Month: September 2021

Tropical Storm Nicholas made landfall as a Category 1 hurricane with maximum sustained winds of 75 mph at 1 a.m. CDT Tuesday about 20 miles northeast of Matagorda, Texas. The center of Nicholas is now located just southwest of Houston, and brings a threat of flooding rain through southeast Texas into Louisiana and Mississippi the next couple of days after making landfall as a hurricane overnight.

As of press time, more than 300,000 homes and businesses had lost power in southeast Texas, including the Houston area. Winds gusts over 50 mph have been clocked at Houston’s Hobby airport this morning. Parts of the far southeast Houston metro area have picked up 4 to 7 inches of rain in the past 24 hours. A storm surge of 3 to 4 feet above normal tide levels was observed on the upper Texas coast, including around the Galveston Bay area.

In Louisiana, Gov. John Bel Edwards declared a state of emergency; Texas soon followed with the same declaration. Texas Governor Greg Abbott said in a news release: “The state of Texas is working closely with officials on the ground to provide the resources and support needed to keep our communities safe, but it is up to all Texans in the path of this storm to take precautions, heed the guidance of officials, and remain vigilant as this severe weather moves through Texas.” Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards said in a Monday afternoon briefing that more than 8,200 National Guard members, including 2,000 from other states, are already deployed to Hurricane Ida cleanup in the southeastern part of the state, Edwards said.

Nicholas will weaken to a tropical depression and as it gradually turns more to the northeast and then east over eastern Texas and Louisiana through Wednesday and into Thursday.

In an appearance before a House committee Monday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken defended the Biden administration’s handling of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan. Blinken testified in front of the House foreign affairs committee via video link during a hearing entitled “Afghanistan 2001-2021: Evaluating the Withdrawal and U.S. Policies.”

In his opening statement, Blinken reiterated that the scenes of chaos at the Kabul International Airport, where thousands of Afghans sought to flee from the Taliban, could not have been predicted. “Even the most pessimistic assessments did not predict that government forces in Kabul would collapse while U.S. forces remained,” Blinken said. “As General (Mark) Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said, ‘Nothing I or anyone else saw indicated a collapse of this army and this government in 11 days.”

He added that the State Department was “able to draw down our embassy and move our remaining personnel to the airport within 48 hours. And the military — placed on stand-by by the president — was able to secure the airport and start the evacuation within 72 hours.” The result was “one of the biggest airlifts in history, with 124,000 people evacuated to safety,” said Blinken, followed by massive efforts by U.S. personnel to house and process tens of thousands of Afghan refugees.

The House committee hearing is just the first among what is expected to be a series of congressional probes of the Afghanistan withdrawal this week. Blinken will also appear before the Senate foreign relations panel on Tuesday.

Editorial credit: Karl Allen Lugmayer / Shutterstock.com

On the 20th anniversary of 9/11, the FBI released a newly declassified document about the 9/11 attacks Saturday, which reveals details about the logistical support given to two of the Saudi hijackers in the lead-up to the terrorist operation. The 16-page document is the first investigative record to be shared since President Joe Biden ordered a declassification review of files about 9/11 last week.

The heavily redacted document provides a summary of an FBI interview in 2015 with a man who had regular contact with Saudi nationals in the U.S. The man aided Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, the first hijackers to arrive in the U.S., once they arrived in the country. It also details contacts the hijackers had with Saudi associates in the U.S,; however, it does not provide evidence that senior Saudi government officials were complicit in the attacks.

The document was released shortly after Biden marked the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks; victims’ families issued a statement last month saying Biden would not be welcome at any memorial events as long as the documents remained classified. Biden has ordered the Justice Department and other agencies to review which documents can be declassified over the next six months.

Before the document was released, the Saudi Embassy in Washington said in a statement Thursday that it welcomed the full declassification of records to “end the baseless allegations against the Kingdom once and for all.” It added that any suggestion that Saudi Arabia was complicit in the attacks was “categorically false.”

Editorial credit: anderm / Shutterstock.com