In a press conference Tuesday conducted by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department in coordination with the FBI and Department of Homeland Security, Sheriff Kevin McMahill reported the police had found another six-page manifesto written by Matthew Livelsberger. McMahill refused to release the full manifesto due to what he said was potentially “confidential” information contained within it.

Livelsberger was a 37-year-old US Army Special Forces soldier from Colorado Springs, Colorado who apparently committed suicide before blowing himself up in Tesla Cybertruck in front of Trump Tower in Las Vegas on New Year’s Day. The bombing injured seven other people, with Livelsberger being the only death.

At the time of his death, Livelsberger was an active member of the Green Berets, a highly-decorated member of the Army’s 10th Special Forces Group who deployed to Afghanistan and other countries in service of US imperialism nine times over his career. Prior to his death, Livelsberger attempted to reach out to multiple right-wing and military podcasters to discuss, among other topics, being followed by the government, secret drone programs and his role in US war crimes.

In an email sent on December 31, 2024, which police confirmed on Tuesday appeared to be authentic, Livelsberger reached out to former US Army soldier Sam Shoemate, who then shared the email on former Navy Seal and CIA contractor Shawn Ryan’s YouTube show on January 3.

In the email, Livelsberger claimed that drone activity in the United States was the result of “gravitic propulsion systems” which he claimed only the US and China possessed. He wrote that Homeland Security and FBI agents had been following him for over a week due to his knowledge of this program and “also war crimes that were covered up during airstrikes in Nimruz province Afghanistan in 2019 by the admin, [Department of Defense], [Drug Enforcement Agency] and CIA.”

He wrote, “I conducted targeting for these strikes of over 125 buildings (65 were struck because of CIVCAS) that killed hundreds of civilian in a single day.” He added, “The UN basically called these war crimes, but the administration made them disappear. I was part of that cover-up with USFORA and Agent [redacted] of the DEA. So I don’t know if my abduction attempt is related to either.”

A 21-page report issued in October 2019 by the United Nations Assistance Mission to Afghanistan (UNAMA) and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) reviewed the air strikes committed by the United States on alleged drug facilities located across the Nimruz province on May 5, 2019.

On that day the US military carried out strikes on more than 60 alleged “drug labs” across the Bakwa district, Farah province and Delaram district. The US military alleged that the “drug labs” were controlled by the Taliban and operated exclusively by its combatants.

However, after the strikes occurred UNAMA began receiving reports of credible allegations of “significant civilian harm” with initial reports indicating anywhere from 40 to 200 civilian casualties.

Over the next four months UNAMA investigators conducted dozens of interviews with local residents and viewed impact sites from the bombings. Local sources identified some of the sites bombed as drug labs while others were “residential homes in which drug processing had not taken place.” The airstrikes also targeted “a marketplace with shops, a fuel station, and vehicles.”

In September 2019, the agency verified that at least 30 civilians were killed and five injured, including 14 children and one woman. UNAMA also received “reliable and credible information” that “at least” another 30 civilians were killed and seven more injured, “the majority of whom were women and children.” In total UNAMA received “specific and detailed information” of 145 civilians impacted by the airstrikes with the majority, 89 killed another 52 injured and four more “undetermined.”

The majority of those killed, 80, were children. In one instance, 12 members of the same extended family were killed when a bomb struck their house.

In addition to the strikes killing dozens of civilians, the UNAMA investigation found that the facilities targeted by the US were not exclusively controlled by the Taliban and “were not performing combat functions.”

After initial denials, claiming there were “zero civilian casualties” in the attacks, US military forces conceded to the UNAMA after it published its preliminary findings that “it is possible there was a CIVCAS [civilian casualty].”

The UN report makes clear that the same terror bombing and disregard for civilians seen in Gaza throughout Israel’s genocidal campaign is not an aberration, or the result of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu alone, but a continuation of decades of US imperialist foreign policy.

From the email, and previous excerpts released by police, it is clear that Livelsberger’s radicalization and subsequent depression was the result of his central role in perpetrating these atrocities. In Livelsberger’s latest manifesto, he allegedly wrote:

These graphic encounters replay in my head every day, all day and it has ruined my relationships with my family and friends. I am now a shell of a human being with noting to live for, it has all been taken away by my affiliations.

There was not a time during my two years in Afghanistan where I had a clear understating or rational feeling in my heart of why my brothers were fighting and dying. We failed and the credibility of military and political leadership was shredded when no one was held accountable.

Despite apparently being haunted by his actions in the military, Livelsberger had no ill-will towards the “commander-in-chief” who authorized the airstrikes, then-President Donald Trump. In the latest manifesto, he allegedly called for a fascist coup to remove “Democratic Party elements” in the “current administration and future remaining Generals and Joint Chiefs.”

This call is similar to another “note” the Las Vegas police claimed they found on Livelsberger’s charred phone. In the initial message released by police, Livelsberger called on “Military and vets move on DC starting now,” and that, “Militias facilitate and augment this activity.”

He allegedly called for soldiers and militias to “Occupy every major road along fed buildings and the campus of fed buildings by the hundreds of thousands. Lock the highways around down with semis right after everybody gets in. Hold until the purge is complete.” He demanded people rally around Trump, Elon Musk and Robert F. Kennedy.

The Las Vegas bombing was the second major attack that was conducted by a US Army veteran on New Years Day last week. Shortly after 3:00 a.m. in New Orleans, Louisiana, 42-year-old former Army veteran Shamsud-Din Jabbar drove a pick-up truck through Bourbon Street, killing 14 people and injuring more than 30 others before dying in a shootout with police.

Both Livelsberger and Jabbar were deployed to Fort Liberty, formerly Fort Bragg, a massive military installation in North Carolina, but it does not appear that they knew each other or that the attacks are formally connected. Livelsberger was at then-Fort Bragg from December 2012 to October 2013 while Jabbar was at the base from June 2012 to January 2015.

While Trump and the Republicans sought to blame immigrants or the “deep state” for these latest attacks, both Liveslberger and Jabbar were products of American society, specifically the US military and the neocolonial wars which have been waged over the last three decades in defense of Wall Street. Trained to kill the enemies of US imperialism, they both ended up turning this training on themselves and others instead.

Recently conducted research by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, or START, at the University of Maryland, found having a background in the US military “is the single strongest individual-level predictor of whether a subject” will be a “mass casualty offender.” A “mass casualty” event is one in which four or more people are injured or killed.

START found that based on the “Profiles of Individual Radicalization in the United States (PIRUS) database, which includes information on more than 3,000 subjects who committed extremist crimes in the United States,” military veterans are “2.41 times more likely to be classified as mass causality offenders than individuals who did not serve in the armed forces.”