Felonious evangelist Jim Bakker recently claimed: “God cannot hear prayers through a mask." The real masking is the reason for so much terror to be caused by incompetent politicians like previous guy, much like the yuppie Ellis, who tried to negotiate with the ‘terrorists” in that Xmas movie, Die Hard.
On the international front, Trump in February 2020 signed an agreement surrendering Afghanistan to the Taliban. The US released 5,000 Taliban fighters, the potential leader of the Taliban in 2018, as well as allowing the Taliban concessions on the control of foreign terror groups.
The remaining syncretic objective of trumpism and its reception of Russian support has other neo-nazi beliefs such as antisemitism, and in the case of AWD, “also sympathize with the Salafi and jihadist forms of Islam.” N.B. (Most Muslims do not use the term, disliking the association of illegitimate violence with a noble religious concept, and instead prefer the use of delegitimising terms like "deviants".[11]).
Disparate beneficiaries of desperate trumpian chaos, but the insurrection was a similar aggregation of criminals.
“The February 2020 peace deal signed by the Trump administration and the Taliban pushed the Afghan government to release up to 5,000 prisoners, some of whom played key roles in the Taliban’s swift takeover of the country.”
As criticism of the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal continues to build, President Biden has argued that he effectively had little choice in the matter. A deal President Donald Trump cut with the Taliban last year forced Biden to choose between a withdrawal now and an escalation of the war, Biden says. And as The Fix’s Aaron Blake notes, with the brutal Taliban regime retaking power, former Trump officials are suddenly and conspicuously scrambling to distance themselves from that deal.
But when the deal was cut in Doha, Qatar, in February 2020, it wasn’t treated as huge news, because the war itself wasn’t big news. So, many people don’t actually know what’s in it.
[...]
When Trump came into office, he was pretty transparent — he just wanted out of Afghanistan. “Trump had no real sense of what was at stake in the war or why to stay,” writes Georgetown professor Paul Miller in a digestible history of the 20-year war.
So Trump took a swing at something his predecessors hadn’t: a full-bore effort to strike a deal with the Taliban. It took nine rounds of talks over 18 months. At one point, Trump secretly invited the Taliban to the presidential retreat at Camp David on the eve of the 9/11 anniversary. But he shut that down — and on Twitter threatened to shut down all talks — after an American service member was killed and there was bipartisan backlash over the invitation.
The Taliban’s end of the deal asked a lot from the group — too much to be realistic, critics said. In addition to making sure nowhere in the country harbored a terrorist cell, the Taliban agreed to be responsible for any individual who might want to attack the United States from Afghanistan, including new immigrants to the country.
One gaping problem, say scholars (including some from the Trump administration): The peace agreement came with no enforcement mechanism for the Taliban to keep its word.
www.washingtonpost.com/...
"This whole peace treaty, largely conducted in Doha, was a deliberate distraction designed to lower the guard and to see what they could get out of Trump's America."
The Taliban knew America wanted out, and fast.
What they got was an "audacious" deal that included the release of 5,000 Taliban prisoners.
Crucially, the Afghan government and leader Ashraf Ghani were largely excluded from the peace deal process.
"The deal signaled to regional actors that they needed to hedge their bets and start making provisions for the end of the Ghani regime in Afghanistan," global security and strategy expert Dr Benjamin Jensen wrote for the Atlantic Council.
[...]
One of their other strategies was negotiated surrenders. Associate Professor Marianne Hanson from the school of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland said they would try to negotiate with community elders "for the people to surrender and their lives would be spared".
Those negotiations sometimes resulted in government forces being removed from the battlefield without a single shot fired, the New York Times reported.
Through this process, the Taliban secured more weapons, ammunition and vehicles as well as victories to use as part of their propaganda material.
It was a strategy which proved "really, really effective", according to Dr Natasha Lindstaedt, an expert on authoritarian regimes and failed states.
As the Taliban took provincial capitals, they crafted text messages and Twitter posts that targeted the soldiers protecting other cities.
"They replicated an American-style military system in Afghanistan, but then they took away the basic components that made it work.
www.abc.net.au/...
Inside Atomwaffen As It Celebrates a Member for Allegedly Killing a Gay Jewish College Student
ProPublica obtained the chat logs of Atomwaffen, a notorious white supremacist group. When Samuel Woodward was charged with killing 19-year-old Blaze Bernstein last month in California, other Atomwaffen members cheered the death, concerned only that the group’s cover might have been blown.
by A.C. Thompson, ProPublica, Ali Winston, special to ProPublica, and Jake Hanrahan, special to ProPublica
Feb. 23, 2018, 5 a.m. EST
Encrypted chat logs obtained by ProPublica — some 250,000 messages spanning more than six months — offer a rare window into Atomwaffen Division that goes well beyond what has surfaced elsewhere about a group whose members have been implicated in a string of violent crimes. Like many white supremacist organizations,
www.propublica.org/…
This is a motion to suppress evidence from a search warrant served at the Texas house where Cole (known as "Khimaere" in AWD) moved to with John Cameron Denton & other AWD after he came under too much law enforcement pressure in the PNW. For background:
This Deadly Neo-Nazi Group’s Media Obsession Could Be Its Downfall
Cole is charged with leading a conspiracy to intimidate reporters across the US, along with other AWD members. Every one of them has since plead guilty aside from him. The allegation is that Sutter's role in building intel was never disclosed.
Sutter, according to the filing, earned more than $140,000 from the feds, including $80,000 since 2018, when AWD came under heavy federal investigation following my ProPublica investigation with @Jake_Hanrahan & AC Thompson propublica.org/article/atomwa…
Inside Atomwaffen As It Celebrates a Member for Allegedly Killing a Gay Jewish College Student
Sutter isn't identified by name, but its undoubtedly him. Martinet Press publishes Order of Nine Angles texts that have radicalized countless youth in Neo-Fascist, Satanist practices. He has that aforementioned '03 conviction for trying to tell a firearm w/an obliterated serial
There's more in this filing, including the original FBI affidavit for the search of the AWD TX house, which has never been made public before. Bottom line is this: Martinet Press has been essentially bankrolled by the feds, pumping out a steady stream of extremist lit
I've covered terrorism cases in the US (Ethan Melzer) and the UK (see last summer's @BBCPanorama w/@DdesimoneDaniel) where Martinet texts/O9A is a central element of Extreme Right wing ideology.
The FBI have effectively been silent partners in Martinet