So many journalist colleagues have raised their hands to donate ZOOM calls and more for our @HomesForOurTrps auction to raise $$ to build specially-designed homes for severely wounded veterans!
Just before dawn on this day in 2009, roughly 400 insurgents surrounded 53 US soldiers stationed in a valley at Combat Outpost Keating. 1/
2/ The COP had been built in 2006 as a way for the US to better bond with locals in neighboring Kamdesh. Just 14 miles from the border with Pakistan, COP Keating was located in gorgeous and legendarily inhospitable Nuristan province.
3/ Over the years US soldiers were killed on their way to build COP Keating, killed defending COP Keating, killed trying to help Afghans while stationed at COP Keating. It was a dangerous and vulnerable outpost and the US was preparing to shut it down.
The US taking out al Qaeda's Ayman al-Zawahiri the same weekend as the Saudis fund a golf tournament at Trump's Bedminster is interesting timing, and further underlines the Saudi government pushing back against any investigation into its possible involvement in 9/11. But ... 1/
2/ ...even if possible Saudi government involvement in 9/11 doesn't bother you, nor do the Saudi roots of 15 of the 19 hijackers plus Osama bin Laden plus much of the funding for al Qaeda...there are plenty of other reasons to not want to partner with the Saudis...
3/ US Intel assessed that Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman (whom Biden infamously fist-bumped) "approved an operation in Istanbul, Turkey to capture or kill Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi," who lived in the US and wrote for the Washington Post.
THREAD on Trump this past week defending his lucrative partnership with the Saudis regarding the LIV golf tournament telling ESPN that "nobody has gotten to the bottom of 9/11."
2/ Trump seemingly said this as a way of letting the Saudis off the hook.
The truth is, beyond the 9/11 Report, there’s still much we don’t know about the Saudi government role on 9/11 — but Trump was an impediment to releasing that information.
3/ @TerrySStrada, an activist for 9/11 families, shares this photo of her and her daughter at the Trump White House on the anniversary of 9/11 in 2019 to lobby for Trump to declassify FBI documents related to investigating the Saudi government role in 9/11.
2/ "We assess that Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman approved an
operation in Istanbul, Turkey to capture or kill Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi..."
3/"..The IS-member Saudi team that arrived in Istanbul on 2 October 2018 included officials who worked for, or were associated with, the Saudi Center for Studies and Media Affairs (CSMARC) at the Royal Court...
The below statue of traitorous Confederate General Edmund Kirby Smith -- who surrendered on June 2, 1865, in Galveston, Texas, and fled to Mexico then Cuba to avoid arrest for treason (later returning to Florida) -- is gone, and today is being replaced with a new one.... 1/
...that of civil rights activist Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, born on this day in 1875, a VP of the NAACP, adviser to FDR, founder of a school for Black girls that ultimately became Bethune-Cookman College, and so much more. 2/
In 2019, @GovRonDeSantis formally requested that the Architect of the U.S. Capitol replace the Kirby statue with one of Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, "represent(ing) the first African American to have a state-commissioned statue in National Statuary Hall." 3/
Former Trump WH Comms director @Alyssafarah says she sees former Trump WH deputy chief of staff (and Secret Service agent) Tony Ornato's reported dispute with Cassidy Hutchinson's testimony he told her the story of Trump lunging at USSS agent Engel through a specific lens...
2/ That lens being that she says she has told the truth under oath to the @January6thCmte only to have Ornato dispute her claim while NOT under oath.
This was regarding Farah's testimony about the police clearing of Lafayette Square in June 2020...
3/ Farah says she told the Committee that she told Ornato and Meadows "to give a warning to the press that they’d be clearing the park so members of the press wouldn’t get hurt. He said on the record to reporters it was untrue." But, Farah says, "half a dozen people heard it.”