THEY STILL DO
Opinion | Poison Pills and Deadly Powders: When Presidents Ordered Assassinations

Amid calls to target Putin, it’s worth recalling why the U.S. has stopped trying to kill foreign heads of state.


President Eisenhower at his desk on March 16, 1959. | Bob Schutz/AP Photo

Opinion by STEPHEN KINZER
03/13/2022 
Stephen Kinzer's new book is Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control.

America’s rage at a foreign demon has rarely been as intense as our current fixation on Vladimir Putin. He is this generation’s Mao or Castro, its Gadhafi or Saddam or Khomeini, the rampaging and perhaps deranged foreign tyrant who personifies everything we hate and fear. Many in Washington see last month’s invasion of Ukraine as entirely his doing. Some believe the world will never be at peace as long as he lives and rules. From there it’s a short step to wishing him “sawed off” — as Dwight Eisenhower put it when he ordered Fidel Castro’s assassination in 1960.

“Is there a Brutus in Russia? Is there a more successful Colonel Stauffenberg in the Russian military?” Sen. Lindsey Graham mused recently. “The only way this ends is for somebody in Russia to take this guy out.”

In some circles it might be considered imprudent for a leading political figure to urge the murder of a foreign leader. Graham, however, was only expressing publicly what some of his colleagues may wish privately. The reasoning is simple. If Putin is the problem, “eliminate” Putin and the problem disappears.

Such open calls for political murder are rare. The Fox News host Sean Hannity jumped aboard, reasoning that “You cut off the head of the snake and you kill the snake. Right now, the snake is Vladimir Putin.” Others are less explicit about their wishes for Putin’s death or overthrow. When a spokesman for British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was struck by an attack of honesty and admitted that sanctions on Russia are intended “to bring down the Putin regime,” she was quickly corrected. Yet when senators including Graham, Cory Booker, Marco Rubio and Amy Klobuchar co-sponsor a resolution accusing Russia of “flagrant acts of aggression and other atrocities rising to the level of crimes against humanity and war crimes,” they are clearly putting a target on his chest.

Two deep fallacies undermine this argument. First is the premise itself — that a different Russian leader might seek an accord to withdraw troops from Ukraine. No one who hopes to secure power in Moscow, however, could ever accept Ukraine’s entry into NATO or the presence of hostile troops on Ukrainian soil. Any Russian president who did so would be seen as exposing his country to mortal danger and quickly deposed. Removing Putin would not alter Russia’s determination never to tolerate an enemy army on another of its borders.

The second and more illuminating argument against killing foreign leaders is the poor record we have in past attempts. We’ve tried it repeatedly. Often we have failed, but even when we seem to have succeeded, the long-term consequences have been terrible. An order from the Oval Office to assassinate a foreign leader would not break a taboo. It would only be the latest in a series of self-defeating blunders.

So far as is known, Dwight Eisenhower was the first president to order such assassinations. He began by targeting Premier Zhou Enlai of China. During the 1950s, Eisenhower and nearly every other policymaker in Washington considered the “Red Chinese” to be maniacal fanatics bent on world conquest. When Zhou announced in 1955 that he would travel to Bandung, Indonesia, for a momentous conference of Asian and African leaders, the CIA saw a chance to kill him. Zhou chartered an Air India jet for his flight to Bandung. It exploded in midair, killing 16 passengers. But Zhou had not boarded. China called it “murder by the special service organizations of the United States.”

After Zhou landed safely on another flight, CIA Director Allen Dulles decided to try again. He directed the chief of the CIA’s chemical division, Sidney Gottlieb, to prepare poison. Gottlieb made one that would kill Zhou 48 hours after it was dropped into his rice bowl — presumably after he was back home in China, giving the Americans plausible deniability. This plot was aborted at the last moment when Gen. Lucian Truscott Jr., then serving as a deputy CIA director, learned of it and exploded in anger. Fearing that CIA involvement would become known, according to his biographer, he “confronted Dulles and forced him to cancel the operation.”

Gottlieb destroyed all his files upon leaving the CIA in 1973. As a result — and because of the tradition that assassination orders must never be explicit — no details of the Zhou Enlai plot have been discovered. It was the strict policy of the CIA, however, never to embark on something as serious as assassinating a head of government without presidential approval.

Evidence ties Eisenhower more directly to other plots. During the summer of 1960, he was preoccupied by political murders. His main target was the demon who would obsess American leaders for generations and still does today, even though he is dead: Fidel Castro. On May 13, 1960, after receiving a briefing from Allen Dulles, he ordered Castro “sawed off.”

“In that period of history, its meaning would have been clear,” Richard Bissell, then the CIA’s covert action chief, testified years later. “Eisenhower was a tough man behind that smile.”

Eisenhower’s order set off a wild series of assassination attempts. For more than three years, CIA planners considered plots ranging from a sniper shot to an exploding seashell. The most elaborate ones involved toxins or devices designed by Sidney Gottlieb. They included, according to a later Senate report, “poison pills, poison pens, deadly bacterial powders, and other devices which strain the imagination.”

While waiting for news of success in his plot against Castro — which never came — Eisenhower ordered another assassination. His victim was to be Patrice Lumumba, a defiant nationalist who was elected prime minister of the Congo in May 1960. Eisenhower feared Lumumba’s challenge to Western power in a huge African country that controls vast mineral riches.

On the morning of Aug. 18, 1960, Allen Dulles received an electrifying cable from the CIA station chief in the Congo, Larry Devlin. “Embassy and station believe Congo experiencing classic Communist effort takeover government,” it said. “Anti-West forces rapidly increasing power Congo and therefore may be little time left in which take action to avoid another Cuba.” Dulles took the cable to the Oval Office.

From 11:10 to 11:23 that morning, according to Eisenhower’s official calendar, he held an “off the record meeting” with Dulles and other CIA officers. After hearing their report, the note-taker wrote, the president “turned to Dulles and said something to the effect that Lumumba should be eliminated. There was stunned silence for about 15 seconds, and the meeting continued.” Senate investigators later pinpointed this moment as the point when Eisenhower “circumlocutiously” ordered Lumumba’s assassination.

What does a president do after giving such an order? Eisenhower posed for a photo with the departing Ecuadorian ambassador, had lunch, and then decamped to Bethesda for an afternoon of golf at Burning Tree Club. In case anyone missed the point, he sent his national security adviser, Gordon Grey, to the next meeting of the CIA’s covert action “special group” with instructions to convey “top-level feeling in Washington that vigorous action would not be amiss.”

A couple of weeks later, Devlin received a cable from CIA headquarters telling him to expect a visit from an officer who would identify himself as “Joe from Paris.” When the officer arrived, Devlin recognized him as Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA’s poison-maker. Gottlieb handed him a packet containing a vial of liquid botulinum and told him he was to use it to kill Lumumba.

“Jesus H. Christ!” Devlin cried. “Who authorized this operation?”

“President Eisenhower,” Gottlieb told him. “I wasn’t there when he approved it, but Dick Bissell said that Eisenhower wanted Lumumba removed.” Then he helpfully added: “With the stuff that’s in here, no one will ever be able to know that Lumumba was assassinated.”

Devlin managed to organize a coup in which Lumumba was overthrown but not killed. He remained immensely popular both at home and abroad. Devlin’s efforts to penetrate his security ring and poison him, including an attempt to slip him a tube of tainted toothpaste, all failed. That didn’t discourage Allen Dulles. “We wish to give every possible support in eliminating Lumumba from any possibility of resuming government position,” he wrote in one cable. At one point Devlin and his officers considered using a “commando type group” to capture him. Then they asked if a sharpshooter with a “high powered foreign made rifle” could be found.

“Hunting good here when light’s right,” one CIA officer observed in a cable to headquarters.

The CIA’s poison ultimately went unused, but Devlin found another way to complete his mission. On November 27, Lumumba slipped out of the home where he was being held under Congolese and United Nations guard. Devlin set out to find and capture him. His key partners were intelligence officers from Belgium, the former colonial power, which had become fabulously wealthy by exploiting the Congo’s mineral wealth. Together, they had Lumumba tracked, seized, tortured and delivered to his most murderous local enemies. A Congolese squad executed him under watchful Belgian eyes. No American was present.

Years later, an interviewer asked Allen Dulles if he regretted any of his operations. “I think that we overrated the danger in, let’s say, the Congo,” he replied. Devlin agreed.

“None of us had any real concept of what he stood for,” Devlin later wrote of Lumumba. “He was simply an unstable former postal clerk with great political charisma, who was leaning toward the Communist bloc. In Cold War terms, he represented the other side. The fact that he was first and foremost an African nationalist who was using the East-West rivalry to advance his cause was played down by the Belgians, who greatly feared him.”

When Eisenhower left office in January 1961, he could count one successful assassination — Lumumba, in concert with the Belgians — and two failures: Zhou Enlai and Castro. His successor, John F. Kennedy, focused intently on Castro. Especially after the spectacular failure of the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, he absorbed Eisenhower’s view that Castro must be “sawed off.”

“There was a flat-out effort ordered by the White House, the president, Bobby Kennedy — who after all was his right-hand man — to unseat the Castro government, to do everything possible to get rid of it by whatever device could be found,” former CIA director Richard Helms later told congressional investigators. The Kennedy administration sought relentlessly to kill Castro, even as it sent peace feelers to him through secret channels. On the very day President Kennedy was assassinated, a CIA officer in Paris passed a poison device to an operative who was to use it to kill Castro.

Kennedy also embraced another of Eisenhower’s Caribbean plots, aimed at the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. Both presidents detested Trujillo and feared that his brutal rule might produce a Castro-style revolution. In July 1960, while Eisenhower was in office, the CIA delivered 12 “sterile” rifles with telescopic sights to anti-Trujillo plotters. Nine months later, with Kennedy in the White House, it delivered three carbines. The plotters carried out their tyrannicide on May 30, 1961. Democracy emerged a couple of years later, but the United States decided it could not tolerate that democracy because President Juan Bosch seemed too leftist and sympathetic to Castro. That led the United States to launch its 1965 invasion of the Dominican Republic and to stage-manage the election of a former Trujillo ally, Joaquin Balaguer, who went on to dominate the country for much of the next 30 years.

The assassination that most tormented Kennedy was one that he set in motion but did not realize he had ordered. In a jumble of diplomatic missteps, and without a direct presidential command, the Kennedy administration authorized the overthrow of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem. On Nov. 1, 1963, assured of U.S. support, plotters carried out their coup and then assassinated Diem.

“Kennedy leaped to his feet and rushed from the room with a look of shock and dismay on his face which I had never seen before,” General Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, later wrote of the moment when news of Diem’s death landed in the Oval Office. “He had always insisted Diem must never suffer more than exile, and had been led to believe or had persuaded himself that a change in government could be carried out without bloodshed.” This killing, the historian Staley Karnow wrote, “haunted US leaders during the years ahead, prompting them to assume a larger burden in Vietnam.”

Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, embraced covert action, as have all modern American presidents, but did not emulate his two predecessors by authorizing assassination. The day after Kennedy was killed, he showed a visitor a portrait of Diem and said, “We had a hand in murdering him. Now it’s happening here.” Later Johnson wondered if Kennedy’s assassination was “divine retribution.” He also expressed disgust for the plots against Castro and Trujillo: “We were running a goddamn Murder Inc. in the Caribbean.”

Americans are impatient by nature. We want quick solutions, even to complex problems. That makes killing a foreign leader seem like a good way to end a war. Every time we have tried it, though, we’ve failed — whether or not the target falls. Morality and legality aside, it doesn’t work. Castro thrived on his ability to survive American plots. In the Congo, almost everything that has happened since Lumumba’s murder has been awful.

Our record in carrying out regime change short of murder is hardly better. The CIA-directed overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 cast Iran into a political whirlwind from which it still has not escaped. A year later, the CIA coup against President Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala aborted a ten-year democratic experiment and set that country on a path toward civil war and genocide.

Soon after the Guatemala coup, Eisenhower invited Allen Dulles and other CIA officers to the White House for official congratulations. They presented an elaborate account of their operation, complete with charts, slides, and film clips. Eisenhower had one question.

“Why the hell didn’t you catch Arbenz?” he asked.

“Mr. President,” came the reply, “that would have set a very dangerous precedent for you.”

Men accused in plot on Michigan governor attended protests

DAVID EGGERT, Associated Press•October 10, 2020



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 In a photo provided by the Antrim County Sheriff, William Null is shown in a booking photo. Null is one of several charged Thursday, Oct. 8, 2020, in state court for allegedly seeking to storm the Michigan Capitol and seek a “civil war.” (Antrim County Sheriff via AP)

LANSING, Mich. (AP) — Among the armed protesters who rallied at the Michigan Capitol against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer's coronavirus lockdown this past spring were some of the men now accused in stunning plots to kidnap her, storm the Capitol and start a “civil war.”

The revelation has sparked scrutiny of rallies that were organized by conservative groups opposed to the Democratic governor's orders and egged on by President Donald Trump. It has also prompted renewed calls from Democrats for a gun ban in the building — an effort that so far has failed even after they reported feeling threatened by rifle-carrying protesters who entered the Statehouse.

At least one man accused of aiding in the surveillance of Whitmer's home as part of the alleged scheme to kidnap her stood in the Senate gallery on April 30 as majority Republicans refused to extend an emergency declaration that was the underpinning of Whitmer's stay-at-home and other restrictions aimed at slowing the spread of the COVID-19 virus. “Several” of the 13 men arrested in the plots against the state government were seen at Capitol protests this year, the state attorney general's office said.

A man whom the FBI identified in court papers as a leader in the alleged plot, Adam Fox, attended an “American Patriot” pro-gun rights rally at the Capitol on June 18 to recruit members of anti-government paramilitary groups to attack the Statehouse, according to a federal complaint that cites a recording from a confidential informant.


“I’m not surprised — and anyone who is just hasn’t been paying attention," Whitmer told The Associated Press by phone on Friday. There have been Republican lawmakers and at least one sheriff at the protests, she said, "who fraternize with these domestic terror groups, who egg them on, who encourage them, who use language that incites them. They too are complicit.”

Some of the men involved in the alleged plots were members and leaders of Wolverine Watchmen, which authorities described as “an anti-government, anti-law enforcement militia group.” Federal authorities became aware in March about an initial plan by Wolverine Watchmen to target and kill police, according to court papers. Officials have not indicated whether law enforcement monitored the anti-lockdown protests in April and May.

Such protests have attracted a range of people, including openly armed Second Amendment backers and members of paramilitary groups dressed in tactical gear — particularly early in the pandemic when some demonstrators displayed Confederate flags, misogynistic anti-Whitmer signs and threatening images. GOP leaders have denounced such tactics while saying many people protest safely and responsibly.

The state's Republican Senate majority leader, Mike Shirkey, “does not condone violence, does not embrace violence and has never advocated in support of violence,” spokeswoman Amber McCann said. “Like many politicians, he has spoken out when he disagreed with policy.”

Barry County Sheriff Dar Leaf told WXMI-TV that maybe the men wanted to arrest Whitmer, not kidnap her, and suggested that could be legal. At least one man charged under the state's anti-terrorism law by Attorney General Dana Nessel appeared on stage in May at a protest in Grand Rapids against Whitmer's stay-at-home order that was also attended by the sheriff and Shirkey.

Nessel, a Democrat, told the AP that Leaf’s remarks were “terrifying.”

“To suggest that it is proper for armed gunmen who are not licensed law enforcement officers to execute an arrest on a sitting governor for policy disagreements is abhorrent to me on every level,” she said.

The bombshell charges prompted Democratic legislators to plead, again, for the GOP-led Legislature to prohibit firearms inside the Capitol.

The federal complaint alleges that Fox in June said he needed 200 men to storm the building and take hostages, including Whitmer, and that several individuals talked about using Molotov cocktails to destroy police vehicles. By July, the men had shifted to targeting Whitmer's official summer residence or her personal vacation home before settling on the latter, according to authorities.

“We literally dodged death this time — this time. But what about next time? Because there'll be a next time,” said Sen. Dayna Polehanki, a Democrat. “I pray we use our God-given common sense to make a law banning guns from this building. If not now, when?”

It is unclear if anything will change. Republican leaders are having further discussions about guns with a commission that maintains the Capitol. A panel member noted that legislators have authority over certain areas of the building including the voting chambers.

“From the evidence I've read, a magnetometer or similar equipment would not have stopped what was planned,” John Truscott said. Shirkey told reporters: “There is no way in a country like ours that you can legislate and get rid of all risk.”

Whitmer told the AP she is concerned about the safety of lawmakers, visiting schoolchildren, media and others.

“The Legislature needs to act to protect everyone at the Capitol,” she said. “It is all of our building and every one of us should be able to go in there and feel safe.”

Mark Pitcavage, senior research fellow at the Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism, said the anti-government movement in the U.S. and certainly in Michigan has been particularly active at statehouses in the past year — first by opposing proposed “red flag” laws that allow authorities to temporarily take guns away from people deemed to be dangerous to themselves or others, and later by opposing governors' measures to combat the pandemic.

“Militia groups and other actors who harbor violent agendas will continue to look for opportunities to conduct attacks against politicians, community members and government officials whom they believe are legitimate targets,” said Javed Ali, a former senior counterterrorism director at the National Security Council who is a policymaker in residence at the University of Michigan.

___

Associated Press writers Ed White in Detroit, John Flesher in Traverse City and Angie Wang in Atlanta contributed.

___

Delaware suspect in Whitmer plot was pardoned last year


RANDALL CHASE, Associated Press•October 9, 2020


DOVER, Del. (AP) — The Delaware man charged in federal court with conspiring to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has a long criminal history and was pardoned just last year by Delaware’s governor for crimes dating to 1994, according to state records.

Barry G. Croft Jr., 44, was taken into custody this week after being arrested by the FBI in Swedesboro, New Jersey. Croft made an initial appearance before a federal magistrate in Wilmington on Thursday.

Croft was being held Friday at a state prison in Wilmington. A hearing on his continued detention and removal to Michigan is scheduled for Tuesday.

Five other men, all from Michigan, were charged in the alleged scheme that involved months of planning and even rehearsals to snatch Whitmer from her vacation home.


Croft spent nearly three years in prison after being convicted on Dec. 1, 1997, of possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony. That sentence followed a one-year stint that ended in March 1996.

In April 2019, one week after Delaware revenue officials filed a state tax lien against Croft for more than $36,700, Democratic Gov. John Carney granted him a pardon for the 1997 gun charge and several other convictions from 1994 to 1996. The crimes involved included assault, burglary, theft and receiving stolen property.

Carney’s pardon came after a December 2018 Board of Pardons hearing at which the attorney general’s office did not object to Croft’s request for a pardon. The board’s recommendation for a pardon was based on the lack of opposition from the state “and the need for a pardon for employment purposes.”

“The prior administration did not oppose this application because Croft’s criminal history was more than 20 years old and it appeared to everyone involved that his offenses were in his past and that he had gotten himself on the right track,” said Mat Marshall, a spokeswoman for Democratic Attorney General Kathy Jennings. “Needless to say, nobody — neither the DOJ nor the bipartisan Board of Pardons — would have endorsed a pardon had they known what the future held.”

Jonathan Starkey, a spokesman for Carney, noted that the charges in Croft’s unopposed pardon petition were from 1994 and 1997, more than 20 years earlier, and the pardon was unopposed.

“The charges brought in Michigan are disturbing and everyone charged in this plot should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” Starkey said. “This is also another warning sign about the growing threat of violence and radicalization in our politics.”

In addition to Croft’s criminal convictions, authorities in Delaware twice sought to have him declared a habitual offender for motor vehicle offenses, first in 1995 and again in 2004.

He was also the subject of a criminal judgment filed in July 2005 but not satisfied until 2018. It’s unclear what offense that involved.

According to the Delaware Department of Correction, Croft was last under DOC supervision in January 2005, when a period of probation ended.

One of the men involved in the plot to kidnap Michigan governor had 'rage issues,' report says

Yelena Dzhanova,
Business Insider•October 10, 2020

Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer addresses the media about the flooding along the Tittabawassee River, after several dams breached, in downtown Midland Reuters/Rebecca Cook


One of the six men charged by the FBI with conspiring to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer had shown signs of "rage issues" while a member of the Michigan Home Guard, BuzzFeed News reported.

The man, Adam Fox, also appeared to want to incite violence against racial justice protesters earlier this year, Michigan Home Guard cofounder Rick Foreman said. 

The FBI said that Fox and the other suspects involved in the plot "agreed to unite others in their cause and take violent action against multiple state governments that they believe are violating the U.S. Constitution."

One man charged on suspicion of conspiring to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer had previously exhibited signs of "rage issues" and clashed with racial justice protesters, BuzzFeed News reported.

Rick Foreman, the cofounder of Michigan Home Guard, which proclaims to be the state's "largest and most active militia," told BuzzFeed News that the man, Adam Fox, had been kicked out of the group earlier this year.

"He has rage issues," Foreman said, adding that there were no problems with Fox until he became a full member of the group. 

"And then all of the sudden he's all anti-government, he wants to start a war, he wants to take people out," Foreman said. 

The FBI on Thursday identified Fox as one of the six men involved with a plot to kidnap Whitmer. Fox had orchestrated several facets of the planned attack, including conducting meetings with accomplices and contacting members of a Michigan-based militia group to carry out the plan, an FBI affidavit reads.

The suspects "agreed to unite others in their cause and take violent action against multiple state governments that they believe are violating the U.S. Constitution," the FBI said.

While at the Michigan Home Guard, Fox had threatened multiple people, Foreman said. 

At one point in June, when Fox had still been a part of the Michigan Home Guard, the group gathered for an "American Patriot Rally" in front of the state capitol building, BuzzFeed News reported. Counterprotesters calling for racial justice appeared, and Fox tried to block them and seemed to want to engage the group in a physical altercation, Foreman told BuzzFeed News. 

Foreman also said that other group members speculated that Fox was taking steroids during his time at the Michigan Home Guard, saying that he had "roid rage." 

Far-right and right-wing protesters were angered earlier this year when Whitmer issued a statewide lockdown in response to the spreading coronavirus. Many brought guns to the state capitol building, according to photographs that flooded social media. Business Insider received almost 1,200 emails from Michigan residents complaining about her executive order. 

President Donald Trump openly embraced the groups, calling them "very good people" who "want their lives back again, safely."

2 suspects in Michigan kidnapping plot are US Marines who were recently-discharged

David Choi, Business Insider•October 10, 2020

Both of the veterans' military awards mentioned in the report were unremarkable.
Joseph Morrison, left, and Daniel Harris. Associated Press

Two of the men charged with terrorism-related crimes and a plot to kidnap the Michigan governor are Marine Corps veterans, a service spokesperson said to Marine Corps Times.

Joseph Morrison, 26, was a Marine reservist who reportedly discharged as a lance corporal, on Thursday, the same day the charges were announced.

Another Marine veteran, 23-year-old Daniel Harris, was an infantryman and was discharged in 2019.

Two of the men charged with terrorism-related crimes and a plot to kidnap the Michigan governor on Thursday are Marine Corps veterans, a service spokesperson reportedly said.

A Marine Corps spokesman told Marine Corps Times on Saturday that Joseph Morrison, 26, was a Marine reservist since 2015. Morrison was reportedly discharged as a lance corporal, a junior enlisted service member, on Thursday.

The spokesman told the Marine Corps Times that his recent discharge was unrelated to the alleged plot he was implicated in.

Morrison was one of the cofounders of an armed militant group dubbed the "Wolverine Watchmen," according to state investigators. The group was said to have had a broad goal of fueling a "civil war leading to societal collapse."

Another Marine veteran, 23-year-old Daniel Harris, enlisted in the service when he was 18 in 2015, according to the Marine Corps Times. Harris, who was an infantryman, was discharged in 2019.

Harris was one of six men charged by federal attorneys for allegedly conspiring to kidnap Gov. Whitmer.

A total of six men, including Harris, are facing federal charges with the plot to kidnap Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan. Seven others, including Morrison, are facing state terrorism-related charges.

The group, which has ties to the amorphous militant "boogaloo" movement, allegedly urged its members to conduct surveillance on Gov. Whitmer's private home and gather information on law enforcement officers to kill them.

Adam Fox, one of the six men who was charged in the plot, was quoted saying he needed "200 men" to attack the Capitol in Lansing and take hostages, including Whitmer.

"Snatch and grab, man. Grab the f---in' governor. Just grab the b----," Fox said during a July 27 meeting recorded by an informant, according to the affidavit. "Because at that point, we do that, dude — it's over."

Gov. Whitmer has been criticized by conservative activists for the state's response to the coronavirus. In April, Whitmer extended a stay-at-home order that imposed restrictions on businesses that were classified as essential. The order was later rescinded as part of the state's reopening plans. The armed group's associates characterized Whitmer as a "tyrant b----," according to a federal affidavit.

Harris's attorney denied his client's alleged involvement was intentional.

"All of this is something that he didn't envision happening, so he has given me information that makes me call into question at least some of the things that are related in the complaint," Parker Douglas, the attorney for Harris, said to WJRT-TV. "And that just means certain things that may have been said or related that he believes may have been taken out of context."

A potential first-of-its-kind fighter-jet purchase could be a sign Saudi Arabia isn't happy with what it's getting from the US


Paul Iddon
Updated Mon, August 21, 2023 

Royal Saudi Air Force F-15Cs fly with US Air Force F-15Cs in June 2019.

US Navy/Handout via REUTERS

Saudi Arabia is reportedly considering a large number of French-made Dassault Rafale fighter jets.


Such a purchase would be a break from Saudi Arabia's long history of buying US and British jets.


This suggests Riyadh doesn't think its traditional partners will be as reliable in the future.

Saudi Arabia has spent decades building an enormous air force composed exclusively of advanced US and British fighter jets. But Riyadh's reported interest in potentially purchasing a large number of French jets may be a sign it doesn't think its longtime patrons are as reliable as before.

In December, France's La Tribune financial newspaper, citing unnamed sources, reported that Saudi Arabia was considering acquiring 100 to 200 Dassault Rafale fighters. The report came amid developments suggesting that the US and other nations might not provide military equipment to Riyadh in the future.

After Riyadh cut oil production in October, US lawmakers proposed legislation freezing all American arms sales to the kingdom, which could have grounded most of the Saudi air force and would further fray already strained US-Saudi relations.

In July, Germany announced it would not allow additional Eurofighter Typhoon fighter jets to be delivered to Saudi Arabia. The Saudi air force has 72 Eurofighters, second only to the number of US-made F-15s it has.

Saudi Arabia's neighbors in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar have built up large fleets of Western-made jets that include dozens of Rafales. The La Tribune report, while unconfirmed, suggests political and practical concerns are pushing the Saudis toward the French jet.
French appeal

A French Dassault Rafale flying near Salon-de-Provence in May 2022.Toni Anne Barson/Getty Images

Buying more Typhoons would be "the sensible move" since the Saudis have the infrastructure to train pilots and operate that jet, "but a German block prevents that," said Sébastien Roblin, a widely published military-aviation journalist.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is "not currently inclined to throw Washington any free bones by ordering F-15EXs," and despite an "about-face" by President Joe Biden, Roblin said, the Saudis know that future jet sales "could be disrupted by domestic political revulsion for Riyadh's actions domestically or the war in Yemen."

As bin Salman pursues a detente with his main rival, Iran, and improves relations with China, opposition to such sales may only increase.

Roblin noted that France has sold armored vehicles, helicopters, artillery, air-to-ground Damocles targeting pods, and SCALP cruise missiles to Riyadh and that French political culture values having "a diversified, independent defense sector" and is therefore "much less susceptible to human-rights-based misgivings, which has enabled sustained arms sales to a wider stable of clients in the Middle East."

Saudi Eurofighter Typhoon fighter jets near Riyadh in January 2017.FAYEZ NURELDINE/AFP via Getty Images

Consequently, Saudi Arabia buying 100 or more Rafales would be a big "economic win" that would "score Riyadh an upgraded strategic partner outside of Washington or London," Roblin said, though he pointed out that Gulf states have a habit of hyping arms buys from new sources, including Russia or China, to elicit "jealous counteroffers from their 'main' strategic partners."

Ryan Bohl, a senior Middle East and North Africa analyst at the risk-intelligence company RANE, said Rafales could be an "attractive option" to Riyadh, considering the sanctions the US and Germany imposed on it after the assassination of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.

French jets are also modern and built by a NATO country, potentially reducing issues with integrating the jets with the Saudis' other Western aircraft. France's less restrictive end-user agreements "underlines this attractiveness," Bohl added.

Riyadh's non-NATO options for jets are relatively limited, and buying Russian or Chinese jets would likely incur US sanctions, which makes Saudi interest in the Rafale seem "realistic," Bohl said. "Saudi Arabia wants to diversify its air force so that if it has an interruption with one of its arm suppliers, like the United States, its air wing doesn't grind to a halt."
Shifting US-Saudi ties

President Joe Biden and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in July 2022.Bandar Algaloud/Reuters

In the near term, Saudi Arabia may find Rafales more burdensome than beneficial, given its extensive investment in US and British aircraft.

"I would be surprised if the Royal Saudi Air Force procured Rafale, given the size and well-established state of its F-15 and Typhoon fleets," Justin Bronk, an expert on airpower at the Royal United Services Institute, told Insider.

Such pragmatic concerns have kept Saudi Arabia from buying French fighters in the past. After all, Bohl said, it's much easier to build an air force with pilots who train on a single system or with systems from a single country of origin. And despite the sophistication of French military hardware, it hasn't been used in battle as much as US equipment has and therefore lacks a "combat record as a selling point" like US-made weapons, Bohl added.

Limits on the Rafale's technology and availability may also deter Riyadh.

A Saudi Air Force F-15 taxis for takeoff at King Faisal Air Base in February 2021.US Air Force/Staff Sgt. Katherine Walters

While the Rafale F4 is "one of the most advanced and versatile of the 4.5-generation fighters on the market," it is "not a true stealth fighter" with the advanced capabilities Saudi Arabia wants, Roblin said.

Even if Riyadh ordered Rafales tomorrow, they would take at least several years to arrive. "Right now, a big problem is Dassault's factory is already booked with orders for over a hundred additional aircraft for Croatia, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Greece, and the United Arab Emirates," Roblin said.

The strength of US-Saudi relations has kept Riyadh firmly in the US camp for decades, but Bohl said that relationship has "fundamentally shifted" and the US is no longer "as expansive of a defense partner" as in the past, a trend that may add to the appeal of other countries' weapons.

"Under previous kings, Saudi Arabia saw the United States as a reliable protector of its security and was willing to do favors through energy policy and arms deals for Washington in exchange for this guarantee," Bohl told Insider. "That led to Riyadh being less willing to do special favors for the United States, like going to it exclusively for arms purchases."

Paul Iddon is a freelance journalist and columnist who writes about Middle East developments, military affairs, politics, and history. His articles have appeared in a variety of publications focused on the region.

Saudi Arabia sets its sights on Britain’s military jewel


Howard Mustoe
Sun, 20 August 2023 

Mohammed bin Salman is attempting to reinvent the petrodollar kingdom - /SPA/AFP via Getty Images

Oil pumps have long dotted Saudi Arabia’s desert landscape, but they could soon be joined by a raft of factories.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman wants to turn the country into the Gulf’s manufacturing powerhouse as it moves away from oil and gas.

The heir to Saudi Arabia’s $2 trillion throne wants to increase industrial exports to $148bn (£116bn) by 2030, tripling factory numbers to 36,000 by 2035 which will churn out everything from warships to cars.


So far, he has poured investment into Lucid, a US-based electric car maker which plans to build a factory in the country, while also striking a planned joint venture with Navantia, the Spanish state-owned builder of naval vessels.

Now, he has his sights set on another lucrative, albeit expensive and notoriously complex market – fighter jets.

It was announced last week that the controversial ruler is set to visit the UK in autumn, which came after a flurry of speculation around Saudi Arabia joining one of Britain’s largest military projects.

Downing Street reportedly wants to make the Kingdom part of the £72bn Tempest programme, initially, an Anglo-Italian effort which Japan joined last year.

Saudi’s deep pockets will be welcome, but industrial insiders are concerned about the nation’s technological offering, as well as its political baggage.

The Tempest project aims to bring a sixth-generation fighter jet into service by the middle of the next decade, replacing the Eurofighter Typhoon.

Notably, Saudi reportedly wants to become a formal partner in the programme rather than simply buying the finished product as a customer, as it has with the Typhoon.

Any partnership will need large capital investment, but it will secure Saudi new local jobs and a hand in designing Tempest, delivering the technological expertise the ruler craves.

Saudi Arabia’s bid to join the Tempest fighter jet programme as an equal partner are said to have unsettled Japanese officials - David Rose

However, speculation around the state’s involvement, alongside the planned visit, has reignited concerns over the Kingdom’s human rights record and its approach to gay rights.

Homosexuality is still a criminal offence punishable by death, while the country is also involved in a years-long war in Yemen.

It will also be Mohammed bin Salman’s (MBS) first UK visit since the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was killed and dismembered on the orders of the Crown Prince, according to analysis by the CIA.

He has denied any involvement.

From a financial perspective, the huge cost of building ever more complex military hardware makes the country an attractive bet with its wealth and keen stance.

But bringing on such a controversial partner has already caused reported discomfort among Japanese officials.

Another question raised by insiders is what the country can add in terms of high-end jet design, with only a handful of countries in the world capable of building supersonic aircraft.

Under MBS, however, Saudi Arabia has supercharged its investment and ambitions in industry, technology and defence as part of the Vision 2030 programme, as the ruler aims to wean the country off oil.

“Through the national industrial strategy and in partnership with the private sector, the Kingdom will become a leading industrial powerhouse that contributes to securing global supply chains and exports high-tech products to the world,” MBS said last year.

The brutal murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018 still casts a shadow onto perceptions of the Kingdom today - MOHAMMED AL-SHAIKH / AFP

The country already has a manufacturing champion in Saudi Arabia’s Basic Industries Corporation, known as SABIC.

With prominence in the chemical sector, it also makes car parts, cosmetics ingredients and metals, bringing in $53bn in sales last year.

The country is also liberalising at pace, says Roxana Mohammadian-Molina, a former investment banker and finance technology entrepreneur, who has done business in Saudi Arabia.

“When you go there it is completely unexpected compared to the preconceived idea that people have,” she said. “It is very open. I have travelled there alone many times, you really feel very safe.

“They are very open to doing business. They are really keen to partner with other countries, particularly the UK universities that can attract talent.”

She pointed to the recent success of Tamara, a payment platform based in Riyadh which picked up a $150m loan from Goldman Sachs in March.

“Ambitions are very high. I think this is a very long process, you’re not going to become a tech hub overnight,” she says. “But the thing is in Saudi Arabia, things move very quickly.”

Liberalisation is among the changes taking place in the country, she added.

“You have big cities like Riyadh that are very advanced and progressive and have a young population, but you also have smaller cities and towns that are still very traditional, it is a fine balance for those interests.”

Women are playing a greater role in the Saudi economy as efforts to liberalise the Gulf state gather pace - FAYEZ NURELDINE/AFP

Saudi Arabia is likely to employ a broad spread of investments before focusing on areas it can excel, said Ayham Kamel, head of Eurasia Group’s Middle East and North Africa research team.

“I think it requires them to have experimented with different sectors for a while before they double down,” he says. “It’s really a wide net. I would expect it to be more focused in the future, but we are not there yet.”

The country’s investments today range from stakes in Nintendo, Uber and Boeing, to Newcastle United FC and its controversial takeover of Golf’s PGA tour through its LIV Golf rival.

Saudi also wants to become a leader in artificial intelligence and is hoovering up the specialist computer chips necessary to develop an AI economy, according to recent reports

Mr Kamel says Riyadh is “ambitious to get into the high-tech industry and migrate part of the production in Saudi Arabia”, he adds.

Riyadh’s plan to increase its defence industrial knowledge is already underway.

In December, the Kingdom signed its deal with Spanish shipbuilder Navatia to form a joint venture to build warships. The final details of the deal will be ironed out next year, but the agreement allows for all of the construction to be done in Saudi shipyards.

The deal allowed the country to “localise military industry” defence minister Prince Khaled bin Salman said at the time.

UK investment chiefs are now keen to snap up more of Saudi’s income rather than see it go to rivals like Spain.

One City veteran who has experience investing in the country expressed frustration about the poor perception of Saudi Arabia in press coverage.

He said: “Saudi Arabia is changing for the good at a stunning speed and to be honest the parts of the press coverage here have been almost profligate in their jaundiced, biased reporting.

“Saudi is far more than Khashoggi. And British business is considered good business. Saudi is the UK’s primary trading partner in the Middle East and the UK is Saudi Arabia’s closest European ally.”

The country was the UK’s 10th-biggest export customer for services last year and Britain enjoys a £7bn trading surplus with Saudi.

But in the eyes of outside investors and potential customers, its human rights record must improve. The country executed 196 people last year, the highest number since Amnesty International started recording the numbers 30 years ago.

Polly Truscott, Amnesty International UK’s foreign policy adviser, said MBS “must be properly held to account for abuses by Saudi officials, including Khashoggi’s murder, the widespread use of torture in Saudi jails and the indiscriminate bombing of civilians in Yemen.”

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for PERMANENT ARMS ECONOMY 

Ukraine and the dark lessons of war: What does it mean to 'take' a country or a city?

Lucian K. Truscott IV, Salon
March 05, 2022

Ukraine Rebel troops (AFP)

Kherson, a port city in the south of Ukraine, has fallen to Russian forces. It is an important port on the Dnieper River delta, and military strategists say that now that the Russians have taken Kherson, they can turn their attention to Odessa to the west, Ukraine's third largest city, a major port and a center of tourism on the Black Sea.

This article first appeared in Salon.

Meanwhile to the north, Ukraine's two largest cities, Kyiv and Kharkiv, remain under siege, with Russian forces targeting civilian neighborhoods indiscriminately. According to the UN, the number of civilians killed by Russian bombs and shelling is approaching 1,000, but judging from what I've seen in television coverage, it's likely much higher. A video on the website of the New York Times on Thursday showed what appear to be projectiles fired from a Russian rocket launcher hitting a civilian neighborhood in Chernihiv, a city to the east and north of Kyiv. You can see civilian pedestrians on the street near where the rockets were about to hit, and then you can't see them. The video has red circles picking out six rocket warheads as they fly in and strike the street and surrounding buildings.

I've also seen a video showing cluster munitions striking an apartment complex in Kharkiv. Cluster bombs are anti-personnel weapons that are banned under international agreements that Russia and the U.S., among others, have not signed. There are no concentrations of Ukrainian army forces on battlefields in this war against which cluster munitions could legitimately be used. The fact that these bombs are landing in neighborhoods populated entirely by civilians suggests that Russian forces have been issued the munitions specifically to target civilian human beings.

Numerous photographs emerged this week of extensive damage to civilian neighborhoods in various cities in Ukraine showing the faces of apartment complexes entirely blown off, fires in what appear to be office and apartment buildings, and other damage to civilian areas.

What does it mean to "take" a city like Kyiv or Kharkiv or Kherson? Russian military commanders have clearly been ordered to "take" these Ukrainian population centers in the process of conquering and occupying the entire country. But from video footage of this war — and from the evidence of every other war in history — "taking" a city pretty much means destroying it, as in the famous GI saying that became a symbol of the Vietnam War: "We had to destroy the village in order to save it."

What is the purpose of an aggressor "taking" a city, or even the entire country, if in the process you are destroying the thing you say you want? If you are the one who ordered the invasion — in this case, Vladimir Putin — what do you do after you have "taken" a country you have destroyed, and how do you plan to deal with a population you have devastated by intentionally killing them with your military forces?

The contrast between "taking" a city or a country and what happens after that defines the essence of war. Look at Aleppo, for example, one of the Syrian cities the Russian air force was credited with helping to "take" from rebel forces opposing the Assad regime. Aleppo is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world and one of the capitals of the cradle of civilization. It has a history that goes back to a time before the Babylonian and Assyrian empires. Dozens if not hundreds of wars were fought over thousands of years between rulers of Aleppo and the kings and potentates of Ur and Babylon, in what is now Iraq, and the Egyptian empire. Aleppo was destroyed and rebuilt again and again. The ruins of Assad's and Russia's war on Aleppo sit on top of the ruins of one king's destroyed empire after another.

In the modern context, that's exactly what is happening today in Ukraine. The Russian army has been ordered to "take" Ukraine, and in so doing it is destroying Ukraine's cities and killing its citizens. In the coming days, we will no doubt see the ruins of onion-domed Orthodox cathedrals that have been destroyed in Kyiv and Kharkiv. I looked at Google Maps to check out Chernihiv, the city mentioned above that was hit hard by Russian rockets and artillery on Wednesday and Thursday. Along with several elaborate Orthodox cathedrals, there is something called the Hollywood Mall in Chernihiv located next to the Hypermarket Vena and the city's Hospital No. 2. Already we are seeing videos and reading reports of hospitals and schools destroyed in Kyiv, and I expect that soon we will see the ruins of the Hollywood Mall in Chernihiv alongside a hospital battered by Russian artillery shells and rockets.

There is a contradiction between the orders given in wars and what those orders accomplish. When armies of aggression invade foreign nations, the homes and apartment buildings and hospitals and grocery stores don't belong to those armies, so they just follow orders and destroy them. Sometimes the destruction occurs by accident, but in the case of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, it is being done on purpose on the orders of the Russian president.

You don't have to take the Ukrainians' word to understand that this is Putin's intent. All you have to do is see that he has issued rocket launchers with thermobaric missiles to his army, with the apparent intention of using them against Ukrainian cities. Thermobaric warheads, also known as "vacuum bombs," are not intended to destroy military fortifications. They have one purpose, and that is to kill human beings by exploding a gas cloud that sucks the oxygen from the air around the explosion, collapsing the lungs of anyone near it. There has been video footage that appears to show these missiles landing in civilian neighborhoods where people are walking down the street. The Russians are not even trying to hide what they're doing. They've allowed American TV reporters to film TOS-1 rocket launchers mounted on T-72 tank chassis as they cross the border into Ukraine on their way to Kharkiv. The only purpose of these rocket launchers is to fire thermobaric warheads.

The defenders of cities and countries under attack by invaders have only one order that they must follow: Defend their land and their homes and their country's treasures at all costs, with their lives if necessary. Their orders contain no contradictions at all. The cities and their buildings and their cathedrals and their homes belong to them. That's why they fight so hard, as the Ukrainians appear to be doing at this very moment. And that's why almost every time the invaders end up being driven away. In Aleppo, that's been going on for thousands of years. The people who live there today are descended from the ancient civilizations that defended the city from Hittites and Assyrians and Phrygians and Babylonians and Persians, and eventually the Macedonians and Byzantines. Now they are rebuilding their city, but if any lesson at all can be learned from history, they will one day be doing it again.

I've been watching the coverage of the war in Ukraine on MSNBC with great interest. One of the sharpest commentators has turned out to be Gen. David Petraeus, who had various commands in both Iraq and Afghanistan and was credited with the "surge" in Iraq that supposedly "won" that war, until it didn't.

As a reporter in Iraq in 2003, I was embedded in the unit Petraeus commanded, the 101st Airborne Division, in Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq. Mosul incorporates Nineveh, the ancient city that was first settled in 6000 B.C. and was the center of the Assyrian Empire around 2000 B.C. — yes, the same Assyrian Empire that included Aleppo. Mosul, which succeeded Nineveh, was conquered by Alexander the Great in 332 B.C. and was conquered by other armies along the way. When I was with Petraeus and his division in 2003, they were only the latest in that very, very long line of conquerors.

Petraeus was helpful to me as a reporter. He gave me the run of the region his division had "taken," including Mosul and Tal Afar and other towns his division "held." After I had been there for a while, I discovered something curious. Neither Petraeus nor his brigade commanders — three very talented West Point colonels — seemed to know what they were doing there. They established various base camps, both large and small, their units drove around in Humvees and the commanders flew around in helicopters, but they weren't really doing anything.

One day, when I was in Petraeus' headquarters in a former Saddam Hussein palace in Mosul (where I had gone to take a shower, because the palace had hot water), I asked the general what he was doing in Mosul. The way I put the question was, "General, what were your orders before you left Baghdad for Mosul?" He gave me a blank look, as if he had never been asked that question before. I then asked him, "Were you ordered to 'take Mosul,' for example?" He again looked at me blankly. It wasn't like I was asking him to divulge some top-secret piece of information. His entire division was up there in northern Iraq, right out in the open. The war was being widely covered on television and by newspapers. Everybody knew where the 101st Airborne was in Iraq. I was wondering what they were doing there, so I asked him a third time: "Were your orders, 'Go to Mosul?'" He didn't answer the question directly, but there was enough of a flicker of recognition on his face that I realized I had hit pretty close to the nub of it.

RELATED: Lt. Col. Alex Vindman: How Trump's coup attempt encouraged Putin's Ukraine invasion

An entire American infantry division had been ordered to go to Mosul and not told what to do when they got there, other than to do what they were now doing, which was driving around and defending themselves from insurgent attacks, but basically occupying space. Being there. You might say they were engaged in the occupation of Mosul, but that wasn't true, because you can't occupy a city or a country unless you've conquered it, and that wasn't what had happened with the 101st and Mosul.

Petraeus and his soldiers faced different reactions from the citizens of Mosul and northern Iraq. The Kurds were happy they were there. I visited a Kurdish unit at an outpost near the Turkish border, and they couldn't have been nicer to the brigade commander I was with. They served us a lavish lunch and took us all around and showed us their fortifications and told us what they were doing. The Shiites were less happy, but they weren't what you would call angry with Petraeus and his army, because they had been second-class citizens under Saddam and now that the Americans had come, they saw an opportunity to take over from the hated Baath Party of the Sunni tribes loyal to Saddam, who had run the country before the Americans got there. And then there were the former Baath party officials and Sunni commanders and soldiers of Saddam's army. They weren't happy at all, because they had been deposed from power, and they were probably the ones who were laying IEDs and shooting at American soldiers every time they got a chance.

And then it came to me: Petraeus and his division were waiting to be relieved by another American unit so they could go home. I soon discovered they were scheduled to return to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, about a month later. I asked who was coming to replace them and discovered it was a "Stryker" brigade from the 9th Infantry Division, which was downright astounding. Petraeus had about 30,000 troops spread over an area the size of Pennsylvania, and even he admitted he didn't have a large enough force to occupy this area that was full of insurgents who were fighting his soldiers and killing them. And now a unit one-third the size of his division was coming in.

I asked one of the brigade commanders who gave that order, and he answered, "General Rove." He was referring to Karl Rove, the Republican consultant who had run George W. Bush's campaign and was now a senior adviser to the president. The sarcastic referral to Rove as a "general" was because everything coming out of Washington to the American forces in Iraq was being done with an eye to Bush's 2004 re-election campaign. Orders had come down for the 101st and other units in Iraq to lower their casualty rates, because dead American bodies weren't exactly selling well to voters back home. Now "General Rove" was going to send a much smaller force into Mosul, perhaps in hopes that with fewer soldiers, they would suffer fewer casualties. Which was upside down and backward, of course, but then Rove wasn't really a general, so how the hell would he know?

The story of Petraeus and the 101st was essentially the story of America's war in Iraq. Units were sent over there and given tasks like occupying cities and training Iraq's reconstituted army while suffering as few casualties as possible, which was a contradiction in terms because they were in a war. And then those units were sent back to the U.S. and replaced with new units, and so on and so on.

Petraeus returned several times on other missions, and then he was sent to solve the hellish situation the U.S. had gotten ourselves into by 2007 when it appeared to be losing the war. He came up with the "surge" that suppressed opposition for a time and lowered casualties, but it didn't answer the question that I had way back in 2003, which was what the hell was America doing in Iraq?

Our military was also fighting a war in Afghanistan, and in 2010, Petraeus replaced Gen. Stanley McChrystal as commander of U.S. forces there. By that time, the U.S. had been rather unsuccessfully occupying Afghanistan for almost 10 years — or doing something anyway.

RELATED: War is the greatest evil: Russia was baited into this crime — but that's no excuse

McChrystal is the other commentator on MSNBC who seems to be on the ball about what is going on over in Ukraine, and it finally dawned on me why these two former American generals understand the situation so well: because they did the same thing to Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. played the role of Russia in those two countries, invading them and trying to occupy them with forces that were too small to accomplish the mission, just as the Russians have. Now Petraeus and McChrystal can sit at home in their studies with a clear understanding of the problems the Russians face in Ukraine — because they faced the same problems themselves. They had to deal with populations that didn't want us there, and were bent on fighting us as fiercely as they could to drive us out. Iraqi and Afghan citizens who didn't want us invading their countries fired RPGs at our vehicles. They set up ambushes to trap our convoys. They fired AK-47s at our soldiers and killed them.

We fought the insurgents in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan, but neither Petraeus nor McChrystal nor the soldiers they commanded did what the Russians are doing in Ukraine: purposefully targeting civilians and civilian neighborhoods and hospitals and schools with thermobaric missiles and cluster bombs. But thousands of civilians were killed in both conflicts. The Watson Institute at Brown University has attempted to count civilian deaths in its "Costs of War" study. According to the institute, civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan were caused by airstrikes, crossfire, IEDs, assassinations, bombings, night raids on suspected enemy positions, including civilian homes, and other causes. It is unknown how many civilian deaths are attributable to American forces, but the Watson Institute estimates that 71,000 civilians were killed in Afghanistan and somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 were killed in Iraq.

When I was in Iraq, I saw the discipline involved in keeping American soldiers who were under attack every day by an enemy they couldn't see from striking out indiscriminately against the neighborhoods from which hostile fire was coming. American forces made mistakes and civilians were killed, but they didn't launch a campaign of terror against a civilian population the way the Russians appear to be doing in Ukraine.

The Russians invaded Ukraine without provocation, and they are attempting to subjugate and occupy it by attacking not just its army, but its entire population. You would think they would have learned from what happened to them in Afghanistan in 1980 when they were driven out of that country in abject defeat, and you would think they would have learned from the way the U.S. lost the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They obviously haven't.

Petraeus and McChrystal understand exactly what's going to happen to the Russians in Ukraine, because it's the same thing that happened to our army in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Russians will end up being driven out of Ukraine by the people who live there, because the cities the invaders have been ordered to "take" belong to the people who are defending them. Like the Iraqis and the Afghans, the Ukrainians mean it, and that is why they will end up winning the war the Russians have brought to their country.

That is why the city of Mosul is still there and David Petraeus is gone, and it's why Kabul is still there and Stanley McChrystal is gone. The citizens of Mosul and Kabul meant it when they told the Americans to get the hell out of their cities and go home. That's why the city of Aleppo, damaged as it may be, is still there and will be rebuilt as it has been for thousands of years, and that's why the Russians who bombed it are now bombing other cities in another country. Aleppo has been destroyed and rebuilt for millennia by the people who fought to defend it and those who are descended from the defenders of the past. One of the apparent lessons of history is that wars will never stop being fought over land that one group holds and another group wants.

Wars and the reasons they are fought are stupid because the people who order them are stupid, and that truth hasn't changed for thousands of years. The Russian who ordered his army to "take" a neighboring country that doesn't belong to him will end up in his dacha somewhere in the Ural, just as the American who ordered his army to "take" countries far from his shores has ended up on his ranch somewhere in Texas.

It's always men, and they're always egomaniacal and arrogant and stupid. History marches on and there are ruins to prove it that you can visit all around the world, including right here in the good old U.S. of A. Syria has Aleppo and we have Gettysburg, and soon Ukraine will have Kyiv and Kharkiv and Kherson.

So where were the 'good guys with guns'? Standing around doing nothing, as usual

Lucian K. Truscott IV,

 Salon
May 28, 2022

Uvalde law enforcement officers (Photo by CHANDAN KHANNA for AFP)

Nearly 10 years have passed since the last school shooting that killed as many children as were murdered in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday. That shooting, at the Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, took the lives of 20 children and six adults. It was supposed to be the mass shooting that changed everything, remember? The killings were so horrific, most of the victims so young and innocent, that surely the House and the Senate could come up with some sort of "common sense" gun control measures that everyone could agree on.

This article first appeared in Salon.

Ha! Ten years have passed, and what has happened? Exactly nothing. Why? At least in part because within days of the Sandy Hook shooting, the National Rifle Association, one of the largest contributors to the political campaigns of (mostly Republican) politicians in the country, swung into action to stop any momentum for new gun laws before they could even get going.

Wayne LaPierre, CEO of the NRA, called a press conference in Washington and with a single sentence, began a refrain about guns and gun violence and gun control that is still with us today: "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun, is a good guy with a gun," LaPierre said that day. What we might call the LaPierre Rule has become gospel for gun owners, gun manufacturers, and the political party that opposes any sort of gun control, the Republican Party. LaPierre's Rule devolved into sub-rules, such as this gem: The solution to gun violence isn't fewer guns, it's more guns in the hands of more people.

RELATED: Uvalde shooting timeline exposes an ugly truth: Cops have no legal duty to protect you

The NRA began a campaign after Sandy Hook to put an armed police officer in every school and to push for "open carry" laws across the country. These are state laws that allow you to openly carry a gun — of any kind, handgun or rifle — on your person or in your car without a permit. At this point, 31 states have open carry laws on their books. Fifteen states require a permit to carry a handgun, and only five, including the District of Columbia, have laws that ban the carrying of handguns in public.

Last year, the state of Texas passed its own law allowing the open carrying of handguns and other firearms without a permit. That law was passed less than two years after mass shootings in El Paso and Odessa killed 30 people. The solution to bad guys having guns is more guns, see? Texans don't want to make guns harder to buy, or to limit the times and places citizens can carry their guns. They want to make it easier. They want more guns on the street, not fewer guns.

Figures on gun ownership in Texas vary. One study I saw, by World Population Review, says that 45.7 percent of Texas citizens over the age of 18 own a gun. Another study, by the Rand Corporation, says that 37 percent of adults in Texas live in a household with a firearm. A recent report on NBC said that Texas has the highest percentage of gun ownership in the country. After the shooting on Tuesday, a tweet by Gov. Greg Abbott from 2015 surfaced in which he said, "I'm EMBARRASSED: Texas #2 in nation for new gun purchases, behind CALIFORNIA. Let's pick up the pace Texans." The tweet was posted following a report in the Houston Chronicle that gun purchases in Texas had topped one million for the year.

In Uvalde, the "good guys with guns" wearing police uniforms stood around for almost an hour before storming a classroom and killing the murderer of 19 children and two teachers.

No matter which figure you use, that's one hell of a lot of "good guys with a gun" in the state of Texas, don't you think? If all that's necessary to take down a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun, the question after the Uvalde shooting is, where were they? Even the good guys with guns wearing police uniforms, it was revealed on Friday, waited almost an hour before they stormed the classroom where the shooter was, and 19 of them waited until they could be backed up by a SWAT team from the Border Patrol before they finally used their guns to kill the murderer of 19 children and two teachers.

The shooter, an 18-year-old resident of Uvalde, had purchased two AR-15 semiautomatic rifles and more than 1,600 rounds of ammunition and 50 — fifty — high-capacity magazines only days after his birthday on May 16. Texas laws require only that you be 18 years old to buy a rifle in the state, but at that age, you can buy any kind of rifle, including a semiautomatic AR-15 style weapon. The shooter was able to buy two of the AR-15s in the days after his birthday when he was apparently already making plans to kill children at an elementary school in Uvalde. Much has been made of the fact that he was not old enough to buy a beer, but he was old enough to buy a rifle capable of firing two to three bullets per second. He was also able to buy the seven 30-round magazines, containing at least 210 bullets.

On Friday we heard reports that citizens of Uvalde, including at least one parent of a child who was killed, were outside the school yelling at armed police officers to go inside and take on the shooter. Cell phone video shot at the scene at 12:37 p.m., while the shooter was inside the school killing children, show one officer holding up his hands trying to prevent a person from filming him and shooing a crowd of people away from the doors of the school. One person can be heard calling to the others that they should enter the school and storm the shooter because the cops aren't doing anything. Another video shot at the same time showed numerous police officers in full tactical gear restraining parents who were trying to enter the school to retrieve their children. One father was pepper-sprayed in the face and a mother was handcuffed. In the background, a police officer in armored gear is hiding behind the bed of a pickup truck aiming his AR-style police rifle at the door of the school.

So some of the good guys with guns were doing exactly what so many cops are accused of every day: menacing civilians and pushing them around and threatening to arrest them for doing nothing that was even remotely illegal.

A spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety said Friday that the gunman was in the school for nearly an hour before a SWAT team from the Border Patrol arrived and was able to get into the classroom where he was and kill him. By that time, all the children in the classroom were dead.

Also absent from the scene in Uvalde were any of the 13 million people who own guns in the state of Texas, all those good guys with guns that Wayne LaPierre has told us are the only thing that can stop "a bad guy with a gun."

Watching the coverage of the aftermath of mass shootings in this country has become commonplace. The shooting at the Tops Supermarket in Buffalo happened two weeks ago, and here we are looking at images of yet another exterior of yet another building where someone carrying an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle walked in and killed people, this time children this time. The scene is always the same: Heavily armed police officers clad in camouflage uniforms, protected by bulletproof vests and wearing helmets, along with an entire panoply of military-style tactical gear, are milling around talking to each other. A few of them are dispatched to do what the army calls "set up a perimeter," which in the case of mass shootings amounts to stringing yellow crime-scene tape around the scene and then guarding it so civilians can't get near the scene and presumably contaminate evidence. In Uvalde, at least one armored personnel carrier could be seen near the school after all the shooting was over and all the kids were dead.

There are always a lot of heavily armed police officers at the scene of mass shootings after they have occurred. It is beyond me why they think it's necessary to show up looking like they're about to be dispatched to serve on the front lines in Ukraine or some other war zone. But there they are, wearing enough body armor and carrying enough firepower to assault an infantry battalion, and what are they doing? Standing around.

Every time there's another mass shooting, more money flows into police departments to buy military-spec rifles and military-spec shotguns and military-spec body armor. Why? To look cool as they stand around in the parking lot while people die.

It's all of a piece. Every time there is another mass shooting, more and more money floods into the budgets of police departments and they go out and buy military-spec M-4 rifles and military-spec shotguns and military-spec body armor and military-spec helmets and military-style camouflage uniforms. Why? Because they're cool, that's why. If they're going to go up against one of these mass shooters, every one of whom is outfitted in military-style tactical gear and carrying military-style AR-15 rifles, then by God, they're not going to be one-upped! Just like Greg Abbott and his exhortation to Texans to buy more guns so they could catch up with California (!), the cops are going to buy more guns and more body armor — more of everything — so they can be ready the next time they're called upon to stand around in a parking lot of a building after 10 or 20 people have been shot and their dead bodies are strewn around the floor somewhere inside.

There's a weird, ironic perfection to the fact that the NRA's convention began on Friday in Houston, offering Wayne LaPierre, who is still the CEO of that august organization of gun-lovers, the chance come up with yet another exhortation to his masses. One year they tried "my dead hands," as in, if you want my guns you'll have to pry them from my dead hands. Then came Wayne's good guys with guns.

Maybe this year Wayne will explain to us that the reason we've had all these school shootings and mass killings is because we don't have enough good guys with guns. More good guys! More guns! That'll show these mass murderers! Next time one of them shoots up a school, we'll have even more people standing around outside picking their camo-clad asses as the bodies of the dead lie there inside submitting to the ministrations of the crime scene investigators.

More guns, and more crime scene investigators! That'll show 'em that in Texas, we're second to nobody!

Police don't stop crime -- so what are they for?

John Stoehr
May 28, 2022

Police outside Robb Elementary School following a shooting on May 24, 2022, in Uvalde, Texas.

 © Dario Lopez-Mills, AP

Sometimes it’s the little things that evoke the biggest feels. I have been writing about the Uvalde massacre most of the week. I have been so focused on facts and arguments, I haven’t sobbed. But the tears came this morning after reading a report by KENS, a TV news station local to that Texas community, where 19 fourth-graders were shot to pieces.

The report was an eyewitness account by a survivor of the shooting. The boy, whom the reporter did not identify, said he and a friend “heard the shooting through the door.” He added that, “I told my friend to hide under something so he won't find us. I was hiding hard. And I was telling my friend to not talk because he is going to hear us.”

The boy told the reporter what happened after police came through the classroom door Salvador Ramos had locked behind him. “When the cops came, the cop said: 'Yell if you need help!' And one of the people in my class said 'help.' The guy overheard and he came in and shot her.”

That’s it. That’s the detail that got me. A child desperately needing to trust a caring adult. A child shot to pieces for needing and trusting.

Because of a cop’s incompetence.

The boy’s eyewitness account is more damning in context.

The Post reported Thursday that Ramos strolled into the school “unobstructed” with a long gun. Officials had said he encountered three cops. First, an in-school cop. Then, two others arriving on the scene. Officials had said the latter two officers sustained injuries.

Turns out all that was a lie.

Police arrived “four minutes” after Ramos entered the building, officials conceded. Meanwhile, while Ramos was shooting 19 fourth-graders to pieces, they dithered outside for an hour.

A video shows some carrying semiautomatic rifles. It shows one cop with his taser drawn, at the ready. Another cop restrains what appears to be a parent in order to prevent them from entering the building.

This is the context in which the boy’s testimony is even more damning than the incompetent cop who got a girl killed for needing to trust.

Irma Garcia and Eva Mireles were the boy’s teachers, the KENS reporter said. They were shot to pieces. They saved his life, he said.

“They were nice teachers," he said.

"They went in front of my classmates to help.


“To save them.”

We have entered a familiar period after shooting massacres during which officials justify what police did and why. We are hearing Thin Blue Line advocates saying it was reasonable to hang back. After all, the scene was dangerous. The suspect had a semiautomatic rifle.

This familiar pattern, by which police authorities presume the public is on their side, and won’t question them too much, is fraying as more details emerge as to what the police didn’t do and why they didn’t do it.


On the video, you can hear rapid-fire gunshots followed by mothers wailing in despair, pleading with armed police to save their kids.

The good guys with the guns were not that good. Indeed, they were deadly. It was the teachers, who were not armed, who did the most to save their students. The real heroes are dead. The cowards are alive.

But the living get to write history.

Matter of fact, police departments across the country do as much to influence public opinion as they do “crime fighting.” Their influence is so great the public finds it completely understandable when cops refuse doing their jobs in the face of mere scrutiny. It’s so strong cops can get away with murder on account of murder being seen as a tragic but sometimes necessary response to the dangers of facing an infestation of criminals and crime. It’s so huge few complain about Uvalde’s cop shop sucking up 40 percent of the town’s yearly budget.

The influence of American police departments on public opinion is deeply rooted in the reason cop shops exist – yes, to “protect and serve,” sometimes, but more often to serve as the last line of defense against democratic forces threatening to flatten the old orders of social and political power. Cops are white power incarnate.

So expect to hear familiar rhetoric about “brave men and women in uniform who put their lives on the line to protect communities.”

Don’t believe it.

Turn that story around.

What are cops for?

First, they don’t stop crime.

“If larger police forces make us safe, then by that logic, the U.S. would already be the safest society in the world as over $115 billion is spent on policing a year, a budget larger than any other country’s military budget except for China,” wrote Kinjo Kiema. “Over 50 years of crime data shows only 2 percent of crimes end in conviction. Police don’t stop crime that has occurred, nor do they prevent it from happening.”

Second, police don’t stop violence.

“When researchers account for the impacts of socio-economic and other factors, the reality that police don’t protect us from violence — because their purpose is to use violence to maintain ‘order’ premised on existing relations of power — becomes more clear,” according to research by activists Mariame Kaba and Andrea J. Ritchie.

Third, police create violence.

“Police are violence workers,” Kaba and Ritchie wrote. “Their response to violence is more violence or the threat of violence. This means more police, police contact and police resources automatically means more violence because cops add their own violence to what’s already” there.

“They are the sources of violence.”

What are police for?

As I’m writing this, the Times reports that Border Patrol agents arrived earlier than previously known. But when they got there, the local Uvalde cops “would not allow them to go after the gunman who had opened fire on students inside the school, according to two officials.”

They “had driven up from the Mexican border, one official said. The official said it was not clear to the federal agents why their team was needed, and why the local SWAT team did not respond.”

As I’m writing, the LA Times reported that the kids “begged for police to enter their classroom and save them, repeatedly calling 911, as a team of 19 police officers waited in the corridor for an hour because a commander believed the situation had shifted from active shooter to a barricade subject, a Texas law enforcement officer said today.”

They don’t stop crime.

They don’t stop violence.

They create violence.

That’s another detail that gets me. We need to trust law enforcement.

Yet law enforcement so often has us wondering why we should.

John Stoehr is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative; a contributing writer for the Washington Monthly; a contributing editor for Religion Dispatches; and senior editor at Alternet. Follow him @johnastoehr.