He Killed for The CIA. Trump Blames Afghan Culture Instead of Langley's (Director's Cut)

Unpaywalled text edited by Sam Thielman. Column edited by Zeteo 

BEFORE WE GET to the subscriber paywall with my latest Zeteo column: Pentagon spokeswoman Kingsley Wilson called an abrupt press conference this morning in the wake of the explosive Washington Post account of the Sept. 2 execution ordered by Sec. Hegseth and Adm. Bradley in the waters near Venezuela. It was her first presser with the right-wing influencers and outlets who signed a pledge only to report what the building spoonfeeds them. Predictably, Wilson, who began by insulting the old Pentagon press corps as irrelevant liars, faced few critical questions, particularly not about the strike. She went unchallenged in asserting that Hegseth never said what the Post quoted him saying—but never specifying which words Hegseth denies saying; alert readers of the Washington Post will notice the "kill everybody" line is a paraphrase of his reportedly spoken order, and so Wilson has wiggle room. She did not diverge from nor substantially add to the line presented by the White House yesterday that the second Sept. 2 strike on survivors aboard the boat was "a decision made by Adm. Bradley" and supported by Hegseth. After promising the strikes will continue, Wilson pointedly noted that Hegseth "100 percent supports" commanders who order "follow-on strikes."

Questioners in the briefing room where I spent many of my workdays from 2011 to 2013 included disgraced former Congressman Matt Gaetz, Laura Loomer and James O'Keefe. They and others asked Wilson about things like whether the Pentagon is insufficiently rooting out anti-Trump disloyalty and what should happen to the Washington Post for lying to the American people. Someone asked if the attacks on Venezuela were also about avenging 2020-era election fraud. Gaetz asked a batshit question about whether, in the event of a regime change, the U.S. would treat members of the Venezuelan military as wholesale complicit with Maduro, reminiscent of post-Saddam de-Baathification in Iraq. 

And then someone I didn't recognize asked a real question, about what Wilson did not dispute were "101 airstrikes" the U.S. has conducted in Somalia during the first year of the Trump administration, and asked why the U.S. military is still in Somalia. Wilson, who flashed a big grin throughout her presser, said "narrowly scoped counterterrorism in places like Somalia" would continue, as "we're not isolationists, but we're also not neocons." No one interjected that 101 "narrowly scoped" airstrikes in a single year is far and away the most intense U.S. barrage in Somalia ever, and one that rivals the high-water mark of the CIA's drone assaults on Pakistan in 2010. 

RELATED TO THE SUBSTANCE of my column below, don't miss FOREVER WARS buddy Kevin Maurer's piece for Rolling Stone on Zero Unit veteran turned alleged National Guard shooter Ramanullah Lakanwal. Kevin reported that Lakanwal had been attacked by a "man [who] sprayed something into his eyes requiring hospital treatment" in the Bellingham, Wash. community where he had been resettled after 2021. He had lost a laundromat job because he "lacked a work authorization card despite being approved for asylum." And Kevin interviewed a "former Afghan unit mate" who said that Lakanwal had been depressed after his CIA handlers ghosted him: 

“He’s very sad [depressed],” said Lakanwal’s Afghan unit mate, who is not a native English speaker. “He’s very worried. This problem, like, he’d say, ‘I am working nine years or 10 years with [the] U.S. government. [They] never answer my phone [call].’”

And in a piece for Drop Site News, Emran Feroz and Abdul Rahman Lakanwal report that Ramanullah Lakanwal's Zero Unit was briefly detained for "kill[ing] police units in Kandahar they were supposed to be defending" circa, roughly, 2018. Who made it into Unit 03? 

According to several people from Lakanwal’s neighboring village, members of his unit were notorious criminals. Another man from Khost City, who knew Lakanwal personally and asked to remain anonymous, claims that his unit regularly raided random villages and that some members were not happy about killing “fellow Afghans” without any proof of their Taliban background.

Feroz and Lakanwal quote a commander of the former U.S.-backed Afghan National Army on what the CIA and its elite U.S. military partners looked for in recruits to the higher-paid Zero Units: "In fact, the Americans just focused on their physical strength. They didn’t care about their potential criminal background, mental health or their widespread drug abuses." An ex-militia commander emphasizes, as Maurer's sources do, the sense of abandonment amongst Zero Unit veterans, as well as their difficulty adjusting, in an unfamiliar country, to life after war. “If they are also traumatized drug addicts like Lakanwal," this ex-militiaman told Drop Site, "they are literal time bombs created through American warfare itself."

As well, yesterday morning I was on Democracy Now! talking about Venezuela and Lakanwal. You can check out both segments at the links in the previous sentence. 

And in a fortuitous bit of timing, new declassified documents from Operation Condor—the trans-South American right-wing death-squad alliance created in 1975, most of whose component regimes came to power with U.S. assistance—were obtained by the National Security Archive. An item that caught my eye from a Senate staff report written in 1979 but never published: "The Chilean intelligence service… maintains close liaison with the German Nazi colony of La Dignidad in southern Chile, which makes its substantial resources available to it." 

A State Department briefing prepared for Henry Kissinger less than a year into Condor reports that some of its membership, using terms awfully reminiscent of the American far right of 2025, "talk of the 'Third World War,' with the countries of the southern cone as the last bastion of Christian civilization … it is important to their ego, their salaries and their equipment-budgets to believe in a Third World War." Further revealing is a line about how the Condor alliance "consider their counter-terrorism every bit as justified as Israeli actions against Palestinian terrorists." The kidnappers, torturers and killers of Condor "believe that the criticism from democracies of their war on terrorism"—breathe that in—"reflects a double standard." And the briefer, Assistant Secretary for Latin America Harry Shlaudeman, delicately informs Kissinger that "Internationally, the Latin generals look like our guys. We are especially identified with Chile. It cannot do us any good." 

Finally, I want to pass along an essay written by the pseudonymous Mr. Knight that engages very deeply with my IRON MAN man run (of blessed memory). This kind of engagement with the text is what every comics writer hopes for. I hope you'll read it, and if the stuff Mr. Knight covers appeals to you, you can buy the first collected edition here and pre-order the second collection, out on Dec. 12, here. In my opinion? They make great holiday gifts. 

OK, the column, after the paywall. (Subscribe.)