rich @rastapoppi - Twitter Profile

Khost Anniversary: Honor the Fallen With the Truth About Camp Chapman On the anniversary of Khost, one real way to honor our fallen and this second deadliest day in CIA history is to be honest about what Camp Chapman is today….not what we wish it still was. I was serving just across the border on that tragic day in 2009. I was CIA and I served alongside those we lost. That is why I refuse to sugarcoat what this place (our former base) has become because truth is the only foundation for action, and action is what honors their sacrifice. Over the last several years, thousands of foreign fighters and suicide bombers have passed through Camp Chapman formerly known as FOB Chapman and the CIA’s Khost Base. Our government knows exactly where it is. No one can credibly claim a lack of satellite coverage. The training isn’t hidden; heck, we on shoestring budgets have tracked Libyans moving through this training pipeline at Chapman. And yet it continues. This camp exists for just one purpose: Al-Qaeda External Operations. Fighters train in Afghanistan, never to stay, only to deploy outward including to Europe and to the U.S. homeland. New terrorist recruits leave energized, radicalized and emboldened, drawing inspiration from the very ground where our fellow CIA officers were killed. At any given time, Camp Chapman can train roughly 2,500 foreign fighters. This is the next generation of our enemy. Among the groups we’ve seen inside are members of al-Qaeda’s global affiliates, Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), Ansar al-Sharia from both Libya and Yemen, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), and al-Shabaab. Khowst province currently hosts two major al-Qaeda training camps used by foreign jihadists, built by us. The first being Camp Chapman, the largest. The second is Camp Salerno, which trains up to 1,500 non-Afghan foreign fighters, many of whom deploy directly after graduation to support TTP operations as a proving ground before deploying for other future external operations and plots. While Camp Salerno is physically larger, it is now controlled by the Badri 313 Unit, currently responsible for training suicide bombers tied to both the Haqqani Network and al-Qaeda. This is not a fragmented movement struggling to train, plot, or project power externally. This is coordination. This is integration. Let’s be clear about what all of this means. Terrorists are training openly at known former U.S. intelligence and military sites, graduating in the thousands, and deploying abroad while the U.S. government watches and does nothing. No disruption. No accountability. No deterrence. Just silence. If honoring the fallen means anything, it means refusing to lie to ourselves. They did not die so the ground they defended could become a conveyor belt for the next generation of terrorists and suicide bombers. They did not die so known terrorist infrastructure could be rebuilt, covered up, and explained away in the service of politics. Truth is the bare minimum we owe them. Action is what honor actually looks like.