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Pentagon knew about Kabul suicide bombing 'hours in advance,' report claims, but troops on the ground say they weren't protected


RT
Mon, 30 Aug 2021 15:48 UTC
kabul bombing casualties troops coffins
© AP Photo / Manuel Balce Ceneta
A Marine Corps team handles the remains of US troops killed in a suicide attack near Kabul airport at Dover Air Force Base, Delaware, August 29, 2021.
US military leaders knew in advance that a "mass casualty event" was planned at Kabul airport, a Politico report reveals. However, accounts from the troops in harm's way suggest that nothing was done.

A suicide bombing outside Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul last Thursday killed more than 150 people, including 13 American troops. The bombing provoked the US into launching two drone strikes, one targeting an alleged "planner" and "facilitator" with the group responsible, and another supposedly wiping out "multiple" would-be suicide bombers but reportedly annihilating a family and children alongside them.

The initial bombing didn't take US officials by surprise. The US embassy in Kabul had warned Americans to stay away from the airport due to "security threats" and, in the hours before the suicide attack, Pentagon leaders held a conference call to prepare for an imminent "mass casualty event," according to a Politico report on Monday.

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Broom

'War is over - Taliban won': Final US flight leaves Kabul airport, ending Afghanistan airlift


RT
Tue, 31 Aug 2021 20:11 UTC
Airport Kabul
© U.S. Marine Corps photo by Sgt. Isaiah Campbell
Evacuees wait to board a US Boeing C-17 Globemaster III during an evacuation at Hamid Karzai International Airport, Kabul, Afghanistan, Aug. 23.
The last three US military transport planes have departed the Hamid Karzai Airport just ahead of the August 31 deadline, officially ending the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, the US Central Command (CENTCOM) has confirmed.

The last C-17 Globemaster transport lifted off from Kabul at 3:29pm East Coast time, General Kenneth McKenzie, head of the CENTCOM officially announced on Monday, calling it "the completion of our withdrawal from Afghanistan."

With the last US military flight departed, McKenzie said every single US service member had now left Afghanistan. However, he acknowledged that the US did not manage to evacuate everyone it wanted to.

Comment: Foreign troops may be out of the country, but we can be sure that the war on Afghanistan is not over: Pepe Escobar: Blowback: The Taliban target US intel's shadow army

Also check out SOTT radio's: NewsReal: Kabul Airport Atrocity - What Actually Happened?



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Syringe

Israeli cabinet bars unvaccinated and untested teachers, doctors from workplaces


Times Of Israel
Tue, 31 Aug 2021 18:39 UTC
COVID-19 vaccine - Israel
© AP Photo/Tsafrir Abayov
Ministers of the high-level coronavirus cabinet voted Monday to expand the so-called Green Pass entry limitations to education, health, and social welfare institutions, a government statement said.

Applying the system to schools, hospitals and welfare facilities means employees — including teachers, doctors, nurses and caregivers — will only be granted entry to their workplaces if they have documentation showing they are vaccinated against COVID-19, have recovered from the virus, or have tested negative for the virus within the past 72 hours.

The expanded rules, approved by a select panel of ministers tasked with forming virus policy, will also apply to workers in all places where customers are required to abide by the Green Pass system and expands on existing restrictions.

Ahead of the school year that starts Wednesday, the cabinet also voted to accept a recommendation to ease restrictions in the so-called "Red Cities," where infection rates are high.
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Bad Guys

Enduring Terror Forever: From al-Qaeda to ISIS-K

Pepe Escobar
The Saker
Mon, 30 Aug 2021 18:10 UTC
Taliban members
© AFP / Haroon Sabawoon / Anadolu Agency
Taliban members stand guard on Saturday at a checkpoint near Hamid Karzai International Airport, the center of evacuation efforts from Afghanistan since the Taliban took over, after Friday's suicide bombing attack.
It was 20 years ago today. Asia Times published Get Osama! Now! Or Else...The rest is history.

Retrospectively, this sounds like news from another galaxy. Before Planet 9/11. Before GWOT (Global War on Terror). Before the Forever Wars. Before the social network era. Before the Russia-China strategic partnership. Before the Dronification of State Violence. Before techno-feudalism.

Allow me to get a little personal. I was back in Peshawar - the Islamic Rome, capital of the tribal areas - 20 years ago after a dizzying loop around Pakistan, tribal territory, a botched smuggling op to Kunar, biding time in Tajikistan, arriving by Soviet helicopter in the Panjshir valley, a harrowing road trip to Faizabad, and a UN flight that took ages to arrive.

In the Panjshir, I had finally met "the Lion", commander Masoud, then plotting a counter-offensive against the Taliban. He told me he was fighting a triad: the Taliban, al-Qaeda and the Pakistani ISI. Less than three weeks later he was assassinated - by two al-Qaeda ops disguised as a camera crew, two days before 9/11.

No one, 20 years ago, could possibly imagine the subsequent slings and arrows of outrageous - terror - fortune. Two decades, $2.3 trillion and at least 240,000 Afghan deaths later, the Taliban are back where they were: ruling Afghanistan. Masoud Jr in theory leads a "resistance" in the Panjshir - actually a CIA ops channeled through CIA asset Amrullah Saleh, former Afghan Vice-President.

Al-Qaeda is a harmless skeleton, even rehabilitated in Syria as "moderate rebels"; the new bogeyman in town is ISIS-K, a spin-off of the Islamic State in "Syraq".

After negotiating a stunning package deal with the Taliban, the Empire of Chaos is concluding a humiliating evacuation from the land it bombed into democracy and submitted for two decades. Once again the US was de facto expelled by a peasant guerrilla army, this time mostly consisting of Pashtuns, descendants of the White Huns - a nomad confederation - as well as the Sakas, nomadic Iranic peoples of the Eurasian steppes.

Comment: See also:

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Attention

'Americans opened fire fearing next explosion': Witnesses of chaotic Kabul suicide bombing aftermath speak to RT


RT
Mon, 30 Aug 2021 00:00 UTC
kabul shooting
© RT
In the pandemonium that followed the suicide bombing at Kabul Airport, witnesses told RT's Murad Gazdiev they ran for their lives as the shooting started. One injured woman described US troops opening fire as civilians fled.

Editor's note: The previous version of this story included quotes based on an incorrect live translation of the people RT interviewed, stating that the witnesses saw American troops "indiscriminately" shooting civilians. We have removed those quotes and added the correct translation of the accounts.

The bomb blast ripped through a crowd of people outside Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul on Thursday, killing more than 150 people, including 13 American troops. In the chaos that followed the explosion, early reports from the ground suggested that American forces opened fire - and that some of the rounds struck the panicked crowd of Afghans at the airport gate.

Comment: See RT's follow-up article on the Pentagon having 'foreknowledge' of the attack here. See below for the summary:
US military leaders knew in advance that a "mass casualty event" was planned at Kabul airport, a Politico report reveals. However, accounts from the troops in harm's way suggest that nothing was done.

The initial bombing didn't take US officials by surprise. The US embassy in Kabul had warned Americans to stay away from the airport due to "security threats" and, in the hours before the suicide attack, Pentagon leaders held a conference call to prepare for an imminent "mass casualty event," according to a Politico report on Monday.

The report says Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin spoke on Wednesday with senior Pentagon leaders - including Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Peter Vasely, commander of American forces in Afghanistan, and Maj. Gen. Christopher Donahue, commanding general of the 82nd Airborne Division at Kabul Airport.

Milley warned of "significant" intelligence indicating that ISIS-K, a regional offshoot of the Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) terror group was plotting a "complex attack," and the brass in Afghanistan stated that the attack would likely take place at the airport's Abbey Gate, where droves of Afghans had gathered in the hopes of a spot on an evacuation flight.

The attack was due to take place within the following 24-48 hours, according to notes from the conference call detail.

[...]

While the Politico article details a frantic yet failed attempt to prevent a massacre, accounts from US troops on the ground in Kabul tell a story of negligence.

Multiple troops stationed at the airport messaged a veteran-run Instagram business page, claiming that they had received word of an incoming suicide bomber, but were instructed by superiors to continue "police calling" (picking up trash) regardless.

Another said that their commanders had precise information about what the suicide bomber looked like, and what time they would strike, down to the hour. "All day on the radio it was a countdown," the service member posted.
See also:



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Colosseum

Lavrov: Despite US humiliation in Afghanistan, Russia not gloating over chaos & only 'worried about region,'


RT
Tue, 31 Aug 2021 18:20 UTC
Kabul Afghanistan
© Getty Images / MARCUS YAM
Kabul, Afghanistan, Aug. 23, 2021
While the fall of Kabul to the Taliban as American troops beat a hasty retreat may have tarnished Washington's reputation and slashed its ambitions, Russia isn't rejoicing over the events, the country's foreign minister has said.

Speaking as part of a campaign event ahead of next month's parliamentary elections, Sergey Lavrov warned that regional instability is far from a cause for celebration. "People have written that we are gloating over events in Afghanistan," the top diplomat said. "But there has been no such feeling."

"We are very worried about some of our closest allies and neighbors, which border both Afghanistan and the Russian Federation and have visa-free travel agreements." According to him, Russia is also concerned about the humanitarian situation in the Central Asian nation, given the history between Afghanistan and the Soviet Union.

Comment: If the US withdraw from Afghanistan actually wasn't just a 'botched operation', here we might have some insight on why things went down the way they did. The US may have 'sacrificed' it's hold over Afghanistan in order to release a new wave of chaos in the Middle East and beyond.

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Pirates

Did the US support the growth of ISIS-K?

Alex Rubinstein
realalexrubi.substack.com
Sat, 28 Aug 2021 00:00 UTC
ISIS-K
© Unknown
ISIS-K
The list of governments, former government officials, and organizations in the region that have accused the US of supporting ISIS-K is expansive and includes the Russian government, the Iranian government, Syrian government media, Hezbollah, an Iraqi state-sponsored military outfit and even former Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who called the group a "tool" of the United States as journalist Ben Norton recently noted, characterizing Karzai as "a former US puppet who later turned against the US, and knows many of its secrets."

So what exactly is ISIS-K and what is it's history? After ISIS's Afghanistan variant became a household name overnight following a suicide bombing at Kabul's airport that killed more than 170 people and wounded more than 200, the group's history demands renewed scrutiny.

Back in May, I tweeted that "I must not be the only one expecting a so-called 'rise of ISIS' in Afghanistan in the near future..."

I wrote this because mass-casualty terrorist attacks are repeatedly used as justification by the United States for continuing its occupations of foreign countries: the "counterterrorism mission," or the "terrorist threat." And it has been a long time since the Taliban has taken credit for any such acts.

In fact, all the way back in August 2016 — a little over five years ago — Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told Iranian media that "In cooperation with the nation, [the Taliban] has prevented the terrorist group from gaining a foothold in Afghanistan."
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Telephone

Pelosi's Jan 6 committee demands telecom companies turn over GOP reps phone records

Libby Emmons
The Post Millennial
Mon, 30 Aug 2021 18:41 UTC
jim jordan nancy pelosi
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's Jan. 6 select committee, which recently put together a blacklist of conservative influencers and journalists, has now expanded its scope to demand that telecommunications companies deliver phone records of certain GOP lawmakers.

Select Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson said that phone records requests would be submitted for "several hundred" people.

In response to this, Rep. Jim Jordan (OH), whose presence on the committee was vetoed by Pelosi, said "Rifling through the call logs of your colleagues would depart from more than 230 years of Congressional oversight. This type of authoritarian undertaking has no place in the House of Representatives and the information you seek has no conceivable legislative purpose," CNN reports.

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Clock

Biden slammed after appearing to check watch while greeting bodies of fallen soldiers

John Solomon
Just the News
Sun, 29 Aug 2021 10:38 UTC
biden checks watch
Conservatives light up Twitter after scene a Dover Air Force Base.

Already under fire for a messy Afghan exit plan, President Joe Biden on Sunday endured fresh criticism for apparently checking his watch while greeting the bodies of fallen soldiers at Dover Air Force Base.

Footage showed the president glancing down at the watch on his left wrist midway through the ceremony, shortly after placing his hand over his heart to salute the caskets of soldiers who died in the bombing in Kabul last week.

Comment: The guy can't even remember what state he's in; can we really expect him to grasp an abstract concept like tact?

See also:

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Bad Guys

Hunting Russians abroad? US asking allies to arrest Russians who will then be extradited to the US, Moscow claims


RT
Mon, 30 Aug 2021 13:32 UTC
Viktor Bout
© Sputnik / Ramil Sitdikov
FILE PHOTO. Journalist during the video link "Moscow - New York" on "The Case of Viktor Bout: the verdict. What's Next".
American jails now hold more Russians suspected and convicted of crimes than those of almost any other foreign country, as Washington pushes for them to be transferred there from third countries, Moscow officials have revealed.

Speaking to RIA Novosti on Monday, Grigory Lukyantsev, the Russian Foreign Ministry's Commissioner for Human Rights, said that more than 50 Russians have been detained by third countries at the request of American officials.

"In terms of persecution, a glaring example is this practice used by the US of actually hunting down our citizens abroad and arresting them in other nations on the orders of American law enforcement agencies who are attempting to bring them to justice in the US," Lukyantsev said. "Since 2008, more than 50 such cases have been known, and, unfortunately, the number of such cases continues to increase."

Comment: It appears the US is engaging in more desperate hybrid war tactics, and China hasn't been spared its game of 'hostage diplomacy' either: China court upholds death sentence against Canadian who tried to smuggle 225kg of methamphetamine

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