Fracas in Caracas and Six for Sedition
The president warned everyone to avoid the airspace over or alongside Venezuela this week.
“To all Airlines, Pilots, Drug Dealers, and Human Traffickers, please consider THE AIRSPACE ABOVE AND SURROUNDING VENEZUELA TO BE CLOSED IN ITS ENTIRETY.”
We have positioned a serious armada on that country’s shore. Among the explanations for these moves the most plausible I can find is Jeff Childers', who once again documents his views with credible links.
The Caribbean communist country is practically daring us to do something about it. “China has poured millions into Venezuelan oil projects and loans,” the Guardian explained. Literally poured. That’s how much money China has. Meanwhile, the paper continued, “Russia has armed Venezuelan President Maduro with Sukhoi fighter jets, helicopters, tanks, and air defence systems.” And probably aggressive nesting dolls, too, but that’s not important right now.
So China and Russia are the first annoyance. But it’s like an addiction; Maduro can’t seem to stop himself. It’s not just Russia and China. The next major irritant is that Venezuela has also been cozying up to the mad mullahs and working with various Middle Eastern terrorist groups, like Hezbollah. Headline from the Atlantic Council, in 2020:
“The Lebanese terrorist group,” the story reported, “has helped to turn Venezuela into a hub for the convergence of transnational organized crime and international terrorism.” So
Add those vexing problems to the surge into the U.S. of Venezuelan cartel gangs —at least one directly connected to Maduro’s government -- and the tsunami of drugs washing northwards, and you already have a geopolitical powder keg a few hundred nautical miles from the border.
Were that insufficient to justify aggressive action, there’s the fact that its neighbor Guyana discovered that it sits on ten billion barrels of oil which Venezuela’s Maduro is laying claim to, signaling an intent to invade. No coincidence that our naval operation “sits squarely at the nexus of at least four issues of critical American interest.”
is partly about oil and protecting US oil companies, at a critical moment of a Bidenflation-fueled affordability crisis. It is partly about a resurgent Monroe Doctrine, as described in Project 2025, and kicking China, Russia, and Iran out of our hemisphere. It is about liquidating the linked plagues of drugs and cartels that are transforming our big cities into third-world hellholes and our vulnerable citizens into zombies. And it is about tamping down a communist dictator who is making our own hemisphere wobbly and war-prone.
In other words, contrary to corporate media’s narrative, there are lots of good reasons to move the military into the Caribbean. It’s literally our own backyard. And as James “Monroe” Doctrine would say, it’s our hemisphere. So,
As Maduro ponders his fate, six congressional Democrats are under investigation by 
the Departments of Defense and Justice. In an ill-considered and badly-timed move, they posted a video urging U.S. service members “to refuse illegal orders.” When asked for specifics, they could not name any illegal Trump orders. It is hard to avoid thinking they were encouraging the troops, in particular the National Guard, whose patrols have substantially reduced the nation’s homicides, to “abandon ship.” The six are:
- Mark Kelly, senator from Arizona and retired U.S. Navy Captain, whom rumor has it may be recalled to service and court martialed for his leading role in this.
- Elissa Slotkin, Michigan senator and former CIA analyst.
- Jason Crow, Colorado representative, former U.S. Army captain.
- Chris Deluzio, Pennsylvania representative, former U.S. Navy lieutenant and JAG officer.
- Maggie Goodlander, New Hampshire representative, U.S. Navy Reserve Lieutenant, former NSC official.
- Chrissy Houlahan, Pennsylvania representative, Air Force Reserve captain.
It may be that the creation and posting of this video is part of a coordinated plan to induce military personnel to disobey all orders, and particularly is directed to the National Guard troops assisting ICE’s actions against illegal immigrants. Almost simultaneously with the release of the video, a billboard was installed outside Fort Bragg (and apparently also near National Guard bases) reading “Did You Go Airborne Just to Pull Security for Ice?” The listed sponsor is “You signed up for.org.” That site gives detailed information on how dissident military should proceed in secret:
The site helpfully suggested two scenarios for National Guard soldiers to consider refusing “illegal” orders:
Use of military forces to carry out deportations, removals, or detention of immigrants.
Use of military forces against civilian protesters.(Presumably, Antifa.)
(In another section labeled “Outside the U.S.,” the website offered “attacks on vessels in international or foreign waters” as another potentially illegal order for our sailors to think about.
While some question whether a 1918 Supreme Court decision involving sedition aimed at civilians would preclude prosecution for seditious efforts aimed at military or naval forces. Bill Shipley argues that it does not. The relevant statute he cites supports his contention:
18 U.S.C. Sec. 2387, “Activities affecting armed forces generally.” That statute is quoted above, but the operative language is “Whoever… advises, counsels, urges, or in any manner causes or attempts to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty by any member of the military or naval forces of the United States…” shall be fined or imprisoned for ten years.
(A companion statute with a higher maximum prison sentence applies during wartime.)
About the time that the Six were encouraging the military to question orders, orders which they themselves did not claim were illegal, an Afghan national, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, who had been admitted under the same rushed Biden era immigration policy (Operation Allies Welcome) of some 66,000 unvetted Afghans following the disastrous withdrawal of U.S. troops from Kabul, drove 2,500 miles from Bellingham, Washington State to D.C.
Once there, he quite professionally tried to assassinate two young National Guard troops from West Virginia who were patrolling the nation’s capital over the Thanksgiving holiday season. One, Sarah Beckstrom, has died of her injuries. The other, Andrew Wolfe, is still in critical condition battling multiple gun wounds. The backstory of the assassin is a condemnation of the immigration plan which brought him here, the organizations that supported and sheltered him, and provides a warning respecting his fellow emigres shuffled around the country in the same misguided operation. It also, quite reasonably, raises the question of whether the Kelly video was part of a coordinated plan to interfere with the operation to sweep the illegal immigrants out of the country and restore order in cities overcome with crime.
The assassin wasn’t just any old jihadi. He was a skilled assassin trained by the CIA in Afghanistan, to discourage others from joining the Taliban.
When he was in Afghanistan, Lakanwal was trained by U.S. intelligence agencies and served in an elite “Zero Unit,” which was a blend of deep-black special ops and dirty work at the crossroads. He was stationed at “Firebase Gecko,” a military compound used by the CIA and Kandahar special forces. Zero Units were outside the military chain of command, and reported to the Afghan National Directorate of Security, or NDS, an intelligence agency propped up with CIA backing for Afghanistan’s U.S.-backed government.
In other words, he was a highly-trained, licensed-to-kill spook with extremely esoteric skills. A sort of third-world James Bond, if James Bond had been a Middle Eastern terrorist.
“He previously worked with the US government, including CIA, as a member of a partner force in Kandahar,” CIA Director John Ratcliffe confirmed in a statement yesterday. That admission was a teensy bit understated. He did more than “work with” the CIA.
A former senior Afghan general told CBS News yesterday that the Zero Units “were the most active and professional forces, trained and equipped by the CIA. All their operations were conducted under the CIA command.” The CBS story reported these “units were known in Afghanistan for their secrecy and alleged brutality, and members were implicated in numerous extrajudicial killings of civilians.” Human Rights Watch has accused the Zero Units of the most serious and brutal rights violations (the CIA denies this and claims it is Taliban propaganda).
In 2018, the New York Times ran a feature story about Zero Units’ war crimes and excesses.
So, Lakanwal was a spook, a brute squad boy, and an assassin. He probably made a lot of local enemies. You can understand why he’d be nervous about sticking around after the Taliban took over.
According to the Times, a ‘childhood friend’ identified only as Muhammad said that Lakanwal suffered from mental health issues because of the casualties his unit had caused. “He would tell me and our friends that their military operations were very tough, their job was very difficult, and they were under a lot of pressure,” Muhammad said.
I’ll just say this once. It was reckless to the point of insanity to allow a trained radical terrorist with known mental health problems to operate unsupervised in the continental United States. Assuming, of course, that he was unsupervised.
A long, dramatic 2022 Propublica article about the Zero Units cited its fighters saying they saw Americans as infidels, never trusted us, but worked with us as a lesser evil or a useful path to a “new Afghanistan.”
Once here, without any mental health treatment for his trauma, this unhinged “dangerous radical” was settled unsupervised in hippy dippy Bellingham, Washington, assisted by a Lutheran NGO, World Relief, which received most of its funding from the U.S. Government. (The cut in USAID funding now may now have caused it to shutter or scale back its operations.)
Are there others out there like him, aiming at National Guard troops? What motivated him to do this now? (Another Afghan immigrant who was brought here under the same rushed operation was just arrested for threatening to bomb a building in Fort Worth, Texas.)Was his action part of a plan in which the video by the six congressmen and women played a role? Was the close timing of the video and the terrorist attack on the Guard a mere coincidence which will have unfortunate consequences for those who made it? Those questions deserve answers.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment