Reply to Trump to widow of Sgt. La David Johnson: 'He knew what he signed up for'

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Massive INTEL failure

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/africa/source-niger-attack-resulted-massive-intelligence-failure-n812626[/quote]

And Trump foreign policy failure.  Chad had troops supporting the US/Niger effort to root out Islamic terrorists but pulled out when idiot Trump put Chad on the ban list and that significantly weakened the effort.[/quote]

And, we have another Maddow follower. 
Even the left wing media is speaking out against her “theories.”

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2017/10/do_not_try_to_turn_niger_into_trump_s_benghazi.html

[quote]Before the tragic deaths of four American and five Nigerien soldiers on Oct. 4, few Americans realized that U.S. troops were deployed to the West African country. While much of the media coverage since then has focused on how long it took President Trump to call the families of the four Americans who were killed, and what he said to them once he did, questions are also now being rightly asked about the incident itself. How could well-equipped American special forces have been ambushed and overwhelmed? Why did it take so long to recover the body of one of the fallen? What was the role of military contractors in this situation? And just what are American troops doing in Niger to begin with?

Those are reasonable and important questions, and the families of the nine soldiers deserve answers. But some normally responsible commentators are delving into speculation about the cause of this crisis that crosses the line from reasonable speculation to irresponsible conspiracymongering.

Case in point: MSNBC host Rachel Maddow. On her Thursday night show, in her trademark “I’m just asking questions” style, Maddow suggested that the Trump administration’s recently implemented travel ban against Chadian citizens might have something to do with the deaths of these soldiers. On Sept. 24, Chad was added to the list of countries in the latest edition of the administration’s ban. This puzzled many observers, as Chad is a major partner of the U.S. in counterterrorism missions. (A CBS report this week suggested that the Chadian government’s failure to provide new passports for analysis was to blame.) Since then, Chad has withdrawn hundreds of troops from Niger, where they were working with local forces to fight Boko Haram, and there’s been some speculation that this was related to the ban. Maddow took this speculation a step further by suggesting that because the Chadian troops had been pulled out, American troops were left more vulnerable than they otherwise might have been.

Maddow’s speculation, which mirrors a conspiracy theory pushed by the Palmer Report, a fringe website, might be tempting to believe, but it makes several key errors. [b]First, there is simply no evidence that the withdrawal of Chadian forces from Niger had anything to do with the ambush. Examining the basic geography of the crisis makes this clear. Chad’s involvement in Niger was limited to the fight against Boko Haram, a Nigeria-based extremist movement that terrorizes civilians in northwest Nigeria, southeast Niger, southern Chad, and northern Cameroon. The Chadians were deployed to the Diffa region, where they fought effectively against Boko Haram and restored a semblance of stability to communities the extremists had terrorized. Their withdrawal has upset communities in the Diffa region, who (rightly) believe that their own government’s forces are incapable of protecting them from a renewed Boko Haram threat.[/b][/quote][/quote]

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