13th
What really went down in DCAR
Attached is the full report that the black propaganda “communications intercept” video was made from. We think that some of Guembe’s backers spun it out trying to make it less obvious what was going on, maybe trying to muddy up the area. In the spirit of full disclosure, we’ve published the entire transmission to try and clear the air, so everybody understands what really went on.
DCAR survived a full on assault from Guembe and members of at least three militaries of different nation states, including 12 tanks and multiple other armored vehicles, including two crop dusters loaded with aerosolized ricin. Current death toll looks a hair over 468,000 including combatants from both sides (somewhere under 100k total) and about 380,000 refugees, including about 48,000 killed with the aforementioned weapon of mass destruction.
I’d been on sleep and emotion suppressing drugs for about 14 straight days when that video was shot, so excuse any signs of flatline. The situation really just needed the core team to be functional and able to do the right thing, not to dissolve into heaps at the magnitude of what had happened. We’ll probably stay on at least the emotion suppressants for two or three months, until people are identified, buried and the families are mostly through the grieving process. We really just need the command crew straight right now.
Guembe has almost certainly been taken alive. Our suspect was found in a vehicle that had gone off the road after the driver was shot, and had a couple of cracked vertebrae. They found him lying very, very still asking for a spinal board before he was moved, laughing and joking. Ironically, the injuries are minor enough he could probably have just ran for it and not severed his spinal column, but apparently whatever they took out of him with neurosurgery included some kinds of irrational “just run!” self-preservation instincts. We may never know if this really is Guembe given that he’s clearly had extensive plastic surgery more than once and there are no matching biometric records. We’re considering how to proceed, but for now he’s been spirited out of DCAR and is recovering in a hospital guarded by UN peacekeepers and a few elite friends of ours who are there to shoot him in the head if anybody attempts to remove him from UN custody. Any Guembe cultists reading this: yes, we will, and no, this story is absolutely not true. What we really found and where Guembe is now is obviously secret.
(paranoids, you know? never trust anybody, not even those telling the truth)
In terms of the mopping up process, there are probably four things to know.
Firstly, DCAR appears to have retained its pseudo-sovereignty. No UN or other peacekeepers have been deployed, there have been formal charges filed against the Guembe supporters who commandeered military resources from our respected neighbors. Secondly, we’re now in relatively formal diplomatic negotiations with at least some of our neighboring sovereign entities to negotiate formal borders. It appears that might, even to the level of a few hundred thousand rifles, is enough for us to be taken seriously enough as a threat to get a GPS line showing where we should not go. Major progress. Thirdly, a good bit of the more heavily traumatized population is clustering around some of the more easily defendable terrain, undoing a lot of our decentralization work, but generally making people feel a lot more secure. We may have to accept that we have a city, which is currently being loosely called “The Rock” (which apparently sounds a bit better in the creole.) Finally, and again, hear ye, hear ye, next time somebody comes down here, we’re going to have far better anti-armor capabilities and night vision, maybe even formal defense pacts that will get us drone cover with a phone call. We’ve seen the international community sit with their hands in their pockets while the residents of DCAR were slaughtered once, and its not happening again.
As far as I can tell most of Guembe’s irregulars have melted back into the woodwork. We’ve been checking people against their CheapIDs fairly fanatically to make sure we don’t wind up with large groups of these guys as infiltrators: people who thought we were being paranoid about identity now have reason to reconsider their positions. As far as we can tell, the objective was for Guembe’s people to take over DCAR and run it as a death camp. We weren’t able to get much out of Guembe before we had to get him out of here or face executing him without formal charges being brought (an absolute no-no from the perspective of much of the DCAR leadership) but some of the military folks he brought with him were found with computers in tact bearing population extermination gameulations in which they competed to find swift, effective extermination strategies which maximized the suffering of the living while still eventually rendering everybody dead. I’ll note that there are signs of neurosurgery on at least half of those who appear to have been in leadership positions, which may explain a lot of the Cult of Guembe’s apparent ability to have utter madmen work together in large groups: they seem to surgically alter the leadership in some kind of initiation rite. You really have to wonder why more wasn’t known about this stuff in the past, but once again, we keep excellent records and will publish a full analysis from the autopsies and brain scans of the few prisoners that were taken alive.
We continue mopping up operations, and donations of money, engineering resources or natural resources can be made through the usual DCAR channels.
I’d like to formally thank whoever sent out the drone cover which gave us a fighting chance against the ground troops. However, I’m in no position to do so: I’ve been relieved of responsibility down here for smuggling Guembe into UN hands to ensure we get a trial. But thank you, whoever you are.
I expect to be headed out in two to four more weeks, and I may yet be declared persona-non-grata down here. See you soon, civilization.
