Reading court docs of the Marine who firebombed that Planned Parenthood clinic was wild.

The profile: Smart, raised upper-class in Orange County, supportive stepdad, mom a clinical psychologist. High school atheist club. Converted adult Tradcath. Autism/ADHD. Terminally online. Joined the Marines as a Farsi language analyst. But he didn't get to deploy in 5 years so he called the Chinese and Russian embassies in DC because he was considering offering his services as a mole.

Other Marines said he'd just say the worst things, but they said nothing.

Photos I took for @starsandstripes of airmen in Incirlik Air Base in Turkey unloading pallets of humanitarian aid for earthquake survivors. They've unloaded 423 cargo aircraft since relief efforts began, I'm told. ~4,234 people and 36 rescue K-9s have flown into the base as well. Airmen push a pallet of humanitarian aid off a cargo plane while deployed to Incirlik Air Base, Turkey, Feb. 22, 2023. Senior Airman Robin Mercer, in front, is normally deployed to Germany but was sent to Turkey on short notice after earthquakes on Feb. 6.

A Biden senior administration official confirms the U.S. has secured Mark Frerich’s release, in an email.

In exchange, "the President made the difficult decision to grant clemency to Haji Bashir Noorzai after he spent 17 years in U.S. Government custody," the official said. A jury found Noorzai guilty of heroin importation and distribution conspiracy charges in 2008. He is considered one of the closest figures to the founder of the Taliban movement, Mullah Mohammad Omar Mujahid.

A 17-year-old boy reunited with his family at Ramstein Air Field on Friday after they were separated during the chaotic evacuation from Afghanistan, State Department officials said. For @starsandstripes.

stripes.com/theaters/middl… @starsandstripes Photos from Hangar 5, at Ramstein Air Field, where Afghan evacuees prepare to board their plane to America.
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Asadullah, a 17-year-old, waits near his family before taking a flight to the U.S. Sept. 1, 2021.

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I've compiled some stories I wrote and some things learned from reporting for @starsandstripes over the last 3.5 years in Afghanistan. We didn't get much attention at the time but I and other reporters wrote some stories that in retrospect help explain why Kabul fell.

https://twitter.com/JpLawrence3/status/1427745380662403082

In my first few weeks in Afghanistan I traveled to Taliban territory during a historic ceasefire. Taliban fighters and government soldiers hugged and shared selfies. The general I was with visited checkpoints that had gone unsupplied for weeks...
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stripes.com/theaters/middl…

This is the worst passage in the story, which isn't as much of a hagiography as I feared.
Still, this is so tired.
Plenty of super fit, well-read, motivated, seemingly well-meaning American generals with the right look and background came to Afghanistan and left it worse off.

https://twitter.com/billroggio/status/1419625383712993281

Like sure, Gen. Miller got a bad hand. But these glowing profiles about him seem off, when he made a gamble to protect a bad peace deal with the Taliban, hid the war from the American people, and saw the Taliban hold the most territory since 2001 under his watch.

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A few notes on Gen. Kenneth "Frank" McKenzie's press conference in Kabul.

McKenzie, top U.S. general in Afghanistan, was in town to reassure the Afghan govt about support the U.S. can give.

In the short term, this means air strikes. After Aug. 31? Things get tricky. 2/10
A big topic was US air strikes:
"The United States has increased airstrikes in the support of Afghan forces over the last several days,” McKenzie said. “We're prepared to continue this heightened level of support in the coming weeks if the Taliban continue their attacks."

A thread of items I bought from the shops outside Bagram Airfield, the largest US/NATO base. The rapid closure of the base since May flooded shops near the base with items thrown out by soldiers packing up.
1/7 Bought some books discarded by a soldier at Bagram. Troops leaving Afghanistan must have not have seen the value in the story of an overlong war that seemingly only existed to give opportunities for elite warriors to be heroic, and on those warriors having trouble coming home
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Raw sewage pours into the fetid waters of Kabul River each day, including some of what comes from the US Embassy and the military hq for Resolute Support NATO.

Reporters at @starsandstripes followed this story for months. Here's what we found:
stripes.com/news/sewage-fr… 2/10
Each night, sewage trucks from all over Kabul, Afghanistan dump their loads at the Makroyan Waste Water Treatment Plant, the only legal dumping site in the city. But the plant hasn’t worked for ~two years because of poor maintenance (grass grows in the crack of a key pipe).

Armed taliban and Afghan soldiers hugged and took selfies last night in Logar to celebrate the first day of Eid's dual cease-fires. Brig. Gen. Abdul Raziq Safi went to investigate reports of armed taliban milling around. He got out of his suv, and hugged and took photos with known taliban such as these two youth (said to be taliban by soldiers in the ANA 203rd Corps. @starsandstripes.