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Longwood Gardens. February, 2013. Photo by joanneleon.
Tina Turner & Mick Jagger Live AID 1985
News and Opinion
Iraqis Feel Safer Now That U.S. Troops Are Gone
Respondents to a new survey say security has improved since Americans left, but jobs, corruption, and political stability have all worsened.
About 350 people were dying each month in Iraq as U.S. troops prepared to leave at the end of 2011, and many in the international community feared Iraqi security forces wouldn't be able to contain the country's violence on their own.
But according to a survey released by Gallup Tuesday, more Iraqis report that security in the country has gotten better (42 percent) than worse (19 percent) now that U.S. troops are gone.
Report: The CIA Increasing Operations in Iraq
There are roughly 220 American military personnel in Iraq currently working for the Office of Security Cooperation-Iraq—and after several military sites get shut down, the number is expected to drop to about 130.
The CIA's ramped-up role comes nine months after officials signaled that the agency planned to cut its presence in Iraq to fewer than half that of wartime levels, when their station in Baghdad included over 700 agency personnel and ranked as the biggest CIA station on the planet. ("Right-sizing," as Obama aides called the CIA drawdown.) Still, as senior US officials made clear last year, Baghdad will of course remain one of the agency's largest stations in the world.
CIA Effort In Iraq Places US Spooks On Syria's Three Largest Borders
Officals told WSJ that the agency provides support to Iraq's Counterterrorism Service (CTS) — comprised of SWAT-like units and U.S.-trained Iraqi special forces — which reports directly to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
[...]
The disclosure places CIA personnel on Syria's three largest borders.
In June The New York Times reported that CIA officers in southern Turkey was been funneling weapons to Syrian rebels. In December NPR reported that CIA officers were training rebels in Jordan on how to identify and safeguard chemical weapons (while Der Spigel reported that it had been happening since May).
In October and November we reported on potential but unconfirmed indications that the CIA may have been funneling heavy weapons from Benghazi, Libya, to Turkey.
The reemergence of the CIA in Iraq has coincided with America's increasing concerns about extremist Syrian rebels, namely Jabhat al-Nusra — the radical Sunni rebel group that is supported by veteran fighters and financing from al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI).
Stumbled into an intervention? What?
The Iraq War That Might Have Been
Ten years on, newly published secret documents shed new light on potential turning points the United States missed.
In our years of research on the Iraq war, we have uncovered a number of similarly hidden forks in the road -- lost opportunities that might have dramatically shortened the Americans' ordeal in Iraq or decisions whose full significance was not apparent until years later. Many are chronicled in internal government documents, thousands of pages that we reviewed in the course of our reporting -- in effect, amounting to a secret Iraq archive that sheds new light on the nearly nine-year-long war.
These memoranda, 23 of which are being published today in the new ebook edition of Endgame, our history of the conflict, cover the whole long arc of the war.
The documents, many of which are being published for the first time, include the dawning awareness that the United States had stumbled into an intervention that would be more taxing and prolonged than it had anticipated -- a point driven home in a blunt 2004 cable from John Negroponte, the first American ambassador in post-Saddam Baghdad, warning President George W. Bush that the United States was "in a deep hole with the Iraqi people" and needed at least five years to get the country on its feet. (Bush's response: "We don't have that much time.")
Iraq war: The day the conflict changed
Ten years after the Iraq invasion, reporter Scott Peterson recalls the day a suicide attack threw him out of bed in a formerly quiet Baghdad neighborhood – and blew a hole in any sense that the war was keeping its distance.
Tears. Agony. And the uncertainty, loss, and fear that has defined much of the last decade for so many Iraqis. This war has had an incalculable human cost and has scarred every single Iraqi.
At almost any point along the Iraq war timeline, until US troops withdrew completely in December 2011, events brought shock and awe to Iraqis, as their social fabric unraveled more and more.
Torture at Abu Ghraib. The siege of Fallujah. Kidnappings and beheadings. Endless car bombs and suicide attacks. The kidnapping for 83 days of the Monitor's Jill Carroll in 2006. Several local Iraqi Monitor staff or their relatives murdered. Ethnic cleansing in Baghdad that at its peak left 3,000 dead each month – the tortured bodies of many victims dumped on the streets every morning. US killings of civilians at Haditha in Anbar Province. Rape and deaths in Mahmoudiya just south of Baghdad. Morgues overrun by casualties.
Dozen US Troops Shot in Firefight on Joint Afghan Base
A gunman wearing an Afghan police uniform opened fire at a police training facility in eastern Afghanistan today, killing at least two American troops and three Afghans, officials say.
The shooting took place while the troops were visiting the facility to help train the Afghans, a key part of the U.S. handover strategy before combat troops leave in 2014. According to coalition officials, the shooting also left several wounded.
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This latest insider attack in Wardak, a restive province in the country's east, comes one day after a deadline set by Afghan President Hamid Karzai for all U.S. Special Forces to leave the province. Karzai set the deadline two weeks ago, after accusing Afghans who work for U.S. Special Forces of harassing, torturing and murdering innocent civilians.
5 U.S. Soldiers Are Killed In Air Crash in Afghanistan
The coalition said that the wreckage of the Black Hawk helicopter had been removed from the site, in the Daman district of Kandahar Province [...] The crash brought the American death toll on Monday to seven, making it the deadliest day this year for United States forces.
Daniel Ellsberg.
A Salute to Bradley Manning, Whistleblower, As We Hear His Words for the First Time
Now I hope the American people can see Manning in a different light. In 1971, I was able to give the media my side of the story, and it is long overdue Manning is able to do the same. As Manning has now done, I stipulated as to all the facts for which I was accused. And I did that for several reasons, and I suspect that Manning had the same motives.
First, it was to exonerate a number of people who were suspected of helping me, like former Defense Department colleagues Mort Halperin, Leslie Gelb and others. I was able to state flatly they did not know about the release in the midst of President Nixon's anxious desire to indict several of them.
And Manning, in saying he took responsibility for the leaks and describing in great detail how he did it, was able to say Julian Assange and Wikileaks had nothing to do with his decision to leak. WikiLeaks had not giving him any special means beyond what a normal newspaper would do.
As the former general counsel of the New York Times James Goodale once said, "Charging Julian Assange with 'conspiracy to commit espionage' would effectively be setting a precedent with a charge that more accurately could be characterized as 'conspiracy to commit journalism.'"
[...]
They were the same motives I felt 42 years ago. We both felt the horror of reading about deceptive, and even criminal, activity. We both felt the public needed this information and should have had it years ago. So we both released classified documents about a bloody, hopeless war.
Such criminal, dangerous, and deceptive behavior by the government can only be changed if Congress and the public are informed of them. And when official secrecy allows the government to cover these facts up, the only way to bring them to the public is to break secrecy regulations.
Investigation likely.
WikiLeaks: recording of Bradley Manning court testimony leaked
A leaked recording of Bradley Manning's testimony in a military court has given the public its first chance to hear the young soldier justifying his decision to leak hundreds of thousands of secret documents to WikiLeaks.
The US Army said in a statement: "The US Army Military District of Washington has notified the military judge presiding over the United States vs. Pfc Bradley Manning court-martial that there was a violation of the Rules for Court. The US Army is currently reviewing the procedures set in place to safeguard the security and integrity of the legal proceedings, and ensure Pfc Manning receives a fair and impartial trial."
The recording appears to have been made inside of the court room itself, rather than the media centre where journalists usually watch the proceedings over a live video feed.
Pfc Manning's voice sounds louder and closer than the military judge's, suggesting it was recorded in the public gallery at the back of the court. There is also no trace of the typing or discussion between journalists that usually takes place in the media centre.
[...]
Glenn Greenwald, a board member of FPF, said he had "purposefully remained completely ignorant of the identity of the source" and did not know where the recording was made.
The source approached FPF with the recording and that the group decided to release it after a discussion with its board members, Mr Greenwald told The Daily Telegraph.
Austerity and the Death of Logic
Bill Black: Both the GOP and the White House refuse to support a bill that ends the sequester, it shows the real intention of the Obama administration
Watch full multipart The Black Financial and Fraud Report
THE NEED FOR SUPPLY-SIDE SOCIALISM
- Inequality has become a barrier to growth. This could be because it reduces the marginal propensity to consume. More likely, I suspect, it's because it has added to debt and because the same institutions that create inequality - managerialism - also give us bad decision-making and rent-seeking.
Policy-making, then, requires more than (very mild) stimulus and the hope of return to business as normal. We must think about ways of increasing trend growth.
It should be obvious to anyone not blinded by ideology that the right's ideas here - of reducing the power of the working class - no longer work. Instead, Duncan Weldon, Stewart Wood and Ha-Joon Chang are right; the left must think about supply-side socialism.
Now, you might object that I've argued that history shows that long-run growth doesn't much change. This fact, though, might not be so hostile to supply-side socialism. For one thing, it shows that "moderate" policies don't work, so perhaps we need something radical. And for another thing, it shows not just that few policies raise growth, but also that few depress them. And this suggests that perhaps radical leftist policies are a "free hit": they might not be disastrous for the economy. As for what such policies might be, I'll suggest some later.
Kind of ironic, given what our govt. is collecting on us and how surveillance drones can break into wifi, etc.
Google to pay $7 million Street View fine
Google agreed to pay a $7 million fine for unlawful collection of data and train its employees on privacy issues
Internet search engine Google GOOG -0.87% will fork over $7 million for collecting personal data without authorization via its Street View service.
The company settled with attorney generals in 38 states, and also pledged to train its employees over data privacy and launch a nationwide campaign to teach people about securing Wi-Fi hotspots. (Watch the BBC’s interview with Street View creator Luc Vincent)
As part of the settlement, Google will have to destroy data it collected from unsecured wireless networks across the U.S. between 2008 and 2010 as part of Street View. It then also improperly stored the information that came in the form of email and text messages, passwords and web histories.
Blog Posts and Tweets of Interest
Evening Blues
Come Protest The Keystone Pipeline Wednesday Evening in Washington, DC
This makes me sick
Bernie Sanders says give people what they want: Safe Medicare and Social Security
Sandy Hook Ride On Washington: The Real Connecticut Effect
Angry Bear: “Trans-Pacific Partnership: A New Constitution”
Affordable, Sustainable Housing I: As Direct Action
Affordable, Sustainable Housing II: Materials & Methods
Led Zeppelin Live Aid 1985 3 Stairway to Heaven