Russia Puts Bounty On U.S. Soldiers - Trump Does NOTHING!

For three years we have been wondering why Donald Trump has been pandering to Vladimir Putin of Russia. Immediately after taking office, Trump tried to remove sanctions against Russia (and only action by Congress stopped that). Then he was cowed by Putin at the Helsinki conference, where he said he didn't believe Russia had interfered in the 2016 election (even though all of the U.S. intelligence agencies have offered proof that it happened). And since then, he has supported Putin and followed policies that hurt our European partners.

But this latest thing is beyond the pale, and once again has me wondering what terrible secret Putin is holding over Trump to make him dance to Russia's tune. Trump has known since March that Russia is offering bounties to Afghans to kill coalition troops in that country -- including United States soldiers. And our intelligence agencies says some of those bounties have been paid by Russia for killing our soldiers.

A real U.S. president would have taken immediate action to stop this. What has Trump done? Nothing! In fact, it is worse than nothing. Since March, when he knew this was happening, he has helped Russia negotiate a lucrative oil deal, said he will invite Putin to attend the next G-7 meeting, and ordered the removal of half our troops from Germany -- all things to reward Putin!

Here is how The New York Times is reporting this story:

American intelligence officials have concluded that a Russian military intelligence unit secretly offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing coalition forces in Afghanistan — including targeting American troops — amid the peace talks to end the long-running war there, according to officials briefed on the matter.

The United States concluded months ago that the Russian unit, which has been linked to assassination attempts and other covert operations in Europe intended to destabilize the West or take revenge on turncoats, had covertly offered rewards for successful attacks last year.

Islamist militants, or armed criminal elements closely associated with them, are believed to have collected some bounty money, the officials said. Twenty Americans were killed in combat in Afghanistan in 2019, but it was not clear which killings were under suspicion.

The intelligence finding was briefed to President Trump, and the White House’s National Security Council discussed the problem at an interagency meeting in late March, the officials said. Officials developed a menu of potential options — starting with making a diplomatic complaint to Moscow and a demand that it stop, along with an escalating series of sanctions and other possible responses, but the White House has yet to authorize any step, the officials said.

An operation to incentivize the killing of American and other NATO troops would be a significant and provocative escalation of what American and Afghan officials have said is Russian support for the Taliban, and it would be the first time the Russian spy unit was known to have orchestrated attacks on Western troops.

Any involvement with the Taliban that resulted in the deaths of American troops would also be a huge escalation of Russia’s so-called hybrid war against the United States, a strategy of destabilizing adversaries through a combination of such tactics as cyberattacks, the spread of fake news and covert and deniable military operations. . . .

Spokespeople at the National Security Council, the Pentagon, the State Department and the C.I.A. declined to comment.

The officials familiar with the intelligence did not explain the White House delay in deciding how to respond to the intelligence about Russia.

Many U.S. Soldiers Disgusted With Trump's Syria Withdrawal

(Photo of Turkish tanks poised to invade Syria is by Unit Bektas at ukdefencejournal.org.uk.)

It shouldn't surprise us that many soldiers are not happy with Trump's decision to betray our Kurdish allies. The following is by Steve Benen at The MaddowBlog:

In a recent piece for The Atlantic, Mark Bowden took a closer look at what it’s like for U.S. troops to serve under Donald Trump, interviewing “officers up and down the ranks, as well as several present and former civilian Pentagon employees.” The results were striking.

“In 20 years of writing about the military, I have never heard officers in high positions express such alarm about a president,” the article noted.

This, of course, was before the president ignored his national security team, withdrew U.S. forces from northern Syria, and effectively invited Turkey to launch a brutal offensive against our Kurdish allies. As the Washington Post reported yesterday, Trump’s decision isn’t sitting well with many U.S. service members.

U.S. veterans have supported Trump in part because of his often-repeated promises to extricate the U.S. military from a generation at war, numerous polls have found. But the calamity on the ground in Syria has wrought angry reactions from service members like few other recent foreign policy decisions.

Troops have reacted viscerally in interviews and on social media despite Defense Department restrictions on them expressing political opinions.

The Post spoke with many troops who “expressed disgust” with the president’s decision.

“I can’t even look at the atrocities,” one Army officer who served in Syria last year said. “The ISIS mission is going to stop, ISIS is going to have a resurgence, and we’re going to have to go back in five years and do it all again.”

A day earlier, David Ignatius wrote in his latest column about a conversation he’d had with a retired four-star general who described Trump’s retreat from Syria as an “unsound, morally indefensible act” and a “disgrace” to America and the soldiers who serve this country.

Ignatius also spoke to an Army officer who added, in reference to Trump’s decision, “It will go down in infamy…. This will go down as a stain on the American reputation for decades.”

The president seems to assume that he enjoys broad political support within the military, which he perceives as conservative, and there’s probably some truth to that. The Military Times reported a few months ago on a poll of U.S. military veterans and the results showed Trump with a 57% approval rating, while 41% disapprove. This is roughly the inverse of Trump’s support with the overall U.S. population.

But if the president believes those numbers can never and will never change, he may be disappointed.

A Dying Soldier's Letter To Bush/Cheney

The open letter below was written by Tomas Young. Mr. Young is a patriotic American who joined the U.S. Army two days after the 9/11 tragedy. He is now a paralyzed veteran living out the final days of his life in hospice care. I am reposting his open letter (found at truthdig) to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney because I think it deserves as wide a readership as possible. It is a searing indictment of the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

To: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney
From: Tomas Young

I write this letter on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War on behalf of my fellow Iraq War veterans. I write this letter on behalf of the 4,488 soldiers and Marines who died in Iraq. I write this letter on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been wounded and on behalf of those whose wounds, physical and psychological, have destroyed their lives. I am one of those gravely wounded. I was paralyzed in an insurgent ambush in 2004 in Sadr City. My life is coming to an end. I am living under hospice care.

I write this letter on behalf of husbands and wives who have lost spouses, on behalf of children who have lost a parent, on behalf of the fathers and mothers who have lost sons and daughters and on behalf of those who care for the many thousands of my fellow veterans who have brain injuries. I write this letter on behalf of those veterans whose trauma and self-revulsion for what they have witnessed, endured and done in Iraq have led to suicide and on behalf of the active-duty soldiers and Marines who commit, on average, a suicide a day. I write this letter on behalf of the some 1 million Iraqi dead and on behalf of the countless Iraqi wounded. I write this letter on behalf of us all—the human detritus your war has left behind, those who will spend their lives in unending pain and grief.

I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole.

Your positions of authority, your millions of dollars of personal wealth, your public relations consultants, your privilege and your power cannot mask the hollowness of your character. You sent us to fight and die in Iraq after you, Mr. Cheney, dodged the draft in Vietnam, and you, Mr. Bush, went AWOL from your National Guard unit. Your cowardice and selfishness were established decades ago. You were not willing to risk yourselves for our nation but you sent hundreds of thousands of young men and women to be sacrificed in a senseless war with no more thought than it takes to put out the garbage.

I joined the Army two days after the 9/11 attacks. I joined the Army because our country had been attacked. I wanted to strike back at those who had killed some 3,000 of my fellow citizens. I did not join the Army to go to Iraq, a country that had no part in the September 2001 attacks and did not pose a threat to its neighbors, much less to the United States. I did not join the Army to “liberate” Iraqis or to shut down mythical weapons-of-mass-destruction facilities or to implant what you cynically called “democracy” in Baghdad and the Middle East. I did not join the Army to rebuild Iraq, which at the time you told us could be paid for by Iraq’s oil revenues. Instead, this war has cost the United States over $3 trillion. I especially did not join the Army to carry out pre-emptive war. Pre-emptive war is illegal under international law. And as a soldier in Iraq I was, I now know, abetting your idiocy and your crimes. The Iraq War is the largest strategic blunder in U.S. history. It obliterated the balance of power in the Middle East. It installed a corrupt and brutal pro-Iranian government in Baghdad, one cemented in power through the use of torture, death squads and terror. And it has left Iran as the dominant force in the region. On every level—moral, strategic, military and economic—Iraq was a failure. And it was you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, who started this war. It is you who should pay the consequences.

I would not be writing this letter if I had been wounded fighting in Afghanistan against those forces that carried out the attacks of 9/11. Had I been wounded there I would still be miserable because of my physical deterioration and imminent death, but I would at least have the comfort of knowing that my injuries were a consequence of my own decision to defend the country I love. I would not have to lie in my bed, my body filled with painkillers, my life ebbing away, and deal with the fact that hundreds of thousands of human beings, including children, including myself, were sacrificed by you for little more than the greed of oil companies, for your alliance with the oil sheiks in Saudi Arabia, and your insane visions of empire.

I have, like many other disabled veterans, suffered from the inadequate and often inept care provided by the Veterans Administration. I have, like many other disabled veterans, come to realize that our mental and physical wounds are of no interest to you, perhaps of no interest to any politician. We were used. We were betrayed. And we have been abandoned. You, Mr. Bush, make much pretense of being a Christian. But isn’t lying a sin? Isn’t murder a sin? Aren’t theft and selfish ambition sins? I am not a Christian. But I believe in the Christian ideal. I believe that what you do to the least of your brothers you finally do to yourself, to your own soul.

My day of reckoning is upon me. Yours will come. I hope you will be put on trial. But mostly I hope, for your sakes, that you find the moral courage to face what you have done to me and to many, many others who deserved to live. I hope that before your time on earth ends, as mine is now ending, you will find the strength of character to stand before the American public and the world, and in particular the Iraqi people, and beg for forgiveness. 

Yuppies Steal Home Of Soldier In Iraq

Thirty years ago when I lived near the city of Frisco, it was a small farming town about 30 miles north of Dallas, Texas. It is far from that today. Today it is a booming city filled with Yuppies trying to escape the big city and has thousands of high-dollar middle class homes. It also has that bane of modern existence -- home owner's associations.

Frisco was also the home of Capt. Michael Clauer, who was in the U.S. Army Reserve -- a fact that was known to his neighbors. The $300,000 home that Capt. Clauer and his wife, Mae, lived in was completely paid for -- a gift from Mae's parents. Capt. Clauer was not worried when he was called up by the Army and sent to Iraq, because he had a family to come back to and a home that he owned free and clear.

But after Capt. Clauer went to Iraq, things began to go wrong. His wife fell into a deep depression, and it was all she could do to take care of their children. She began to ignore the mail, including bills, and spent much of the time with her parents. Among the ignored bills were those from their home owner's association, and after several months the HOA sent her another letter saying the Clauers owed $800 in fees to the HOA and they were planning to foreclose on the home (believe it or not, Texas law allows them to do that).

The HOA made good on their threat. They took the home and sold it for $3500 (about 1/10 of its true worth). When Capt. Clauer returned from Iraq, the new owner was already living in the home. And much to Capt. Clauer's consternation, the foreclosure had been legal and Texas law did not allow any way for him to reclaim his home (or be paid for it).

Frankly, I consider this to be nothing more than felony theft. The neighbors (and fellow members of the HOA) all knew Capt. Clauer was a United States soldier serving his country in Iraq. Evidently, they didn't care about that and were unwilling to wait until he got back from Iraq to take care of the fees. Their piddly fees were obviously more important than acting to help a soldier serving in Iraq.

But even though they followed Texas law (which should be changed as soon as possible), they overlooked a federal law. The Servicemembers Civil Relief Act (SCRA) is supposed to protect soldiers serving in a war zone from financial problems back home, although law experts say it is routinely ignored (like the HOA did in Frisco).

Navy Lt. Janelle Kuroda, an attorney and expert on SCRA, said there are at least 100 pending cases where a service member's rights had been violated by someone ignoring the SCRA. But the law is on the books, and has a serious purpose. Kuroda said a service member's "number one focus needs to be on the mission, and if their focus is elsewhere at home with ongoing court proceedings, with family issues, or mortgage issues or other issues, then it's going to take away from their readiness and their ability to put everything they have toward the mission."

Capt. Clauer is currently suing the HOA for ignoring the SCRA. He says the neighbors knew he was in Iraq, and should have waited until he returned before taking any action to foreclose. I hope he wins this case and that the HOA is forced to reimburse him for the full value of his home -- which they stole from him. In addition, I believe he should be awarded punitive damages for the HOA breaking federal law.

The HOA believes they had the legal right to take Capt. Clauer's home (although that is doubtful in light of the federal law), but there is no doubt that they did NOT have the moral right. There action was not just wrong, it was inexcusably immoral and unethical. How do they sleep at night?

This Just Ain't Right !

This story has got me upset. I am astounded at this decision delivered by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. These misguided justices have decided that not only does the Westboro Baptist Church (Fred Phelp's group of idiots) have the right to picket and disrupt the solemnity of the funerals of U.S. soldiers who gave their life for their country, but the father of a fallen soldier must also pay the attorney fees for the church.

I know the court was just trying to uphold the principle of free speech and religious expression, but I think they have gone too far. There is also a right to privacy, and I think that should extend to the family of a fallen soldier. They should have the right to grieve with friends and associates without being subjected to the vile actions of people like those in the Westboro Baptist Church (pictured). The funeral of a loved one is one of the most personal and difficult things a person can experience.

No one is trying to deny the right of this church to picket and to say what they want. But the Constitution doesn't guarantee they can do this anywhere. There are limits to free speech. You cannot yell "fire" in a crowded theater, and you should not be able to disrupt a funeral. Not allowing the people to disrupt a funeral does not impinge on their right to free speech, because there are many many other places for them to picket and get their message across.

I almost never agree with Bill O'Reilly of Fox News about anything, but I do this time. O'Reilly also deplores the court's decision and has offered to pay the attorney fees for the soldier's family if need be ($16,510). But hopefully that won't be necessary.

The family is appealing the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, and the court has agreed to take the case. The court will decide whether free speech is the dominant issue in this case, or whether that right can be limited by the right to privacy and religious freedom of the fallen soldier's family.

I am a big supporter of free speech rights, even when that speech is offensive. But disrupting a funeral is over the line. There's just no excuse for that kind of behavior.

Every Day 3 US Soldiers Die In Iraq

The occupation of Iraq continues as its civil war rages on. US troops sit in the middle of the conflict. At our current troop level, they are not able to stop the fighting but are simply a target for both sides in the conflict. To date, 3,605 US soldiers have been killed.

The last three months have been especially bloody, with more than 100 American soldiers killed in each month. So far, Bush's "troop surge" has been a miserable failure. Instead of quelling the violence, the surge seems to have provoked even greater violence.

So far this year (through July 8th), 602 US soldiers have been killed. This is an average of 3.185 soldiers killed each and every day for the last six months, and there is no reason to believe this rate will be reduced any time soon.

Bush has told us that he has no plans to pull our troops out during his administration. If this is true, that means at least 1795 more US soldiers will be killed before Bush leaves office in January 2009.

Another 1800 dead Americans! And for what? So the giant oil companies can make huge windfall profits off Iraqi oil? So Bush can salvage some personal pride and not have to admit he made an awful blunder? Are these goals really worth killing 1800 more Americans and putting the total number of American deaths over 5,400?

We cannot wait for Bush to leave office. The American people oppose this illegal occupation, and elected Democrats in the hope they would stop the killing. But so far nothing has been done. This must change!

The Democrats tell us they don't have the votes in the Senate to pass their "timetables". That may be true. But they do have enough votes to block any further funding of the war. All they need is the political courage to do it.

I know some Democrats believe if they cut off the war funding they will lose votes in next year's election. However, I believe if they continue to demonstrate their political cowardice and continue to let Bush push them around, they will lose far more votes. Americans do not like cowards and never vote for them.

We must stop the war funding and force Bush to bring our troops home now. Each day we delay means three more Americans will die. We must stop the killing now!