United States foreign policy has lacked an aspirational guiding principle for a generation. One reason might be the historic volatility of political parties, unlike anything in the past century. United States foreign policy has a record of long-term trends that depend in part on the political parties in power. During the Cold War, for example, […]
The latest row between the U.S. and its main rival in Latin America recently took a turn for the worse when three U.S. diplomats were expelled from Venezuela. The allegations were that these three diplomats were aiding in the sabotage of Venezuela’s power grid tied in with other sensational accusations. In response, the U.S. expelled […]
Am I lucky or what? Made it through Heathrow, UK airport security, and onto the plane headed back for the US a measly 48 hours before a British-born Islamic extremist of Nigerian extraction drove his car over a British soldier outside the Woolwich Artillery Barracks and then tried to hack the victim’s head off with a rusty meat cleaver. Across the pond, before the UK went into shock, and Cameron’s government into an emergency meeting designed to address what common-sense suggests might be the response of the British people: rage and retaliation. . .
“Tribalism” as many know describes the political system in technologically primitive countries without established central government or democratic tradition. Today it also applies to the US Congress. What is tribalism? Blind faith in a single leader or ideology. Support for a clan member in any dispute no matter how incriminating. Decision by consensus, while graybeards […]
Bite me. You might as well go outside and shout it loud, because there isn’t enough DEET in your medicine chest to fend off the bloodlust of Culex pipiens, Anopheles, Aedes vexans, and dozens of other species of infected mosquitoes blanketing the United States. And West Nile virus season has just begun—consider August 2012 a preview.
Don’t get me wrong. Health organizations, federal, state and local, have spent buckets of money on nice-looking, easy-to-understand websites that calmly advise citizens to douse ourselves with bug spray, wear light, long-sleeved clothing (think Out of Africa), eliminate standing pools of water, and, of course, just stay inside the damn house until the Center for Disease Control (CDC) sounds the all-clear.
All good. But hardly sufficient.
West Nile virus—how it got here, how it travels, how it kills, and how health officials could, but often fail to mount the most effective responses—is a complicated story, a cautionary tale, some would say, about power, ego, bureaucracy, preparedness, ignorance, incompetence, and disparate champions whose voices routinely go unheard and whose counsel is too often ignored.
Right now, the highbeams are on Dallas, Texas, ‘Ground Zero’ for West Nile—and Mayor Mike Rawlings has indeed declared a state of emergency in the municipality. As the number of victims escalates, however, so does the anxiety of state and local officials, as well as the complaints of constituents, who’ve begun to question and criticize the city’s response to the health crisis….
Hollywood on the Potomac–movie actors deserting Tinseltown to remind the Big Dogs back east that every time an A-list celeb is arrested for picketing a foreign embassy an angel gets his wings.
Actor George Clooney, his father Nick, and four Congressional Democrats were among more than a dozen protesters who descended on the Sudanese Embassy on March 16 for the purpose of crossing, in a disorderly fashion, a police line.
The cast of characters? Along with Clooneys I and II, it included Reps. James Moran (D-VA), Jim McGovern (D-MA), John Olver (D-MA) and Al Green (D-TX). NAACP President Ben Jealous was also arrested, along with Martin Luther King III.
Clooney’s mid-day performance on Mass Ave was the finale to a 3-day tour in DC that included an impassioned plea to a standing-room-only crowd at the Council on Foreign Relations, and dramatic testimony delivered to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about the miserable state of affairs in the border region of Sudan.
Omar al-Bashir’s military, operating out of Khartoum, is working assiduously to wipe out mostly Christian populations hunkered down on some highly contested, oil-rich real estate to the south.
Clooney, who has frequently taken on the role of the world-weary activist in his films, accuses Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir and the ‘same criminals responsible for Darfur’ of conducting a genocidal war against his own people, of starving, maiming, raping, and murdering them.
And he says it as if no one has ever heard it before. . .
It’s called a ‘murder-for-hire’ sting, a standard law enforcement ploy designed to help the criminal find the very worst in his nature and act on it. But sting operations come with their own risks as well as rewards—and attorneys know that ‘entrapment’ can be a strong defense. . .
Informants are like sharks, scouring the underworld for opportunities and targets the feds can use as springboards to career-making cases. It’s the informant’s job to find two sticks (agent and opportunity), to rub them together vigorously, and to blow gently on the sparks of criminal enterprise.
Think about this as well….the ‘downpayment’ for the ‘hit,’ the100k wired to the US undercover bank account is enough to trigger a case for conspiracy, but it still doesn’t prove that the Iranian government was driving the bus. To do that, US authorities must establish a link between the owner of the account in the UAE — or the owner/s of an account held by an international financial institution with correspondent branches/banks around the world — and the government of Iran.
This is a critical point–one that could defuse the Obama Administration’s claim that ‘senior officials at the highest levels of the Iranian government’ were tied to the assassination plot and challenge the call of senior US officials for alterations to current foreign policy, in the US and abroad, toward Iran. If US authorities cannot prove that this was something more than a plot formulated by a small group of non-state actors, the President, the Secretary of State, DEA and the FBI have some explaining to do. . .
Ok. Now we’re into it. Administration top dogs have thrown ATF Director Ken Melson and US Attorney for Arizona Dennis Burke under the truck.In firefighting, they call it a ‘controlled burn,’ torching a perimeter of just enough man-made flame to meet and beat the advance of a wildfire impervious to less-drastic solutions.
Good luck, gentlemen.
The House Oversight Committee’s investigation into the DOJ/ATF gun-running operation known as Fast and Furious is roaring through the halls of Congress, and despite DOJ’s efforts to spin the story every which way but up, Representative Darrell Issa (R-Calif) and Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) are on a trail insiders whisper may lead investigators all the way to the top.
…evidence that the US did in fact sign such an agreement with Mexico, authorizing ATF, in cooperation with Mexican authorities, to implement the gun-walking ‘sting’ that provided Mexican gunman with killing tools used to fire on and murder US agents would corroborate the intent and involvement, at the highest levels, of ATF officials, of the Attorney General (either Holder or his representatives would have had to sign off on the operation), and of the President of the United States—who, as Holder’s supervisor, must be held accountable for the decisions and actions of his subordinates.
It would be difficult, as well, to believe that Eric Holder would have undertaken such a risky endeavor, such a politically sensitive gamble, without a discussion having occurred between Holder and Obama before the implementation of the ATF operation. The stakes, in terms of US-Mexico relations, would have just been too high.
Did the US get away clean? Almost. As close to it, maybe, as Fate allows. For the past few days, another story, a sidebar to the bigger report, has been gaining steam: one of the Stealth Blackhawks used to invade the bin Laden compound crashed as a result of a ‘hard landing.’ An accident. No matter. It turns out that the Stealth Helicopters used to transport the Navy SEALs are “never-before-seen,” state-of-the-art military technology, composed of carbon fibers that resist standard detection by the enemy. Cutting edge, top-secret, and not available to the world.
But let’s talk about bin Laden. The first notion we can discard is that the US pulled this feat off alone–that our intelligence and military capabilities allowed a convoy of Blackhawk helicopters carrying teams of Navy Seals, along with gunships (loaded with 100+ Army Rangers or Marines) flying defense above the Blackhawks, to penetrate, probably from Afghanistan, 100 miles or more into Pakistan’s airspace to one of the country’s most heavily guarded locations (Pakistan’s ‘West Point’) without detection by Pakistan’s intelligence/ military forces or without encountering Pakistani fighter jets.
After Faheem poignantly detailed President Karzai’s disapproval of the Wikileaks document leak, we now have Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ strong reaction from the incident: “I’m not sure anger is the right word. I just — I think mortified, appalled,” Gates said. “And if I’m angry, it is because I believe that this information puts those in Afghanistan […]
On January 24th, a Russian-made Iranian passenger aircraft carrying 157 passengers and 13 crew crash-landed in northeastern Iran injuring at least 46 people. The Taban Air aeroplane caught fire upon landing at Mashhad airport at 7:20am local time. Iran has a bloody aviation history. Last July, a Caspian Airlines jet carrying 168 people crashed into […]
http://www.alliance-exchange.org/policy-monitor/2009/12/09/exchanges-funded-635-million-fy-2010
Or, how to scuttle promising international developments with senseless moral posturing. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has agreed to co-sponsor a resolution condemning the Turkish mass expulsion/massacres of 1915-1916, and labeling it a “genocide.” It clearly meets the definition of ethnic cleansing, and no one is absolving Turkey of blame. 1.5 million Armenians were […]