Just Waking Up

I dared to take a 2.5-hour nap late in the day after a large Thanksgiving meal, and now I am hopelessly behind on the day's news. 

But I know that the 20-year-old National Guard soldier shot in Washington, D.C. yesterday has died of her wounds. That some information on her killer has come out. And that Trump talked to some of the remaining White House Press Corps.

More will continue to be known or understood as being true about the killer. (I use the passive voice — "come out" and "be known" — intentionally because I don't trust whether the information on him is being released in good faith, or being manipulated in some way by this regime.)

At the moment, there is this from the press event, Aaron Rupar transcribing:

Q: Officials say the suspect in the DC shooting was vetted & it came up clean

TRUMP: He went cuckoo. He went nuts. There was no vetting

Q: Actually, your DOJ IG [inspector general] says there was thorough vetting of Afghans. So why blame Biden?

TRUMP: You're just asking questions because you're a stupid person 

Which brought to mind this existing cartoon for one respondent:

The killer was, it appears, part of a CIA unit in Afghanistan. He was brought to the U.S. after our withdrawal. (A New York Times story from this evening documenting that here.)

This post from X is by the Fox News chief national security correspondent:

Gillian Branstetter wrote:

From a 2022 ProPublica report on CIA-trained "Zero Units" in Afghanistan, a former member of which shot two National Guard troops in DC yesterday:



[Quoting ProPublica] "I cataloged hundreds of night raids by one of the four Zero Unit squads, which was known in Afghanistan as 02 unit, eventually identifying at least 452 civilians killed in its raids over four years."

So... What is the speculation as to his motivations for the shooting? The simplest is that he was mentally ill, perhaps in part because of guilt from his own actions in the war. Second is that he understood the Trump regime's plans to return asylum-claimants to their countries of origin and knew that would be a death sentence for him. Third, and wildly speculative, coming from the conspiracy-minded: he was induced to do the shooting by Trump allies in the CIA to further destabilize the U.S. — whether they intended death or not. 

As we all know, it is still early in all of this. Not enough is known, and it will likely be impossible to ever know enough to be sure. But it has to be said, since it is being said.