[Washington Examiner] The Republican-led congressional committee tasked with seeking answers and accountability for America’s defeat in the war in Afghanistan has instead sought to let the generals who lost the war off the hook.
Chairman Michael McCaul and the House Foreign Affairs Committee have been investigating the Biden-Harris Administration’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, but, as part of that inquiry, McCaul decided to absolve U.S. military commanders of responsibility. I recently resigned as a senior investigator on the Committee in part because I believe it is incontrovertible that military brass like General Mark Milley and General Frank McKenzie share blame for what went wrong in August 2021. McCaul doesn’t agree. He is wrong.
McCaul’s deliberate decision to deflect from the failures of U.S. military commanders is perhaps best illustrated by a phone call McCaul had with Milley and McKenzie just ahead of the Committee’s public hearing with them.
"I’m trying to protect you a little bit," McCaul told McKenzie on that call (as I openly took notes), alluding to the righteous indignation of the Gold Star families at the military’s lack of candor.
McCaul told the generals at the start of the call, conducted on speakerphone in his private office, that he had told other members of Congress that he would "use the gavel" if any of the congressional questions did not "show proper respect" to Milley and McKenzie.
The Chairman also previewed to the generals all the questions he planned on asking them — telling them he was doing so "so there are no surprises." Can you imagine a prosecutor helping a defendant prepare for his defense? Well, that’s exactly what former federal prosecutor McCaul did.
#2
First of all, Trump gave the leadership a 'warning order' about to pull out of Afghanistan. That meant you better be making plans for an orderly withdraw. The senior leadership disobeyed the C-in-C, running their own show. When Biden took office, that plan should have been sitting there ready to execute. Instead it was a 'chinese fire drill' execution.
[AFRICANEWS] Sudan ...a Moslem country located in the Horn of Africa. It is noted for its affinity for rule by ex- or current generals, its holy men, and for the oppression of the native Afro population by its Arab conquerors. South Sudan, populated mostly by the natives, split off from Sudan proper, which left North and South Darfur to be oppressed by the guys with turbans... 's top military leader, General Abdel-Fattah Burhan, met on Sunday with locals and first responders at the site of a dam collapse in the northeast of the country
The Arbaat Dam north of Port Sudan burst following torrential rain in the area, washing away farms and villages downstream.
Amr Eissa Taher, the head water resources official for the Red Sea state said the damage was extensive.
A local official told the Sudanese news site al-Tagheer that at least 60 people may be dead with many more missing.
The health ministry says resources have been deployed to the area to help people who have been stranded.
It is the latest disaster to hit Sudan, which has been ravaged by war since April last year when fighting broke out between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces.
Millions of people have been forced from their homes by the fighting and several of the country's states have declared famine.
The extreme weather conditions will only exacerbate food shortages.
The dam was the main water supply for Port Sudan which has become the de facto administrative capital since fighting overtook Khartoum.
Oh no! No more cocktail parties and afternoon teas with genuine Danish danish pastries? However will the international diplomatic corps survive??
[AFRICANEWS] Denmark said it will close its embassies in Mali and Burkina Faso ...The country in west Africa that they put where Upper Volta used to be. Its capital is Oogadooga, or something like that. Its president used to be Blaise Compaoré, who took office in 1987 and was chased out in 2014. Now it's the usual army officer type guy, Captain Ibrahim Traore, running things, who's just doing a bang-up job unless he's already been deposed... as part of its new strategy for cooperation with Africa.
The Foreign Ministry said on Monday that military coups in both countries had limited ''the scope for action in the Sahel region ... North Africa's answer to the Pak tribal areas... Instead, it plans to open new missions in Senegal ... a nation of about 14 million on the west coast of Africa bordering Mauretania to the north, Mali to the east, and a pair of Guineas to the south, one of them Bissau. It is 90 percent Mohammedan and has more than 80 political parties. Its primary purpose seems to be absorbing refugees... , Tunisia, and Rwanda, and increase its diplomatic workforce in its embassies in Egypt, Kenya, South Africa, Nigeria, and Ghana.
Copenhagen said that following the closures in Bamako and Ougadougou, it will appoint a special representative for the Great Lakes and Sahel region.
Relations between the two African countries and the West have deteriorated since Mali's coup in 2020 and in Burkina Faso in 2022.
Both have turned to Russia and its Wagner mercenary group for support since then.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/27/2024 00:00 ||
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Top|| File under: Tin Hat Dictators, Presidents for Life, & Kleptocrats
[HODHODYEMENNEWS] Workers and employees of the al-Jumhuriya Model General Hospital in the city of Aden began their strike on Sunday in protest against the non-payment of their salaries and financial dues.
It’s Yemen. Does anyone have money to pay for such luxuries?
The head of the hospital's union committee, Najd Saeed Ali, confirmed the start of the strike in all hospital departments until the workers' demands are met and all financial dues, including salaries, incentives, and bonuses, are paid.
He stated that the strike came for demanding the hospital employees' financial dues that had not been paid for several months, pointing out that the union does not bear responsibility for any negative consequences that may result from the strike.
Najd attributed that to the financial administration's inability, the delay in payroll and entitlements, and the lack of serious follow-up in the Ministry of Finance in the government loyal to the Saudi-led coalition.
For his part, the secretary-general of the hospital's union committee, Ammar Muhammad Qaed, called for those who tampered with the administration or accounts to be held accountable.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/27/2024 00:00 ||
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Top|| File under: Southern Transitional Council
[GEOTV] A local court in the Punjab 1.) Little Orphan Annie's bodyguard
2.) A province of Pakistain ruled by one of the Sharif brothers
3.) A province of India. It is majority (60 percent) Sikh and Hindoo (37 percent), which means it has relatively few Moslem riots.... capital on Monday discharged suspect Farhan Asif from the charges of spreading disinformation regarding the killer of three children in Southport, England — the gruesome murders that recently sparked widespread riots in the United Kingdom.
“He has suffered enough embarrassment over the foolishness of faraway unbelievers. No more will we make one of the Master Religion suffer for their stupid fates.”
The Lahore police had arrested the suspect on the charges of publishing "fake news" story that allegedly triggered widespread anti-immigrant riots in the UK.
The riots saw numerous mosques, asylum centres and immigrant homes being attacked in several regions of Britannia.
In Pakistain, Federal Investigation Agency's (FIA) Cybercrime wing was investigating the charges against Asif.
During the hearing today, the investigation officer (IO) informed a judicial magistrate's court in Lahore that the "news" about the murder had been shared on the social media previously and suspect Asif had only "re-shared" it.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Maria Orlova
[REGNUM] A wedding in the Dagestani village of Nizhneye Kazanishche. The newlyweds are about to go outside, but suddenly the young wife's mother starts circling around her daughter, calling her to dance. The music thunders, and the aunts' round dance carries the young woman along. The husband is shocked by what is happening: he tries to stop the dancing, and when he fails, he rips the wires of the music equipment out of the sockets.
The video from the wedding in Nizhny Kazanishche appeared the day before in Dagestani Telegram channels, and then in VKontakte communities. In the public group “Voice of Dagestan”, the video collected more than a thousand likes and almost two thousand comments in a couple of days. In addition to expressing support for the groom — “handsome!”, “that’s how it should be!” — and mass condemnation of the bride’s mother, commentators discussed how the young people found each other and decided to get married with such different families?
"Where was the groom looking when he was wooing a girl from a non-observant family? He saw what kind of parents and relatives the girl had. And what were the girl's parents and the girl herself thinking when she married a guy who observed religion?" - one of the most "liked" comments under the video.
In response, one user suggested that the families might not have come to a compromise on how the wedding would go. And if they did, the "social" mother-in-law only formally agreed to be left alone, and then at the celebration she did things her way. "You need to initially take someone from your circle as a partner," the author of the comment concludes.
The male commentator immediately explained that in modern Dagestan, "the imam concludes the marriage before the banquet halls, the young couple are already husband and wife. The husband has all rights to his wife as soon as he takes her to his home from her parents' house." In general, "according to religion," music and dancing are prohibited at weddings.
In any case, a compromise could have been found, one of the commentators is sure, describing his own story from two years ago. Then, according to the man, "they gave away a niece in marriage to a groom of a different nationality."
“Seeing the groom with a beard, I made a remark: “Wearing a beard is not prohibited, I cannot forbid it, but the size of the beard is not a criterion for assessing a person’s faith in the Almighty, it should be in the soul of every person.”
Then I informed the guests that from our side there would be a full wedding, the bride's exit from the house would definitely be with music. The groom's side agreed with us. Moreover, at their request, the wedding was held together, in one hall," the man wrote.
Another story was shared by a girl “whose parents were communists and her husband was religious.”
"When he came to my parents' house, my father immediately made it clear that the wedding would be with music and alcohol - at most, he would not put alcohol on his table - out of respect, that he was against the hijab, and a few other things. My husband agreed. We got married, after some time I covered myself. And my husband conveyed the religion to my parents so beautifully that they began to study it themselves," the girl wrote.
According to another version, the conflict at the wedding could have been programmed from the start - if both the bride and the groom had “non-observant” families.
"Most people in Dagestan have secular families since the communist era, but the youth are more religious. That is, the adults have agreed on something, but the young people have not," wrote one user.
However, the reason for the dispute may be much more prosaic: the bride’s mother could simply be trying to recoup the costs of the celebration.
"We had a case. The groom's parents, without the newlyweds, had a secular wedding the next day to cover their expenses. Perhaps the mother decided to do this at the expense of her daughter's dance," wrote a resident of Dagestan.
There is a tradition at weddings: guests can dance with the bride, after giving her a banknote. In this way, a decent amount can be collected.
At the same time, as explained in the comments, usually the groom's side bears most of the costs of organizing the wedding. And this time, the "musicians and other fun" were obviously ordered by the wife's family.
In any case, as one commentator wrote aphoristically, for the young family “the honeymoon was icy.”
In turn, a resident of Makhachkala offered a recipe for how to prevent similar situations in the future. According to her, conflicts will stop "when both the bride's side and the groom's side understand one simple truth: their children are building their own family. Parents need to understand long ago that they should not interfere in the relationship of two people who are getting married. There will be less pulling back and forth, there will be fewer divorces and broken lives."
The incident in the Dagestani village really illustrates the split in local society, 60-year-old Dagestani Rizvan A., chairman of a collective farm in the Tver region, told Regnum. The man visits his homeland every year and sees how the mood in the region changes.
According to Rizvan, the young wife found herself between two fires: on the one hand, the duty of a Dagestani girl is to honor her parents and obey her mother, on the other hand, to obey her husband.
"We, the older generation, grew up in the Soviet Union. It is customary for us to work hard and have a good rest. How can we not drink excellent Dagestani cognac at a wedding, how can we not dance? I don't understand!
And some of the youth in Makhachkala are now completely different. They are interested in mosques, gyms and barbershops. They want to live like the sheikhs in Saudi Arabia, so they try to become more righteous than Mohammed himself. Our girls have never worn niqabs, the Dagestani women's dress is very beautiful. And now women wrap themselves in black, like in Iran," says the interlocutor of IA Regnum.
He is sure that this is a conflict not only between generations, but also between Soviet modernism and religious archaism.
Dagestan is a boiling cauldron of nations. Only officially, 14 nationalities live side by side here, speaking different languages, but connected by a common history and centuries-old neighborhood.
A Dagestani wedding is one of the main events in the life of a new family. Several hundred guests are usually invited to the celebration. But if earlier a wedding in Dagestan was a celebration of good neighborliness, now different worldviews can clash, which will not only spoil the holiday, but also threaten to create a much wider conflict than a quarrel between two families.
In Dagestan today, there are two types of weddings. The first is the "regular" one, where they dance to loud music and drink to the health of the newlyweds. The second is a Muslim wedding, where alcohol is strictly prohibited, and the ceremony is accompanied by the quiet singing of nasheeds - traditional singers who sing without the accompaniment of musical instruments. Dancing is not prohibited in Islam, but it is believed that men and women should dance separately from each other, in different rooms.
"Most of the peoples of Dagestan profess Islam. But historically, Dagestani Islam absorbed the traditions of the mountain peoples, it was very different from the harsh Islam of the Arabian Desert.
95% of the population of Dagestan are Sunni Muslims, 5% are Shiites. In short, Shiites, who believe in the infallibility of Muslim teachers-imams, are the main current of Islam in Iran. And in more moderate Muslim countries, Sunnis predominate, believing that vital issues should be decided by the Muslim community,” religious scholar Farit Batyrgareev tells IA Regnum.
Recently, he continues, Wahhabism has been considered a separate branch - a movement whose followers believe that Islam must be cleansed of all innovations that appeared after the Prophet Muhammad and his descendants. At the same time, the radicalization of Islam in the post-Soviet space coincided with the global trend.
"Most likely, the growth of Islamist sentiments among Dagestani youth is based on the demand for social justice, so clearly expressed in the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad. Faced with corruption, bureaucracy and other vices of the secular regional system, young people are leaving for mosques," Batyrgareev said.
But radicalism and misunderstood principles of Islam manifest themselves in horrific excesses. In June, terrorists in Dagestan attacked synagogues and a church, where Russian Orthodox priest Nikolai Kotelnikov was brutally murdered. The attackers included the son and nephew of the former head of the Sergokalinsky district, Magomed Omarov.
At the end of October 2023, about 1,200 people rioted at Makhachkala's Uytash airport, breaking into the building and then onto the airfield. The radical youth were waiting for a plane from Tel Aviv to arrive.
On August 23, the Armavir City Court issued the first verdict to the participants in the pogrom: five defendants in the criminal case were sentenced to prison terms of six to nine years. However, they did not admit their guilt.
The main problem is that radical Islamists are ready to do anything. Not so much because of their hatred of Russia, but because of their rejection of the entire modern world as such. In addition, the seething energy of radicals can be used for their own purposes by Russia's enemies, trying to split society and incite interethnic strife.
And the young family from Nizhny Kazanishche can only wish that everything works out for them. If the young people love each other, they will understand and forgive their other half. And if not, maybe it’s good that everything ended, essentially, before it began?
Promises are easy in the heat of the moment. Execution — that depends on the agreement of petty bureaucrats up and down the land, who have thus far only accepted cleaning up the paperwork while resisting actually doing anything about those rejected, It’s a moral position, donchaknow.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz vowed to step up deportations on Monday during a visit to Solingen, where a deadly mass stabbing linked to ISIS has emboldened the far-right opposition and stoked criticism of his government's handling of migration.
"We will have to do everything we can to ensure that those who cannot and are not allowed to stay in Germany are repatriated and deported," Scholz told news hounds in the western city, where he laid a flower at the scene of the crime.
"This was terrorism, terrorism against us all," he added.
The attack, in which a 26-year-old suspected ISIS member from Syria is accused of killing three people, has fuelled political tensions over asylum and deportation rules ahead of three state elections next month.
The group grabbed credit for the attack, which occurred on Friday evening during a festival celebrating Solingen's 650-year history. Alongside the three killed, eight were maimed, some seriously.
The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which campaigns for a crackdown on migration, is leading in the polls in Saxony and Thuringia, where state elections are set for Sunday, and in Brandenburg, which has its election on September 22.
The AfD seized on the attack in its election campaign, with Thuringia's leading candidate for the party, Bjoern Hoecke, pitching to voters the choice of "Hoecke or Solingen".
Opinion pollsters Stefan Merz of Infratest dimap and Manfred Guellner of Forsa told Rooters the attack would be unlikely to translate into more votes for the far-right party because its supporters had already been mobilised by migration issues.
Infratest dimap's Merz cited the possibility that the centre-right CDU could benefit at the expense of Scholz's centre-left Social Democrats ...every time you hear the phrase white people, white supremacy,white anything but paint, you're listening to a Democrat. Ask him/her/it to reimagine something for you; they do that a lot, though not well. They can hear a dog whistle a mile or two away. They invented the spoils system and Tammany Hall, and inspired the addition of the word (Thomas) Nasty to the English language. They want to stop continental drift and repeal the law of unintended side effects... .
Posted by: Fred ||
08/27/2024 00:00 ||
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Top|| File under: Moslem Colonists
[NY Post] A Brooklyn Muslim cleric who once partnered with New York Mayor Eric Adams on a campaign to end hate is now spreading it by calling for the annihilation of Israel, The Post has learned.
Meanwhile, one of his counterparts at a mosque in the Bronx has taken to blasting “Zionist Hollywood” and Christians for packing their churches with LGBTQ worshippers, whom he claims they are recruiting to bolster dwindling congregations.
As the Israeli war against Hamas in Gaza continues, imam Sheikh Muhammad Al-Barr, called on Allah at his Bay Ridge mosque to “liberate Palestine from the occupiers and the plunderers” during a Friday service earlier this month.
“Oh Allah, annihilate those who occupied their lands, and those who betrayed and deserted them, and those who spilled their blood,” Al-Barr said in Arabic August 12 at the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge’s Masjid ibn Umair.
The video of Al-Barr’s sermon was posted last week by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), a think tank that features human rights activist Natan Sharansky and lawyer and former diplomat Stuart Eizenstat, among other religious leaders on their board of advisors.
Al-Barr, whose last name is also spelled “Elbar,” also said that “the mujahideen [Hamas fighters] in Gaza are achieving more than our Arab armies could in 1967 and 1973,” a reference to the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War, respectively.
“Muhammad Al-Barr explains how…Hamas managed to do what the Arab armies of Egypt and Syria …did not do in 1967 and 1973,” said Yigal Carmon, president and founder of MEMRI in an interview with The Post Monday.
“He ignores one thing: How Hamas used the population as human shields…The imam shows total support for a terrorist organization in the heart of New York and totally ignores how October 7 began.”
Adams joined forces with the Bay Ridge mosque and a host of elected officials in April 2017 in a campaign to combat hate against the Muslim community. At the time he was Brooklyn Borough President.
“Any attack on one religious life is an attack on all religious ways of life,” said Adams in comments at a prayer service at the Bay Ridge mosque. “Right here in the borough, we have a welcome mat for all groups.”
It is unclear if Adams has since had any contact with Al-Barr. In response to a request for comment a spokesperson said: “The mayor has been abundantly clear that hate has no place in our city, whether it be antisemitism, Islamophobia, or any other form of bigotry.
The pro-Hamas comments in Bay Ridge came three days after an imam at the Islamic Center of Rockland County called for “the destruction of the Zionist Jews,” according to a translation by MEMRI TV.
The Rockland County mosque apologized for the visiting imam’s sermon following complaints from local Jewish groups and elected officials.
“On August 9, during a sermon at our masjid, a guest imam delivered several hurtful statements that included a prayer to God for the destruction of Zionist Jews as part of the conflict in Gaza,” the Islamic Center said in a statement.
“We unequivocally condemn these statements. We sincerely apologize for any pain caused by these remarks and will ensure that our platform is not used to promote these types of harmful messages going forward.”
In a live stream at the Muslim America Society’s Bronx Muslim Center in July, an unidentified imam said that Christians and Jews were jealous of Muslims, and that Christians were forced to allow LGBTQ into churches to bolster their numbers.
“My brothers and sisters, they have reasons to be jealous of us,” the imam continued. “We are the best of nations, those Jews ain’t it anymore…They can’t see that slaughtering innocent children, men and women is wrong. [They say] ‘We’re looking for the terrorists.’ Meanwhile they are the terrorists. May Allah destroy our enemies.”
The Bronx imam also warned the congregation against the “Zionist owned” entertainment industry in Hollywood — “all these musicians of yours have contracts with these Zionists” — and warned against taking children to Disney amusement parks.
“There is a subtext to this imam in the Bronx claiming Christians are turning to ‘LGBT’ congregants as the churches lose support,” said Sam Westrop, director of the Middle East Forum’s Islamist Watch project.
“He and other Islamists across America worry that American Islam has suffered years of dilution from embracing leftist allies too tightly. Now they fear Islamic youth across the country are increasingly embracing ‘LGBT’ and other ‘progressivist’ phenomena as well. Their duplicitous radicalism has backfired.”
The Muslim American Society, a Washington DC-based non-profit which oversees the Bronx Muslim Center, did not return a request for comment Monday, nor did the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge.
[GEOTV] A far-right Israeli minister sparked fresh outrage on Monday by saying he would build a synagogue at Jerusalem's flashpoint Al-Aqsa mosque compound if he could, once again challenging government policy.
National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who has repeatedly ignored the government's long-standing ban on Jews praying at the site, told Army Radio that if it were possible he would build a synagogue at the Al-Aqsa compound, known to Jews as the Temple Mount.
One must admire the honesty in the article, even as the headline lies like a rug.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/27/2024 00:00 ||
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Top|| File under: Hamas
[GEOTV] Iran on Monday praised the drone and missile assault by Lebanon's Hezbollah group on Israel, saying its arch-foe had lost the ability to prevent such attacks amid heightened regional tensions.
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on Sunday said the group, which is backed by Tehran, had launched a large-scale attack on Israel, targeting "the Glilot base — the main Israeli military intelligence base".
Praise in public, castigate for arrogant ineffectiveness in private — that’s what all the management textbooks say.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/27/2024 00:00 ||
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Top|| File under: Govt of Iran Proxies
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
...a Moslem country located in the Horn of Africa. It is noted for its affinity for rule by ex- or current generals, its holy men, and for the oppression of the native Afro population by its Arab conquerors. South Sudan, populated mostly by the natives, split off from Sudan proper, which left North and South Darfur to be oppressed by the guys with turbans...
...The country in west Africa that they put where Upper Volta used to be. Its capital is Oogadooga, or something like that. Its president used to be Blaise Compaoré, who took office in 1987 and was chased out in 2014. Now it's the usual army officer type guy, Captain Ibrahim Traore, running things, who's just doing a bang-up job unless he's already been deposed...
Workers and employees of the al-Jumhuriya Model General Hospital in the city of Aden began their strike on Sunday in protest against the non-payment of their salaries and financial dues.
...every time you hear the phrase 
