Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

“What separates us from the animals, what separates us from the chaos, is our ability to mourn people we’ve never met.”

-Author David Levithan

“One of the worst days in America’s history saw some of the bravest acts in Americans’ history. We’ll always honor the heroes of 9/11. And here at this hallowed place, we pledge that we will never forget their sacrifice.”

-President George W. Bush at the Pentagon in 2008

"When Americans lend a hand to one another, nothing is impossible. We’re not about what happened on 9/11. We’re about what happened on 9/12."

-Jeff Parness

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, September 10 (Putin's War)

2. Ukraine: CDS Daily brief (10.09.22) CDS comments on key events

3. Kharkiv offensive: Russia surprised as Ukraine takes several towns - UK

4. A CIA spy pursued bin Laden after 9/11. Now he’s being mourned as a legend.

5. 9/11 anniversary makes it easy for veterans to remember why we were in Afghanistan by Scott Mann

6. Americans are finally feeling better about the economy

7. Goodbye, Globalization?

8. Ukraine pushes major counteroffensive as war marks 200 days

9. 9/11 attacks still reverberate as US marks 21st anniversary

10. 9/11 was a test. The books of the last two decades show how America failed.

11. 9/11 reflections on service and working together

12. Gradually, then Suddenly (Freedman on Ukraine)

13. Interview: Chinese workers held by armed guard, denied wages, forced into overtime

14. As Russians Retreat, Putin Is Criticized by Hawks Who Trumpeted His War

15. Last reactor at Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant stopped

16. On The 21st Anniversary Of 9/11, Al-Qaeda Releases Message By Unnamed Leader Glorifying Preparators

17. Putin’s Plot to Charm China Is About to Go Full Blast

18. Watch: Iranian Cyberspy Caught on Zoom Trying to Hack U.S. Target

19. APT42: Crooked Charms, Cons and Compromises

20. Ukraine’s southern offensive ‘was designed to trick Russia’

21. Could Russia’s Sudden Ukraine Retreat Mean a Tactical Nuclear Weapons Strike Is Coming?

22. On 9/11 Anniversary, End the Self-Delusion About America’s Enemies By H. R. McMaster and Bradley Bowman

23. 10 High-School Questions for the Authors of the ‘Principles’ Open Letter by Paul Yingling

24. Conservative Groups Urging Lawmakers To Vote ‘No’ On More Ukraine Aid

25. How the Feds Coordinate With Facebook on Censorship

26. How The U.S. Military Is Confronting The Growing White Nationalist Extremism In Its Ranks

27. An ex-professor spreads election myths across the U.S., one town at a time

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, September 10 (Putin's War)

Maps/graphics: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-september-10

Key Takeaways

Ukrainian forces in Kharkiv Oblast are collapsing Russia’s northern Donbas axis, and Ukrainian forces will likely recapture Izyum itself in the next 48 hours.
The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) announced the withdrawal of troops from the Balakliya-Izyum line on September 10, and the Russian MoD’s failure to set effective information conditions is collapsing the Russian information space.
The withdrawal announcement and occupation authorities’ failure to organize evacuation measures is further alienating the Russian milblogger and Russian nationalist communities that support the Kremlin’s grandiose vision of capturing the entirety of Ukraine.
Ukrainian forces reached positions within 15–25km of the Russo-Ukrainian border in northeastern Kharkiv Oblast, Izyum’s northern outskirts, and Lyman’s south and southwestern outskirts, and captured the western half of Kupyansk.
Russian forces are reinforcing frontline positions in Kherson Oblast while Ukrainian forces conduct positional battles and continue their interdiction campaign against Russian logistics lines.
Russian forces conducted limited ground assaults north of Kharkiv City, south of Bakhmut, and west of Donetsk City.
Russian recruitment drives are generating some criticism among Russian milbloggers and regions.
Russian forces are reportedly intensifying filtration measures in Kherson and Zaporizhia Oblasts in response to Ukrainian counteroffensives on the Southern Axis.

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, September 10 - Institute for the Study of War

understandingwar.org

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, September 10 | Institute for the Study of War

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, September 10

Sep 11, 2022 - Press ISW

Download the PDF

Kateryna Stepanenko, Grace Mappes, George Barros, Angela Howard, and Mason Clark

September 10, 11:30pm ET

Click here to see ISW’s interactive map of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This map is updated daily alongside the static maps present in this report.

The Ukrainian counteroffensive in Kharkiv Oblast is routing Russian forces and collapsing Russia’s northern Donbas axis. Russian forces are not conducting a controlled withdrawal and are hurriedly fleeing southeastern Kharkiv Oblast to escape encirclement around Izyum. Russian forces have previously weakened the northern Donbas axis by redeploying units from this area to Southern Ukraine, complicating efforts to slow the Ukrainian advance or at minimum deploy a covering force for the retreat. Ukrainian gains are not confined to the Izyum area; Ukrainian forces reportedly captured Velikiy Burluk on September 10, which would place Ukrainian forces within 15 kilometers of the international border.[1] Ukrainian forces have penetrated Russian lines to a depth of up to 70 kilometers in some places and captured over 3,000 square kilometers of territory in the past five days since September 6 – more territory than Russian forces have captured in all their operations since April.

Ukrainian forces will likely capture the city of Izyum itself in the next 48 hours if they have not already done so. The liberation of Izyum would be the most significant Ukrainian military achievement since winning the Battle of Kyiv in March. It would eliminate the Russian advance in northwest Donetsk Oblast along the E40 highway that the Russian military sought to use to outflank Ukrainian positions along the Slovyansk – Kramatorsk line. A successful encirclement of Russian forces fleeing Izyum would result in the destruction or capture of significant Russian forces and exacerbate Russian manpower and morale issues. Russian war correspondents and milbloggers have also reported facing challenges when evacuating from Izyum, indicating Ukrainian forces are at least partially closing a cauldron in some areas.[2]

The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) announced the withdrawal of troops from the Balakliya-Izyum line on September 10, falsely framing the retreat as a “regrouping” of forces to support Russian efforts in the Donetsk Oblast direction – mirroring the Kremlin’s false explanation for the Russian withdrawal after the Battle of Kyiv.[3] The Russian MoD did not acknowledge Ukrainian successes around Kharkiv Oblast as the primary factor for the Russian retreat, and claimed that Russian military command has been carrying out a controlled withdrawal from the Balakliya-Izyum area for the past three days. The Russian MoD falsely claimed that Russian forces undertook a number of demonstrative actions and used artillery and aviation to ensure the safety of withdrawing Russian forces. These Russian statements have no relation to the situation on the ground.

The Russian MoD’s inability to admit Russian failures in Kharkiv Oblast and effectively set information conditions is collapsing the Russian information space. Kremlin-sponsored TV propagandists offered a wide range of confused explanations for Ukrainian successes ranging from justifications that Russian forces are fighting against the entire Western Bloc, to downplaying the importance of Russian ground lines of communication (GLOCS) in Kupyansk.[4] The Kremlin’s propagandists appeared unusually disorganized in their narratives, with some confirming the liberation of certain towns and others refuting such reports. Guest experts also were unable to reaffirm the hosts’ narratives that Ukrainian successes are not significant for the Donbas axis. Such programming may reveal the true progress of the Russian “special military operation” to the general Russian public that relies on state media and the Russian MoD for updates.

The withdrawal announcement further alienated the Russian milblogger and Russian nationalist communities that support the Kremlin’s grandiose vision for capturing the entirety of Ukraine. Russian milbloggers condemned the Russian MoD for remaining quiet, choosing self-isolation, and distorting situational awareness in Russia.[5] One milblogger even stated that the Russian MoD’s silence is a betrayal of Russian servicemen that fought and still fight in Ukraine.[6] A Russian milblogger also noted that the Russian MoD has repeatedly ignored or demeaned the milblogger community that raised concerns with Russian military leadership and lack of transparency on the frontlines.[7] The milbloggers called on the Russian MoD to take the information space into its own hands and stop relying on silencing information.

Prior to the withdrawal announcement, the Russian MoD released footage of Russian military convoys reportedly moving to reinforce the Kharkiv direction on September 9.[8] Many Russian outlets and milbloggers expressed hope that these reinforcements would stabilize the frontline and repel Ukrainian advances on Izyum despite the Russian MoD failing to address the unfolding situation days prior. Russian milbloggers would have likely accepted MoD’s announcement of a withdrawal like they previously did with the Russian retreat from the Snake Island and other tactical Russian losses if the Russian information space was not oversaturated with footage of Ukrainian successes. Such inconsistencies in messaging further support ISW’s assessment that the Russian MoD faces challenges in responding to unexpected developments within the established informational framework, which portrays Russian invasion of Ukraine as an easy and faultless operation.[9] Most importantly, such unaware information practices erode the Russian public’s trust in Russian MoD messaging and disrupt the Kremlin’s propaganda facade.

Russian milbloggers also criticized the Russian occupation authorities for failing to organize evacuation measures in Kharkiv Oblast. Some milbloggers noted that occupation administrations are disoriented and lack initiative.[10] The Ukrainian counteroffensive is effectively paralyzing the Russian occupation leadership that is likely afraid for its fate.

Key Takeaways

Ukrainian forces in Kharkiv Oblast are collapsing Russia’s northern Donbas axis, and Ukrainian forces will likely recapture Izyum itself in the next 48 hours.
The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) announced the withdrawal of troops from the Balakliya-Izyum line on September 10, and the Russian MoD’s failure to set effective information conditions is collapsing the Russian information space.
The withdrawal announcement and occupation authorities’ failure to organize evacuation measures is further alienating the Russian milblogger and Russian nationalist communities that support the Kremlin’s grandiose vision of capturing the entirety of Ukraine.
Ukrainian forces reached positions within 15–25km of the Russo-Ukrainian border in northeastern Kharkiv Oblast, Izyum’s northern outskirts, and Lyman’s south and southwestern outskirts, and captured the western half of Kupyansk.
Russian forces are reinforcing frontline positions in Kherson Oblast while Ukrainian forces conduct positional battles and continue their interdiction campaign against Russian logistics lines.
Russian forces conducted limited ground assaults north of Kharkiv City, south of Bakhmut, and west of Donetsk City.
Russian recruitment drives are generating some criticism among Russian milbloggers and regions.
Russian forces are reportedly intensifying filtration measures in Kherson and Zaporizhia Oblasts in response to Ukrainian counteroffensives on the Southern Axis.

We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because those activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukrainian military and population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.

Ukrainian Counteroffensives – Southern and Eastern Ukraine
Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine (comprised of one subordinate and two supporting efforts);
Russian Subordinate Main Effort- Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast
Russian Supporting Effort 1- Kharkiv City
Russian Supporting Effort 2- Southern Axis
Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
Activities in Russian-occupied Areas

Ukrainian Counteroffensives (Ukrainian efforts to liberate Russian-occupied territories)

Eastern Ukraine: (Vovchansk-Kupyansk-Izyum-Lyman Line)

Ukrainian forces reached the northern outskirts of Izyum on September 10 and will likely recapture the city within the next 48 hours if they have not already.[11] Russian and Ukrainian sources reported that Ukrainian forces have not yet entered Izyum and largely reported that Russian forces are withdrawing from the city.[12] Russian sources reported that the Russian military deployed reinforcements to cover a withdrawal from Izyum to the left bank of the Oskil River.[13] Ukrainian forces’ northern advance has severed Russian forces’ most significant ground lines of communication (GLOCS) to Izyum. Russian forces must now rely on suboptimal paths to the south and southeast that run through difficult terrain and over the Siverskyi Donets and Oskil rivers to withdraw forces.

[Source: Esri, Maxar, Earthstar Geographics, and the GIS User Community]

Ukrainian forces seized the western half of Kupyansk on September 10 and can likely take the rest of the city within 24 hours if they choose to cross the Oskil River.[14] Russian sources reported that Russian forces retreated from western Kupyansk to the east bank of the Oskil River, where, a Russian source claimed, Russian forces can defend Kupyansk’s industrial zone more easily.[15] A Russian source claimed that Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance groups are operating in the eastern half of Kupyansk.[16] Geolocated footage shows Russian forces fleeing east from Kupyansk’s eastern outskirts, suggesting that most or all Russian forces in Kupyansk are withdrawing or have withdrawn to the east, most likely to Svatove, Luhansk Oblast.[17]

Ukrainian forces advanced to the southern and southwestern outskirts of Lyman on September 10, where Russian forces are covering the Izyum group’s withdrawal. Russian sources reported that Russian forces defended positions in Lyman against Ukrainian advances.[18] Some Russian sources reported that Ukrainian forces established positions in small areas of Lyman’s environs, but that the Russian defense holds.[19] Conflicting Russian reports that Russian forces withdrew from Lyman are likely false but attest to the panicked and confused state of the Russian information space about Russian forces’ situation in this area.

Ukrainian forces advanced to positions within 15–25km of the Russo-Ukrainian border in northeastern Kharkiv Oblast on September 10. Russian sources reported that Ukrainian forces captured Velyky Burlyk at the T2111 and T2114 intersection and Khotomlya on the east bank of the Pechenhy Reservoir.[20] Russian sources stated that Ukrainian forces took advantage of the absence of a continuous Russian front line while advancing on Velyky Burluk.[21] Ukrainian forces’ continued quick pace of advance is severing long-held Russian GLOCS that support operations in northern Luhansk Oblast, and their loss will severely hamper Russian and proxy operations.

Russian forces likely no longer hold all of Luhansk Oblast as of September 10. Ukrainian forces likely captured Bilohorivka sometime between September 4 and 10. Russian sources reported that Russian forces withdrew from Bilohorivka sometime on September 4–10.[22] Luhansk Oblast Administration Head Serhiy Haidai stated that Ukrainian forces reached the outskirts of Lysychansk on September 10.[23] A recently posted, though undated, video shows Ukrainian forces entering Bilohorivka on an unspecified date.[24] Bilohorivka was on the previously known frontline and is immediately adjacent to Lysychansk.

Southern Ukraine: (Kherson Oblast)

Ukrainian military officials reported that Ukrainian forces are conducting positional battles in Kherson Oblast on September 10 but did not disclose specific areas of operation.[25] Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command Spokesperson Nataliya Humenyuk stated that Ukrainian forces have advanced tens of kilometers in some unnamed areas of Kherson Oblast and noted that the Ukrainian counteroffensive is pushing Russian forces to retreat to their second lines of defenses.[26] Humenyuk added that Russian forces continue to resist Ukrainian attacks and retain ammunition and supplies on the frontlines, but Russian units are suffering heavy losses. The Ukrainian General Staff, for example, stated that unspecified elements of the Russian 106th Guards Airborne Division operating in Kherson Oblast lost over 58 servicemen in one day.[27] Humenyuk and other Ukrainian military officials reiterated that Ukrainian forces are continuing their interdiction campaign by striking Russian ground lines of communication (GLOCS), ammunition depots and key positions to further weaken the reportedly 25,000- to 35,000-strong group of Russian troops on the Dnipro River’s right bank.[28] Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command notably reported that Ukrainian forces destroyed another Russian ferry crossing over the Dnipro River in Lvove (west of Nova Kakhovka) and an ammunition depot in Bilyaivka in northern Kherson Oblast.[29] Russian forces are also reportedly attempting to repair the collapsed Kakhovka Bridge.[30]

Social media footage of strikes, explosions, and activated Russian air defense systems indicates Ukraine’s interdiction campaign against Russian logistics in Kherson Oblast continued on September 10. Kherson City Telegram channels and media outlets reported a powerful explosion at a local military recruitment center in Kherson City, which housed newly arrived Russian personnel and military staff.[31] Ukrainian sources also reported explosions in Kherson City’s industrial zone and in the area of the Antonivsky Railway Bridge.[32] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed to have destroyed five rounds of Ukrainian HIMARS strikes in the vicinity of Nova Kakhovka.[33] Local reports also indicate that Russian forces are continuing to use barges to transport equipment to and from Kherson City.[34]

Ukrainian military officials also noted the arrival of additional Russian troops to central Kherson Oblast, which will reinforce occupied positions. Russian forces reportedly deployed an unspecified 1,300-person-strong Chechen unit to Kherson Oblast.[35] It is possible that the Chechen units may be newly formed volunteer battalions or are at least in part staffed by new recruits. The Ukrainian General Staff and Ukrainian intelligence previously noted that new arrivals are older and inexperienced men, which fits the profile of Russian volunteer recruits.[36] Deputy Head of the Republic of Bashkortostan Alik Kamaletdinov announced that volunteer battalions from Bashkortostan are fighting on the frontlines in the Mykolaiv Oblast direction, suggesting that Russian forces are deploying newly formed volunteer units to the Southern Axis.[37] Russian forces are reportedly also regrouping surviving personnel of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) 1st Army Corps into other units.[38]

Ukrainian and Russian sources identified four areas of kinetic activity along the Kherson Oblast administrative border: west of Kherson City, near Snihurivka (about 60km east of Mykolaiv City), southeast of the Ukrainian bridgehead over the Inhulets River, and south of the Kherson-Dnipropetrovsk Oblast administrative border. Kremlin-affiliated Russian war correspondents published footage of Russian artillery reportedly striking Ukrainian forces attempting to advance on Oleksandrivka, approximately 40km west of Kherson City, and noted that the settlement is near a “gray zone” between Russian and Ukrainian artillery positions.[39] A Russian milblogger also claimed that Russian forces are launching offensive operations from Snihurivka to suppress a claimed Ukrainian logistics hub in Bereznehuvate, about 25km due north from Snihurivka.[40] The Russian MoD claimed that Russian forces struck a Ukrainian command post in the Snihurivka Raion.[41] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces launched air strikes on Bruskynske (on the T2207 highway about 11km southeast of the bridgehead), which may indicate that Ukrainian forces are advancing in its vicinity or that Russian forces have left their positions near the settlement.[42] A Russian milblogger also noted that Ukrainian and Russian forces engaged in positional battles near Ukrainian-liberated Vysokopillya, Olhyne, and Arkhanhelske in northern Kherson Oblast.[43]

The Russian MoD did not comment on the progress of the Ukrainian southern counteroffensive on September 10.[44] A Kremlin-affiliated war correspondent stated that Russian reporters in Kherson Oblast have strict restrictions on publishing combat footage and noted minimal use of commercially-available drones.[45]

Russian Main Effort- Eastern Ukraine

Russian Subordinate Main Effort- Donetsk Oblast (Russian objective: Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)

Russian forces did not conduct any confirmed ground attacks in the Siversk area on September 10 and continued to conduct routine strikes on Siversk and surrounding settlements.[46] A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces attempted to break through Russian defenses in Spirne (southeast of Siversk).[47]

Russian forces attempted several minor ground attacks south of Bakhmut of September 10. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted failed offensive operations near Bakhmut, toward Mayorsk, Mykolayivka Druha, Zaitseve, Vesela Dolyna, and Bakhmut.[48] Chechen Republic Head Ramzan Kadyrov posted footage of Chechen Akhmat Special Forces Commander Apta Alaudinov celebrating an alleged breakthrough at an unspecified point in the Soledar direction (approximately 12km northeast of Bakhmut), and a Russian milblogger mirrored claims of unspecified “slight” Wagner group advances east of Bakhmut.[49] The milblogger also claimed that Russian forces took control of several blocks around the Knauf Gips Donbas gypsum factory southeast of Soledar.[50] These represent the only claimed Russian territorial gains on September 10. Russian forces continued routine artillery strikes on Bakhmut and its surroundings.

Russian forces conducted two confirmed ground attacks west of Donetsk City on September 10. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled attempted Russian assaults on Pervomaiske (about 18km west of Donetsk City) and Novomykhailivka (about 29km southwest of Donetsk City).[51] Russian milbloggers denied social media reports that Ukrainian forces attacked Russian positions near the Donetsk City Airport.[52]

Supporting Effort #1- Kharkiv City (Russian objective: Prevent Ukrainian forces from reaching the Russian border)

Russian forces conducted a limited ground assault north of Kharkiv City and continued routine fire on Kharkiv City and the surrounding settlements on September 10.[53] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled a Russian ground assault near Sosnivka, less than 10km from the international border.[54] A Russian source claimed that Ukrainian forces are probing Russian defenses in Liptsy.[55]

Supporting Effort #2- Southern Axis (Russian objective: Maintain frontline positions and secure rear areas against Ukrainian strikes)

Russian forces did not attempt to advance in western Zaporizhia Oblast and continued routine shelling throughout the Southern Axis.[56] Ukrainian sources reported that Ukrainian forces struck unspecified targets in Russian-occupied Polohy on the western Zaporizhia Oblast frontline.[57] Melitopol Mayor Ivan Fedorov noted reports of unspecified explosions and shooting in Melitopol on the night of September 9–10.[58]

Russian forces continued launching artillery, missile, and air strikes at Dnipropetrovsk and Mykolaiv Oblasts on September 10. Russian forces launched two Kh-59 cruise missiles on Dnipro City, and Ukrainian air defense units shot down one of the missiles.[59] Russian forces continued to target Nikopol Raion with MLRS and heavy artillery and launched S-300 air defense missiles at the pier area in Mykolaiv City.[60]

Russian occupations authorities are setting information conditions to seize control of Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) operations amid international outcries. Zaporizhia Oblast occupation official Vladimir Rogov claimed that Ukrainian officials deliberately shut down power to the ZNPP and that the occupation administration is considering having the ZNPP continue to generate power or conserving the plant through a cold shutdown.[61] Rogov stated that he is opposed to peacekeepers visiting the ZNPP, claiming they will be biased against Russia, and claimed the ZNPP needs security against claimed Ukrainian shelling instead of peacekeepers.[62] Rogov’s statement comes one day after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) released a draft resolution calling on Russia to cease all operations at the ZNPP.[63] Rogov’s statements indicate continued Russian hostility towards any non-Russian intervention at the ZNPP.

Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts (Russian objective: Expand combat power without conducting general mobilization)

Russian federal subjects’ (regions) excessive recruitment advertisements for contract service and enlistment into volunteer detachments are igniting some criticism among local Russians and milbloggers. Khaborovsk Krai residents started a petition to send Khabarovsk Krai Governor Mikhail Degtyaryov to the frontlines in Ukraine after Degtyaryov stated that he would love to fight in Ukraine if he did not hold his office.[64] ISW previously reported that the Kremlin likely ordered regional heads to personally advertise contract service, and such efforts may give rise to local dissatisfaction with regional authorities.[65] Hundreds of Khabarovsk Krai residents protested Degtyaryov’s appointment as the krai governor in summer of 2020, and his recruitment advertisement may be reopening public criticism of his leadership.[66] Russian military correspondent and milblogger Maksim Fomin (known under the alias Vladlen Tatarsky) has called on interested volunteers to refrain from enlisting into volunteer battalions, despite previously welcoming the Kremlin’s force-generation initiative in mid-July.[67] Fomin stated on September 10 that recruits should enlist into the Russian Armed Forces to fill out the 3rd battalion in existing Russian brigades (referencing the Russian practice of pulling personnel from each regiment’s first and second battalions to generate battalion tactical groups), rather than joining “disparate battalions and incomprehensible detachments.”[68] Fomin also called on officers to properly train volunteers, instead of simply taking photos of recruits at the training ground for propaganda.

Russian forces are reportedly continuing to forcefully mobilize men in Luhansk Oblast and are recruiting Central Asian men for contract service. The Ukrainian General Staff noted that Russian recruiters are promising retired Kyrgyz military personnel high salaries through social media to serve in the Russian invasion of Ukraine.[69] Luhansk Oblast Administration Head Serhiy Haidai stated that Russian forces continued to forcefully mobilize disabled and old men.[70]

Activity in Russian-occupied Areas (Russian objective: consolidate administrative control of occupied areas; set conditions for potential annexation into the Russian Federation or some other future political arrangement of Moscow’s choosing)

Russian forces are reportedly intensifying filtration measures in Kherson and Zaporizhia Oblasts in response to Ukrainian counteroffensives on the Southern Axis. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces and Russian Security Service (FSB) elements deployed from Russia are searching for civilians who assist Ukrainian forces and are checking civilian mobile phones in Nova Kakhovka.[71] The Ukrainian General Staff reported similar filtration practices in Enerhodar.

Russian occupation authorities are further restricting the movement of goods from Ukraine into occupied territories that will likely impact the transport of humanitarian cargo. Head of the Zaporizhia Occupation Administration Yevheny Balitsky announced a complete ban on September 10 of commercial cargo transport to occupied territories through the checkpoint at Vasylivka, Zaporizhia Oblast.[72] Occupation authorities will likely use the ban on cargo transportation at Vasylivka to justify preventing humanitarian convoys from entering occupied Zaporizhia Oblast from unoccupied Ukraine.

Note: ISW does not receive any classified material from any source, uses only publicly available information, and draws extensively on Russian, Ukrainian, and Western reporting and social media as well as commercially available satellite imagery and other geospatial data as the basis for these reports. References to all sources used are provided in the endnotes of each update.

[2] https://t.me/rybar/38539

[3] https://t.me/mod_russia/19719; https://t.me/mod_russia/19720; https://…

[4] https://twitter.com/juliadavisnews/status/1568310989149605888?s=46&t=RGO…

[5] https://t.me/milinfolive/90245; https://t.me/rybar/38565; https://t.me…

[6] https://t.me/milinfolive/90245

[7] https://t.me/rybar/38565

[8] https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-ass…

[9] https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-ass…

[10] https://t.me/rybar/38574; https://t.me/rybar/38531

[13] https://t.me/rybar/38570; https://t.me/rybar/38539; https://t.me/voenkors/204; https://t.me/vyso…

[14] https://twitter.com/Danieltilli1/status/1568549387927752704; https://twitter.com/Ubastard5/status/1568516132021358596; https://twitter.com/kr007t/status/1568497765910462465; https://t.me/SBUkr/5065; https://suspilne dot media/280311-zsu-zajsli-do-kupanska-harkivskoi-oblasti-nad-mistom-ukrainski-prapori/; https://t.me/rusich_army/5050; https://t.me/notes_veterans/4711;

[16] https://t.me/akimapachev/2966

[17] https://twitter.com/666_mancer/status/1568480938191093762; https://twitter.com/romankappa/status/1568486550551334912

[20] https://t.me/rybar/38586; https://t.me/rybar/38570; https://t.me/yuras…

[23] https://suspilne dot media/280421-ukrainski-vijskovi-na-okolicah-lisicanska-gajdaj/; https://twitter.com/IAPonomarenko/status/1568594855118442497; https://twitter.com/IAPonomarenko/status/1568594855118442497

[24] https://twitter.com/Chelove31050108/status/1568659197813788673

[25] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02TQaGimRmYE7TSCj7vT…

[26] https://suspilne dot media/280378-na-pivdni-zsu-na-deakih-dilankah-prosunulis-na-dekilka-desatkiv-kilometriv-gumenuk/

[27] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02TQaGimRmYE7TSCj7vT…

[28] https://suspilne dot media/280378-na-pivdni-zsu-na-deakih-dilankah-prosunulis-na-dekilka-desatkiv-kilometriv-gumenuk/; https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=640665084335774; https://www.facebook…

[29] https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=857484785219631

[30] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02TQaGimRmYE7TSCj7vT…

[31] https://news dot liga.net/politics/news/v-hersone-vzryv-soobschayut-ob-unichtojenii-mesta-razmescheniya-voennyh-rf; https://t.me/hueviyherson/25690; https://t.me/hueviyherson/25691; http… https://suspilne dot media/280272-vtorgnenna-rosii-v-ukrainu-den-199-tekstovij-onlajn/

[32] https://t.me/hueviyherson/25684; https://t.me/stranaua/63041

[33] https://t.me/mod_russia/19716

[34] https://t.me/hueviyherson/25688

[35] https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=640665084335774; https://www.facebook…

[36] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02TQaGimRmYE7TSCj7vT… dot gov.ua/content/kontrnastup-syl-oborony-ukrainy-prymushuie-okupantiv-prosyty-dopomohy-v-chervonoho-khresta-ta-tikaty-na-vkradenykh-velosypedakh.html

[37] https://www dot bashinform dot ru/news/social/2022-09-10/alik-kamaletdinov-rasskazal-o-boevyh-uspehah-dobrovolcheskih-batalonov-iz-bashkirii-2943760

[38] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02TQaGimRmYE7TSCj7vT…

[39] https://t.me/rybar/38549; https://t.me/msgazdiev/1053

[40] https://t.me/rybar/38576; https://t.me/boris_rozhin/63324

[41] https://t.me/mod_russia/19716

[42] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02TQaGimRmYE7TSCj7vT…

[43] https://t.me/rybar/38519

[44] https://t.me/mod_russia/19716; https://t.me/mod_russia/19719; https://…

[45] https://t.me/rybar/38549; https://t.me/msgazdiev/1053

[46] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02TQaGimRmYE7TSCj7vT…

[47] https://t.me/vladlentatarsky/16018; https://t.me/NeoficialniyBeZsonoV/17513

[48] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02TQaGimRmYE7TSCj7vT…

[49] https://t.me/RKadyrov_95/2808; https://t.me/rybar/38519

[50] https://t.me/rybar/38519

[51] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02TQaGimRmYE7TSCj7vT…

[52] https://twitter.com/mhmck/status/1568623664089661440 https://twitter.co…

[53] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02TQaGimRmYE7TSCj7vT… https://t.me/der_rada/2572

[54] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02TQaGimRmYE7TSCj7vT…

[55] https://t.me/rybar/38570

[56] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02TQaGimRmYE7TSCj7vT…

[57] https://t.me/stranaua/63011

[58] https://t.me/ivan_fedorov_melitopol/542

[59] https://t.me/dnipropetrovskaODA/1804; https://t.me/mykola_lukashuk/1440…

[60] https://t.me/mykolaivskaODA/2517; https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=640… https://t.me/Yevtushenko_E/756

[61] https://t.me/kommunist/9194; https://t.me/miroshnik_r/8638; https://t.me/vrogov/4792; https://ria dot ru/20220910/zaes-1815813787.html

[62] https://t.me/vrogov/4795; https://tass dot ru/mezhdunarodnaya-panorama/15709331

[63] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/exclusive-draft-iaea-resolution-say…

[64] https://ru.krymr.com/a/news-khabarovsk-gubernator-petiziya/32027511.html

[65] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign…

[66] https://www.rferl.org/a/rallies-in-russia-s-khabarovsk-continue-as-prote…

[67] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign…

[68] https://t.me/vladlentatarsky/16010

[69] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02TQaGimRmYE7TSCj7vT…

[70] https://t.me/luhanskaVTSA/5665

[71] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02TQaGimRmYE7TSCj7vT…

[72] https://t.me/BalitskyVGA/263

CDS Daily brief (10.09.22) CDS comments on key events

Humanitarian aspect:

As of the morning of September 10, 2022, more than 1,129 Ukrainian children are victims of full- scale armed aggression by the Russian Federation, Prosecutor General's Office reports. The official number of children who have died and who have been wounded in the course of the Russian aggression is 383 and more than 746, respectively. However, the data is not conclusive since data collection continues in the areas of active hostilities, temporarily occupied areas, and liberated territories.

On the night of September 10, around 01:10, Mykolaiv was shelled, the Head of Mykolayiv Oblast Military Administration Vitaliy Kim said. Also, around 05:30, there was shelling outside the villages of Chervona Dolyna and Shyroke. There are no casualties reported. Shelling of the Bereznehuvate amalgamated community and nearby villages continued.

Today around noon, the Russian army shelled Zelenodolsk in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, with "Uragan" MLRS hitting an industrial enterprise, said the head of the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast Council, Mykola Lukashuk. No victims were reported. Lukashuk stressed that Zelenodolsk is one the most heavily shelled towns in the Kryvy Rih district. During the morning shelling in the Sinelnykove district, two trucks and a tractor were damaged in two agricultural enterprises, and a garage and a forge were destroyed. The Russian forces fired six S-300 rockets. Their impact created craters up to seven meters deep.

At night, the Russian military once again hit Kharkiv Oblast with missiles. A private house was struck in the village of Nova Vodolaha. A female body was recovered from its rubble, the Kharkiv Oblast Directorate of the State Emergency Service reported.

The city of Kharkiv came under Russian fire on the evening of September 10. At least two people were injured and one person killed. As of 19:30, the shelling still continued, the city mayor Ihor Terekhov said.

As of today, September 10, due to the damaged power lines, poles and equipment, 38,748 households in 94 towns and villages of Zaporizhzhya Oblast are left without electric power supply. The data accounts only for the part of the Oblast controlled by the Ukrainian government, Zaporizhzhya Oblast Military Administration said.

The Russian-installed authorities of the part of Kharkiv Oblast occupied by the Russian Federation called on all residents of the occupied areas to "evacuate" to Russia "to save their lives". The "evacuation" is due to the Ukrainian counteroffensive on the Kharkiv Oblast.

The "Yellow Ribbon" resistance movement distributed leaflets calling for the liberation of Crimea and stating that Crimea is Ukrainian territory. In Kherson Oblast, activists of the "Yellow Ribbon"

movement distributed leaflets calling on the locals not to take Russian passports. They also called on the residents to take yellow ribbons and tie them to trees and other objects outside, Ukrinform reports.

Occupied territories

At least 70 thousand people, which comprises more than half of the city's population, have evacuated from Melitopol, Zaporizhzhya Oblast, the legally elected Ukrainian city mayor Ivan Fedorov said. He said that no official evacuation is organized; however, it is still possible to evacuate with private transportation, and volunteers are helping with that. A new wave of evacuation is expected before the start of the heating season in October.

The occupying authorities of the part of Kharkiv Oblast occupied by the Russian Federation called on all residents of the occupied areas to "evacuate" to Russia "to save their lives". The "evacuation" is due to the Ukrainian counteroffensive on the Kharkiv Oblast.

The "Yellow Ribbon" resistance movement distributed leaflets calling for the liberation of Crimea and stating that Crimea is Ukrainian territory. In Kherson Oblast, activists of the "Yellow Ribbon" movement distributed leaflets calling on the locals not to take Russian passports. They also called on the residents to take yellow ribbons and tie them to trees and other objects outside, Ukrinform reports.

Operational situation

It is the 199th day of the strategic air-ground offensive operation of the Russian Armed Forces against Ukraine (in the official terminology of the Russian Federation – "operation to protect Donbas"). The enemy continues to concentrate its efforts on establishing full control over the territory of Donetsk Oblast, maintaining the captured parts of Kherson, Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhya, and Mykolaiv Oblasts.

The Russian military conducts high intensity aerial reconnaissance and continues improving its troops' logistical support.

There is a continued threat of air and missile strikes throughout the territory of Ukraine, in particular from the territory and airspace of the Republic of Belarus. Over the past day, the Russian forces launched 13 missile and 23 air strikes on targets on the territory of Ukraine. In particular, infrastructure was affected in the areas around Velyki Prokhody, Avdiivka, Nevelske, Maryinka, Velyka Novosilka, Neskuchne, Vilne Pole, Poltavka, Mali Shcherbaky, Bilohirya, Ternovi Pody, Blahodatne, Suhy Stavok, Kostromka and Bezimenne.

The Russian forces dealt airstrikes on civilian and military infrastructure in the areas around Senkivka, Bleshnya, Hai in Chernihiv Oblast and Slavhorod, Velyka Pysarivka, Stukalevka, Zapsillia, Khodyne, Myropilske and Velikiy Prykil in Sumy Oblast.

In addition, the Russian military conducted aerial reconnaissance using UAVs - 96 sorties were recorded.

During the day, to support the ground groupings, the Ukrainian Air Force carried out 33 strikes. It destroyed an ammunition depot, and inflicted damage on almost 25 enemy strongholds and places of manpower and equipment concentration.

Ukrainian air defense units destroyed two UAVs and one cruise missile in different directions.

Over the past day, missile troops and artillery of the Ukrainian Defense Forces damaged eighteen enemy control points of various levels, 28 areas of the Russian manpower concentration, air defense and EW systems, artillery units, and more than twenty ammunition and fuel depots.

During the day, the Russian forces launched more than 12 missile and more than 12 air strikes on targets on the territory of Ukraine. For this purpose, they flew up to forty sorties. In particular, infrastructure was affected in Velyki Prohody, Starovirivka, Yuryvka, Temyrivka, Ternovi Pody, Sukhy Stavok, Barvinok and Bilohirka.

Command and staff exercises continue in the Armed Forces of the Republic of Belarus. Six battalions were deployed along the state border with Ukraine: one of the 11th separate motorized rifle brigade (Slonim), one of the 103rd separate airborne brigade (Vitebsk), and four from the 6th separate motorized rifle brigade (Grodno) and a detachment of the 5th separate SOF brigade (Maryina Gorka), up to two self-propelled artillery batteries (Ivanova Sloboda, Gomel Oblast), up to two self-propelled artillery batteries (Tonezh, Gomel region) and up to a "Msta-B" howitzer battery (Vidibor, Brest Oblast).

Units of the Ukrainian Defense Forces hold their positions and prevent the Russian military from advancing deep into the Ukrainian territory. Ukrainian troops successfully repelled Russian attacks in the areas of Kostyantynivka, Prudyanka, Ruski Tyshky, Virnopillya, Mykolaivka Druha, Zaitseve, Avdiivka, Kamianka, Pobieda and Bezimenne.

The 237th air assault regiment of the Russian Airborne Forces ceased to exist due to the death or injury of all servicemen of the regiment. A significant part of those who survived is in extremely poor condition.

At the same time, propagandists of Russian mass media claim that the counteroffensive of the Armed Forces of Ukraine is a fake "PR action". Kremlin propaganda is trying to convince its citizens that all reports of a counteroffensive are a "show performance" for Europe and the civilized world, and all the weapons and military equipment the West had provided [to Ukraine] have been sold to unknown buyers.

The morale and psychological state of the personnel of the invasion forces are considerably deteriorating due to significant losses and unwillingness to fight. The number of deserters in the Russian units is increasing. In the area of Babenkivka Druga (Kharkiv Oblast), the Russian military is using helicopters and weapons to search for deserters and return them to combat positions. In

addition, an intensive bus movement of unarmed Russian soldiers through the Kalanchak checkpoint in the direction of the temporarily occupied Crimea was recorded.

Kharkiv direction

• Zolochiv-Balakleya section: approximate length of combat line - 147 km, number of BTGs of the RF Armed Forces - 10-12, the average width of the combat area of one BTG - 13.3 km;

• Deployed enemy BTGs: 26th, 153rd and 197th tank regiments, 245th motorized rifle regiment of the 47th tank division, 6th and 239th tank regiments, 228th motorized rifle regiment of the 90th tank division, 1st motorized rifle regiment, 1st tank regiment of the 2nd motorized rifle division, 25th and 138th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 6th Combined Arms Army, 27th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 1st Tank Army, 275th and 280th motorized rifle regiments, 11th tank regiment of the 18th motorized rifle division of the 11 Army Corps, 7th motorized rifle regiment of the 11th Army Corps, 80th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 14th Army Corps, 2nd and 45th separate SOF brigades of the Airborne Forces, 1st Army Corps of so-called DPR, PMCs.

The main efforts of the Russian forces were focused on restraining the counteroffensive of the Ukrainian Defense Forces in the Balaklia operational direction. As part of this effort, the Russian command moved additional units of the "Wagner" PMC and the marines of the Northern Fleet. The occupation authorities considered a possible "mobilization" of the male population in the occupied territories.

The Russian occupiers shelled the military and civilian infrastructure with tanks, combat vehicles, barrel and rocket artillery in the areas around Dmytrivka, Prudyanka, Zolochiv, Sosnivka, Duvanka, Udy, Liptsi, Peremoha, Momotove, Borshchova, Velyki Prokhody, Ruski Tyshki, Stary Saltiv, Cherkaski Tyshki and Petrivka.

As a result of the successful actions of the Ukrainian Defense Forces, the enemy retreated from Velyki Prokhody, Nechvolodivka, and Morozivka. On September 9, the enemy 7th separate motorized rifle regiment of the 11th Army Corps of the Coastal Forces of the Baltic Fleet withdrew from Balaklia in the direction of Savyntsi and took up the defense.

In total, more than a thousand square kilometers of Ukrainian territory were liberated from the Russian occupation forces. Units of the Ukrainian Defense Forces wedged themselves into the enemy's defense to a depth of up to 50 km. More than thirty towns and villages were liberated or taken under control.

Ukrainian communities are returning to normal life in the liberated territories. Demining is underway. Units of the Ukrainian National Guard conduct stabilization measures. The National Police has resumed its operation. The police record numerous crimes committed by the Russian military on Ukrainian soil and are ready to counter provocations and infiltration by sabotage reconnaissance groups. The local population is immediately provided with all possible assistance because the [Russian] occupiers left behind destroyed infrastructure, houses, and [lots of] scrap metal [from their destroyed equipment].

As a result of the counteroffensive of the Ukrainian Defense Forces in several directions, the occupying forces are looking for ways to withdraw from the hostilities and possible encirclement areas safely.

The enemy 202nd separate motorized rifle regiment retreated from its positions and moved to the nearest forest strip. The military unit was left without commanders and communications. Currently, the Russian soldiers call their relatives with requests to contact the command and find out where they should go next. Some of them ask their wives to contact the hotlines of the Russian Ministry of Defense and the Red Cross with a demand to withdraw them from the territory of Ukraine.

The Russian occupiers tried to resist the offensive in the Kharkiv direction, shelling the positions of the Armed Forces of Ukraine with tanks and the heavy flamethrower system "Solntsepiok". However, they suffered considerable losses, left their positions and retreated in small groups. They complain about the powerful offensive of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the lack of ammunition and equipment. Due to the lack of logistics, they retreat in a disorganized manner. Bicycles and scooters taken from the local population are used to leave combat positions. Many enemy soldiers go on foot.

Kramatorsk direction

● Balakleya - Siversk section: approximate length of the combat line - 184 km, the number of BTGs of the RF Armed Forces - 17-20, the average width of the combat area of one BTG - 9.6 km;

● 252nd and 752nd motorized rifle regiments of the 3rd motorized rifle division, 1st, 13th and 12th tank regiments, 423rd motorized rifle regiment of the 4th tank division, 201st military base, 15th, 21st, 30th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 2nd Combined Arms Army, 35th, 55th and 74th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 41st Combined Arms Army, 3rd and 14th separate SOF brigades, 2nd and 4th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 2nd Army Corps, 7th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 1st Army Corps, PMCs.

The Russian forces concentrate their main efforts on the Siversk direction, shelling the Ukrainian positions with barrel, rocket artillery and tank weapons in the areas around Sloviansk, Dolyna, Krasnopillya, Velyka Komyshuvakha, Mykilske, Dibrivne, Serebryanka, Kryva Luka, Sydorove, Hryhorivka, Ivano -Daryivka, Spirne, Dmytrivka, Virnopillya, Bohorodychne, Verkhnokamyanske, Siversk, and Rozdolivka.

Ukrainian Defense forces successfully repelled enemy attacks in the Soledar area.

Donetsk direction

● Siversk - Maryinka section: approximate length of the combat line - 235 km, the number of BTGs of the RF Armed Forces - 13-15, the average width of the combat area of one BTG - 17 km;

● Deployed BTGs: 68th and 163rd tank regiments, 102nd and 103rd motorized rifle regiments of the 150 motorized rifle division, 80th tank regiment of the 90th tank division, 35th, 55th and 74th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 41st Combined Arms Army, 31st separate airborne

assault brigade, 61st separate marines brigade of the Joint Strategic Command "Northern Fleet", 336th separate marines brigade, 24th separate SOF brigade, 1st, 3rd, 5th, 15th, and 100th separate motorized rifle brigades, 9th and 11th separate motorized rifle regiment of the 1st Army Corps of the so-called DPR, 6th motorized rifle regiment of the 2nd Army Corps of the so-called LNR, PMCs.

The enemy's main efforts were focused on conducting hostilities in the Bakhmut operational direction, shelling the positions of the Ukrainian Defense Forces in the areas around Zaitseve, Mykolaivka Druga, Vesela Dolyna, Soledar, Bakhmutske, Bakhmut, Yakovlivka, Krasnohorivka, Avdiivka, Opytne, Vodyane, Karlivka, Pervomaiske, New -York, Zaitseve, Mayorsk, Vesele, and Pisky.

Ukrainian Defense forces successfully repelled Russian attacks in the areas of Zaitseve, Vesela Dolyna, Bakhmut and Pervomaiske.

The enemy 3rd separate motorized rifle brigade of the 1st Army Corps of the so-called DPR attacked the positions of the Ukrainian Defense Forces in the areas of Zaitseve (lower), Mayorsk and Hladosove, Mykolaivka Druga. The battle continues. In the area of Kodema, Mykolaivka Druga, the Russian military wedged into the Ukrainian defense to the depth of the platoon strongholds. It was stopped and pushed back in other directions.

The units of the "Wagner" PMC and the 7th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 1st Army Corps of the so-called DPR attacked Pokrovske, Vesela Dolyna, Soledar, Klynove, and Bakhmut. They failed and retreated.

Units from the 11th separate motorized rifle regiment of the 1st Army Corps of the so-called DPR tried to storm Pisky and Pervomaiske, suffered losses and were repulsed.

Zaporizhzhya direction

● Maryinka – Vasylivka section: approximate length of the line of combat - 200 km, the number of BTGs of the RF Armed Forces - 17, the average width of the combat area of one BTG - 11.7 km;

● Deployed BTGs: 36th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 29th Combined Arms Army, 38th and 64th separate motorized rifle brigades, 69th separate cover brigade of the 35th Combined Arms Army, 5th separate tank brigade, 37 separate motorized rifle brigade of the 36th Combined Arms Army, 135th, 429th, 503rd and 693rd motorized rifle regiments of the 19th motorized rifle division of the 58th Combined Arms Army, 70th, 71st and 291st motorized rifle regiments of the 42nd motorized rifle division of the 58th Combined Arms Army, 136th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 58 Combined Arms Army, 46th and 49th machine gun artillery regiments of the 18th machine gun artillery division of the 68th Army Corps, 39th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 68th Army Corps, 83th separate airborne assault brigade, 40th and 155th separate marines brigades, 22nd separate SOF brigade, 1st Army Corps of the so-called DPR, and 2nd Army Corps of the so-called LPR, PMCs.

The Russian military did not engage in active offensive operations. They shelled the positions of Ukrainian troops with tanks, mortars, barrel and rocket artillery in the areas around Maryinka, Novomykhailivka, Mykilske, Vuhledar, Shevchenko, Velyka Novosilka, Bohoyavlenka, Neskuchne, Vremivka, Novoandriivka, Hulyaipole, Charivne, Novosilka, Shcherbaky, Vilne Pole, Malynivka, Orihiv, Novopil, Paraskoviivka, Kurakhove, Pavlivka, Novodanylivka.

The Russian military tries to hold positions. However, dissatisfaction with the new reinforcements is growing; most of the "new recruits" are 55-60 years old.

Russian troops turned five schools in Melitopol into military bases. Ukrainian partisans have already destroyed one such base.

Kherson direction

● Vasylivka–Nova Zburyivka and Stanislav section: approximate length of the battle line - 252 km, the number of BTGs of the RF Armed Forces - 27, the average width of the combat area of one BTG - 9.3 km;

● Deployed BTGs: 114th, 143rd and 394th motorized rifle regiments, 218th tank regiment of the 127th motorized rifle division of the 5th Combined Arms Army, 57th and 60th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 5th Combined Arms Army, 135th, 503rd and 693rd motorized rifle regiments of the 19th motorized rifle division, 70th, 71st and 291st motorized rifle regiments of the 42nd motorized rifle division, 51st and 137th parachute airborne regiments of the 106th parachute airborne division, 7th military base of the 49th Combined Arms Army, 16th and 346th separate SOF brigades.

There is no change in the operational situation.

Kherson-Berislav bridgehead

● Velyka Lepetikha – Oleksandrivka section: approximate length of the battle line – 250 km, the number of BTGs of the RF Armed Forces – 22, the average width of the combat area of one BTG –

11.8 km;

● Deployed BTGs: 108th Air assault regiment, 171st separate airborne assault brigade of the 7th Air assault division, 4th military base of the 58th Combined Arms Army, 429th motorized rifle regiment of the 19th motorized rifle division, 33rd and 255th motorized rifle regiments of the 20th motorized rifle division, 34th and 205th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 49th Combined Arms Army, 224th, 237th and 239th Air assault regiments of the 76th Air assault division, 217th and 331 Air assault regiments of the 98th Air assault division, 126th separate coastal defense brigade, 127th separate ranger brigade, 11th separate airborne assault brigade, 10th separate SOF brigade, PMC.

Ukrainian missile units attacked two Russian pontoon crossings in Darivka and Nova Kakhovka across the Ingulets and Dnipro rivers. Ukrainian forces struck the ferry crossing in Nova Kakhovka, two ammunition depots in the Berislav district and several command posts. They repulsed the Russian assault on Bezymenne.

To strengthen the Russian grouping in the captured territories of Kherson Oblast, an ethnicity- based unit of the so-called "Kadyrovites" numbering up to 1,300 people arrived.

In order to maintain their positions in Kherson Oblast, the Russian forces brought in "fresh" soldiers from the territory of the Russian Federation. However, the replenishment categorically refuses to participate in offensive combat operations.

Russian troops forbid civilians to leave Velyka Oleksandrivka on the Ingulets River to use them as "human shields" against Ukrainian attacks.

Azov-Black Sea Maritime Operational Area:

The forces of the Russian Black Sea Fleet continue to project force on the coast and the continental part of Ukraine and control the northwestern part of the Black Sea. The ultimate goal is to deprive Ukraine of access to the sea and connect unrecognized Transnistria with the Russian Federation by land through the coast of the Black and Azov seas.

Along the southern coast of Crimea, there are two enemy cruise missile carriers, a frigate and a small missile ship. Up to 16 enemy Kalibr missiles are ready for a salvo. Additionally, six other enemy warships and vessels of the auxiliary fleet of the Russian Black Sea Fleet and the Caspian Flotilla are at sea, providing reconnaissance and blockade of navigation in the Azov-Black Sea waters.

Three Russian patrol ships and boats are on combat duty in the waters of the Sea of Azov on the approaches to the Mariupol and Berdyansk seaports.

All large amphibious ships are in the ports of Novorossiysk and Sevastopol for replenishment and scheduled maintenance. There are no signs of preparation for an amphibious assault on the southern coast of Ukraine.

One enemy project 636.3 submarine is on high alert in Sevastopol; three submarines are in Novorossiysk.

Enemy aviation continues to fly from Crimean airfields Belbek and Gvardiyske over the northwestern part of the Black Sea. Over the past day, 12 Su-27, Su-30 and Su-24 aircraft from Belbek and Saki airfields were involved.

A Russian corvette, minesweeper and boats are on patrol in the Sea of Azov.

According to the Navy of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, during the day, 69 vessels passed through the Kerch-Yenikal Strait in the interests of the Russian Federation: 31 vessels sailed in the direction of the Black Sea, of which 6 continued their movement in the direction of the Bosphorus Strait; 38 ships sailed in the direction of the Sea of Azov, of which 12 were moving from the Bosphorus Strait.

On September 9, a minesweeper of the Romanian Navy F-29 “Lt. Dimitrie Nicolescu” (Musca type) hit a drifting mine. The mine drifted about 25 nautical miles northeast of Constanta's Romanian Black Sea port. The explosion on the water's surface damaged the compartment in the aft part of the ship. The ship is operational. All 75 crew members are doing fine. This is the third drifting sea mine detected in the Romanian territorial waters since the beginning of the Russian armed aggression against Ukraine. Since February 24, 2022, Turkey, Romania, Bulgaria and Ukraine have already destroyed 28 mines in the western part of the Black Sea waters.

Five ships left Ukrainian ports as part of the "grain initiative" implementation. They have 90,000 tons of Ukrainian agricultural products on board. The vessel will go to African and European countries. In total, 2.6 million tons of agricultural products have already been exported since the departure of the first ship with Ukrainian food. A total of 113 ships with agricultural products left Ukrainian ports, destined for the countries of Asia, Europe and Africa.

Operational losses of the enemy from 24.02 to 10.09

Personnel - almost 52,250 people (+350);

Tanks – 2,136 (+14);

Armored combat vehicles – 4,584 (+9);

Artillery systems – 1,259 (+22);

Multiple rocket launchers (MLRS) - 311 (+5); Anti-aircraft warfare systems - 162 (+3); Vehicles and fuel tanks – 3,426 (+27); Aircraft - 239 (0);

Helicopters – 212 (+1);

UAV operational and tactical level - 898 (+10); Intercepted cruise missiles - 215 (+1);

Boats / ships - 15 (0).

Ukraine, general news

Since the beginning of September, when active hostilities began, the Armed Forces of Ukraine have liberated about two thousand square kilometers of Ukrainian territory, President Zelenskyi said in his evening address.

According to the advisor to the Head of the Presidential Office, Mykhailo Podolyak, Russia is not ready to talk about Ukraine’s negotiating position, which Podolyak believes to be adequate. First, Russian troops have to leave Ukrainian territory, including the occupied areas of Donbas and Crimea, and then Ukraine will be ready to discuss the following three things. 1) reparations for all the losses that Ukraine has suffered. 2) ways to exist, and coexist, since Ukraine and Russia are neighbours, to ensure security for Ukraine, and 3) the legal responsibility that must be borne by a number of people, including those with Russian citizenship, who committed crimes in Ukraine.

International diplomatic aspect

Germany "will continue to stand by Ukraine as long as it takes — with the delivery of weapons, as well as humanitarian and financial support," said German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock during her unannounced visit to Kyiv. She pledged Germany's support in demining areas liberated from the Russian invaders. Annalena Baerbock is one of the most die-hard critics of Russia and a proponent of more vigorous defence support of Ukraine.

However, during the visit of Ukraine's Prime Minister [to Germany], Chancellor Olaf Scholz was "general and vague" and showed "no desire to change his negative stance on tank deliveries." The German defence minister insisted that Berlin "hit the limit" in weapons it could send to Kyiv from army reserves, contrary to the information that Krauss-Maffei Wegmann indicated its readiness to supply Ukraine with 100 Leopard 2A7 tanks.

At the same time, NATO's Secretary-General believes that the risks of depletion of stockpiles are overweighted by the benefits of sending more arms to Ukraine. "By ensuring that Russia, that President Putin doesn't win in Ukraine, we're also increasing our own security and strengthening the Alliance by proving that we don't allow that kind of behavior close to our own borders. So, the use of these stocks actually helps to increase our own security and reduce the risk of any aggressive actions by Russia against NATO Ally countries," said Jens Stoltenberg. NATO is "calling for even more support, and we urge them to dig deeply into the inventories, to the stocks, to continue to provide the supplies that Ukraine need immediately".

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development is to provide Ukraine with about $530 million of assistance. EU Commissioner Johannes Hahn calls on the member states to step up financial support to Ukraine in 2023 as the "war is very likely to still go on."

The Ukrainian and French presidents agreed on the necessity of Russian troops' withdrawal from the Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant. The two leaders also discussed future defense assistance to Ukraine.

Russia, relevant news

Russian mass media reported that municipal council members of the Smolensk municipal entity in St. Petersburg adopted a resolution appealing to the Russian State Duma to remove President Putin from the post of the head of the Kremlin over the decision to invade Ukraine.

Most likely, the successes of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, in particular, on the Kharkiv - Izyum line undermined confidence in the Kremlin's military and political leadership. Apparently, the Russian Ministry of Defense faced a problem in need of communicating the issues of "unexpected operations" of the Ukrainian army. Therefore, in the absence of a reaction from the Ministry of Defense, this information gap was filled by bloggers with their own explanations and coverage of actual footage of combat operations that testify to losses with the Russian Federation and, accordingly, with criticism of the Russian leadership.

Describing the Ukrainian breakthrough in Kharkiv Oblast, the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation claimed a "planned" operation "to curtail and organize the transfer" of troops to the territory of the so-called DPR in the area of Balakleya and Izyum in the last three days.

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3. Kharkiv offensive: Russia surprised as Ukraine takes several towns - UK

Kharkiv offensive: Russia surprised as Ukraine takes several towns - UK

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By Matt Murphy

BBC News

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4. A CIA spy pursued bin Laden after 9/11. Now he’s being mourned as a legend.

A badass American hero.

Excerpt:

“My dad was so many things. At his core he was truly a badass. Really an American hero,” Cowell wrote in her Instagram caption. “He made America safer and 99% of you never knew it. On a deeply personal level, he was my dad...And I’m absolutely shattered.”

A CIA spy pursued bin Laden after 9/11. Now he’s being mourned as a legend.

The Washington Post · by Ian Shapira · September 9, 2022

Inside her Northern Virginia home, Anne McFadden keeps an informal shrine to her late husband Gary Schroen, a fellow spy and one of the CIA’s most revered and longest-serving officers.

A staircase wall shows the cover of “First In,” Schroen’s book that chronicles his mission at the age of 59 leading the agency’s first officers into Afghanistan two weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks. An adjacent photo features Schroen and his colleagues on that team — its code name was “Jawbreaker” — sporting black-and-white keffiyehs next to their helicopter, tail sign: “91101.” On a sideboard, 11 CIA medals, most emblazoned with the agency’s seal of an eagle and a 16-point compass star, sit open in square-shaped wooden cases.

“You know, he didn’t talk that much about what he got the medals for," McFadden said on a recent day inside their home, where the counterintelligence specialist granted her first interview since her husband’s death last month. “He had these in a drawer. I put them out.”

Schroen worked for the CIA as an operations officer and contractor for more than 50 years before dying Aug. 1 after complications from a fall outside their Alexandria home. He was 80.

At the CIA, he managed case officers and recruited foreigners as spies and collaborators, paying them with hard cash and running covert actions against enemies abroad.

Even though Schroen wrote an acclaimed memoir about his most legendary operation — and even though McFadden herself has worked as a CIA employee and contractor for more than 35 years — her husband’s modesty and penchant for secrecy meant she only knew so much.

But McFadden, 66, said her husband’s Jawbreaker mission, which laid the groundwork for the Taliban’s collapse in the fall of 2001 and the 20-year U.S. war in Afghanistan, gave Schroen the most gratification.

The operation also helped make Schroen famous at Langley, where the Russian-made (and CIA-modified) Mi-17 that choppered the Jawbreaker team over the Hindu Kush Mountains into Afghanistan was dedicated in a ceremony in 2019 as an agency museum exhibit outside on its campus.

When Schroen died — shortly after a CIA drone strike killed al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri — agency director William J. Burns released a statement, hailing him as a “legend and inspiration to every Agency officer."

The acknowledgment was a rare gesture. Typically, the CIA announces the death of an officer when they have been killed in the line of duty and awarded a black star engraved on its lobby’s Memorial Wall. Even then, the agency only names them if their identities are deemed no longer sensitive.

But Schroen, a main character in the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Ghost Wars” by Steve Coll, was well-known to the world, at least among spy services, reporters and other national security types. At a memorial service at their church later this month, McFadden said, she expects several hundred to attend, many of them Langley friends or mentees.

“Gary said [Jawbreaker] was the best thing he did in his career. It was the culmination of everything he’d been trying to do,” McFadden said. “There” was a little bit of vengeance, but mostly, he just said, ‘I was the right person to go.’ I once asked him if he was afraid and he said, ‘Not really.’ ”

‘Off to a Bad Start’

Sitting on her couch, McFadden pulled out her husband’s papers.

The Illinois native, born Nov. 6, 1941, joined the Army Security Agency in 1959 at the age of 18.

But Schroen’s career almost blew up as soon as it began, according to an unpublished story he wrote, “Off to a Bad Start.” When a beer bottle he had left on top of his barracks mailbox in Germany spilled all over outgoing Christmas cards and other correspondence, his enraged commanding officer threatened him with a court-martial and 25 years in prison. He was accused of “tampering with the U.S. mail,” Schroen wrote.

The court-martial never happened. Instead, he got busted back one grade to private E-2. Soon, after an honorable discharge in 1962, he was off to Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. During college, where he worked side jobs as a janitor and unloading trucks for UPS, he got a letter in the mail from another three-letter agency.

He entered the CIA in June 1969 when the agency, led by Richard Helms, was combating the Soviets and running clandestine operations in southeast Asia.

But Schroen was dispatched to another part of the world. In the early 1970s, he and his first wife, Pat — their first date was seeing “The Spy Who Came In From the Cold” — settled in Iran with their only child at the time, Christopher.

Around then, members of the Mujahideen-e Khalq had launched several attacks against Americans in Tehran, Schroen wrote in another of his biographical stories. Under high alert, several CIA officers in Tehran were issued concealed-carry weapons.

So, one night in September 1975, Schroen wrote, he began his seven-block walk home from the embassy — armed.

“He looked like any other young diplomat at the Embassy, except a closer examination would have revealed a Browning 9mm Hi-Power automatic tucked under his belt on his left side, hidden by the suit jacket,” Schroen wrote of himself in the third person.

When Schroen was about four blocks from home, he saw two Iranian men in suits, standing by a sedan. One man reached his hand into a small bag — the “perfect size for a handgun,” he wrote.

Then, Schroen pulled out his Browning. He was going to shoot, but one of the men shook his head no, and the second man nodded. Schroen took off in a sprint.

“In looking back over the years, it is clear to me that this was an MEK assassination operation targeting me,” Schroen wrote. “The fact that I was alert and armed, and I drew my weapon before they could react, I am sure saved my life.”

It wouldn’t be the last time Schroen was nearly killed. On Nov. 21, 1979, student protesters stormed the U.S. Embassy in Pakistan, setting it on fire and trapping Schroen and many others inside. A Marine was fatally shot, but Schroen outlasted the rioters in a code room vault and left the compound physically unscathed.

“If there aren’t 3,000 students coming over the fence, then it’s not an emergency,” McFadden said her husband used to say.

Nearly two decades later, as the chief of station in Islamabad, he helped lead a 1997 CIA-FBI operation that captured Mir Aimal Kansi, an FBI “Top Ten” fugitive. On Jan. 25, 1993, Kansi had fatally shot two CIA employees and wounded others while they were waiting in their cars at a stoplight to enter agency headquarters.

“Kansi’s arrest wouldn’t have happened without Gary,” said a former CIA colleague on contract with the agency and who helped with the planning. “Gary was the one who had a good relationship with Pakistan’s intelligence service. He nurtured it over years. To try to do something like that unilaterally, in western Pakistan, in no man’s land, would have been, in my view, difficult to do without Pakistan’s assistance.”

He thought he was out

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2o01, Schroen drove to the CIA. He had recently completed a stint as the deputy chief of the agency’s Near East Division, helping oversee covert operations.

But now, he was a little less than two months away from turning 60, and he had entered a retirement transition program. His plans changed that morning when he saw people congregate around a television, he wrote in “First In.” One of the World Trade Center towers in Manhattan had been hit by a plane.

Then, another aircraft struck the second tower, followed by a plane plowing into the Pentagon.

Days later, Schroen met with the CIA’s counterterrorist center director, Cofer Black. The agency was now assigning the near-retiree the mission of a lifetime: to captain a team of CIA officers and lead them into Afghanistan’s Panjshir Valley, where they needed to collaborate with the Northern Alliance, defeat the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and hunt down Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind the Sept. 11 attacks. Their team would soon get a code name: Jawbreaker.

“I want bin Laden’s head shipped back in a box filled with dry ice,” Black told him, Schroen recounted in his book.

Shortly after Schroen and his fellow Jawbreakers arrived in late September in Afghanistan, they generated hundreds of intelligence reports that allowed U.S. military aircraft to strike Taliban and al-Qaeda strongholds, he wrote. After about six weeks — an intense period of paying off warlords, dealing with demands from headquarters, and suffering multiple bouts of stomach issues — Schroen was summoned home, just days before his 60th birthday. Later that month, one of his CIA colleagues, Johnny “Mike” Spann, became the first American killed in Afghanistan.

Hank Crumpton, the special operations chief of the agency’s counterterrorist center at the time, spoke to Schroen nearly every day while he was in Afghanistan. “He had a huge impact in my planning with the agency director [George Tenet] and even directly with President George W. Bush,” Crumpton recalled in an interview. "I took what he said as gospel.”

‘My dad was so many things’

Though Schroen retired from the CIA in November 2001, he couldn’t resist the pull of coming back as a contractor.

By 2007, he was teaching new CIA officers in tradecraft. That is when he met McFadden, an agency colleague. Gary’s second marriage was falling apart, and now, he wanted to date. On their first outing, McFadden recalled, he was waiting for her at the hostess stand of a steak house, dressed in a suit and holding a martini.

“I asked him, ‘Are you trying to do a James Bond?’” McFadden said, laughing.

The two married on Nov. 27, 2009 at Grace Episcopal Church in Alexandria. McFadden, whose career spanned a range of subjects from Iran to chemical and biological counterproliferation, was always surprised that someone of Schroen’s standing treated her with such respect.

“I just felt cherished, there is no other word,” McFadden said. “It astonishes me every day that Gary Schroen fell in love with me.”

About 18 months later, they were asleep when their home phone rang in the middle of the night. It was a reporter, McFadden said, and this was how he learned that bin Laden had been killed in a Navy SEAL raid on May 2, 2011, at his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

“He was happy, really happy, that it was done, and that what he and his colleagues started so long ago was accomplished,” McFadden said.

Schroen worked into his 70s. Recently, he had been retained as an expert by the law firm Kreindler & Kreindler, which is representing relatives of the Sept. 11 victims in a suit against Saudi Arabia alleging the kingdom abetted al-Qaeda in the run-up to the terrorist attacks.

He also dealt with his share of heartbreaks. His son, Christopher Schroen, died of cancer in 2017, at the age of 47.

One of his daughters, Jenny Schroen, said that, growing up as the child of a spy, they were taught a certain secrecy: "He made it clear and said that, ‘If anyone asks where I worked, just say the government. If they press, then say, the State Department.’”

His other daughter, Kate Cowell, posted on her Instagram account a photo from the 1980s of herself as a teenager next to her father. The spy wore a white sweater and a polo shirt with a popped collar, and glasses with huge rectangle-shaped lenses.

“My dad was so many things. At his core he was truly a badass. Really an American hero,” Cowell wrote in her Instagram caption. “He made America safer and 99% of you never knew it. On a deeply personal level, he was my dad...And I’m absolutely shattered.”

Back at their Alexandria home, where Schroen enjoyed tending to their rescue dog, Gracie, and watching cardinals flock to the bird feeders by the crepe myrtle, McFadden walked into her bedroom. There, on her dresser, next to a framed photo of the two of them by a Christmas tree, she picked up one of her husband’s most prized possessions. It was a Rolex. Blue, gold, and silver.

The timepiece was a gift he bought himself nearly 21 years ago — a gift for his 60th birthday and an award for his safe return from Jawbreaker’s mission.

“He said, ‘I’ve always wanted a Rolex and I survived Afghanistan and I am buying one,’” McFadden recalled. "He wore it all the time.”

The Washington Post · by Ian Shapira · September 9, 2022

5. 9/11 anniversary makes it easy for veterans to remember why we were in Afghanistan by Scott Mann

Excerpts:

The U.S. government must resume all sanctions on the Taliban and stop all aid. Credible sources tell us that millions of dollars in humanitarian aid is not getting to its intended victims.

The government must assume the care and management of Afghan special operations partner forces and other at-risk, high-impact Afghan security officials from veteran groups.

And the government must support the Afghan National Resistance Front, which is the legitimate Afghan Government. They are the best option for standing against terrorism emanating from Afghanistan.

Even if America doesn't pull its head out of the sand, veterans won't stop trying to intervene in this impending disaster because they know what's at stake. Without immediate action, the next 9-11 Commission testimony is practically writing itself.

9/11 anniversary makes it easy for veterans to remember why we were in Afghanistan

foxnews.com · by Scott Mann | Fox News

Video

Lt. Col. Scott Mann reflects on stranded Afghan commandos, Task Force Pineapple one year later

Afghan special operators have been high-priority targets of the Taliban since U.S. military forces withdrew from Afghanistan last year, former Green Beret says.

NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!

"Why does Afghanistan matter so much to you?"

This is a question that comes up a lot in my interviews, most recently with a young reporter while discussing the actions of Operation Pineapple Express and other volunteer groups during the botched August 2021, evacuation of Kabul.

I was floored. How could these people not know why Afghanistan mattered so much to all of these veterans?

Then, it hit me. They don’t remember why we were there. They didn’t even live through 9/11.

Nezam was part of the Afghan National Army’s first group of American-trained commandos and the inspiration for Operation Pineapple Express. Nezam is shown here with his family.

How do you explain this deadly lack of understanding to generations who weren’t born yet or were too young to understand what was happening? Or to those who were there, but have simply forgotten?

How can you make them understand that history is about to repeat itself, but it doesn’t have to be that way?

There is a generation of Americans that can never forget the images burned into their minds of planes striking the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. The worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil, killed 2,977 people, and for the veterans, it was personal. It happened while they stood vigil. American warriors, eyes narrowed and fixed on the smoldering rubble displayed on the television, made a single, silent vow "never again on my watch." 800,000 American warriors would deploy to Afghanistan, sacrificing youth, marriages, limbs, mental health, and in some cases, their very lives.

America built relationships and made promises during those two decades of war.

Video

Al Qaeda's attack was largely due to bad U.S. ground intelligence and the inability of a partner force to counter them in their unrestricted planning and preparation. To prevent this from happening ever again, our combat veterans and civilians built partnerships with Afghan police, soldiers, nonprofits, Afghan schools, and a myriad of other organizations. America asked the people of Afghanistan to stand up, reach for freedom, and oppose oppression in all its forms. Like proud parents, we assured them they could be whatever they wanted to be, and we would be there by their sides.

Then, in August 2021, we left. We broke those promises, squandered those relationships, and handed control back to the very oppressors we fought against 20 years before.

Why can’t veterans forget?

Veterans know something most Americans don't. The enemy gets a vote in what happens next. The United States might be done with al Qaeda and ISIS, but they aren’t done with us. This enemy will follow us home.

There is credible evidence that al Qaeda is fully re-constituting right now. Foreign fighters from Syria, Iraq, North Africa, and even Southeast Asia are openly training on former Afghan Army bases in Kandahar and Helmand. The Taliban are fully accommodating and have gone so far as to issue visas to al Qaeda members that allow them to move freely throughout the country in clear violation of the Doha Agreement.

Additionally, Iran and al Qaeda have set sectarian differences aside and are cooperating to foment disruption in the Middle East. According to numerous Afghan Special Operations Forces, this al Qaeda is a younger, more capable force. ISIS-K is also in play.

There is an unthinkable yet highly possible scenario in how all this plays out. It's not a stretch to imagine that America’s enemies will launch another catastrophic attack on the homeland. Out of the ashes emerges a freshly mobilized U.S. blinded by revenge and short-term memory toward "bringing justice to the evildoers." Backed by American citizens, young warriors will load up again on C-17 cargo planes and fly back into the graveyard of empires to exact justice.

But this time it will be different.

Video

Instead of Northern Alliance resistance allies waiting on the ground to receive and work with our troops, there will be thousands of forlorn, pissed-off former Afghan commandos who are well-trained and well-equipped in U.S. tactics and gear. They have been co-opted by al Qaeda after watching their children starve, salivating for revenge over unkept promises.

This September 11th, Americans should demand change and accountability from their government. It’s not too late to protect our homeland if we act now.

The U.S. government must resume all sanctions on the Taliban and stop all aid. Credible sources tell us that millions of dollars in humanitarian aid is not getting to its intended victims.

The government must assume the care and management of Afghan special operations partner forces and other at-risk, high-impact Afghan security officials from veteran groups.

And the government must support the Afghan National Resistance Front, which is the legitimate Afghan Government. They are the best option for standing against terrorism emanating from Afghanistan.

Even if America doesn't pull its head out of the sand, veterans won't stop trying to intervene in this impending disaster because they know what's at stake. Without immediate action, the next 9-11 Commission testimony is practically writing itself.

Lt. Col. Scott Mann (ret.) is author of "Operation Pineapple Express: The Incredible Story of a Group of Americans Who Undertook One Last Mission and Honored a Promise in Afghanistan." (Simon & Schuster, August 30, 2022)

foxnews.com · by Scott Mann | Fox News

6. Americans are finally feeling better about the economy

Excerpts:

The looming question, economists say, is whether the current calm signals a turning point for inflation, or whether this is just a momentary reprieve before the economy worsens.

“The Fed still has a big challenge ahead, which is to cool inflation beyond gas prices and to control inflation before it fundamentally distorts people’s behavior,” KPMG’s Swonk said. “It’s getting very complex now, and the more complexity there is, there’s more chance of a misstep as well.”

...

After more than a year of widespread price increases, many households have become savvier about their spending habits.

The Fed’s latest “beige book" report, released this week, found that many households have traded down to cheaper goods and are shifting more of their spending toward essentials like food.

That has certainly been the case at Walmart, where executives say they’re seeing more middle- and high-income customers than usual. The retail giant, known for its low prices, is also finding that families are also more likely to buy store brands and lower-priced options like hot dogs and canned tuna instead of deli meats, for example, than they were a year ago.

“As the year has progressed, we’ve seen more pronounced consumer shifts and trade-down activity,” John David Rainey, the retailer’s chief financial officer, said in an August earnings call.

Americans are finally feeling better about the economy

Gas prices are falling, and there are signs households are learning to deal with inflation

By Abha Bhattarai

September 10, 2022 at 7:00 a.m. EDT

The Washington Post · by Abha Bhattarai · September 10, 2022

After months of gloom, Americans are finally starting to feel better about the economy and more resigned to inflation.

Consumer sentiment, which hit rock bottom in June, has begun inching up in recent weeks. Gas prices are down. Decades-high inflation appears to be easing. And at the same time, Americans are making small changes — buying meat in bulk, for example, or shifting more of their shopping to discount chains — suggesting that many families are learning to deal with higher prices.

“While consumer sentiment is still fairly low by historic standards, we’re starting to see pretty dramatic improvements,” said Joanne W. Hsu, an economist at the University of Michigan and director of its closely watched consumer surveys. “It’s very much being driven by a slowdown in inflation, particularly with the decline in gas prices.”

That’s particularly good news for the White House, which has been hammered by criticism that it hasn’t done enough to address inflation.

Gas prices, which peaked at more than $5 a gallon in June, are down to about $3.74 a gallon nationwide. That 25 percent drop in costs has been substantial for many Americans, particularly those in lower-income households where gas costs make up a larger share of weekly expenses.

Overall inflation, meanwhile, has eased slightly — prices remained flat in July, though they’re still up 8.5 percent from a year ago — as a result of aggressive interest rate hikes by the Federal Reserve.

Even so, the impact on both pocketbooks and psyches has been swift. Measures of business conditions, short-term financial prospects and purchasing plans all improved in August, according to key metrics from the Conference Board. Consumer confidence increased that month after falling for three straight months, and the number of Americans reporting vacation plans reached an eight-month high.

“When gas prices go down at the pump, people immediately feel better,” said Diane Swonk, chief economist at accounting giant KPMG. “Inflation is still high, but the fact that gas prices have come off record highs makes a huge difference in how much people are spending and their expectations for the future.”

In Omaha, Nils Haaland says he’s feeling much better about the economy now that filling up his Honda pickup costs $65 instead of $95. Haaland teaches theater at a community college and sometimes works as a handyman. He says soaring prices for fuel and food this summer forced him and his wife to stop dining out, postpone summer travel and buy less meat. Although prices are still relatively high, he says he feels less worried that inflation will continue to spiral out of control.

“For a long time, I was making sure I wasn’t just indiscriminately filling up my cart at the grocery store, but now a lot of that behavior has loosened up a bit,” the 58-year-old said. “When gas went back to $3.50 a gallon, all of a sudden it was like, ‘Oh, we know how to make this work. Things are going to be okay.’ ”

The Fed has been moving swiftly to raise interest rates enough to contain inflation. Although there are signs that its approach is working — prices have stabilized and home values are beginning to cool in some parts of the country — there is still concern that the central bank’s actions could slow the economy too much, tipping it into recession.

The looming question, economists say, is whether the current calm signals a turning point for inflation, or whether this is just a momentary reprieve before the economy worsens.

“The Fed still has a big challenge ahead, which is to cool inflation beyond gas prices and to control inflation before it fundamentally distorts people’s behavior,” KPMG’s Swonk said. “It’s getting very complex now, and the more complexity there is, there’s more chance of a misstep as well.”

In California, Jack Foote says economic uncertainty has him rethinking his retirement plans. Foote, 58, had hoped to retire in June but says a recent pay raise, combined with lingering fears that the economy may still sour, has kept him at his administrative job at the Los Angeles Unified School District for a bit longer.

“I generally feel better about gas prices and the economy, but I also worry about the possibility that things could still go south,” Foote said. “Maybe things are stabilizing for now, but it doesn’t feel like a sure thing.”

Although inflation is still a top priority for U.S. voters in the run-up to the midterm elections, the share of Americans who say it is their biggest concern has fallen. Some 30 percent of Americans say rising prices are their No. 1 voting issue, down from 37 percent in July, according to a new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll.

After more than a year of widespread price increases, many households have become savvier about their spending habits.

The Fed’s latest “beige book" report, released this week, found that many households have traded down to cheaper goods and are shifting more of their spending toward essentials like food.

That has certainly been the case at Walmart, where executives say they’re seeing more middle- and high-income customers than usual. The retail giant, known for its low prices, is also finding that families are also more likely to buy store brands and lower-priced options like hot dogs and canned tuna instead of deli meats, for example, than they were a year ago.

“As the year has progressed, we’ve seen more pronounced consumer shifts and trade-down activity,” John David Rainey, the retailer’s chief financial officer, said in an August earnings call.

Leslie Hix, 67, a retired account manager in Gadsden, Ala., says she and her husband have begun traveling again now that gas prices are more manageable. They recently went to the Bahamas with their grandchildren and are going on a Mediterranean cruise this month.

“We saw gas prices going up all year, but it didn’t hit us until recently, when we realized how much we had dipped into our savings,” Hix said, adding that she’s also started shopping for food at Walmart instead of getting grocery delivery from a pricier chain.

“We’re not going back to all of our old habits just yet, but we are absolutely feeling a lot better about the economy,” she said.

Some business owners are noticing a shift, too. Suzanne Windham, a dentist in Shreveport, La., says clients have begun spending more freely. They’re more willing to shell out for pricey treatments than they were at the beginning of the year, when people expressed more fear about covid risks as well as their finances.

But now business is up 15 percent from last year, and Windham says she is feeling better about the economy.

“It’s surprised me that business has boomed, but it’s been really good,” she said. “People seem more relaxed and less worried.”

The Washington Post · by Abha Bhattarai · September 10, 2022

7. Goodbye, Globalization?

"...marry hard-headed economics with the optimism necessary to sell it"

Excerpts:

The last double movement came after the United States went off the gold standard in 1971. The result was a decade of inflation, a surge in commodity prices, and an explosion of protectionism. But unlike the previous two waves, the backlash of the 1970s was channeled into President Ronald Reagan's sunny optimism of the 1980s.

Reagan was not a consistent free trader. His administration pioneered the practice of voluntary export restraints—in which the exporting country voluntarily restricts its exports, a tactic that hurts consumers while benefiting domestic producers—that Trump's chief trade negotiator embraced as his preferred tactic. But Reagan negotiated trade deals, supported increases in immigration, and repeatedly argued that globalization would benefit the United States and the classical liberal values it held dear. When Reagan made Americans more optimistic about the future, he made them more enthusiastic about an open global economy.

Americans are anything but optimistic right now, and critics will continue to use Polanyi-like arguments to blame the excesses of neoliberalism. But protectionists have been in power for the last six years, and their policies are partially responsible for steep inflation, goods shortages, and a faltering service sector. Perhaps this next decade will produce a successor to Reagan, someone who can marry hard-headed economics with the optimism necessary to sell it.

The alternative is dire. "The true nature of the international system under which we were living was not realized until it failed," Polanyi wrote in The Great Transformation. "Hardly anyone understood the political function of the international monetary system; the awful suddenness of the transformation thus took the world completely by surprise….When it broke, the effect was bound to be instantaneous."

Goodbye, Globalization?

Reason · by Daniel W. Drezner · September 11, 2022

Globalization

As American politicians turn against economic openness, history suggests the consequences could be dire.

Daniel W. Drezner | From the October 2022 issue

(Photo: CSA-Printstock/iStock)

At the dawn of the 21st century, countries in both the Global South and the former communist bloc were falling over each other to lower their trade barriers, liberalize their capital markets, and encourage their best and brightest to study in the West. Multinational firms were expanding their supply chains to bring workers from Mexico, China, Vietnam, India, and Russia into their fold. The internet had created entirely new ways for information to cross borders. Labor productivity was soaring and global poverty was falling.

U.S. politicians largely embraced this trend. Republicans and Democrats cooperated to negotiate trade agreements with both longtime friends and former foes. All this took place in a context of public optimism: In January 2000, 69 percent of Americans told Gallup they were satisfied with the country's direction.

Two decades later, things have not quite worked out the way many champions of free trade hoped at the end of President Bill Clinton's administration. Neither China nor Russia turned into liberal, free market democracies. Two decades of unending war have been peppered by financial crises, populist uprisings, and pandemics. Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the ensuing sanctions are merely the latest shock to the system.

Countries are now falling over each other to erect new barriers to trade, impose capital controls, and restrict migration flows. U.S. politicians have embraced this trend too: The strongest throughline between the Donald Trump and Joe Biden presidencies has been their hostility to economic openness. All this is taking place in a context of public pessimism: In March, just 22 percent of Americans told Gallup they were satisfied with the country's direction.

The souring of the 21st century has triggered accusations and recriminations about who bears responsibility for the end of "the end of history." Free trade advocates note the enormous benefits that economic liberalization has brought to the global economy and decry the rise of neo-mercantilism in the United States and elsewhere. But free trade's critics offer a challenging rebuttal: They argue the last two decades have exposed the internal contradictions of neoliberalism. As they see it, we're witnessing the natural response of societies buffeted by the vicissitudes of the free market; economic openness sowed the seeds of its own destruction.

There is a kernel of truth to this. But a kernel of truth is not the whole truth, and globalization's proponents do not need to completely rethink their priors. The benefits of trade and international engagement persist even in the current era.

Advocates of free markets still have a strong case to make, and they need to make it. This particular argument against an open global economy has been made before. When it triumphed, the result was world war.

Polanyi's Challenge

To understand the intellectual roots of today's resistance to free markets, the book to examine is Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation.

Polanyi, writing in 1944, wanted to understand how the world had arrived at a low moment of depression, fascism, and war. Where writers like F.A. Hayek saw socialism's rise as a tragic result of state interference in free markets, Polanyi viewed it as the ineluctable backlash against those same markets' volatility.

There are three arguments in The Great Transformation that require recognition and response from free market enthusiasts. First, Polanyi pushed back vigorously against the assumption that unregulated markets were the "natural" state of the world. Governments take concerted action, Polanyi noted, to maintain the modern capitalist system.

One present-day example is intellectual property rights. To incentivize innovation and creativity, governments enforce laws that protect trademarks, patents, and copyrights. If the state did not do that, innovation would be lower but diffusion would be much more rapid, as films, software, and pharmaceuticals would be pirated almost immediately. The tradeoff of more innovation for less diffusion might be worth it, but getting there requires purposive government action.

Polanyi's second argument was that the ultimate result of laissez faire policies is "the demolition of society." According to The Great Transformation, human beings inevitably resist efforts to turn labor into a commodity. Market liberalization would produce rising inequality. And then, Polanyi's predictions turned rather gloomy: "Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the effect of social exposure; they would die as the victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime, and starvation. Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed."

Finally, Polanyi described what he called the "double movement." If the state consciously tried to create a marketplace disembedded from the rest of society, it would trigger blowback against markets. Exactly how that double movement manifested itself could vary. While socialists might call for expanded state support of the less fortunate, another possible response would be xenophobic nationalism. Polanyi drew a straight line from 19th century globalization to the horrors of the 1930s and '40s.

How accurate is all this in describing the current moment? If we look at the United States, we can see undeniable similarities. The hidden shocks from liberalizing trade with China and migration from Latin America, combined with the very prominent shock of the 2008 financial crisis, produced a lot of social disruption in the last 15 years. Throw in climate change, a pandemic, and great-power rivalries, and suddenly Polanyi's hyperbolic description of a society ravaged by the market starts to sound familiar.

Consciously or unconsciously, both left-wing and right-wing critics of the global economy rely on Polanyi's logic to connect the dots between neoliberalism and the current state of the world. In February, journalist Glenn Greenwald argued that Canadian trucker protests were "a long time in the making," saying the underlying discontent reflected "mass, widespread anger and even hatred toward the neoliberal ruling class throughout the West." That sentiment, he said, was bound to "find still-more extreme expressions."

Tucker Carlson's rants on Fox News are often premised on a similar logic. In April, for example, he claimed that "neoliberalism is looting with a smokescreen of race and gender politics so you won't notice that it happened." That ideology, he said, is "a cover for the distribution of wealth, a distribution that has become more lopsided in our age than at any age ever," representing "a shocking discredit to capitalism."

Testing the Bicycle Theory

The Great Transformation is an important critique, and it is unsurprising that people like Greenwald and Carlson have gravitated to some form of its arguments. Still, there are clear problems with applying it to the modern world.

To begin with, the countries that heeded Polanyi's warnings the most are facing the most severe populist blowback. The entire ethos of the European Union was to integrate the continent's economies while supplying an ample social safety net for those in need. Despite these efforts to cushion the market's effects, 21st century populism was percolating in Europe well before Trump won the American presidency, particularly in the countries with the strongest social safety nets. Hostility to economic migration has been a recurring theme of European politics for the last two decades, from fears of "Polish plumbers" inundating Western Europe to more recent backlashes against Syrian and Afghan refugees. Even Nordic states such as Sweden have turned far more nativist in the last decade. It seems implausible to blame laissez faire capitalism for this blowback.

Research on the rise of populism provides further reason to be skeptical of that thesis. Most analyses of support for Brexit and Trump—most prominently from political scientists Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart—have found that cultural backlash was the predominant factor. To put it crudely, working-class whites reacted to perceived losses in social and economic standing by embracing a reactionary brand of politics and blaming immigrants and minorities for their troubles. As Cas Mudde, one of the deans of populism research, wrote a few years ago, the debate between cultural backlash and economic anxiety was debated by populist scholars for decades, and settled in favor of the cultural backlash hypothesis.

Also contrary to Polanyi's thesis, most Americans have not turned against globalization. In the United States, there is a striking mismatch between the way politicians talk about how voters think about trade and immigration and the way voters actually think about these issues.

According to the politicians, Americans are fed up with the job-destroying impact of international trade and the wage-lowering impact of immigration. That take was apparent in Congress' response to Biden's first State of the Union address. The biggest applause line was the president's promise that "when we use taxpayer dollars to rebuild America, we are going to buy American: buy American products to support American jobs."

Polling data paint a different picture. In 2021, according to Gallup, 79 percent of Americans viewed trade positively—a record number. While that percentage dropped to 63 percent in 2022, it was still considerably higher than it was during the heyday of globalization in the late 1990s. Gallup's results on immigration are similar: From 2000 to 2022, the percentage of Americans who wanted more immigration more than tripled, while the percentage who wanted less immigration fell by nearly half.

But even if hostility to globalization does not appeal to the median American voter, it does have some appeal to the pivotal American voter. In the last few election cycles, the key to victory has been through the Rust Belt, and that meant demonstrating fealty to the idea that America used to be great before globalization. Furthermore, supporters of free trade and immigration do not place a high priority on those issues, while its salience for opponents is much higher. That explains why U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai is convinced that Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 in no small part due to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a proposed trade pact among the United States and 11 other countries.

In response to this political reality, successive administrations have taken whacks at the open global economy. The Trump administration withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, sabotaged the World Trade Organization (WTO), raised tariffs across a wide variety of goods, launched a trade war with China, and expended significant effort to reduce migration to the United States. The Biden administration has continued most of these policies.

No progress has been made on reviving the WTO as a force for trade liberalization. There has been a moratorium on new trade deals. Tai has insisted despite all evidence to the contrary that the China tariffs provide bargaining leverage, so the trade war with China persists. The Biden administration has made scant effort to increase immigration flows.

The two administrations' signature foreign economic deals reflect their resistance to the open global economy. The Trump administration renegotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement, which became the more restrictive United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA). The Biden administration launched the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity to entice partners away from excessive dependence on China. The most telling fact about this proposed agreement is that it does not include what trade negotiators call "market access"—i.e., reduced import barriers. This is a trade deal with no additional trade in it.

Although critics like Greenwald and Carlson attack the current administration as neoliberal, Biden's team is just as prone to repeating Polanyi's critique as they are. "To Biden's officials," Politico noted in May, "the last four decades of neoliberal economic policy—pursued through tax cuts, weaker regulations and pro-globalization trade deals—are largely to blame for today's spiraling inequality and economic nationalism."

The response to Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine intensified the attack on global openness. The unprecedented sanctions imposed on Russia have segmented the global economy, increasing food and fuel prices. More than 700 multinational corporations pulled back from their operations in Russia, far exceeding what was legally required. The longer the war goes on, the more permanent the spike in geopolitical risk seems. Little wonder that a host of investment letters joined BlackRock's Larry Fink in warning that Russia's invasion "has put an end to the globalization we have experienced over the last three decades."

Once upon a time, when the United States was the international leader of trade liberalization, policy wonks talked about the "bicycle theory" of trade negotiations. The metaphor was simple: For all the benefits of freer trade, ideological and interest-group opposition to it was always strong. If trade negotiators continued to push for greater openness, the trade bicycle would maintain speed and be easy to ride. But if momentum stalled, the whole edifice would tip over like a bicycle that slows to a crawl. Protectionist forces would agitate for exceptions, carve-outs, and restrictions, making the global economy less and less free.

In the next few years, we will find out if the bicycle theory was right, because it is safe to say that U.S. economic liberalization has ground to a halt. Thanks to Polanyi's double movement, over the past five years the United States and the global economy have halted the push toward openness and are trending toward closure.

Making Economies Less Resilient

The Great Transformation posited that a shift toward unregulated markets would trigger a social backlash, leading to a re-regulated economy. But what happens when a more protectionist economy creates its own forms of economic malaise? Maybe the next double movement will force a return to a more open economy.

Inflation is the most obvious way that increased protectionism has been a drag on the U.S. economy. One underrated benefit of an open global economy is that trade increases productivity, which allows the economy to grow at a faster rate without triggering price hikes. This is particularly true of the United States. Greater demand for goods can be absorbed by greater imports; greater demand for labor can be met by a large influx of foreign workers.

During the pandemic years, the federal government sustained demand through fiscal and monetary stimulus. It paid considerably less attention to the supply side of the ledger, helping fuel a surge of inflation unseen since the 1970s.

Americans continued to buy imported goods at record levels, regardless of the tariffs, and that contributed to rising prices. The Peterson Institute for International Economics estimates that if the United States ended the trade war with China, eliminated steel and aluminum tariffs, and ended softwood lumber duties on Canada, the inflation rate would be cut by 1.3 percentage points. "Removing the China tariffs is the single-largest policy lever to bring down inflation that President Biden has," economist Jason Furman declared in April. Within the Biden administration, both Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and (now-former) Deputy National Security Adviser Daleep Singh suggested lifting tariffs as one way of fighting short-term inflation.

By itself, trade liberalization will ameliorate inflation but not cure it. Indeed, many critics of globalization argue that the global supply chain stresses caused by the pandemic reinforced the case for insourcing. The Biden administration has echoed that argument, which overlooks something economists have been trying to explain for years: Countries that are more integrated into global value chains experience far fewer price shocks than less integrated countries.

The idea that globalization enhances economic resilience is counterintuitive, especially as China seems to shut down its port facilities on a regular basis. So, consider the baby formula crisis that emerged this spring.

This is a market where the United States is usually self-sufficient: 98 percent of infant formula consumed by Americans is manufactured in the United States. The market suffered a supply shock when the formula produced at one Michigan plant was recalled due to suspected bacterial contamination; the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) subsequently shut down the plant.

That is exactly the sort of situation in which imports can smooth out supply. But thanks to the Trump and Biden administrations, that did not happen. Infant formula is subject to tariff-rate quotas of 17.5 percent after certain quantities are imported. The USMCA sharply limited how much formula Canada could export to the United States. The FDA prevented imports from the European Union over picayune disputes about labeling.

The result: By May, more than 40 percent of stores were out of baby formula, and the military was airlifting emergency supplies from Europe. "We're seeing what happens when we reduce trade with other countries for an essential good," The Atlantic's Derek Thompson observed. "We're more vulnerable to emergencies like a bacteria-infested plant in Michigan." Protectionism and excessive regulation make an economy less resilient during such emergencies.

An immigration shortfall, created by the pandemic and increased restrictions, is also taking a toll. Economists estimate that 2 million fewer working-age immigrants entered the United States than would have been the case if pre-2020 migration patterns had persisted. Contrary to public perception, most of these missing immigrants would have been college-educated. The sectors of the economy that are most dependent on immigrants, including hospitality, food service, and STEM-related fields, have seen especially high rates of unfilled jobs. And that, in turn, has helped push prices higher.

The Trump and Biden administrations have either imposed or maintained a welter of policies designed to restrict and regulate the cross-border movement of goods, services, and people. That has made the United States not more resilient but less productive and more vulnerable to local shocks. As Edward Alden recently warned in Foreign Policy, "it is often a small step from prudent self-sufficiency to damaging attempts at autarky."

The Next Reagan

One could argue that there have been three double movements in the last 150 years. In response to the 19th century era of globalization, the major economies of Europe launched a series of trade wars against each other in a prelude to World War I. The global economy opened up again in the 1920s. But as the Great Depression worsened, the large economies ratcheted up tariffs, restricted immigration, or engaged in beggar-thy-neighbor policies in the run-up to World War II.

The last double movement came after the United States went off the gold standard in 1971. The result was a decade of inflation, a surge in commodity prices, and an explosion of protectionism. But unlike the previous two waves, the backlash of the 1970s was channeled into President Ronald Reagan's sunny optimism of the 1980s.

Reagan was not a consistent free trader. His administration pioneered the practice of voluntary export restraints—in which the exporting country voluntarily restricts its exports, a tactic that hurts consumers while benefiting domestic producers—that Trump's chief trade negotiator embraced as his preferred tactic. But Reagan negotiated trade deals, supported increases in immigration, and repeatedly argued that globalization would benefit the United States and the classical liberal values it held dear. When Reagan made Americans more optimistic about the future, he made them more enthusiastic about an open global economy.

Americans are anything but optimistic right now, and critics will continue to use Polanyi-like arguments to blame the excesses of neoliberalism. But protectionists have been in power for the last six years, and their policies are partially responsible for steep inflation, goods shortages, and a faltering service sector. Perhaps this next decade will produce a successor to Reagan, someone who can marry hard-headed economics with the optimism necessary to sell it.

The alternative is dire. "The true nature of the international system under which we were living was not realized until it failed," Polanyi wrote in The Great Transformation. "Hardly anyone understood the political function of the international monetary system; the awful suddenness of the transformation thus took the world completely by surprise….When it broke, the effect was bound to be instantaneous."

This article originally appeared in print under the headline "Goodbye, Globalization?".

Reason · by Daniel W. Drezner · September 11, 2022

8. Ukraine pushes major counteroffensive as war marks 200 days

Ukraine pushes major counteroffensive as war marks 200 days

AP · by The Associated Press · September 11, 2022

As the war in Ukraine marks 200 days, the country has reclaimed broad swaths of the south and east in a long-anticipated counteroffensive that has dealt a heavy blow to Russia.

The counterattack began in the final days of August and at first focused on the southern region of Kherson, which was swept by Russian forces in the opening days of the invasion. But just as Moscow redirected attention and troops there, Ukraine launched another, highly effective offensive in the northeastern region of Kharkiv.

Facing the prospect of a large group of its forces becoming surrounded, Moscow ordered a troop pullback from Kharkiv, in a dramatic change of the state of play that posed the biggest challenge to the Kremlin since it launched the invasion Feb. 24.

“The Ukrainian army has taken advantage of the relocation of the bulk of the Russian forces to the south and is trying to direct the course of the war, excelling in maneuver and showing great ingenuity,” said Mykola Sunhurovskyi, a military expert with the Razumkov Centre, a Kyiv-based think tank. Ukraine’s quick gains, he added, are “important both for seizing initiative and raising troops’ spirit.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy commended the military in a video address late Saturday, saying it has reclaimed about 2,000 square kilometers (over 770 square miles) of territory so far this month. He also taunted Moscow over its withdrawal, saying the Russian army was “demonstrating the best it can do — showing its back” and “they made a good choice to run.”

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Both sides have suffered heavy losses in Europe’s largest conflict since World War II. Ukraine’s military chief said last month that nearly 9,000 of the country’s soldiers have been killed in action. And while Moscow hasn’t reported its own losses since March, Western estimates put the toll as high as 25,000 dead, with the wounded, captured and deserters bringing the overall Russian losses to more than 80,000.

Ukraine has sought to mobilize the population to reach an active military of 1 million people, while Russia, in contrast, has continued to rely on a limited contingent of volunteers for fear that a mass mobilization could fuel discontent and upset internal stability.

As the war slogs on, a growing flow of Western weapons over the summer is now playing a key role in the counteroffensive, helping Ukraine significantly boost its precision strike capability.

Since the counteroffensive began, Ukraine said, its forces have reclaimed more than 30 settlements in the Kharkiv region.

In the Kherson region, troops sought to drive Russian forces from their foothold on the west bank of the Dnieper River, a potential vantage point for a push deeper into Ukraine by Moscow.

The city of Kherson, an economic hub at the confluence of the Dnieper and the Black Sea with a prewar population of about 300,000, was the first major population center to fall in the war.

Russian forces also have made inroads into the Zaporizhzhia region farther north, where they seized Europe’s largest nuclear power plant. The last of its six reactors was shut down Sunday after operating in a risky “island mode” for several days to generate electricity for the plant’s crucial coling systems after one of the power lines was restored.

Moscow has installed puppet administrations in occupied areas, introduced its currency, handed out Russian passports and prepared for local plebiscites to pave the way for annexation. But the counteroffensive has derailed those plans, with a top Moscow-backed official in Kherson saying the vote there needs to be put off.

The counterattack followed methodical strikes on Russian infrastructure and supply lines. Ukrainian forces have used American-supplied HIMARS multiple rocket launchers to pound the two bridges across the Dnieper, forcing Russian troops in the Kherson region to rely on pontoon crossings that also have faced daily strikes.

Last month, a series of explosions also hit airbases and a munitions depot in Crimea, underlining the vulnerability of the peninsula that was annexed by Russia in 2014 and has been crucial for its southern operations. Ukrainian authorities initially refrained from claiming responsibility, but the country’s military chief, Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyy, acknowledged in recent days that his forces hit them with rockets.

Ukrainian military analyst Oleh Zhdanov said that “Ukraine has used the tactics of methodically exhausting the Russian army, weakening it and depriving it of a possibility to regularly beef up its forces.”

Unlike in the south, where Ukraine’s counteroffensive proceeded more slowly on the barren steppes of Kherson that left troops vulnerable to Russian artillery, the Kharkiv region’s forests offered natural cover that allowed for lightning-fast surprise attacks from multiple directions.

“Swiftness and surprise have become key components of the Ukrainian army action in the Kharkiv region after Russian forces deployed there had been relocated to the south,” Zhdanov said.

Michael Kofman, an expert on the Russian military at the Virginia-based think tank CNA, said the counteroffensive “has proven a very significant victory for Ukraine.”

“Russian forces appear to have been spread thinly, and military leadership unprepared despite earlier evidence of Ukrainian buildup,” Kofman wrote. “I think it’s fair to assess that Russia was caught by surprise with little in the way of reserves locally available.”

After capturing the town of Balakliia, about 55 kilometers (about 34 miles) southeast of Kharkiv, Ukrainian forces quickly pressed their offensive farther east to Kupiansk, a rail hub vital for sustaining Russian operations in the region.

They claimed control of the strategic city Saturday, cutting supply lines to a big group of Russian forces around Izyum to the south. To prevent their complete encirclement, Moscow ordered the hasty retreat, claiming that they were relocating to focus on the neighboring Donetsk region.

Zhdanov noted that a successful counteroffensive is key to persuading allies to further increase supplies of weapons to Ukraine, something that was discussed Thursday at a NATO meeting in Germany.

“The events in the south and in the Kharkiv region must show to the West that the Ukrainian military know to handle the weapons and need to develop their success,” Zhdanov said.

___

Yuras Karmanau in Kyiv contributed to this report.

AP · by The Associated Press · September 11, 2022

9. 9/11 attacks still reverberate as US marks 21st anniversary

9/11 attacks still reverberate as US marks 21st anniversary

AP · by JENNIFER PELTZ, KAREN MATTHEWS and JULIE WALKER · September 11, 2022

NEW YORK (AP) — Americans remembered 9/11 on Sunday with tear-choked tributes, and pleas to “never forget,” 21 years after the deadliest terror attack on U.S. soil.

Bonita Mentis set out to read victims’ names at the ground zero ceremony wearing a necklace with a photo of her slain sister, Shevonne Mentis, a 25-year-old Guyanese immigrant who worked for a financial firm.

“It’s been 21 years, but it’s not 21 years for us. It seems like just yesterday,” Mentis said. “The wounds are still fresh.”

“No matter how many years have passed, nobody can actually comprehend that what happened that very day,” she added.

Victims’ relatives and dignitaries also convened at the other two attack sites, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania.

More than two decades later, Sept. 11 remains a point for reflection on the hijacked-plane attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people, reconfigured national security policy and spurred a U.S. “war on terror” worldwide. Sunday’s observances, which follow a fraught milestone anniversary last year, come little more than a month after a U.S. drone strike killed a key al-Qaida figure who helped plot the 9/11 attacks, Ayman al-Zawahri.

Pierre Roldan, who lost his cousin Carlos Lillo, a paramedic, said “we had some form of justice” when a U.S. raid killed Osama bin Laden in 2011.

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“Now that Al-Zawahri is gone, at least we’re continuing to get that justice,” Roldan said.

The Sept. 11 attacks also stirred — for a time — a sense of national pride and unity for many, while subjecting Muslim Americans to years of suspicion and bigotry and engendering debate over the balance between safety and civil liberties. In ways both subtle and plain, the aftermath of 9/11 ripples through American politics and public life to this day.

But like some other victims’ relatives, Jay Saloman fears that Americans’ consciousness of 9/11 is receding.

“It was a terrorist attack against our country that day. And theoretically, everybody should remember it and, you know, take precautions and watch out,” said Saloman, who lost his brother.

Like a growing number of those who read names at ground zero, firefighter Jimmy Riches’ namesake nephew wasn’t born yet when his relative died. But the boy took the podium to honor him.

“You’re always in my heart. And I know you are watching over me,” he said after reading a portion of the victims’ names.

More than 70 of Sekou Siby’s co-workers perished at Windows on the World, the restaurant atop the trade center’s north tower. Siby had been scheduled to work that morning until another cook asked him to switch shifts.

The Ivorian immigrant wrestled with how to comprehend such horror in a country where he’d come looking for a better life. And he found it difficult to form friendships as close as those he’d had at Windows on the World. It was too painful, he’d learned, to become attached to people when “you have no control over what’s going to happen to them next.”

“Every 9/11 is a reminder of what I lost that I can never recover,” Siby said in the leadup to the anniversary. He’s now president and CEO of ROC United, a restaurant workers’ advocacy group that evolved from a post-9/11 relief center.

Speaking at the Pentagon on Sunday, President Joe Biden recalled seeing smoke rise from the stricken U.S. military headquarters on 9/11, when he was a senator. He vowed that the U.S. would continue working to root out terrorist plots and called on Americans to stand up for democracy on days beyond the anniversary.

“We have an obligation, a duty, a responsibility to defend, preserve and protect our democracy — the very democracy that guarantees the right to freedom that those terrorists on 9/11 sought to bury in the burning fire, smoke and ash,” the Democrat said.

First lady Jill Biden was scheduled to speak in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where one of the hijacked planes went down after passengers and crew members tried to storm the cockpit as the hijackers headed for Washington. Al-Qaida conspirators had seized control of the jets to use them as passenger-filled missiles.

Vice President Kamala Harris and husband Doug Emhoff joined the observance at the National Sept. 11 Memorial in New York, but by tradition, no political figures speak. The observance centers instead on victims’ relatives reading aloud the names of the dead.

Nikita Shah headed there in a T-shirt that bore the de facto epigraph of the annual commemoration — “never forget” — and the name of her slain father, Jayesh Shah.

The family later moved to Houston but often returns to New York for the anniversary to be “around people who kind of experienced the same type of grief and the same feelings after 9/11,” said Shah. She was 10 when her father was killed.

Readers often add personal remarks that form an alloy of American sentiments about Sept. 11 — grief, anger, toughness, appreciation for first responders and the military, appeals to patriotism, hopes for peace, occasional political barbs, and a poignant accounting of the graduations, weddings, births and daily lives that victims have missed.

Some relatives also lament that a nation which came together — to some extent — after the attacks has since splintered apart. So much so that federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, which were reshaped to focus on international terrorism after 9/11, now see the threat of domestic violent extremism as equally urgent.

“It took a tragedy to unite us. It should not take another tragedy to unite us again,” said Andrew Colabella, whose cousin, John DiGiovanni, died in the 1993 bombing World Trade Center bombing that presaged 9/11.

Beyond the attack sites, other communities around the country marked the day with candlelight vigils, interfaith services and other commemorations. Some Americans joined in volunteer projects on a day that is federally recognized as both Patriot Day and a National Day of Service and Remembrance.

___

Associated Press reporter Colleen Long contributed from Washington.

AP · by JENNIFER PELTZ, KAREN MATTHEWS and JULIE WALKER · September 11, 2022

10. 9/11 was a test. The books of the last two decades show how America failed.

A sad commentary through a comprehensive reading list.

I have developed, forwarded, and read many reading lists but not one quite like this.

9/11 was a test. The books of the last two decades show how America failed.

Essay by Carlos Lozada

Illustrations by Patrik Svensson

Updated Sept. 3 at 6:00 a.m.

Originally published Sept. 3, 2021

The Washington Post

Deep within the catalogue of regrets that is the 9/11 Commission report — long after readers learn of the origins and objectives of al-Qaeda, past the warnings ignored by consecutive administrations, through the litany of institutional failures that allowed terrorists to hijack four commercial airliners — the authors pause to make a rousing case for the power of the nation’s character.

“The U.S. government must define what the message is, what it stands for,” the report asserts. “We should offer an example of moral leadership in the world, committed to treat people humanely, abide by the rule of law, and be generous and caring to our neighbors. . . . We need to defend our ideals abroad vigorously. America does stand up for its values.”

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This affirmation of American idealism is one of the document’s more opinionated moments. Looking back, it’s also among the most ignored.

Rather than exemplify the nation’s highest values, the official response to 9/11 unleashed some of its worst qualities: deception, brutality, arrogance, ignorance, delusion, overreach and carelessness. This conclusion is laid bare in the sprawling literature to emerge from 9/11 over the past two decades — the works of investigation, memoir and narrative by journalists and former officials that have charted the path to that day, revealed the heroism and confusion of the early response, chronicled the battles in and about Afghanistan and Iraq, and uncovered the excesses of the war on terror. Reading or rereading a collection of such books today is like watching an old movie that feels more anguishing and frustrating than you remember. The anguish comes from knowing how the tale will unfold; the frustration from realizing that this was hardly the only possible outcome.

Whatever individual stories the 9/11 books tell, too many describe the repudiation of U.S. values, not by extremist outsiders but by our own hand. The betrayal of America’s professed principles was the friendly fire of the war on terror. In these works, indifference to the growing terrorist threat gives way to bloodlust and vengeance after the attacks. Official dissembling justifies wars, then prolongs them. In the name of counterterrorism, security is politicized, savagery legalized and patriotism weaponized.

It was an emergency, yes, that’s understood. But that state of exception became our new American exceptionalism.

It happened fast. By 2004, when the 9/11 Commission urged America to “engage the struggle of ideas,” it was already too late; the Justice Department’s initial torture memos were already signed, the Abu Ghraib images had already eviscerated U.S. claims to moral authority. And it has lasted long. The latest works on the legacy of 9/11 show how war-on-terror tactics were turned on religious groups, immigrants and protesters in the United States. The war on terror came home, and it walked in like it owned the place.

“It is for now far easier for a researcher to explain how and why September 11 happened than it is to explain the aftermath,” Steve Coll writes in “Ghost Wars,” his 2004 account of the CIA’s pre-9/11 involvement in Afghanistan. Throughout that aftermath, Washington fantasized about remaking the world in its image, only to reveal an ugly image of itself to the world.

The literature of 9/11 also considers Osama bin Laden’s varied aspirations for the attacks and his shifting visions of that aftermath. He originally imagined America as weak and easily panicked, retreating from the world — in particular from the Middle East — as soon as its troops began dying. But bin Laden also came to grasp, perhaps self-servingly, the benefits of luring Washington into imperial overreach, of “bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy,” as he put it in 2004, through endless military expansionism, thus beating back its global sway and undermining its internal unity. “We anticipate a black future for America,” bin Laden told ABC News more than three years before the 9/11 attacks. “Instead of remaining United States, it shall end up separated states and shall have to carry the bodies of its sons back to America.”

Bin Laden did not win the war of ideas. But neither did we. To an unnerving degree, the United States moved toward the enemy’s fantasies of what it might become — a nation divided in its sense of itself, exposed in its moral and political compromises, conflicted over wars it did not want but would not end. When President George W. Bush addressed the nation from the Oval Office on the evening of Sept. 11, 2001, he asserted that America was attacked because it is “the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world, and no one will keep that light from shining.” Bush was correct; al-Qaeda could not dim the promise of America. Only we could do that to ourselves.

I.

“The most frightening aspect of this new threat . . . was the fact that almost no one took it seriously. It was too bizarre, too primitive and exotic.” That is how Lawrence Wright depicts the early impressions of bin Laden and his terrorist network among U.S. officials in “The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11.” For a country still basking in its post-Cold War glow, it all seemed so far away, even as al-Qaeda’s strikes — on the World Trade Center in 1993, on U.S. Embassies in 1998, on the USS Cole in 2000 — grew bolder. This was American complacency, mixed with denial.

The books traveling that road to 9/11 have an inexorable, almost suffocating feel to them, as though every turn invariably leads to the first crush of steel and glass. Their starting points vary. Wright dwells on the influence of Egyptian thinker Sayyid Qutb, whose mid-20th-century sojourn in the United States animated his vision of a clash between Islam and modernity, and whose work would inspire future jihadists. In “Ghost Wars,” Coll laments America’s abandonment of Afghanistan once it ceased serving as a proxy battlefield against Moscow. In “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden,” Peter Bergen stresses the moment bin Laden arrived in Afghanistan from Sudan in 1996, when Khalid Sheikh Mohammed first pitched him on the planes plot. And the 9/11 Commission lingers on bin Laden’s declarations of war against the United States, particularly his 1998 fatwa calling it “the individual duty for every Muslim” to murder Americans “in any country in which it is possible.”

Yet these early works also make clear that the road to 9/11 featured plenty of billboards warning of the likely destination. A Presidential Daily Brief item on Aug. 6, 2001, titled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US” became infamous in 9/11 lore, yet the commission report notes that it was the 36th PDB relating to bin Laden or al-Qaeda that year alone. (“All right. You’ve covered your ass now,” Bush reportedly sneered at the briefer.) Both the FBI and the CIA produced classified warnings on terrorist threats in the mid-1990s, Coll writes, including a particularly precise National Intelligence Estimate. “Several targets are especially at risk: national symbols such as the White House and the Capitol, and symbols of U.S. capitalism such as Wall Street,” it stated. “We assess that civil aviation will figure prominently among possible terrorist targets in the United States.” Some of the admonitions scattered throughout the 9/11 literature are too over-the-top even for a movie script: There’s the exasperated State Department official complaining about Defense Department inaction (“Does al Qaeda have to attack the Pentagon to get their attention?”), and the earnest FBI supervisor in Minneapolis warning a skeptical agent in Washington about suspected terrorism activity, insisting that he was “trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing it into the World Trade Center.”

In these books, everyone is warning everyone else. Bergen emphasizes that a young intelligence analyst in the State Department, Gina Bennett, wrote the first classified memo warning about bin Laden in 1993. Pockets within the FBI and the CIA obsess over bin Laden while regarding one another as rivals. On his way out, President Bill Clinton warns Bush. Outgoing national security adviser Sandy Berger warns his successor, Condoleezza Rice. And White House counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke, as he reminds incessantly in his 2004 memoir, “Against All Enemies,” warns anyone who will listen and many who will not.

With the system “blinking red,” as CIA Director George Tenet later told the 9/11 Commission, why were all these warnings not enough? Wright lingers on bureaucratic failings, emphasizing that intelligence collection on al-Qaeda was hampered by the “institutional warfare” between the CIA and the FBI, two agencies that by all accounts were not on speaking terms. Coll writes that Clinton regarded bin Laden as “an isolated fanatic, flailing dangerously but quixotically against the forces of global progress,” whereas the Bush team was fixated on great-power politics, missile defense and China.

Clarke’s conclusion is simple, and it highlights America’s we-know-better swagger, a national trait that often masquerades as courage or wisdom. “America, alas, seems only to respond well to disasters, to be undistracted by warnings,” he writes. “Our country seems unable to do all that must be done until there has been some awful calamity.”

The problem with responding only to calamity is that underestimation is usually replaced by overreaction. And we tell ourselves it is the right thing, maybe the only thing, to do.

II.

A last-minute flight change. A new job at the Pentagon. A retirement from the fire station. The final tilt of a plane’s wings before impact. If the books about the lead-up to 9/11 are packed with unbearable inevitability, the volumes on the day itself highlight how randomness separated survival from death. “The ferocity of the attacks meant that innocent people lived or died because they stepped back from a doorway, or hopped onto a closing elevator, or simply shifted their weight from one foot to another,” Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn write in “102 Minutes,” their narrative of events inside the World Trade Center from the moment the first plane hit through the collapse of both towers. Their detailed reporting on the human saga — such as a police officer asking a fire chaplain to hear his confession as they both flee a collapsing building — is excruciating and riveting at once.

Yet, as much as the people inside, the structures and history of the World Trade Center are key actors, too. They are not just symbols and targets but fully formed and deeply flawed characters in the day’s drama.

Had the World Trade Center, built in the late 1960s and early 1970s, been erected according to the city building code in effect since 1938, Dwyer and Flynn explain, “it is likely that a very different world trade center would have been built.” Instead, it was constructed according to a new code that the real estate industry had avidly promoted, a code that made it cheaper and more lucrative to build and own skyscrapers. “It increased the floor space available for rent . . . by cutting back on the areas that had been devoted, under the earlier law, to evacuation and exit,” the authors write. The result: Getting everybody out on 9/11 was virtually impossible.

Under the new rules, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey was able to rent three-quarters of each floor of the World Trade Center, Dwyer and Flynn report, a 21 percent increase over the yield of older skyscrapers. The cost was dear. Some 1,000 people inside the North Tower who initially survived the impact of American Airlines Flight 11 could not reach an open staircase. “Their fate was sealed nearly four decades earlier, when the stairways were clustered in the core of the building, and fire stairs were eliminated as a wasteful use of valuable space.” (The authors write that “building code reform hardly makes for gripping drama,” an aside as modest as it is inaccurate.) The towers embodied the power of American capitalism, but their design embodied the folly of American greed. On that day, both conditions proved fatal.

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The assault on the Pentagon, long treated as an undercard to New York’s main event, could have yielded even greater devastation, and again the details of the building played a role. In his oral history of 9/11, “The Only Plane in the Sky,” Garrett Graff quotes Defense Department officials marveling at how American Airlines Flight 77 struck a part of the Pentagon that, because of new anti-terrorism standards, had recently been reinforced and renovated. This meant it was not only stronger but, on that morning, also relatively unoccupied. “It was truly a miracle,” Army branch chief Philip Smith said. “In any other wedge of the Pentagon, there would have been 5,000 people, and the plane would have flown right through the middle of the building.” Instead, fewer than 200 people were killed in the attack on the Pentagon, including the passengers on the hijacked jet. Chance and preparedness came together.

The bravery of police and firefighters is the subject of countless 9/11 retrospectives, but these books also emphasize the selflessness of civilians who morphed into first responders. Port Authority workers Frank De Martini, Pablo Ortiz, Carlos da Costa and Peter Negron, for instance, saved at least 70 people in the World Trade Center’s North Tower by pulling apart elevator doors, busting walls and shining flashlights to find survivors, only to not make it out themselves. “With crowbar, flashlight, hardhat and big mouths, De Martini and Ortiz and their colleagues had pushed back the boundary line between life and death,” Dwyer and Flynn write. The authors also note how the double lines of people descending a World Trade Center staircase would automatically blend into single file when word came down that an injured person was behind them. And Graff cites a local assistant fire chief who recalls the “truly heroic” work of civilians and uniformed personnel at the Pentagon that day. “They were the ones who really got their comrades, got their workmates out,” he says.

The civilians aboard United Airlines Flight 93, whose resistance forced the plane to crash into a Pennsylvania field rather than the U.S. Capitol, were later lionized as emblems of swashbuckling Americana. But one offhand detail in the 9/11 Commission report underscores just how American their defiance was. The passengers had made phone calls when the hijacking began and had learned the fate of other aircraft that day. “According to one call, they voted on whether to rush the terrorists in an attempt to retake the plane,” the commission report states. “They decided, and acted.”

They voted on it. They voted. Even in that moment of unfathomable fear and distress, the passengers took a moment to engage in the great American tradition of popular consultation before deciding to become this new war’s earliest soldiers. Was there ever any doubt as to the outcome of that ballot?

Such episodes, led by ordinary civilians, embodied values that the 9/11 Commission called on the nation to display. Except those values would soon be dismantled, in the name of security, by those entrusted to uphold them.

III.

Lawyering to death.

The phrase appears in multiple 9/11 volumes, usually uttered by top officials adamant that they were going to get things done, laws and rules be damned. Anti-terrorism efforts were always “lawyered to death” during the Clinton administration, Tenet complains in “Bush at War,” Bob Woodward’s 2002 book on the debates among the president and his national security team. In an interview with Woodward, Bush drops the phrase amid the machospeak — “dead or alive,” “bring ’em on” and the like — that became typical of his anti-terrorism rhetoric. “I had to show the American people the resolve of a commander in chief that was going to do whatever it took to win,” Bush explains. “No yielding. No equivocation. No, you know, lawyering this thing to death.” In “Against All Enemies,” Clarke recalls the evening of Sept. 11, 2001, when Bush snapped at an official who suggested that international law looked askance at military force as a tool of revenge. “I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass,” the president retorted.

The message was unmistakable: The law is an obstacle to effective counterterrorism. Worrying about procedural niceties is passe in a 9/11 world, an annoying impediment to the essential work of ass-kicking.

Except, they did lawyer this thing to death. Instead of disregarding the law, the Bush administration enlisted it. “Beginning almost immediately after September 11, 2001, [Vice President Dick] Cheney saw to it that some of the sharpest and best-trained lawyers in the country, working in secret in the White House and the United States Department of Justice, came up with legal justifications for a vast expansion of the government’s power in waging war on terror,” Jane Mayer writes in “The Dark Side,” her relentless 2008 compilation of the arguments and machinations of government lawyers after the attacks. Through public declarations and secret memos, the administration sought to remove limits on the president’s conduct of warfare and to deny terrorism suspects the protections of the Geneva Conventions by redefining them as unlawful enemy combatants. Nothing, Mayer argues of the latter effort, “more directly cleared the way for torture than this.”

To comprehend what our government can justify in the name of national security, consider the torture memos themselves, authored by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel between 2002 and 2005 to green-light CIA interrogation methods for terrorism suspects. Tactics such as cramped confinement, sleep deprivation and waterboarding were rebranded as “enhanced interrogation techniques,” legally and linguistically contorted to avoid the label of torture. Though the techniques could be cruel and inhuman, the OLC acknowledged in an August 2002 memo, they would constitute torture only if they produced pain equivalent to organ failure or death, and if the individual inflicting such pain really really meant to do so: “Even if the defendant knows that severe pain will result from his actions, if causing such harm is not his objective, he lacks the requisite specific intent.” It’s quite the sleight of hand, with torture moving from the body of the interrogated to the mind of the interrogator.

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After devoting dozens of pages to the metaphysics of specific intent, the true meaning of “prolonged” mental harm or “imminent” death, and the elasticity of the Convention Against Torture, the memo concludes that none of it actually matters. Even if a particular interrogation method would cross some legal line, the relevant statute would be considered unconstitutional because it “impermissibly encroached” on the commander in chief’s authority to conduct warfare. Almost nowhere in these memos does the Justice Department curtail the power of the CIA to do as it pleases.

In fact, the OLC lawyers rely on assurances from the CIA itself to endorse such powers. In a second memo from August 2002, the lawyers ruminate on the use of cramped confinement boxes. “We have no information from the medical experts you have consulted that the limited duration for which the individual is kept in the boxes causes any substantial physical pain,” the memo states. Waterboarding likewise gets a pass. “You have informed us that this procedure does not inflict actual physical harm,” the memo states. “Based on your research . . . you do not anticipate that any prolonged mental harm would result from the use of the waterboard.”

You have informed us. Experts you have consulted. Based on your research. You do not anticipate. Such hand-washing words appear throughout the memos. The Justice Department relies on information provided by the CIA to reach its conclusions; the CIA then has the cover of the Justice Department to proceed with its interrogations. It’s a perfect circle of trust.

Yet the logic is itself tortured. In a May 2005 memo, the lawyers conclude that because no single technique inflicts “severe” pain amounting to torture, their combined use “would not be expected” to reach that level, either. As though embarrassed at such illogic, the memo attaches a triple-negative footnote: “We are not suggesting that combinations or repetitions of acts that do not individually cause severe physical pain could not result in severe physical pain.” Well, then, what exactly are you suggesting? Even when the OLC in 2004 officially withdrew its August 2002 memo following a public outcry and declared torture “abhorrent,” the lawyers added a footnote to the new memo assuring that they had reviewed the prior opinions on the treatment of detainees and “do not believe that any of their conclusions would be different under the standards set forth in this memorandum.”

In these documents, lawyers enable lawlessness. Another May 2005 memo concludes that, because the Convention Against Torture applies only to actions occurring under U.S. jurisdiction, the CIA’s creation of detention sites in other countries renders the convention “inapplicable.” Similarly, because the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment is meant to protect people convicted of crimes, it should not apply to terrorism detainees — because they have not been officially convicted of anything. The lack of due process conveniently eliminates constitutional protections. In his introduction to “The Torture Memos: Rationalizing the Unthinkable,” David Cole describes the documents as “bad-faith lawyering,” which might be generous. It is another kind of lawyering to death, one in which the rule of law that the 9/11 Commission urged us to abide by becomes the victim.

Years later, the Senate Intelligence Committee would investigate the CIA’s post-9/11 interrogation program. Its massive report — the executive summary of which appeared as a 549-page book in 2014 — found that torture did not produce useful intelligence, that the interrogations were more brutal than the CIA let on, that the Justice Department did not independently verify the CIA’s information, and that the spy agency impeded oversight by Congress and the CIA inspector general. It explains that the CIA purported to oversee itself and, no surprise, that it deemed its interrogations effective and necessary, no matter the results. (If a detainee provided information, it meant the program worked; if he did not, it meant stricter applications of the techniques were needed; if still no information was forthcoming, the program had succeeded in proving he had none to give.)

“The CIA’s effectiveness representations were almost entirely inaccurate,” the Senate report concluded. It is one of the few lies of the war on terror unmasked by an official government investigation and public report, but just one of the many documented in the 9/11 literature.

IV.

Officials in the war on terror didn’t deceive or dissemble just with lawmakers or the public. In the recurring tragedy of war, they lied just as often to themselves.

In “To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq,” Robert Draper considers the influence of the president’s top aides. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz (long obsessed with ousting Saddam Hussein), Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld (eager to test his theories of military transformation) and Cheney (fixated on apocalyptic visions of America’s vulnerability) all had their reasons. But Draper identifies a single responsible party: “The decision to invade Iraq was one made, finally and exclusively, by the president of the United States, George W. Bush,” he writes.

A president initially concerned about defending and preserving the nation’s moral goodness against terrorism found himself driven by darker impulses. “I’m having difficulty controlling my bloodlust,” Bush confessed to religious leaders in the Oval Office on Sept. 20, 2001, Draper reports. It was not a one-off comment; in Woodward’s “Bush at War,” the president admitted that before 9/11, “I didn’t feel that sense of urgency [about al-Qaeda], and my blood was not nearly as boiling.”

Bloodlust, moral certainty and sudden vulnerability make a dangerous combination. The belief that you are defending good against evil can lead to the belief that whatever you do to that end is good, too. Draper distills Bush’s worldview: “The terrorists’ primary objective was to destroy America’s freedom. Saddam hated America. Therefore, he hated freedom. Therefore, Saddam was himself a terrorist, bent on destroying America and its freedom.”

Note the asymmetry. The president assumed the worst about what Hussein had done or might do, yet embraced best-case scenarios of how an American invasion would proceed. “Iraqis would rejoice at the sight of their Western liberators,” Draper recaps. “Their newly shared sense of national purpose would overcome any sectarian allegiances. Their native cleverness would make up for their inexperience with self-government. They would welcome the stewardship of Iraqi expatriates who had not set foot in Baghdad in decades. And their oil would pay for everything.”

There are lies, and then there is self-delusion. The Americans did not have to anticipate the specifics of the civil war that would engulf the country after the invasion; they just had to realize that managing postwar Iraq would never be as simple as they imagined. It did not seem to occur to Bush and his advisers that Iraqis could simultaneously hate Hussein and resent the Americans — feelings that could have been discovered by speaking to Iraqis and hearing their concerns.

Anthony Shadid’s “Night Draws Near: Iraq’s People in the Shadow of America’s War,” published in 2005, is among the few books on the war that gets deep inside Iraqis’ aversion to the Americans in their midst. “What gives them the right to change something that’s not theirs in the first place?” a woman in a middle-class Baghdad neighborhood asks him. “I don’t like your house, so I’m going to bomb it and you can rebuild it again the way I want it, with your money?” In Fallujah, where Shadid hears early talk of the Americans as “kuffar” (heathens), a 51-year-old former teacher complains that “we’ve exchanged a tyrant for an occupier.” The occupation did not dissuade such impressions when it turned the former dictator’s seat of government into its own luxurious Green Zone, or when it retrofitted the Abu Ghraib prison (“the worst of Saddam’s hellholes,” Shadid calls it) into its own chamber of horrors.

Shadid understood that governmental legitimacy — who gets to rule, and by what right — was a matter of overriding importance for Iraqis. “The Americans never understood the question,” he writes; “Iraqis never agreed on the answer.” It’s hard to find a better summation of the trials of Iraq in the aftermath of America’s invasion. When the United States so quickly shifted from liberation to occupation, it lost whatever legitimacy it enjoyed. “Bush handed that enemy precisely what it wanted and needed, proof that America was at war with Islam, that we were the new Crusaders come to occupy Muslim land,” Clarke writes. “It was as if Usama bin Laden, hidden in some high mountain redoubt, were engaging in long-range mind control of George Bush, chanting ‘invade Iraq, you must invade Iraq.’ ”

The foolishness and arrogance of the American occupation didn’t help. In “Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone,” Rajiv Chandrasekaran explains how, even as daily security was Iraqis’ overwhelming concern, viceroy L. Paul Bremer, Bush’s man in Baghdad, was determined to turn the country into a model free-market economy, complete with new investment laws, bankruptcy courts and a state-of-the-art stock exchange. In charge of the new exchange was a 24-year-old American with no academic background in economics or finance. The man tasked with remaking Iraq’s sprawling university system had no experience in the Middle East — but did have connections to the Rumsfeld and Cheney families. A new traffic law for Iraq was partially cut and pasted from Maryland’s motor vehicle code. An antismoking campaign was led by a U.S. official who was a closet smoker. And a U.S. Army general, when asked by local journalists why American helicopters must fly so low at night, thus scaring Iraqi children, replied that the kids were simply hearing “the sound of freedom.”

Message: Freedom sounds terrifying.

For some Americans, inflicting that terror became part of the job, one more tool in the arsenal. In “The Forever War” by Dexter Filkins, a U.S. Army lieutenant colonel in Iraq assures the author that “with a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them.” (Filkins asked him if he really meant it about fear and violence; the officer insisted that he did.) Of course, not all officials were so deluded and so forthright; some knew better but lied to the public. Chandrasekaran recalls the response of a top communications official under Bremer, when reporters asked about waves of violence hitting Baghdad in the spring of 2004. “Off the record: Paris is burning,” the official told the journalists. “On the record: Security and stability are returning to Iraq.”

In “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden,” Bergen sums up how the Iraq War, conjured in part on the false connections between Iraq and al-Qaeda, ended up helping the terrorist network: It pulled resources from the war in Afghanistan, gave space for bin Laden’s men to regroup and spurred a new generation of terrorists in the Middle East. “A bigger gift to bin Laden was hard to imagine,” Bergen writes.

If Iraq was the war born of lies, Afghanistan was the one nurtured by them. Afghanistan was where al-Qaeda, supported by the Taliban, had made its base — it was supposed to be the good war, the right war, the war of necessity and not choice, the war endorsed at home and abroad. “U.S. officials had no need to lie or spin to justify the war,” Washington Post reporter Craig Whitlock writes in “The Afghanistan Papers,” a damning contrast of the war’s reality vs. its rhetoric. “Yet leaders at the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department soon began to make false assurances and to paper over setbacks on the battlefield.” As the years passed, the deceit became entrenched, what Whitlock calls “an unspoken conspiracy” to hide the truth.

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Drawing from a “Lessons Learned” project that interviewed hundreds of military and civilian officials involved with Afghanistan, as well as from oral histories, government cables and reports, Whitlock finds commanding generals privately admitting that they long fought the war “without a functional strategy.” That, two years into the conflict, Rumsfeld complained that he had “no visibility into who the bad guys are.” That Army Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, a former coordinator of Iraq and Afghanistan policy, acknowledged that “we didn’t have the foggiest idea of what we were undertaking.” That U.S. officials long wanted to withdraw American forces but feared — correctly so, it turns out — that the Afghan government might collapse. “Bin Laden had hoped for this exact scenario,” Whitlock observes. “To lure the U.S. superpower into an unwinnable guerrilla conflict that would deplete its national treasury and diminish its global influence.”

All along, top officials publicly contradicted these internal views, issuing favorable accounts of steady progress. Bad news was twisted into good: Rising suicide attacks in Kabul meant the Taliban was too weak for direct combat, for instance, while increased U.S. casualties meant America was taking the fight to the enemy. The skills and size of the Afghan security forces were frequently exaggerated; by the end of President Barack Obama’s second term, U.S. officials concluded that some 30,000 Afghan soldiers on the payroll didn’t actually exist; they were paper creations of local commanders who pocketed the fake soldiers’ salaries at U.S. taxpayer expense. American officials publicly lamented large-scale corruption in Afghanistan but enabled that corruption in practice, pouring massive contracts and projects into a country ill-equipped to absorb them. Such deceptions transpired across U.S. presidents, but the Obama administration, eager to show that its first-term troop surge was working, “took it to a new level, hyping figures that were misleading, spurious or downright false,” Whitlock writes. And then under President Donald Trump, he adds, the generals felt pressure to “speak more forcefully and boast that his war strategy was destined to succeed.”

Long before President Biden declared the end of the U.S. war in Afghanistan this summer, the United States twice made similar pronouncements, proclaiming the conclusion of combat operations in 2003 and again in 2014 — yet still the war endured. It did so in part because “in public, almost no senior government officials had the courage to admit that the United States was slowly losing,” Whitlock writes. “With their complicit silence, military and political leaders avoided accountability and dodged reappraisals that could have changed the outcome or shortened the conflict.”

It’s not like nobody warned them. In “Bush at War,” Woodward reports that CIA Counterterrorism Center Director Cofer Black and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage traveled to Moscow shortly after 9/11 to give officials a heads up about the coming hostilities in Afghanistan. The Russians, recent visitors to the graveyard of empires, cautioned that Afghanistan was an “ambush heaven” and that, in the words of one of them, “you’re really going to get the hell kicked out of you.” Cofer responded confidently: “We’re going to kill them. . . . We’re going to rock their world.”

Now, with U.S. forces gone and the Taliban having reclaimed power in Afghanistan, Washington is wrestling with the legacy of the nation’s longest war. Why and how did America lose? Should we have stayed longer? Was it worth its price in blood and billions? How does the United States repay the courage of Afghans who worked alongside U.S. military and civilian authorities? What if Afghanistan again becomes a haven for terrorists attacking U.S. interests and allies, as the airport suicide bombing in Kabul that killed 13 U.S. service members last month may signal? Biden has asserted that “the war in Afghanistan is now over” but has also pledged to continue the fight against terrorists there — so what are the limits and the means of future U.S. military and intelligence action in the country?

These are essential debates, but a war should not be measured only by the timing and the competence of its end. We still face an equally consequential appraisal: How good was this good war if it could be sustained only by lies?

V.

In the two decades since the 9/11 attacks, the United States has often attempted to reconsider its response. Take two documents from late 2006: the report from the Iraq Study Group, co-chaired by James A. Baker III and Lee H. Hamilton, which argued that Washington needed to radically rethink its diplomatic and political strategy for Iraq; and “The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual,” written by a team led by then-Army Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, which argued that U.S. officials needed to radically rethink military tactics for insurgency wars of the kind it faced in Iraq and Afghanistan.

They are written as though intending to solve problems. But they can be read as proof that the problems have no realistic solution, or that the only solution is to never have created them.

“There is no magic formula to solve the problems of Iraq,” the ISG report begins, yet its proposed fixes would have required plenty of fairy dust. The report calls for a “diplomatic offensive” to gain international support for Iraq, to persuade Iran and Syria to respect Iraq’s territory and sovereignty, and to commit to “a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace on all fronts.” Simple! Iraq, meanwhile, needed to make progress on national reconciliation (in a country already awash in sectarian bloodletting), boost domestic security (even though the report deems the Iraqi army a mess and the Iraqi police worse) and deliver social services (even as the report concludes that the government was failing to adequately provide electricity, drinking water, sewage services and education).

The recommendations seem written in the knowledge that they will never happen. “Miracles cannot be expected,” the report states — twice. Absent divine intervention, the next step is obvious. If the Iraqi government can’t demonstrate “substantial progress” toward its goals, the report asserts, “the United States should reduce its political, military, or economic support” for Iraq. Indeed, the report sets the bar for staying so high that an exit strategy appears to be its primary purpose.

The counterinsurgency manual is an extraordinary document. Implicitly repudiating notions such as “shock and awe” and “overwhelming force,” it argues that the key to battling an insurgency in countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan is to provide security for the local population and to win its support through effective governance. It also attempts to grasp the nature of America’s foes. “Most enemies either do not try to defeat the United States with conventional operations or do not limit themselves to purely military means,” the manual states. “They know that they cannot compete with U.S. forces on those terms. Instead, they try to exhaust U.S. national will.” Exhausting America’s will is an objective that al-Qaeda understood well.

“Soldiers and Marines are expected to be nation builders as well as warriors,” the manual proclaims, but the arduous tasks involved — reestablishing government institutions, rebuilding infrastructure, strengthening local security forces, enforcing the rule of law — reveal the tension at the heart of the new doctrine. “Counterinsurgents should prepare for a long-term commitment,” the manual states. Yet, just a few pages later, it admits that “eventually all foreign armies are seen as interlopers or occupiers.” How to accomplish the former without descending into the latter? No wonder so many of the historical examples of counterinsurgency that the manual highlights, including accounts from the Vietnam War, are stories of failure.

The manual seems aware of its importance. The 2007 edition contains a foreword, followed by an introduction, then another foreword, a preface, then some brief acknowledgments and finally one more introduction. (Just reaching Chapter 1 feels like defeating an insurgency.) But the throat-clearing is clarifying. In his foreword, Army Lt. Col. John Nagl writes that the document’s most lasting impact may be as a catalyst not for remaking Iraq or Afghanistan, but for transforming the Army and Marine Corps into “more effective learning organizations,” better able to adapt to changing warfare. And in her introduction, Sarah Sewall, then director of Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, concludes that its “ultimate value” may be in warning civilian officials to think hard before engaging in a counterinsurgency campaign.

At best, then, the manual helps us rethink future conflicts — how we fight and whether we should. It’s no coincidence that Biden, in his Aug. 16 remarks defending the decision to withdraw American troops from Afghanistan, specifically repudiated counterinsurgency as an objective of U.S. policy. “I’ve argued for many years that our mission should be narrowly focused on counterterrorism, not counterinsurgency or nation-building,” the president affirmed. Even the longest war was not long enough for a counterinsurgency effort to succeed.

In his 2009 book, “The Good Soldiers,” David Finkel chronicles the experiences of an Army battalion deployed in Iraq during the U.S. troop surge in 2007 and 2008, a period of the war ostensibly informed by the new counterinsurgency doctrine. In his 2013 sequel, “Thank You for Your Service,” the author witnesses these men when they come home and try to make sense of their military experience and adapt to their new lives. “The thing that got to everyone,” Finkel explains in the latter book, “was not having a defined front line. It was a war in 360 degrees, no front to advance toward, no enemy in uniform, no predictable patterns, no relief.” It’s a powerful summation of battling an insurgency.

Adam Schumann returns from war because of post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury, “the result of a mortar round that dropped without warning out of a blue sky,” Finkel explains. Schumann suffers from nightmares, headaches and guilt; he wishes he needed bandages or crutches, anything to visibly justify his absence from the front. His wife endures his treatments, his anger, his ambivalence toward life. “He’s still a good guy,” she decides. “He’s just a broken good guy.” Another returning soldier, Nic DeNinno, struggles to tell his wife about the time he and his fellow soldiers burst into an Iraqi home in search of a high-value target. He threw a man down the stairs and held another by the throat. After they left, the lieutenant told him it was the wrong house. “The wrong f---ing house,” Nic says to his wife. “One of the things I want to remember is how many times we hit the wrong house.”

Hitting the wrong house is what counterinsurgency doctrine is supposed to avoid. Even successfully capturing or killing a high-value target can be counterproductive if in the process you terrorize a community and create more enemies. In Iraq, the whole country was the wrong house. America’s leaders knew it was the wrong house. They hit it anyway.

VI.

In the 11th chapter of the 9/11 Commission report, just before all the recommendations for reforms in domestic and foreign policy, the authors get philosophical, pondering how hindsight had affected their views of Sept. 11, 2001. “As time passes, more documents become available, and the bare facts of what happened become still clearer,” the report states. “Yet the picture of how those things happened becomes harder to reimagine, as that past world, with its preoccupations and uncertainty, recedes.” Before making definitive judgments, then, they ask themselves “whether the insights that seem apparent now would really have been meaningful at the time.”

It’s a commendable attitude, one that helps readers understand what the attacks felt like in real time and why authorities responded as they did. But that approach also keeps the day trapped in the past, safely distant. Two of the latest additions to the canon, “Reign of Terror” by Spencer Ackerman and “Subtle Tools” by Karen Greenberg, draw straight, stark lines between the earliest days of the war on terror and its mutations in our current time, between conflicts abroad and divisions at home. These works show how 9/11 remains with us, and how we are still living in the ruins.

When Trump declared that “we don’t have victories anymore” in his 2015 speech announcing his presidential candidacy, he was both belittling the legacy of 9/11 and harnessing it to his ends. “His great insight was that the jingoistic politics of the War on Terror did not have to be tied to the War on Terror itself,” Ackerman writes. “That enabled him to tell a tale of lost greatness.” And if greatness is lost, someone must have taken it. The backlash against Muslims, against immigrants crossing the southern border and against protesters rallying for racial justice was strengthened by the open-ended nature of the global war on terror. In Ackerman’s vivid telling — his prose can be hyperbolic, even if his arguments are not — the war is not just far away in Iraq or Afghanistan, in Yemen or Syria, but it’s happening here, with mass surveillance, militarized law enforcement and the rebranding of immigration as a threat to the nation’s security rather than a cornerstone of its identity. “Trump had learned the foremost lesson of 9/11,” Ackerman writes, “that the terrorists were whomever you said they were.”

Both Ackerman and Greenberg point to the Authorization for Use of Military Force, drafted by administration lawyers and approved by Congress just days after the attacks, as the moment when America’s response began to go awry. The brief joint resolution allowed the president to use “all necessary and appropriate force” against any nation, organization or person who committed the attacks, and to prevent any future ones. It was the “Ur document in the war on terror and its legacy,” Greenberg writes. “Riddled with imprecision, its terminology was geared to codify expansive powers.” Where the battlefield, the enemy and the definition of victory all remain vague, war becomes endlessly expansive, “with neither temporal nor geographical boundaries.”

This was the moment the war on terror was “conceptually doomed,” Ackerman concludes. This is how you get a forever war.

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There were moments when an off-ramp was visible. The killing of bin Laden in 2011 was one such instance, Ackerman argues, but “Obama squandered the best chance anyone could ever have to end the 9/11 era.” The author assails Obama for making the war on terror more “sustainable” through a veneer of legality — banning torture yet failing to close the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay and relying on drone strikes that “perversely incentivized the military and the CIA to kill instead of capture.” There would always be more targets, more battlefields, regardless of president or party. Failures became the reason to double down, never wind down.

The longer the war went on, the more that what Ackerman calls its “grotesque subtext” of nativism and racism would move to the foreground of American politics. Absent the war on terror, it is harder to imagine a presidential candidate decrying a sitting commander in chief as foreign, Muslim, illegitimate — and using that lie as a successful political platform. Absent the war on terror, it is harder to imagine a travel ban against people from Muslim-majority countries. Absent the war on terror, it is harder to imagine American protesters labeled terrorists, or a secretary of defense describing the nation’s urban streets as a “battle space” to be dominated. Trump was a disruptive force in American life, but there was much continuity there, too. “A vastly different America has taken root” in the two decades since 9/11, Greenberg writes. “In the name of retaliation, ‘justice,’ and prevention, fundamental values have been cast aside.”

In his latest book on bin Laden, Bergen argues that 9/11 was a major tactical success but a long-term strategic failure for the terrorist leader. Yes, he struck a vicious blow against “the head of the snake,” as he called the United States, but “rather than ending American influence in the Muslim world, the 9/11 attacks greatly amplified it,” with two lengthy, large-scale invasions and new bases established throughout the region.

Yet the legacy of the 9/11 era is found not just in Afghanistan or Iraq, but also in an America that drew out and heightened some of its ugliest impulses — a nation that is deeply divided (like those “separated states” bin Laden imagined); that bypasses inconvenient facts and embraces conspiracy theories; that demonizes outsiders; and that, after failing to spread freedom and democracy around the world, seems less inclined to uphold them here. More Americans today are concerned about domestic extremism than foreign terrorism, and on Jan. 6, 2021, our own citizens assaulted the Capitol building that al-Qaeda hoped to strike on Sept. 11, 2001. Seventeen years after the 9/11 Commission called on the United States to offer moral leadership to the world and to be generous and caring to our neighbors, our moral leadership is in question, and we can barely be generous and caring to ourselves.

In “The Forever War,” Dexter Filkins describes a nation in which “something had broken fundamentally after so many years of war . . . there had been some kind of primal dislocation between cause and effect, a numbness wholly understandable, necessary even, given the pain.” He was writing of Afghanistan, but his words could double as an interpretation of the United States over the past two decades. Still reeling from an attack that dropped out of a blue sky, America is suffering from a sort of post-traumatic stress democracy. It remains in recovery, still a good country, even if a broken good country.

About this story

Copy editing by Jennifer Morehead. Design and development by Andrew Braford.

The Washington Post

11. 9/11 reflections on service and working together

Spirit of America is one of the "successes" from 9/11. Great Americans' selfless service in support of US national security by doing work that cannot be done by others.

---------- Forwarded message ---------

From: Jim Hake, Spirit of America <staff@spiritofamerica.org>

Date: Sun, Sep 11, 2022 at 10:59 AM

Subject: 9/11 reflections on service and working together

Greetings,

Today marks 21 years since the attacks of 9/11. Americans will always remember where they were when the first plane hit the World Trade Center. How they felt and, for many, how their lives changed.

I founded Spirit of America in response to 9/11. I wanted to stand up for what America stands for – the promise of a free and better life. And, I wanted to give other citizens like me a chance to serve those ideals, too. My TED Talk tells the story.

Last year, to mark the 20th anniversary of 9/11, Spirit of America hosted a live stream event with Lt. Gen. (Ret.) H.R. McMaster, Ambassador Ryan Crocker, the Honorable Michéle Flournoy, and former commander of the US Special Operations Command, Admiral (Ret.) Eric Olson.

They each reflected on where they were that day, what we have learned as a country, and what gives them hope for the future. Their words are as poignant today as they were a year ago.

“Our national security is everyone's responsibility,” Admiral Olson said. “If we leave our security to a small portion of the nation, we simply won't be as secure. There's much that each of us can do to be better citizens in ways that strengthen all of us.”

“We are really good as Americans at picking ourselves up, dusting ourselves off, and demonstrating incredible resilience,” Flournoy said. “I have faith in our ability to take this country forward, to serve our communities and the nation. Spirit of America embodies what we can do when we pull our efforts and focus on what is best about what this country has to offer.”

Every day Spirit of America works alongside our troops and diplomats to demonstrate the best of what America stands for and help them preserve the promise of a free and better life. Thank you for honoring that commitment with us.

Jim Hake and the Spirit of America team

12. Gradually, then Suddenly (Freedman on Ukraine)

Sir Lawrence Freedman writing about Ukraine. I just received his latest book in the mail yesterday: Command: The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine. In honor of 9/11 I read the section on Afghanistan after 9/11 last night. He provides some fasctingina and important ahostory and analysis.

Gradually, then Suddenly

https://samf.substack.com/p/gradually-then-suddenly?sd=pf

Lawrence Freedman

Sep 10

The Ukrainian flag is raised again in Kupyansk

“How did you go bankrupt?”

Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”

― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises.

As with bankruptcy so with military defeat. What appears to be a long, painful grind can quickly turn into a rout. A supposedly resilient and well-equipped army can break and look for means of escape. This is not unusual in war. We saw it happen with the Afghan Army in the summer of 2021.

For the past few days we have been witnessing a remarkable Ukrainian offensive in Kharkiv. We have the spectacle of a bedraggled army in retreat - remnants of a smashed-up convoy, abandoned vehicles, positions left in a hurry, with scattered kit and uneaten food, miserable prisoners, and local people cheering on the Ukrainian forces as they drive through their villages. The speed of advance has been impressive, as tens of square kilometres turn into hundreds and then thousands, and from a handful of villages and towns liberated to dozens. Even as I have been writing this post paragraphs keep on getting overtaken by events.

It would of course be premature to pronounce a complete Ukrainian victory in the war because of one successful and unexpected breakthrough. But what has happened over the past few days is of historic importance. This offensive has overturned much of what was confidently assumed about the course of the war. It serves as a reminder that just because the front lines appear static it does not mean that they will stay that way, and that morale and motivation drain away from armies facing defeat, especially when the troops are uncertain about the cause for which they are fighting and have lost confidence in their officers. Who wants to be a martyr when the war is already lost?

Ukrainian Objectives

The Kharkiv offensive has been described as opportunistic. This is because the Ukrainian High Command appears to have decided to take advantage of Russia moving substantial forces towards Kherson to deal with the much-advertised attack there by opening up a new offensive against areas that had been left with weaker defences. According to an alternative explanation this was not opportunistic but always intended. The Russians were suckered by Ukraine’s regular talk of this coming Kherson offensive into diverting troops, even though Kharkiv was always the real objective. It would, however, be unwise to assume that the Kherson offensive is of only secondary relevance: southern Ukraine remains of great strategic importance for the Ukrainian economy, the links to the Black Sea, and the connection to Crimea. The offensive there has not been halted for the sake of Kharkiv and is also still making progress.

In practice, as with all good strategists, the Ukrainian Commanders probably prepared for a range of contingencies. Their choices depended on what the Russian did. Once they saw the extent of the Russian troop movements, and the developing vulnerability this created, then the plan for Kharkiv will have firmed up in their minds. I also suspect that they wanted to make sure that the Kherson offensive was well established before risking opening up another front and that this governed the timing.

What we can be sure of is that the Kharkiv offensive was not impulsive. It required careful preparation, including getting troops and their equipment into position without their intentions becoming too obvious. A sequence of moves has unfolded over the last few days designed to shock and disorient Russian forces, breaking through thin lines of defence, avoiding distractions by bypassing Russian positions that were in no position to interfere with their movement, and threatening them, and the rest of the Russian force in the region, with being cut off from their sources of supply and reinforcement, and also means of escape. The aim was not simply to grab territory and inflict blows on Russian forces, though that has been done. One aim was to get to Kupyansk, a city of 27,000 inhabitants, a major transportation hub for both road and rail. The other was to take Izyum (45,000 inhabitants), with its substantial garrison and command centre.

When the operation started the first target was the city Balakliya (over 25,000 inhabitants) which was encircled before the Russian defenders were pushed out. From there the Ukrainians drove forward, achieving a pincer movement by also pushing forward to the Oskil River, south of Kupyansk. To prevent reinforcements coming in, , Ukraine damaged the bridge across the Oskpil river to Kupyansk. On Friday, another offensive line opened up with an attack on Russian positions in Lyman (over 20,000 inhabitants) which had been taken by the Russians after a fierce battle at the end of May. This opened up the move against Izyum. Reports suggest that both Izyum and Kupyansk have either fallen or are close to falling, with Russians troops in disarray. According to the Ukrainians hundreds of Russians have already been killed and many captured. Ukrainian sources have described whole units wiped out. It is not clear how many Russian troops may be caught by these manoeuvres – perhaps some 10,000.

There are dangers in offensives where the supply lines get too stretched, and forward units lose air defence cover. These are after all some of the problems that thwarted the initial Russian offensive last February. Unsurprisingly the Russian Ministry of Defence has insisted that all will be well and that reinforcements are on the way. Some footage was supplied showing vehicles on the move, although doubts were soon expressed about how real these reinforcements were, what they could do when they arrived, and if they could arrive at all. The main Russian response, as per normal, has been to send random rockets into the city of Kharkiv, killing civilians.

Russian Angst

There is one group of Russians who are far from complacent. Russian military bloggers are a patriotic group who are desperate for a Russian victory. Unlike the crude and increasingly risible propagandists, whose instructions are to show that all is well and that any apparent Ukraine advance has already turned into a disastrous failure, the bloggers assess the conflict with a degree of objectivity. They have no desire to praise the regime because they feel badly let down by its ineptitude, by its failure to prepare properly for a major war and also its refusal to put the country on a proper war-footing. These nationalists are therefore furious because the best chance to reconnect a wayward Ukraine to Mother Russia has now been lost, and the armed forces are suffering personnel and material losses, along with a deep humiliation, from which they will take years to recover.

When it comes to explaining what went wrong the bloggers consider both the possible underestimation of the enemy as well as overestimation of Russian capabilities. At times it can seem as if the bloggers (in sharp contrast to the propagandists) are talking up the Ukrainians to make their own troops look less bad. They note that Ukrainian forces are benefitting from an inflow of advanced weaponry and have been influenced by Western tactical and operational concepts which they have been applying effectively. Here the bloggers have reported the competence of the Ukrainians in combined arms, synchronising the effects of armour, infantry and artillery, while avoiding unnecessary urban battles and moving with sufficient air defences to make conditions hazardous for Russian air power.

The bloggers certainly don’t blame their own troops for the current disarray. They are usually portrayed as fighting valiantly. They instead point to weaknesses such as lack of coordination between units, aggravated in the case of Balakliya by part of the defending force being composed of units from Russia’s national guard (Rosgvardia) as well as miserable units from the occupied Donbas, given little choice but to join the army. They note that neither were prepared for this sort of warfare, poorly trained in the proper use of their weapons. Another weakness has been the lack of sufficient artillery and air support, with inadequate intelligence so that, unlike the Ukrainians, the Russians have been unable to call in precise artillery fire.

The limits of intelligence have also been evident in other respects. The local Russian command failed to pick up any signs of the impending assault. The poor performance of airpower, one of the few means available to Russians to disrupt the Ukrainian advance, suggests that it has been effectively neutralised. ‘In general things are really bad’, writes one blogger, ‘there has not been much resistance from our side for the third day already. Our troops abandon not particularly fortified positions and retreat.’

Most importantly some now consider defeat possible. Few believe that the position in Kharkiv can be recovered. One contemplates catastrophe:

‘Sergei Shoigu [Minister of Defence] and Valery Gerasimov [Chief of the General Staff] are one step away from an unthinkable achievement – the strategic defeat of the RF Armed Forces by a deliberately weaker enemy with almost no aviation, and with their own aviation.’

The notorious Igor Girkin has observed that ‘The war in Ukraine will continue until the complete defeat of Russia. We have already lost, the rest is just a matter of time.’

What Next?

Russia is losing but it has not yet lost. It still occupies a large chunk of Ukrainian territory and still has substantial military assets in the country. As I have argued regularly in these posts wars can take unexpected turns, as we have just seen. Calamitous miscalculations as well as audacious manoeuvres can transform the character of a conflict. There is always a risk of analyses getting too far ahead, jumping from the current state of affairs to the next and beyond and then asking what happens in purely hypothetical situations. Earlier in the summer there was a tendency to assume that the coming months would be dominated either by more gruelling Russian offensives as in the Donbas or perhaps a stalemate, so that the war could last months or even years. This stalemate philosophy still persists, not least because it is hard to even contemplate such a great military power being humbled.

So while the situation is far more positive for Ukraine the same cautions about extrapolating too far ahead must apply. Even if Kharkiv is completely liberated there will still be much to do. In the Kherson Oblast the other offensive is also developing and taking shape. This has so far been in the ‘slow grind’ category though it is picking up pace and more encirclement operations are possible there. The Russians must now be worrying about their position in Donetsk. Unresolved is the extraordinarily dangerous situation at the Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant. This is an unsustainable situation, one the Director-General of the IAEA has described as ‘precarious’ as the plant’s offsite power has been turned off and it is still being shelled.

The initiative is now firmly with Ukraine. The experience of the last few days will create doubts in the minds of Russian commanders about the reliability and resilience of their troops, and add to the predicaments they already face when working out how to allocate their increasingly scarce resources of manpower, intelligence assets and airpower. Might they risk a repeat of this operational disaster if they move forces to plug one gap only for another to open up? How much more can they expect from their forces, many who will now have been fighting for long weeks without respite and without much to show for their efforts? By contrast, there will have been a boost to the morale of even the more beleaguered Ukrainian forces (and as the Washington Post reports some of their units have also had a tough time). There may also have been a boost to their capabilities from supplies of equipment and ammunition captured in Kharkiv.

There is now talk of defeat on the Russian side. There was no sense of this in President Putin’s insouciant remarks at the Vladivostok economic forum, with Russia’s isolation symbolised by the lack of international presence (Myanmar, Chinese and Armenian representatives turned up). He claimed that nothing had been lost by the war and sovereignty had been gained as if his desire to intensify autocracy and achieve autarky in the name of self-reliance has been worth the tens of thousands of Russians dead, wounded, and taken prisoner, and the years of defence production and economic modernisation up in smoke. His forces might stabilise the situation, at least away from Kharkiv, and provide more breathing space while he hopes Europe’s economic pain leads them to abandon Ukraine. But as I argued in my last post that is unlikely to happen, and he may now have less time than he thought to find out.

Because of the opacity of Putin’s decision-making and his delusional recent utterances, presenting Russia as the keeper of some core civilisational values, there is no suggestion that he has reached the point where he can acknowledge the position into which he has led his country. Prudence therefore requires us to assume that this war will not be over soon. But nor should it blind us to the possibility that events might move far faster than we assumed – first gradually, and then suddenly.

Note: I should thank the many accounts on twitter who provide translations of the Russian blogs as well as news from the front lines. In no particular order - @wartranslated, @ChrisO_wiki, @RALee, @WarMonitor3, @JayinKyiv, @KyivIndependent, @IAPonomarenko, @Leonidragozin, @Hromadske and there are many more.

13. Interview: Chinese workers held by armed guard, denied wages, forced into overtime

One Belt One Road. Treatment worse than Koreans from the north.

Interview: Chinese workers held by armed guard, denied wages, forced into overtime

benarnews.org

In 2021, Chinese migrant worker Zhang Qiang signed on to a Belt and Road project in Indonesia, drawn by what he believed would be higher wages than he could make at home.

Happily married for nine years, with two daughters, Zhang promised his youngest that he would buy her a princess-style bed for her bedroom with the extra money, then left his hometown of Anyang city, in the central province of Henan to take the job.

“At that time, I had just put a down payment on a home in China, and taken out a mortgage,” Zhang, 32, told Radio Free Asia (RFA), an online news service affiliated with BenarNews. “My youngest told me when we were settled in the new place that she wanted a princess bed.”

“I told her ‘yes’. I said I would definitely get her one when I have earned this money overseas,” he said.

“[I told her] I was introduced by a friend, and was going to Indonesia to work for six months at 500 yuan (U.S. $72) a day. That after working... I can come back to China.”

Zhang signed up for the job with Rongcheng Environmental Protection, alongside more than 20 other workers recruited at the same time, but the company said the contract-signing would have to wait, citing COVID-19 restrictions in Nanjing at the time, and the lack of access to a printer.

“They found an excuse after I got to Nanjing for why we couldn’t sign the contract ... then, after a week of quarantine, we flew out to Indonesia,” he said.

The reality was far from what he had been promised.

On arrival in Indonesia, Zhang’s passport was taken from him, and he was pressured to sign a contract for lower wages than advertised, locking him in for a longer period than had been promised.

“As soon as we got off the plane, they arranged for us to take a COVID-19 test, and then they had us throw our passports into a box,” Zhang said.

Zhang’s group was taken to work on the Delong Industrial Park project in Sulawesi, part of a Chinese-invested nickel-mining project under the Belt and Road infrastructure initiative.

“They had told us before we left that we’d be working nine hours a day,” he said. “Once we got there, that became nine-and-a-half hours, as well as overtime in the evenings.”

“They would dock your wages if you refused to do overtime.”

Once inside the migrant workers’ camp, Zhang also found that escape was no easy matter, as the place was patrolled by armed guards.

“You basically couldn’t leave the site, and they had security guards with guns guarding it,” Zhang said. “There were people with guns at the dormitory area too.”

There were other changes made to the terms of the contract, too.

“They said it would be for six months, but the boss told us we wouldn’t be going home in six months,” he said. “Before we left, they told us we’d have to leave a month’s wages as a deposit, and that the rest of our wages would be paid monthly, as normal.”

“Once we got there, they didn’t give us any money in the first month, and after that, they just handed out 10,000 yuan (U.S. $1,450) for living expenses,” Zhang said. “The rest of our wages would have to wait until several months after we’d gone home.”

Two undated photos show the conditions workers faced at the Delong Industrial Park project in Sulawesi, Indonesia. [Zhang Qiang]

Brutal work conditions

Once work was under way, Zhang and the other workers were denied breaks and forced to work nonstop in high temperatures doing physically grueling labor. Stopping for a rest or a cigarette would also result in docked wages. They started to hear reports of frequent worker suicides at the site.

In desperation, Zhang and some of the relatives of other workers at the site appealed to the Chinese embassy in Jakarta for help. But the call only resulted in a backlash for the workers from their gang boss.

“The lower-ranking boss [Lu Jun] came to us and said ... have you been watching too many movies? Trying to complain isn’t going to work here,” Zhang said.

When the contracts finally appeared, they stipulated monthly living expenses of 1,000 yuan (U.S. $145), with the full wages only paid six months after the workers’ return to China.

“It was one of those overlord contracts, so we didn’t sign it,” Zhang said.

The workers insisted on going back to China, whereupon they were told that they would have to stump up 75,000 yuan (U.S. $10,830) each. After a period of stalemate, even that offer was withdrawn.

When asked to comment by RFA, Lu Jun said the workers were in breach of contract.

“Originally the deal was that they would work for a year, but two months after they got here, they said they wanted to go back to China,” Lu said. “They would have to pay the cost of that themselves.”

“So then five of them ran away before they’d paid what they owed me.”

But the five workers weren’t out of the woods yet. They managed to find another gang boss, Liu Peiming, and paid him 250,000 yuan (U.S. $36,100) after he said he would have them home within a week.

But he secretly arranged to have them sent to Phase II of the Delong project instead.

“We kept telling them that we wanted to go home, but he didn’t care anymore, and just said there was no way we were getting home for 50,000 yuan (U.S. $7,220) [apiece], and that he’d need another 20,000 to 30,000 yuan (U.S. $2,890 to $4,330),” Zhang said.

Eventually, Zhang and his colleagues got the story out via the media, and higher-ups and Delong got involved.

“We have said they should first refund the 250,000 yuan to us and give us back our passports, because this is illegal detention,” Zhang said.

Liu eventually did return the money, but Delong still has their passports.

Repeated attempts to contact Liu Peiming’s assistant and Delong for comment had resulted in no reply at the time of writing.

Undated photos show the conditions workers faced at the Delong Industrial Park project in Sulawesi, Indonesia. [Zhang Qiang]

Smuggled to Malaysia

Eventually, the group fell in with the proprietor of the Peony Hotel near Phase II, who promised to smuggle them into Malaysia, for which they had to pay 13,000 yuan (U.S. $1,875) each.

“We had to take an eight- or nine-meter (26- or 29-foot) speedboat used for fishing and make a two-hour crossing at sea, making us jump down when the water was shallow enough to stand in,” Zhang said. “As soon as we reached the Malaysian border, the coastguard caught us.”

The Peony Hotel’s proprietor denied taking money from the group when contacted by RFA.

“I recommended an interpreter who could arrange for people to go that route, and put them in touch so they could sort it out between them,” she said. “I also recommended someone in Jakarta who could change their money.”

“Don’t come asking me about it; I never made money out of it.”

Zhang and his four companions eventually made it home to Henan in February 2022 after being deported by the Malaysian authorities.

They are now heavily in debt, leaving them with no choice but to get straight back to work again.

“I wanted to sue them, but there were various debts hanging over me when I got back, so I went back to work,” Zhang said. “Life is so stressful.”

He now works as a courier, and feels he had a relatively lucky escape.

“These sites are completely closed off ... which puts you under a very intense kind of psychological pressure,” Zhang said. “Two people committed suicide during our two months at Phase III, and I read about several more online after I got home, too.”

Since 2010, an estimated 10 million Chinese nationals have taken jobs overseas, with 570,000 believed to still be working overseas as of the end of May 2022, according to the New York-based rights group China Labor Watch.

Many travel on tourist or business visas and work without a contract, however, meaning that the true figure may be far higher. Even where contracts do exist, breaches of their terms are very common, the group said.

benarnews.org

14. As Russians Retreat, Putin Is Criticized by Hawks Who Trumpeted His War

Russian bloggers will be a case study topic as Putin's War is studied in the future.

As Russians Retreat, Putin Is Criticized by Hawks Who Trumpeted His War

Russian bloggers reporting from the front line provide a uniquely less-censored view of the war. But as Russia’s military flails, these once vocal supporters are exposing its flaws, lies and all.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/10/world/europe/russia-ukraine-retreat-putin.html?referringSource=articleShare&smid=nytcore-ios-share&utm_source=pocket_mylist

Give this article

A destroyed Russian military vehicle in Balakliya, in the eastern Kharkiv region, on Saturday.Credit...Juan Barreto/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

By Anton Troianovski

Published Sept. 10, 2022

Updated Sept. 11, 2022, 12:19 a.m. ET

Sign up for the Russia-Ukraine War Briefing. Every evening, we'll send you a summary of the day's biggest news. Get it sent to your inbox.

As Russian forces hastily retreated in northeastern Ukraine on Saturday in one of their most embarrassing setbacks of the war, President Vladimir V. Putin was at a park in Moscow, presiding over the grand opening of a Ferris wheel.

“It’s very important for people to be able to relax with friends and family,” Mr. Putin intoned.

The split-screen contrast was stunning, even for some of Mr. Putin’s loudest backers. And it underscored a growing rift between the Kremlin and the invasion’s most fervent cheerleaders. For the cheerleaders, Russia’s retreat appeared to confirm their worst fears: that senior Russian officials were so concerned with maintaining a business-as-usual atmosphere back home that they had failed to commit the necessary equipment and personnel to fight a long war against a determined enemy.

“You’re throwing a billion-ruble party,” one pro-Russian blogger wrote in a widely circulated post on Saturday, referring to the Putin-led celebrations in Moscow commemorating the 875th anniversary of the city’s founding. “What is wrong with you? Not at the time of such a horrible failure.”

Image

President Vladimir Putin speaking in Moscow on Saturday in a photo provided by the Russian government.Credit...Sputnik, via Reuters

Even as Moscow celebrated, he wrote, the Russian Army was fighting without enough night vision goggles, flak jackets, first-aid kits or drones. A few hundred miles away, Ukrainian forces retook the Russian military stronghold of Izium, continuing their rapid advance across the northeast and igniting a dramatic new phase in the war.

The outrage from Russian hawks on Saturday showed that even as Mr. Putin had succeeded in eliminating just about all of the liberal and pro-democracy opposition in Russia’s domestic politics, he still faced the risk of discontent from the conservative end of the political spectrum. For the moment, there was little indication that these hawks would turn on Mr. Putin as a result of Ukraine’s seemingly successful counteroffensive; but analysts said that their increasing readiness to criticize the military leadership publicly pointed to simmering discontent within the Russian elite.

“Most of these people are in shock and did not think that this could happen,” Dmitri Kuznets, who analyzes the war for the Russian-language news outlet Meduza, said in a phone interview. “Most of them are, I think, genuinely angry.”

The Kremlin, as usual, tried to minimize the setbacks. The defense ministry described the retreat as a decision “to regroup” its troops, even though the ministry said a day earlier that it was moving to reinforce its defensive positions in the region. The authorities in Moscow carried on with their festive weekend, with fireworks and state television showing hundreds lined up to ride the new, 460-foot-tall Ferris wheel.

Image

A banner in Moscow with the “Z” symbol that read “We will complete the task” on Saturday.Credit...Maxim Shemetov/Reuters

But online, Russia’s failures were in plain sight — underscoring the startling role that pro-Russian military bloggers on the social network Telegram have played in shaping the narrative of the war. While the Kremlin controls the television airwaves in Russia and has blocked access to Instagram and Facebook, Telegram remains freely accessible and is filled with posts and videos from supporters and opponents of the war alike.

The State of the War

Ukraine’s Gains: Ukrainian forces appear to have scored the most significant battlefield gains since April by reclaiming territory in the northeast, in a rapid advance that has taken Russian troops by surprise.
Southern Counteroffensive: Military operations in the south have been a painstaking battle of river crossings, with pontoon bridges as prime targets for both sides. So far, it is Ukraine that has advanced.
Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Plant: After United Nations inspectors visited the Russian-controlled facility last week amid shelling and fears of a looming nuclear disaster, the organization released a report calling for Russia and Ukraine to halt all military activity around the complex.
The Road to Rebuilding: With a major conference on post-war reconstruction scheduled for next month, Ukraine’s allies face complicated questions about the process and the oversight of the funds.

The widely followed pro-war bloggers — some embedded with Russian troops near the front line — amplify the Kremlin’s false message that Russia is fighting “Nazis” and refer to Ukrainians in derogatory and dehumanizing ways. But they are also divulging far more detailed — and, analysts say, accurate — information about the battlefield than the Russian Defense Ministry is, which they say is underestimating the enemy and withholding bad news from the public.

One of the bloggers, Yuri Podolyaka, who is from Ukraine but moved to Сrimea following its annexation in 2014, told his 2.3 million Telegram followers on Friday that if the military continued to play down its battlefield setbacks, Russians would “cease to trust the Ministry of Defense and soon the government as a whole.”

It was the bloggers who first rang alarm bells publicly about a possible Ukrainian counteroffensive in the country’s northeast.

Live Updates: Russia-Ukraine War

Updated

Sept. 11, 2022, 10:40 a.m. ET50 minutes ago

50 minutes ago

On Aug. 30, a Kremlin spokesman held his regular conference call with journalists and repeated his mantra: The invasion of Ukraine was going “in accordance with the plans.”

The same day, several Russian bloggers were reporting on social media that something was very much not going according to plan. Ukraine was building up forces for a counterattack near the town of Balakliya, they said, and Russia did not appear in position to defend against it.

Image

A woman riding past a building in the recently liberated town of Balakliya in the Kharkiv region on Saturday.Credit...Juan Barreto/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

“Hello, hello, anybody home?” one asked. “Are we ready to fend off an attack in this direction?”

Days later, it became apparent that the answer was no. Ukrainian forces overran Russia’s thin defenses in Balakliya and other nearby towns in northeastern Ukraine. By this weekend, some analysts estimated that the territory retaken by Ukraine amounted to about 1,000 square miles, a potential turning point in what had become a war of attrition this summer.

“It’s time to punish the commanders who allowed these kinds of things,” Maksim Fomin, a pro-Russian blogger from eastern Ukraine, said in a video published on Friday, claiming that Russian forces did not even try to resist as Ukraine’s military swept forward this week.

Some of the bloggers are embedded with military units and work for state-run or pro-Kremlin media outlets, preparing reports for television while providing more detail on their Telegram accounts. Others appear to operate more independently, relying on personal connections for access near the front line and adding their bank details to their Telegram posts to solicit donations.

Mr. Kuznets, a former Russian war correspondent himself, said that Russian military officials appeared to tolerate the presence of war bloggers despite their occasional criticism, in part because they agreed with the bloggers’ hawkish, imperialist views. And the bloggers play a crucial role in spreading the pro-Russian message on social media, where their audience includes both Russians and Ukrainians.

Still, among some bloggers, the anger over the Russian military’s mistakes reached a fever pitch on Saturday. One called Russia’s retreat a “catastrophe,” while others said that it had left the residents who collaborated with Russian forces at the mercy of Ukrainian troops — potentially undermining the credibility of the occupying authorities all across the territory that Russia still holds.

And while the Kremlin still maintains that the invasion is merely a “special military operation,” several bloggers insisted on Saturday that Russia was, in fact, fighting a full-fledged war — not just against Ukraine, but against a united West that is backing Kyiv.

Image

A Ukrainian soldier at a frontline position near Kherson last week.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times

The stunned fury reflects how some analysts believe many in the Russian elite view the war: a campaign rife with incompetence, conducted on the cheap, that can only be won if Mr. Putin mobilizes the nation onto a war footing and declares a draft.

“I am sure that they reflect the opinion of their sources and the people they know and work with,” Mr. Kuznets said. “I think the biggest group among these people believes that it is necessary to fight harder and carry out a mobilization.”

Both Western and Russian analysts said that Mr. Putin would need a draft to sharply expand the size of his invading force. But he appears determined to resist such a measure, which could shatter the passivity with which much of the Russian public has treated the war. In August, 48 percent of Russians told the independent pollster Levada that they were paying little or no attention to the events in Ukraine.

As a result, analysts say, Mr. Putin faces no good options. Escalating a war whose domestic support may turn out to be superficial could stir domestic unrest, while continuing retreats on the battlefield could spur a backlash from hawks who have bought into the Kremlin narrative that Russia is fighting “Nazis” for its very survival.

Ever since Russia retreated in April from its attempt to capture Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, the Kremlin’s goals in the war have been unclear, disorienting Mr. Putin’s supporters, said Rob Lee, a military analyst at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

“The Ukrainians’ war effort is obvious, it’s understandable, whereas on the Russian side, it was always a question of: What is Russia doing?” Mr. Lee said in a phone interview. “The goals aren’t clear, and how they achieve those goals isn’t clear. If you’re fighting a war and you’re not sure what the ultimate goal is, you’re going to be quite frustrated about that.”

Ivan Nechepurenko contributed reporting.

15. Last reactor at Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant stopped

A new complication in modern warfare in nuclear powered nations and conflict areas.

It seems that part of Russia's long term strategy is to ensure Ukraine has no power generation capability this coming winter.

Last reactor at Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant stopped

AP · by KARL RITTER · September 11, 2022

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Europe’s largest nuclear plant has been reconnected to Ukraine’s electricity grid, allowing engineers to shut down its last operational reactor in an attempt to avoid a radiation disaster as fighting rages in the area.

The six-reactor Zaporizhzhia plant lost its outside source of power a week ago after all its power lines were disconnected as a result of shelling. It was operating in “island mode” for several days, generating electricity for crucial cooling systems from its only remaining operational reactor.

Nuclear operator Energoatom said one of those power lines was restored “to its operational capacity” late Saturday, making it possible to run the plant’s safety and other systems on electricity from the power system of Ukraine.

“Therefore, a decision was made to shut down power unit No. 6 and transfer it to the safest state – cold shutdown,” the company said in a statement.

Energoatom said the risk remains high that outside power is cut again, in which case the plant would have to fire up emergency diesel generators to keep the reactors cool and prevent a nuclear meltdown. The company’s chief told The Associated Press on Thursday that the plant only has diesel fuel for 10 days.

Russia-Ukraine war

Ukraine pushes major counteroffensive as war marks 200 days

Russian troops retreat after Ukraine counteroffensive

EXPLAINER: Ukraine's threatened nuclear plant shuts down

China legislator criticizes sanctions on visit to Russia

The plant, one of the 10 biggest atomic power stations in the world, has been occupied by Russian forces since the early stages of the war. Ukraine and Russia have blamed each other for shelling around the plant that has damaged the power lines connecting it to the grid.

Energoatom renewed its appeal for Russian forces to leave the Zaporizhzhia plant and allow for the creation of a “demilitarized zone” around it.

The International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. nuclear watchdog which has two experts at the plant, confirmed to the AP on Sunday that external power has been restored at Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant.

“After yesterday’s restoration of the power line – which connects the ZNPP to the switchyard of a nearby thermal power station – the operator of the ZNPP this morning shut down its last operating reactor, which over the past week had been providing the plant with the required power after it was disconnected from the grid,” the IAEA said in an emailed statement. “IAEA staff present at the ZNPP were informed this morning about these new developments, which were also confirmed by Ukraine.”

IAEA Director-General Rafael Grossi has called for a safe zone around the plant to avert a disaster.

___

Jon Gambrell and Hanna Ahrirova contributed to this report.

___

Follow the AP’s coverage of the war at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

AP · by KARL RITTER · September 11, 2022

16. On The 21st Anniversary Of 9/11, Al-Qaeda Releases Message By Unnamed Leader Glorifying Preparators

I hate to include this in today's distro. But we must not forget that the enemy is still fighting and seeks our destruction.

On The 21st Anniversary Of 9/11, Al-Qaeda Releases Message By Unnamed Leader Glorifying Preparators

memri.org

The following report is a complimentary offering from MEMRI's Jihad and Terrorism Threat Monitor (JTTM). For JTTM subscription information, click here.

On September 10, 2022, Al-Sahab, the media arm of Al-Qaeda Central Command released a message marking the 21st anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, titled "Gains – The Day Of Criterion, The Day Of Badr, And The Criterion Of The Age On The Day Of September."

The eight-page message, which did not include the name of the author or leader, glorified the 9/11 attackers and depicted the attacks as an extension of the Battle of Badr, a battle lasting several hours that took place in the year 624 between a small group of Muslims led by Muhammad and a larger group from the tribe of Quraysh, resulting in a decisive Muslim victory. The message highlighted the impact of 9/11 on the United States, suggesting that the attacks were the beginning of the U.S. collapse on all levels.

9/11 Attacks As An Extension Of The Battle Of Badr

The message, which has a similar style to those prepared by slain Al-Qaeda leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri, who was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Kabul on July 31, starts by underlining the significance of the Battle of Badr, saying that despite the long record of victories in Islamic history, Badr has special importance due to the scarce resources of the Muslim fighters at that time, who were mostly equipped with their faith and courage.

After a lengthy description of the Battle of Badr, the message addresses the significance of 9/11, stressing that it has a similar impact on the global course of events.

Citing American author Paul Kennedy, who allegedly wrote that 9/11 was a turning point in shaping the events of the 21st century, the message asserted that "America will never return to what it used to be before the collapse of its biggest icons: the Pentagon, the headquarters of the U.S Department of Defense – the greatest power in the human history, and the World Trade Center, a skyscraper that represents its economic hegemony, and the frightening financial dominance of American capitalism."

The 'Timeless' 9/11 Attacks Were Unexpected

The message argues that the importance of 9/11 attacks lay in the fact that they were totally unexpected. "The attacks hit America in a place that it had never considered or expected." Recalling the day of the attacks, the message highlights the leadership of slain Al-Qaeda leader, Osama Bin Laden, saying that the American press reported on the day of the attack that "a Muslim called Osama Bin Laden, in the farthest corners of the earth and in its forests, threw four spears [i.e., airplanes] from Kandahar to Washington and New York, and three of these spears hit America's military and economic hearts."

It further boasted that 9/11 killed more people than those killed in Pearl Harbor attack. Glorifying the impact of the attacks, the message describes them as "timeless Islamic conquest that the whole world watched on live broadcast," adding that "the world has not seen or heard like them before, militarily or strategically."

9/11 Attacks Ignited Strife Among The Crusaders

Elaborating on the impact of 9/11, the message argues that it ignited an internal conflict among the "Crusaders," saying that both Western Europe with its Catholic majority along with Eastern Europe and its Orthodox majority, tried to exploit the attacks "to take down Protestant America" from the leadership of the world.

The message further boasted that 9/11 dealt a heavy blow to the American intelligence community, saying that it cast doubts among the American people and the world about the efficiency of their intelligence services.

"What made the Americans and others wonder: What if this attack was launched by a superpower or even terrorists who possess lethal weapons such as nuclear or bacterial weapons!"

Discussing the economic impact of the attacks, the message underlined that targeting the World Trade Center "paralyzed the global and American economic system."

Poem Praising 9/11 Attackers

The message said in conclusion: "I do not think that anyone, regardless of their analytical skills imagined that nine knights were capable of destroying, 6,000 disbelievers in the country that is well-known for its satellite capabilities and central intelligences, and a producer of accurate spying devices." Praising Allah for granting the 9/11 attackers success in implementing the attacks, the message concluded with a poem praising their bravery that led to a unique assault that humiliated the "American-Crusader arrogance."

The publication included a photo of a forthcoming book by slain Al-Qaeda veteran Abu Mohammad Al-Masry titled "9/11 – Between the Truth And Skepticism."

[1] Genews, As-Sahab, September 10, 2022.

memri.org

17. Putin’s Plot to Charm China Is About to Go Full Blast

Putin’s Plot to Charm China Is About to Go Full Blast

SCROUNGING

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping are slated to meet face-to-face for the first time since Putin launched his war in Ukraine.

Shannon Vavra

National Security Reporter

Updated Sep. 10, 2022 3:45AM ET / Published Sep. 09, 2022 11:54PM ET

The Daily Beast · September 10, 2022

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping are gearing up to meet each other in Uzbekistan in what will be their first face-to-face meeting since Putin invaded Ukraine in February.

The two will meet on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the Russian ambassador to China, Andrey Denisov, told reporters Wednesday, according to TASS. India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan also comprise the SCO.

“This summit promises to be interesting, because it will be the first full-fledged summit since the pandemic,” Denisov said. “I do not want to say that online summits are not full-fledged, but still, direct communication between leaders is a different quality of discussion.”

Xi and Putin did in fact meet on the margins of the Beijing Winter Olympics this February, less than three weeks before the invasion of Ukraine, affirming a union they called a “no limits” partnership, meant to represent their shared vision for the globe and agreeing to work together in opposition to “further enlargement of NATO.”

But this week’s meeting could mark an uncomfortable inflection point in the relationship between the two powers, given the failure of Putin’s Ukraine invasion to achieve its basic strategic aims.

In the early days of the war Xi was unsettled by the way Putin had carried out the invasion, according to a CIA analysis delivered to lawmakers on Capitol Hill, and since, Xi hasn’t outright endorsed the war in Ukraine. But Beijing has pointed out that China believes the United States is the “main instigator” of the war, echoing Kremlin talking points. Their summit could be a signal that although there might be some mistrust in the relationship, the two leaders are interested in deepening their relationship. Especially as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization emerges after Russia’s invasion more united than ever, Xi and Putin have even more reason to enhance their bond.

More than six months into Russia’s war in Ukraine, Putin is feeling the squeeze of sanctions and isolation. In addition to the sanctions, Russia has in recent days halted Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline flows to Europe and, in an attempt to pressure Europe to bend to Putin’s will, has said that the gas exports can return if the west eases up its sanctions on Moscow. U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken urged European nations to not bend to Russia’s “bullying.” And European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has indicated Europe will be bearing down, investing in renewable energies and increasing LNG imports from other countries, even under threat of a tough winter ahead, all in the name of throttling Russian revenues used to fund the war in Ukraine.

In China, though, Russia has a key partner for energy exports. Just this week, Russia announced it would be transitioning its gas shipments to China so they are paid for in rubles and yuan rather than U.S. dollars as part of an effort to reduce Moscow’s reliance on western and U.S. currencies. This year, China has increased its imports of Russian energy resources, and has boosted its purchases of crude, oil products, gas, and coal from Russia to $35 billion since the beginning of the war, compared to $20 billion last year.

Meanwhile in Ukraine, the Russian army has been faltering. Ukrainian forces have been rolling out a counteroffensive in the south of Ukraine in an attempt to seize back Kherson, which Russia captured in the first few days of the war. Ukraine has already been racking up the wins: Taking back two villages in Kherson oblast and, just in recent hours, advancing 50 kilometers into Russian lines in the Kharkiv region, taking back more than 20 villages, according to a Ukrainian general. President Volodymyr Zelensky said Thursday Ukrainian forces have seized over 1,000 square kilometers since the beginning of September, too.

Putin’s forces are not doing well, even according to top Russian brass. Russian military operations are experiencing a slowdown, according to Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. Russians’ supply lines are not doing well in the counteroffensive, the U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said Thursday.

“The Ukrainians have inflicted significant damage to the Russians' supply lines and ammunition supply points and command-and-control nodes,” Austin told reporters Thursday.

And the Ukrainians are not willing to back down on defense yet. Ukrainian military leadership predicted this week that unless there is a dramatic shift in aid to Ukraine to beat back the Russians faster, the war will drag on well into next year. The only path forward for Ukraine must include multiple counterstrikes against Russia, General Valery Zaluzhnyi, the commander-in-chief of the armed forces of Ukraine, and Lieutenant General Mykhailo Zabrodskyi, first deputy chairman of the National Security, Defense, and Intelligence Committee of the Verkhovna Rada, said in an op-ed published this week.

“The U.S.-China relationship is becoming more fraught seemingly by the week.”

The meeting with Xi would not be the first time Russia has leaned on governments sympathetic to Putin’s cause as Russia’s war effort has flagged. This week, two U.S. officials told The Daily Beast that Russia has begun leaning on North Korea for shipments of artillery shells and rockets in an attempt to bolster its military supplies in Ukraine.

But in this case, it’s not just Russia making its case to China. Xi’s vision of the world aligns well with Putin’s—one in which democracy threatens their ascent to power. And the meeting should be significant for Xi, as well, David Shullman, the former Deputy National Intelligence Officer for East Asia on the National Intelligence Council, told The Daily Beast.

“The U.S.-China relationship is becoming more fraught seemingly by the week,” Shullman said. “It’s not a one-sided thing where Russia only needs China because Russia’s facing international pressure and U.S. pressure over Ukraine. From China’s perspective—I’m not saying Russia plays a key role in the Taiwan Strait and crisis in a military sense—but having that partnership and having that relationship with Putin is important.”

Tensions between the United States and China have ratcheted up in recent weeks after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan—which China says it lays claim to. Xi is likely eyeing which partners it can rely on should those tensions come to a head one day. Having watched the United States rally a harsh western response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Xi is likely reframing his thoughts about Taiwan and interested in bolstering Beijing’s relationship with Moscow, Shullman said.

“There is a sense now in China… that China needs to think even more deeply about how to avoid vulnerability to what the United States could do in the economic domain in the event of a Taiwan Strait crisis [and] having as many partners as possible to push back on that.”

The Daily Beast · September 10, 2022

18. Watch: Iranian Cyberspy Caught on Zoom Trying to Hack U.S. Target

All Zoom users beware. Like email and text do not open messages or click on links from addresses you do not know. Do not Zoom with people you do not know.

Watch: Iranian Cyberspy Caught on Zoom Trying to Hack U.S. Target

Yahoo · by Adam Rawnsley

iran hacker video phishing attempt iran-hacker-video.jpg - Credit: Adobe Stock

Last month, a U.S. academic logged into a Zoom meeting with “Samuel Valable.” The academic had heard from “Valable” via a LinkedIn account, suggesting the two meet. When the academic logged on, the figure on the other end came through in grainy stills, blaming a bad internet connection for his lack of live footage. Midway through the conversation, he dropped what appeared to be a Google Books link into the Zoom chat. “This is the book that I use as my main material. It’s down here. I sent it in the little chat box,” says “Valable” in the video as a web link with the name “googlebook” appears in the Zoom chat window.

The academic became suspicious, and thanks to some quick thinking — and with the help of a group of cybersecurity researchers — they’ve captured the first-known public live action-recording of an Iranian cyber-spy at work.

Ukraine’s southern offensive ‘was designed to trick Russia’

Exclusive: Russian forces wrong-footed by attack in Kharkiv region after preparing for offensive in the south

The Guardian · by Isobel Koshiw · September 10, 2022

The much-publicised Ukrainian southern offensive was a disinformation campaign to distract Russia from the real one being prepared in the Kharkiv region, Ukraine’s special forces have said.

Ukrainian forces are continuing to make unexpected, rapid advances in the north-east of the country, retaking more than a third of the occupied Kharkiv region in three days. Much of Ukraine’s territorial gains were confirmed by Russia’s defence ministry on Saturday.

“[It] was a big special disinformation operation,” said Taras Berezovets, a former national security adviser turned press officer for the Bohun brigade of Ukraine’s special forces.

“[Russia] thought it would be in the south and moved their equipment. Then, instead of the south, the offensive happened where they least expected, and this caused them to panic and flee.”

On 29 August, Ukraine’s southern command announced that the long-anticipated offensive in the Kherson region had begun. But soldiers on the Kherson frontline said at the time that they saw no evidence of said offensive or that the active battles taking place were a reaction to an attempted Russian offensive several days earlier.

For the past two weeks, Ukrainian forces in the south took several villages – no small feat given the reported strength of Russian positions and one which nevertheless resulted in injuries.

But the gains were not remarkably different from the steady but limited progress Ukrainian forces had been making in the Kherson region over July and August.

And yet, the capture of these tiny Kherson villages, with populations of a few thousands, suddenly became big international news.

Natalia Humeniuk, a spokesperson for Ukraine’s southern command, had insisted on a “regime of silence” and temporarily banned journalists from visiting the frontlines in Kherson.

But Berezovets said that the media stir around the southern offensive was a coordinated disinformation campaign by Ukraine, targeted at Russian forces, that had been building for several months.

It was successful in provoking Russia to move equipment and personnel to the southern front, including partly from Kharkiv region, said Berezovets.

“Meanwhile [our] guys in Kharkiv were given the best of western weapons, mostly American,” he said.

Part of the special operation involved rooting out informants in Ukrainian-controlled parts of Kharkiv to stop them passing information about Ukraine’s preparations to the Russians, said a military source with knowledge of the operation.

“The [informants] were almost completely cleaned up. They mostly comprised normal Ukrainian civilians but there were some Russian agents undercover as Ukrainian civilians,” said the source. “The Russians had no idea what was going on.”

Russia’s defence ministry has confirmed the retreat, describing it as a regroup. It says it has retreated from Izium and the town of Balakliia to “bolster efforts” on the Donetsk front.

“A three-day operation was carried out on the drawdown and organised transfer of the Izium-Balakliia group of troops to the territory of the Donetsk People’s Republic,” said the defence ministry spokesperson, Igor Konashenkov.

“In order to prevent damage to the Russian troops, a powerful fire defeat was inflicted on the enemy.”

Russian state media and bloggers have confirmed Russian soldiers have been forced to make a large-scale retreat from Kharkiv.

Ukrainian troops have in the past few days pushed Russian forces out of a number of settlements in the region that Moscow occupied since the first days of its invasion.

In a video address late on Friday, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said Ukrainian forces had liberated more than 30 settlements in the Kharkiv region.

A local resident of Izium, who prefers to remain anonymous, said that the Ukrainian troops had entered the city. Before that, “Russian occupying forces were rapidly withdrawing, leaving ammunition and equipment behind”.

Ukraine’s retake of Izium could be its most significant success in pushing back the Russians since the beginning of the invasion.

By capturing the nearby town of Kupiansk, Ukrainian forces have managed to cut off the supply lines for the Russian formations in control of the Izium area,” said Serhiy Kuzan, a military expert at the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Center.

Kuzan said the Russian formations in charge of the south-east area of Kharkiv, labelled the Izium area by military experts, were professional Russian soldiers, not mercenaries or conscripts from Russian-occupied Donbas.

The offensive has been carried out at lightning speed, with a third of occupied Kharkiv being captured by Ukrainian forces in just a matter of days, he said.

The UK’s Ministry of Defence has said Ukraine’s counter-offensive took Russian forces by surprise, adding that Kyiv’s forces had advanced 50km (31 miles) along a narrow frontline and retaken or surrounded several towns.

With Ukrainian operations also continuing in Kherson, the Russian defensive front is under pressure on both its northern and southern flanks,” it said.

“We are actually surprised by how poorly the Russians have retreated,” said Kuzan. “Retreat is part of the art of war. When we retreated, we made sure they suffered losses as they advanced and we did to so to ensure that they only advanced 1, 2, 3 kilometres.

“They were so confident that they didn’t prepare their defences,” he added. “This has shown that the only advantage they have is in the number of artillery pieces and heavy equipment. So all we need is the same amount.”

After the big territorial gains made this week by Ukraine, Moscow is sending columns of military reinforcements to the Kharkiv region, according to reports in Russian media.

The Guardian · by Isobel Koshiw · September 10, 2022

21. Could Russia’s Sudden Ukraine Retreat Mean a Tactical Nuclear Weapons Strike Is Coming?

Thinking the unthinkable.

Could Russia’s Sudden Ukraine Retreat Mean a Tactical Nuclear Weapons Strike Is Coming?

19fortyfive.com · by Michael Rubin · September 10, 2022

How the Situation in Ukraine Could Get Far More Dangerous: After days of a withering Ukrainian counteroffensive, the Russian defense ministry announced that it was withdrawing its forces from two areas in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region. In a video statement, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky quipped, “The Russian army in these days is demonstrating the best that it can do — showing its back.” Ukrainians celebrated, and rightly so. While Russian spokesmen said that Russian forces were “repositioning” ahead of a new offensive, reporters on the ground cast doubt on such pronouncements both because they mirror Russian statements as it abandoned its drive toward Kyiv and also because Russian forces left in such great haste that they left numerous arms and equipment behind.

Western officials are understandably happy. “This [Ukrainian progress] shows the bravery, skills, and determination of Ukrainian forces, and it shows that our support is making a difference every day on the battlefield,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said at a September 9 press conference. Reflecting on his recent trip to Ukraine, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken observed at the same press conference, “Even as President Putin threw as much as he could against Ukraine earlier this summer, Ukraine absorbed the blow and now is pushing back.”

While it is right to celebrate the Russian rout, the war may be entering a far more dangerous phase.

Consider: If Russian President Vladimir Putin tired of attrition and decided to use tactical nuclear weapons, how would Russian behavior—a rapid withdrawal and even leaving key equipment behind—be different? The answer: It would not be.

The Biden administration allowed fear of Russian nuclear weapons to self-deter and to limit deliveries of the weaponry that Ukrainian forces needed in the first weeks of the war. Fortunately, against the backdrop of Ukrainian perseverance, they recognized how unbecoming a policy governed by fear and weakness could be. That does not mean, however, that the United States and NATO should not have a contingency plan both to head off Russian use of nuclear weapons and respond to their use should Putin now cross the line.

The White House and U.S. intelligence community may feel confident that they will have forewarning should Putin give the order to deploy tactical nuclear weapons. They may believe that satellite photographs, signals intelligence, and human intelligence will provide a clear picture. The nature of intelligence, however, is that there is always doubt and deception. Just as late Al Qaeda leader Usama Bin Laden used old-fashioned messengers rather than email or cell phones, so too might some core Russian commanders. During its 2006 war with Israel, Hezbollah successfully demonstrated the ability to conceal long-range missiles, thanks both to diversions designed to be discovered as well as other underground facilities, all built by North Korean engineers. This is not to suggest a North Korean angle to Ukraine, but certainly, Russian strategists look at lessons learned from every conflict.

Nor is it necessarily true that Putin would try to hide in advance tactical nuclear warhead use. In 2012, President Barack Obama drew a “redline” around the use of chemical and biological weapons in Syria. When Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces subsequently used chemical weapons against a Damascus suburb, Obama stood down. Partisans subsequently questioned the existence of a redline. This was disingenuous as senior Obama officials had supplemented press reporting at the time with background press calls to think tankers and opinion leaders to enunciate how serious Obama was about his redline. When that wordplay did not work, many opposed to enforcing the redline shifted tack and argued that from the perspective of the bombs’ victims, it mattered little whether their death came from gas or explosive maiming. After all, the result was the same. Lost was any appreciation for what the end to the stigma associated with chemical weapons might mean for future warfare.

Putin might count on proponents fearful of any robust reaction to resurrect the post-chemical redline arguments in the aftermath of a tactical nuclear strike. He might calculate that Washington and Brussels will always look for a reason not to act or escalate and that both will be willing to engage in logical somersaults to do so. Simply put, Putin might calculate that Washington will paralyze itself until the danger of retaliation passes.

It is for this reason that the White House and NATO should make clear upfront that this will not work. They should detail the pain Russia will suffer should withdrawal be a feint ahead of tactical nuclear use against Ukrainian forces and cities. Such pain should not only include truly crippling sanctions rather than cosmetic half-measures but also include enhancing the ability of Ukraine to expand the zone of hostility to the entirety of Russia, from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean. They should also detail the eventual financial and territorial reparations owed to Ukraine and all countries downwind from any radioactive exposure as well as those countries long victimized by the Russian informal empire.

The free world owes Zelensky a debt of gratitude for refusing White House advice to evacuate ahead of the initial Russian invasion. Biden, to his credit, overcame that mistake and allowed Ukraine’s president to do more than any leader since Winston Churchill to defend freedom and democracy in the face of evil. Zelensky deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.

The policy decisions now looming for Biden may be as great. Celebrations may be premature if Putin seeks to achieve through nuclear weapons what he could not with manpower. To remain silent now, downplay the threat that Russia might use its tactical nuclear weapons, or let fear govern policy will mean the end of the post-World War II liberal order.

As the Ukraine war enters a crucial new phase, it is time both to step up deterrence and plan for what comes after Russian first use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine.

Now a 1945 Contributing Editor, Dr. Michael Rubin is a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Dr. Rubin is the author, coauthor, and coeditor of several books exploring diplomacy, Iranian history, Arab culture, Kurdish studies, and Shi’ite politics, including “Seven Pillars: What Really Causes Instability in the Middle East?” (AEI Press, 2019); “Kurdistan Rising” (AEI Press, 2016); “Dancing with the Devil: The Perils of Engaging Rogue Regimes” (Encounter Books, 2014); and “Eternal Iran: Continuity and Chaos” (Palgrave, 2005).

19fortyfive.com · by Michael Rubin · September 10, 2022

22. On 9/11 Anniversary, End the Self-Delusion About America’s Enemies By H. R. McMaster and Bradley Bowman

Excerpts:

So why does this all matter today? If the United States fails to keep pressure on terrorist groups like al Qaeda, it should expect more attacks on its homeland. But more than that, if Americans don’t demand an end to self-delusion in Washington regarding the nature and objectives of the country’s adversaries and what is necessary to secure its national interests, they should expect more self-defeat when confronting other adversaries—such as Beijing, Moscow, Pyongyang, and Tehran.

Indeed, Americans are witnessing a paragon of self-delusion in the Biden administration’s efforts to reach a new nuclear agreement with Iran. In Tehran, a radical regime is pretending to negotiate in good faith even as it remains as determined as ever to wage a campaign of terrorism against the United States and its partners through proxies while progressing toward a nuclear weapons capability and seeking the destruction of Israel.

On this 9/11 anniversary, Americans should demand better from their leaders and officials in Washington, who might begin with telling the truth about the adversaries the United States confronts. A failure to do so will only invite more disasters in the future.

On 9/11 Anniversary, End the Self-Delusion About America’s Enemies

Foreign Policy · by H. R. McMaster, Bradley Bowman · September 9, 2022

Shadow Government

A front-row seat to the Republicans' debate over foreign policy, including their critique of the Biden administration.

Al Qaeda once again has a safe haven in Afghanistan, endangering Americans.

By H. R. McMaster, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and a former U.S. national security advisor, and Bradley Bowman, the senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Taliban gunmen in Afghanistan in 2001.

Taliban gunmen near Kandahar, Afghanistan on Oct. 31, 2001. BANARAS KHAN/AFP via Getty Images

Sunday marks the 21st anniversary of the terrorist attacks against the United States—planned and launched by al Qaeda from Afghanistan—that killed 2,977 innocent people. Much has changed since then, but following the disastrous U.S. military withdrawal last year, the Taliban once again rule Afghanistan, and al Qaeda enjoys a safe haven there—just as it did on Sept. 11, 2001.

Some may dismiss the tragic outcome in Afghanistan as a sad episode the United States can safely relegate to the history books as Washington focuses on important challenges elsewhere. But nothing could be further from the truth. Threats remain in Afghanistan, and the failure to address the self-delusion in Washington that led to the disastrous withdrawal in the first place will invite future disasters in U.S. policy toward other adversaries.

To understand the persistent malady of self-delusion in Washington, consider U.S. President Joe Biden’s comments in August 2021. “What interest do we have in Afghanistan at this point with al Qaeda gone?” he asked in an effort to justify his decision to withdraw every U.S. service member from Afghanistan. “We went to Afghanistan for the express purpose of getting rid of al Qaeda in Afghanistan. … And we did.”

The problem with such statements is that they were clearly not accurate, as many warned early last year and as the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Long War Journal has documented for many years. The Taliban gave al Qaeda a safe haven to plan 9/11, and the two groups have remained attached at the hip ever since. Indeed, no less than a United Nations monitoring team reiterated in an April 2021 assessment that “the Taliban and Al-Qaida remain closely aligned and show no indication of breaking ties.” You know there is a problem when a U.N. entity has a clearer view of the United States’ enemies than the White House.

As an attempted vindication for the results of its Afghanistan policy, the Biden administration points to the successful U.S. drone strike that killed the head of al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in July in Kabul. But Americans would be wise to ask a few questions: Why did Zawahiri move to the Afghan capital after the United States’ troop withdrawal when he could have stayed where he was or moved elsewhere? What does his eagerness to make Taliban leaders his new landlords and neighbors say about the continued relationship between the two terror groups? What other members of al Qaeda moved into Afghanistan after the U.S. withdrawal? And what have they been doing there?

If the United States fails to keep pressure on terrorist groups like al Qaeda, it should expect more attacks on its homeland.

The White House should not be so foolish as to believe that one strike in a year is sufficient to deprive al Qaeda of the breathing space it needs to plan and launch attacks against the United States and its allies.

Biden’s justification for the withdrawal was just the latest example of a bipartisan habit of self-delusion. In Afghanistan, Washington’s policies and strategies over two decades were based on fictions U.S. leaders told themselves and the American people rather than objective assessments of enemies and adversaries, the situation on the ground, and the necessary actions to secure U.S. interests. This self-delusion has led to self-defeat.

The United States saw that self-delusion in then-U.S. President Barack Obama’s 2009 speech at the U.S. Military Academy, in which he announced his decision to send an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan. In the very next sentence, Obama declared: “After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home.” U.S. troops should not stay in harm’s way a day longer than the country’s interests require, but such declarations signal a lack of resolve and send a counterproductive message to the United States’ adversaries.

The world saw the same Washington self-delusion again in the Trump administration’s 2020 deal with the Taliban and subsequent concessions to the group. These concessions delivered psychological blows to the United States’ Afghan allies that fell more heavily than any physical blows the Taliban could deliver, including negotiating with the Taliban without the Afghan government, not insisting on a cease-fire, forcing the Afghan government to release thousands of imprisoned terrorists, curtailing intelligence support, ending active pursuit of the Taliban, withdrawing close air support from Afghan forces, and terminating contractor support for Afghan forces.

Indeed, declarations of withdrawal by three consecutive administrations emboldened enemies, sowed doubts among allies, encouraged hedging behavior, perpetuated corruption, and weakened state institutions.

The Biden administration failed to learn from the last complete withdrawal: from Iraq in 2011 and the subsequent reemergence of al Qaeda there, soon to morph into the Islamic State. By the summer of 2014, the Islamic State had gained control of territory in Iraq and adjoining Syria roughly the size of Britain and became one of the most destructive and powerful terrorist organizations in history. It turns out that threats don’t subside when one simply ignores realities on the ground, decides to stop fighting, and returns home. In fact, they usually get worse.

The United States and its partners in the region have now deprived the Islamic State of its so-called caliphate in Iraq and Syria because a small number of U.S. troops were kept there to support others bearing the brunt of the fighting. The Taliban-al Qaeda terror syndicate now has an emirate because the United States failed to do the same in Afghanistan.

So why does this all matter today? If the United States fails to keep pressure on terrorist groups like al Qaeda, it should expect more attacks on its homeland. But more than that, if Americans don’t demand an end to self-delusion in Washington regarding the nature and objectives of the country’s adversaries and what is necessary to secure its national interests, they should expect more self-defeat when confronting other adversaries—such as Beijing, Moscow, Pyongyang, and Tehran.

Indeed, Americans are witnessing a paragon of self-delusion in the Biden administration’s efforts to reach a new nuclear agreement with Iran. In Tehran, a radical regime is pretending to negotiate in good faith even as it remains as determined as ever to wage a campaign of terrorism against the United States and its partners through proxies while progressing toward a nuclear weapons capability and seeking the destruction of Israel.

On this 9/11 anniversary, Americans should demand better from their leaders and officials in Washington, who might begin with telling the truth about the adversaries the United States confronts. A failure to do so will only invite more disasters in the future.

H. R. McMaster is a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, a former U.S. national security advisor during the Trump administration, and the author of Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World. Twitter: @LTGHRMcMaster

Bradley Bowman is the senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former advisor to members of the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees. Twitter: @Brad_L_Bowman

23. 10 High-School Questions for the Authors of the ‘Principles’ Open Letter

10 High-School Questions for the Authors of the ‘Principles’ Open Letter

Actual civics students would demand more from the former SecDefs and retired four-stars who opined so vaguely on civil-military “best practices.”

defenseone.com · by Paul Yingling

Recently, eight former Secretaries of Defense and five retired four-star officers took to War on the Rocks to state the obvious: military officers have a duty to support and defend the Constitution. The New York Times declared that the piece “read like a high school civics class.” Having taught high-school civics, I must object. No teacher worthy of the name would ever step in front of a class of high-school students and mumble platitudes devoid of both historical context and contemporary application. Regrettably, the great men who authored this piece did exactly that.

Unlike high-school teachers, cabinet secretaries and generals value personal dignity more than public clarity. These great men arrange their lives so as to avoid being asked hard questions in public. High-school students do not share this perspective; they relish nothing so much as publicly skewering self-important blowhards. Should these great men dare to bring their list of platitudes to a classroom, these are some questions they would face:

1. You wrote, “While the civil-military system…can respond quickly to defend the nation in times of crisis, it is designed to be deliberative.” So here’s my question, for the secretaries: Did this system respond quickly enough to defend the United States on January 6? Or were Pentagon leaders deliberating too long while a mob was beating cops with flag poles and fire extinguishers inside the Capitol?

2. A follow-up: If the system moved too slowly on January 6, what are you doing to change it? If the answer is “nothing,” why are you doing nothing?

3. Another follow-up, this time for the generals and the admiral. According to the New York Times, “It took more than four hours from the time the Capitol Police chief made the call for backup to when the D.C. National Guard troops arrived.” Who has been held accountable for this delay? If nobody, why not? If you don’t know who’s accountable, what are you doing to find out?

4. Back to the secretaries. You wrote, “There are significant limits on the public role of military personnel in partisan politics.” Should Gen. Milley have resigned, not simply apologized, after serving as a political prop in President Trump’s tear-gas-laced march past Black Lives Matter Plaza? Please begin your answer with “yes” or “no.”

5. And for the generals: instead of resigning, Milley reportedly told his staff that he intended to “fight from the inside.” Where in the officer’s oath do we find an obligation to “fight from the inside?” If Milley was “fighting from the inside,” was he violating his oath?

A follow-up: How does the press, including Peter Baker and Bob Woodward, know so much about what Milley was thinking? Where in the officer’s oath is there an obligation to clean up your reputation through selective press leaks?

6. Another question for the generals. You wrote that “because the Constitution provides for only one commander-in-chief at a time, the military must assist the current commander-in-chief in the exercise of his or her constitutional duty to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” What is an officer’s obligation when the sitting commander-in-chief leads an assault against the Constitution, as Trump did on January 6?

7. For the secretaries: Why did it take you so long to say so little? Your letter does not mention Trump’s name, or Milley’s, or anybody else’s. Who was wrong on January 6? What did they do wrong, and why was it wrong?

8. And a follow-up: You wrote, “Civilian leaders must take responsibility for the consequences of the actions they direct.” What civilian leader has taken responsibility for the consequences of the decisions they made on January 6? Begin your answer with a name.

9. For everyone: your letter does not explicitly mention January 6. Why not? And if you’re not writing specifically about that, what events prompted eight former Secretaries of Defense and five retired four-star generals to write an op-ed about the stuff every freshman learns in high-school civics? Be specific.

10. And finally: you wrote that “the U.S. military must…come to terms with wars that ended without all the goals satisfactorily accomplished.” What in the world does that mean? Did the U.S. lose the war in Iraq? How about Afghanistan? Begin your answer with “yes” or “no.”

Paul Yingling is a retired Army officer who lives and writes in Green Mountain Falls, Colorado.

defenseone.com · by Paul Yingling

24. Conservative Groups Urging Lawmakers To Vote ‘No’ On More Ukraine Aid

True colors revealed?

Conservative Groups Urging Lawmakers To Vote ‘No’ On More Ukraine Aid

“This new package will prolong a fight that lacks an American dog, allowing regional allies to shirk their security responsibilities yet again,” one former Trump official said.

defenseone.com · by Jacqueline Feldscher

Conservative groups are lobbying members of Congress to vote against the White House’s request for additional money for Ukraine, arguing that the administration is asking for a blank check with no long-term plan to end the war.

The White House announced Friday that it would request an additional $13.7 billion to help Ukraine between October and December, including $11.7 for security and economic assistance and $2 billion to reduce energy costs that have increased during the war. Congress has already approved two supplemental funding packages, for $13.6 billion in March and $40 billion in May.

Conservative groups, including Heritage Action and Concerned Veterans for America, quickly urged lawmakers to reject the plea for additional aid.

“These funding requests ignore the concerns of the American people, and President Biden refuses to answer basic questions regarding fiscal responsibility and appropriateness of his funding requests,” Jessica Anderson, the executive director of Heritage Action, said in a statement. “U.S. support for Ukraine deserves an open and honest debate without liberal congressional leadership using funding for the U.S. government as a vehicle for Washington’s priorities.

Others, including Russ Vought, president of the Center for Renewing America and former director of the Office of Management and Budget, also slammed the request for more aid.

“The American people are tired of the neoconservative policy consensus that demands billions of their tax dollars be spent to defend the integrity of Ukraine’s border when resources and stewardship cannot be found to address our own,” Vought said. “This new package will prolong a fight that lacks an American dog, allowing regional allies to shirk their security responsibilities yet again.”

After the White House announcement, some right-leaning media organizations published headlines criticizing Republicans who support Ukraine funding, saying that they are ignoring domestic problems, including security at the border with Mexico. An article in The Federalist on Thursday slammed “McConnell and his fellow swamp creatures” for refusing to “put America’s security interests ahead of Ukraine’s.” Fox News’ Tucker Carlson has not yet weighed in on the latest ask, but said in May that “leaders believe protecting Ukraine is more important than protecting you.”

Some Republicans have already vowed not to support the latest request for aid. Rep. Warren Davidson, R-Ohio, tweeted that Ukraine should get “$0.00” while America’s southern border is not secure, especially without a greater financial commitment from NATO and an audit of where the funding is actually going. Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., also criticized the Democrats proposed “spending spree” for Ukraine aid, quipping that “we are the USA, not the US-ATM.”

Davidson and Boebert were among the 57 House Republicans who voted against the $40 billion supplemental bill in May. Eleven Republicans voted against the measure in the Senate.

However, stories in conservative media coupled with right-leaning groups lobbying lawmakers to vote against the additional funds are likely to increase the number of Republicans who oppose this request compared to previous supplementals, said Dan Caldwell, vice president of foreign policy at Stand Together, a nonprofit within the Koch network.

“It creates more political pressure on Republicans to vote no,” he said. “My bet right now is that all that coming together is going to lead to an increase in the numbers of Republicans opposing aid if it’s a standalone vote.”

It may not just be Republicans questioning the long-term strategy of the Biden administration. Marcus Stanley, advocacy director at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, predicted that progressive Democrats who have long pushed back against expensive endless wars may start questioning how the war in Ukraine ends, and pushing the White House to incorporate more diplomacy and negotiation into its strategy for Ukraine, though he noted that they will be less likely to break with the president and oppose the aid than their Republican counterparts.

“I think that people are going to be raising their voice in a much more concerted manner about what’s the exit strategy here? How does this end?” Stanley said. “That will, I think, lay the groundwork for thinking about what the long-term strategy is here, and whether there are any limits to pouring money into an endless war.”

It’s not clear how long the $13.7 billion would last, if it’s approved. Congress authorized $40 billion on May 21, and the White House said Sept. 2 that three-quarters of that money had been committed. If the administration maintains that rate of expenditure, the money could last less than two months, meaning Congress could be considering another supplemental in the lame duck session after the election.

Many Democrats, senior military leaders, and Republicans with more traditional neoconservative views say it’s critical to keep supporting Ukraine—arguing that the fight is about the battle for democracy, and warning that Russian leader Vladimir Putin won’t stop with just Ukraine if he successfully takes the country.

“There must be a sustained political will because this is not just an issue of Ukraine and Russia. This is an issue of freedom and democratic values across the globe,” Sen. Jack Reed, R-R.I., the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said Wednesday at an event hosted by Defense News. “This is a fundamental battle between Putin, an autocrat, and the free world and we have to stay in this fight.”

Army chief Gen. James McConville also said Monday that it’s in the global interest to continue supporting Ukraine as it attempts to drive Russia out of its territory.

“It’s certainly in all of our interests…to bring this unprovoked invasion to some type of solution,” McConville said at the Defense One State of Defense event. “I think most people recognize that.”

Most people do want to keep supporting Ukraine, according to multiple polls. Seven in 10 Americans want to send more weapons and military supplies to the troops fighting against Russia, according to a July poll by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. In a global poll of people in 22 countries released Wednesday by the Open Societies Foundation, more than 60 percent agreed that “this is a confrontation between democracy and authoritarianism.”

defenseone.com · by Jacqueline Feldscher

25. How the Feds Coordinate With Facebook on Censorship

Excerpts:

The civil case was brought by the Attorneys General of Missouri and Louisiana, who allege that misinformation crackdowns by the tech giants are legally “government action,” since they involve “open collusion” with public officials. In a court filing last week, the AGs posted some of what they have already obtained, which they call “a tantalizing snapshot into a massive, sprawling federal ‘Censorship Enterprise.’”

Well, maybe. Many of the email chains read like good-faith interactions between public officials and internet companies worried about clearly false information. What raises eyebrows in some communications, though, is an oozing solicitousness toward top White House advisers. This week the judge granted additional discovery, meaning more emails soon.

***

The trouble with seeing all of the correspondence, some of which dates to the Trump Administration, as inherently illegitimate is that much of it seems to involve actual misinformation. The White House flags the Instagram user anthonyfauciofficial, apparently someone posing as Dr. Anthony Fauci, and asks: “Any way we can get this pulled down? It is not actually one of ours.” The answer from Facebook (most of the names are redacted): “Yep, on it!”

How the Feds Coordinate With Facebook on Censorship

Newly released emails show tech sites working with public officials, often solicitously.

By The Editorial BoardFollow

Updated Sept. 9, 2022 7:05 pm ET

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-the-feds-coordinate-with-facebook-twitter-white-house-social-media-emails-covid-instagram-11662761613?utm_source=pocket_mylist

One nagging question in the social-media age is how online platforms like Facebook and Twitter choose to “moderate” speech—and why, and whether the government is leaning on them to step it up. Hundreds of pages of emails between federal officials and the big social sites were recently dropped in court, and they make for instructive, if not definitive, reading.

OPINION: POTOMAC WATCH

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The civil case was brought by the Attorneys General of Missouri and Louisiana, who allege that misinformation crackdowns by the tech giants are legally “government action,” since they involve “open collusion” with public officials. In a court filing last week, the AGs posted some of what they have already obtained, which they call “a tantalizing snapshot into a massive, sprawling federal ‘Censorship Enterprise.’”

Well, maybe. Many of the email chains read like good-faith interactions between public officials and internet companies worried about clearly false information. What raises eyebrows in some communications, though, is an oozing solicitousness toward top White House advisers. This week the judge granted additional discovery, meaning more emails soon.

***

The trouble with seeing all of the correspondence, some of which dates to the Trump Administration, as inherently illegitimate is that much of it seems to involve actual misinformation. The White House flags the Instagram user anthonyfauciofficial, apparently someone posing as Dr. Anthony Fauci, and asks: “Any way we can get this pulled down? It is not actually one of ours.” The answer from Facebook (most of the names are redacted): “Yep, on it!”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tells Twitter about false claims circulating that some Covid diagnostics were “revoked by the FDA.” Twitter calls the warning “super helpful.” The CDC also flags tweets saying that Covid vaccines contain microchips or that unvaccinated people are at risk “just by being near to vaccinated people.” The Twitter contact responds that “some of these have been previously reviewed and actioned,” and “I will now ask the team to review the others.”

In some messages, a tech giant is doing the asking, especially as new Covid theories keep popping up. Facebook queries the CDC to see if it can “debunk” claims that vaccines in children might cause hepatitis or ALS or possibly “magnetism,” or that they can “alter blood color.”

In replying, the CDC looks careful. Is it a myth that Covid vaccines are ineffective in kids? “CDC can’t speak to this until the pharmaceutical companies have reported data.” Is heart inflammation a risk? “True, there have been increased reports of myocarditis.” The same goes for “Guillain-Barre Syndrome (GBS) in people who have received the J&J/Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine, but not the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.”

A Twitter worker tells the CDC: “My team has asked for examples of problematic content so we can examine trends.” Particularly helpful would be “if you have any examples of fraud—such as fraudulent covid cures, fraudulent vaccines cards, etc.” There’s evidence here that the big social sites were worried about a Gresham’s law of information, with bad Covid information driving out the good, so they welcomed help in correcting the record.

***

More worrying are a few tense emails involving high political appointees who had the White House imprimatur. On July 16, 2021, a reporter asked President Biden about Covid misinformation and his message to sites like Facebook. “They’re killing people,” he said. “Look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated. And they’re killing people.”

That day, a person the AGs describe as “a very senior executive at Meta” sent an email to Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. “I know our teams met today to better understand the scope of what the White House expects from us on misinformation going forward,” the executive says. Oh, is that why it’s called the bully pulpit? In a text message soon after, the exec added: “It’s not great to be accused of killing people—but as I said by email I’m keen to find a way to deescalate and work together collaboratively.”

A week later, the AGs say, “that senior Meta executive” sent a follow-up email. “I wanted to make sure you saw the steps we took just this past week to adjust policies on what we are removing with respect to misinformation,” it says. “We hear your call for us to do more and, as I said on the call, we’re committed to working toward our shared goal of helping America get on top of this pandemic . . . . You have identified 4 specific recommendations for improvement and we want to make sure to keep you informed of our work on each.”

Fascinating. After Mr. Biden publicly accused social sites of killing people, what else did the White House say privately? On Tuesday federal Judge Terry Doughty gave the government 21 days to turn over correspondence that the tech giants might have had with Dr. Fauci, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, and several public-affairs staff at the Department of Health and Human Services.

We already know that Twitter worked with the government to censor Covid commentator Alex Berenson. Bring on more Facebook emails.

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WSJ Opinion: Hits and Misses of the Week

How The U.S. Military Is Confronting The Growing White Nationalist Extremism In Its Ranks

The U.S. military’s revised approach to political speech prohibits retweeting or even “liking” messages that promote anti-government or white nationalist and other extremist groups.

Written By Dwight Stirling

Posted September 9, 2022

newsone.com · by Written By Dwight Stirling Posted 57 mins ago · September 9, 2022

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Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin visits National Guard troops deployed at the U.S. Capitol on January 29, 2021, on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., after the Department of Homeland Security issued a bulletin warning of a continued threat from domestic violent extremists. | Source: Pool / Getty

Less than a month after the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol, Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin took the extraordinary step of pausing all operations for 24 hours to “address extremism in the ranks.” Pentagon officials had been shaken by service members’ prominent role in the events of Jan. 6.

Of the 884 criminal defendants charged to date with taking part in the insurrection, more than 80 were veterans. That’s almost 10% of those charged.

More remarkable, at least five of the rioters were serving in the military at the time of the assault: an active-duty Marine officer and four reservists.

Service members’ involvement in the insurrection has made the spread of extremism – particularly white nationalism – a significant issue for the U.S. military.

Solving the problem

A blue ribbon committee called the Countering Extremist Activity Working Group was quickly commissioned in April 2021 to evaluate the extent of the problem.

The group found about 100 substantiated cases of extremism in the U.S. armed forces in 2021.

The latest instance occurred in July 2022, when Francis Harker, a National Guard member with white supremacist connections, was sentenced to four years in prison for planning an anti-government attack on police. Harker, who carried a picture saying “there is no God but Hitler,” was planning to attack police officers in Virginia Beach, Virginia, with Molotov cocktails and semi-automatic rifles.

Worried, Austin has tightened the rules regarding political speech within the military. The new rules prohibit any statement that advocates for “violence to achieve goals that are political … or idealogical in nature.” The ban applies to members of the military both on and off duty.

Also, for the first time, the new rules prohibit statements on social media that “promote or otherwise endorse extremist activities.”

While the intent behind the new rules is laudable, political speech – even of an offensive or distasteful nature – goes to the core of U.S. democracy. Americans in uniform are still Americans, protected by the First Amendment and afforded the constitutional right of free speech.

In light of the stricter policy, it is useful to consider how courts apply the First Amendment in the military context.

Good order and discipline

While soldiers and sailors are certainly not excluded from the protection of the First Amendment, it is fair to say they operate under a diluted version of it.

As one federal judge observed, the “sweep of the protection is less comprehensive in the military context, given the different character of the military community and mission.”

The “right to speak out as a free American” must be balanced against “providing an effective fighting force for the defense of our Country,” a federal judge noted in a separate case.

These and other federal judges point to the military’s need for good order and discipline in justifying this approach.

While never precisely defined, good order and discipline is generally considered being obedient to orders, having respect for one’s chain of command and showing allegiance to the Constitution. Speech that “prevents the orderly accomplishment of the mission” or “promotes disloyalty and dissatisfaction” within the ranks harms good order and discipline, and can be restricted.

In 1974, for example, the Supreme Court ruled that the Army can punish an officer for encouraging subordinates to refuse to deploy.

The officer’s comments included: “The United States is wrong in being involved in the Vietnam War. I would refuse to go back to Vietnam if ordered to do so.”

In 1980, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Army could legally fire an ROTC cadet for making racist remarks during a newspaper interview.

Explaining his political philosophy, the cadet said: “What I am saying is that Blacks are obviously further behind the whites on the evolutionary scale.”

In 2012, a San Diego district court ruled that the Marine Corps can lawfully discharge a sergeant who mocked president Barack Obama while appearing on the “Chris Matthews Show.” At one point the sergeant told the host: “As an active duty Marine, I say screw Obama and I will not follow his orders.”

While each of these statements is protected by the First Amendment in civilian life, they crossed the line in military life because they were deemed harmful to morale and represented what one federal court described as more than “political discussion … at an enlisted or officers’ club.”

The military’s job is to fight, not debate

In deciding these First Amendment cases, courts often hark back to why the military exists in the first place.

“It is the primary business of armies and navies … to fight the nation’s wars should the occasion arise,” the Supreme Court said in 1955.

In a separate case, the Supreme Court declared: “An army is not a deliberate body. It is the executive arm. Its law is that of obedience.”

Quickly following orders can mark the difference between life and death in combat.

On a national level, the degree to which an army is disciplined can win or lose wars. A mindset of obedience does not come solely from classroom training but from repeated rehearsals under realistic conditions.

As a military judge observed in a 1972 decision, while service members are free to discuss political issues when off duty, the “primary function of a military organization is to execute orders, not to debate the wisdom of decisions that the Constitution entrusts” to Congress, the judiciary and the commander in chief.

New policy bans ‘liking’ extremist messages

The U.S. military’s revised approach to political speech prohibits retweeting or even “liking” messages that promote anti-government or white nationalist and other extremist groups.

Does a restriction this broad comply with legal precedent?

As a law professor who has served more than 20 years in the U.S military, I believe the broader rules will probably be upheld if challenged on First Amendment grounds.

The most comparable case is Blameuser v. Andrews, a 1980 case from the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals where an ROTC cadet espoused white supremacist political views in a newspaper interview.

Amongst other extremist remarks, the cadet told the reporter: “You see, I believe that in the final analysis, the Nazi Socialist Party will take over America and possibly the whole world.”

Finding that the statements harmed good order and discipline, the Seventh Circuit ruled that the Army did not violate the First Amendment when it subsequently removed him from the officer training program.

The cadet’s “views on race relations draw into question his ability to obey commands, especially in a situation in which he regards the military superior as socially inferior,” the Blameuser decision said.

The military has wide latitude in deciding who is deserving of the “special trust and confidence” that comes with military employment. Military officials are free to consider political and social beliefs that are “inimical to the vital mission of the agency” in making hiring and firing decisions, the Blameuser decision said.

Social media posts expressing support for violent political activities will likely be treated in the same way.

As the Seventh Circuit said in Blameuser, by liking or retweeting an extremist message, a service member’s actions are “demonstrably incompatible with the important public office” they hold.

Dwight Stirling, Lecturer in Law, University of Southern California

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

An ex-professor spreads election myths across the U.S., one town at a time

The Washington Post · by Annie Gowen · September 8, 2022

National

David Clements is traveling the country trying to convince local leaders to withhold certification of election results. If he succeeds, it could cause chaos.

September 8, 2022 at 1:10 p.m. EDT

NELIGH, Neb. — One recent still summer night in this tiny city on the Nebraska prairie, more than 60 people showed up at a senior citizens center to hear attorney David Clements warn of an epidemic of purported election fraud.

For two hours, Clements — who has the rumpled look of an academic, though he lost his business school professor’s job last fall for refusing to wear a mask in class — spoke of breached voting machines, voter roll manipulation and ballot stuffing that he falsely claims cost former president Donald Trump victory in 2020. The audience, which included a local minister, a bank teller and farmers in their overalls, gasped in horror or whispered “wow” with each new claim.

“We’ve never experienced a national coup,” he told the crowd, standing before red, white and blue signs strung up alongside a bingo board. “And that’s what we had.”

Clements, who has no formal training or background in election systems, spent months crisscrossing the back roads in his home state of New Mexico in a battered Buick, trying to convince local leaders not to certify election results. His words had an impact: In June, officials in three New Mexico counties where he made his case either delayed or voted against certification of this year’s primary results, even though there was no credible evidence of problems with the vote.

Now, Clements has taken his message nationwide, traveling to small towns in more than a dozen states, with a focus, he said, on places that are “forgotten and abandoned and overlooked.” His crusade to prove that voting systems can’t be trusted has deepened fears among election experts, who say his meritless claims could give Trump allies more fodder to try to disrupt elections in November and beyond.

Republican primary candidates embracing Trump’s stolen election rhetoric have flourished this year. Clements’s strategy is to target his message locally: to county commissioners and clerks, jobs that are lower profile but that wield an outsize role in administering America’s decentralized election system. If local jurisdictions fail to certify their votes, it could throw the outcome of an election into chaos, raising doubt about the results and giving ammunition to losing candidates who refuse to accept their defeat.

Clements is one among a tightknit circle of Trump supporters who travel the country as self-appointed election fraud evangelists. They embrace the instructions of leaders like former Trump adviser turned podcaster Stephen K. Bannon, who has urged election deniers to run for local races and sign up to be poll workers in what he calls his “precinct-by-precinct” takeover strategy.

Like others preaching the gospel of election fraud, Clements has attracted a large following online, where he mixes conspiracies with Christian nationalist and sometimes violent rhetoric. He has appeared on Fox News and on Bannon’s podcast. He’s dined with Trump and Mike Lindell, the chief executive of MyPillow and high-profile election fraud conspiracist.

“We’ve got enough evidence to have indictments, people tried for treason and have the remedy of firing squads. That’s what we need,” Clements told an audience at a New Mexico church in February.

A recent report from congressional Democrats on election misinformation highlighted Clements’ activities, and concluded that “the greatest current threat to democratic legitimacy now comes from lies by domestic actors who seek to convince Americans that their election systems are fraudulent, corrupt, or insecure.”

New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver, who has clashed repeatedly with Clements and his wife, said the “misinformation and disinformation” were being “seeded as core beliefs, not just with elected officials but the general public.”

“I do worry about potential violence toward election officials, in particular around the upcoming general election,” she said.

Clements said in a brief interview in Nebraska that he believes his efforts are noble.

“Why?” he asked. “Because I care about the truth. Because I want to make sure our voices are accurately captured. Because the rule of law needs to exist.”

Pacing the room at the senior center in Neligh, microphone in hand, Clements put the matter in stark terms.

“We’ve figured out how they’re screwing you out of your vote,” Clements said. “That’s the battle. So what’s the solution?”

“Sledgehammers!” a woman at the back of the room yelled out.

A shifting course

Clements, 42, was a popular tenure-track assistant professor teaching law in the business school of New Mexico State University on Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob loyal to Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol. As news of the attack came, he was in his cabin in the mountains of New Mexico with his wife and three young children.

Distraught that Biden’s victory would be validated by Congress despite the insurrection, he has said that he ran outside and fell on his knees, next to the fire pit.

“I said, ‘God save us, please, please save our country,’ ” he recalled in a speech in Michigan last year. He looked back and saw his wife and children standing in the window watching him, weeping. “And something happened. My heart filled … and I heard, ‘We are going to win.’ ”

Clements came down from the mountain filled with zeal and — sitting down in his garage armed with nothing more than a laptop and a “crappy microphone” — soon began posting about alleged election fraud on YouTube. He said he began examining the alleged evidence of fraud in contested states like Georgia and Pennsylvania in the days following the election, and later had some of those who claimed to have observed it firsthand appear on his YouTube videos.

Clements said in an interview that as an attorney he was “eminently qualified” to talk about the legalities surrounding voting machines, and that his wife, Erin, has two decades of expertise working with data as a civil engineer. Neither, however, has experience running elections or formal education in voting machine systems.

No fewer than 86 judges rejected at least one post-election lawsuit filed by Trump or his supporters, a Washington Post review of court filings found.

Clements, who was born in Seattle, grew up the child of itinerant parents who worked blue-collar jobs. Early in his life, he struggled with drugs, alcohol and an assault conviction, he has said.

“I’m a child of the trailer park. My mom worked at Kmart and Lowe’s, my dad bagged groceries,” he said. “Dysfunctional family. At times I felt cursed. I’d see other happy families on vacation while I would bus their tables as an underage kid and say, ‘is this it, Lord?’ ”

But, he said he realized, “God was preparing me for something, to see artifice, to see lies.”

He delved into politics too, serving as a county Republican chair and as an unsuccessful Republican primary candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2014. Later, he served as the vice chair for legal affairs of the state’s Libertarian party.

At New Mexico State University, Clements was known for his engaging lectures, being available to students and grading papers late into the night, according to David Pecchia, a former student and retired Air Force master sergeant who was close to Clements and considered him a mentor. Pecchia wrote a recommendation letter for Clements for a teaching award that recognizes excellence in pre-tenure professors. Clements won last year.

Just weeks later, in October 2021, he was fired, by his own account, for refusing to wear a mask in class. In his disciplinary hearing, which Clements posted online, the university said he violated the school’s covid-19 mask and vaccination policy.

Pecchia said his respect for Clements evaporated one day when he saw his former teacher leading an anti-mask march through a craft market where Pecchia sold his woodworking, causing a disturbance.

“Clements was saying, ‘You’re zombies, man. You’re zombies,’ ” Pecchia recalled. “This guy has gone off the deep end. It’s like he’s been radicalized somehow. It was a complete change. I never ever got the impression he was so radical about things like that and I felt stupid I had submitted a letter for this guy nominating him for this great award.”

Anti-vaxxers quickly embraced Clements, with far-right Colorado podcaster Joe Oltmann creating an online fundraiser for him and calling him “a lightning rod of truth and courage.” The appeal has since brought in more than $304,000 in donations, including from donors who say they support his “election integrity” crusade. Clements says he is not paid for his appearances but asks for donations for travel expenses at the door.

As his zeal over election fraud heightened, other associates fell away.

“Given his intelligence and accomplishments, the fact that he’s decided to pursue this provably false theory is tragic and surprising,” said Chris Luchini, the head of the Libertarian Party of New Mexico and a former colleague of Clements.

Pressing on, on foot

In October, around the time he was fired from his university job, David and Erin Clements mailed a 261-page document to commissioners and county clerks across New Mexico alleging widespread issues with the voting systems — what the congressional report called “imaginary fraud.”

Asked for comment, Erin Clements sent a video of Democratic lawmakers raising concerns about election security. Many of the comments predated the 2020 election and focused on the potential for foreign interference. The U.S. intelligence community has continued to warn that foreign actors are likely targeting American elections.

David and Erin Clements claimed that the state’s voting tabulators are insecure and miscount votes. They also alleged that unnamed bad actors “massively” manipulated voter registration rolls, allowing people to illicitly vote in the last presidential election.

The couple soon found an ally in Couy Griffin, a flamboyant former Disneyland Paris rodeo cowboy who until this week was a member of the county commission in Otero, a rural New Mexico community of 69,000 along the Texas border. Griffin, who was once thanked by Trump for saying “The only good Democrat is a dead Democrat” and who was convicted of a misdemeanor for entering a restricted area during the Capitol riot, has long alleged the 2020 presidential election was stolen. A state judge on Tuesday ordered Griffin removed from office, citing his role in having “aided the insurrection” on Jan. 6, 2021.

“This is a nonpartisan issue,” Griffin said in an interview. “Whether you are a Democrat or a Republican we should all want to make sure our elections are secure.”

Griffin said David Clements “knows what he’s talking about,” and that he is the kind of expert Griffin wants to explain complicated voting systems to him, rather than the election officials in his own county.

By March, volunteers organized by David and Erin Clements calling themselves the New Mexico Audit Force were going door-to-door in Otero County asking citizens about how they voted in 2020. The canvass was part of a controversial third-party audit that commissioners had voted to spend nearly $50,000 on in January, despite the fact that the county went overwhelmingly for Trump, with the incumbent winning nearly 62 percent of the vote.

The effort sparked a voter intimidation inquiry by the House Oversight Committee. The audit later fell apart, with the firm hired to analyze the results agreeing to return part of its initial payment, stipulating they had found no evidence of fraud.

But David and Erin Clements pressed on, appearing before the three-member, all-Republican Otero commission with a new target: the state’s June 7 primary. David Clements urged commissioners not to perform their statutory duty to certify the results, arguing that doing so would place them in legal jeopardy because of the problems they alleged with the machines. The county’s attorney disagreed, calling the argument “highly unlikely.”

Yet two independent election security experts who have examined the Clements’ work — Susan Greenhalgh, senior adviser on election security for the nonprofit Free Speech For People, and Kevin Skoglund, president and chief technologist for the nonpartisan Citizens for Better Elections — said the fraud charges are baseless and misleading. New Mexico’s Secretary of State has also rejected the allegations.

A document that David Clements claims shows a failure to update voter check-in machines for 11 years is inaccurate, since the state uses a different check-in system, the Secretary of State’s office said.

The claim that the volunteer canvassers found dozens of “ghost voters” at one address turned out to reference the post office box at a nearby military base.

Clements also asserted that the digital file containing the ballot from the 2020 elections had been deliberately “wiped” from the voting machines when in fact separate files are created for each election and the ballots and other records are preserved.

“Their reports on election fraud are a jumble of conspiracy theories and full of errors. They are wrong about voting technology, election processes, certification, and legal requirements,” Skoglund said. “They even quote me and cite my work on voting systems with modems and internet connectivity, but I disagree with every conclusion they draw from my work.”

“I don’t think he understands what he’s talking about most of the time,” said Greenhalgh. “He takes things and extrapolates them to a place that comes completely out of thin air. It sounds good and people believe it because it sounds authoritative if you don’t know much.”

The “fanciful arguments” of conspiracists obscure the country’s real need to continue to address election vulnerabilities, she said, such as internet voting — 31 states and the District of Columbia allow it for overseas, military and in some places disabled voters — as well as outdated paperless voting machines.

Clements’ allegations extend to voting machines made by multiple companies, including Dominion Voting Systems, which are used in New Mexico and have been the target of false claims by Trump supporters. Those claims are rooted in a 2020 election night error by the clerk in a Michigan county that resulted in the heavily Republican area briefly reporting that Biden had beaten Trump there. The error was quickly corrected, but the damage was done.

Dominion officials have denied all allegations made against the company, filing multibillion-dollar defamation lawsuits against various people who spread the claims.

“This is yet another example of how lies about Dominion have damaged our company and diminished the public’s faith in elections,” Dominion spokeswoman Stephanie Walstrom said of Clements.

In his own backyard: claims of fraud

At the June hearing in Otero, David and Erin Clements turned up to a crowded meeting room to give the commission a nearly three-hour update on their “findings.” The couple’s conclusions prompted Griffin to chastise his own clerk, Robyn Holmes, a Republican who has thirty years of experience running elections in the county.

“If I was in your position I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night,” Griffin said to Holmes. “You’re in the middle of elections that are fraudulent right now if what they’re telling us is true.”

“If what they’re telling us is true,” Holmes said, shouting, “IF!”

Toward the end of the meeting, Donna Swanson, a former presiding poll judge in Otero County who worked with Holmes for years, stepped up to speak.

“I totally take exception to the idea that Robyn Holmes — our Republican clerk — doesn’t know what she’s doing. So who is the leader here today?” Swanson asked. “Is it my county commissioners or these people sitting here who had lunch with Donald Trump and the MyPillow guy?”

On June 17, the state’s deadline to certify election results, Clements drove several hundred miles in his old Buick, hoping to stop commissions across New Mexico from okay’ing the votes. He appeared first in Torrance County, where he led off comments at a raucous meeting. Citizens hurled insults at leaders voting for certification, calling them “cowards,” “traitors to our country” and “rubber stamp puppets.”

In Sandoval County, Clements had so riled residents that the commissioners had to be removed from the hearing room by sheriff’s deputies for their safety after voting 4-1 to approve the results, according to County Commissioner Katherine Bruch, a Democrat.

In Otero, two commissioners who had voted not to certify earlier in the week reversed their decisions and approved the results, bowing to an emergency order from the state’s Supreme Court that mandated them to follow their statutory duty.

Griffin, the only dissenter, called his vote in from Washington, where he had just been sentenced to 14 days in jail — time served — for his role in the Capitol attack.

“My vote to remain a no isn’t based on any evidence, it’s not based on any facts, it’s only based on my gut feeling and my own intuition, and that’s all I need,” Griffin said, his drawl tinny on the speakerphone.

The Otero controversy is far from over. On Aug. 11, Clements and his wife presented the final findings of their “audit” in a special five-hour commissioners meeting, during which he got into a shouting match with the county attorney and told Holmes she should resign because it was “disgusting how you fight the people.” She left the meeting in tears.

Holmes has grown so disheartened by the couple’s oft-repeated allegations that she has stopped coming to meetings unless asked for. “I was to the point that, ‘You guys aren’t even telling half-truths anymore,' ” she recalled. “It’s all falsehoods and speculation. I’m not going to sit and argue with that.”

In the end, the commissioners voted to sue the secretary of state’s office for forcing them to certify the primary results. Their county attorney, R.B. Nichols, advised that the “frivolous lawsuit” would “not pass muster” in court and would cost the county more than $100,000.

That day, Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released their report into the threat of election misinformation. It singled out “fraudulent” audits in Maricopa County, Ariz., and Otero County as key drivers in an effort by “malicious domestic actors” to erode trust in American democracy.

A call for action

At the meeting at the Nebraska senior center in early August, Clements appealed to his audience to get on social media and to keep showing up at county commission meetings, again and again, until local leaders are worn down and give in. All they need to do to change the system, he assured them, is to win over a handful of commission votes.

“We’re in a contest of wills. Who is going to break whose will?” Clements said. “I’m not asking you all to storm the beaches of Normandy, to suffer a bloody death to save our republic. I’m asking you all to consider showing up to an air-conditioned building, organizing, opening your mouth and saying: ‘These machines suck. I know they do. I don’t want them. Make them go away.’ ”

One woman told him she and others in her county were planning to have a days-long outdoor slumber party near her county’s one ballot drop-box before the November election to guard it from being stuffed with ballots — a fear propagated by the debunked film 2000 Mules.

A rancher named Dave Wright raised his hand to say that it was obvious to him the Democratic National Committee had figured out how to cheat, so why couldn’t the Republicans do so as well?

Clements ended on a mournful note just before the audience began trickling out into the quiet evening, the sun setting over fields of thirsty corn.

“I stand before you as someone who used to be an award-winning professor, an award-winning prosecutor — who is unemployed,” Clements said. “I come to you as someone who had a future. And if we don’t fix our country, I can’t go back to that world.”

Magda Jean-Louis and Alice Crites contributed to this report.

The Washington Post · by Annie Gowen · September 8, 2022

28.

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Senior Advisor, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

VIDEO "WHEREBY" Link: https://whereby.com/david-maxwell

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

V/R

David Maxwell

Senior Fellow

Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Phone: 202-573-8647

Personal Email: d avid.maxwell161@gmail.com

Web Site: www.fdd.org

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Subscribe to FDD’s new podcast, Foreign Podicy

FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.

If you do not read anything else in the 2017 National Security Strategy read this on page 14:

"A democracy is only as resilient as its people. An informed and engaged citizenry is the fundamental requirement for a free and resilient nation. For generations, our society has protected free press, free speech, and free thought. Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data. The American public and private sectors must recognize this and work together to defend our way of life. No external threat can be allowed to shake our shared commitment to our values, undermine our system of government, or divide our Nation."

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