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Trump’s Rump Coverer’s Other Mission: Militarized Voter Suppression [UPDATE-3]

[NB: Updates at bottom of post. /~Rayne]

We all know Bill Barr has been hard at work covering Trump’s ass since he was sworn in February 14th last year. What a nasty Valentine’s Day present for us.

His lies have been ridiculously egregious, from the manner in which he misled the public about the findings in the Special Counsel’s Report, to his lies to broadcast media about the election.

He’s also obstructed justice by politicizing and obstructing investigations, including removal of personnel overseeing their conduct.

A particularly low point in Barr’s tenure was his deployment of federal personnel to harass and intimidate peaceful protesters so that Trump could get a photo-op, occupying a church without clerical permission so Trump could wave a Bible upside down on camera.

It’s all of a piece, and it’s getting worse.

Federal personnel without clear identification have been snatching people off the street in Portland, Oregon.

Read the entire Twitter thread. This is like Pinochet’s Carabineros de Chile and secret police, disappearing civilians. It’s not clear what has happened to these people who’ve been grabbed — they aren’t Mirandized in public view, they aren’t told why they are being dragged away.

And the state and local government didn’t ask for this federal intervention, just as Mayor Bowser didn’t ask for Barr to deploy Department of Justice personnel in Washington D.C. to ensure Trump could get his obscene photo-op.

Worse, we can’t be certain exactly who it is pulling people off the streets. It could be white nationalists in cosplay.

Why aren’t local law enforcement demanding more accountability from Barr and his Stasi?

Oregon’s Senator Ron Wyden has been asking for answers after federal employees shot unarmed peaceful protesters hitting one in the face:

This is a clear violation of citizens’ First Amendment rights. But Wyden hasn’t yet asked about these secret federal police who are acting without state or local authorization, snatching citizens off the streets.

Trump has been warning/threatening to send federal agents to cities in blue states — this is pointed politicization of law enforcement, and more since these states have not requested federal help in policing protests.

But these Stasi aren’t there to de-escalate tensions. They’re deployed instead to suppress citizens trying to exercise their right to vote, like these National Guard in Philly’s streets on primary election day:

There’s no way around it: Bill Barr is setting up a secret federal security force which may end up working like death squads targeting anyone who protests Trump or his administration, particularly citizens in cities which vote for Democrats.

The threats are getting worse, what with White House press doofus implying Chicago may be targeted next.

Mayor Lightfoot isn’t having any of it, but where is Congress?

Both houses need to address this immediately before it gets any worse. Congress needs to investigate Bill Barr’s use of armed federal personnel who are not clearly identified while policing without the request of states and cities, violating citizens’ rights in the process.

GOP senators may argue they aren’t affected but can they really afford to lose any more votes because Barr overreached and suppressed their voters, too?

There’s enough here apart from Barr’s obstruction of justice that Barr should be impeached and removed from office.

 

UPDATE-1 — 10:00 P.M. ET —

Which agencies? Is it just U.S. Marshals Special Operations Group and Customs and Border Protection’s BORTAC or are there more involved so far? We need answers from their leadership about the lack of identification.

Portland’s mayor wants the feds out.

The federal agencies’ presence is not making things better, it’s making things worse.

Perhaps like Trump’s response to COVID-19 that’s the point: it’s about making things worse.

 

UPDATE-2 — 10:45 P.M. ET —

Not getting better. It looks like it’s getting rapidly worse. Somebody in DOJ or DHS want to explain why this vehicle is in Portland?

 

UPDATE-3 — 11:23 P.M. ET —

That’s it? That’s all DHS would provide? The utter arrogance of a department funded by our tax dollars.

Persons garbed like federal agency personnel are kidnapping American citizens off the street without any explanation and this is all the information the feds will share?

Bullshit. Unacceptable.

CIA Death Squads in Afghanistan to Have Fewer Bases

Greg Miller reports in the Washington Post that the CIA will be closing several bases in Afghanistan as US military forces are withdrawn from the country. I’ve been obsessing lately about US death squads operated primarily by the CIA but also affiliated with Special Operations forces and their bases. These death squads have been an integral part of the vaunted David Petraeus COIN strategy in both Iraq and Afghanistan (and rest on the heritage of death squads funded by the US in Latin America and those run by the US in Vietnam).

Miller’s article joins a growing trend toward public acknowledgement of the paramilitary activities the CIA has carried out in Afghanistan:

The CIA has begun closing clandestine bases in Afghanistan, marking the start of a drawdown from a region that transformed the agency from an intelligence service struggling to emerge from the Cold War to a counter­terrorism force with its own prisons, paramilitary teams and armed Predator drones.

Think for just a moment about what is being admitted here. These are clandestine bases that are being closed. Those clandestine bases had their own prisons and paramilitary teams. Remember all the US denials regarding the disappearance of innocent civilians and their torture at secret prisons in both Iraq and Afghanistan? Those denials get a lot less believable with this matter-of-fact admission that clandestine bases with their own prisons and paramilitary teams are being closed. You can bet that those secret prisons did not sit empty and the CIA paramilitary teams did not sit around all day just playing cards at their secret bases.

The entire article is worthy of reading for the number of confirmations it has on CIA activities in Afghanistan. However, lest we think that Mr. Moral Rectitude is going to be cutting back on his war crime activities in Afghanistan, we have this near the end of the article:

This year, President Obama approved new counterterrorism guidelines that call for the military to take on a larger role in targeted killing operations, reducing the involvement of the CIA.

But the guidelines included carve-outs that gave the agency wide latitude to continue armed Predator flights across the border and did not ban a controversial practice known as “signature strikes,” in which the agency can launch missiles at targets based on patterns of suspicious behavior without knowing the identities of those who would be killed.

John Brennan will hang on to his “latitude” to continue signature strikes. It seems likely that he also will keep his death squads active in Afghanistan, but they will be operating out of fewer bases. International laws and treaties are just immaterial if you have enough moral rectitude.

Oh, and as a postscript, the article does confirm affiliation of CIA death squads CIA paramilitary forces with military bases (just as has been at the center of the controversy surrounding the Nerkh base in Maidan Wardak Province, where Karzai expelled US Special Forces):

Even so, a full withdrawal of U.S. troops would probably trigger a deeper retrenchment by the CIA, which has relied on U.S. and allied military installations across the country to serve as bases for agency operatives and cover for their spying operations.

It appears that Brennan and the Obama administration just don’t care any more about maintaining secrecy on their war crimes. After all, who is going to stop them?

NYTimes Carefully Transcribes Dubious Denials of US Role in Wardak Province Torture, Murders

As evidence from investigations carried out by Afghan officials continues to mount that a figure now named (although it seems quite likely to me that this is not a real name) Zakaria Kandahari is at the heart of the cases of torture and murder of Afghan civilians that prompted Hamid Karzai to ban US Special Forces from Maidan Wardak province in February, the US found it necessary to provide an anonymous official to the New York Times as they published the Afghan revelations. Here is the heart of the dispute as outlined in the Times article:

The accusations against the man, Zakaria Kandahari, and the assertion that he and much of his unit are American are a new turn in a dispute over counterinsurgency tactics in Wardak that has strained relations between Kabul and Washington. American officials say their forces are being wrongly blamed for atrocities carried out by a rogue Afghan unit. But the Afghan officials say they have substantial evidence of American involvement.

They say they have testimony and documents implicating Mr. Kandahari and his unit in the killings or disappearances of 15 Afghans in Wardak. Mr. Kandahari is of Afghan descent but was born and raised in the United States, they say. Included in the evidence, the Afghan officials say, is a videotape of Mr. Kandahari torturing one of the 15 Afghans, a man they identified as Sayid Mohammad.

As the discussion moves to the videotape, the anonymous official is trotted out:

Afghan officials who have seen the videotape say a person speaking English with an American accent can be heard supervising the torture session, which Mr. Kandahari is seen conducting.

An American official, speaking on the condition of anonymity in line with official policy, confirmed the existence of the video showing Mr. Kandahari but denied that he was an American citizen. “Everybody in that video is Afghan; there are no American voices,” the official said.

What appears not to be in dispute, then, is that Kandahari is torturing the victim in the tape. The US claims no Americans are present and even that the voice identified by the Afghans as having an American accent is not American. But how can the anonymous US official know whose voice is the one in dispute? If the person is not seen on the tape, then the only way the American official’s claim could be true is if they carried out voice analysis on a computer and got a positive match with a person known not to be American.

But the next denial from the anonymous official is even less believable. The US Special Forces group at the center of this controversy is now known to have been based in the Nerkh district of the province and to be an “A Team”, “who work with extra resources that the military calls “enablers””. Remarkably, the article doesn’t make the tiny leap that is needed to deduce that at least some of these “enablers” working with the A Team must be CIA, even though near the end of the article, it is noted that this group came to Nerkh from Camp Gecko in Kandahar and there is a definite CIA connection there: Read more

Karzai Expels Special Operations Forces From Afghan Province Over Program at Heart of Petraeus’ “Success”

Today’s story in the Washington Post covering Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s decree expelling US Special Operations forces from a province just outside Kabul illustrates how completely the upper levels of the US military have been ignoring reality in Afghanistan. The Post reported that the “announcement appeared to come as a surprise to American military officials”. For those who have been paying attention, it has been clear that Afghanistan has been upset for years over a program tied to US Special Operations forces that develops what amounts to private militias which are sometimes under the Afghan Local Police name and sometimes not. These groups are particularly lawless and have been reported to participate in revenge killings, disappearances and torture (which are also the specialties of JSOC). And this program was at the heart of David Petraeus’ operations when he took over in Afghanistan:

Jack Keane, a former Army general and a mentor to David H. Petraeus, the American commander in Afghanistan when the program began, said that “the brilliance of the program is also the vulnerability” because recruits are selected by elders, not by Americans. Although there has always been some form of NATO vetting, “we’re totally dependent on their judgment as to who they’ve selected.”

And some groups continue to warn of the dangers of reintroducing militia-like forces to a country long bedeviled by warlords. Last year, Human Rights Watch reported instances of killing, rape, theft and other abuses among the local police that raised “serious concerns about the A.L.P. vetting, recruitment and oversight.” The group added: “Creation of the A.L.P. is a high-risk strategy to achieve short-term goals in which local groups are again being armed without adequate oversight or accountability.” (At the time, NATO said that some aspects of the report were dated or incorrect.)

Although a short pause in Special Operations forces training of Afghan Local Police took place back in September when the article quoted above came out, it is clear now that the “re-screening” of ALP personnel was a sham and that the abuses under this program continue. Here is Khaama Press describing Karzai’s decision:

After a thorough discussion, it became clear that armed individuals named as US special force stationed in Wardak province engage in harassing, annoying, torturing and even murdering innocent people. A recent example in the province is an incident in which nine people were disappeared in an operation by this suspicious force and in a separate incident a student was taken away at night from his home, whose tortured body with throat cut was found two days later under a bridge. However, Americans reject having conducted any such operation and any involvement of their special force.”

“The Ministry of Defense was assigned to make sure all US special forces are out of the province within two weeks,” the statement said adding that “All the Afghan national security forces are duty bound to protect the life and property of people in Maidan Wardak province by effectively stopping and bringing to justice any groups that enter peoples’ homes in the name of special force and who engage in annoying, harassing and murdering innocent people.”

This comes as US special forces and their interpreters were accused of misbehavior and humiliation of innocent local residents in Nekh district of Maidan Wardak province earlier in January.

Most of the news reports covering this move by Karzai do note that Special Operations forces are expected to play a key role after the “withdrawal” of coalition forces planned for the end of 2014. As noted in the Guardian: Read more