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afghanistan
'No, Not This Time': Combat Veteran Graham Platner Doesn't Mourn for Dick Cheney
"The only legacy we have to remember," said the Maine candidate for US Senate about the former vice president, "is that he wasted thousands of young American lives, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, and trillions of dollars for absolutely nothing."
Nov 05, 2025
Graham Platner, the US combat veteran and oyster farmer running for the Democratic nomination to defeat Republican US Senator Susan Collins of Maine in next year's election, is not interested in mourning the life and legacy of reviled war criminal Dick Cheney, though he does have "some thoughts" on the subject.
While Democratic leaders of the old guard such as Barack Obama and Kamala Harris issued statements Tuesday fawning over Cheney's service to country, contributing to the familiar hagiography that typically follows the demise of even the worst American leaders the nation has inflicted on the world, Platner stuck a distinctly different tone.
"Usually, when a former vice president passes, we all take some time to mourn," Platner says in a video posted to social media Tuesday. "As a veteran of the Iraq war, I’m going to say: No, not this time."
Platner, who served in the US Marines and in the US Army during multiple combat tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan, pushed back against the pattern of whitewashing the misdeeds of the dead, especially for elected leaders never held to account.
"Over the next couple days, I'm sure there are going to be thousands of think pieces about his legacy," said Platner, "but the only legacy we have to remember is that he wasted thousands of young American lives, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, and trillions of dollars for absolutely nothing."
Some thoughts on Dick Cheney and his legacy. pic.twitter.com/vY7S3nu2nt
— Graham Platner for Senate (@grahamformaine) November 4, 2025
"If we take anything" from Cheney's death, continued Platner, "it should be that we need to build a politics that keeps the politicians, like Susan Collins, who support illegal foreign wars like the one in Iraq, accountable and get them out of office."
Platner has spoken at length about his time on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan and how, after multiple tours, he became not only disillusioned with the wars but also incredibly angry over the foreign policy decisions that started them.
Cheney, who served as VP under former President George W. Bush, has long been seen as the chief architect and driving force behind the effort to manipulate the US public into backing the invasion of Iraq in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, despite Iraq having nothing to do with the plot.
Cheney infamously said after 9/11 it would be time to "take off the gloves," which resulted in a torture regime operated by the CIA and war crimes across the Middle East, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and beyond at the direction of the Bush administration.
Bob Brigham, a self-identified progressive from Montana, was among those who applauded Platner for his statement.
"Dick Cheney was a war criminal who cost my buddy his life in Iraq," said Brigham in a social media post. "Platner has a pitch-perfect remembrance of the a-hole. May Dick Cheney roast in hell!"
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Why Pointing the US Military at Cartels Won’t Stop the Flow of Drugs
The Trump administration may present this as some magic solution that will win the drug war once and for all, but the reality is bullets and bombs have been lobbed at the narco traffickers repeatedly to little positive effect.
Aug 12, 2025
In 2020, during the last year of the Trump administration’s first term, U.S. President Donald Trump asked then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper a shocking question: Why can’t the United States just attack the Mexican cartels and their infrastructure with a volley of missiles?
Esper recounted the moment in his memoir, using the anecdote to illustrate just how reckless Trump was becoming as his term drew to a close. Those missiles, of course, were never launched, so the entire interaction amounted to nothing in terms of policy.
Yet five years later, Trump still views the Mexican cartels as one of Washington’s principal national security threats. His urge to take offensive action inside Mexico has only grown with time. Unlike in Trump’s first term, using the U.S. military to combat these criminal organizations is now a mainstream policy option in Trump’s Republican Party. According to The New York Times, Trump has signed a presidential directive allowing the Pentagon to begin using military force against specific cartels in Latin America, and U.S. military officials are now in the process of studying various ways to go about implementing the order.
While this may come as a shock to some foreign policy commentators, it shouldn’t. Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations (and short-lived national security adviser) Mike Waltz, and U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Ron Johnson have all left the door open to military force, whether it takes the form of striking fentanyl-production facilities by air or deploying U.S. special operations forces to take out top cartel leaders on Mexican soil.
Effectively declaring war on Mexico, America’s top trading partner and neighbor with which we share a nearly 2,000 mile-long border, presents the illusion of progress without actually making any.
The Trump administration wasted no time going down this road. The Central Intelligence Agency is engaging in more surveillance flights along the U.S.-Mexico border, and inside Mexican airspace, to gather information on key cartel locations. The U.S. national security bureaucracy was already in preliminary discussions about the possible use of drone strikes against the cartels as well. And on February 20, the U.S. State Department designated six Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, which is designed to deter Americans from working with the cartels and lay the foundation for future strikes.
This is all good politics for Trump, who recognizes implicitly that getting tough on Mexico economically and politically is red meat for his base. But politics isn’t nearly as important as policy, and the policy implications of U.S. military operations in Mexico—even if the purpose is a noble one—is riddled with costs and make managing the problems the Trump administration ostensibly cares about even harder.
First, we should remember one thing right off the bat: Using the military to tackle cartels is not a new phenomenon. The Trump administration may present this as some magic solution that will win the drug war once and for all, but the reality is bullets and bombs have been lobbed at the narco traffickers repeatedly to little positive effect. Successive Mexican governments since the turn of the century, from the conservative Felipe Calderón to the leftist Andres Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), have relied on the military under the presumption this was the best way the Mexican state could pressure criminal organizations into extinction.
Calderón, for instance, declared a full-blown war on the cartels immediately after his election in 2006, deploying tens of thousands of Mexican troops into some of the country’s most violent states. Despite lambasting the military-first strategy during his own presidential campaign, Enrique Peña Nieto largely continued Calderón’s strategy with a special emphasis on targeting so-called “kingpins” of the narco-trafficking world. When AMLO entered office in 2018, he tried to get the Mexican army back into the barracks but wound up expanding their authority and rushing Mexican soldiers into hot spots, like Culiacan, whenever large-scale violence broke out.
The result was a bloodbath. Rather than submit to the state’s diktats, the cartels fought the Mexican state with ever greater levels of force. Politicians, police officers, and soldiers were all targeted and killed with greater frequency. Areas of Mexico previously insulated from cartel violence were suddenly drawn into the maelstrom. Although senior narco traffickers were killed and captured in the process, Mexico’s cartel landscape was shattered into a million different pieces; as my colleague Christopher McCallion and I wrote in July, the demise of the cartel’s senior leadership merely opened up these organizations to extreme bouts of infighting between replacements who sought to grab the crown.
The end product was a massive uptick in Mexico’s homicide rate, which is now three times greater than it was before Calderón declared war almost two decades ago.
Of course, the Trump administration is unlikely to mimic the Mexican government’s past strategy entirely. It’s hard to envision tens of thousands of U.S. troops deploying to Tamaulipas, Guanajuato, or Sinaloa, sealing off neighborhoods, establishing checkpoints, and conducting offensive operations against cartels that in some instances have more firepower than the Mexican army. If Washington is going to do anything militarily, it’s more likely to come in the form of air power. Bombing fentanyl manufacturing plants would be more economical and wouldn’t involve U.S. ground forces, so the risk to U.S. personnel would be much lower.
Still, if the objective is to bomb the cartels into submission or convince them to stop producing and shipping drugs across America’s southern border, then an air campaign will fall flat. We can say this with a reasonable degree of certainty because there’s first-hand experience to go by. The U.S. Air Force did something similar in Afghanistan in 2017-2018, taking out opium labs in Taliban-controlled areas to deprive the Taliban insurgency of the revenue it needed to wage the war.
But as the Special Inspector General of Afghanistan Reconstruction reported, the bombing campaign failed to do anything of significance. The U.S. air campaign didn’t dent the Taliban’s revenue streams to the point where it made a negotiated resolution on U.S. terms possible. As David Mansfield, the world’s leading expert on Afghanistan’s drug patterns, wrote in a 2019 report, “It is hard to see how the campaign offered anything in terms of value for money, with the cost of the strikes and ordnance used far outweighing the value of the losses to those involved in drugs production or potential revenues to the Taliban.”
Why would Mexico be any different than Afghanistan? If anything, denting cartel revenue via an air campaign would be even more difficult than it was with respect to the Taliban. Unlike heroin, fentanyl is a synthetic drug that can be easily produced, isn’t particularly labor intensive, and doesn’t require acres upon acres of poppy fields that can be easily located. Sure, the United States is bound to find some of these facilities, but the cartels responsible for production will still have a monetary incentive to set up shop somewhere else. Fentanyl nets the cartels billions of dollars every year; this is a very large financial resource that the Sinaloa and New Jalisco Generation cartels—or frankly anyone in the business—will be hard pressed to pass up.
And if even if they magically did find a new line of work, other players would step into the void to increase their own market share.
These are only several problems associated with treating the U.S. military as a panacea to the drug problem. But the important thing to take away is that effectively declaring war on Mexico, America’s top trading partner and neighbor with which we share a nearly 2,000 mile-long border, presents the illusion of progress without actually making any. And it will inject immense tension in a U.S.-Mexican relationship that Washington should be strengthening, not undermining.
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200+ US Veterans Volunteer to Attend Asylum Court With Afghans Targeted by Trump
"This isn't political. This is personal," said one veteran. "For many of us, these are people that we served with."
Jul 01, 2025
Hundreds of U.S. military veterans have signed up to accompany Afghans who took part in the American-led invasion and occupation of their homeland to their asylum court hearings, where they face possible arrest and deportation by the Trump administration, despite having entered the United States legally and the risk of deadly Taliban retribution against them and their families should they be forced back to Afghanistan.
#AfghanEvac and Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA) said Tuesday that over 220 veterans have volunteered for Battle Buddies, "an initiative to support our wartime allies as they go through their immigration processes—because no one who stood with us in war should have to stand alone in court."
"Afghan wartime allies were promised a pathway to immigration to the United States based on their service to our mission over the course of our longest war," Battle Buddies said on their website. "They came through legal channels. They showed up to court as required. And now they are being targeted, arrested, and detained by ICE—with no warning, no due process, and no justification."
"That's not just wrong—it's un-American," the groups argued. "Battle Buddies brings veterans, advocates, and everyday Americans to courtroom doors—standing quietly, legally, and deliberately to witness and affirm that our promises still stand."
Speaking at a Monday press conference, IAVA CEO Kyleanne Hunter said: "This isn't political. This is personal. For many of us, these are people that we served with."
Battle Buddies was launched after the June 12 arrest by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents of former Afghan interpreter and logistics contractor Sayed Naser Noori at a San Diego courthouse following a routine asylum hearing. When U.S. forces withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021, Naser went into hiding in his home country while awaiting the issuance of a special U.S. visa for Afghans who helped the American military.
After the Taliban murdered one of his brothers in 2023 for collaborating with the occupation, Naser applied for U.S. asylum and was granted humanitarian parole to enter the United States while his asylum case was processed. But he was arrested anyway under the Trump administration's mass deportation effort after a judge dismissed his asylum case. The administration then fast-tracked his deportation.
An Afghan ally who served alongside U.S. forces was legally paroled into the U.S. and showed up for his first hearing.DHS detained him anyway—using a vague “improvidently issued” excuse.He followed the rules.We have the video.This must stop.#AfghanEvac #DueProcess
[image or embed]
— afghanevac.bsky.social (@afghanevac.bsky.social) June 13, 2025 at 3:06 PM
As Military.com reported Monday, Naser's last hope is a so-called "credible fear" interview, which he has requested. Although immigration officials have acknowledged his right to such a hearing—without which he cannot be legally deported—one has noto yet been scheduled.
"To the American government: I believed in you. I worked with you. I helped you for years, side by side. I trusted your words and followed your rules," Naser said in a statement read at Monday's news conference. "You say that people like me should come legally. I did. And now I am locked away."
"To President Trump, I love America, and I was building a life here," Naser's statement continued. "I had a car. I had a bank account. I had a job. Who will take care of all that now that I'm in detention? Instead of locking us away with no warning, why not offer us a shelter or some support?"
"There are better ways than treating people like criminals," he added, "especially those who stood with you during war."
"You say that people like me should come legally. I did. And now I am locked away."
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) falsely claimed last month that "there is *no* record to show that [Naser] assisted the U.S. government in any capacity."
Speaking at Monday's news conference, #AfghanEvac founder Shawn VanDiver said that DHS is "full of shit."
VanDiver noted that DHS "has said Sayed was not vetted, DHS has said that there's no evidence that Sayed served alongside our country."
"Both of those things are lies—knowable lies," he added. "They know that they're not telling the truth."
Indeed, media outlets including Military.com and San Diego's KPBS reported that they have verified that Naser and his brothers worked with the U.S. military during the occupation.
While Naser is the first publicly known Afghan collaborator to be arrested while following procedure at a courthouse, he is far from the only one facing removal from the U.S. under the Trump administration's draconian deportation drive. Thousands of Afghans who fled the Taliban reconquest of their homeland now fear they will be forcibly returned to Afghanistan, where at least hundreds of people who served as soldiers, government officials, police, contractors, or other collaborators have been killed by the Taliban, according to United Nations officials and human rights groups.
The situation worsened after the Trump administration in May revoked temporary protected status (TPS) for more than 8,000 Afghans and then designated Afghanistan as one of the countries subject to a new travel ban.
Shir Agha Safi, executive director of Afghan Partners in Iowa, a Des Moines-based nonprofit, recently told The Guardian that some Afghans facing deportation "would choose suicide over being tortured and killed by the Taliban."
"They have said this because the Taliban is still there and if you send an Afghan back to Afghanistan that would mean a death penalty," Safi added.
"This decision endangers thousands of lives, including Afghans who stood by the United States."
However, ignoring the many Afghan collaborators killed by the Taliban, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem claimed in a recent statement that "Afghanistan has had an improved security situation, and its stabilizing economy no longer prevent[s] them from returning to their home country."
The termination of TPS for Afghans prompted bipartisan rebuke, with U.S. Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) appealing last month to Noem and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
"This decision endangers thousands of lives, including Afghans who stood by the United States," the senators wrote. "This decision represents a historic betrayal of promises made and undermines the values we fought for far more than 20 years in Afghanistan."
Murkowski and Shaheen warned that cutting off TPS status for Afghans "exposes these individuals to the very real threat of persecution, violence, and even death under Taliban rule."
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