Iraq

Jeffrey Kaye at Truthout has a good piece today on the suicide — or murder? — of Yemeni Guantanamo Bay prisoner Mohammad Ahmed Abdullah Saleh al Hanashi in June. It’s a powerful reminder of why human rights advocates, as well as U.S. military leaders, think it’s important to close that prison soon.
I admit I overlooked [...]

Despite Hasan’s reported contacts with an al-Qaeda-connected cleric in Yemen, the U.S. Army’s Criminal Investigation Division and FBI will handle the probe.

It turns out that expanding your contracts with the government after killing people and paying hush money can attract congressional scrutiny. The New York Times:
Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who is chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, wrote in a letter on Wednesday that his committee was told by a top State Department official [...]

From Beijing, President Obama says that his imminent announcement of refined Afghanistan strategy will contain some very important details:
“I am very confident that when I announce the decision, the American people will have a lot of clarity about what we’re doing, how we’re going to succeed, how much this thing is going to cost,” Mr. [...]

If President Obama orders an additional 30,000 to 40,000 troops to Afghanistan, he will be deploying practically every available U.S. Army brigade to war, leaving few units in reserve in case of an unforeseen emergency and further stressing a force that has seen repeated combat deployments since 2002.

Robert Kaplan on the real lessons of Fort Hood:
The massacre at Fort Hood, Texas, in which 13 soldiers were shot and killed by Army Maj. Nidal Hasan, paradoxically took my memory back to April 2004, when I was embedded with a Marine battalion during the first battle of Fallujah. The battalion just happened to have [...]

As DeLong noted, Blackwater lost its license to operate in Iraq in 2007, after its security officers gunned down innocent civilians in Baghdad’s Nisour Square. Yet Blackwater didn’t actually leave Iraq until earlier this year, and even then it didn’t really leave. Many of its security guards were allowed to stay and work under a [...]

Breaking news from The New York Times:
Top executives at Blackwater Worldwide authorized secret payments of about $1 million to Iraqi officials that were intended to silence their criticism and buy their support after a September 2007 episode in which Blackwater security guards fatally shot 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad, according to former company officials.

The Hill reports that Allen West, a former Army lieutenant colonel promoted by the National Republican Congressional Committee as one of its “young guns,” has come to some conclusions about the meaning of Maj. Hasan’s murders at Ft. Hood:
“This enemy preys on downtrodden soldiers and teaches them extremism will lift them up,” West said in [...]

Say this for the insurgents in Afghanistan: they evidently have a good lesson-learning process. As I wondered after gunmen stormed a U.N. safe house last week, the U.N. mission in Afghanistan will follow the a similar script as after the 2003 bombing of its compound in Iraq. It’s withdrawing hundreds of employees from Kabul until [...]