War on Terror 9/11

orphan category

reboot combine with war on drugs narco terror extra jud killings 9 25

see 911

---

mma

Fox News embeds with feds bringing the war on terror to Trump’s invasion of Chicago

The military created its modern embed program to sell the post-9/11 wars. Now, as Trump unleashes his deportation machine on Chicago and beyond, Fox News is along for the ride.

Written by John Knefel

Published09/17/25

Men in military fatigues loitered out of focus as Fox News national correspondent Griff Jenkins, in an understated, earth-toned shirt, somberly described the launch of a new, multi-agency operation in a city one of his colleagues had recently described as “a war zone.” Jenkins was on what Fox anchor Bill Hemmer referred to as an “exclusive ride-along,” embedded with militarized forces in tactical gear as they — in the words of their top commander — went hunting.

“Operation Midway Blitz is fully underway,” Jenkins intoned during the September 9 segment. “They are surging in this elite team of ICE agents behind me, just moments ago executed a criminal arrest warrant for an illegal Mexican agent.”

Although Jenkins was in Chicago, not the outskirts of Baghdad in 2003, the optics couldn’t have been any clearer if former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were holding a special deck of 55 cards. Operation Midway Blitz was MAGA’s updated take on Operation Iraqi Freedom’s “shock and awe,” and compliant media were along for the ride.

As former President George W. Bush launched his global war on terror after the attacks on 9/11, the U.S. military modernized its approach to journalistic access and created an embed program — attaching reporters to front-line units with the ultimate goal of selling the invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. While journalists had a modicum of freedom from military censorship during the Vietnam War, which resulted in negative coverage that the brass blamed for the U.S. failure there, the model was different by 2003.

The new approach was to stymie critical reporting before it went public, what some researchers refer to as a “precensorship” regime. The predictable result was coverage that legitimized the Iraq War and deemphasized stories that centered on Iraqi victims and exposed the horrors of the occupation.

Now, Fox News and the Trump administration are bringing that paradigm to U.S. cities as the wars on terror, drugs, and immigrants congeal into an all-purpose authoritarian campaign on domestic soil.

Trump hasn’t deployed National Guard troops to Chicago yet, though he has repeatedly made that threat. His new target is Memphis, Tennessee, in part because Republican Gov. Bill Lee supports the effort, which will include other federal agencies as well. Operation Midway Blitz, on the other hand, is an element of Trump’s mass deportation campaign, which is spearheaded by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The stakes for Trump’s militarized approach were made plain on September 12, when an ICE agent shot and killed a man after a vehicle stop just outside Chicago.

Jenkins’ report was filed three days earlier, but it clearly showed how such stops and arrests can quickly escalate.

Video

Citation

From the September 9, 2025, edition of Fox News' America's Newsroom

“Take a look at this video,” Jenkins said, describing the violent detention of a Chicago resident. “Early they captured him coming out of his house. He got into his vehicle and tried to hide in there.”

“The ICE agents were forced to break the window and extract him,” Jenkins continued over footage of agents wearing camouflage and body armor — some in masks — throwing the man to the ground and handcuffing him.

“Griff, you saw some action — immediately,” Hemmer said to close out the segment.

Fox News helped bring the war on terror to the southern border

Jenkins’s stunt represents an escalation from Fox News in that it imposes the logic and aesthetics of foreign war reporting on a major U.S. city, but the network has a long history of working alongside armed agents of the state to produce what are essentially press releases, most recently as it pertains to immigration enforcement.

The parallels between the heady days of the George W. Bush administration and Trump’s second term are everywhere, for those curious to look.

As the industrial base of the war on terror evolved to focus on the U.S. southern border, so too did the complimentary media coverage. The center of gravity for the right’s national security priorities shifted from places like Fallujah to places like Texas’ Eagle Pass, and Fox News reporters and producers could titillate their audiences with dramatic, war-like footage much closer to home.

Fox’s Bill Melugin, who served for years as a border correspondent, frequently embeds with ICE units and state law enforcement like the Texas Department of Public Safety. Like Fox’s recent Chicago footage, Melugin’s coverage has served to reinforce the right-wing argument that the border was a war zone where only a militarized response would suffice.

Melugin’s own reporting helps illustrate how the war on terror metastasized to fit the needs of the Republican Party — and Fox News — in the Trump era. As Media Matters previously reported:

Melugin was the key driver of one of the biggest immigration stories of 2021, the perceived crisis of Haitian migrants who had established a small camp under the International Bridge in Del Rio, Texas. There was a crisis, but it was for the Haitians who were relegated to extreme deprivation, humiliation, and stigma — not for the residents of Del Rio or for the United States more broadly.

Melugin initially used an airborne drone to cover the story, later appearing on Tucker Carlson Tonight repeatedly to discuss his footage. When the Federal Aviation Administration instituted a two-week flight restriction over Del Rio, the Texas Department of Public Safety allowed him to embed in an agency helicopter to continue his coverage. The FAA later gave Fox clearance to fly the drone again, which Melugin did, keeping the manufactured crisis in the headlines.

…

He regularly refers to families as “family units,” the official, and dehumanizing, term used by the Department of Homeland Security. His reports often sound like he’s on safari, hunting prey. “Just a short time ago we had a group of runners come zipping right by us,” he said in November. “We found two of those runners hiding in a bush. Very difficult to see them.” Later in the segment, Melugin referenced a “remarkable” video published by far-right website Breitbart that showed a man trying to sink rafts migrants were using to cross the Rio Grande.

In April 2022, Melugin co-bylined an article warning that “Border Patrol apprehended at least 23 people coming across the southern border whose names are on the terror watchlist in 2021.” The story served as the basis for at least seven segments the day it was published, part of a longrunning and false right-wing narrative that terrorists were widely attempting to infiltrate the United States through the southern border.

Fox News makes the war on terror great again

Jenkins’ embed is play-acting, another form of threat inflation that simultaneously casts Chicago as a war zone — despite the city’s historically low rates of gun violence — and Trump as its liberator. His performance is an attempt to legitimize Trump’s campaign, and to naturalize the full importation of war on terror logic to U.S. streets. Beyond Chicago, Fox has supported Trump’s threats to other cities, including sending in troops to Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and New York City.

And if Melugin’s vague fearmongering about terrorists at the border in the early 2020s felt like an afterimage of the 9/11 era, Fox’s coverage of the first six months of Trump’s second term is more like a targeting scope coming into focus. The parallels between the heady days of the George W. Bush administration and Trump’s second term are everywhere, for those curious to look.

The war on terror is back, and this time it's wearing a bright red MAGA hat.

Fox anchor Harris Faulkner recently echoed Bush’s that “either you are with us or with the terrorists” when she responded to Trump’s extrajudicial killing of 11 people on a boat off the coast of Venezuela on September 2. Addressing critics of Trump’s order, Faulkner asked: “Are they working against America and for the drug cartels?” (Trump has since targeted a second boat, killing three people, and claims to have “knocked off” a third without offering further details.)

Fox celebrated the initial strike itself and has been pushing for military escalation in Venezuela — up to and including regime change. The playbook is so familiar Fox’s Jesse Watters reanimated one of the key phrases used to sell the invasion of Iraq. “That drugged out dinghy was a floating weapon of mass destruction packed with enough poison to kill countless Americans,” Watters said on September 3.

Video

Citation

From the September 3, 2025, edition of Fox News' The Five

A range of Fox personalities celebrated Trump’s decision just days after taking office to send people to Guantanamo Bay, perhaps the defining symbol of both the beginning of the war on terror and its seeming permanence. Pete Hegseth, the former Fox & Friends Weekend co-host now serving as Trump’s secretary of the newly renamed Department of War, deployed to the Guantanamo detention camp with the National Guard following 9/11. Two decades later, he returned there in his official capacity “to speak to service members who are currently supporting the illegal alien holding operations being led by the Department of Homeland Security.”

The war on terror is back, and this time it's wearing a bright red MAGA hat. But for those not attached — in every sense of the word — to the government forces currently terrorizing U.S. cities, it’s clear the war never even ended at all.

---

an 9 25

Evidence: The government seeks to deport an Ohio chaplain, but its case has come under scrutiny from supporters and legal advocates.
Support: The U.S. paints the chaplain as a link in terrorist organizations, but in Ohio, families laud his work at a children’s hospital and in the community.
Test Case: If the government secures its quest for deportation, experts say the case could empower the Trump administration’s mass deportation blueprint.

*These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.

In the weeks leading up to July 9, Ayman Soliman told friends he was terrified of losing the sanctuary he’d found after fleeing Egypt in 2014 and building a new life as a Muslim chaplain at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital.

Soliman, 51, was to show up at 9 a.m. on that date for his first check-in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement since losing his asylum status. He’d been granted the protections in 2018 under the first Trump administration. Then, in the last month of the Biden presidency, immigration authorities moved to revoke them based on sharply disputed claims of fraud and aid to a terrorist group. Once President Donald Trump returned to office weeks later, court records show, immigration officials bumped up the terrorism claims and formalized the asylum termination June 3.

By the time of Soliman’s ICE appointment, friends said, he was distraught over the prospect of being returned to the regime that had jailed him for documenting protests as a journalist. He arrived at the agency’s field office in Blue Ash, Ohio, accompanied by fellow clergy and a couple of Democratic state lawmakers.

“I didn’t come to America seeking a better life. I was escaping death,” he said in a video filmed just before he entered.

Inside, Soliman’s attorneys said, he was shocked to find FBI agents waiting for him. They interrogated him for three hours about his charity work more than a decade ago in Egypt, the basis for the Department of Homeland Security accusations of illegal aid, or “material support,” to Islamist militants.

His lawyer eventually emerged from the ICE office holding a belt and a wallet. Soliman had been swept into custody, joining a record 61,000 people now in ICE detention. As he awaits an immigration court trial Sept. 25, he is being held in a county jail run by a sheriff who posted a sign outside reading, “Illegal Aliens Here.”

Legal observers are watching the chaplain’s case as a bellwether of the Trump administration’s ability to merge the vast federal powers of immigration and counterterrorism. The case is also a reminder, they say, of sweeping post-9/11 statutes that both Republican and Democratic administrations have been accused of abusing, especially in cases involving Muslims.

Material support laws ban almost any type of aid to U.S.-designated foreign terrorist groups, extending far beyond the basics of weapons, personnel and money. Prosecutors describe the laws as an invaluable tool against would-be attackers, but civil liberties groups have long complained of overreach.

Over the years, successive administrations have faced legal challenges over how they wield the power; a milestone Supreme Court decision during the Obama administration upheld the laws as constitutional. Now, however, there are particular fears about the material support “sledgehammer,” as one legal scholar put it, in the hands of Trump, who has been openly hostile toward Muslims and determined to deport a million people who are in the United States without permission.

“These statutes are written extraordinarily broadly with the unstated premise that discretion will be exercised responsibly. And one thing this administration has shown is that it doesn’t understand what it means to exercise discretion responsibly,” said David Cole, a Georgetown Law professor who argued high-profile material support cases and served as national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

At issue are DHS allegations that Soliman’s involvement with an Islamic charity provided material support to the Muslim Brotherhood. But neither the charity nor the Brotherhood is a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, and an Egyptian court found no official ties between the groups.

The Biden-era DHS, which first flagged the issue, said it would revoke Soliman’s asylum if “a preponderance of the evidence supports termination” after a hearing, according to the December notice. At the time, court records show, the material support allegation was listed as a secondary concern after more common asylum questions about the veracity of official documents and his claims of persecution in Egypt.

Once Trump came to power weeks later, Soliman’s attorneys said, the material support claims metastasized, with U.S. authorities declaring the Muslim Brotherhood a Tier III, or undesignated, terrorist group and adding new arguments about ties to Hamas. The Brotherhood, a nearly century-old Islamist political movement, renounced violence in the 1970s, though Hamas and other spinoffs are on the U.S. blacklist. In addition to the Egypt-related concerns, DHS filings about Soliman had noted warrants for “murder and terrorism” in Iraq — a country Soliman says he’s never visited.

By elevating the national security argument, Soliman’s lawyers said, DHS was able to bypass an immigration judge and order the chaplain held without bond as “potentially dangerous.” An established terrorism nexus means less transparency for immigrants — and more power for the authorities.

“DHS is judge, jury and executioner,” said Robert Ratliff, one of Soliman’s attorneys.

The idea of Soliman as a secret militant has outraged residents who know him locally as “the interfaith imam” and the first Muslim on the pastoral care team at Cincinnati Children’s, a top-ranked pediatric hospital. Colleagues described a popular chaplain with nicknames for the tiny patients and soothing words for their bleary-eyed parents.

Judy Ragsdale, the former pastoral care director who hired Soliman in 2021 shortly before retiring, said she wrote a letter to hospital leaders imploring them to speak out against the allegations that could return him to certain persecution in Egypt. He lost authorization to work in June, when his asylum was terminated.

“This is a ‘Schindler’s List’ moment,” Ragsdale said she told hospital leaders. “And if you don’t stand up for Ayman, you’re complicit in what’s happening to him.”

Some fear DHS is parlaying the scope and secrecy of counterterrorism laws into a weapon to boost the president’s mass-deportation mission.

Immigrant rights groups say a sped-up campaign with fewer guardrails for due process is already leading to removals based on evidence that hasn’t been fully vetted. If DHS is successful in test cases like Soliman’s, they say, material support claims could be more easily applied to immigration cases with even tenuous links to militant factions, including newly designated cartels.

The White House referred questions to Homeland Security, which routed a request for comment to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services; a spokesperson there said in a statement that the agency generally “does not discuss the details of individual immigration cases and adjudication decisions.”

“An alien — even with a pending application or lawful status — is not shielded from immigration enforcement action,” the statement said. The FBI declined to comment.

Jeffrey Breinholt, an architect of the material support statutes who spent three decades as a federal terrorism prosecutor, defends the laws as crucial to closing loopholes that were exploited by foreign militant groups and their domestic sympathizers.

Breinholt, who retired in 2024, said he has no concerns about the widening scope as it converges with Trump’s deportation push. The designation of cartels, he said, “is a natural outgrowth of the success we have had with ‘material support’ crime.”

To Cole and other critics, however, the Soliman case could be “the canary in the coal mine.”

More Than a Chaplain

Within a few hours of Soliman’s detention, dozens showed up for an impromptu rally and news conference in the ICE center parking lot. That backup has since grown into a hundreds-strong campaign to refute the DHS allegations, which supporters call a resurgence of anti-Muslim fearmongering that has persisted across party lines since the 9/11 attacks 24 years ago this month.

“Any time you have a brown man or a Muslim man and you use the words ‘FBI’ and ‘red flag,’ you don’t have to say any more,” said Tala Ali, a friend of Soliman’s who heads the board of a Cincinnati mosque where he sometimes led prayers.

Voices calling for Soliman’s release include parents who met him in the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit. The families are in disbelief that the chaplain they’d grown close to is now jailed in a high-stakes international case. They knew he’d fled Egypt but said they were learning details of his ordeal through the campaign to free him.

“It would be very easy to be resentful and be angry with the world when you have to live through that kind of trauma, and he’s not like that at all. He’s taking on other peoples’ trauma,” said Heather Barrow, whose infant daughter, Mya, died in the NICU last year.

She said Soliman stepped in to spare her grieving family the heartache of making funeral arrangements for a 5-month-old. He attended Mya’s celebration of life and, later, a butterfly release on June 7, which would’ve been her first birthday. A month later, he was in an ICE cell.

“I was like, how is this happening? He was just at our house,” Barrow said.

Another couple, Taylor and Bryan McClain, also came to rely on Soliman when their newborn, Violette, arrived at Cincinnati Children’s last year with life-threatening complications. The chaplain steadied them during their 271 days in the NICU, which Taylor said felt like “a roller coaster in a tornado and it’s on fire.” The McClains call him “family.”

“I say with full confidence: Violette is alive because of the advocacy that Ayman gave us,” Taylor said one recent afternoon as she held her daughter, now just over a year old.

Clergy members make up another bloc of support — so many that they built a spreadsheet to divide visiting hours among imams, rabbis and pastors. Immigration advocates and Ohio civil rights leaders have added their names to petitions. So have University of Cincinnati student groups including the Ornithology Club and the Harry Potter Appreciation Club.

More than a dozen people faced criminal charges stemming from a melee after a rally in Soliman’s support; demonstrators and police blame each other for the violence July 17.

Two of Soliman’s fellow chaplains at Cincinnati Children’s, Adam Allen and Elizabeth Diop, said they lost their jobs for refusing to keep quiet about their jailed colleague. Meanwhile, the hospital, a cherished local institution, is taking heat for its silence. Soliman’s supporters launched a letter-writing campaign demanding a response from the hospital, which has said it does not discuss personnel issues.

Signs appeared outside the hospital. “Missing Chaplain,” they said. “Abducted By ICE.”

Cincinnati Children’s Hospital did not return messages seeking comment. In an internal memo published by The Cincinnati Enquirer, hospital CEO Dr. Steve Davis told employees that the lack of response “should not be mistaken for a lack of caring or action.” As a nonprofit, Davis stressed, the hospital has strict rules about “activities that could be characterized as political.”

Soliman’s supporters press on. One recent Sunday evening, about 200 filled a Cincinnati church where preachers from several faith backgrounds urged them to demand his freedom.

“The trial that Imam Ayman is going through is our trial,” Abdulhakim Mohamed, head of the North American Imams Fellowship, told the crowd. “His justice is ours to own. The injustice is also ours to bear.”

Escape From Egypt

Soliman’s entanglement with the Egyptian security apparatus began in 2000 when he joined fellow college students to protest repressive laws, he said in asylum papers.

He was periodically locked up and intimidated after that, he said. The persecution worsened more than a decade ago during uprisings that remade the Middle East by toppling dictators — including Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak — but in some places spiraled into civil war.

Soliman worked as a freelance journalist covering pro-democracy revolts in Egypt and neighboring Libya. Friends say he was also studying to become an imam and served on the board of a local chapter of the Islamic charity Al-Gameya al-Shareya, which is known for its network of hospitals and orphan programs throughout Egypt.

The charity, whose name has multiple English spellings, launched in 1912 and is often described as “one of the most established national Islamic organizations.” Scholars have written that early leaders came from the Muslim Brotherhood, archenemy of Egypt’s current military leadership, but that ties ended around 1990 under government pressure.

In the years since, researchers found, the group maintained smooth relations with the government as its more than 1,000 chapters nationwide encompass Egyptians of all political leanings. That delicate balance faltered briefly in 2013 when a military-led counterrevolution quashed the nascent democratic movement and deposed elected leaders who were part of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Egypt’s military rulers declared the Brotherhood a terrorist organization and shuttered any organization it suspected of ties. Al-Gameya Al-Shareya was among more than 1,000 civil society groups blacklisted in the crackdown, court filings say, and chapters suspected of helping the Brotherhood during elections were dissolved. The group resumed operations the next year, when an Egyptian court lifted the ban, ruling that the charity “has no ties to the Muslim Brotherhood,” according to news reports.

Egypt’s return to zero tolerance for dissidents made Soliman’s activism dangerous, he said in court papers. As a journalist and Islamic scholar, he represented two fields the Egyptian government views as existential threats: a free press and religious organizing.

Soliman fled to the United States in 2014 on a visitor visa and later filed a petition for asylum, describing how security forces over the years had locked him up on false charges and tortured him with electrical shocks. In one incident, his attorney said, Egyptian forces with machine guns stormed into an apartment where Soliman was asleep with his wife and young child. (Through attorneys, Soliman asked to withhold details about his family because they remain in Egypt.)

“For me, it’s life or death,” Soliman later told a U.S. immigration officer of his need to escape.

Officials in Cairo referred questions to the Egyptian Embassy in Washington, which did not respond to requests for comment.

The asylum application asked whether Soliman had belonged to political parties or other associations in his home country. Ratliff, the attorney, said Soliman marked “yes” and attached a statement that mentioned Al-Gameya Al-Shareya and his role in fundraising for the local chapter.

Friends said Soliman rejoiced when he was granted asylum in 2018, under the first Trump administration, and sought permanent residency as the next step toward reuniting with his family. But the process stalled. “Bureaucratic hurdle after bureaucratic hurdle,” Ratliff said.

Then came a more serious snag. In 2021, Soliman learned he was on a federal watchlist when a background check for a chaplain job at an Oregon prison showed that the FBI had flagged him, court papers show.

His attorneys said they have no idea why. It could’ve been about a specific piece of intelligence. It could’ve been a misspelling or mistaken identity, simple errors that have landed ordinary Muslims on opaque “war on terror” watchlists that are nearly impossible to get off.

Soliman, friends say, insisted on trying to clear his name. With the help of the Muslim Legal Fund of America, he sued government agencies including the FBI and the Transportation Security Administration. That route led to open-ended legal battles that yielded no clear answers and no green card.

Instead, his place in the country became more vulnerable. In December, the final stretch of the Biden administration, Soliman received notice that the government intended to terminate his asylum based on “inconsistencies” in his claims of persecution and concern that his charity work made him inadmissible based on “possible membership in a terrorist organization.”

Some of his friends are convinced it was payback for the lawsuits, but attorneys say there’s no telling what triggered a review.

“What Ayman has experienced is something that, post-9/11, has been the reality of Muslims in this country,” said Ali, his friend and advocate. “All he did was try to get answers and accountability for what he’d been put through.”

Big Claims, Little Transparency

Contested asylum cases like Soliman’s were prime targets when Trump took office the next month and supercharged deportations, a top campaign pledge. Since his return to office, ICE arrests have doubled.

Soliman was called to an asylum hearing in February, a month into the new administration, for a last shot at defending his eligibility. A DHS officer asked about claims in the Biden-era notice alleging “discrepancies in date and number of times he suffered harm” and raising doubts about a handwritten Egyptian police report and letters authenticating his journalistic work.

A transcript shows Soliman explaining that he sometimes got confused when describing traumatic incidents from years ago in English, his second language. He said the police report was a rough translation included by mistake and submitted statements verifying his journalism.

Then the DHS officer’s questioning took a turn: “When did you start supporting Al-Jameya Al-Shareya?”

For the rest of the meeting, the transcript shows, the officer drilled down on Soliman’s knowledge of the charity: fundraising, chapter size, support for violence and whether he had been aware of a Brotherhood link.

Another of Soliman’s attorneys interrupted when the immigration officer said the Brotherhood had been a Tier III group since 2012. That’s not how it works, the attorney countered — only top-tier terrorist organizations like al-Qaida or the Islamic State are given dates of designation. Tier III, she said, is for undesignated groups and is determined on a case-by-case basis, with the burden of proof on the government.

“Counsel, I’ll give you an opportunity at the end to make a closing,” the DHS officer said.

“I understand,” the attorney replied, “but we’re talking about something factual.”

The next time Soliman heard from DHS was the official termination of his asylum, effective June 3. This time, there was no hedging in language that declared he was ineligible based on “evidence that indicated you provided material support to a Tier III terrorist organization.” A few weeks later, he was taken into custody and notified of his pending removal.

Soliman’s legal team sued, arguing that he was stripped of asylum on illegal grounds because the designations had been made “without proper findings” and based on no new evidence.

Court filings show DHS attorneys introducing, then withdrawing or amending, materials to build a case linking Soliman to the Brotherhood through the charity.

“It looked like, ‘What can we put here to get to there?’” said Ratliff, a former immigration judge.

Among the supporting evidence filed by the government are three academic reports by scholars with deep knowledge of Islamic charities in Egypt. Soliman’s legal team filed statements from all three balking at how DHS had cherry-picked their research.

Steven Brooke at the University of Wisconsin-Madison detailed “important mistakes of fact and interpretation.” Neil Russell, an academic in Scotland, called the U.S. conclusions “a mischaracterization of my findings.” Marie Vannetzel, a French scholar who has conducted field research with Al-Gameya Al-Shareya, rebutted what she called “a dishonest manipulation of my text and my work.”

Vannetzel wrote that she rejects the idea that Soliman, “simply by virtue of his activity in the association, could be accused of providing material support to the Muslim Brotherhood.”

Observers of Cairo’s unsparing campaign to uproot Islamist opposition say the matter is clear-cut: If the charity survived the scrutiny of Egyptian intelligence, then it’s not Muslim Brotherhood. “It’s really striking that this group is not proscribed,” said Michael Hanna, an Egypt specialist and U.S. program director of the nonprofit International Crisis Group.

Soliman’s attorneys also criticized the government’s assertion in court filings that he, as a board member of one local branch, would’ve been aware of any Brotherhood affiliation of chapters nationwide. “If a Rotarian in Seattle commits murder, we don’t go charging Rotarians in Des Moines with conspiracy,” Ratliff said.

Separate from U.S. attempts to tie Soliman to the Brotherhood was a puzzling footnote about Iraq that appeared in a later filing. Without detail, DHS attorneys alluded to warrants for “murder and terrorism activities.” Ratliff said a DHS attorney later confirmed to him in a phone call that it wasn’t about Soliman, but didn’t explain why it was there.

The error remained uncorrected in filings until Sept. 3, when DHS attorney Cheryl Gutridge acknowledged in court that it was an “inadvertent” reference to another case, Ohio news outlets reported. The original wording suggesting that Soliman faced murder charges in Iraq had been included in the government’s successful argument for keeping him in custody.

DHS did not address questions about the Iraq reference.

A close friend, Ahmed Elkady, said Soliman told him on a jail visit he was stunned to be linked to Iraq, a place he’s never been: “He said, ‘How can I become a virtual terrorist?”

A Sheriff’s ICE Fiefdom

As he awaits trial in immigration court, Soliman is in custody at the Butler County Jail, about 30 miles outside of Cincinnati, past cornfields and a German social club and the Town and Country Mobile Home Park.

For more than 20 years, this outpost has been the domain of Sheriff Richard Jones, a cowboy hat-wearing firebrand who keeps a framed photo of Trump in his office. In the run-up to the 2024 election, Jones mused that a Trump victory might put him “back in the deportation business.”

From 2003 to 2021, the jail had been contracted to house immigration detainees until the arrangement dissolved in the Biden era. As predicted, the county entered into a new agreement with ICE in February, after Trump returned to power, to hold around 400 detainees: $68 a day per person, plus $36 an hour for the sheriff’s office toward transportation.

Jones celebrated the restored partnership by posting a fake image showing inflatable gators outside the jail, a nod to ICE’s “Alligator Alcatraz” detention center in Florida. A Black Lives Matter group in Dayton issued a statement calling the sheriff’s post an “egregious act of cruelty and historical mockery.”

As it returns to deportation work, the jail still faces a federal civil rights lawsuit filed in 2020 by two ICE prisoners who said they endured beatings and discrimination. One plaintiff, a Muslim, said a jailer called him a “fucking terrorist” and threatened to throw his prayer rug in the toilet. Jones has disputed the claims.

The sheriff is in the news again because of Soliman. In court filings, the Muslim chaplain says he was denied access to a space where he could lead communal prayers and then placed in “isolation” for nearly a week with only an hour of phone access between midnight and 1 a.m.

Soliman’s attorneys say in court papers that the episode was related to “targeted harassment” over his religion. The sheriff’s office told local outlets that it respects religious freedom and said Soliman was placed in isolation because he was “argumentative” and “threatening.”

After agreeing to an interview with ProPublica, Jones later decided he was “no longer interested,” the sheriff’s spokesperson, Deputy Kim Peters, wrote in a text message.

As he languishes in jail, Soliman’s empty apartment in Cincinnati has become a way station for an inner circle of supporters, who said they felt like “intruders” when they first gathered there. Soliman is known as an elegant dresser, but his apartment was in bachelor-pad disarray, a reflection of his long hours at the hospital and the abruptness of his detention, said his friends, also clerics. The imams laughed when one confessed that he first thought the FBI had ransacked the place.

Over water bottles and energy drinks scavenged from Soliman’s fridge, they talked about the deportation threat. In Egypt, pro-government news outlets already have trumpeted the case as proof that Soliman was leading a secret Brotherhood cell in America.

Despite Soliman’s predicament, they said, being in limbo here is preferable to the alternative.

“You think I’m afraid of being here in jail?” Soliman told fellow imam Ihab Alsaghier during a recent visit. “Every moment I’m alone, I imagine I’m on a flight back to Egypt.”

---

reverse teflon? 8 22 a n

Experts are weighing in on Monday evening’s historic news that under the direction of President Joe Biden Americans have killed the top leader of al-Qaeda, the top terrorist who succeeded Osama bin Laden and was a top architect of the 9/11 terror attacks.

“A CIA drone strike has killed al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahri in Afghanistan, according to five people familiar with the matter,” the Associated Press reports. “Current and former officials began hearing Sunday afternoon that al-Zawahri had been killed in a drone strike, but the administration delayed releasing the information until his death could be confirmed, according to one person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the matter.”

The killing of the top terrorist is said to validate President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan, which he received tremendous criticism for more than one year ago.

“To kill Americans and their allies — civilian and military — is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in every country in which it is possible to do it,” The Washington Post reports “Zawahiri wrote in a 1998 manifesto.”

“Three years later, he would put words into action by helping to plan the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.”

“My first reaction: tears of relief,” said counterterrorism expert, former Republican, and former Trump administration DHS official Elizabeth Neumann. “Justice for 9/11 families and all of the many men and women that have been fighting since to keep us safe at home and abroad. The threat remains. But tonight we can be soberly grateful for justice.”

Neumann served in several roles at the Trump DHS including as Deputy Chief of Staff to DHS Secretary John Kelly and Acting DHS Secretary Elaine Duke, and DHS Assistant Secretary for Threat Prevention and Security Policy to their successors.

National security attorney Bradley Moss tweeted, “Trump was taking Saudi blood money to host a golf outing this weekend. Biden was killing terrorists.”

Former DOJ spokesperson under Eric Holder and special advisor to the National Security Council at the Biden White House, and MSNBC analyst Matthew Miller wrote, “Build Back Better is alive and Ayman al-Zawahiri is dead.”

“This is a success,” says CNN national security analyst Juliette Kayyem, a former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security who has an extensive background on terrorism and national security, “both because of the target, al-Zawahiri, but also because the Biden Administration had claimed that leaving Afghanistan would not impact counterterrorism efforts. They still would have ‘over the horizon’ capability. That appears to be true.”

SiriusXM Progress host Dean Obeidallah, an attorney, journalist, and contributor to CNN and MSNBC writes, “”Most people who get Covid quarantine quietly by watching TV or reading books. President Biden spent his Covid quarantine killing the leader of Al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahri!”

meanwhile....

On Wednesday, a key congressional ally of former President Donald Trump broke with him over the legitimacy of the Saudi-sponsored golf tournament he is hosting on his Trump National Bedminster property in New Jersey.

The argument came after Nick Adams, a pro-Trump social media influencer, took to Twitter to complain that the golfers participating in the tournament weren't getting top billing. "I really have no interest in the PGA Tour FedEx Cup Playoffs without the top LIV Tour golfers being included," he wrote. "Brooks Koepka, Dustin Johnson, Bryson DeChambeau, Patrick Reed, and Jason Kokrak should ALL be playing."

Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), however, disagreed.

"I have no interest in watching these guys play after selling their souls to the highest bidder when that bidder is a foreign country known to have financed 9-11 and other terrorist activity," wrote Roy. "But whatever… somehow this is MAGA or something."

Fifteen of the 19 hijackers involved in the coordinated attacks on New York and Washington were Saudi nationals. An FBI memo released last year hinted at official Saudi involvement.

Trump himself claimed in 2016 while he was running for president that Saudi Arabia was responsible, without providing any evidence.

"(Now) he chooses to host the kingdom at his course in the backyard where 750 people were blown away," said Brett Eagleson, who was 15 when his dad died in the rubble of the World Trade Center, referencing the number of New Jersey residents killed on 9/11.

"It's incredibly infuriating," he said.

Bankrolled by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, LIV has sought to lure top golfers from the establishment PGA and DP World tours with contracts that have run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Human Rights groups say the venture is a "sportswashing" exercise being used to boost Saudi Arabia's international reputation. Organizers insist their intention is to boost golf's popularity worldwide.

Trump has come under heavy criticism, particularly from the families of 9/11 victims, for agreeing to host the Saudi-backed golf tournament, with many openly protesting the tournament.

For Tim Frolich, who was injured on 9/11, the tournament has reopened old wounds.

"I had trouble sleeping last night, just the anger," the 58-year-old told AFP.

Trump, for his part, has defended Saudi Arabia's involvement in the tournament, claiming to reporters that "nobody's gotten to the bottom of 9/11."

With additional reporting by AFP

7 22

neo-con is // neo-libtard [Gt Recession] Bush 43; BOTH MUY MACHO, REDUCTIONISTIC?

aha GULF WAR 2 POSTER CHILD FOR CASCADE OF FAILS:

JRNLISM FAIL

set off refugee surge --> brexit [CAMBRIDGE anal ] , alt rt, authoritarian [eu la penn] ; wolfie neo-cons wanted it for decades , cooked the intel, hunted the whistleblowers Plame

SEE WMD BS YELLOWCAKE CHENEY

de-Bathification --? al queda, CNP fail ministry of oil

origin of xian nat'l trumpism?recall his BS about ppl dancing in streets in NJ? birther obama other foreigner secret muslim

televangelist grifters said it was god angry at our sin (loss of white xian am?]

pvtization blackwater halliburton? tigerswan

origin of xian nat'l trumpism?recall his BS about ppl dancing in streets in NJ? birther obama other foreigner secret muslim

https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/christians-are-right-wing-radical/

k j salon

earlier this week, a new Pew survey foundthat the share of Americans who believe Donald Trump was largely responsible for the violence of Jan. 6, 2021, has declined by nearly 10 percent over the past year, while the percentage of people who think he bears no responsibility has increased by almost as much. On Wednesday, the Freedom from Religion Foundation and the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty released a new report that helps explain that shift:The same Christian nationalism that served as the unifying principle behind theJan. 6 insurrection is also driving efforts among the faithful to rewrite the history of that day.

As two of the report's contributors, scholars Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry, co-authors of "Taking America Back for God," noted in a launch event on Wednesday, Christian nationalist support for Jan. 6 rioters has doubled in the past year, while support for prosecuting those rioters has declined by 20 percent. That suggests, said Perry, "that this ideology is powerfully connected to a reinterpretation of these events" in a way that could become "a powerful motivator for future potential violence."

At more than 60 pages and drawing on the work of a number of academics, journalists and researchers, "Christian Nationalism and the January 6 Insurrection" is the most comprehensive account to date of the role of the movement in the attack. Within the political and cultural universe of Christian nationalism, America is a special place: It was created as a Christian nation and its founding documents were divinely inspired. Christianity should and must have a privileged position in public life, and "true Americans" are understood to be "white, culturally conservative, natural-born citizens."

That ideology, argues the report, served both as the unifying theme for the various factions that joined in the assault on the Capitol as well as the "permission structure" that allowed participants to justify their violence. To call those fringe ideas is misleading: Surveys repeatedly find that close to half of the country supports the idea of fusing Christianity and civic life.

Christian nationalism also lends itself to a number of other convictions, notes the report. Surveys in early 2021 found strong associations between Christian nationalist views, such as the proposition that thefederal government should declare America a Christian nation, and a whole range of far-right beliefs not directly connected to faith. Those include the disproved claim that Antifa or Black Lives Matter caused the violence on Jan. 6, while Donald Trump was blameless; support for various white supremacist and antisemitic beliefs; and even a willingness to accept the outlandish premises of QAnon.

Two-thirds of white Americans who strongly support Christian nationalist ideology believe that the 2020 election was rigged; 40 percent of them think that violence from patriotic Americans might be necessary to save the country; and more than 40 percent are convinced that Democrats are engaged in "elite child trafficking," said Whitehead.

The report includes some meditations on the movement's origins as well. Penn religion scholar Anthea Butler, the author of "White Evangelical Racism," writes that white Christian nationalism began moving more firmly into the mainstream after9/11, as the "Holy War" coding of the "War on Terror" helped popularize its ideology, laying the groundwork for Trump's rise. The seemingly contradictory beliefs of Christian nationalism — that America is the greatest nation on earth thanks to its foundation in Christianity, and also that America has been overtaken by alien and even demonic enemies — only serves to keep the movement in a state of tense mobilization, observed journalist Katherine Stewart, author of "The Power Worshippers."

"It's astonishing to so many of us that the leaders of the Jan. 6 attack styled themselves as patriots," Stewart added at Wednesday's event. "But it makes a glimmer of sense once we start to understand that their allegiance is to a belief in blood, earth and religion, rather than to the mere idea of a government of the people, by the people and for the people."

Most of the report was written by Andrew Seidel, a constitutional attorney at theFreedom from Religion Foundation and author of "The Founding Myth." It consists of a meticulous accounting, drawing on hundreds of hours of video footage, of Christian nationalism's ubiquitous role in the lead-up to Jan. 6 and its execution. There are the flags, the signs, the cross and gallows that we've all seen.

There are also some less familiar pieces of evidence, such as the 50-person Christian choir singing about swords and taking possession of the land while the attack was underway. Multiple rioters recounted how God's hand or voice had urged them to enter the capital. One avowed white supremacist had convinced his parole officer to let him travel to Washington that week to hand out Bibles. And then there's the man who broke down Nancy Pelosi's office door, believing that "the crowd would tear her 'into little pieces,'" and latertestified in court that God had been on Trump's side: "And if patriots have to kill 60 million of these communists, it's God's will."...

an 921

September 11 marked the 20th anniversary of 9/11, the deadliest terrorist attack in United States history. With the Taliban back in control in Afghanistan, Islamist extremism has been in the news a lot recently. Examining the history of terrorism and extremism in the U.S., liberal economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman does something that most of the far-right pundits at Fox News will never do: He looks at the big picture. And Krugman stresses that when it comes to terrorism in the U.S., most of the violence has come from domestic extremists — not foreign terrorists and radical Islamists.

"It may seem like a terrible thing to say," Krugman writes, "but a fair number of people — especially in the news media — are nostalgic about the months that followed 9/11. Some pundits openly pine for the sense of national unity that they imagine prevailed in the aftermath of the terrorist attack. More subtly, my sense is that many long for the days when the big threat to America seemed to come from foreign fanatics, not homegrown political extremists."

The anti-Islam hysteria that followed 9/11, Krugman argues, ignored the threat of domestic extremism.

"To his credit," Krugman explains, "President George W. Bush tried to tamp down the anti-Muslim backlash, visiting an Islamic center just six days after the attack and calling on Americans to respect all religions. Try to imagine Donald Trump doing something similar."

Krugman adds, "It's also notable that some of the most prominent neocons — intellectuals who promoted the invasion of Iraq and called for an even wider set of wars — eventually became eloquent, even courageous Never Trumpers. This suggests that their belief in spreading democratic values was genuine even if the methods they advocated — and the political alliances they chose to make — had catastrophic results."

During the 2000s, Krugman argues, many Republicans used the horrors of 9/11 to "seize domestic political advantage."

"This cynicism in the face of the horror tells us that even at a time when America truly was under external attack, the biggest dangers we faced were already internal," Krugman recalls. "The Republican Party wasn't yet full-on authoritarian, but it was willing to do whatever it took to get what it wanted and disdainful of the legitimacy of its opposition. We were well along on the road to the January 6 putsch — and toward a GOP that has, in effect, endorsed that putsch and seems all too likely to try one again."

Krugman ends his column on a disturbing note, pointing out that far-right Republicans are a much greater threat to the U.S. than foreign terrorists.

"It's not an accident that Republicans today have left both tolerance and respect for democracy behind," Krugman warns. "Where we are now, with democracy hanging by a thread, is where we had been heading for a long time. America was viciously attacked 20 years ago. But even then, the call that mattered was coming from inside the house. The real threat to all this nation stands for is coming not from foreign suicide bombers, but from our own right wing."

921 intercept

OVER TWO DECADES, U.S.’S GLOBAL WAR ON TERROR HAS TAKEN NEARLY 1 MILLION LIVES AND COST $8 TRILLION

:{:{Murtaza Hussain:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}::(style="box-sizing:border-box;color:#6653ff;"):}:

===

aha war is cause and effect of chaos/ system fail, doom spiral?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/climate-change-future/

war burkina faso, [tigre ...] more drown meditt

...War on (of and for) Terror

One of the most dramatic drivers of displacement over the last 20 years, according to researchers from Brown University's Costs of War project, has been that conflict in Afghanistan and the seven other "most violent wars the U.S. military has launched or participated in since 2001." In the wake of the killing of 2,974 people by al-Qaeda militants that September 11th and the decision of George W. Bush's administration to launch a Global War on Terror, conflicts the United States initiated, escalated, or participated in -- specifically, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, the Philippines, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen -- have displaced between 37 million and 59 million people.

While U.S. troops have also seen combat in Burkina Faso and Washington has pumped hundreds of millions of dollars of "security assistance" into that country, its displaced aren't even counted in the Costs of War tally. And yet there's a clear link between the U.S.-backed overthrow of Libya's autocrat, Muammar Qaddafi, in 2011 and Burkina Faso's desperate state today. "Ever since the West assassinated Qaddafi, and I'm conscious of using that particular word, Libya has been completely destabilized," Chérif Sy, Burkina Faso's defense minister, explained in a 2019 interview. "While at the same time it was the country with the most guns. It has become an arms cache for the region."

Those arms helped destabilize neighboring Mali and led to a 2012 coup by a U.S.-trained officer. Two years later, another U.S.-trained officer seized power in Burkina Faso during a popular uprising. This year, yet another U.S.-trained officer overthrew yet another government in Mali. All the while, terrorist attacks have been ravaging the region. "The Sahel has seen the most dramatic escalation of violence since mid-2017," according to a July report by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Defense Department research institution...

aha: bottomless well of BS /justification for big war budget, war, fear, islamophobia...

note gulf war 2 b/c lie that saddam met w/ al-Q AND WMD; now vpence runs same play!

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/mike-pence-shows-just-how-much-contempt-he-holds-for-the-american-public-with-tweet-containing-multiple-lies

no lnx

Mike Pence shows just how much contempt he holds for the American public with tweet containing multiple lies

Written by Mark Sumner / Daily Kos January 5, 2020

Donald Trump has lied over 14,000 times since taking office. Some of those lies are about the economy, some of them about his political opponents, and a surprising number involve Trump claiming credit for programs actually signed into law by Barack Obama. Trump’s been joined in his lies by members of his White House team, from Kellyanne Conway to Mick Mulvaney to Mike Pompeo, delivering a fat untruth with a sneer seems to be the primary qualification to join Team Trump.

But it’s a tweet posted by Mike Pence on Friday that may be the best illustration of the lies originating from this White House. Because it’s not just a lie, it’s multiple lies. Incredibly lazy lies. Lies so sloppy, with so little attention to history, reason, or anything else, that Pence should be forced to wear them eternally stapled to his massive white forehead.

In defense of assassinating Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, Pence went through a long list of Soleimani’s supposed crimes. Among them “Assisted in the clandestine travel to Afghanistan of 10 of the 12 terrorists who carried out the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States.”

The list of reasons why this tweet is ridiculous is far longer than the original tweet. First of all, on the most straightforward point, there were 19 hijackers on 9/11. Not 12. A spokesperson for Pence has since launched a defense for this in saying that Pence was talking about a “subset” of the hijackers who traveled to Afghanistan through Iran. That statement also clarifies how Soleimani “assisted” these hijackers. He “allowed them to land” in Iran. A quick check of the records shows that Soleimani also allowed 4 million other people to land in Iran in 2001 alone. He was apparently a very busy fellow.

As many, many people have pointed out since Pence’s tweet, 15 of the 19 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia. They didn’t just touch down in Saudi Arabia to change planes on the way to Kabul, they lived there—which would seem to make a lot of Saudi officials more bomb-worthy than Soleimani if that were the real basis of Trump’s action. More importantly, not only were the large majority of the hijackers Saudi, all of them were Sunni. So was all of al-Qaeda. The whole organization is composed of Salafist jihadists, a subset of radical Sunnis who regard Shiite Muslims as heretics worthy of death.

Attempting to tie the Sunni forces of al-Qaeda to the Shiite government of Iran may just signal that Mike Pence is astoundingly ignorant.But it certainly shows the disdain the whole Trump White House holds for the intelligence of the American public. And it’s not the only way they’re demonstrating their contempt.

Here’s the schedule for the top Defense Department officials on Friday.

Mark Esper, Secretary of Defense: No public or media events.

David Norqust, Deputy Sec. of Defense: No public or media events.

Mark Miley, Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff: No public or media events.

John Hyten, Vice chair Joint Chiefs of Staff: No public or media events.

In the wake of an event that takes the nation to the brink of war, the Defense Department had nothing to say. The generals left it guys like Pence to distribute lies.

Pence isn’t even pretending to have secret intelligence that supports the death of Soleimani. Completely missing from his list of reasons is any detail about the supposed “imminent threat” that the general represented to Americans.

The reason for that is clear enough: The intelligence that Donald Trump, Mike Pompeo, Mike Pence and others have been claiming supported the assassination of a foreign official, was just as absurd as Pence’s tweet.

https://yyy.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/10/college-professor-fired-trump-52-cultural-sites-tweet-joke

paging greg l

college professor fired for joking about Trump's 52 cultural sites tweet

Asheen Phansey jokingly listed 52 US cultural sites for Iran to bomb, including Mall of America and the ‘Kardashian residence’

Poppy Noor

@PoppyNoor

Fri 10 Jan 2020 11.37 ESTLast modified on Fri 10 Jan 2020 12.43 EST

The Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota – one of 52 US ‘cultural sites’ listed by Professor Asheen Phansey of Babson College in a satirical Facebook post.

A professor who jokingly listed 52 cultural sites in America that Iran should bomb has been fired from his job at a private Massachusetts college.

Donald Trump claimed on 4 January that the US had earmarked 52 Iranian cultural sites for destruction – warning the country not to strike back after a US drone killed Iran’s top general, Qassem Suleimani, last week.

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

Jan 4, 2020

Replying to @realDonaldTrump

....hundreds of Iranian protesters. He was already attacking our Embassy, and preparing for additional hits in other locations. Iran has been nothing but problems for many years. Let this serve as a WARNING that if Iran strikes any Americans, or American assets, we have.....

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

....targeted 52 Iranian sites (representing the 52 American hostages taken by Iran many years ago), some at a very high level & important to Iran & the Iranian culture, and those targets, and Iran itself, WILL BE HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD. The USA wants no more threats!

274K

2:52 PM - Jan 4, 2020

Twitter Ads info and privacy

127K people are talking about this

Trump appeared to backtrack on those comments on Tuesday, probably because attacks against cultural property are a violation of the rules of warfare stated by the Hague Convention.

But following Trump’s post, Professor Asheen Phansey posted to his own Facebook page, saying: “[The Supreme Leader of Iran] should tweet a list of 52 sites of cultural American heritage that he would bomb … Um … Mall of America? … Kardashian residence?”

The Facebook post, which has since been deleted, was subject to a “prompt and thorough investigation” by Babson College, also Phansey’s alma mater.

On Wednesday, Phansey apologized through his attorney for the Facebook post, saying it was a poor attempt to poke fun at the United States’ lack of history. The statement said the post was a “bad attempt at humor” rather than an incitement to violence.

“I am sorry that my sloppy humor was read as a threat … I am completely opposed to violence and would never advocate it by anyone,” the statement said.

Babson College announced on Thursday that Phansey was no longer employed by the college, as a result of the investigation into his Facebook post. The statement sread: “[The Facebook post] does not represent the values and culture of the College. Babson College condemns any type of threatening words and/or actions condoning violence and/or hate.”

Phansey released a statement on Thursday evening, saying that he was “disappointed” at the decision to terminate his employment.

“I am disappointed and saddened that Babson has decided to abruptly terminate my 15-year relationship with the college just because people willfully misinterpreted a joke I made to my friends on Facebook.”

He said that he loved the institution, had put much into it and hoped it “would have defended and supported my right to free speech”.

He added that the incident gave him cause for concern about freedom of speech.

“Beyond my own situation, I am really concerned about what this portends for our ability as Americans to engage in political discourse without presuming the worst about each other.”

tom d 1219

...

Looking Back on 9/11

It’s in this context that we should all look back on what truly did come down that Tuesday morning in September 2001, an all-American day of the grimmest sort. That was, of course, the day when this country was attacked by 19 suicidal hijackers, most of them Saudi, using American commercial jets as their four-plane air force. They, in turn, were inspired by a man, Osama bin Laden, and his organization, al-Qaeda, part of a crew of radical Islamists that Washington had backed years earlier in an Afghan War against the Soviet Union. In response to the events of that day — though it seems unimaginable now — we could have joined a world already in pain, one that had experienced horrors largely unimaginable in this country until that moment, in a kind of global solidarity.

Instead, responding to the destruction of those towers in Manhattan and part of the Pentagon, the Bush administration essentially launched a war against much of the planet. They soon dubbed it a “Global War on Terror,” or GWOT, and key officials almost instantly claimed it would have more than 60 countries (or terror groups in them) in its sights. Eighteen years later, the U.S. is still at war across a vast swath of the globe, involved in conflict after conflict from the Philippines to Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq to northern Africa and beyond. In the process, that GWOT has produced failed state after failed state and terror group after terror group, enough to make the original al-Qaeda (still going) look like nothing at all. And of course, in all these years, the U.S. military, hailed here as “the finest fighting force that the world has ever known” (and similar formulations), lacks a single decisive (or even modest) victory. Meanwhile, everywhere, yet more towers, real or metaphorical, continue to fall; in fact, whole cities in the Middle East now lie in rubble.

The top officials of President George W. Bush’s administration would, at the time, mistake 9/11 for a kind of upside-down stroke of luck, the perfect excuse for launching military operations, including invasions, geared to the ultimate domination of the planet (and its key oil supplies). Via drones armed with missiles and bombs, they would turn any president into an assassin-in-chief. They would, in the end, help spread terror groups in a fashion beyond imagining on September 12, 2001, while their never-ending wars would displace vast numbers of innocent people, creating a refugee crisis of a kind not seen since the end of World War II when significant parts of the planet stood in ruins. And all of that, in turn, would help spark, on a global scale, what came to be known as the “populist right,” in part thanks to the very refugees created by that GWOT. The response to what came down on 9/11, in other words, would create its own hell on Earth...

War on terror has killed over 801,000 people and cost $6.4 trillion: report

Jessica Corbett / Common Dreams

719 reprint not wrong?

https://www.globalresearch.ca/america-created-al-qaeda-and-the-isis-terror-group/5402881

rhet: in the name of

maybe redumbent cf god devil term, but note what BS trump has pulled in the name of national security, trade war tariffs, border wall emergency [an intensification of war on metaphor?

===

https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/the-illegal-cia-operation-that-brought-us-9-11/

Was it conspiracy or idiocy that led to the failure of U.S. intelligence agencies to detect and prevent the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon headquarters? That’s one of the questions at the heart of “The Watchdogs Didn’t Bark: The CIA, NSA, and the Crimes of the War on Terror,” by John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski. In their careful and thorough investigation of the events leading up to the attacks, the authors uncover a story about the Central Intelligence Agency’s neglect, possible criminal activities and a cover-up that may have allowed al-Qaida to carry out its plans uninhibited by government officials.

In the latest installment of “Scheer Intelligence,” the journalists tell Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer how an interview with Richard Clarke, the counterterror adviser to Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, led them to a jaw-dropping revelation regarding two hijackers involved in the infamous attacks. As it turns out, Khalid Muhammad Abdallah al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, two men linked to al-Qaida, were staying at an FBI informant’s home in San Diego in 2000, and they were being tracked by the National Security Agency. Despite knowledge of the men’s ties to the terrorist organization responsible for 9/11, neither was investigated by the FBI. Clarke and others believe that this may have had to do with a CIA attempt to turn the two men into agency informants.

===

http://www.c-span.org/video/?406808-5/open-phones-sarah-chayes

corruption --> terrorism

Dark side : the inside story of how the war on terror turned into a war on American ideals

Mayer, Jane.

New York : Doubleday, [2008]

Rating:

View online content

More...

Location	Call Number	Status
McH Stacks	HV6432 .M383 2008	HV6432 .M383 2008

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/ex-cia-director-white-house-ignored-months-warnings-about-911-avoid-leaving-paper

...beginning in May of 2001, Tenet and Black launched an initiative called “the Blue Sky paper” and pitched it to Bush’s national security team. The CIA called for a joint CIA and military campaign to end the Al Qaeda threat by “getting into the Afghan sanctuary, launching a paramilitary operation, creating a bridge with Uzbekistan.”

According to Tenet, the Bush administration said they wanted to back-burner the plan.

“And the word back,” claims Tenet, “‘was ‘we’re not quite ready to consider this. We don’t want the clock to start ticking,’” meaning they didn’t want a paper trail.

According to Black, Bush’s national security team was living in the past.

“I think they were mentally stuck back eight years [before]. They were used to terrorists being Euro-lefties—they drink champagne by night, blow things up during the day, how bad can this be? And it was a very difficult sell to communicate the urgency to this,” he explained.

In July, after receiving more confirmations of upcoming attacks, Tenet and Cofer demanded an immediate meeting with Rice.

“Rich [Blee] started by saying, ‘There will be significant terrorist attacks against the United States in the coming weeks or months. The attacks will be spectacular. They may be multiple. Al Qaeda’s intention is the destruction of the United States.’” Tenet remembered.

According to Tenet, “[Condi said:] ‘What do you think we need to do?’ Black responded by slamming his fist on the table, and saying, ‘We need to go on a wartime footing now!’”

When asked “what happened?” after the meeting, Black said nothing much.

“Yeah. What did happen?” Black said. “To me it remains incomprehensible still. I mean, how is it that you could warn senior people so many times and nothing actually happened? It’s kind of like The Twilight Zone.”

In her memoir, Rice mentioned the meeting but found it indistinguishable from other meetings she had with intelligence officials because they were discussing threats “every day.”

...

note that Gitmo and Abu gahrib catalyzed jihadi