Military Bases and Installations

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    A Miscalculation by Iran Led to Israeli Strikes’ Extensive Toll, Officials Say

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    Interviews with half a dozen senior Iranian officials show that they were not expecting Israel to strike before another round of talks.Iran’s senior leaders had been planning for more than a week for an Israeli attack should nuclear talks with the United States fail. But they made one enormous miscalculation.They never expected Israel to strike before another round of talks that had been scheduled for this coming Sunday in Oman, officials close to Iran’s leadership said on Friday. They dismissed reports that an attack was imminent as Israeli propaganda meant to pressure Iran to make concessions on its nuclear program in those talks.Perhaps because of that complacency, precautions that had been planned were ignored, the officials said.This account of how Iranian officials were preparing before Israel conducted widespread attacks across their country on Friday, and how they reacted in the aftermath, is based on interviews with half a dozen senior Iranian officials and two members of the Revolutionary Guards. They all asked not to be named to discuss sensitive information.Officials said that the night of Israel’s attack, senior military commanders did not shelter in safe houses and instead stayed in their own homes, a fateful decision. Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the commander of the Revolutionary Guards’ aerospace unit, and his senior staff ignored a directive against congregating in one location. They held an emergency war meeting at a military base in Tehran and were killed when Israel struck the base.By Friday evening, the government was just beginning to grasp the extent of damage from Israel’s military campaign that began in the early hours of the day and struck at least 15 locations across Iran, including in Isfahan, Tabriz, Ilam, Lorestan, Borujerd, Qom, Arak, Urmia, Ghasre Shirin, Kermanshah, Hamedan and Shiraz, four Iranian officials said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      2 Veterans Found With Stolen Military Weapons and Nazi Material, Officials Say

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      The authorities said a soldier was assaulted with a hammer as the men tried to steal gear from a military base in Washington State. The theft led investigators to a house full of contraband.Two masked men dressed in fitness clothing worn by Army Rangers made their way onto a military base some 50 miles south of Seattle on Sunday night. The authorities said the men were intent on stealing thousands of dollars in combat equipment from an Army Ranger regiment there.However, the robbery quickly went awry.A soldier walked in and began asking questions as the two men were surrounded by piles of equipment. The soldier was bludgeoned with a hammer and one of the attackers brandished a knife.As the robbers fled, they dropped a bloody rucksack full of stolen combat gear. Handwritten on the rucksack was the name “Fields,” which investigators discovered matched the last name of a man whose identification had been scanned when he drove that day onto the military installation, Joint Base Lewis-McChord.His name led the authorities to a home elsewhere in Washington State, where they said they discovered a startling scene: rooms and rooms of Nazi and white supremacy paraphernalia and a stockpile of stolen weapons.That, according to a criminal complaint filed on Wednesday in U.S. District Court in the Western District of Washington, tells the story of the investigation that led to the two men, identified by the authorities as Charles Ethan Fields and Levi Austin Frakes, being charged with assault, robbery and theft of government property “by force and by violence and by intimidation.”The 11-page complaint and a Facebook post by the sheriff of Thurston County, Wash., so far amounts to the only public information about the activities of the two men, who were both identified in the complaint as veterans, leaving more questions than the authorities will currently answer.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Ukraine Hid Attack Drones in Russia. These Videos Show What Happened Next.

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      <!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –> <!–> –><!–> [–><!–>Strategic bombers in at least two airfields, Belaya and Olenya, were destroyed. In total, Ukraine targeted bases in five regions, according to Russia’s Ministry of Defense, which said attacks on three other locations had been repelled. The Times was not able to verify those claims, […] More

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      Reluctant at First, Trump Officials Intervened in South Asia as Nuclear Fears Grew

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      After Vice President JD Vance suggested that the conflict between India and Pakistan was not America’s problem, the Trump administration grew concerned that it could spiral out of control.As a conflict between India and Pakistan escalated, Vice President JD Vance told Fox News on Thursday that it was “fundamentally none of our business.” The United States could counsel both sides to back away, he suggested, but this was not America’s fight.Yet within 24 hours, Mr. Vance and Marco Rubio, in his first week in the dual role of national security adviser and secretary of state, found themselves plunged into the details. The reason was the same one that prompted Bill Clinton in 1999 to deal with another major conflict between the two longtime enemies: fear that it might quickly go nuclear.What drove Mr. Vance and Mr. Rubio into action was evidence that the Pakistani and Indian Air Forces had begun to engage in serious dogfights, and that Pakistan had sent 300 to 400 drones into Indian territory to probe its air defenses. But the most significant causes for concern came late Friday, when explosions hit the Nur Khan air base in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, the garrison city adjacent to Islamabad.The base is a key installation, one of the central transport hubs for Pakistan’s military and the home to the air refueling capability that would keep Pakistani fighters aloft. But it is also just a short distance from the headquarters of Pakistan’s Strategic Plans Division, which oversees and protects the country’s nuclear arsenal, now believed to include about 170 or more warheads. The warheads themselves are presumed to be spread around the country.The intense fighting broke out between India and Pakistan after 26 people, mostly Hindu tourists, were killed in a terrorist attack on April 22 in Kashmir, a border region claimed by both nations. On Saturday morning, President Trump announced that the two countries had agreed to a cease-fire.One former American official long familiar with Pakistan’s nuclear program noted on Saturday that Pakistan’s deepest fear is of its nuclear command authority being decapitated. The missile strike on Nur Khan could have been interpreted, the former official said, as a warning that India could do just that.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Directive Calls to Turn Border Land Into ‘Military Installation’

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      President Trump announced a plan on Friday to turn a narrow strip along the Mexican border in California, Arizona and New Mexico into a military installation as part of his effort to curtail illegal crossings.The plan, set out in a White House memorandum, calls for transferring authority over the 60-foot-wide strip of federal border land known as the Roosevelt Reservation from other cabinet agencies to the Defense Department. Military forces patrolling that area could then temporarily detain migrants passing through for trespassing on a military reservation, said a U.S. military official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters.The directive expands a military presence that has increased steadily along the southern border, even as crossings have already dropped precipitously during the Trump administration. The ordering of troops to the border has already put the military in politically charged territory, and, depending on the details of the effort, the plan could run afoul of laws that limit the use of regular federal troops for domestic law enforcement.The directive says that the border strip will become a “military installation under the jurisdiction of” the Pentagon. Military members would be able to stop anyone crossing into the “military installation” but would not have the power to make immigration arrests, according to the military official. Border Patrol agents could then be summoned to arrest the migrants.The memorandum formalizes a plan that the administration had been considering for weeks. The Washington Post had reported on the plan earlier.A White House spokesman did not respond to questions seeking clarity as to what U.S. forces operating in the strip of border land would be able to do. A Defense Department spokesman also did not respond to questions seeking clarity.Military officials are still working out how to execute the plan, including how long troops could detain migrants before turning them over to Border Patrol agents, and what type of “no trespassing” signs needed to be installed along the border, warning migrants they were about to enter a U.S. military reservation.Then there are other logistics that would have to be hammered out, such as the languages the signs are written in, and how far apart they are posted. There is also the question of where to position military patrols along hundreds of miles of rugged land along the border, and what additional training those troops might need.Adam Isacson, who focuses on border security and human rights at the Washington Office on Latin America, said the memorandum appeared to create a path for using quasi-military personnel to detain migrants.A section of the memorandum calls for the authorization of state National Guard members to work on the military-controlled strip. If those working at the installation hold migrants until Customs and Border Protection officials pick them up, their use “comes very close to military personnel detaining migrants,” Mr. Isacson said.Zolan Kanno-Youngs More

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      Judge Rejects Attempts to Temporarily Stop Migrant Detention at Guantánamo

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      A federal judge on Friday rejected for now efforts to block the Trump administration from sending migrants to the American military base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, declaring that because the government had emptied the wartime prison of those detainees, the petitions were moot.Judge Carl Nichols of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia expressed doubts toward those bringing challenges on behalf of the migrants, a potentially favorable sign for the administration as it seeks to use the base in President Trump’s deportation campaign.Mr. Trump has said he wants to use Guantánamo’s 30,000 beds “to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people.” He issued an executive order in January to expand the Migrant Operations Center there “to provide additional detention space for high-priority criminal aliens.” The administration has sent two groups of migrants to Guantánamo, but it is not clear how many were considered dangerous criminals.Days before the hearing on Friday, the Trump administration abruptly returned a group of migrants it had sent to Guantánamo to the United States, without indicating why. It was the second time federal officials had suddenly cleared the base of migrants who had been flown there. In late February, the government repatriated all but one of 178 detained migrants to Venezuela after they spent just a few weeks at the facility. One migrant was brought back to the United States.Judge Nichols on Friday considered two challenges brought by migrants and advocacy groups on their behalf. Less than 30 minutes after the lawyers finished their arguments, he said the plaintiffs had “failed to established they are suffering irreparable harm” that warranted a temporary order to halt the administration’s policies.Judge Nichols said that if the government sent any of the migrants in question to Guantánamo, he would be prepared to consider issuing an emergency order. Lawyers for the Trump administration said they would notify the judge if any plaintiffs were sent there, and were instructed to inform the court by Wednesday of how early in the relocation process they would do so.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Fort Liberty Set to Be Renamed Fort Bragg, Fulfilling a Trump Promise

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      In 2020, Congress pushed past the president’s veto of a military policy bill to rename the base, which was originally named for a Confederate general.The Trump administration will officially reinstate the name of an Army base in North Carolina on Friday to Fort Bragg, which was originally named for an incompetent Confederate general who owned enslaved people.The base’s name was changed to Fort Liberty in June 2023 as part of the U.S. military’s examination of its history with race. But President Trump campaigned on a promise to restore the old name.The official ceremony at the military base on Friday will cement a political victory for Mr. Trump, who suffered a legislative defeat in 2020 when Congress pushed past his veto of a bill with a provision to rename nine Army bases that had honored treasonous Confederate generals who fought against the United States to preserve slavery and white supremacy.The original naming of those bases was part of a movement to glorify the Confederacy and advance the Lost Cause myth that the Civil War was fought over “states’ rights” and not slavery.The reversion of Fort Liberty to Fort Bragg is part of a larger effort by Mr. Trump to purge the military of top officers, diversity initiatives, transgender service members and other things that he said had made the armed forces “woke.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Administration Moves More Migrants to Guantánamo Bay

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      The military transported about 15 immigration detainees from Texas to the U.S. base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, on Sunday, bringing in new migrants who have been designated for deportation days after it cleared the base of its first group of deportees.No new migrants had been sent to the base since the Homeland Security Department cleared it of 178 Venezuelans on Thursday.A brief announcement did not identify the nationalities of the newest arrivals. Nor did it give exact figures. But a government official said they were in the category of “high-threat illegal aliens,” and therefore were being held in Camp 6, a prison that until last month housed detainees in the war on terrorism.Last week, the Trump administration delivered 177 Venezuelan men who had been designated for deportation from Guantánamo to the Venezuelan government on an airstrip in Honduras.It is unclear why those men had to be taken to Guantánamo on 13 military flights from El Paso from Feb. 4 to Feb. 17, and then shuttled to an air base in Honduras on two chartered U.S. aircraft. On Feb. 10, Venezuela sent one of its commercial airliners to El Paso for 190 other Venezuelan citizens the United States wanted to deport.Juan E. Agudelo, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official who is based in Miami, said in a court filing on Thursday that the administration was using Guantánamo to “temporarily house aliens before they are removed to their home country or a safe third country.” Mr. Agudelo was unable to predict the length of the average stay for a migrant before deportation beyond “the time necessary to effect the removal orders.”Sunday’s transfer happened without advanced notice. The U.S. government declined a request last week from a consortium of U.S. civil liberties lawyers that asked for 72 hours’ notice before more people in homeland security custody were sent there.The government said in a filing that it had made arrangements for would-be deportees being held there to speak by phone with lawyers. Three of the men who were sent home on Thursday had one-hour calls with lawyers who had sued for access to the migrants and specifically named those three. More

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      Some Migrants Sent by Trump to Guantánamo Are Being Held by Military Guards

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      Dozens of Venezuelan migrants sent by the Trump administration to the U.S. military base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, are being guarded by troops rather than civilian immigration officers, according to people familiar with the operation.While the Trump administration has portrayed the detainees as legally in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, military guards and medics are doing the work, the people said.The Trump administration has not released the migrants’ names, although at least two have been identified by their relatives through pictures released of the first flight.By not disclosing the migrants’ identities, the government has prevented their relatives from learning where they are being held and complicated lawyers’ efforts to challenge their detention.Spokespeople for the Homeland Security and Defense Departments have been unwilling or unable to answer detailed questions about what is happening to the migrants at the base.But The New York Times has obtained the names of 53 men who are being held in Camp 6, a prison building where until recently the military held Al Qaeda suspects. The Times has published the list.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More