Leaked documents reveal No 10 cover-up over Iraq invasion
• Inquiry to hear how Blair hid true intentions for war
• Military ‘ill-prepared' for aftermath of invasion
Military commanders are expected to tell the inquiry into the Iraq war, which opens on Tuesday, that the invasion was ill-conceived and that preparations were sabotaged by Tony Blair‘s government's attempts to mislead the public.
They were so shocked by the lack of preparation for the aftermath of the invasion that they believe members of the British and US governments at the time could be prosecuted for war crimes by breaching the duty outlined in the Geneva convention to safeguard civilians in a conflict, the Guardian has been told.
By remarkable coincidence, Sarah Palin's new book, Going Rogue: An American Life just came out, jumped to the top of my ‘waiting to read” stack, and includes the phrase “Commonsense Conservative” is featured in that book. Combine it with Richard Branson's “Gaia Capitalism” and you have the makings of something special.
This book is short (123 pages), easy to read, and an inspiring patriotic labor of love, a gift to all of us who care deeply for American the Beautiful and are confused and/or angry about all that has been done “in our name” by the festering cesspool of Washington-based politicians and senior bureaucrats who live to claim budget share (inputs) rather than deliver public service (outputs).
The author provides the single best, most complete, and most sensible demarche against EARMARKS that I have ever seen. Included are eight illustrations and I will list them here because they capture the essence of this book's common sense:
Seventy per cent of Afghans surveyed see poverty and unemployment as the major cause of the conflict in their country, according to new research by international aid agency Oxfam and a group of Afghan organisations. Ordinary Afghans blame government weakness and corruption as the second most important factor behind the fighting, with the Taliban coming third, followed by interference by neighboring countries.
Al Qaeda today no longer poses a direct national security threat to the United States itself, but rather poses a second-order threat in which the worst case scenario would be an al Qaeda-trained or -inspired terrorist managing to pull off an attack on the scale of something in between the 1993 Trade Center attack, which killed six, and the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, which killed 168.
Robotic systems can’t replace a pilot’s gut instinct
BY COL. JAMES JINNETTE, USAF
Unmanned combat systems have fundamental limitations that can make their technology a war-losing proposition. These limitations involve network vulnerabilities, release consent judgment and, most importantly, creative capacity during air combat and close air support (CAS) missions. Although futurists might assume these problems away with grand ideas of technologies yet to be developed, during the next few decades these limitations will remain critical constraints on our ability to provide airpower in the joint fight.
AIR FORCE COL. JAMES JINNETTE is director of the Air Force Element at the Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., and a recent Army War College graduate. Prior to his current posting, Jinnette was an F-15E squadron commander. He has completed three close air support deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In 1987, the conservative author Midge Decter described her association with Israel and those willing to place it above conventional judgment. ‘We know ourselves to be bound by ties so deep, so essential, so unconditional, that they are beyond daylight examination. To be a Jew is not an act, it is a fate. The existence of Israel is absolutely central to that fate. The rest is mere details – knowable, unknowable, makes no difference.’
This vein of thinking can be gathered from Israel’s leader David Ben-Gurion in a New York Times Magazine article in December 1960. On that occasion he was defending the illegal abduction of the war criminal Adolf Eichmann, who had been nabbed by Mossad agents from Argentina. ‘I know they [the abductors] committed a breach of the law, but sometimes they are moral obligations higher than formal law.’
This idea of Israel, and Jewish fate, being placed in the realm of an obligatory ‘higher law’, does lend itself to various, dangerous implications. Decter’s observations resonate with the recent decision by Tel Aviv to allow 900 new homes to be built in East Jerusalem in the sprawling Jewish neighbourhood of Gilo. 40,000 Israelis are already resident there. President Obama has gone so far as to see the move as ‘dangerous’. The Secretary General of the UN, Ban Ki-moon has publicly seen the gesture as one that undermines the peace effort.
International conventions and views, which tend to find such settlements illegal, are considered inapplicable by the rank and file in Tel Aviv. The law of nations, that seemingly abstract body of customs and norms that are often more honoured than people might realize, are cast aside as undue hindrances to the functioning of the state.
The perceptive social theorist, Zygmunt Bauman, claims that Israeli policy persists in being made in the shadow of the Holocaust. The narrative of threatened existence girds such policies, whether they be ruthless measures against the Palestinians, or the issue of constructing more settlements. A state of affairs like an ‘indivisible’ Jerusalem are created, an assertion of something supposedly non-negotiable. Lines are drawn across borders, and there is a stubborn refusal to budge.
The Prediction Market Clusters founded in 2004 in Silicon Valley, are a global commons and open community for prediction markets and collective intelligence networks worldwide. The open and agnostic community is a focused action/research collaboration network of vendors, academia, traders, users, developers, markets, regulators and stakeholders. All are welcome. The goal is to provide Next Practices, awareness, diffusion, adoption and pull-through for enterprise, institutional and consumer prediction markets. PM Clusters conduct popular, distributed leadership retreats for enterprise prediction markets, Wisdom of Crowds, collective intelligence networks and collaborative forecasting worldwide.
Phi Beta Iota: David Pozen, JD Yale 2007, has provided advance access to the complete draft on his paper forthcoming in the Stanford Law Review, and we are both appreciative of this offering, and impressed–deeply impressed–by this seminal work. At a time when the U.S. “security clearance” system is so totally hosed up (and 70,000 clearances behind) that we might do better with with “spin the bottle,” the author is highlighting the reality that most of the secrecy we buy with $75 billion a year in taxpayer funds is not really that important–not only have others, such as Rodney McDaniel, made it clear that 809% to 90% of all “official” secrecy is about turf protection and budget share rather than national security, but it is administrative secrecy rather than “deep secrecy” that is leveraged by a very few with their own informal system for assigning trust, generally at the expense of the larger mass of uninformed individual who are treated as “collateral damage” that is of little consequence. The download options are at the top of the linked page
