Seattle Children’s Hospital is standing by its “mission” of providing gender surgeries for children.
Many of these irreversible gender surgeries consist of removing healthy tissue and leaving the patients permanently sterilized.
The pediatric hospital has a section on its website specifically devoted to gender surgeries.
“Seattle Children’s is the only pediatric academic medical center with fellowship-trained plastic surgeons who provide gender-affirming surgery in our region — Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana and Idaho,” the website says. “We treat teens and young adults who are patients of Seattle Children’s Gender Clinic. We also accept patients who are receiving gender-affirming care through providers outside of Seattle Children’s.”
While the hospital claims to only perform genital surgeries on patients over 18, the Seattle Children’s Gender Clinic page states that they accept patients as young as nine years old for other treatments.
The page says that they offer puberty blockers, “gender-affirming hormones,” “gender-affirming surgeries,” “brief mental health support,” and a partnership with the Autism Center.
Speaking to the Daily Caller, a spokesperson for the hospital stood by the practice of mutilating minors.
“We will continue to offer evidence-based gender-affirming care because it is lifesaving care and is aligned with our mission to help every patient live their healthiest and most fulfilling life possible,” a Seattle Children’s spokesman told the Daily Caller. “Seattle Children’s providers are specifically trained to care for the unique needs of adolescents, teens and young adults. This allows our team to offer personalized care that is tailored to meet each patient’s individual needs and goals.”
The Daily Caller report noted that the “Surgical Gender Affirmation Program” at Seattle Children’s says it “treats teens and young adults” with gender identity issues through “complex procedures, including face and neck surgery, top surgery (breast/chest), bottom surgery (genitals) and body contouring.”
“For infertility issues, Seattle Children’s fertility preservation program says it is the only hospital in the region capable of ‘remove[ing] and freeze[ing] immature eggs so they can be used later in life,'” the report adds. “This makes ‘fertility preservation possible for patients who have not yet gone through puberty and for those who cannot delay treatment to ripen and freeze their eggs,’ the Seattle Children’s website states.”
The hospital also denounced the backlash other hospitals have been facing for performing these procedures on children.
“Seattle Children’s stands with the Children’s Hospital Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics in condemning all violence and threats against any hospital or institution or that provides evidence-based gender-affirming care,” the spokesman told the Caller. “As providers of this care, we are witnessing firsthand the negative impact this is having on the wellbeing of our transgender and gender-diverse patients and their families, as well as our healthcare providers. Above all, we are committed to keeping our staff, patients and families safe.”
Over 2 million illegals walked across the border this year, an all-time record. Another one million crossed the border but did not turn themselves in.
Joe Biden’s first act after inauguration was to end the construction of President Trump’s border wall and open the US southern border.
The result has been a disaster.
Democrats know the country cannot absorb and assimilate 4 million illegals in 18 months time. That was never their plan. Their plan was to put America in crisis and break down the system.
It should be obvious at this point.
Unfortunately, many of the migrants do not make it to the US alive. One Texas town is running out of room to buy Joe Biden’s dead migrants.
Jorge Ventura reported:
BORDER CRISIS:
“It’s got to the point where our local mortuaries are no longer taking in the deceased”
Unidentified deceased migrants are being buried at the local cemetery in Eagle Pass as officials scramble to find space for the bodies@DailyCallerpic.twitter.com/Oxk0akjecI
Here’s a makeshift cross labled “Baby John Doe” marked at the grave of an unidentified infant who drowned in the Rio Grande on August 13th.
Makeshift cross labeled “Baby John Doe” , unidentified infant drowned in the Rio Grande River on August 13th. Officials are starting to bury migrants in their local cemetery. Unfortunately this has become the new normal in Eagle Pass, Texas. @DailyCallerpic.twitter.com/AfqQaiIx7o
The funeral director in Eagle Psss as told the sheriffs they have reached capacity and can no longer take in anymore deceased migrants. The sheriff is now responsible for the bodies, behind us a refrigerator trailer the sheriff requested to put the bodies in @DailyCallerpic.twitter.com/pS6D0TeuSF
Biden’s corrupt FBI is no better than the worst militant police entities in history.
The FBI raided the home of the President of the United States. This is the same President whom the FBI attempted to prevent from winning the 2016 Election and then attempted to remove from office his entire Presidency. FBI leaders from the corrupt Obama/Biden Administration hired a Russian and used his made-up information as the basis to attempt to remove President Trump from office.
The same FBI who is creating a false narrative by reclassifying Jan. 6 cases as separate instances of “domestic terrorism.” The FBI who labeled a veteran-led organization as a domestic terrorist group.
At least 14 FBI whistleblowers have gone to Rep. Jordan with allegations of misconduct and abuse within the bureau under Christopher Wray’s leadership.
Rep. Jordan received new information about retaliation against at least one whistleblower and a ‘purge’ of conservative employees.
Jim Jordan said security clearances of conservative employees are being revoked as punishment.
Now, insiders at the FBI told The Washington Times that the agency is becoming more political by putting liberal agents in charge through promotions and punishing or firing agents who support conservative causes.
The outlet noted:
They said this institutionalizes a liberal bias in the upper ranks of the nation’s premier law enforcement agency.
In one high-profile example, an FBI agent on duty demonstrated solidarity with Black Lives Matter marchers in Washington by “taking a knee” as the protesters passed. The agent was rewarded with a promotion to a supervisor rank.
The BLM march in Washington in 2020 was part of protests and riots that swept the country in response to the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Some law enforcement officers began kneeling with BLM protesters in Austin, Texas; Portland, Oregon; Los Angeles; Coral Gables, Florida; Buffalo, New York; and elsewhere.
Among six on-duty agents in full FBI gear who “took a knee” for BLM protesters in Washington was a female agent who later was promoted to the No. 2 supervisory post at the Washington field office.
Reminder … the same FBI who literally kneeled to BLM while they were rioting, looting, and burning down buildings … are working nonstop to arrest any Trump supporter who was near the House Chamber. The FBI is rotten to the core … two-tiered justice hypocrites. pic.twitter.com/Cn9xMy2yyY
In 2020, after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, BLM protesters sparked riots and demonstrations around the country. In a show of support for BLM protesters, some law enforcement officers including FBI agents cowardly took a knee.
FBI whistleblower Kyle Seraphine has been suspended from work at the agency, and all employees gathered in the Deputy Director’s conference room to discuss “presence patrols” following the BLM protest. He said he witnessed Mr. Knapp showering his agents with praise. .
Each agent in a group of “kneeling agents” was hugged by Ms. Knapp and received a gift card from her for his actions at the protest, Mr. Serafin said to him.
“So she centered her rhetoric about ‘they were heroes… they saved lives and did the right thing.’ [Director Christopher A. Wray] They didn’t escalate things to say how proud I am. I don’t want anyone to look sideways at me,” Seraphine recalls her words.
Another former FBI official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, also recalled an incident in the conference room.
“Some people were like, ‘What they did is pretty disgraceful. You shouldn’t stand for one side or the other,’” the former official said.
Seraphine said participating in a BLM protest should be considered a violation of the Hatch Act policy, a law that prohibits federal employees from engaging in political activity while on duty, on federal property, or while using government resources. said it is.
“A lot of the other agents on the scene got down on their knees and said, ‘Look, we didn’t feel threatened,’” he said.
Florida Govenor Ron DeSantis delivered an update on Thursday morning following the destruction of Hurricane Ian.
Ian was downgraded from a hurricane level 4 when it hit land to a tropical storm on Thursday morning.
Governor DeSantis says the state is still assessing the damage as the tropical storm crosses the state.
Brennan Prill posted this time-lapse video of the storm surge in Ft. Myers on Wednesday.
I've been capturing video from this webcam in Fort Myers all day and I've put it into a Timelapse. Check out the storm surge rushing in! Crazy. #Ian#flwxpic.twitter.com/lj7a1wThga
Florida has more than 42,000 linemen already staged for power restoration efforts across the state. Thank you for being prepared to power up our state.
Less than a day after being released from prison on no bail for failing to register as a sex offender, the ex-con is back behind bars for attempted kidnapping and battery.
Quavon Ewing, 32, has been charged with attempted kidnapping and aggravated battery for allegedly attacking three women in the span of 45 minutes, less than 24 hours after he appeared in a Cook County Court on a different charge, WGNTV reported.
He was released released on a felony recognizance bond by Cook County judge.
Quavon Ewing was accused of trying to drag a woman into his car on Sunday. Authorities said he also beat another woman in the 100 block of West Roosevelt Road and another in the 600 block of South State Street on the same day.
Prosecutors told a judge Wednesday that Ewing put one woman into a bear hug and began moaning and groaning while calling her “baby.” The woman bit her attacker on the neck and got away.
In the second incident, 15 minutes later, prosecutors say Ewing grabbed a woman by the shoulders and attempted to push her into the van while repeatedly punching her. The woman got away when a witness intervened and the man fled.
Prosecutors say 15 minutes after the second attack, CTA surveillance video captured Ewing urinating in a CTA Blue Line station and then throwing a bottle of the urine on a woman.
Prosecutors said two of the women later identified Ewing as their attacker in a photo line-up.
As the bond hearing started, Ewing asked the judge: “Can I make a statement?” Judge Maryam Ahmad quickly fired back: “No, you may not. We are going to do the talking.” She then muted his microphone. Judge Ahmad was the same judge who released Ewing on an I-Bond Saturday after police arrested him for failing to register as a sex offender.
After going through the charges and Ewing’s criminal history, which includes prior convictions and prison sentences for criminal sexual abuse, aggravated battery and criminal trespass to property, the judge called Ewing “real and present danger to the community” and set his bond on the most recent charges at $500,000.
Ewing was required to register as a sex offender after his previous conviction but failed to do so prompting the Saturday court hearing in which he was released on an I-Bond.
Ewing’s defense attorney said his client suffers from bipolar and schizophrenia.
The Gateway Pundit previously reported that Democrats recently passed a new law in Illinois that will eliminate the cash bail system starting on January 1, 2023. This is according to the new law aimed at reforming the state’s criminal justice system. This will lead to more crimes in the state.
This will result in the release on no bail while awaiting court date of those accused of certain felonies, such as “second-degree murder, aggravated battery, and arson without bail, as well as drug-induced homicide, kidnapping, burglary, robbery, intimidation, aggravated DUI, aggravated fleeing and eluding, drug offenses and threatening a public official.”
Republican Mayor of Orland Park, Keith Pekau, said in a press conference recently that this new law would deny victims their constitutional rights.
“Offenders released on electronic monitoring have to be in violation for 48 hours before law enforcement can act. They can almost drive to Alaska before we can even look for them,” said Pekau.
“It denies victims their constitutional rights. And keep this in mind, businesses and homeowners will no longer be able to remove trespassers from your residence or your businesses. Someone could decide to live in your shed, and all we can do is give them a ticket. You have to decide what level of force is required to remove them and whether or not it’s legal. This is a massive threat to the residents of Orland Park, Cook County in Illinois,” he said.
It was reported earlier today that a young man and recent graduate from Temple University was gunned down in Philidelphia.
23-year-old Everett Beauregard was seen on video walking up to his South Philly apartment on Thursday, September 22 just after midnight when a gunman shot him to death.
According to police, the murder suspect had been circling the neighborhood on foot for one hour before he randomly shot and killed Everett Beauregard.
The two men did not exchange any words before the suspect turned and fired shots.
Now it turns out per a cursory review of his work profile, Beauregard was a Democrat Election organizer in the 2020 Election.
His murderer wandered around the neighborhood before murdering Beauregard. This is clear in the video above. Once they met, Beauregard was dead.
There is no information suggesting that the murder had anything to do with the 2020 Election other than the fact that the Democrats won races in Philidelphia and this is what you get in today’s Democrat run cities.
GOP lawmakers are demanding Attorney General Merrick Garland justify why the FBI deployed dozens of fully-armed agents to raid Catholic pro-life activist Mark Houck as his “screaming” children watched the feds drag their father off to jail.
The FBI must have an “extraordinary reason” for apprehending Houck and ransacking his home as his children watched in horror, an open letter signed spearheaded by Rep. Chip Roy, R- Tx., contends.
“There is much to learn about the extent of the FBI’s operations in this case, apparently since state-level charges were apparently dismissed by local authorities in Philadelphia,” the letter states. “Surely, the FBI must have an extraordinary reason for showing up at the home of an American family, allegedly with roughly 25 heavily armed federal agents, and arresting a father in front of his seven children
“At the moment, it appears to be an extraordinary overreach for political ends.”
The lawmakers are demanding Garland provide address the conspicuous circumstances surrounding Houck’s arrest by Sept. 30.
Garland must publicly disclose the rationale behind the “excessive level of force used by the FBI in this case, and why the force of federal law enforcement was once again used against an American citizen in what should be a state and local matter,” the letter states.
As the Gateway Pundit has reported, Houck is a father of seven and a well-known pro-life author. He is also the founder and president of the King’s Men, an organization dedicated to helping men become better husbands, fathers, and leaders and promotes Christian values. The group also promotes therapy for recovering pornography addicts.
Mark Houck seen with his children
Houck was arrested by the FBI at his rural Pennsylvania home on Sept. 23 for allegedly violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act while protecting his son from crude actions leveled by an abortion activist who was escorting women into a Planned Parenthood clinic. Ryan-Marie, his wife and a home school mother, claims the FBI’s SWAT team surrounded their property with 15 vehicles at 7:05 am. Swarming the house with rifles in firing position, the FBI “started pounding on the door and yelling at us to open it.”
The FBI maintains the arresting officers were not part of a SWAT team.
In 2021, the 72-year-old abortion escort allegedly insistently harassed Houck’s 12 -year old son while accompanying him during sidewalk counsel in front of an abortion clinic last year. After weeks of agitation, Houck ultimately shoved the abortion escort.
“For ‘weeks and weeks,’ a ‘pro-abortion protester” would speak to the boy saying ‘crude … inappropriate and disgusting things,’ such as ‘you’re dad’s a fag,’ and other statements that were too vulgar for her to convey,” Lie Site News reports. “Repeatedly, Mark would tell this pro-abortion man that he did not have permission to speak to his son and please refrain from doing so. And “he kept doing it and kind of came into [the son’s] personal space” obscenely ridiculing his father. At this point, “Mark shoved him away from his child, and the guy fell back.
“He didn’t have any injuries or anything, but he tried to sue Mark,” and the case was thrown out of court in the early summer.”
The FBI’s intervention in the dispute is another example of the Biden administration’s politicization of the Justice Department, GOP Rep. Chip Roy warns.
“Attorney General Merrick Garland oversees an increasingly politicized FBI that seems hell-bent on making examples of average American citizens who don’t align politically with the administration,” Roy told Fox News. “Given what we know about it thus far that is what the case of the raid on Mark Houck’s home appears to be. And the FBI should immediately answer for its apparent use of a 25-30 person SWAT team with guns drawn to target Mark Houck, a pro-life father of seven, for allegedly shoving a guy in front of an abortion clinic (while he maintains he was defending his 12-year-old son).
“Congress owes the American people transparent accountability for any and all wrongdoing by the FBI and Garland’s DOJ. Even further, the FBI needs a complete and total overhaul, and we should return primary law enforcement power to the states and to get the Bureau out of the business of politics once and for all.”
The letter was also signed by Reps. W. Gregory Steube of Florida, Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Louie Gohmert of Texas, Matt Rosendale of Montana, Bill Posey of Florida, Mary Miller of Illinois, Andy Biggs of Arizona, Randy Weber of Texas, Ronny Jackson of Texas, Ralph Norman of South Carolina, Dan Bishop of North Carolina, Jody Hice of Georgia, Bob Good of Virginia, Jeff Duncan of South Carolina, and Paul Gosar of Arizona.
Six senators also signed the letter, including Sens. Steve Daines of Montana, James Risch of Idaho, Roger Marshall of Kansas, Mike Braun of Indiana, James Lankford of Oklahoma, and Mike Crapo of Idaho.
If found guilty, Houck faces a prison sentence of up to 11 years and fines up to $350,000.
President Trump said Senator Joe Manchin is “off the rails” and “who the hell can blame him?” in a recent post on Truth Social.
Manchin agreed on Tuesday to drop his demand to attach energy permitting reforms to the stopgap bill to fund the government. This allowed the bill’s advancement and Senate approval. Of course, there was no Republican pushback on this latest spending binge.
Inslation is currently at 40 year highs and the country is in recession ad the DC elites sign off on billions more in spending – And billions more to Ukraine.
President Donald Trump: When people ask, “What happened to Joe Manchin, why did he go off the rails?” The answer is very simple—Mitch McConnell forced his hand by saying that Manchin was weak and ineffective and that he, McConnell, had him totally under control. Manchin couldn’t stand for that and turned strongly, not against the Republicans, but against McConnell, who he has always despised. The fact is, Joe Manchin should have been brought into the Republican Party long ago. So sad for our Country that now we are wasting Trillions of Dollars on the Green New Deal Hoax, and other like disasters, that will lead to even higher inflation and ultimately, economic destruction. With all of that said, who the “hell” can blame Joe Manchin for doing what he did?
Manchin, a moderate Democrat from West Virginia, agreed on Tuesday to drop his demand to attach energy permitting reforms to the stopgap bill to fund the government, allowing the bill’s advancement and Senate approval. Manchin’s proposal had faced bipartisan opposition, with McConnell leading the Republican charge for it to be excluded from the larger bill.
Manchin said in a statement that he asked Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to remove his proposal due to his “firmly held belief that we should never come to the brink of a government shutdown over politics.” A short time later, Trump said in a series of Truth Social posts that Manchin’s issues with McConnell had resulted in Republicans being unable to convince him to switch parties…
…Manchin, who has earned a reputation for being a frequent Senate roadblock to passing President Joe Biden’s agenda alongside fellow moderate Democratic Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, has repeatedly denied any suggestions that he may abandon the Democratic Party to become a Republican.
However, a passage from the book This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future, which was authored by New York Times reporters Alex Burns and Jonathan Martin and published earlier this year, claimed Manchin said last year that he would join the GOP on the condition that McConnell was ousted as the Republican leader.
Remember three weeks ago when Putin and the Russian military were on the ropes and the Ukrainian army was steamrolling through Kharkov? That was then and Urkaine’s promised victory failed to materialize. With the benefit of hindsight, it appears that Russia abandoned the strategically meaningless territory in the Kharkov Oblast of Ukraine and re-deployed forces to the Donbas, Zaporhyzhia and Kherson. Why? To be in position for the referendum–i.e., to defend the Ukraine oblasts that would be given the chance to vote whether or not to reunite with mother Russia. Putin’s subsequent announcement of the referenda, which began last Friday, was not a Hail Mary pass nor an act of desperation. The planning for this had been in the works for at least a month, maybe longer.
While Ukraine continued to throw its troops against the Russian lines and launched artillery strikes on civilian targets, it paid a terrible price in terms of human casualties and destroyed tanks and combat vehicles, and failed completely to disrupt the vote. There have been international observers monitoring the vote throughout the four oblasts. I wish at least one reporter would ask these observers when they were first contacted and asked to come to the Russian controlled territory and do the monitoring. That detail would provide some insight into the extent of the pre-planning for the referenda.
It appears that the vote to reunite with Russia will be overwhelming in favor of becoming Russian republics. Once the results are certified the Russian Duma will act to accept the decision and Putin will put the cherry on the sundae and make it official. At that point–this Friday–the special military operation in Ukraine will end and Russia will be in position to defend its new territory.
I expect Putin to speak commemorating the event and will put Ukraine, NATO and the United States on notice that any further attacks on Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporhyzhia and Kherson will be an attack on Russia. Ukraine and the west will be on notice. The ball will be in their court.
This will create an opportunity for what is left of Ukraine to seek peace. I doubt that Ukraine and the west will accept this chance. The attacks on the new Russian population will continue and Russia will act. In contrast to the restraint demonstrated during the course of the last six plus months, Russia is likely to respond with more aggressive tactics that may include turning off the power in Ukraine and attacking command centers, including Zelensky’s headquarters in Kiev. This will lead to a significant escalation in the combat, but Ukraine and NATO will have a limited capacity to respond. Why?
The west no longer has the industrial base to match Russia’s production of war material. This weakness is compounded by the double whammy of inflation and economic collapse that is savaging Europe and starting to hurt the United States. The Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), the world’s oldest and the UK’s leading defense and security think tank, recently published an important essay detailing this decline:
The war in Ukraine has proven that the age of industrial warfare is still here. The massive consumption of equipment, vehicles and ammunition requires a large-scale industrial base for resupply – quantity still has a quality of its own. The mass scale combat has pitted 250,000 Ukrainian soldiers, together with 450,000 recently mobilised citizen soldiers against about 200,000 Russian and separatist troops. The effort to arm, feed and supply these armies is a monumental task. Ammunition resupply is particularly onerous. For Ukraine, compounding this task are Russian deep fires capabilities, which target Ukrainian military industry and transportation networks throughout the depth of the country. The Russian army has also suffered from Ukrainian cross-border attacks and acts of sabotage, but at a smaller scale. The rate of ammunition and equipment consumption in Ukraine can only be sustained by a large-scale industrial base.
This reality should be a concrete warning to Western countries, who have scaled down military industrial capacity and sacrificed scale and effectiveness for efficiency. This strategy relies on flawed assumptions about the future of war, and has been influenced by both the bureaucratic culture in Western governments and the legacy of low-intensity conflicts. Currently, the West may not have the industrial capacity to fight a large-scale war. If the US government is planning to once again become the arsenal of democracy, then the existing capabilities of the US military-industrial base and the core assumptions that have driven its development need to be re-examined.
https://ift.tt/5yNY6lW
This is the work of Lt Col (Retd) Alex Vershinin, a US citizen. He spells out in detail the challenge the United States and its NATO allies face if they dare to engage Russia in a tit-for-tat battle:
Presently, the US is decreasing its artillery ammunition stockpiles. In 2020, artillery ammunition purchases decreased by 36% to $425 million. In 2022, the plan is to reduce expenditure on 155mm artillery rounds to $174 million. This is equivalent to 75,357 M795 basic ‘dumb’ rounds for regular artillery, 1,400 XM1113 rounds for the M777, and 1,046 XM1113 rounds for Extended Round Artillery Cannons. Finally, there are $75 million dedicated for Excalibur precision-guided munitions that costs $176K per round, thus totaling 426 rounds. In short, US annual artillery production would at best only last for 10 days to two weeks of combat in Ukraine. If the initial estimate of Russian shells fired is over by 50%, it would only extend the artillery supplied for three weeks.
Russia, by contrast, enjoys the luxury of defense plants that are operating 24-7 and producing ammunition, vehicles, tanks, drones, missiles and rockets. The west still labors under the delusion that Russia’s economy is barely tottering along. Russia has the minerals, material, and qualified personnel required to produce what the Russian military needs to sustain operations; especially intense combat operations.
I do not know if this was the Russian plan from the outset–i.e., conduct operations that would create a de facto disarmament of the United States and Europe–or if this is pure serendipity. Regardless, the west has no viable options, short of nuclear war, of defeating Russia in Ukraine.
The coming weeks will expose fractures in the NATO alliance. Britain, for example, woke up this morning to learn that the once mighty pound Sterling, which once had twice the value of the US dollar, is now worth less than the dollar. That means that the Brits will be paying more for products they import from the United States. Although the United States only accounts for 12% of the UK imports, the price increase will further inflame the inflationary spiral in the UK. Newly minted British Prime Minister Liz Truss already is facing push back from the Tories about her proposed economic plan. The death of Queen Elizabeth put the political problems on a back burner for a couple of weeks. That honeymoon is over and the pressure of domestic politics in the UK will make continued support for Ukraine less certain.
The collapsing economies in France, Germany and Italy also will compel those countries to spend more time trying to quiet growing domestic unrest. When you factor in the energy crisis and Ukrainian military setbacks as winter sets in, the foundation of NATO unity vis-a-vis Ukraine, is likely to crack.
Tucker Carlson had an excellent opening last night discussing the Italian election and the victor, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
Tucker showed some of Meloni’s recent speeches and discussed the ramifications of the vote in Italy. He correctly points out that those in charge will never learn. They think they are above all this.
They’re panicked because they know the current system in doomed. And in fact, what happened last night in Italy is the best-case scenario for them. Because it was a peaceful transfer of power. That’s a good thing. That’s what you want.
In a democracy, people should be allowed to have some influence on the priorities of the government that claims to represent them. And when they speak in an election, the people who have been repudiated have a moral obligation to take a second and ask, ‘why didn’t they like what I was offering them?’.
They have a right to an opinion, in fact their opinion is at the center of our system, this democracy. But they never ask themselves that. They never take any blame whatsover. They didn’t in 2016 when Trump got elected. They immediately blamed Putin, or Macedonian bot farms. They never blame themselves, and so they never learned a single thing from what happened…
The beurocrats who drove Italians to seek a change peacefully at the ballot box, are completely unwilling to learn from that vote.
During the 2022 FIBA Women’s World Cup in Sydney, Australia, two players from the Mali national team got into a fight after their team was eliminated from the quarterfinal competition after suffering a loss against Serbia.
The altercation that took place between Salimatou Kourouma and Kamite Elisabeth Dabou was witnessed by Serbian reporters as the two were heading through the postgame media area.
Watch the video below:
WATCH: Mali players fight each other at women’s basketball World Cup
The incident was caught on camera by Serbian television as they conducted an interview with one of their players following the victory in Sydney, Australia.
Serbia’s Sasa Cado looked visibly shocked, swiftly taking a step back, as she set eyes upon the scene in front of her, with Salimatou Kourouma throwing at least three punches at Kamite Elisabeth Dabou.
Her team-mates swiftly interjected to break up the fight, which came a day before Mali finished their Group B campaign with a match against Canada.
The tournament has been hugely frustrating for the Malians, who are one of two sides at the 12-team finals to have yet to win a game, following previous losses against Japan, hosts Australia and France.
Mali are only playing in the tournament after African champions Nigeria, who beat their fellow West Africans in last year’s Women’s Afrobasket, were withdrawn from the tournament by their government owing to issues in Nigerian basketball.
In response to a brawl between two members of the Mali women’s basketball team, FIBA has opened an investigation, according to ESPN.
“FIBA acknowledged today that there was an altercation between Mali players in the mixed zone following the Group B game Serbia-Mali at the FIBA Women’s Basketball World Cup 2022,” FIBA said in a statement.
“Following the incident, FIBA has opened an investigation. Once the investigation is concluded, FIBA will decide on any applicable disciplinary measures.”
Iran continues to erupt in protests following the murder of 22-year-old Iranian woman, Mahsa Amini, from injuries sustained after her arrest for the “improper” wearing of a hijab.
Uprisings in Iran have continued since Amini’s murder. Police, Bassiji militia and Revolutionary guards have started shooting randomly at protestors and at least 50 are believed dead.
During the protests, Hadis Najafi became a brave symbol of defiance against the brutal Iranian regime. A powerful video shared on social media shows her at an anti-hijab protest putting her hair up in a ponytail, preparing to join the protest and go up against security forces.
For daring to speak out, Najafi has reportedly been murdered by Iran security forces. She was brutally shot six times and killed in the city of Karaj.
Hadis Najafi, a 23-year-old Iranian woman who went viral in a video as she prepared to join anti-governmental protests, was shot dead by Iranian security forces, according to multiple reports on Sunday.
Najafi was shot six times and killed in the city of Karaj by Iranian security forces on Wednesday, Iranian Journalist and women’s rights advocate Masih Alinejad, along with others, reported throughout social media.
According to the reports, she sustained injuries in the abdomen, neck, heart and hand on September 21. After being shot by security forces she was taken to Ghaem Hospital, where she was later pronounced dead.
Masih Alinejad, an Iranian-American women’s rights activist, shared details of Najaf’s murder on social media. New-York-based Alinejad, saying of the regime, “The Regime has guns and bullets but they are afraid of our hair.”
This 20 Yr old girl who was getting ready to join the protest against the murdering of #MahsaAmini got killed by 6 bullets.#HadisNajafi, 20، was shot in the chest, face and neck by Islamic Republic’s security forces.
Be our voice.#مهسا_امینیpic.twitter.com/NnJX6kufNW
Alinejad shared other stories of women murdered by the regime.
1)
Ghazale Chelavi took to the streets to protest the killing of #MahsaAmini by hijab police in Iran but she herself got killed by security forces. Her friend told me that she got shot in the head in Amol city. She was 32 Yr old mountaineer full of life. Her family are shocked. pic.twitter.com/CF4JZCWYke
This is a 18 year old woman also named Mahsa was killed by the Islamic republic in the protest over the brutal death of #MahsaAmini
Her name is Mehsa Mogoi. She got shot in Isfahan.
If the world don’t take action more people with get killed.#مهسا_امینیpic.twitter.com/3ER7Wq8JoQ
#HananehKian, 23, has been shot dead by Iranian regime state security agents in Noshahr, Iran. #IranProtests.
She was on her way home from the dentist when she was killed.
#HananehKian, 23, has been shot dead by Iranian regime state security agents in Noshahr, Iran. #IranProtests.
She was on her way home from the dentist when she was killed.
At risk of sounding like a cranky old man complaining about kids playing ball in the street in front of my house, I want to try to help the folks who have never worked as an analyst at the CIA understand why the current organization is virtually useless. It boils down to this very simple fact–CIA analysts now work in Mission Centers alongside with CIA operations officers and intelligence analysis takes a back seat to operational priorities.
How so? Let me take you back in time to 1985. In the old days the Directorate of Intelligence occupied the north wing of the CIA and the Directorate of Operations sat in the south wing. There was a time when there were doors separating the two wings–I understand it was in place until 1978. Prior to 1978, if you strolled out of your office in the Central American Branch, for example, and tried to go to the operations side of the house you were stopped at the halfway point to the other side by a locked door. Intelligence and Operations were kept separate. The Ops folks understandably wanted to protect their sources and feared that an analyst could compromise a sensitive asset.
When I came along in 1985, those doors had been removed and analysts and operations officers could, in theory, interact. But there was still a separation. The stereotypical analyst was a nerd. Not in the bad sense. But the majority of analysts were introverted personalities. The stereotypical operations officer was the exact opposite–outgoing, liked to socialize and bullshit.
I worked both sides of the house. I did two “internships” with the Operations folks in 1985/86 and then entered the trenches as an analyst. Analysts would start their day with a morning meeting to review overnight intelligence developments and identify possible articles that could be written and submitted to the National Intelligence Daily and/or the Presidential Daily Brief. At the end of the meeting, the analyst would head to the toilet where he or she would brush their teeth, floss and relieve themselves. I am not exaggerating. The mirrors in the bathrooms on the analytical side of the house were speckled with the results of flossing. What about doing a “number 1?” A number of the male analysts would enter a stall and close the door to urinate in private. The average analyst was not comfortable standing at the urinal chatting with a colleague while answering nature’s call.
Ops officers, by contrast, after their morning meeting or review of operational traffic from overseas, also would trundle off to the toilets. Few brushed their teeth and flossed at work (I presume most did that at home before heading to the office every morning). Male ops officers would stand shoulder to shoulder at the urinal and make un-woke jokes and chat up their colleagues.
I offer this crude example because it highlights the personality differences that characterized the Intelligence Directorate vice the Operations Directorate. (Note–I am not arguing that this was the ideal system, I am trying to help you understand the bureaucratic and personality dynamics that separated the two Directorates.)
Intelligence analysts rarely had access to operational traffic while Ops officers had full access to the raw intel the analysts were receiving. This created tension, especially when the operations side of the house was pursuing a policy objective such as supporting the mujahedeen in Afghanistan or the Contras in Central America. Analysts faced pressure to produce analysis that supported the operations programs and, in several instances, were not privy to what was actually happening on the ground in the conflict zones.
Let me offer one anecdote where I was a first hand witness. On Tuesday, March 15, 1988, I was part of a CIA briefing team sent to meet with members of Congress to discuss intelligence that the Sandinistas were massing troops on the southern border of Honduras in a location known colloquially as the Bocay Salient. There was a training base for the Contras in the Bocay. I was the Honduran analyst at the time and was accompanied by the military analyst from the Nicaraguan Branch and a representative of the Directorate of Operations who worked on the military ops in the Central American Task Force .
Halfway through the briefing, which was attended only by Republican members of the House, we received “intelligence” that Sandinista troops had entered the Bocay and were attacking the contra base. It was presented as if this was a modern day attack on the Alamo. Contra forces were fighting valiantly but being mauled by the more numerous Sandinista battalions. We ended the briefing and hurried back to Headquarters to try to figure out what was going on.
When we climbed into the CIA van to head back up the river to Headquarters, the Ops representative from the Central American Task Force began yelling at me and the military analyst from the Nicaragua Branch, accusing us of having helped create this crisis because our past analysis was not sufficiently supportive, in his opinion, of the Contra cause.
Upon arriving back at CIA Headquarters, I went to my terminal and pulled up the “intelligence” about the attack on the Contras. The intelligence told a different story. The Bocay Salient was very sparsely populated with people back then and the terrain featured mountains and triple canopy jungle. You could send an army division into that region and they would be lost in the jungle. Impossible terrain to move in force. The intelligence report from the CIA base camp in the Bocay stated that there had been contact several kilometers from the base with a Sandinista patrol. WHAT??!!
The members of Congress and the Reagan National Security team had been informed that a massacre, a la The Alamo, was underway. I received a phone call from one of Elliot Abrams’ senior staffers. Steve was in a panic and repeated to me the story of the Contras being wiped out. I calmed him down and read to him the actual details. His response, “OH MY GOD. I’ve got to tell Elliot.”
President Reagan had been briefed and was going to deliver a speech castigating the Democrats for not heeding his warnings about the Sandinista threat. And this is what happend:
President Reagan ordered 3,200 American troops sent to Honduras for military exercises Wednesday in what the White House described as ‘a measured response’ to a Nicaraguan invasion directed against U.S.-backed Contra rebels. . . .
The announcement, read to reporters at a late-night White House briefing, followed a day-long round of deliberations within the administration and on Capitol Hill on a cross-border offensive denied by the Nicaraguan government.
With U.S. officials charging the drive was intended to crush a Contra force weakened by the Feb. 29 cutoff of American aid, Fitzwater said Reagan ordered the action in response to a request from Honduran President Jose Azcona Hoyos. . . .
Although the White House had confirmed an earlier ‘request for assistance’ from Azcona, it was not described as an appeal for military support. Officials said the decision to send troops was a response to a subsequent request, conveyed to U.S. Ambassador Everett Briggs in Tegucigalpa around 5:30 p.m. EST, the same time a high-level review of options was under way in the White House Situation Room.
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That, boys and girls, is how the sausage of foreign and military policy is made. This was pure theater. The Contra forces in the Bocay were in no danger. Yes, the Sandinistas had entered Honduras in a very remote, strategically unimportant area. But the United States seized on this incident to create a justification to deploy the 82nd Airborne to Honduras.
Now you may understand my cynicism and doubts about pronouncements from the U.S. intelligence community.
In 2015, then CIA Director John Brennan reorganized the CIA and brought the analysts and operations folks together in Mission Centers, e.g. Counter Terrorism Center, Counter Narcotics Center, Counter Proliferation Center, etc. On the superficial level this sounds like a dandy idea because analysts will now have direct access to what the operations folks are working on. But that is not how it works out.
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Paul Pillar, a retired CIA officer, wrote a terrific piece about Brennan Rube Goldberg Initiative, The CIA and the Cult of Reorganization. Here are some of the key points:
Now the Central Intelligence Agency is being hit again with the reorganization bug, with changes that director John Brennan announced last week. The intelligence community has been subjected to this sort of thing at least as much as other parts of the federal bureaucracy. The most notable instance was a reorganization of the community a decade ago as the most visible part of the 9/11 Commission’s response to a popular demand to shake things up after a terrible terrorist attack. That change added new bureaucracy on top of continuing old organizations, and in the years since has given us little or no reason to believe that it was a net improvement.
The principal feature of the changes that Brennan announced is to move all of the agency’s operational and analytical work, and not just selected parts of it, into integrated “mission centers” covering issue areas defined either geographically or functionally. As with most other reorganizations, both criticism and praise tend to be overstated. Any change in a bureaucracy’s performance, for good or for ill, resulting from changing the wiring diagram will not be nearly as pronounced as either critics or promoters usually would lead us to believe.
A criticism of this newest reorganization, for example, is that it would lead to still more focus on current doings at the expense of longer-range analysis. But within each issue area there is no reason to believe that worthwhile long-range analysis cannot be done in the mission centers. Another line of criticism involves a feared compromise of the integrity of analysis because of overly close association of the analysts with operators. This would only be a problem, however, where covert action is involved. Although some unfortunate experiences involving Central America in the 1980s demonstrate the corrupting potential, covert action—despite the public image of what the CIA does—constitutes a small (and usually well-compartmented) portion of the agency’s work. There is a substantial hazard of policy preferences influencing analysis stemming from relations with policy-makers, but that is a separate matter from relations between analysts and operators within an intelligence agency.
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The last sentence is the critical point. Imagine you are the senior analyst responsible for Russia in the Mission Center handling the Ukraine crisis. Do you think that analyst is allowed to make the historically factual argument that Russia believed it was facing a future attack from NATO because of NATO’s stated intentions to bring Ukraine into the NATO universe? Do you think the analyst would be allowed to point out that U.S. and NATO military exercises in Ukraine, along with training of Ukrainian forces, had heightened Russian fears? The answer is no. Any analyst daring to push such verboten issues would be committing career suicide. Plus the analyst would be accused of undermining U.S. and NATO policy.
In short, you cannot (or should not) put analysts and operations folks in the same tent, so to speak. Operations will always–I REPEAT–always take precedence over analysis, especially when it comes to issues that are top priority for the White House. This is why I believe the current U.S. intelligence on Ukraine cannot be trusted. It is compromised by U.S. internal politics and by CIA bureaucratic politics.
I believe the United States needs a professional intelligence service that is comprised of analysts who have the task of reviewing all source intelligence and providing political leaders with an unvarnished, apolitical assessment of what is going on in the world. What do I mean by “apolitical?” The analyst and his or her supervisors are not fretting over how the White House or Congress will react to analysis based on genuine intelligence that is out of step with Administration priorities.
I also believe that the United States needs professional case officers who are skilled at recruiting and managing foreign agents who provide the United States with the national secrets of their country.
What has damaged, perhaps irreparably, the CIA’s ability to carry out these two missions is that the operations side of the house also engages in covert and clandestine paramilitary operations. Those activities, because of the amounts of money involved and the risk to the prestige of the United States, inevitably take precedence and put the other two mission–analysis and recruiting information sources–on the back burner.
A great example of this is what happened in the aftermath of the U.S. covert action in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The movie, Charlie Wilson’s War, captures the hubris of that event. Once our mission to force the Soviets to withdraw from Afghanistan was achieved, Afghanistan fell off the radar as a collection priority and the intelligence analysts lacked the information and resources to track the rise of Al Qaeda. Doing analysis on Afghanistan was a backwater job, with little prospects for promotion, during the 1980s. It was only in the aftermath of 9-11 that Afghanistan became sexy again. And, once again, the analysis took a back seat to the operational priorities of defeating the Taliban. How did that work out?
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(@AlinejadMasih) 
