Zero Dark Thirty Two
October 28, 2019
“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”
“Revolutionaries do not make revolutions! The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and when they can pick it up. Armed uprising by itself has never yet led to revolution.”
– Hannah Arendt
He Ran, But He Couldn’t Hide – Death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is no more. The elusive 48-year-old head of the Islamic State died during a US military operation in Syria, five years after he launched a self-proclaimed caliphate that inspired violence worldwide. In a televised announcement on Sunday, President Trump stated: “Last night the United States brought the world’s Number One terrorist leader to justice. He was a sick and depraved man, and now he’s gone.”
US intelligence recently tracked Baghdadi, a veteran militant jihadist who spent a year in a US-run prison in Iraq, to a volatile area in Syria’s northwest Idlib province near the border with Turkey. Saturday night, with support from Kurdish forces and the CIA, and cooperation from Russia and Turkey, US troops from the elite military unit Delta Force were helicoptered in under cover of darkness.
When the assault began on the compound where the fugitive terrorist had been hiding, Baghdadi took three of his six children and retreated into an underground tunnel, where he detonated his bomb-laden vest. Two women wearing explosive vests, identified as Baghdadi’s wives, also blew themselves up. Nearly 12 children were removed from the compound, but where they were taken is unclear. Two US servicemen received non-life-threatening wounds in the operation.
Vice President Mike Pence said he and the president were informed on Thursday of Baghdadi’s likely location; Trump authorized the mission on Saturday morning. DNA testing quickly run on samples taken from Baghdadi’s remains, along with DNA material voluntarily provided by one of his daughters, confirmed his identity.
Back To Russia With Love From Republicans
- Maria Butina, the gun-loving young Russian woman who infiltrated conservative circles and befriended prominent Republicans during the 2016 campaign, arrived in Moscow Saturday, a day after being released from prison and deported.
- She pleaded guilty to conspiring to act as a foreign agent in Russia’s effort to influence US politics, and served more than 15 months in Tallahassee Federal Correctional Institution.
- She was greeted as a hero and welcomed home at Moscow’s main international airport by her father and a spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry. State news broadcasts portrayed Butina as an innocent victim of Cold War-style paranoia in the US. Butina complained about prison conditions in the US and said she had kept a detailed diary of her experience that she planned to turn into a “creative project.” (NYT)
No Chill in the Streets of Chile
- Tens of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets last week in Santiago, Chile to protest social inequality. It was the most serious uprising since the fall of Augusto Pinochet.
- Police sent hundreds of shooting and beating victims, with gunshot and head wounds and head fractures, to a dilapidated health clinic ill-equipped to care for all the working class wounded. At least 19 have died nationwide, but many more deaths are expected due to the clinic’s lack of basic medical supplies, like surgical gloves, syringes, masks and flasks for blood samples.
- Resources are so limited that physicians and nurses must decide whether to withhold supplies for patients near death in favor of those with a better chance of survival, emphasizing the chasm between services at this run-down structure and gleaming private clinics just 6 miles away. (Guardian)
Increasing Toll of Iraqi Protests
- In Baghdad on Friday hundreds of protesters waving Iraqi flags faced off against black-clad riot police.
- Iraq has been gripped by an unprecedented wave of nationalist and anti-sectarian protests in recent weeks, with predominantly Shia demonstrators taking to the streets, blaming the government for the country’s dysfunction and determined to upend the entire Shia political and religious governing establishment that has been in place since the toppling of Saddam Hussein in 2003.
- So far the death toll stands at over 200, and Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi, who came into office a year ago, has resisted public pressure to step down. (Guardian)
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Sometimes, You Should Trust the Chief
- President Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly spoke at an event in Georgia, and said he had given the president some advice as he was vacating his post, and he “felt bad” because the president didn’t follow the advice, and now the president is facing impeachment.
- “Whatever you do, don’t hire a yes man’ — someone who won’t tell you the truth,” Kelly said he told Trump. “Don’t do that. Because if you do, I believe you will be impeached.”
- Needless to say, Trump denied Kelly had ever said that, or anything like that. “If he would have said that I would have thrown him out of the office. He just wants to come back into the action like everybody else.”
- White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham exclaimed the following: “I worked with John Kelly, and he was totally unequipped to handle the genius of our great President.” (Guardian)
A Quid Pro Quo Presidency
- According to the lawyer for US envoy to the EU, Gordon Sondland, his client did believe that President Trump’s conditioning a meeting at the White House on Ukraine’s president opening investigations into Trump’s political rivals was a quid pro quo.
- Sondland gave that admission when testifying before the House Intelligence Committee as part of the ongoing impeachment inquiry. But Sondland denied he knew about Trump’s withholding millions of dollars in military aid unless and until Ukraine publicly announced it was investigating Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son.
- However, testimony given last week by Bill Taylor, Acting US ambassador to Ukraine, contradicted Sondland’s answers that he didn’t know about, or couldn’t recall knowing about, the aid being withheld in exchange for investigations by Ukraine. Several Intelligence Committee members want Sondland called back to clarify some of his previous answers. (WSJ)
- From Simple Exchange To Shakedown: The Evolution Of ‘Quid Pro Quo’ (NPR)
Additional USA News
- As President Trump Tweets And Deletes, The Historical Record Takes Shape (NPR)
- Nearly 1 Million Customers To Lose Power In Planned PG&E Power Outages (NPR)
- 1.5 Million Packages a Day: The Internet Brings Chaos to N.Y. Streets (NYT, $)
- ‘Me v Trump’: Joe Biden bullish despite polling and fundraising problems (Guardian)
All The President’s Women
- Former executive editor of the National Enquirer, Barry Levine, and author Monique El-Faizy, have joined up to craft a lurid and informative examination of the weaponized libido of America’s 45th president. It’s entitled: All the President’s Women: Donald Trump and the Making of a Predator.
- According to investigative reporter Ronan Farrow, Trump’s secrets were stashed in a safe in Levine’s office until they were shredded in December 2016 – a claim the Enquirer denies.
- The narrative spans Trump’s days growing up in Queens to his arrival in the Oval Office, and chronicles everything in between, mommy and daughter issues included. Some of the information is well-known, some is new, and a whole lot is disturbing.
- All the President’s Women also examines evangelical support for Trump and Trump’s religious life. El-Faizy has some experience in documenting similar subject matter. She is the author of God and Country, which examined the rise of the evangelical community in the aftermath of George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election. (Guardian)
;Additional Reads
- How To Find A Mentor And Make It Work (NPR) And on the flipside, advice for how mentors should engage with mentees: How to Give People Advice They’ll Be Delighted to Take (NYT, $)
- The American Tipping System Makes No Sense (Atlantic, $) and The Tipping System Is Immoral: (You should still generally leave 30 percent.) (NYT, $)
- Why do we think cats are unfriendly? (BBC) and Dog People Live Longer. But Why? (NPR)
- Mexico’s Day of the Dead festival rises from the graveyard and into pop culture (Guardian) and The Deadliest Halloween Costume Of All (NPR)
- Inside Instagram’s nudity ban (Vox)