The Niger mission

Here's the latest on what happened in Niger:

Sketching out the timeline of the attack, Dunford said a dozen U.S. soldiers and 30 Nigerien troops embarked Oct. 3 on a “reconnaissance mission” to the village of Tongo Tongo, near the border with Mali.

“The assessment by our leaders on the ground at that time was that contact with the enemy was unlikely,” he said.

The next morning, the soldiers were returning to their base when they were hit with machine-gun fire and rocket-propelled grenades. One hour after taking fire, the Americans radioed a request for air support.

"Reconnaissance"? Not so long ago, there was a news story -- I don't have it to hand -- which indicated that the Americans were on a routine mission to talk to tribal leaders.

The ABC interview with Myeshia Johnson (La David Johnson's widow) may contain a further clue. You probably already know that she has backed up the version of events offered by the unfairly-vilified Congresswoman Wilson. The interview is here. Here is the portion which I'm trying to figure out:

"He couldn't remember by husband's name. The only way he remembered my husband's name is because he told me he had my husband report in front of him. That's when he actually said 'La David.'"

The wording here is not quite as clear as I would prefer, but it seems to indicate that Trump said that LaDavid Johnson reported directly to the President before going to Africa. If that reading is correct, then this was no routine mission.

On the other hand, maybe I'm missing something, or perhaps simply confused. Is there some other way to interpret Myeshia Johnson's words?

For more clues, see here:

The U.S. soldiers had indeed initially been sent on a reconnaissance mission, but while they were in the field, they were ordered to pursue and capture or kill a specific enemy target. One of the sources says that because the soldiers were out in the field for too long on a “mission that morphed, they were spotted, surveilled and ultimately hit.”

The U.S. soldiers on the recon mission were ordered to divert in favor of targeting the enemy target, even after a second supporting team was unable to join them. It’s not yet clear who changed the orders, or how high up the chain it went. However, this did come just five days after the nation of Chad pulled its support troops from the Niger effort, in retaliation for Trump’s decision to add Chad to his racist Muslim travel ban.

There are still several other questions about the Niger mission. Why did Donald Trump work so hard to try to cover it up in the first place? Why did he then lie by claiming it was a recon mission? Why did he use a private contractor to evacuate U.S. soldiers after the mission went wrong, instead of using the military itself? Finally, how is this all related to Niger’s decision to sign a military alliance with Russia just seven weeks earlier?

On a related note:

The Myeshia Johnson fake. As longtime readers know, I'm fascinated by political fakelore. The death of La David Johnson has brought forward a spectacularly evil example of the genre. The following fake Facebook post has been making the rounds for nearly a week:

Obviously, this post is a complete fabrication. What I want to know is: Whodunnit?

For years, we've been reading Snopes articles (like this one) which expose these frauds. Almost always, these things are churned out by right-wingers. (I can think of only one left-wing example of the genre; it was issued during the first Dubya administration.)

We've become used to these fakes. They've become a quotidian nuisance -- part of our political landscape. We act as though these things pop up spontaneously, like snails on the sidewalk after a rain. Most of us never pause to think: Someone made this. Someone went to the trouble. Coming up with a good example of political effort takes effort -- yet the rightwingers do it constantly.

I think someone is paying for it.