In short, Trump’s Homeland Security team didn’t like Chad’s response about passport security, so Chad — a strong ally in fighting Islamist extremism in central Africa — got thrown into the new Trump Travel Ban list, which seems to have prompted them to pull back from supporting US and French forces in the region [1] fighting such extremism, which may have led to the still-confused deaths of four US soldiers in Niger.
This is the most important story nobody is talking about right now, and it’s a doozie.
Be forewarned: this may make you seething mad when you think through the implications. I know I really wanted to kick something, very badly.
What you need to know (so that I don’t get too discursive and just hit the high points, I’m writing this without notes from memory and from an hour of research I just did—if I get a detail wrong, excuse me; let me know, and I’ll correct it):
1. Travel ban 3.0 included, among the usual suspects, some new countries, including North Korea, Venezuela, and… Chad.
2. At the time of the announcement, Chad seemed an strange addition, because:
a) it has been an ally in anti-ISIS/Qaeda/Boko Haram operations, and our joint anti-ISIS task force with France and the UK (and others I think) was based in Chad’s capital, N’Djamena
b) though a dictatorship, it’s an important ally because its military is the strongest, most-disciplined, and best-equipped in central Africa.
3. Lots of State Department officials were quoted off the record (and many former ones, on the record) saying the addition of Chad was “bizarre”, “puzzling”, “incompetent”, and “dangerous”.
4. The rationale publicly given by the administration at the time—namely, that there were militant terrorist groups associated with al-Qaeda and ISIS operating within Chad—did not clarify its inclusion, as many other countries not added to the list have far more active groups operating within their borders (to take one obvious instance, Mali).
5. The work the US military was most closely involved with Chadian forces on was anti-ISIS/Qaeda training and Special Forces missions in the area, including Chad, Mali, Nigeria… and Niger.
6. Immediately after the ban was announced by the Trump administration, Chad voiced its protest, and announced that in response it would begin pulling its troops out of those other countries and would cease coöperation in those countries with US forces.
7. About a week after that, the incident in Niger resulting in the deaths of four Special Forces sergeants based at Fort Bragg occurred.
8. Details about the incident and what led to the American soldiers’ deaths remain sketchy. However, we do know that, prior to the travel ban announcement, Chad would likely have been involved in an operation like this, including providing air support and medevac operations.
9. We also have heard that the mission went sideways at least partly due to lack of air support, and that after there were US Special Forces casualties, there was difficulty getting medevac.
10. President Trump repeatedly refused to answer questions about this incident—the highest-casualty single event of his presidency. His staff had drafted a statement for him to issue on the incident; he ignored it and said nothing. On Monday, asked yet again, he made his specious comment about his predecessors’ not giving the same level of attention to the families of fallen service members that he had, which led to the past four days’ uproars.
11. It now appears possible to infer that the reason he did not want to discuss it was that the new travel ban’s inclusion of Chad may have contributed to the incident and its aftermath.
12. From the announcement until now, the reason for Chad’s inclusion was mysterious; the only speculation that had been advanced (without evidence) that seemed to make any sense at all was that the Chadian government had fined ExxonMobil over $60B last year, when now-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was ExxonMobil’s CEO; in other words, Chad’s inclusion had been simple personal spite.
13. But from reporting from the AP today, we have now learned that the real reason Chad was added to the list was because it had been asked to supply the US with blank specimen passports for security examination, but was unable to do so because their supply of passport paper had run out and they were still awaiting replenishment. Without supplying the requested passport specimen, Chad had failed the technical requirements being used as criteria for exclusion from the travel ban.
14. Chad asked the US to waive the requirement until they had more paper, or to accept a printed passport produced before the paper had run out instead, but the request was denied.
And, so, we’re left with a very ugly possibility: four American soldiers were killed as a direct result of Chad’s being included in the new travel ban because they had run out of passport paper that the administration had requested. And, rather than admitting this in questioning, President Trump distracted the press with an obviously false and inflammatory claim about Barack Obama’s and George W. Bush’s calls to Gold Star families, and then dragged his own chief of staff’s status as a Gold Star father into the ruckus, ordering him to go to the White House press room podium today and give him cover.
This is atrocious. I wouldn’t blame you if you want to kick something now, too.
