On October 4, four American Special Forces soldiers were ambushed and slain on the border of Niger and Mali. Their killers were members of an ISIS-affiliated guerrilla group.
The next day, President Donald Trump attacked one of his favorite targets—the free press—as “fake news.”
Over the weekend of October 7-8, Trump went golfing. Then he took to Twitter and let his venom flow. His victims included:
- The National Football League;
- Puerto Rico;
- North Korea;
- Bob Corker, Republican United States Senator from Tennessee and the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
For 12 days after the tragedy, Trump said nothing.
Then, during an October 16 press conference in the White House Rose Garden, a reporter asked him about his silence.
So Trump claimed—falsely—that earlier Presidents—including Barack Obama—had never or rarely called or written family members of soldiers who died on duty.
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Donald Trump
But it was his call to Myeshia Johnson, the widow of Sergeant La David Johnson, that ignited a firestorm.
According to Florida Democratic Representative Frederica Wilson, Trump’s condolence call was brutally insensitive. Wilson was riding in a limousine with Johnson and heard the conversation on speakerphone.
“He knew what was signing up for, but I guess it hurts anyway,” Wilson quoted Trump as telling the grieving widow.
Cowanda Jones-Johnson, a family member who raised Johnson, told CNN that Wilson’s account of the call was “very accurate.”
Veterans such as Arizona United States Senator John McCain have expressed their outrage at Trump’s callousness. But this shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone.
On January 21, Donald Trump—on his first full day as President—visited CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
Officially, he was there to pay tribute to the men and women who dedicate their lives to discovering when and where America’s enemies are planning to strike. And to countering those threats.
And now Trump was appearing before what, to CIA employees, was the agency’s most sacred site: The star-studded memorial wall honoring the 117 CIA officers who had fallen in the line of duty.
So Trump spent much of his time talking about himself.
Among the worst examples:
- Somebody said, are you young? I said, I think I’m young. You know, I was stopping—when we were in the final months of that campaign, four stops, five stops, seven stops. Speeches, speeches, in front of 25,000, 30,000 people, 15,000, 19,000 from stop to stop. I feel young….
- And I was explaining about the numbers. We did a thing yesterday at the speech. Did everybody like the speech? I’ve been given good reviews. But we had a massive field of people. You saw them. Packed. I get up this morning, I turn on one of the networks, and they show an empty field….
- And they said, Donald Trump did not draw well. I said, it was almost raining, the rain should have scared them away, but God looked down and he said, we’re not going to let it rain on your speech…..
- So a reporter for Time magazine—and I have been on their cover, like, 14 or 15 times. I think we have the all-time record in the history of Time magazine.
Crowds at Trump and Obama Inaugurals
In February, Trump approved and ordered a Special Forces raid in Yemen on an Al-Qaeda stronghold.
The assault resulted in the death of Navy SEAL Chief Petty Officer William “Ryan” Owens.
Disavowing any responsibility for the failure, Trump said:
“This was a mission that was started before I got here. This was something they wanted to do. They came to me, they explained what they wanted to do—the generals—who are very respected, my generals are the most respected that we’ve had in many decades, I believe. And they lost Ryan.”
* * * * *
Seventy-four years before Donald Trump took office as President of the United States, Adolf Hitler suffered a blow from which he never recovered: The surrender of his once-powerful Sixth Army at Stalingrad.
For five months, 330,000 of the German army’s finest troops had fought to capture that city on the Volga River. Then they had been surrounded by even larger Russian armies and became the besieged.
Finally, on February 2, 1943, their commanding general, Friedrich Paulus, surrendered.
Adolf Hitler flew into a rage.
- Not at the loss of 150,000 Germans who had been killed.
- Not at the agonies of the tens of thousands of others wounded.
- Not at the suffering of the 91,000 men taken prisoner.
No, what infuriated Hitler was the refusal of General Friedrich Paulus to commit suicide rather than surrender.
Knowing that no German field marshal had ever allowed himself to be taken prisoner, Hitler had, by wireless, promoted Paulus—shortly before he chose to do so.
“When the nerves break down, there is nothing left but to admit that one can’t handle the situation and to shoot oneself,” screamed Hitler.
“This hurts me so much because the heroism of so many soldiers is nullified by one single characterless weakling.”
In April, 1945, with Russian troops about to capture Berlin, Hitler, 50 feet below ground in a fortified bunker, blamed his defeat on the Germans who had given him their unconditional loyalty for 12 years.
For egomaniacal tyrants, blame always falls on others.
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MERCENARIES: NO FEAR OF GOD, NO LOYALTY TO MAN
In Bureaucracy, History, Military, Politics, Social commentary on November 7, 2017 at 12:03 amOn October 4, four American Special Forces soldiers were ambushed and gunned down at the border of Niger and Mali.
For 12 days after the tragedy, President Donald Trump said nothing.
Then, during an October 16 press conference in the White House Rose Garden, a reporter asked him about his silence.
Donald Trump
So Trump claimed—falsely—that earlier Presidents—including Barack Obama—had never or rarely called or written family members of soldiers who died on duty.
But it was his call to Myeshia Johnson, the widow of Sergeant La David Johnson, that ignited a firestorm.
According to Florida Democratic Representative Frederica Wilson, Trump’s condolence call was brutally insensitive. Wilson was riding in a limousine with Johnson and heard the conversation on speakerphone.
“He knew what was signing up for, but I guess it hurts anyway,” Wilson quoted Trump as telling the grieving widow.
But maybe Sergeant Johnson didn’t know what he was signing up for.
On October 19, Pentagon officials said that a private contractor airlifted some of the troops from the scene.
Trump had sent a private aviation contractor—instead of the U.S. military—to retrieve the bodies of the four soldiers killed in Niger.
Robyn Mack, an official for U.S. Africa Command, said Texas-based Berry Aviation was “on alert during the incident and conducted casualty evacuation and transport for US and partner forces.”
Sergeant Johnson’s body was left behind when the bodies of his three fellow soldiers were evacuated. His remains were recovered two days after the extraction by Nigerien troops.
Even worse, his corpse had been so corrupted by heat that the Pentagon demanded a closed coffin for his burial service.
Contractor aircraft are typically not armed, though their crews may carry side-arms for personal protection.
It’s possible that lightly-armed private contractors were so eager to leave the danger area they did a slapdash search for bodies—and accidentally left Johnson’s behind.
Berry Aviation has also done Defense Department work in Afghanistan, Central African Republic and Burkina Faso.
Since the end of the Cold War, the American military and Intelligence communities have grown increasingly dependent on private contractors. In the past, such groups were called mercenaries.
In his 2007 bestseller, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, Tim Weiner writes:
“Patriotism for profit became a $50-billion-a-year business….The [CIA] began contracting out thousands of jobs to fill the perceived void by the budget cuts that began in 1992.
“A CIA officer could file his retirement papers, turn in his blue identification badge, go to work for a much better salary at a military contractor such as Lockheed Martin or Booz Allen Hamilton, then return to the CIA the next day, wearing a green badge….”
Much of the CIA became totally dependent on mercenaries. They appeared to work for the agency, but their loyalty was actually to their private companies. The CIA thus had two workforces-–but the private one was paid far better.
Wrote Weiner: “Legions of CIA veterans quit their posts to sell their services to the agency by writing analyses, creating cover for overseas officers, setting up communications networks, and running clandestine operations.”
One such company was Total Intelligence Solutions, founded in 2007 by Cofer Black, who had been the chief of the CIA’s counter-terrorism center on 9/11.
His partners were Robert Richer, formerly the associate deputy director of operations at the CIA, and Enrique Prado, who had been Black’s chief of counter-terror operations at the agency.
Future CIA hires followed suit: Sign up for five years, win that prized CIA “credential” and sign up for far more money with a private security company.
This situation met with full support from Right-wing “pro-business” members of Congress and Presidents like George W. Bush.
They had long championed the private sector as inherently superior to the public one. And they saw no danger that a man dedicated to enriching himself might put greed ahead of safeguarding his country.
One of Trump’s key military advisers is Erik Prince, the former head of Blackwater. Under President George W. Bush, the now-infamous mercenary company got $1 billion to provide security for American officials and soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Blackwater was also accused of abusing Iraqis and engaging in torture.
There were, however, others who could have offered a timely warning against this use of mercenaries-–had there been leaders willing to heed it.
One of these, reaching back more than 500 years ago, was the Florentine statesman, Niccolo Machiavelli, who famously warned of the dangers of relying on mercenaries.
Niccolo Machiavelli
In The Prince, Machiavelli writes:
“Mercenaries…are useless and dangerous. And if a prince holds on to his state by means of mercenary armies, he will never be stable or secure. For they are disunited, ambitious, without discipline, disloyal. They are brave among friends; among enemies they are cowards.
“They have neither the fear of God nor fidelity to man, and destruction is deferred only as the attack is. For in peace one is robbed by them, and in war by the enemy.”
Centuries after Machiavelli’s warning, Americans are realizing the bitter truth of it firsthand.
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