Ft. Irwin stands in for Iraq At the Army base in the Mojave Desert, emigre actors and Hollywood sets help prepare U.S. soldiers for the life and warfare they are about to encounter. An actor pushes a cart into the street at Medina Wasl, a Ft. Irwin model of an Iraqi village where U.S. [...]
Cheney and Rumsfeld pressured CIA to mislead Congress in the 1970s, too. By Margie Burns – Online Journal Contributing Writer / May 27, 2009. The first time Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld pressured the CIA to mislead Congress was in 1975 and 1976, when Cheney was chief of staff to President Gerald Ford and Rumsfeld [...]
Sci-fi writers join war on terror By Mimi Hall, USA TODAY Looking to prevent the next terrorist attack, the Homeland Security Department is tapping into the wild imaginations of a group of self-described “deviant” thinkers: science-fiction writers. “We spend our entire careers living in the future,” says author Arlan Andrews, one of a handful of [...]
On December 13, the whistleblowing website Wikileaks did investigative- and citizen journalists a great service by publishing the Army Special Operations Forces FM 3-05.130, titled Unconventional Warfare. Published in September 2008, the 248-page document though unclassified, is restricted “to U.S. Government agencies and their contractors only to protect technical or operational information from automatic dissemination under [...]
Eco-Explosives, a Bleeding BEAR, and the Armani-Clad Super Soldier by Nick Turse [Research support for this article was provided by the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute.] On paper, every session looked like gold to me. Technology and the Warfighter. Neuroscience and Its Potential Applications. Lethality Technologies. Autonomous/Unmanned Systems. (Robots!) But when I got to [...]
Whatever It Takes – The politics of the man behind “24.” by Jane Mayer February 19, 2007. Joel Surnow calls the show he helped create “patriotic.” Photograph by Martin Schoeller. The office desk of Joel Surnow—the co-creator and executive producer of “24,” the popular counterterrorism drama on Fox—faces a wall dominated by an American flag [...]
Gotcha! Radley Balko | December 6, 2008, 1:28pm Like Mark Draughn, I’ve been somewhat skeptical of Barry Cooper, the former drug cop turned pitchman for how-to-beat-the-cops videos. He comes off as more of a huckster than a principled whistle-blower, which I think does the good ideas he stands for (police reform) more harm than good. [...]
Swat Team conducts food raid in rural Ohio. On Monday, December 1, a SWAT team with semi-automatic rifles entered the private home of the Stowers family in LaGrange, Ohio, herded the family onto the couches in the living room, and kept guns trained on grandparents, their daughter-in-law (whose husband is currently serving as a U.S. [...]
Iraq: How Realistic Is Obama’s Pullout Plan? Guest Scott Horton: When Obama finally resides in the Whitehouse on the 20th of January, 2009, he will have to face one of his first and major challenges: Iraq. Being a candidate against the war on Iraq, he has vowed to withdraw the American troops from Iraq within [...]
The Meaning of Mumbai: South Asia, the new arena by Justin Raimondo The Mumbai massacre comes at a time when the U.S. is about to switch battlefields in its avowedly “generational” war on terrorism, from the Middle East to South Asia. As we move our forces eastward into Afghanistan and, inevitably, Pakistan, the events in [...]