Online Journal of Politics and Foreign Affairs
Joe Dwyer, made famous in a March 2003 Warren Zinn photo for his heroic service in Iraq, has died, apparently a casualty of that service. During the first week of the war in Iraq, a Military Times photographer captured the arresting image of Army Spc. Joseph Patrick Dwyer as he raced through a battle zone [...]
This story is a few days old now, but Noah Shachtman‘s post is the first I’ve seen it: Chinese elite anti-terror police officers are wheeling into action ahead of next month’s Beijing Olympics on two-wheeled scooters. Members of the country’s armed police unit practised on the Segway models that have been re-named ‘Anti-Terror Assault Vehicles’ [...]
Al Qaeda in Iraq [AQI] is all but defeated, Marie Colvin reports for The Sunday Times. A huge operation to crush the 1,200 fighters who remained from a terrorist force once estimated at more than 12,000 began on May 10. Operation Lion’s Roar, in which the Iraqi army combined forces with the Americans’ 3rd Armoured [...]
A while back, I asked for reader suggestions on posts but, alas, have published no posts in response to said suggestions. Most of the suggestions were for posts and post series requiring research. Three of my colleagues have volunteered to write something in response to suggested topics and I have underway a post on General [...]
Ãngrid Betancourt Pulecio was freed yesterday in a daring rescue by the Colombian National Army after more than five years of captivity by FARC narco-terrorists. [S]he and 14 other hostages — including three U.S. military contractors held since 2003 — were airlifted to freedom in an audaciously “perfect” operation involving military spies who tricked the [...]
Blogger Brian Beutler was shot in DC’s Adams Morgan neighborhood Monday night, Greg Sargent reports for TPM. Brian Beutler, a well-known progressive blogger, was shot and seriously injured during a mugging last night in Washington, D.C. One bullet damaged Beutler’s spleen, and he had it removed during surgery this morning at the Washington Hospital Center. [...]
North Korea gave China the long awaited accounting of its nuclear activities, as agreed in the six-party talks. In return, the US will delist NK as a state sponsor of terrorism and lift some trade sanctions: The United States on Thursday welcomed a long-delayed North Korean account of its shadowy nuclear activities and said it [...]
Bernhard Warner brings an interesting perspective to the fight between the AP and the blogosphere over copyright law. In attempting to bolster the AP’s case, he actually weakens it considerably. To understand where the AP is coming from with this caveman approach to copyright enforcement, you have to understand what it’s like to work for [...]
Some San Diego students got a harsh lesson about drunk driving recently. On a Monday morning last month, California Highway Patrol officers visited 20 classrooms at El Camino High School to announce some horrible news: Students had been killed in car wrecks over the weekend. Classmates wept. Some became hysterical. A few hours and many [...]
The Taliban have freed “as many as 1,000″ prisoners being held by the Afghan government in Kandahar. Hundreds of prisoners escaped from a jail in southern Afghanistan on Friday after Taliban fighters blew off the gates in a suicide attack that killed several police officers, according to a U.S. military official. Many of those freed [...]
Terrorist suspects detained at Guantánamo Bay (and presumably, anyplace else under American jurisdiction) have the right to file habeus corpus petitions in U.S. civilian courts the Supreme Court ruled today in a 5-4 decision. Further, Congress could not pass a law waiving these protections absent rebellion or invasion. Justices Rule Terror Suspects Can Appeal in [...]
Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler, who is serving as the defense attorney for Canadian citizen Omar Khadr’s war crimes trial (previously discussed on OTB here) has divulged that the Pentagon has been urging interrogators in Guantanamo Bay to destroy all of their notes regarding their interrogation of detainees. The Pentagon urged interrogators at Guantanamo Bay to [...]
Pubs in Yorkshire are being ordered to require patrons to remove their hats. Why? Because the hats are making it hard to identify people on CCTV. Pubs in Yorkshire have been ordered to ban people from wearing flat caps or other hats so troublemakers can be more easily recognised. The Park Hotel in Wadsley, Sheffield, [...]
Admiral Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the graduating class of the Army War College to accept responsibility, listen to their subordinates, and broaden their horizons. He also signaled a radical transformation of the way the Defense Department does business. The chairman also called on a national discourse on defense. [...]
A crazed Tokyo man has killed seven people in a stabbing spree. A man who police said “was tired of life” drove into a crowd of pedestrians Sunday and then went on a stabbing rampage in Tokyo’s premier electronics and video game district, killing seven people and wounding 10, authorities said. The deadly lunchtime assault [...]
Radley Balko wonders why a catalog selling off duty noveltywear to police officers is doing selling “Death Dealer” t-shirts. It’s just another sign, I’m afraid, of the paramilitarization of our police forces. Cops have long emulated the military, aping their uniforms, haircuts, rank structure, and customs and courtesies. Often, to a rather absurd level wherein [...]
Thomas Barnett makes an interesting observation based on the practices of New York’s Finest that Al Baker documented a while back in the NYT. NYC, as so often in history, leads the way in such innovation. Every single police gun ever discharged, accounting for every single bullet, all packaged up in reports used for “lesson [...]
Democratic frontrunner Barack Obama further elaborated on his “accidental foreign policy” agenda Friday in a speech before the Cuban American National Foundation, the Cuban exile group that historically has been a bastion of hard-line anti-Castro sentiment. In his remarks, Obama called for a “new strategy” towards Cuba and other Latin American nations and contrasted his [...]
Paul Krugman recently visited Berlin and had an epiphany: It’s different than Atlanta. To see what I’m talking about, consider where I am at the moment: in a pleasant, middle-class neighborhood consisting mainly of four- or five-story apartment buildings, with easy access to public transit and plenty of local shopping. It’s the kind of neighborhood [...]
Prosecutors in Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s ongoing corrpution case have added taking cash bribes from a U.S. businessman to Olmert’s ever-expanding list of allegations: State Prosecutor Moshe Lador, speaking at a Supreme Court hearing, said investigators suspected New York businessman Morris Talansky had given Olmert “dollars, in cash and in envelopes, during brief meetings [...]
Remember those 400 missing laptops at the State Department? They’ve been “found.” Or, more accurately, they were never really missing. CQ‘s Jeff Stein, who reported the original story, has the follow-up: A senior official in the department’s Office of the Inspector General, speaking only on a not-for-attribution basis, acknowledged that managers in the Diplomatic Security [...]
The State Department’s computer security team has lost 400-odd laptop computers, CQ’s Jeff Stein reports. Hundreds of employee laptops are unaccounted for at the U.S. Department of State, which conducts delicate, often secret, diplomatic relations with foreign countries, an internal audit has found. As many as 400 of the unaccounted for laptops belong to the [...]
Megan McArdle is “physically sick” that the DC Madam has committed suicide, driven to do so by a state using its resources to hound a woman engaging in consensual commerce rather than tracking down violent criminals. James Poulos wonders why he should care that a lawbreaker has killed herself. Emotionally, I’m much closer to James [...]
Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the so-called “DC Madam” has (apparently) killed herself. Police were called to the home of DC Madam Deborah Jeane Palfrey’s mother on Thursday to investigate her apparent suicide. Police have confirmed that the dead person is Palfrey who was 52. Palfrey was dubbed “The DC Madam” by the national media after her [...]
In a very, um, tortured exchange on “60 Minutes” with Leslie Stahl, Justice Antonin Scalia argues that being tortured in prison is not a violation of the 8th Amendment’s prohibition against “cruel and unusual punishments” because it’s not punishment. “To the contrary,” Scalia says. “Has anybody ever referred to torture as punishment? I don’t think [...]
Tyler Cowen asks, “Why do affluent, middle-class, and poor voters all seem so exquisitely sensitive to election-year income growth for the wealthiest families?” He explains: Oddly, the voting of lower-income voters is relatively insensitive to their own election-year incomes. One option is that media reporting is biased toward coverage of the rich and famous. Another [...]
Rusty Shackleford argues that discussions about the Iraq War get clouded with emotional and political baggage surrounding the decision to invade in 2003 and that we can gain clarity by speaking of two Iraq Wars: the successful invasion to topple Saddam’s regime and the post-Saddam nation-building phase. The post-invasion period subjected Iraqis to the tyranny [...]
Barack Obama is a socialist. We were pretty sure this was the case after he made his remarks about how bitter people in small towns cling to religion. As Bill Kristol points out, this is very similar to Karl Marx’ line about religion being the opiate of the masses, if not as eloquent as the [...]
A bunch of DC area libertarians apparently decided to celebrate Thomas Jefferson’s birthday by congregating at his memorial at midnight and dancing to the sounds of their iPods for ten minutes. No, I don’t get it either. At any rate, as Julian Sanchez and Radley Balko report, the constabulary showed up, ordered everyone to move [...]
Even though Americans are fatter than ever, we’re actually less tolerant of fat people. So say fat people. Led by Tatiana Andreyeva, a postdoctoral research associate at Yale’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, a team of researchers questioned 1,100 subjects, aged 35 to 74, twice over a 10-year span (once between 1995 and [...]
Joe Biden is getting plaudits from the Leftosphere for asking Ryan Crocker a really dumb question in yesterday’s hearings. Here’s the video: The transcript: BIDEN: Mr. Ambassador, is Al Qaeda a greater threat to US interests in Iraq, or in the Afghan-Pakistan border region? CROCKER: Mr. Chairman, al Qaeda is a strategic threat to the [...]
General David Petraeus’ testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee today was cautious and somewhat predictable. Key quotes follow with bold emphasis mine in all cases: Since Ambassador Crocker and I appeared before you seven months ago there has been significant but uneven security progress in Iraq. Since September, levels of violence and civilian deaths [...]
Could the Mahdi Army and other key Iraqi “militias” disband? Signs are pointing in that direction. Iraq’s top leadership council issued a call over the weekend: A top leadership council called Saturday on Iraqi parties to disband their militias or risk being barred from taking part in elections and participating in political life. A statement [...]
Hollywood legend and longtime NRA spokesman Charlton Heston had died after a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease. Robert W. Welkos and Susan King for the LAT: Charlton Heston, the Oscar-winning actor who achieved stardom playing larger-than-life figures including Moses, Michelangelo and Andrew Jackson and went on to become an unapologetic gun advocate and darling of [...]
A crazy man was arrested at Orlando’s airport yesterday with some interesting things in his bag. A Jamaican man behavior specialists spotted acting suspiciously was detained and arrested after components used to make pipe bombs, unknown liquids and bomb-making literature were found in his luggage at Orlando International Airport. Officials said federal behavior identification agents [...]
As mentioned earlier, I had the opportunity to interview Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff this afternoon on his ordering environmental waivers to expedite construction of a fence along the U.S. – Mexico border and other issues. The summary below is a description, not a transcription, of the conversation, unless quotation marks are used. Noting [...]
I noted yesterday morning an NPR report that had some members of the Iraqi national army taking off their uniforms and joining with the Mahdi Army. The Times of London‘s James Hider has more details: Abu Iman barely flinched when the Iraqi Government ordered his unit of special police to move against al-Mahdi Army fighters [...]
A sniper has managed to shut down a major Interstate and a county school system, terrorizing the Commonwealth of Virginia. (Or, actually, not. I managed to make it all the way to work and then some before reading about it from Glenn Reynolds, who lives the next state over.) State Police are looking for more [...]
The Swamp has a good little nugget of information on the current Civil War “eruption of violence” in Southern Iraq between the central government, composed of the pluarality government whose largest members are Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq and Dawa, and al-Sadr’s Jaish al Mahdi. The upshot? One of the causes of the current surge [...]
The Mahdi Army controls Basra and four days of intense fighting there has been punctuated with the bombing of one of Iraq’s two main oil pipelines.* U.S. officials are painting this is a success story. Karim Kadim/Associated Press via NYT The Pentagon on Wednesday said an eruption of violence in southern Iraq, where US-backed government [...]
The Washington Post has a heartbreaking article which might as well be titled “The More Things Change…” regarding our current “progress” in Fallujah: [Col. Faisal Ismail al-]Zobaie, 51, knows the nature of the men in black masks. He is a former insurgent. Now, as the police chief, he has turned against the insurgency, especially al-Qaeda [...]
American PhDs working in Germany are suddenly being visited by the police for using the title “Dr.” Americans with PhDs beware: Telling people in Germany that you’re a doctor could land you in jail. At least seven U.S. citizens working as researchers in Germany have faced criminal probes in recent months for using the title [...]
President Bush said he was envious of our troops in Afghanistan and would love to be there if he were only younger and not otherwise engaged being president. In a videoconference, Bush heard from U.S. military and civilian personnel about the challenges ranging from fighting local government and police corruption to persuading farmers to abandon [...]
New York Governor Elliot Spitzer is “involved” in a prostitution ring. Details are still sketchy. Gov. Eliot Spitzer has informed his most senior administration officials that he had been involved in a prostitution ring, an administration official said this morning. Mr. Spitzer, who was huddled with his top aides inside his Fifth Avenue apartment early [...]
British military personnel are unable to wear their uniforms off base because of persistent harassment. Plans to urge soldiers, sailors and airmen to wear their uniforms in public were in disarray last night after RAF personnel were ordered to dress in civilian clothes while off-duty because of persistent threats and abuse. The uniform ban was [...]
An Armed Forces Recruiting Station in New York’s Times Square was hit with an improvised explosive at 3:45 this morning. Investigation is still underway but, as of this writing, The police have attributed the blast to an improvised explosive device, and Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said the device had been placed in an ammunition [...]