Blew – COOPER GENERAL NEWS

When Jordan Baize emerged from his basement in Bremen, Kentucky, where he had taken shelter during a tornado, he saw the roof of his house blown off, doors unhinged, and shards of glass and insulation strewn all over the place.

However, his Yamaha piano was still intact. Under an overcast sky the next morning, Mr. Baize sat alone in his living room and started playing a song that had stuck in his mind for days.

Whitney Brown, Mr. Baize’s sister, said she heard her brother play on Saturday when she was in his bedroom packing clothes in boxes. When she started recording Mr. Baize, she recognized the tune as a Christian worship song, “There’s Something About That Name,” and remembered the words:

“Kings and kingdoms will all pass away, but there is something about this name,” a reference to Jesus Christ.

She said these texts seemed appropriate to the situation. Her brother’s house, his “kingdom,” had been destroyed, but it was not his hope, she said.

“It was healing just to know that he was still holding on to the hope of Jesus,” said Ms. Brown, 32, a masseuse and doula and a sawmill owner.

At least 88 people were killed in tornadoes in Kentucky, Arkansas, Illinois, Mississippi, Missouri and Tennessee on Friday. Twelve people were killed in Bremen.

Mr Baize, 34, said he didn’t notice his sister taping him but was encouraged by the reaction after she posted the video on Facebook.

“In these times, whether or not people around the world suffered a tornado this past weekend, we all face storms of some kind,” said Mr. Baize, an accountant and consultant. “That little bit of peace and perspective, which I had to deal with in what I thought was a personal, private moment, appealed to people all over the world in my opinion.”

Mr Baize said he fell into the basement with his two children, his ex-wife and her husband, and they huddled under a mattress just before the Friday night tornado was expected. Three or four minutes later, he said. It took about 30 seconds.

After the storm passed, he and his children spent the night at his parents’ house nearby. When he returned to the house the next morning, he made an inventory of the rubble: rubble everywhere, three or four inches of rain in the remains of the house, and damaged trees that three generations of his family had grown up on. He turned to the piano, which was covered in water.

“I thought I could see what shape the piano is in,” he recalls. “If it’s in a terrible, terrible state, I can at least play one more time.” He started playing and felt a sense of peace.

Gloria Gaither wrote the lyrics for “There’s Something About That Name” and her husband Bill Gaither composed the music. She said she was overwhelmed after seeing the video clip for the song they wrote decades ago.

“A song obviously appears in a person’s life when he needs it,” she said, “under circumstances that we would never have dreamed of.”

A controlled detonation by American forces, which could be heard across Kabul, has destroyed Eagle Base, the last CIA outpost outside of Kabul airport, US officials said on Friday.

The demolition of the base was to ensure that no devices or information left behind could get into the hands of the Taliban.

Eagle Base, which began in a former brick factory at the beginning of the war, was used throughout the conflict. It grew from a small outpost to a sprawling center where the anti-terrorism forces of the Afghan intelligence services were trained.

These forces were some of the only ones who continued to fight after the government collapsed, according to current and former officials.

“You were an exceptional unit,” said Mick Mulroy, a former CIA officer who served in Afghanistan. “They have been one of the most important ways the Afghan government has kept the Taliban in check for the past 20 years. They were the last to fight and they suffered heavy losses. “

Native Afghans knew little about the grassroots. The terrain was extremely safe and designed to be nearly impossible to penetrate. Walls up to ten feet high surrounded the grounds and a thick metal gate quickly slid open and shut to let cars in.

Inside, the cars had to go through three external security checkpoints, where the vehicles were searched and documents checked before they were allowed to enter the base.

During the early years of the war, a subordinate CIA officer was put in charge of the salt mine, a detention facility near Eagle Base. There, the officer ordered a prisoner, Gul Rahman, to take off his clothes and chain them to a wall. He died of hypothermia. A CIA board recommended disciplinary action but was overruled.

A former CIA contractor said leveling the base would not have been an easy task. In addition to burning documents and crushing hard drives, sensitive devices also had to be destroyed so that they did not fall into the hands of the Taliban. Eagle Base, the former contractor said, is not an embassy where documents can be burned quickly.

The destruction of the base was planned and had nothing to do with the massive explosion at the airport, in which an estimated 170 Afghans and 13 American soldiers were killed. But the detonation hours after the attack on the airport alarmed many people in Kabul, who feared that it was another terrorist attack.

The official American mission in Afghanistan to evacuate US citizens and Afghan allies ends next Tuesday. The Taliban have said the evacuation effort cannot be extended, and Biden government officials say continuing beyond that date would significantly increase the risks for both Afghans and US forces.