Tuesday, Dec 02nd
Last update09:17:53 AM GMT
Intelligence subcommittee Chairwomen Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) and Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) are leading an investigation into what they described as a practice of incomplete and often misleading intelligence briefings, which arose in the wake of CIA Director Leon Panetta’s June 24 admission that intelligence officials failed to notify Congress about a top-secret program to assassinate al Qaeda leaders.
TVNL Comment: The word is "lied."
Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials.
The agency pays Mr. Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the C.I.A.’s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai’s home. The financial ties and close working relationship between the intelligence agency and Mr. Karzai raise significant questions about America’s war strategy, which is currently under review at the White House.
Mohammed Jawad, widely considered the prison's youngest detainee, is back home in Afghanistan after a judge ordered him freed. He is angry and confused. Many U.S. officials are unhappy he's free.
He was about 12, he says, and had spent the day helping his uncle dig a well before heading out to buy some tea. He says he was grabbed by police who beat him and threatened to kill his family unless he put his thumbprint to paper and admitted he'd tried to kill two U.S. soldiers. The Pashto speaker, largely illiterate, didn't understand their Persian and had little idea what he'd agreed to, he says. A U.S. judge would later agree.
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A former Marine Corps captain with combat experience in Iraq, Hoh had also served in uniform at the Pentagon, and as a civilian in Iraq and at the State Department. By July, he was the senior U.S. civilian in Zabul province, a Taliban hotbed.
"I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States' presence in Afghanistan," he wrote Sept. 10 in a four-page letter to the department's head of personnel. "I have doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy, but my resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end."
For weeks, former Bush administration officials have been attacking President Obama for “dithering” on whether to send more troops to Afghanistan, with Vice President Cheney saying that “signals of indecision out of Washington hurt our allies and embolden our adversaries.” But these Bush officials are also facing criticisms for largely neglecting Afghanistan in order to invade Iraq. In response, they have been citing an Afghanistan strategy report they handed off to the Obama administration that clearly laid out recommendations for moving forward.
Police are gathering the personal details of thousands of activists who attend political meetings and protests, and storing their data on a network of nationwide intelligence databases.
According to the Iraqi Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs’ January 2008 Report, 4.5 million Iraqi children have been made orphans. Of these, only 459 orphans are in government care. I’ll say that again. Out of 4.5 million, only 459 children are in government care. 800 orphans at the time of this report were being held in Iraqi prisons, 100 of these in American prisons, charged as terrorists.
In proportion to the US population of 310 million, this would mean the equivalent of 19.3 million US orphans. That’s the size of the combined populations, all ages, of our six biggest cities, New York, LA, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, and Philadelphia, all rendered orphans.
Campaigners against global warming have drawn on an arsenal of visually startling tactics over the years, from posing nude on a Swiss glacier to scaling smokestacks at coal-fired power plants.
On Saturday, they tried something new with the goal of prodding countries to get serious about reaching an international climate accord: a synchronized burst of more than 4,300 demonstrations, from the Himalayas to the Great Barrier Reef, all centered on the number 350.
J Street was formed a year and half ago as a more liberal alternative to the nation's main pro-Israel lobbying organization, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, better known as AIPAC. J Street's executive director has said that he wants his group to be the "blocking back" for Mr. Obama's efforts to bring peace to the Middle East.
But by taking on the long-established AIPAC and the hawkish Israeli government, and by embracing individuals who have expressed hostility to Israel, J Street also has alienated some veteran Israel supporters in Washington. For example, one of next week's speakers is a Muslim activist who has said that Israel should be considered a suspect in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
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