War, Intelligence, & Terrorism

Harper's Magazine | The core of Dalrymple’s rather long and erudite ramble through the history of Western military operations in Afghanistan comes in his description of a meeting with local elders in Jalalabad, where a council, or jirga, had just been held:

Daily Mail | The world's most notorious terrorist outsmarted America by releasing a menacing message as Air Force One touched down on Saudi Arabian soil at the start of Barack Obama's first and much vaunted Middle East tour.

Associated Press | The Army has dropped the Vietnam-era name "psychological operations" for its branch in charge of trying to change minds behind enemy lines, acknowledging the term can sound ominous.

New York Times | The case has put the Obama administration in the middle of a political and legal dispute, with the Justice Department siding with the Saudis in court last month in seeking to kill further legal action. Adding to the intrigue, classified American intelligence documents related to Saudi finances were leaked anonymously to lawyers for the families.

Harper's Magazine | Has the newspaper of record adopted a double standard for torture techniques—using the “t”-word when the techniques are applied by other nations, but using more evasive characterizations when agents of the United States government are in the spotlight?

The First Post | US Air Force officer Mai Pedersen, who worked with Dr Kelly in Iraq in the 1990s, claims that the 59-year-old could not have killed himself as he was too weak to cut his own wrists and would have struggled to swallow 29 painkillers.

BBC | In the city of Basra two weekends ago, demonstrators took to the streets bearing a mock coffin draped in black, inscribed with the word: "electricity".  When the crowd started throwing stones at the local government building, security forces fired back, using live rounds. Two demonstrators were killed.

Wikipedia | Craig David Button (November 24, 1964 - April 2, 1997) was a United States Air Force pilot who died when he mysteriously crashed an A-10 Thunderbolt II aircraft on April 2, 1997. Before the incident, Captain Button inexplicably flew hundreds of miles off-course without radio contact, appeared to maneuver purposefully and did not attempt to eject before the crash.

American Libraries | The Leroy C. Merritt Humanitarian Fund—established in 1970 to provide financial aid to librarians who are in jeopardy for their stand on intellectual freedom, who face discrimination, or who have been denied employment rights—celebrated its 40th anniversary Monday with a gala dinner in the exhibition hall of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

BBC | The old KGB clan, symbolised by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, still seems to exercise influence. It must have been fun for them, a reminder of the "good old days" perhaps, to nurture this network, though surely some smart people in Moscow must have begun to wonder when there would be some results.

Guardian | A six-page "British-US Communication Intelligence Agreement", known as BRUSA, later UKUSA, tied the two countries into a worldwide network of listening posts run by GCHQ, Britain's biggest spying organisation, and its US equivalent, the National Security Agency.

Herald Sun | NATO and Afghan security forces cornered Ghulam Sakhi at a compound in Logar province's Puli Alam district, and called for women and children to leave the building, a coalition statement said.

Visual Statstics | One of the episodes of the Cold war was the Chernobyl meltdown (April 25, 1986). It was never properly investigated, as the Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, at that time in power only about a year, blamed the meltdown on the previous administration and 'malaise' of the Soviet society he wanted to reform with his perestroika.

The Guardian | Barack Obama today rejected calls to abandon his Afghan war strategy and either offer an open-ended commitment to US troops fighting there or start withdrawing immediately, after his dismissal of the US and Nato commander in Kabul, General Stanley McChrystal.

Tri Valley Central | Criminal investigators are examining allegations that Afghan security firms have been extorting as much as $4 million a week from contractors paid with U.S. tax dollars and then funneling the spoils to warlords and the Taliban.

Swedish Wire | US President Barack Obama relieved General Stanley McChrystal of his duties Wednesday over disparaging remarks in a magazine article, replacing him as Afghan commander with General David Petraeus.

Infowars | Two former CIA officials have admitted to creating a fake video in which intelligence officers dressed up as Osama Bin Laden and his cronies in an effort to defame the terrorist leader throughout the middle east. The details are outlined in a Washington Post article by investigative reporter and former Army Intelligence case officer Jeff Stein.

Washington Post | State Department officials struggled to explain Monday why they have awarded a new $120 million contract to a private security firm that was kicked out of Iraq four months ago amid charges that its personnel gunned down unarmed civilians.

Rolling Stone | The general stands and looks around the suite that his traveling staff of 10 has converted into a full-scale operations center. The tables are crowded with silver Panasonic Toughbooks, and blue cables crisscross the hotel's thick carpet, hooked up to satellite dishes to provide encrypted phone and e-mail communications

Judicial Watch | President Obama’s nominee to be second-in-command at the Justice Department represented the Saudi royals who helped finance the 2001 terrorist attacks and raked in millions of dollars to “monitor” a collapsed insurance company that got a massive government bailout.

ABC News | There has been rampant speculation about WikiLeaks' next revelation following its recent release of a top secret military video showing an attack in Baghdad which killed more than a dozen people, including two employees of the Reuters news agency.

ABC News | Pakistan's main spy agency continues to arm and train the Taliban and is even represented on the group's leadership council despite U.S. pressure to sever ties and billions in aid to combat the militants, a research report concluded.

Raw Story | Detail by painful detail, the CIA is coming to grips with one of the most devastating episodes in its history, a botched cloak-and-dagger flight into China that stole two decades of freedom from a pair of fresh-faced American operatives and cost the lives of their two pilots.

Infowars | More than twelve U.S. and Israeli warships, including an aircraft carrier, passed through the Suez Canal on Friday and are headed for the Red Sea. “According to eyewitnesses, the U.S. battleships were the largest to have crossed the Canal in many years,” reported the London-based newspaper al-Quds al-Arabi on Saturday.

FOX News | A nationwide alert has been issued for 17 members of the Afghan military who have gone AWOL from a Texas Air Force base where foreign military officers who are training to become pilots are taught English, FoxNews.com has learned. 

Raw Story | Five Stryker Brigade soldiers from Joint Base Lewis-McChord killed three civilians in separate incidents in Afghanistan's Kandahar Province earlier this year, according to charging documents released Wednesday by the Army.

After Downing Street | Ethan McCord, one of the soldiers seen in the now-famous Wikileaks video in which two American Apache helicopters fire upon a relaxed, unhurried gaggle of men in Baghdad, has stated in an interview with World Socialist Website that he witnessed numerous times the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians in Iraq after IED attacks.

History Commons | The US military conducted a training exercise in the five days before the September 11 attacks that included simulated aircraft hijackings by terrorists, according to a 9/11 Commission document recently found in the US National Archives. In one of the scenarios, implemented on September 9, terrorists hijacked a London to New York flight, planning to blow it up with explosives over New York.

Global Security | US forces have fired so many bullets in Iraq and Afghanistan - an estimated 250,000 for every insurgent killed - that American ammunition-makers cannot keep up with demand. As a result the US is having to import supplies from Israel.

Daily Beast | After several days underground, the founder of the secretive website WikiLeaks has gone public to disclose that he is preparing to release a classified Pentagon video of a U.S. airstrike in Afghanistan last year that left as many as 140 civilians dead, most of them children and teenagers.

Associated Press | An American construction worker has been detained in the mountains of Pakistan after authorities there found him carrying a sword, pistol and night-vision goggles on a solo mission to hunt down and kill Osama bin Laden.

The Nation | Sources close to Blackwater and its secretive owner Erik Prince claim that the embattled head of the world's most infamous mercenary firm is planning to move to the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The Middle Eastern nation, a major hub for the US war industry, has no extradition treaty with the United States. In April, five of Prince's top deputies were hit with a fifteen-count indictment by a federal grand jury on conspiracy, weapons and obstruction of justice charges.

Wired | All around Afghanistan, from Kandahar Airfield to the Bagram jail, the U.S. military is on a building spree, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on wartime encampments. By one count, America and its allies now have 700 bases in Afghanistan.

Ron Suskind | Rob Richer received a copy of The Way of the World on Monday night, August 4, the day before publication. On Tuesday, he said he had read key portions of the book and was comfortable with what they contained. Later that day, though, he issued the following the statement:

The Big Picture, Boston.com | Last Friday, April 30th, was the 35th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon and the end of the Vietnam War, and last Tuesday, May 4th, was the 40th anniversary of the shooting of protesting students at Kent State University.

Reuters | The letter, addressed to the U.N. Security Council president from the North's permanent representative to the body, followed the filing of a complaint by the South last week demanding action by the international community to deter further aggression.

Times Online | In the week that the UN Security Council imposed a new round of sanctions on Tehran, defence sources in the Gulf say that Riyadh has agreed to allow Israel to use a narrow corridor of its airspace in the north of the country to shorten the distance for a bombing run on Iran.

Foreign Policy | Before one of the major Iranian protests of the past year, a journalist in Germany showed me a list of three prominent Twitter accounts that were commenting on the events in Tehran and asked me if I know the identities of the contributors.

BBC | Thousands of people across the UK might have been stopped and searched illegally, figures released by the Home Office suggest.

Abramoff was released Tuesday {6-8-10} from a minimum-security federal prison in western Maryland to a halfway house and could be allowed to spend the last few weeks of his sentence in home confinement before his scheduled release date of Dec. 4.

Mary Ferrel Foundation | Robert F. Kennedy, who had made many enemies during his time on the Washington scene, was well aware of the dangers he faced in trying to reclaim the Presidency lost in 1963 when his brother was killed in Dallas.

Independent | He said the "Channel project" had intervened in the cases of at least 200 children who were thought to be at risk of extremism, since it began 18 months ago. The number has leapt from 10 children identified by June 2008.

Washington Post | At the U.S. naval station here, a handsome electronic sign hangs between two concrete pillars. In yellow enamel against a blue metal backdrop is a map of Cuba, the "Pearl of the Antilles," above flashing time and temperature readings.

Mother Jones | In the course of trying to prove that its "enhanced" interrogation program was legal, the Bush administration may have broken the law, according to a new report (PDF) by Physicians for Human Rights.

Axis of Logic | For nearly four decades, there’s been an open ques­tion about the 1971 coup that brought dic­ta­tor Hugo Banzer Suárez to power in Bolivia: was the U.S. gov­ern­ment involved? Thanks to newly declas­si­fied doc­u­ments, we now have an answer.

Kuriositas | Over the years the USA has developed many formidable aircraft.  However, there were many that didn’t ever get far from the drawing board for a variety of reasons. 

Wired | SPC Bradley Manning, 22, of Potomac, Maryland, was stationed at Forward Operating Base Hammer, 40 miles east of Baghdad, where he was arrested nearly two weeks ago by the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division.

BBC | Electronics company Hewlett-Packard has donated a number of scanners to the centre in Milton Keynes so volunteers can begin the ground-breaking task.

Associated Press | The night a torpedo-armed North Korean submarine allegedly sank a South Korean patrol ship, the U.S. and South Korea were engaged in joint anti-submarine warfare exercises just 75 miles away, military officials told The Associated Press.

Boston.com, The Big Picture | Memorial Day in the United States, a day set aside to honor our men and women who died while in military service since the time of U.S. Civil War.