Some reaction to yesterday's Wikileak disclosure of horrific footage from an American helicopter gunship mowing down unarmed* civilians, as crewmen gloated over the killings. James Fallows: I can't pretend to know the full truth or circumstances of this. But at face value it is the most damaging documentation of abuse since the Abu Ghraib prison-torture photos. As you watch, imagine the reaction in the US if the people on the ground had been Americans and the people on the machine guns had been Iraqi, Russian, Chinese, or any other nationality. As with Abu Ghraib, and again...

06 April, 2010

On the morning of July 12, 2007, US soldiers aboard two Apache helicopters used 30mm cannons to kill about a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad. The US military caimed that all the dead were anti-Iraqi combatants, but among them were two Iraqi employees of the Reuters News Agency, driver Saeed Chmagh, 40, a father of four, and photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen, 22, described as on of the best war photographers in Iraq. Two children were also injured. Reuters demanded an investigation. US authorities concluded that their forces acted properly. Using the Freedom of Information Act, Reuters unsuccessfully sought...

05 April, 2010

Arch-conservative David Frum stiffed CBC Radio's flagship The Current this morning [see update below], failing at the last minute to show up for a heavily promoted interview on his reincarnation as a thoughtful moderate. The program was forced to recycle a dumpster diving documentary in place of what I fear would have been the latest in a series of fawning interviews. Let's hope this will, in Canada at least, slow the media juggernaut bent on canonizing Frum as discerning paragon of moderation. Frum, as the saying goes, was born on third base and thought he hit a triple. His father was a...

01 April, 2010

A photo recently added to the White House photostream on Flickr reveals a startling presidential penchant for meticulous editing: Ouch! The speechwriter who endured this grueling feedback, Jon Favreau, is the second-youngest in presidential history. The only man every to serve at a more tender age, Atlantic magazine writer and former Jimmy Carter speechwriter James Fallows, offered these comments on the photo: The volume of Obama's editing is unusual but not unheard of. The quality of his editing is exceptional for a public figure. Think of just one sentence in the shot above. The original says "This has always been...

27 March, 2010

When is the last time the U.S. had a president like this? Never, that's when. Putra Nababan is an interviewer for Seputar Indonesia (English: Around Indonesia), Indonesia's most-watched newscast. On Monday, he interviewed Barack Obama. From age six to 10, Obama lived in Jakarta, Indonesia, the home of his stepfather, Lolo Soetoro....

23 March, 2010

I'm late getting to this, but Washington Post columnist Fareed Zakaria captured the fundamental fallacy of Washington's reaction to the Christmas Day [un-]Bomber. The purpose of terrorism is to provoke an overreaction. Its real aim is not to kill the hundreds of people directly targeted but to sow fear in the rest of the population. Terrorism is an unusual military tactic in that it depends on the response of the onlookers. If we are not terrorized, then the attack didn't work. Alas, this one worked very well. Hat tip: Cameron Bode, Excerpticize....

25 January, 2010

Last Saturday, 57-year-old Jules Paul Bouloute, got off a flight from Haiti to New York. While attempting to find his way out of  Kennedy Airport's American Airlines Terminal, he accidentally opened an emergency exit door and set off an alarm. [caption id="attachment_4221" align="alignleft" width="250" caption="Jules Paul Bouloute"][/caption] This has happened to most of  us. In confusion, inattention, or an ill-considered attempt to find a shortcut, we open a restricted door and set off an alarm. Sometimes it leads to an embarrassed chat with the on-duty Commissionaire; sometimes there are no consequences at all. In Bouloute's case, however, security officials evacuated Terminal 8 for...

22 January, 2010

Responding to our post on the failed Christmas Day airplane bombing, Cameron Bode points to another section of Glenn Greenwald's trenchant analysis of US response to the failed Christmas airplane bombing: Ever since I began writing in late 2005 about this fear-addicted dynamic, the point on which David Brooks focused yesterday is the one I've thought most important. What matters most about this blinding fear of Terrorism is not the specific policies that are implemented as a result. Policies can always be changed. What matters most is the radical transformation of the national character of the United States...

04 January, 2010

A week after the attempted Christmas Day bombing of a Northwest Airlines fight, two polar-opposite American columnists — one left, one right — have come to nearly identical conclusions about the essential danger posed by airline security restrictions. From the right, a New Year's Day column by the New York Times's David Brooks decried a citizenry that "expect[s] perfection from government and then throw[s] temper tantrums when it is not achieved." [T]he Transportation Security Administration has to be seen doing something, so it added another layer to its stage play, “Security Theater” — more baggage regulations, more in-flight restrictions. At some point, it’s...

03 January, 2010

The Washington Post looks at what happened to the US economy over the last decade: For the first time since the 1930s, no growth in jobs, a decline in household net worth, and falling middle-class earnings. Moneyquote: There has been zero net job creation since December 1999. No previous decade going back to the 1940s had job growth of less than 20 percent. Economic output rose at its slowest rate of any decade since the 1930s as well. Middle-income households made less in 2008, when adjusted for inflation, than they did in 1999 -- and the number is sure to have declined further...

03 January, 2010
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