THE SET-UP: Yeah, it’s unusual to see a TRIFECTA on the weekend, but the newscycle has a way of intruding on best laid plans.
Today, it was a pair of reports on the suicidal “Cybertruck” explosion in Las Vegas and the PTSD/TBI that may have compelled Green Beret Matthew Livelsberger to take his own life.
The headline atop a report by CNN focused on his “political grievances,” but he also “wrote that he needed to ‘cleanse’ his mind of the ‘brothers I’ve lost’ and relieve himself of ‘the burden of the lives I took.’”
The Associated Press elaborated on that theme in its reporting on the ”five-time recipient of the Bronze Star, including one with a V device for valor under fire.” A source told AP that he sought counseling from the Army because he “struggled with the mental and physical toll of his service, which required him to kill and caused him to witness the deaths of fellow soldiers.”
Further details about his state of mind came from Alicia Arritt, an active-duty Army nurse and former “confidant” who’d met Livelsberger in Colorado Springs after she’d served at “Landstul Regional Medical Center in Germany … where many of the worst combat injuries from Iraq and Afghanistan were initially treated before being flown to the U.S.” Per AP:
There she saw and treated traumatic brain injuries, or TBIs, which troops suffered from incoming fire and roadside bombs. Serious but hard to diagnose, such injuries can have lingering effects that might take years to surface.
“I saw a lot of bad injuries. But the personality changes can happen later,” Arritt said.
In texts and images he shared with Arritt, Livelsberger raised the curtain a bit on what he was facing.
“Just some concussions,” he said in a text about a deployment to Helmand Province in Afghanistan. He sent her a photo of a graphic tattoo he got on his arm of two skulls pierced by bullets to mark lives he took in Afghanistan. He talked about exhaustion and pain, not being able to sleep and reliving the violence of his deployment.
She also told AP:
[She] “saw symptoms of TBI as early as 2018.” “He would go through periods of withdrawal, and he struggled with depression and memory loss.”
“I don’t know what drove him to do this, but I think the military didn’t get him help when he needed it.”
The question of whether or not the Army did enough to help Livelsberger is likely to fade quickly. In fact, one hallmark of the “Global War On Terror” is how completely we’ve ignored the War’s ethical conundrums, psychological impact and lingering physical scars. Instead, the men and women who cycled through multiple deployments are conveniently fetishized as “heroes” and left to grapple with their moral and physical injuries while we ritualistically “salute” them at the start of NFL games … and then gorge on beer and nachos.
The apparent “self-radicalization” of Shamsud-Din Jabbar, on the other hand, is going to be grist for the political mill and, to the point of the three stories in today’s TRIFECTA, a potential impetus for further deployments. At the same time, Shamsud-Din Jabbar’s 13 years of military service will be treated as anomalous given that Jabbar looks the part of foreign evildoer … his slight Texas drawl notwithstanding.
That ISIS flag on the back of his rented truck makes nuance impossible. We’ll ignore his troubled state of mind before he adopted an Islamic State of mind. And it doesn’t matter that Jabbar did not cross the border to kill Americans because he “hated our freedom.” He will be used as a poster boy for mass deportations when he could or should be the impetus for looking closely at a troubling phenomenon highlighted by The Intercept’s Nick Turse the day after the attack:
From 1990 to 2010, about seven persons per year with U.S. military backgrounds committed extremist crimes. Since 2011, that number has jumped to almost 45 per year, according to data from a new, unreleased report shared with The Intercept by Michael Jensen, the research director at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, or START, at the University of Maryland.
Military service is also the single strongest individual predictor of becoming a “mass casualty offender,” far outpacing mental health issues, according to a separate study of extremist mass casualty violence by the researchers.
The point here is not to blame soldiers for being vulnerable to extremism or prone to mass violence. Instead, let’s consider the “missing link” between Livelsberger and Jabbar. Their service “overlapped” twice—at Fort Bragg and in Afghanistan. But that strange coincidence isn’t so strange when you consider the reality of maintaining a globe-spanning empire … or, more to the point, the oft-ignored fact that the US is a globe-spanning empire.
That reality was not lost on a local TV station in Norfolk, Virginia. When 13 News Now reported on Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s Christmas Eve message to the troops, it noted that “more than 200,000 U.S. military members are deployed overseas this holiday season, on all seven continents in more than 170 countries.”
That’s a globe-spanning empire if ever there was one. But you’d never know if from the day-to-day newscycle, such as it is. We’ve had no reckoning for the wars we lost in Iraq and Afghanistan, nor do we grapple with the demands placed upon “the troops” who maintain a sprawling empire most denial-based Americans refuse to acknowledge.
That may be what Livelsberger was unintentionally trying to tell us on New Year’s Day. In a “letter recovered by investigators,” he reportedly wrote that he wanted his suicide to be “a wake-up call” to a nation that is “terminally ill and headed towards collapse.” He was rational enough to recognize that “‘Americans only pay attention to spectacles and violence’ and ‘fireworks and explosives’ were best to get his point across.”
If the past decade of relentlessly dire news about the post-9/11 spike in military suicides is any indication, it’s doubtful we’ll do anything more than miss it. - jp
TITLE: U.S. Reportedly Setting Up New Base In Northern Syria
https://www.twz.com/news-features/u-s-reportedly-setting-up-new-base-in-northern-syria
EXCERPT: A half dozen years after abandoning Kobani, U.S. forces are reportedly building a base in this northern Syrian city on the Turkish border that has been riven by strife between Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and Turkish-backed forces. This all comes as a new Syrian government is trying to establish control over the country after ousting Bashar al-Assad.
Several videos and images have emerged on social media claiming to show U.S. troops and equipment heading toward Kobani, reportedly to build a new international coalition base. The U.S. has a presence of about 2,000 troops in Syria, ostensibly deployed to continue the ongoing fight against ISIS. That fight apparently came to the U.S. on Wednesday, when a man claiming ISIS affiliation carried out a deadly attack in New Orleans.
U.S. forces “brought in a convoy of 50 trucks carrying cement blocks to SDF-controlled areas in north-eastern Syria,” the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) wrote Thursday morning. “SOHR activists have reported seeing the convoy on Al-Hasakah-Al-Raqqah highway, while it was heading to Ain Al-Arab area (Kobani) in the eastern countryside of Aleppo. The convoy was accompanied by a military vehicle of SDF. According to SOHR sources, this comes as a part of US forces’ efforts to boost their bases and establish a new military base in Ain Al-Arab in light of the growing security and military tension in that region.”
The international coalition forces “brought a convoy of logistic reinforcements including premade chambers, surveillance cameras, cement blocks, fuel tanks and digging machinery towards Kobani,” SOHR added. “…the digging and drilling will start tomorrow and more military reinforcements such as soldiers, weapons, armored vehicles, radars, and anti-aircraft weapons will be brought.”
The War Zone cannot independently verify these claims and has reached out to U.S. Central Command and the White House National Security Council for details. We will update this story with any information provided.
TITLE: DoD denies US military building a new 'base' in Syria
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/us-military-in-syria/
EXCERPT: The Pentagon addressed questions regarding reports this week about the U.S. military moving construction materials into Kobani, a city in northeastern Syria close to Turkey's border, ostensibly to help its long time partners, the Kurdish-led Syrian Defense Forces, stave off attacks by the Turks.
"We're continuing to work and focus on our mission, which you know why we're in Syria, to ensure the enduring defeat of ISIS. But when it comes to US forces in Kobani, there's no plan or intent right now to set up any base. I'm not sure where those reports are coming from," said Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh.
Unfortunately the follow-ups in the briefing room were weak and didn't ask the next logical question more plainly: if not a "base" is there an outpost or smaller fortification being constructed for the mobilization of U.S. troops and personnel? If video and on-the-ground reports are to be believed, something is going on there.
When asked again about whether there are U.S. forces in Kobani, Singh said, according to the transcript, "On your first question on Kobani, I'm not aware of US forces. Again, I've seen those reports and, as Liz had asked me earlier about US forces establishing some type of base or presence in Kobani, I'm not tracking that that is accurate or that we have plans to do so in any way."
So no "presence" in Kobani? Sources who talked with RS [Responsible Statecraft] mentioned that if the reports of the material rolling into Kobani are accurate, it may mean something other than a "base" is being built by the U.S. military there. The wall segments, for instance, could be erected to house a company or platoon, or bigger. The key is to watch for more videos or reporting about the volume of material being transported to indicate the size and scope of the construction. Singh may be right about there not being "a base" planned, but the U.S. military has a range of installations under different names across the globe housing thousands of troops and military assets. They aren't all called "bases."
RS reached out to the Pentagon press office on Thursday and asked if the military "is sending reinforcements and is building a new facility in Kobani" and if so, were the troop numbers beyond the 2,000 being reported in the country today. We were told they were currently looking into the reports.
TITLE: Honduras Threatens to Expel U.S. Military as Latin America Gears Up for Trump Deportations
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/03/world/americas/honduras-trump-mass-deportations.html
EXCERPTS: Honduras’s president threatened to push the U.S. military out of a base it built decades ago in the Central American country should President-elect Donald J. Trump carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants from the United States.
The response by President Xiomara Castro of Honduras, in an address broadcast on television and radio on Wednesday, was the first concrete pushback by a leader in the region to Mr. Trump’s plan to send back millions of Latin American citizens living in the United States.
The threat came as foreign ministers were set to meet later this month to address the deportation issue.
“Faced with a hostile attitude of mass expulsion of our brothers, we would have to consider a change in our policies of cooperation with the United States, especially in the military arena,” Ms. Castro said of Honduras.
“Without paying a cent for decades,” she added, “they maintain military bases in our territory, which in this case would lose all reason to exist in Honduras.”
Honduras’ foreign minister, Enrique Reina, said afterward in a radio interview that Honduras’s leader had the power to suspend without the approval of the country’s Congress a decades-old agreement with the United States that allowed it to build the Soto Cano air base and operate America’s largest military task force in Central America from there.
The move would present grave risks for the small country, which depends on the United States as its largest trading partner and a source of humanitarian aid.
Will Freeman, a fellow in Latin America studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, said of the Honduran president’s statement: “I’m surprised a bit by the boldness of it.”
Since the 1980s, an American task force has operated out of Soto Cano, an air base owned by the Honduran government in Comayagua, a town about 50 miles from the capital, Tegucigalpa. It was originally built by the United States in the 1980s to help contain what it said was the Communist threat in the region.
Soto Cano currently hosts more than a thousand American military and civilian personnel, a spokeswoman for the task force there, Joint Task Force Bravo, said on Friday.
“We are guests of the Honduran government on a Honduran base,” said the spokeswoman, Capt. Hillary Gibson.
While the task force has played a role in counternarcotics efforts, Captain Gibson said, it has recently focused on disaster relief and administering humanitarian aid.
The U.S. military maintains a presence at bases in other countries in the region, including in El Salvador, though these have fewer U.S. military troops than Soto Cano.
Mr. Freeman, the fellow in Latin America studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the Honduran government’s posture came as a surprise because while Ms. Castro had recently taken what he described as a publicly confrontational approach to the United States — including moving to end a longstanding extradition treaty — behind closed doors she had been known to “play friendly” with the U.S. ambassador, trying to elicit America’s continued support.
He said it was also surprising that Ms. Castro would send such a warning before Mr. Trump assumed office, particularly in light of statements from Mr. Trump’s pick for secretary of state, Marco Rubio, the Republican senator from Florida.
Mr. Rubio had warned that Honduras under Ms. Castro’s government could become “the next Venezuela.”