The Boston Globe published what seemed to be a solid article on Jan. 17, alleging that former Liberian dictator Charles Taylor had been a U.S. intelligence informant. The article was based on a Freedom of Information Act request and stated that:
After a quarter-century of silence, the US government has confirmed what has long been rumored: Taylor, who would become president of Liberia and the first African leader tried for war crimes, worked with US spy agencies during his rise as one of the world’s most notorious dictators.
The disclosure on the former president comes in response to a request filed by the Globe six years ago under the Freedom of Information Act. The Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s spy arm, confirmed its agents and CIA agents worked with Taylor beginning in the early 1980s.
The story goes into methodology to some extent, stating their reasons for drawing that conclusion, etc.
A journalism professor professor of mine, Dan Kennedy, wrote up the case in more detail on Media Nation. If there's anything fishy about this case, one of Kennedy's readers, 'dm wilson' summed it up in a comment:
it’s a troubling editor’s note. don’t you think Bender would have had to have this conversation with his editors before the piece was published?
Yes. Without a doubt, an investigative story that the Globe knew would make a worldwide splash would be thoroughly checked out for holes and flaws, but the editor's note seems to imply the paper did no such fact-checking.
Either the Globe made an extreme oversight, giving free reign to a rogue journalist or they allowed an outside source undue influence over their editorial process. Both scenarios seem unlikely.
It's a strange case, as Kennedy says.
Bender is a good and careful reporter, and it seems pretty clear that there are other shoes yet to be dropped. The only thing we can say for certain at this point is that it’s all way too weird to come to any conclusions.
Disclosure: I spent the fall of 2011 working for boston.com, the Globe's free website. I'm no longer on the company's payroll.
A human rights group set up by the Russian president, meanwhile, has called for snap elections.
The Kremlin's rights panel also called for the resignation of the election chief on Saturday in a statement about what it called "discredited" polls that have sparked mass demonstrations.
Recommendations by the panel - which advises Medvedev on rights and social issues - are not binding but will add to pressure on the authorities for radical changes in the wake of the polls.
It said that there was "mass distrust of the poll results" which showed significantly diminished support for Vladimir Putin's United Russia party, but still gave it a majority in parliament.
The Kremlin panel added that new election laws should be put in place "with the aim of then calling snap elections" to replace the current parliament that met for its first session on Wednesday.
"Numerous reports of ballot stuffing, re-writing of protocols of ballot results, an unjustified removal of observers and journalists [from polling stations], a ban on photography and video recording and other violations of electoral rights as well as inexplicable paradoxes of electoral statistics lead to mass distrust of the poll results," the panel's statement said.
"I'm happy that I have lived to see the people waking up. This raises big hopes," the 80-year-old Gorbachev said on Ekho Moskvy radio.
He urged Putin to follow his example and give up power peacefully, saying Putin would be remembered for the positive things he did if he stepped down now. The former Soviet leader, who has grown increasingly critical of Putin, has little influence in Russia today.
Photo: In Brussels today, a group showed solidarity with the Russian protestors, holding up signs calling for fair elections. Creative Commons/Flickr user Max Mayorov
As online communities and lawmakers alike get fired up over SOPA and PIPA legislation that would regulate the internet by blocking access to some sites, it has become clear that the U.S. government will never, in its current form, be able to significantly regulate the internet.
“I feel that the general public is not aware of the gravity of SOPA and Congress seems like they are about to cater to the special interests involved, to the detriment of Internet, for which I and many others live and breathe,” DeSopa developer T Rizk explained to TorrentFreak.
“It could be that a few members of congress are just not tech savvy and don’t understand that it is technically not going to work, at all. So here’s some proof that I hope will help them err on the side of reason and vote SOPA down,” he added.
As T Rizk explains, the goal of the browser addon is not to break the potential law, but to prevent it from coming into existence. These developers have rendered obsolete a law that is still grinding through the legislative process.
Under a government that offers the transparency and opportunity for debate that the U.S. does, such legislation can never succeed. The extrmely adaptive and quick-acting online community can render obsolete any regulatory bill before it can go into effect and inhibit the net's ability to defend against it, as DeSopa has shown.
In short, America's system of governance, developed before computers had even been thought of, is too slow to regulate the ubiquitous yet agile internet.
The only way and sort of regulation could succeed in reigning in the internet would be through a secret project, developed over months or years, that would go into effect without warning, laying down extreme surveillance and limitations all at once. Within the American political system, such a project is unlikely to be concieved and even more unlikely to succeed.
Western intelligence agencies have failed to secure any consistent flow of information from North Korea, the New York Times said today. It took 48 hours for outside nations to get word of Kim Jong-Il's death. Their source? North Korean state media.
For South Korean and American intelligence services to have failed to pick up any clues to this momentous development — panicked phone calls between government officials, say, or soldiers massing around Mr. Kim’s train — attests to the secretive nature of North Korea, a country not only at odds with most of the world but also sealed off from it in a way that defies spies or satellites.
North Korea, arguably the greatest threat to national security in Asia, is an enigma to even the highest levels of U.S. intelligence. Sattelite imagery is easy to beat: put up a roof. Without assets inside the county and inside the highest levels of government, there can be no advanced knowledge of anything unfolding in North Korea, where a new leader is still largely unknown to outside nations.
“We have clear plans about what to do if North Korea attacks, but not if the North Korean regime unravels,” said Michael J. Green, a former Asia adviser in the Bush administration. “Every time you do these scenarios, one of the first objectives is trying to find out what’s going on inside North Korea.”
In many countries, that would involve intercepting phone calls between government officials or peering down from spy satellites. And indeed, American spy planes and satellites scan the country. Highly sensitive antennas along the border between South and North Korea pick up electronic signals. South Korean intelligence officials interview thousands of North Koreans who defect to the South each year.
And yet remarkably little is known about the inner workings of the North Korean government. Pyongyang, officials said, keeps sensitive information limited to a small circle of officials, who do not talk.
The pilots brushed off the common criticism that they are too removed from the battle to properly consider the lives they may be taking.
The pilots said that it’s not just their aircraft that are misunderstood. They’re well aware of a public perception that pilots like them simply push a button to blithely drop bombs on people they’ve never seen in countries they’ve never visited, all from the comfort of their US air base.
Pilots at Holloman said they’re not surprised the public may have such a view, since even some experienced flyers arriving for training here have mistaken ideas about what it’s like to be the human element in a UAV. After all, these guys walk out the door of their simulated cockpits and go home to their families at the end of a work day.
In fact, the pilots' take on the differences between manned and unmanned flight hints that it might be safer for everyone. No rushed decisions, no over-defensiveness out of fear.
“Your visibility is like looking through a soda straw because you’re just looking at one thing at a time, based on the capabilities of the camera, whereas in a real aircraft you can look around very easily,” he said.
But a simulated cockpit has distinct advantages as well. These pilots, who have all seen combat duty themselves in manned aircraft, said the safety allows them to do their job more effectively.
“You’re going slow and you’re not worried about ejecting or the environmental factors you have in a manned aircraft, your ability to really concentrate on exactly what’s happening is much better,” Brent said.
Mike agreed. “You’re not in a rush to make a decision because you’re not pressured by fuel or speed or anything like that,” he said.
But Yosef Lapid, a professor at Mexico State University who studies terrorism, said the dangers of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) should be considered carefully.
“When you look at how the laws of war have emerged, there’s a sense that the underdog should have some decent chance of challenging,” he said. “I think these technologies violate that sense of justice.”
Lapid also worries about the long-term effects of using UAVs in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan. In all the countries where armed UAVs are flown, large protests have erupted among the civilian population, which has at times suffered enormous casualties.
“It’s important to ask that question … not only how many terrorists we’re eliminating but how many new terrorists we are creating,” he said.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta made a surprise visit to speak at the closing ceremony, where the American flag was lowered, symbolizing the United States' withdrawal. In his speech, Panetta pointed to "a new chapter in history" for the nation. Iraq's president and prime minister were not present for the ceremony.
No senior Iraqi government officials showed up for the event, though the name tags attached to two chairs in the front row indicated American hopes that they might. One was labeled for Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, the other for President Jalal Talabani.
The American withdrawal from Iraq was required by Dec. 31 according to an agreement between the nations. Once it became clear that the deadline was inflexible, U.S. officials determined there was no reason to keep troops away from their families for the holidays.
U.S. commanders had openly urged Iraqi leaders to extend the military’s presence beyond the agreed Dec. 31 deadline, so that they could continue to train the Iraqi security forces, build the country’s almost non-existent conventional defenses and allow more time for the wobbly political consensus forged after last year’s elections to solidify.
But in a rare display of consensus, Iraq’s usually squabbling factions united to insist that troops could stay only if they were subject to Iraqi law, a condition that the U.S. military had made clear from the outset would not be possible.
The time and date of the ceremony was kept secret to reduce the possibility of a planned terrorist attack, and it seems to have worked. The event was uneventful, in stark contrast to the beginning of the war.
The Pentagon's #3, Michele Flournoy, is leaving her post as Undersecretary of Defense for Policy in February, she told AP. The 50-year-old mother of three said she needs to rebalance her personal life. Unsurprisingly, the Pentagon doesn't give many days off, and it's not so easy to step out to take the kids to dinner.
“By nature it is an all-consuming job and it does take a toll on the family,” she said, adding that she considers her time as the undersecretary of defense for policy as “probably the highlight of my professional life.” She was the first woman ever to hold the post when she started the job in February 2009, two years after co-founding and serving as the first president of the Center for a New American Security, a prominent think tank.
As an adviser to former CIA director and current Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, Flournoy is held in high esteem, wrote Laura Rozen on The Envoy:
"I hate to see Michele go--as a defense intellectual, a standout bureaucratic player, as a respected colleague and trailblazer for women she has few if any peers," former Clinton administration official Heather Hurlburt, executive director of the progressive National Security Network, told Yahoo News Monday. "Goodness knows she has earned any re-balancing she wants. I think it highlights for both men and women how extreme the demands of government service have become."
The demands, no doubt, are great. Flournoy made the conscious decision to choose between two once-in-a-lifetime opportunities: parenting and her role at the Pentagon.
Flournoy said her children understand that their parents’ hard-charging jobs are “once-in-a-lifetime opportunities” at an important juncture in American history, but it has required difficult trade-offs.
“You can make the sacrifice for a period, but at some point the cost becomes too high and you need to rebalance,” she said.
Her resignation comes as the U.S. makes a shift in its foreign policy focus from the Middle East to Asia, where China poses an ever-increasing threat to U.S. dominance and tensions with Pakistan are high. Flournoy's successor is likely to spend much more time thinking about policy in Asia -- and inherent within that, naval policy -- than the Middle East, where troops levels are expected to fall over the next few years.
Photo: Michele Flournoy meets troops in Herat, Afghanistan in April 2011. Creative Commons/Flickr user isafmedia
This week, the crisis came when a Chinese fisherman stabbed two South Korean coast guard commandos when they tried to arrest the fishermen for operating illegally in Korean waters. Officials say the fisherman denies having stabbed anyone.
South Korea’s Chosun Ilbo newspaper noted that this was the second murder of a South Korean sailor by Chinese fishermen over illegal fishing in the South China Sea in three years. The first drowned after an attack in 2008.
Chosun Ilbo went on say that the only way to deterfurther violence was "strong reprisals."
Adding violence to the already-tense international relationship would not help things, but it could help protect Koreans. Neither of these incidents have directly involved the Chinese government, but they certainly illustrate an attitude of hostility between China and South Korea.
With strong U.S. backing, the small nation of South Korea poses a significant threat to China, as any engagement could draw action from the Pentagon and possibly Japan. And as we learned in 1914, it only takes one violent death to start a very, very large war. Let's hope for the sake of the region that those Chinese fishing captains can limit their knife use to the fish.
As its relationship deteriorates with Pakistan, the U.S. has been forced to get creative in resupplying its troops in Afghanistan. Now the government must pay a higher cost -- either diplomatic or monetary (the choice is with the Pentagon) -- to keep troops fed.
The Diplomat explains:
The U.S. and NATO, having already anticipated problems with Pakistan, had been building up another set of overland supply routes from Europe through the former Soviet Union to Afghanistan, known as the Northern Distribution Network (NDN). By the time of the Pakistan cutoff, a bit more than a third of NATO cargo to Afghanistan went in via the northern route, slightly more than via Pakistan. The remainder goes in by air, which avoids any geopolitical complications but is far more expensive.
It's not known how long Pakistan will keep the supply routes closed, but after an incident last year in which the U.S. killed three Pakistani soldiers, Pakistan shut off the border for ten days. U.S. officials say that with the NDN, and with large amounts of goods stockpiled in Afghanistan, they don't anticipate any shortages as a result. Still, recent events have shown that the United States’ partners on the northern route may now try to take advantage of its increased dependence on them.
Uzbekistan has been a key partner on the NDN and an estimated 98 percent of overland traffic from the north to Afghanistan passes through the southern Uzbekistan border city of Termez. As a result, and despite the unseemliness of cooperating with one of the most brutal and repressive governments in the world, the United States has been strengthening its ties with Tashkent. Washington recently changed its policy which forbade sales of military equipment to the country because of its miserable human rights record. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, on a visit to Tashkent in October, said there had been “progress” on human rights and democracy in the country, prompting critics to claim that Washington was selling out its principles for the sake of access for its military.
The U.S. is now forced to rely on countries fundamentally opposed to American ideals. Uzbekistan has something of a human rights crisis, condemned just today by Human Rights Watch for torture and a corrupt justice system, among other things. Human Rights Watch said the U.S. has failed to address the former Soviet state's failures for need of access.
"Driven by a short-term interest in Uzbekistan's strategic importance ... the U.S. and the (European Union) have failed to respond to Uzbekistan's deepening human rights crisis," HRW said in its report.
The U.S. could be using more air transport or alternate routes instead, but in the interest of keeping costs down, has opted to use more politically precarious routes. The Diplomat explains the options:
By the time of the Pakistan cutoff, a bit more than a third of NATO cargo to Afghanistan went in via the northern route, slightly more than via Pakistan. The remainder goes in by air, which avoids any geopolitical complications but is far more expensive.
Russia isn’t as essential a link as Uzbekistan – the coalition can bypass Russia by transiting through the Caucasus, across the Caspian Sea into Kazakhstan and then Uzbekistan. But the Russian route is nevertheless easier and cheaper.
The added money would have a political cost back home, and taxpayers likely would rather not pay to airmail chemically preserved meatcakes to the troops. Americans would almost always rather read about atrocities in the paper than pay extra taxes to keep money out of the hands of those who commit them.
The bottom line is that without Pakistan as a suplly route, and even with it, Washington's political power, foreign and domestic, will suffer. With taxpayer money flowing to the oppressive regimes they publically condemn and a very sensitive polticial string in the hands of a country on the other side of a nuclear missile shield only so America can continue to send its young men to attempt (in vain, some say) to stabilize the Graveyard of Empires, this can not end well.
One of the CIA's most important secrets in the war on terrorism was hiding in plain sight, on a leafy residential street along a busy set of train tracks in Romania's capital. There, tucked in the basement of a government building, the CIA ran a clandestine prison, former U.S. intelligence officials said.
For years, the building — codenamed Bright Light — housed some of the CIA's most important terror suspects, including Khalid Sheik Mohammad, the mastermind of the Sept. 11,2001 attacks against the U.S. Even after the detainees were shipped off to Guantanamo Bay in 2006 and reports about the prison began to surface, the Romanian government repeatedly denied any knowledge of its existence.
A joint investigation by The Associated Press and German public television, ARD Panorama, however, located the former prison and unearthed details of the facility where harsh interrogation tactics were carried out.
The Romanian prison was part of a network of so-called black sites that the CIA operated and controlled overseas in Thailand, Lithuania and Poland. All the prisons were closed by May 2006, and the CIA's detention and interrogation program ended in 2009.
