CBS' 60 Minutes asks: "Hundreds of thousand of people could die in a nuclear attack, but hundreds of thousands of others could be saved. That’s because the Pentagon — after decades of searching — believes it has found a drug to treat radiation exposure. Why isn’t that drug available? "
posted by lupus_yonderboy
on Jan 30, 2006 -
41 comments
D.C. Circuit: Military Tribunals Just Fine, Thanks. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit unanimously rejected an appeal by an Afghan who is being detained by the military to the tribunals established by the President's Court order in 2001. The
decision reversed a federal trial court ruling that the tribunals violated the Geneva Convention.
posted by esquire
on Jul 15, 2005 -
67 comments
To be successful, an occupation such as that contemplated after any hostilities in Iraq requires much detailed interagency planning, many forces, multi-year military commitment, and a national commitment to nation-building... To conduct their share of the essential tasks that must be accomplished to reconstruct an Iraqi state, military forces will be severely taxed in military police, civil affairs, engineer, and transportation units, in addition to possible severe security difficulties. The administration of an Iraqi occupation will be complicated by deep religious, ethnic, and tribal differences which dominate Iraqi society. U.S. forces may have to manage and adjudicate conflicts among Iraqis that they can barely comprehend. An exit strategy will require the establishment of political stability, which will be difficult to achieve given Iraq's fragmented population, weak political institutions, and propensity for rule by violence. From the US Army War College in February 2003:
Reconstructing Iraq: Insights, Challenges, and Missions for Military Forces in a Post-Conflict Scenario (PDF). From June 2005, Anthony Cordesman's analysis of factual misstatements in the President's recent address:
Truth and spin on Iraq. Foresight is 20/20. Irresponsibility and mendacity are timeless.
posted by y2karl
on Jun 30, 2005 -
44 comments
What is the ID SNIPER(TM) rifle? "It is used to implant a GPS-microchip in the body of a human being, using a high powered sniper rifle as the long distance injector. [...] At the same time a digital camcorder with a zoom-lense fitted within the scope will take a high-resolution picture of the target. This picture will be stored on a memory card for later image-analysis."
Other popular products by Empire North include
JUJU the Citizen Eye. Empire North is run by
Jakob Boeskov.
posted by sour cream
on Mar 24, 2005 -
22 comments
Transferring the problem does not transfer the moral responsibility. According to Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark, Afghanistan is the hub of a global network of detention centres, the frontline in America's 'war on terror', where arrest can be random and allegations of torture commonplace. I
leave it up to each reader to judge for themselves, but if they are right can the world afford to turn a blind eye?
posted by MadOwl
on Mar 20, 2005 -
10 comments
While the proverbial road to hell is paved with good intentions, the internal government memos collected in this publication demonstrate that the path to the purgatory that is Guantanamo Bay, or Abu Ghraib, has been paved with decidedly bad intentions. The policies that resulted in rampant abuse of detainees first in Afghanistan, then at Guantanamo Bay, and later in Iraq, were product of three pernicious purposes designed to facilitate the unilateral and unfettered detention, interrogation, abuse, judgment, and punishment of prisoners: (1) the desire to place the detainees beyond the reach of any court or law; (2) the desire to abrogate the Geneva Convention with respect to the treatment of persons seized in the context of armed hostilities; and (3) the desire to absolve those implementing the policies of any liability for war crimes under U.S. and international law.
Regarding the
Torture Papers, which detail
Torture's Paper Trail, and, then there's
Hungry for Air: Learning The Language Of Torture, and, of course, there's
( more inside)
posted by y2karl
on Mar 14, 2005 -
97 comments
Well, for a fact or two,
The Beirut Wall Isn't Falling,
Lebanon is not Ukraine and
it is not democracy that's on the march in the Middle East. And while
remembering all those arguments made 1,500 deaths ago--not to mention
those so far uncounted but estimated at 100,000+ civilian deaths--let it be, all the while the
Iraq War compels Pentagon to rethink Big-Picture Strategy, it is that American military intevention which makes
America as a Revolutionary Force in the Middle East, according to some. Meanwhile,
Kishore Mahbubani, author of
Beyond the Age of Innocence: Rebuilding Trust between America and the World lists
Five Strategic Mistakes the West has made which continue to destabilize the Islamic world. Along related lines, comes
The Origins of
al Qaeda’s Ideology: Implications for US Strategy.
Sound bites, wishful thoughts and stage managed demonstrations aside, could it be something more thoughtful might be required? Say, like,
Understanding Islamism ? (Now available in new slow acting convenient Word or pdf form) Say,
Which War Is This Anyway ?
posted by y2karl
on Mar 11, 2005 -
54 comments
War on Drugs - Do you remember it? A call for support of this amorphous war has been trumpeted by every American President from
Nixon through
Clinton. The current guy, has associated himself (at least a little bit) with the
Drug War in the previous campaign but current policy,
not so much. What I’m curious about is the actual phrase, the concept of War on Drugs. It looks like we still dedicate
large sums of money to the effort. It seems to me that we just don’t use the phrase much anymore. Did we
win? Did we
lose? Do we just want to
forget about it? Or, did we repackage the endeavor under a
new name? I tend to think we are not capable of waging more than one war against
the nameless other at a given time. It would just be too scary. So, I think maybe we're bundling the
War on Terror and the
War on Drugs under a
new brand name.
posted by Crackerbelly
on Dec 8, 2004 -
31 comments
I feel safer already! Yesterday, the
Department of Homeland Security lowered the terror alert-level for the financial-services sector in the NY/DC area from orange to yellow, which has nothing, repeat nothing, to do with the election. "We don't do politics here at this department," days DHS deputy secretary James Loy. When the alert was jacked up back in August, some
felt otherwise.
posted by digaman
on Nov 11, 2004 -
16 comments
‘Staying the Course’ Isn’t an Option "
If Bush is re-elected, there are only two possible outcomes in Iraq:
Four years from now, America will have 5,000 dead servicemen and women and an untold number of dead Iraqis at a cost of about $1 trillion, yet still be no closer to success than we are right now, or
The U.S. will be gone, and we will witness the birth of a violent breeding ground for Shiite terrorists posing a far greater threat to Americans than a contained Saddam."
posted by specialk420
on Sep 26, 2004 -
50 comments
An interesting assessment of the war on terrorism. I love it when blogs seem to be filling a void in media coverage. This one is taking a critical look at the war on terrorism and seems to be finding some holes. If you go past the partisan talk (and it seems like that blog is slanted, even though it claims to be centrist), there's a lot of interesting links in there.
posted by TNLNYC
on Sep 16, 2004 -
9 comments
Earlier this month, internal white house rumors were leaked saying that ideally, it'd be great to find an Al Queda suspect during the week of the Democratic National Convention, since the Democrats would likely be grabbing headlines. Sounds like some crass opportunism instead of truly protecting the republic from terrorists, doesn't it?
Well, what do you know, today
this message floated
at the top of CNN.com, more important than Kerry's keynote.
Even though the guy was caught on Sunday, we don't hear about it until today.
Foxnews looks the same way (
screenshot), with the Al Queda headline above Kerry's one day in the sun at Fox News. But it's all just a coincidence and we're not being played like a fiddle. Sure.
posted by mathowie
on Jul 29, 2004 -
94 comments
Secret world of US jails The United States government, in conjunction with key allies, is running an 'invisible' network of prisons and detention centres into which thousands of suspects have disappeared without trace since the 'war on terror' began.
In the past three years, thousands of alleged militants have been transferred around the world by American, Arab and Far Eastern security services, often in secret operations that by-pass extradition laws. The astonishing traffic has seen many, including British citizens, sent from the West to countries where they can be tortured to extract information. Anything learnt is passed on to the US and, in some cases, reaches British intelligence.
posted by Postroad
on Jun 14, 2004 -
34 comments
Rumsfeld fears U.S. losing long-term fight against terror. The troubling unknown, he said, is whether the extremists -- whom he termed "zealots and despots" bent on destroying the global system of nation-states -- are turning out newly trained terrorists faster than the United States can capture or kill them.
"It's quite clear to me that we do not have a coherent approach to this," Rumsfeld said at an international security conference.
Who are you and what have you done with Rumsfeld? And Can you do it some more?
via the illustrious oliver willis.
posted by jonmc
on Jun 7, 2004 -
60 comments
The State of Britain today. Mass
surveillance of it's citizenry. ID cards. Making criminals of teenagers who
snog (!) And a bill to rival the
USA Patriot Act removing property & human rights at a minister's whim. With men being imprisoned in UK jails for over almost 2 years, without charge or trial (ala Guantanamo) it looks like the partnership between Bush and Blair is a little more than simple expediency.
posted by Blue Stone
on Dec 1, 2003 -
26 comments
Not in Iraq or in Afghanistan, but right here at home. The forgotten front in the War on Terror™?
Agents found an underground bunker, thousands of rounds of ammunition, hundreds of pounds of gunpowder and manuals on guerrilla warfare, "booby traps" and explosives....
posted by amberglow
on Oct 18, 2003 -
30 comments
Homeland Security: falling apart before its even built. The bastard child of Bush's 'small government' ideology and Congress's desperate attempt to secure the nation is unsurprisingly falling apart for lack of support both in funds and from the executive branch. Isn't something worth doing and this important, worth doing well?
posted by skallas
on Sep 8, 2003 -
14 comments
«Clearly, one of the most critical questions of the twenty-first century concerns why the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 were not prevented. As I outline below, there are numerous aspects regarding the official stories about September 11th which do not fit with known facts, which contradict each other, which defy common sense, and which indicate a pattern of misinformation and coverup. The reports coming out of Washington do very little to alleviate these concerns.»
22 questions to chose from and decide which ones are nightmares of a conspiracy theorist and which ones must be answered.
posted by acrobat
on Sep 4, 2003 -
70 comments
Does America Torture? "The men's death certificates, made public earlier this week, showed that one captive...died from 'blunt force injuries to lower extremities complicating coronary artery disease' while another ...from [a] blood clot in the lung that was exacerbated by a 'blunt force injury'." What steps are we taking in our "war on terror"? What if other countries decide to treat our civilians as "enemy combatants"? Is the Pax Americana so important that we must resort to torture, or, as is most often the case, giving up prisoners to countries that are known torturers?
posted by taumeson
on Mar 7, 2003 -
113 comments
Not really a game, but is scary/funny: This is a projection of the most likely outcome of a new war in the Gulf. I used sophisticated temporal algorithms and historical semiotic analysis to achieve an accuracy rating of 99.999%. It's the mother of all Flash games.
posted by samelborp
on Jan 27, 2003 -
31 comments
Promoting Democracy and Fighting Terror. "During the war on terrorism, George W. Bush has shown a split personality on the promotion of democracy abroad. Bush the realist seeks warm ties with dictators who may help in the fight against al Qaeda, while Bush the neo-Reaganite proclaims that democracy is the only true solution to terror. How the administration resolves this tension will define the future of U.S. foreign policy."
posted by homunculus
on Jan 8, 2003 -
5 comments
