Lucien's Secret List

Historic events referenced in Casualties of the State, including research for writing the story.

1800s

1842 - Buffalo, New York: William Wells Brown helped 69 fugitive black American slaves reach Canada through the Buffalo Underground Railroad. #CivilRights

1880 - Russia: Fyodor Dostoyevsky published The Brothers Karamazov. (Lucien Archer quotes from the chapter “The Grand Inquisitor”.) #Literature

1900s

1919 October 11 - Washington, D.C.: “Marcus Garvey Neutralization Memo” J. Edgar Hoover, assistant to the Attorney General and head of the “General Intelligence Division” and future director of the FBI, wrote a memo to Special Agent Ridgely about Garvey being a “negro agitator.” #FBI #CivilRights

1919 November 19 - Washington, D.C.: James Wormley Jones, an Army captain and World War One veteran, was recruited by J. Edgar Hoover as the Bureau’s first black American special agent. His job was to go into Harlem, New York, infiltrate the Marcus Garvey movement, and find evidence that could be used to build a legal case against Garvey and silence Garvey’s political movement. #FBI #CivilRights

1944 - Washington, D.C.: The U.S. Navy commissioned the first 13 black American officers. At the time, there were over 100,000 black sailors in the U.S. Navy. #CivilRights

1949 - Buffalo, New York: Leeland Jones, Jr. was elected county supervisor from the Ellicott District. He is the first black American elected to office in the history of the city. #CivilRights

1953 August 19 - Iran: The democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh was overthrown in favor of strengthening the monarchical rule of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. This action was orchestrated by the United Kingdom (“Operation Boot”) and the United States (“Operation TPAJAX”). #ForeignPolicy #WarProfiteering #Blowback

1956 October - Washington, D.C.: Hoover reclassified the FBI’s ongoing surveillance of black American leaders, including it within the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), which was established two months earlier; justifying his actions by saying that the black nationalist movement was infiltrated by Communists. #FBI #CivilRights

1960s

1960 - Buffalo, New York: Floyd Edwards was promoted as the first black American lieutenant in the Buffalo Police Department. #CivilRights

1964 August 2 - Vietnam: Gulf of Tonkin incident. The USS Maddox appeared to have been attacked, without provocation by North Vietnam forces. Five days later, the U.S. Congress passed a resolution granting President Johnson authorization for a conventional military response, without a formal declaration of war. (Continued, 1970s. See 2003 for refutation of Gulf of Tonkin incident.) #ForeignPolicy #FalseFlag

1965 November - Vietnam: U.S. and Australian military forces launched “Operation Hump,” a search-and-destroy operation to drive out Vietcong fighters. #War

1967 - California: Philip K. Dick published the Ganymede Takeover, a science-fiction novel about an alien occupation of Earth. #Literature

1968 January - Vietnam: U.S. and South Vietnamese forces engaged with the North Vietnam Army in the five-month Battle of Khe Sanh for control of the region. #War

1970s

1972 March - Vietnam: North Vietnam launched “The Easter Offensive,” a five-month military campaign against South Vietnamese and U.S. forces. #War

1974 - Chicago, Illinois: Albert Wohlstetter, a professor at the University of Chicago, accused the CIA of systematically underestimating Soviet missile deployment in his 1974 Foreign Policy article entitled “Is There a Strategic Arms Race?” Wohlstetter concluded that the United States was allowing the Soviet Union to achieve military superiority by not closing a perceived missile gap. Many conservatives then began a concerted attack on the CIA’s annual assessment of the Soviet threat. (Wohlstetter was an inspiration for the title character in Stanley Kubrick’s film, Dr. Strangelove.) #ForeignPolicy

1975 April 13 - Lebanon: Civil war, lasting until 1990, fostered the rise of Hezbollah. #War

1975 - Washington, D.C.: Former President Richard Nixon’s policy of détente, the easing of hostility between the U.S. and the Soviets, was under attack by certain former military officials and conservative policy intellectuals. Ford administration officials Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were among those challenging as too soft the CIA’s estimate of Moscow’s military power. President Ford’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board asked William Colby, then director of the CIA, to approve the initiative of producing comparative assessments of the Soviet threat. Colby refused, stating it was hard “to envisage how an ad hoc independent group of analysts could prepare a more thorough, comprehensive assessment of Soviet strategic capabilities than could the intelligence community.” #ForeignPolicy

1975 October - Washington, D.C.: “Halloween Massacre.” Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney stage-managed a Presidential Cabinet purge that made Rumsfeld Secretary of Defense and Cheney White House Chief of Staff. They pushed out CIA director William Colby and replaced him with George H. W. Bush. Historically, this was the rise of a “neoconservative” faction of the Republican party. #Politics

1976 May - Washington, D.C.: Team B. The new CIA director, George H. W. Bush, authorized an alternative unit outside the CIA to challenge the agency’s intelligence on Soviet intentions. Bush was more compliant to the political winds than his predecessor, William Colby. Consisting of 16 “outside experts” aligned by conservative ideology, the unit was called “Team B.” A young aide from the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Paul Wolfowitz, was selected to represent Donald Rumsfeld’s interest and served as co-author of Team B’s report. The report was single-minded in its conclusion about the Soviet buildup and cleansed of contrary intelligence. It was leaked to sympathetic journalists and generated public support for a new round of military spending, particularly on missiles. It was fundamentally a political tool in the struggle for a neoconservative faction’s control of the Republican Party, wrestling influence away from Henry Kissinger and destroying his policy of détente. (Decades later, Team B’s conclusions were found to be false. Paul Wolfowitz would be one of the chief architects of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.) #Politics #ForeignPolicy

1978 - Washington, D.C.: The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) established a special court for secret judicial review of surveillance requests. (Most requests for surveillance were granted by the court. Over 33 years through 2011, the FISA court granted 33,942 warrants, with only 11 denials Ð a rejection rate of 0.03 percent of the total requests.) #SecurityOverFreedom

1979 - Afghanistan: “Operation Cyclone” lasted until 1989. Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and the CIA trained and supported the mujahideen, Islamic militants, in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union. Osama bin Laden, son of a billionaire Saudi, was among their ranks. The relationship between the CIA and ISI seemed complicated over the years, swaying between cooperative to opportunistic at the expense of the other. During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the intelligence agencies of the U.S. and Pakistan had the same interests in expelling the Soviets. But their core interests were not the same, and they never trusted each other. A pattern emerged when matters got personal. Information slipped out through confidential channels. (Continued, 1990s.) #ForeignPolicy #Geopolitics #Blowback

1980s

1981 - Washington, D.C.: Another neoconservative run at controlling the CIA was taken when President Ronald Reagan appointed businessman William Casey CIA Director with a mandate to “ride hard” on agency liberals. Casey set up an irregular, covert operation led by Marine Corps Colonel Oliver North, which eventually ended in the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal. (See 1970s, “Team B.”) #ForeignPolicy #Geopolitics #WarProfiteering #Blowback

1982 - Detroit, Michigan: “Operation Save the Tiger” was a large extortion case involving a threatening letter mailed to the Michigan-based Kellogg Corporation. Detroit agents quickly identified the extortionists and arrested them before they could carry out their plot to poison Kellogg products unless paid a large ransom. #FBI

1982 - Lebanon: The Israeli invasion and subsequent occupation of southern Lebanon created the opportunity for Iranian diplomats and agents to help fashion the unified entity Hezbollah from a group of Shi’a militias and groups. In the ensuing decade, Hezbollah perpetrated a series of terror attacks, including suicide bombings, hijacking aircraft, and kidnapping Western hostages in Lebanon and abroad. #ForeignPolicy #War #Blowback

1982 - Beirut, Lebanon: President Ronald Reagan sent Marines on a peacekeeping mission. #ForeignPolicy

1982 - Iraq: U.S. normalized relations with the Iraqi government, removing it from a list of State Sponsors of Terrorism, then supplying it with economic aid, counter-insurgency training, operational intelligence on the battlefield, and weapons to combat Iran. #ForeignPolicy #WarProfiteering #Blowback

1983 April 18 - Beirut, Lebanon: The U.S. embassy was bombed, killing 63, including 17 Americans. #Blowback

1983 October 23 - Beirut, Lebanon: The Marine Barracks was bombed, killing 241 Americans and 58 French. #Blowback

1983 December - Baghdad, Iraq: When Reagan’s Secretary of State George Shultz wanted to secretly back Saddam Hussein against the Iranians, Shultz bypassed the CIA and sent Donald Rumsfeld to Baghdad to seal the deal. Rumsfeld had returned to the private sector in 1977 as a CEO for a pharmaceutical company. (See 1970s, “Team B.”) #ForeignPolicy

1984 February - U.S. troops withdrew from Lebanon. #ForeignPolicy #Blowback

1984 March 24 - Baghdad, Iraq: Donald Rumsfeld’s second visit with Saddam Hussein. On that day the United Nations reported that Iraq had used chemical weapons, mustard gas and tabun nerve agents, against Iranian troops. #ForeignPolicy

1985 - Iraq purchased eight strains of anthrax from the United States in 1985, according to British biological weapons expert David Kelly. The Iraqi military settled on the American Type Culture Collection strain 14578 as the exclusive strain for use as a biological weapon, according to Charles Duelfer. #ForeignPolicy #WarProfittering #Blowback

1988 December 21 - Lockerbie, Scotland: Pam Am Flight 103 was destroyed by a suitcase bomb, with 270 people killed. #Blowback

1990s

During this period, Hezbollah changed its modus operandi in the international arena. It began expanding and establishing its operational and logistical infrastructure. At the same time, it reduced the scope of its attacks in this arena and concentrated on planning and perpetrating attacks against “quality” targets. Hezbollah attacked Israeli and Jewish targets worldwide. The most well-known attacks carried out by the organization were in Argentina. #ForeignPolicy #Blowback

Afghanistan: Civil war. The Pakistan Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI) provided strategic and intelligence support to the Taliban against the Northern Alliance. (Continued, 2001.) #Geopolitics

1991 - Iraq: “Operation Desert Storm.” Allied warplanes bombed a crowded marketplace and hit a residential complex and killed 78 people in Fallujah. #War

1993 February 26 - New York, New York: World Trade Center bombing, plotted by members of al-Qaeda. The original plan of destruction failed, but six people died and over a thousand were injured. During the ensuing investigation, Osama bin Laden’s name was discovered on a list of donors to an Islamic charity that helped finance the bombing. #Blowback

1994 February - Arlington, Virginia: Aldrich Hazen Ames, a 31-year CIA veteran, was arrested for espionage charges, having spied for Russia since 1985. #CIA

1995 - Pakistan: A Trans-Afghanistan gas pipeline with Turkmenistan was proposed because Russia restricted access to natural gas pipelines it owned in foreign countries. The U.S. company Unocal, in conjunction with the Saudi oil company Delta, promoted an alternative project. Within three years, negotiations begin with the Taliban. #Geopolitics

1995 February - Washington, D.C.: John O’Neill was appointed as FBI Chief of Counterterrorism. Richard A. Clarke, the National Coordinator for Counterterrorism, informed him that Ramzi Yousef, the suspected mastermind behind the first World Trade Center bombing, had been spotted in Pakistan. O’Neill swiftly organized the multi-agency operation that led to Ramzi’s arrest. #Counterterrorism

1995 April - Washington, D.C.: After the terrorist bombing in Oklahoma City, John O’Neill formed a separate FBI section for domestic terrorism, but he concentrated on redesigning and expanding the foreign-terrorism branch. He organized a swap of deputies between his office and the CIA’s counterterrorism center, despite resistance from both agencies. #Counterterrorism

1996 January - Washington, D.C.: John O’Neill helped create a CIA station, code-named Alex, led by Michael Scheuer, with a single-minded purpose. “Its mission was not just tracking down bin Laden but focusing on his infrastructure, his capabilities, where he got his funding, where his bases of operation and his training centers were.” #Counterterrorism

1996 June 25 - Saudi-Arabia: Bombing attack against American targets in the Khobar Towers. The intelligence community realized that Osama bin Laden was not just the financier, but the leader of al-Qaeda. #Blowback

1996 - Washington, D.C.: Antiterrorism Act passed into law, following the Oklahoma bombing. (It eroded civil liberties, particularly a “guilt by association”, and does nothing to prevent the attack of September 11, 2001.) #SecurityOverFreedom

1996 December 26 - Delaware: Erik Prince incorporated Blackwater Lodge and Training Center, then bought property in North Carolina, founding what would become one of the largest military contractors of the early 21st Century. #WarProfiteering

1996 - Scotland: Secret papers from an unnamed foreign government were given to Scottish police investigating the 1988 bombing of Pam Am flight 103. #Counterterrorism

1997 June - Washington, D.C.: Founding of think tank “Project for a New American Century” that envisioned a new Pearl Harbor as accelerating the neoconservative agenda. Signatories included “Jeb” Bush, Dick Cheney, Eliot Cohen, Zalmay Khalilzad, Lewis Libby, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz. (See 1970s, “Team B.”) #ForeignPolicy #Politics

1998 January - Afghanistan: Taliban selected a U.S.-backed company over an Argentinian competitor, signing an agreement that allowed the proposed project for a Trans -Afghanistan gas pipeline to proceed. #Geopolitics

1998 May - Afghanistan: John Miller interviews Osama bin Laden. #Counterterrorism

1998 - Washington, D.C.: Zalmay Khalilzad, employed by the RAND Corporation and consulting for Cambridge Energy Research Associates, conducted a risk analysis for Unocal’s Trans-Afghanistan gas pipeline. #Geopolitics

1998 August: American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam bombed. The U.S. alleged that Osama bin Laden was behind the attacks. In New York, John O’Neill, then special agent in charge of the National Security Division, created a special FBI desk to hunt for and dismantle al-Qaeda. The Taliban’s leader, Mullah Omar, announced that bin Laden had the Taliban’s support. All pipeline negotiations were halted. Unocal withdrew from the pipeline consortium a few months later, then closed its offices in Afghanistan and Pakistan. #Blowback #Counterterrorism

1999 December 14 - New York: What began as an investigation of a suspicious individual in Port Angeles, Washington led to an operation led by John O’Neill to investigate the man’s associates, averting an Oklahoma City-scale bombing of a Los Angeles airport. Despite this, O’Neil was passed over for promotion and increasingly sidelined. #Counterterrorism

2000s

2000 October 12 - Yemen: U.S. destroyer Cole attacked by terrorists. John O’Neill headed the investigation, but cultural differences with Yemenis and conflict with the U.S. ambassador dampened the effectiveness. #Blowback

2001 July - Washington, D.C.: Counterterrorism Chief Cofer Black delivered a memo to Presidential National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” #Counterterrorism

2001 August 6 - Washington, D.C.: Presidential Daily Brief: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” #Counterterrorism

2001 August 16 - FBI Field Office, Minnesota: Zacarias Moussaoui was arrested on a visa overstay and caught the attention of the FBI because he wanted to learn to fly planes but didn’t care to know how to take off or land. Those investigating, including Special Agent Catherine Kiser, conjectured that Moussaoui might have been acting under orders from al-Qaeda, but they needed proof before they could get a FISA warrant to search his computer. Meanwhile, the CIA had received similar reports of suspected terrorists training at a flight school in Phoenix, Arizona. #Counterterrorism

2001 August 23 - New York: FBI Agent John O’Neill resigned from the FBI. He became head of security at the World Trade Center in New York. #Politics

2001 August 30 - CIA Headquarters, Washington, D.C.: CIA Director George Tenet received a memo, titled “Islamist Extremist Learns to Fly,” that confirmed that Moussaoui recruited operatives on the other side of the world in Chechnya. Information sharing was cut at the highest levels. Back in Minnesota, the FBI agents working the case were discouraged from pressing too hard for a warrant. The threat of mayhem was probable cause to obtain a regular criminal warrant. (Yet the decision to not seek warrants gave rise to the myth that a wall between overseas intelligence and criminal investigations made necessary the U.S.A. PATRIOT Act, an encroachment on civil liberties written years before and enacted into law in October, 2001.) #Counterterrorism #Politics

2001 September 10 - Washington, D.C.: Donald Rumsfeld gave one of his first major addresses as defense secretary, advocating a change in the Pentagon’s war-fighting bureaucracy. This speech was latter known as the “Rumsfeld Doctrine,” which stated that the Pentagon ought to use high tech/small footprint forces and an increased and accelerated use of private contractors in fighting war, and that regime change was to be the center of the strategy. In his speech Rumsfeld said, “I’ve come not to destroy the Pentagon, but to liberate it. We need to save it from itself.” #Politics #ForeignPolicy

2001 September 11 - Terrorist attacks in Washington, D.C., New York City, and Pennsylvania killed over 2,996 people and injured more than 6,000. Violence happens all over the world and within our country, but this horrific tragedy was at the center of attention of the American public, and the world. Many of us are left to wonder: why? Some of us endeavor to find answers and right the wrongs, so that these kinds of events do not happen again and we may live in peace. (Former FBI counterterrorism chief John P. O’Neill was one of the victims.) #Blowback

2001 October - Washington, D.C.: The U.S.A PATRIOT Act was passed into law. The title of the act is an acronyms for Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism. #Counterterrorism #SecurityOverFreedom

2001 November - Afghanistan: New York Times correspondent Carlotta Gall moved to Afghanistan to cover the war on terror. In the following ten years, she scrutinized U.S. aid to Pakistan. The U.S. increased its pledge of financial aid to Pakistan, so long as the Islamic nation moderated its factions of militant groups. But in latter years it became clear that this was a hard promise to keep. (Continued, 2011). #Journalism #Geopolitics

2001 Qasem Suleimani, Iranian Quds Force commander, may have directed Iranian diplomats to meet with U.S. diplomats to collaborate on destroying the Taliban, which was targeting Shia Afghanis at the time. (That plan was dashed immediately once Iran was listed on the “Axis of evil.”) #Geopolitics

2002 January 29 - Washington, D.C.: U.S. President George W. Bush used the term “axis of evil” in his State of the Union Address to describe governments, namely Iran, Iraq, and North Korea, that he accused of helping terrorists and seeking weapons of mass destruction. This rhetoric was used to pinpoint these common enemies of the U.S. and rally the country in support of the War on Terror. #ForeignPolicy #Geopolitics

2002 - Afghanistan: Opium production restarts, reaching pre-war level. #Geopolitics #Blowback

2002 - Washington, D.C.: Rumsfeld was reprising Team B by creating his own intelligence shop. Ahmed Chalabi organized alarmist reports on Hussein’s nuclear weapons, which later proved to be fabricated, These reports bypassed the CIA and went directly to the White House. (Chalabi became oil minister of post-war Iraq.) #ForeignPolicy #Politics

2002 February - Washington, D.C.: Responding to inquiries from the Vice President’s office and the Departments of State and Defense about the allegation that Iraq had a sales agreement to buy uranium in the form of yellowcake from Niger, the CIA had authorized a trip by Joseph C. Wilson, an experienced diplomat, to Niger to investigate the possibility. Wilson ultimately concluded that there “was nothing to the story” and reported his findings the following month. #ForeignPolicy #Politics

2002 December 27 - A new agreement on the construction of the Trans-Afghanistan gas pipeline was signed by the leaders of Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. #Geopolitics

2002 January 28 - Washington, D.C.: In his State of the Union Address, President George W. Bush said, “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” #ForeignPolicy #Politics

2003 February 15 - Millions of people in sixty countries around the world participated in peaceful marches to protest and prevent war in Iraq. Estimates range from six to thirty million protesters, making it the largest protest event in human history. #ForeignPolicy #CivilRights

2003 March - “Operation Iraqi Freedom” - U.S. forces invaded Iraq. #ForeignPolicy #WarProfiteering

2003 April - Fallujah, Iraq: U.S. and allied forces occupied a primary school called the Leader’s School. Iraqis protested and rioted, resulting in 12 people killed and 70 people injured. #War

2003 April 28 - Fallujah, Iraq: Iraqi protesters were killed by Army units tasked with law enforcement. #War

2003 April 30 - Fallujah, Iraq: The 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment replaced the 82nd Airborne. Further protests and insurgent violence plagued the unit for the next eleven months in what became known as the First Battle of Fallujah. #War

2003 May - Cannes, France: Premiere of documentary The Fog of War. Former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara admitted that the August 2 , 1964 attack by North Vietnamese torpedo boats against USS Maddox in the Tonkin Gulf happened with no Defense Department response, but that the August 4, 1964 attack against the USS Maddox and the USS Turner Joy never happened. These incidents resulted in Congressional authorization of President Lyndon Johnson’s use of military action against North Vietnam and the Viet Cong. #FalseFlag #WarProfiteering

2003 May 30 - A U.S. federal judge ruled that the terrorist group Hezbollah carried out the attack on the Marine Barracks in Lebanon at the direction of the Iranian government. The ruling allowed families of the victims to sue Iran. #ForeignPolicy #Counterterroism

2003 July 6 - Washington, D.C.: Joseph Wilson contributed an “op-ed” entitled “What I Didn’t Find in Africa” in the New York Times, in which he stated that on the basis of his “experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war,” he had“little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq’s nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.” He went on to say, “America’s foreign policy depends on the sanctity of its information. For this reason, questioning the selective use of intelligence to justify the war in Iraq is neither idle sniping nor ‘revisionist history’ … The act of war is the last option of a democracy, taken when there is a grave threat to our national security. More than 200 American soldiers have lost their lives in Iraq already. We have a duty to ensure that their sacrifice came for the right reasons.” #ForeignPolicy #Politics

2003 July 12 - Washington, D.C.: Administration supporters of the Iraq war were determined to neutralize the CIA’s doubts about the White House assertion that that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and obtained materials for nuclear weapons. Robert Novak published a column which mentioned claims from “two senior administration officials” that Valerie Plame had been the one to suggest sending her husband, Joseph Wilson, to Niger. Plame was a covert CIA officer and specialist on weapons of mass destruction. Novak had learned of Plame’s employment, which was classified information, from State Department official Richard Armitage. David Corn and others suggested that Armitage and other officials had leaked the information as political retribution for Wilson’s article. The scandal led to a criminal investigation; no one was charged for the leak itself. But according to testimony given in the 2005 CIA leak grand jury investigation and United States v. Libby, Bush administration officials Richard Armitage, Karl Rove, and Lewis Libby discussed the employment of Plame with members of the press. The Vice President’s Chief of Staff Lewis Libby was convicted of lying to investigators. His prison sentence was ultimately commuted by President Bush. #ForeignPolicy #Politics

2004 March 31 - Iraq: Four employees of the private U.S. security firm Blackwater U.S.A were ambushed as they drove through the center of Fallujah. In images broadcast around the world, their burnt corpses were dragged through the streets. Two of them were strung up from a bridge. #War #Blowback

2005 June - Tal Afar, Iraq: The 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment had a major role in Operation Restoring Rights, successfully attacking an enemy stronghold and dismantling a major insurgent training center. #War #Counterterrorism

2006 - Afghanistan: The Trans-Afghanistan gas pipeline project stalled because the region is under de facto control of Taliban. #Geopolitics

2007 October 25 - Washington, D.C.: The United States Department of the Treasury designates the Iranian Quds Force a terrorist organization for providing material support to U.S. enemies. Since 2003, the Quds Force, led by Qasem Suleimani, aided Iraqi Shiite insurgents against U.S. forces. #Counterterrorism #Geopolitics

2007 - Afghanistan: Opium production peaks in Afghanistan, doubling pre-war level. Most of it is trafficked to Europe; opiates trafficked into U.S. mostly originate from Andean region in South America. #Geopolitics #Blowback

2007 - Islamabad, Pakistan: The Pakistani military submitted to the U.S. embassy expense claims just under $1 billion. No receipts were provided. U.S. officials did not withhold financial aid because of “Pakistan’s importance in the hunt for Osama bin Laden and other foreign fugitives.” #WarProfiteering #Geopolitics

2007 December 27 - Rawalpindi, Pakistan: Assassination of Benazir Bhutto. Pakistani leadership has played out a deadly struggle between political dynasties for decades. The Bhutto family were socialist in their reforms of Pakistan. Their opponents, Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq and later Pervez Musharraf, were Army generals who seized power of the country through coup d'état. Zia-uh-Haq fostered militant Islamic policies and kick-started the Afghan war against Soviet occupation in 1979. Musharraf prided himself on his legacy as a moderate, but he was indicted for conspiring in the assassination of Bhutto, which the Taliban organization in Pakistan claimed responsibility. #Politics #Geopolitics

2007 August 29 - North Dakota: Minot / Barksdale Nuclear Bent Spear Incident. Six AGM-129 ACM Air Launched Cruise Missiles each containing one W80 (nuclear warhead) were removed from safeguarded weapons storage facilities at the Minot AFB in North Dakota, loaded aboard a B-52 bomber and flown 1500 miles to Barksdale AFB in Louisiana. The warheads were left unguarded, and the error was not discovered until the next day. #War

2007 September 7 - Washington, D.C.: U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth orders Iran to pay $2.65 billion to survivors and to family members of the service members killed in the 1983 bombing. #Counterterrorism #ForeignPolicy

2007 September 16 - Iraq: Employees of Blackwater Security Consulting, a private military company, shot at Iraqi civilians killing 17 and injuring 20 in Nisour Square, Baghdad. The killings outraged Iraqis and strained relations between Iraq and the United States. Seven years later, four Blackwater employees were tried and convicted in U.S. federal court; one of murder, and the other three of manslaughter and firearms charges. #War

2007 October - United Kingdom: Key prosecution witness in the Lockerbie bombing trial, Tony Gauci, a shopkeeper from Malta, was allegedly offered a $2 million reward (from CIA) in return for giving evidence. #Counterterrorism

2007 August - Saint Louis, Missouri: Bud Deraps, an 82 year old WWII Navy veteran, speaks out against the use of Depleted Uranium in the battlefield because of its adverse effects on American soldiers and the contamination of the environment. #War #CivilRights

2008 March 31 - Iraq: Iranian Quds Force Commander Qasem Suleimani arranged a ceasefire between the Iraqi Army and the Mahdi Army, the latter being the first organized Shia insurgency. #Geopolitics

2009 October 10 - Oral history (1978-2002) of former Special Agent of the FBI, Catherine Kiser. She tried to sound the alarm about Zacarias Moussaoui from the FBI Field Office in Minnesota. #Counterterrorism

2010s

2010 February - Kabul, Afghanistan: Matt Waldman, a researcher and advisor on foreign affairs, defense and peace studies, begins interviews with nine insurgent field commanders. He finds that, contrary to the official narrative, Pakistan’s security / intelligences services (ISI) and military “orchestrates, sustains and strongly influences” the Afghan Taliban insurgent movement. Waldman later publishes a paper with the Crisis States Research Centre of the London School of Economics, “The sun in the sky: the relationship between Pakistan's ISI and Afghan insurgents.” #Geopolitics

2010 March 20 - Washington, D.C.: Remarks of President Obama Marking Nowruz. On the Persian new year, the President televised a speech directly to the people and leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran, offering a new chapter of engagement on the basis of mutual interests and mutual respect. #Geopolitics #ForeignPolicy

2010 July - Washington, D.C.: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton accused the Pakistani government of their lack of full cooperation in the hunt for bin Laden. She believed that "elements of the bureaucracy had to know where he was hiding." #Geopolitics #ForeignPolicy #Counterterrorism

2010 October - Iraq: Prime Minister Maliki was allied with Assad's Syria (to promote construction of an oil pipeline) and Iran's General Qassem Suleimani, who brokered a deal to get American forces out of Iraq. Suleimani, acting on orders from Iran, was interested in a weak Iraq that would become dependent on Iran when U.S. forces withdraw. #Geopolitics #ForeignPolicy #War

2010 December - Pakistan: The CIA station chief in Pakistan leaves the country because his identity was leaked by disgruntled persons in the ISI in retaliation for the CIA's drone strikes in the region. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, while the drone program was effective in precisely killing over two-thousand enemies operating in Pakistan, over five-hundred civilians were also killed. Other sources state that civilian casualties range as low as two percent, and as high as thirty percent. Notably, since 2008 the Pakistani government emphasized a dramatic decrease of civilian deaths. Pakistan, while conflicted over its populace's fear and anger over the drone incursions, seems eager to gain favor of the U.S. in the war on terror. #War #Geopolitics

2011 January - Pakistan: An American, Raymond Davis, was arrested for shooting to death two Pakistani men who he believed were trying to rob him. When Davis was revealed to be a CIA contractor, top officials in the ISI were incensed, and suddenly the organization demanded a sharp reduction in the number of American intelligence operatives based in Pakistan. #Geopolitics

2011 May - United Arab Emirates (UAE): After leaving behind Academi (formerly Blackwater), Erik Prince’s new company, Reflex Responses, signs a $529 million contract with the UAE to put together an 800-member battalion of non-muslim mercenaries to protect the country’s interests. #WarProfiteering #Geopolitics

2011 May - Abbottabad, Pakistan: Osama bin Laden was killed after hiding and operating in the same town as Pakistan’s top military academy. Only a few hundred yards away was Pakistan’s “Quantico,” that is, it's military academies. A New York Times article, dated June 23, 2011, also co-written by Gall, along with a blog post by R. J. Hillhouse, a national security intelligence analyst, detailed how the persons called by Bin Laden's courier were also in contact with Pakistani intelligence officials. #Counterterrorism

Bin Laden's courier had made calls to the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, a militant group designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. since 1997. The group was previously named Harakat ul-Ansar when it originated in 1985 in Pakistan as to counter the Soviets. In 1989, after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, it focused operations against Indian forces in the disputed territorial regions of Jammu and Kashmir. In 1993, allegedly under guidance and funding by the ISI, the group was reorganized and united with two other splinter groups. The group's actions suited the strategic interests of the ISI, including a 1999 hijacking of an Indian airplane, which resulted in three top leaders released into Taliban custody from Indian prisons. #Geopolitics

R. J. Hillhouse theorized that the Harkat was an intermediary between Bin Laden and the Pakistani government. This arrangement facilitated Bin Laden's house arrest while maintaining plausible deniability by Pakistan in harboring him. One old adage stood out true, "Follow the money." After all, the U.S. was pouring billions of dollars in military aid to Pakistan in exchange for complicity in the war on terrorism and the hunt for Bin Laden. Keeping the bogeyman safe indefinitely while the U.S. was unaware of his location in Abbottabad would guarantee the continued flow of money. Throughout its history, the ISI routinely placed human assets, especially militant leaders, under protective custody in cities, often close to military installations. #Geopolitics #WarProfiteering

2011 September - Washington, D.C.: U.S. State Department freezes the assets of Ibrahim al-Badri, also known as Abu Du’a, a.k.a. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, who funnels foreign fighters into the country. #Counterterrorism

2011 - Afghanistan: After residing in Afghanistan for ten years, New York Times Correspondent Carlotta Gall developed a theory that it was insufficient for the U.S. to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan; that the root of the problem lies with Taliban support in corrupt factions of Pakistan's government and intelligence agencies; and, that the invasion of Iraq was not a solution. Gall stated that President Pervez Musharraf and his intelligence chief, Lt. Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani and exposed how they worked with the Pakistani Taliban in order to control the militants operating in Pakistan and to use them as proxies to dominate Afghanistan. Pakistan makes a show of cooperation with America in fighting terrorism while covertly abetting and coordinating Taliban, Kashmiri, and foreign Qaeda-aligned militants. In her interviews with officials across both governments, Gall concluded that the ISI is responsible for this operational strategy. #Geopolitics #Counterterrorism

2012 August - Casualties in Iraq since 2003: U.S. military fatalities: 4,409. U.S. military wounded?: 31,928. U.S. civilian contractor fatalities?: 1,569. Iraqi civilian fatalities: 114,676. Casualties in Afghanistan: U.S. military fatalities: 1,950. U.S. military wounded??: 17,095. #War

2012 September - Time period that Casualties of the State takes place.