Coding standard - Expert developers are around to take care of the new versions being introduced to you.

XML sitemap - Generate and submit a sitemap to search engine, it helps with getting the structure of your site content.

Navigation - It makes it very robust with menus, drop down menu functionality, tags, categories and tons of widget with WordPress.

4. Easy to customize colors, designs, and even features with the help of a WordPress theme. You do not need special help or need to be a developer for it. You get to get into the depth of it with the help of Panel, that is provided in a control panel under WP dashboard. The codes help you with customizing your themes by editing the codes.

5. WordPress is secure enough, giving you complete security standards and not giving out any loopholes to lose your trust. Regular updates strongly protect you from certain vulnerability.

Based on the certain analysis, we predict that 2019 is going to be a year where people are going to recommend to other eCommerce business people about all the above platforms. It is all about better user experience, better order management and on point delivery methods for Online Business to grow in full power.

#eCommerce web development company

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takenews-blog1 · 6 years

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Nostradamus Predicted This Presidency & Different Prophecies That Got here True

New Post has been published on https://takenews.net/nostradamus-predicted-this-presidency-different-prophecies-that-got-here-true/

Nostradamus Predicted This Presidency & Different Prophecies That Got here True

Round 500 years in the past, French doctor and alleged seer Nostradamus revealed a set of prophecies that individuals are nonetheless studying and believing right now. He’s credited with with the ability to see into the longer term and foresee lots of the occasions which have taken place everywhere in the world, together with a Donald Trump presidency.

One of many greatest occasions of 2016 was Trump defeating Hillary Clinton within the presidential election. Did Nostradamus know this was going to occur?

In certainly one of his quatrains, it seems that he was completely conscious. Decide for your self when you assume Nostradamus knew what Trump would do in 2017.

Consultants who’ve studied Nostradamus and his predictions imagine the French seer knew Donald Trump was going to win the election due to the next quatrain: “The nice shameless, audacious brawler. He can be elected governor of the military: The boldness of his rivalry. The bridge damaged, the town faint from concern.”

Throughout his marketing campaign, Trump accused China of manipulating their foreign money. Nostradamus thought China would attempt to dethrone the US as the most important superpower on the earth and would cease the “financial imbalance” on earth. It’s not clear how the Asian nation would accomplish this monumental job.

Then there’s this quatrain: “The false trumpet concealing insanity will trigger Byzantium to alter its legal guidelines. From Egypt there’ll go forth a person who desires the edict withdrawn, altering cash and requirements.”

Nostradamus generally used a play on phrases when writing his predictions. Some imagine the false prophet (known as a “trumpet” within the quatrain) that Nostradamus is referring to is Donald Trump. And, the outdated world for trumpet is definitely “trump.” Since Hillary Clinton beat Trump by two million common votes, some don’t contemplate Trump to be their actual President. For lots of people, the previous “Apprentice” host is a false prophet. Nevertheless, the wording is open to interpretation.

Byzantium was an historical Greek colony that grew to become Constantinople after which Istanbul, Turkey. Some imagine Nostradamus’ reference to the traditional colony is a commentary on the refugee disaster that’s presently taking on Europe. Take a look at this a part of the quatrain once more: “The false trumpet concealing insanity will trigger Byzantium to alter its legal guidelines.”

Some interpret this as a reference to Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant insurance policies. He’s within the technique of drafting new journey bans concentrating on majority-Muslim nations: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. Whereas the connection will not be precisely 100 p.c clear, you can not deny that the prediction appears to have a hoop of fact.

In one other quatrain, Nostradamus seems to foretell Donald Trump can be impeached. It additionally notes that Trump will expel all enemies. Is that this referring to all of the unlawful immigrants that the President has been concentrating on? Not solely is he stopping refugees from coming into America, he’s additionally deporting those that should not residents of the US. Have a look and make your personal judgment:

“The nice Senate will ordain the triumph For one who afterwards can be vanquished, pushed out; on the sound of the trumpet of his adherents there can be Put up on the market their possessions, enemies expelled.”

Russia’s potential involvement and intervention within the U.S. election has been a giant subject of debate in the US during the last couple of months. Nostradamus allegedly had some perception into Russia’s political standing in 2017 involving its neighbor Ukraine. He predicted that the 2 nations would attain a peaceable settlement.

Nevertheless, regardless of the promise of peace between the 2 nations, Nostradamus additionally hinted there could also be an excellent conflict. One startling prediction mentions “Sizzling Wars” probably involving organic warfare. Some are speculating the time period “Sizzling Wars” could, in truth, be pointing to a different nice world conflict: World Warfare III.

In one other quatrain, Nostradamus mentions a “nice metropolis” that might be interpreted as Mexico, which was often known as the Aztec city-state Tenochtitlan throughout Nostradamus’ time. Does the next quatrain seek advice from Donald Trump want to construct a wall across the U.S. and Mexican border? The quatrain mentions that the town won’t wish to “consent to the nice severity.” Is that this referring to Mexico’s refusal to construct the wall?

“The republic of the nice metropolis Is not going to wish to consent to the nice severity; King summoned by trumpet to exit The ladder on the wall; the town will repent.”

There’s one other quatrain that mentions the “trumpet” who could be very unsettled and is anticipated to interrupt some kind of settlement. Donald Trump has points with the North American Free Commerce Settlement (NAFTA), which eradicated most tariffs on items traded between Mexico and Canada. It additionally included processes to get rid of regulatory and different limitations. Trump additionally desires to tug out of the Paris Local weather Settlement. It’s unclear what the final line of the quatrain refers to.

“The trumpet shakes with nice discord. An settlement damaged: lifting the face to heaven: the bloody mouth will swim with blood;

the face anointed with milk and honey lies on the bottom.”

Folks can’t assist however attempt to discover connections between Nostradamus’ predictions and Donald Trump. BuzzFeed discovered a person on the Boing Boing boards who dissected a quatrain that will seek advice from David Duke, who used to steer the Ku Klux Klan and supported Trump throughout his election. “His don” could seek advice from Donald, who finally disavowed Duke, thus “denying him the jug.”

“Father duke outdated in years and choked by thirst, On his final day his don denying him the jug: Into the properly plunged alive he’ll come up lifeless, Senate to the thread loss of life lengthy and light-weight.”

Nostradamus mentions “the nice Royal” in one other quatrain, which can seek advice from Donald Trump’s distant relative King Richard III. A YouTuber identified that Trump loves gold (and has a resort made out of 24-carat gold) and he’s additionally very rich. The brass may seek advice from pennies, or “pence” as they’re identified in Britain. The U.S. vp is Mike Pence. The quatrain additionally refers to a damaged settlement and a bloody conflict.

“The nice Royal certainly one of gold, augmented by brass, The settlement damaged, conflict opened by a younger man: Folks bothered due to a lamented chief, The land can be coated with barbarian blood.”

Some followers of Nostradamus imagine that the seer predicted Trump presidency would result in a nuclear apocalypse. This isn’t precisely a shock to many theorists who assume Nostradamus’ ebook The Prophecies predicted three “antichrists.” Some consultants imagine the primary two had been Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler. Is it potential that Donald Trump is the third antichrist?

Nostradamus famously referred to this third antichrist by the identify of “Mabus” and predicted that their loss of life would result in one thing terrifying, which many have interpreted as a nuclear holocaust:

“Mabus will quickly die, then will come, A horrible undoing of individuals and animals, Directly one will see vengeance, 100 powers, thirst, famine, when the comet will go.”

Whereas it might be attention-grabbing to invest on Nostradamus’ prophecies, a lot of his predictions have been debunked. Leaders from Saddam Hussein to Barack Obama have been linked because the third antichrist. And, regardless of common perception, Nostradamus didn’t write the quatrain that was extensively attributed to him following the Sept. 11 terror assaults. He did, nevertheless, predict the loss of life of King Henry II of France.

“The younger lion will overcome the older one, On the sphere of fight in a single battle; He’ll pierce his eyes by a golden cage,

Two wounds made one, then he dies a merciless loss of life.”

In 1666, a hearth began at a bakery in London that unfold throughout the town and burned for 3 days. Over 70,000 homes, 87 church buildings, St. Paul’s Cathedral, and plenty of different buildings had been destroyed. Whereas solely six deaths had been recorded, it’s potential the deaths of the poor and middle-class weren’t counted and plenty of victims had been cremated within the hearth, so their deaths weren’t recorded.

“The blood of the simply can be demanded of London Burnt by hearth within the yr ’66 The traditional Girl will fall from her excessive place And lots of the identical sect can be killed.”

In 1789, the folks of France revolted. They had been hungry, poor, and indignant with the monarchy, which had dominated the nation for hundreds of years. After the monarchy was overthrown, a republic was established. Revolutionaries had been impressed by each liberal and radical concepts, resulting in the worldwide decline of absolute monarchies and the rise of republics and liberal democracies. Outdated concepts had been changed by Enlightenment ideas of citizenship and inalienable rights.

“From the enslaved populace, songs, Chants and calls for Whereas princes and lords are held captive in prisons. These will sooner or later by headless idiots Be acquired as divine prayers.”

Certainly one of Napoleon’s most well-known prophecies nearly immediately named Napoleon Bonaparte. He mentions the letters “PAU, NAY, LORON,” which flip into “Napaulon Roy,” or Napoleon Bonaparte, when they’re rearranged. Napoleon was some of the well-known French emperors. The quatrain notes his rise to energy. It additionally factors to Napoleon imprisoning the Popes Pius VI and Pius VII.

“PAU, NAY, LORON can be extra of fireside than of the blood, To swim in reward, the nice one to flee to the confluence. He’ll refuse entry to the Piuses, The wicked ones and the Durance will preserve them imprisoned.”

French chemist and microbiologist Louis Pasteur was born in 1822. He’s most identified for his scientific breakthroughs on the causes and prevention of a number of illnesses. He helped stop deaths from puerperal fever and developed the primary vaccine for rabies and anthrax. Most individuals know him for inventing the strategy of treating milk and wine to cease bacterial contamination (pasteurization). He’s sometimes called the “father of microbiology.”

“The misplaced factor is found, hidden for a lot of centuries. Pasteur can be celebrated nearly as a God-like determine. That is when the moon completes her nice cycle, However by different rumors he shall be dishonored.”

Adolf Hitler and the German military, crossing over to seize France are referenced as “beasts” in one other certainly one of Nostradamus’ predictions. Hitler was dictator of the German Reich. He launched World Warfare II and was answerable for the Holocaust.

“From the depths of the West of Europe, A younger youngster can be born of poor folks, He who by his tongue will seduce an excellent troop; His fame will enhance in direction of the realm of the East. Beasts ferocious from starvation will swim throughout rivers: The better one will trigger it to be dragged in an iron cage When the Germany youngster will observe nothing.”

Throughout World Warfare II, the US dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. An estimated 70,000 folks died in Hiroshima. Roughly 70 p.c of the town’s buildings had been fully destroyed. Round 35,000 folks had been killed in Nagasaki. The Nagasaki bombing was the second and, to this point, the final time a nuclear weapon was utilized in fight. It was additionally the second detonation of a plutonium bomb.

“Close to the gates and inside two cities There can be scourges the like of which was by no means seen, Famine inside plague, folks put out by metal, Crying to the nice immortal God for aid.”

Nostradamus additionally reportedly predicted the deaths of two well-known Kennedys. U.S. President John F. Kennedy was shot (“struck down within the day by a thunderbolt”) on Nov. 22, 1963, at 12:30 p.m.. His brother Robert Kennedy was shot at 1 a.m. (“one other falls at night time time”) 5 years later. In 1963, pupil riots came about in London and Paris. 5 years later, Florence skilled big flooding (“a pestilence in Tuscany”).

“The nice man can be struck down within the day by a thunderbolt, An evil deed foretold by the bearer of a petition. One other falls at nighttime. Battle at Reins, London, and a pestilence in Tuscany.”

Some consultants imagine that Nostradamus predicted the 1969 mission to the moon. Neil Armstrong, the primary man on the moon, and Buzz Aldrin traveled on Apollo 11 to achieve the floor of the moon. The 2 astronauts spent lower than two-and-a-half hours on the astronomical physique. Armstrong stated famously within the broadcast again to earth: “one small step for [a] man, one big leap for mankind.”

“He’ll come to journey to the nook of Luna, The place he can be captured and put in a wierd land, The unripe fruits to be topic of nice scandal, Nice blame, to 1, nice reward.”

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newstfionline · 6 years

Text

Donald Trump’s First Year Sets Record for U.S. Special Ops

By Nick Turse, TomDispatch, December 15, 2017

“We don’t know exactly where we’re at in the world, militarily, and what we’re doing,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, in October. That was in the wake of the combat deaths of four members of the Special Operations forces in the West African nation of Niger. Graham and other senators expressed shock about the deployment, but the global sweep of America’s most elite forces is, at best, an open secret.

Earlier this year before that same Senate committee--though Graham was not in attendance--General Raymond Thomas, the chief of U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), offered some clues about the planetwide reach of America’s most elite troops. “We operate and fight in every corner of the world,” he boasted. “Rather than a mere ‘break-glass-in-case-of-war’ force, we are now proactively engaged across the ‘battle space’ of the Geographic Combatant Commands… providing key integrating and enabling capabilities to support their campaigns and operations.”

In 2017, U.S. Special Operations forces, including Navy SEALs and Army Green Berets, deployed to 149 countries around the world, according to figures provided to TomDispatch by U.S. Special Operations Command. That’s about 75% of the nations on the planet and represents a jump from the 138 countries that saw such deployments in 2016 under the Obama administration. It’s also a jump of nearly 150% from the last days of George W. Bush’s White House. This record-setting number of deployments comes as American commandos are battling a plethora of terror groups in quasi-wars that stretch from Africa and the Middle East to Asia.

“Most Americans would be amazed to learn that U.S. Special Operations Forces have been deployed to three quarters of the nations on the planet,” observes William Hartung, the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy. “There is little or no transparency as to what they are doing in these countries and whether their efforts are promoting security or provoking further tension and conflict.”

Growth Opportunity. America’s elite troops were deployed to 149 nations in 2017, according to U.S. Special Operations Command.

“Since 9/11, we expanded the size of our force by almost 75% in order to take on mission-sets that are likely to endure,” SOCOM’s Thomas told the Senate Armed Services Committee in May. Since 2001, from the pace of operations to their geographic sweep, the activities of U.S. Special Operations forces (SOF) have, in fact, grown in every conceivable way. On any given day, about 8,000 special operators--from a command numbering roughly 70,000--are deployed in approximately 80 countries.

“The increase in the use of Special Forces since 9/11 was part of what was then referred to as the Global War on Terror as a way to keep the United States active militarily in areas beyond its two main wars, Iraq and Afghanistan,” Hartung told TomDispatch. “The even heavier reliance on Special Forces during the Obama years was part of a strategy of what I think of as ‘politically sustainable warfare,’ in which the deployment of tens of thousands of troops to a few key theaters of war was replaced by a ‘lighter footprint’ in more places, using drones, arms sales and training, and Special Forces.”

The Trump White House has attacked Barack Obama’s legacy on nearly all fronts. It has undercut, renounced, or reversed actions of his ranging from trade pacts to financial and environmental regulations to rules that shielded transgender employees from workplace discrimination. When it comes to Special Operations forces, however, the Trump administration has embraced their use in the style of the former president, while upping the ante even further. President Trump has also provided military commanders greater authority to launch attacks in quasi-war zones like Yemen and Somalia. According to Micah Zenko, a national security expert and Whitehead Senior Fellow at the think tank Chatham House, those forces conducted five times as many lethal counterterrorism missions in such non-battlefield countries in the Trump administration’s first six months in office as they did during Obama’s final six months.

A Wide World of War. U.S. commandos specialize in 12 core skills, from “unconventional warfare” (helping to stoke insurgencies and regime change) to “foreign internal defense” (supporting allies’ efforts to guard themselves against terrorism, insurgencies, and coups). Counterterrorism--fighting what SOCOM calls violent extremist organizations or VEOs--is, however, the specialty America’s commandos have become best known for in the post-9/11 era.

In the spring of 2002, before the Senate Armed Services Committee, SOCOM chief General Charles Holland touted efforts to “improve SOF capabilities to prosecute unconventional warfare and foreign internal defense programs to better support friends and allies. The value of these programs, demonstrated in the Afghanistan campaign,” he said, “can be particularly useful in stabilizing countries and regions vulnerable to terrorist infiltration.”

Over the last decade and a half, however, there’s been little evidence America’s commandos have excelled at “stabilizing countries and regions vulnerable to terrorist infiltration.” This was reflected in General Thomas’s May testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee. “The threat posed by VEOs remains the highest priority for USSOCOM in both focus and effort,” he explained.

However, unlike Holland who highlighted only one country--Afghanistan--where special operators were battling militants in 2002, Thomas listed a panoply of terrorist hot spots bedeviling America’s commandos a decade and a half later. “Special Operations Forces,” he said, “are the main effort, or major supporting effort for U.S. VEO-focused operations in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, across the Sahel of Africa, the Philippines, and Central/South America--essentially, everywhere Al Qaeda (AQ) and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) are to be found.”

Officially, there are about 5,300 U.S. troops in Iraq. (The real figure is thought to be higher.) Significant numbers of them are special operators training and advising Iraqi government forces and Kurdish troops. Elite U.S. forces have also played a crucial role in Iraq’s recent offensive against the militants of the Islamic State, providing artillery and airpower, including SOCOM’s AC-130W Stinger II gunships with 105mm cannons that allow them to serve as flying howitzers. In that campaign, Special Operations forces were “thrust into a new role of coordinating fire support,” wrote Linda Robinson, a senior international policy analyst with the RAND Corporation who spent seven weeks in Iraq, Syria, and neighboring countries earlier this year. “This fire support is even more important to the Syrian Democratic Forces, a far more lightly armed irregular force which constitutes the major ground force fighting ISIS in Syria.”

Special Operations forces have, in fact, played a key role in the war effort in Syria, too. While American commandos have been killed in battle there, Kurdish and Arab proxies--known as the Syrian Democratic Forces--have done the lion’s share of the fighting and dying to take back much of the territory once held by the Islamic State. SOCOM’s Thomas spoke about this in surprisingly frank terms at a security conference in Aspen, Colorado, this summer. “We’re right now inside the capital of [ISIS’s] caliphate at Raqqa [Syria]. We’ll have that back soon with our proxies, a surrogate force of 50,000 people that are working for us and doing our bidding,” he said. “So two and a half years of fighting this fight with our surrogates, they’ve lost thousands, we’ve only lost two service members. Two is too many, but it’s, you know, a relief that we haven’t had the kind of losses that we’ve had elsewhere.”

This year, U.S. special operators were killed in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and the Sahelian nations of Niger and Mali (although reports indicate that a Green Beret who died in that country was likely strangled by U.S. Navy SEALs). In Libya, SEALs recently kidnapped a suspect in the 2012 attacks in Benghazi that killed four Americans, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens. In the Philippines, U.S. Special Forces joined the months-long battle to recapture Marawi City after it was taken by Islamist militants earlier this year.

And even this growing list of counterterror hotspots is only a fraction of the story. In Africa, the countries singled out by Thomas--Somalia, Libya, and those in the Sahel--are just a handful of the nations to which American commandos were deployed in 2017. As recently reported at Vice News, U.S. Special Operations forces were active in at least 33 nations across the continent, with troops heavily concentrated in and around countries now home to a growing number of what the Pentagon’s Africa Center for Strategic Studies calls “active militant Islamist groups.” While Defense Department spokeswoman Major Audricia Harris would not provide details on the range of operations being carried out by the elite forces, it’s known that they run the gamut from conducting security assessments at U.S. embassies to combat operations.

Data provided by SOCOM also reveals a special ops presence in 33 European countries this year. “Outside of Russia and Belarus we train with virtually every country in Europe either bilaterally or through various multinational events,” Major Michael Weisman, a spokesman for U.S. Special Operations Command Europe, told TomDispatch.

For the past two years, in fact, the U.S. has maintained a Special Operations contingent in almost every nation on Russia’s western border. “[W]e’ve had persistent presence in every country--every NATO country and others on the border with Russia doing phenomenal things with our allies, helping them prepare for their threats,” said SOCOM’s Thomas, mentioning the Baltic states as well as Romania, Poland, Ukraine, and Georgia by name. These activities represent, in the words of General Charles Cleveland, chief of U.S. Army Special Operations Command from 2012 to 2015 and now the senior mentor to the Army War College, “undeclared campaigns” by commandos. Weisman, however, balked at that particular language. “U.S. Special Operations forces have been deployed persistently and at the invitation of our allies in the Baltic States and Poland since 2014 as part of the broader U.S. European Command and Department of Defense European Deterrence Initiative,” he told TomDispatch. “The persistent presence of U.S. SOF alongside our Allies sends a clear message of U.S. commitment to our allies and the defense of our NATO Alliance.”

Asia is also a crucial region for America’s elite forces. In addition to Iran and Russia, SOCOM’s Thomas singled out China and North Korea as nations that are “becoming more aggressive in challenging U.S. interests and partners through the use of asymmetric means that often fall below the threshold of conventional conflict.” He went on to say that the “ability of our special operators to conduct low-visibility special warfare operations in politically sensitive environments make them uniquely suited to counter the malign activities of our adversaries in this domain.”

U.S.-North Korean saber rattling has brought increased attention to Special Forces Detachment Korea (SFDK), the longest serving U.S. Special Forces unit in the world. It would, of course, be called into action should a war ever break out on the peninsula. In such a conflict, U.S. and South Korean elite forces would unite under the umbrella of the Combined Unconventional Warfare Task Force. In March, commandos--including, according to some reports, members of the Army’s Delta Force and the Navy’s SEAL Team 6--took part in Foal Eagle, a training exercise, alongside conventional U.S. forces and their South Korean counterparts.

U.S. special operators also were involved in training exercises and operations elsewhere across Asia and the Pacific. In June, in Okinawa, Japan, for example, airmen from the 17th Special Operations Squadron (17th SOS) carried out their annual (and oddly spelled) “Day of the Jakal,” the launch of five Air Force Special Operations MC-130J Commando II aircraft to practice, according to a military news release, “airdrops, aircraft landings, and rapid infiltration and exfiltration of equipment.” According to Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Dube of the 17th SOS, “It shows how we can meet the emerging mission sets for both SOCKOR [Special Operations Command Korea] and SOCPAC [Special Operations Command Pacific] out here in the Pacific theater.”

At about the same time, members of the Air Force’s 353rd Special Operations Group carried out Teak Jet, a joint combined exchange training, or JCET, mission meant to improve military coordination between U.S. and Japanese forces. In June and July, intelligence analysts from the Air Force’s 353rd Special Operations Group took part in Talisman Saber, a biennial military training exercise conducted in various locations across Australia.

More for War. The steady rise in the number of elite operators, missions, and foreign deployments since 9/11 appears in no danger of ending, despite years of worries by think-tank experts and special ops supporters about the effects of such a high operations tempo on these troops. “Most SOF units are employed to their sustainable limit,” General Thomas said earlier this year. “Despite growing demand for SOF, we must prioritize the sourcing of these demands as we face a rapidly changing security environment.” Yet the number of deployments still grew to a record 149 nations in 2017. (During the Obama years, deployments reached 147 in 2015.)

At a recent conference on special operations held in Washington, D.C., influential members of the Senate and House armed services committees acknowledged that there were growing strains on the force. “I do worry about overuse of SOF,” said House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry, a Republican. One solution offered by both Jack Reed, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Republican Senator Joni Ernst, a combat veteran who served in Iraq, was to bulk up Special Operations Command yet more. “We have to increase numbers and resources,” Reed insisted.

“Almost by definition, the dizzying number of deployments undertaken by U.S. Special Operations forces in recent years would be hard to track. But few in Congress seem to be even making the effort,” said William Hartung. “This is a colossal mistake if one is concerned about reining in the globe-spanning U.S. military strategy of the post-9/11 era, which has caused more harm than good and done little to curb terrorism.”

However, with special ops deployments rising above Bush and Obama administration levels to record-setting heights and the Trump administration embracing the use of commandos in quasi-wars in places like Somalia and Yemen, there appears to be little interest in the White House or on Capitol Hill in reining in the geographic scope and sweep of America’s most secretive troops. And the results, say experts, may be dire. “While the retreat from large ‘boots on the ground’ wars like the Bush administration’s intervention in Iraq is welcome,” said Hartung, “the proliferation of Special Operations forces is a dangerous alternative, given the prospects of getting the United States further embroiled in complex overseas conflicts.”

Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch, a fellow at the Nation Institute, and a contributing writer for the Intercept. He is the author of the bestselling Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam. His latest book is Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan. His website is NickTurse.com.

#U.S. Special Operations forces #SOCOM #US commandos

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