Posted on

David Isenberg: Using and Regulating Private Military Contractors (PMC)

PMSC Using States: Who’s Been Naughty and Who’s Been Nice? EXTRACT: One problem though. Since Montreux came into being nobody has had a way to compare in any kind of systematic way how various states were ensuring that PMSC headquartered on their territory were complying with the document’s best practices. In effect, nobody has known …

Continue reading “David Isenberg: Using and Regulating Private Military Contractors (PMC)”

Posted on

Yale The Politic: The Intelligence Gathering Conundrum + Toxic Secrecy RECAP

SHORT URL This Post: http://tinyurl.com/Steele4Yale The Politic Introducing The Yale Undergraduate Journal of Politics The Intelligence Gathering Conundrum As distrust of the U.S. abounds, reliable intelligence is more difficult to procure. By Zachary Mohriing “Snowden and Manning fucked us. Who would want to work with us?” asked one former CIA officer.  Edward Snowden and Bradley …

Continue reading “Yale The Politic: The Intelligence Gathering Conundrum + Toxic Secrecy RECAP”

Posted on

Patrick Cockburn: Saudi Arabia Funds Terrorism & Mass Murder — USG Silent & Therefore Complicit [While Also Approving $4B to “Train & Equip” Saudi National Guard]

Mass murder in the Middle East is funded by our friends the Saudis World View: Everyone knows where al-Qa’ida gets its money, but while the violence is sectarian, the West does nothing Patrick Cockburn The Independent, Sunday 8 December 2013 Donors in Saudi Arabia have notoriously played a pivotal role in creating and maintaining Sunni …

Continue reading “Patrick Cockburn: Saudi Arabia Funds Terrorism & Mass Murder — USG Silent & Therefore Complicit [While Also Approving $4B to “Train & Equip” Saudi National Guard]”

Posted on

Berto Jongman: David Ignatius Pimps “Fresh Approach” by Second String Prefects

A fresh approach to looking at foreign threats By David Ignatius, Washington Post, December 6, 2013 The chairs of the House and Senate intelligence committees stated last weekend that the world was getting more unsafe. A few days later, the Pew Research Center reported that 52 percent of Americans think the U.S. should “mind its own …

Continue reading “Berto Jongman: David Ignatius Pimps “Fresh Approach” by Second String Prefects”

Posted on

Chuck Spinney: The Intellectual and Political Foundations of 21st Century Jihad Sayyid Qutub’s Fundamentalism and Abu Bakr Naji’s Jihadism

My friend, Bill Polk, a distinguished historian specializing in the Middle East, is busily writing a series of extended essays aimed at increasing our understanding of the conflict in Syria and, by extension, our seemingly  perpetual war with the Islamic world.  I posted the first part of this series, collectively entitled Understanding Syria, on 8 …

Continue reading “Chuck Spinney: The Intellectual and Political Foundations of 21st Century Jihad Sayyid Qutub’s Fundamentalism and Abu Bakr Naji’s Jihadism”