Two National Guardsmen photographed while stationed outside the southern Farragut North station entrance. Photograph Source: Pbritti – CC BY 4.0

The death of the National Guard soldier Sgt. Beckstrom in Washington, DC was an easily averted tragedy that should never have occurred. To begin with, the Guard should never have been deployed in DC. Their presence in the District was motivated by some combination of Trump’s racism, his hatred of Democrats and the fascist posturing of Stephen Miller, Peter Hegseth and the rest of the White House sycophant crowd. Instead of her parents spending their holiday in a hospital room praying their daughter would survive, the family should have been celebrating it at their home in West Virginia. That’s the obvious element of this tragedy that didn’t have to be.

The less obvious element, yet more fundamental one, is who the alleged shooter was and what history could have brought him to commit the murder. When one delves into this part of the story, the story they discover is one that indicts not jut the alleged killer, but the Pentagon, the White House, Congress, the CIA and the US political system; in other words, the US war machine. Let’s start somewhere near the beginning.

Rahmanullah Lakanwal, the accused shooter, was twenty-nine years old. That means he was born in 1996 and was five years old when the events of 9-11 occurred. That also means he was five years old when the US attacked his country of birth and began a war and occupation and war that encompassed his entire life. Sometime in his late teens or early twenties, he signed up with the invaders’ army, joining a program that featured units known as National Strike Units—known colloquially as Zero Units—that was composed of death squads whose task was killing those deemed to be targets by the invaders. Many of the killings undertaken by these groups were face to face—no bombs or missiles........

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