The President’s decisions are more aggressive and incur more risk than I was originally prepared to accept.
– Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, in his prepared statement to the House Armed Services Committee Thursday morning, on the Afghan troop withdrawal announced by President Obama Wednesday evening
New York Times writer James Risen claims in a court affidavit that the government has monitored his phone calls in an effort to identify his confidential sources. “I have learned from an individual who testified before a grand jury in this District that was examining my reporting about the domestic wiretapping program that the Government …
Are the use of targeted drone strikes by the CIA and U.S. military legal?
Note: this is cross posted from an essay in Counterpunch that can be found here … CS
June 22, 2011
From Serbia to Libya
The Myth of Precision-Guided Coercion
By FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY, Counterpunch
http://www.counterpunch.org/spinney06222011.html
Vieux Port, St Raphael, France
At the end of May the British press was …
Hailing again from Wikistrat’s International Grand Strategy Competition (30 teams of grad students/interns from elite universities and think tanks around the world), where I serve as head judge (and I get paid), I wanted to share the decidedly provocative vision of Russia’s long-term future security paradigm as crafted by the New …
Folks don’t think a lot about the advances the U.S. military brings to everyday life. For starters, there’s the Internet, via which you’re now reading Battleland (yes, it was the brainchild of the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, not Al Gore). DARPA also played a major role in creating something else we take for …
The U.S. troop presence has peaked in Afghanistan at 101,000 and from here on out the Afghans will increasingly be on their own, President Obama made clear Wednesday night. The military challenge going forward is easy to describe, but tough to execute: can the fledgling Afghan national security forces — salted with corruption, …
Epsilon announced April 1 that hackers had snatched customer email information. Citigroup got hit May 10. Hackers hijacked customer data from Sony on April 20. Somebody squirreled into Lockheed Martin’s network on May 21. These are just a few of the dramatically increasing cyber attacks aimed at private companies.
What is the …
After a decade of war in Afghanistan, the battle lines — at least among the activists — are clearly drawn. The usual suspects have been rolling out their voice boxes atop soapboxes to explain, in advance of President Obama’s speech Wednesday night, why we must keep fighting, or come home. Few fall in-between.
This is what …
We always think of “collateral damage” as harm done to individuals by a wayward bomb. But sometimes collateral damage applies to an entire nation. That’s the sense you get from Mark Kukis’ new book, Voices from Iraq, a People’s History, 2003-2009. He delves into the shards of war to see how those most affected — after all, we …
I can remember the first time I came to Washington some 35 years ago and walked around the White House, protected from the outside world by a freshly-black-painted, wrought-iron fence. I recall doing that not so long ago. I did it again Tuesday afternoon, at least on the Pennsylvania Avenue side. But down by the South Lawn I was …
This pair of special-forces snipers from the Dominican army readies for an event at last week’s Fuerzas Comando 2011 near San Salvador at Shangallo Range in Ilopango, El Salvador. Fuerzas Comando, established in 2004, is an annual U.S. Southern Command-sponsored, special-operations skills competition and leader seminar among the …
President Obama traveled to West Point 18 months ago to redefine the American strategy in Afghanistan and explain why he would dispatch an additional 30,000 troops there, to a total of 100,000. “These are the resources that we need to seize the initiative, while building the Afghan capacity that can allow for a responsible transition of …
