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By Michael Dirda
By Joe Conason
$11.66
$24
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Jeff Vespa/WireImage
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With his new book “Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield,” Jeremy Scahill brings the last decade of the American government’s clandestine war making into the clearest possible focus.
Posted on Apr 27, 2013
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Nation Books
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By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch —
With “Blowback,” Chalmers Johnson aimed to paint a portrait of how America’s informal empire and its historically unprecedented garrisoning of the world looked to others, and so explain why animosity and blowback were building globally. Now we have a secret history of 21st-century American war in Jeremy Scahill’s latest book, “Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield.”
Posted on Apr 23, 2013
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Wikimedia Commons / Brigadier Lance Mans
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By Cora Currier, ProPublica —
You might have heard about the “kill list.” You’ve certainly heard about drones. But the details of the U.S. campaign against militants in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia—a centerpiece of the Obama administration’s national security approach—remain shrouded in secrecy. Here’s a guide to what we know—and what we don’t know.
Posted on Jan 13, 2013
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Paresh Nath, Cagle Cartoons, The Khaleej Times, UAE —
Posted on Jan 2, 2013
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Poster Boy NYC (CC BY 2.0)
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By Alfred W. McCoy, TomDispatch —
Through rendition—the sending of terrorist suspects to the prisons of countries that torture—and related policies, President Obama has outsourced human rights abuse to Afghanistan, Somalia and elsewhere, thus avoiding the political stigma of torture, while tacitly tolerating such abuses and harvesting whatever intelligence can be gained from them.
Posted on Aug 15, 2012
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michael baird (CC BY-SA 2.0)
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By Nick Turse, TomDispatch —
From Asia and Africa to the Middle East and the Americas, the Obama administration is increasingly embracing drones and special operations forces to fight scattered global enemies on the cheap. A centerpiece of this new American way of war is the outsourcing of fighting duties to local proxies around the world.
Posted on Aug 10, 2012
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AN HONORABLE GERMAN (CC BY-SA 2.0)
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A newly hired philosophy professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., has become the latest defender of President Obama’s deadly drone program.
Posted on Aug 3, 2012
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United Nations Photo (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
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Humanitarian groups withheld aid from Somalis suffering the effects of a severe drought that killed tens of thousands and displaced more than a million people last year out of fear that their assistance would amount to material support for regional terrorists under the U.S. Patriot Act, a Davidson College professor says.
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AP / Wilfredo Lee
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By Susan Zakin — A flight attendant’s voice had come over the loudspeaker, asking my husband and another guy with a common Muslim name to get off the Delta flight scheduled to depart from JFK. It is the 10th anniversary of 9/11.
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Luojie, Cagle Cartoons, China Daily, China —
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Flickr / Oxfam East Africa (CC-BY)
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The World Food Program and other such aid organizations have been unable to reach 2.2 million famine victims in militant-controlled areas of Somalia. In fact, the militant group al-Shabab denies that a famine is happening at all.
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Flickr / UK Department for International Development (CC-BY)
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The U.N. on Wednesday declared the first official famine of the 21st century. The designation was applied to war-torn Somalia, where tens of thousands of people—mostly children—have died of malnutrition.
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Wikimedia Commons
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The man who attacked cartoonist Kurt Westergaard after his caricature of the Prophet Muhammad was printed in a Danish newspaper has been convicted of attempted murder and terrorism and sentenced to nine years in prison.
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Yonhap via AP / Jo Jung-ho
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By Steven Borowiec — The rise of piracy in the Arabian Sea has raised difficult legal questions, but there’s little ambiguity about how the accused will be handled by South Korea.
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AP / Stephen Wandera
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African leaders from 53 countries began meeting Sunday in Uganda for an African Union summit about the recent attacks by Al-Shabab fighters. Those attacks, which killed at least 74 people earlier this month, were said to be a reaction to the killing of several Somalians by African Union peacekeepers.
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Fake news by Andy Borowitz —
The pirate leader acknowledged that they merged their operations with Goldman in late 2008 to take advantage of the more relaxed regulations governing bankers as opposed to pirates, “plus to get our share of the bailout money.”
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AP / Evert Elzinga
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By Eugene Robinson — The United States will soon have about 100,000 troops chasing shadows in Afghanistan, not long after an airliner was nearly blown up by a terrorism suspect who had no connection to that country. What’s wrong with this picture?
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Flickr / ninjawil
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You’re not still thinking about Afghanistan are you? The U.S. may be sending more troops and treasure there, but the real action is in other failed and failing states such as Somalia and Yemen, which has gotten visits from David Petraeus, Joe Lieberman and ... (continued)
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knowledge.uneca.org
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File this one under Dubious Honors of the World: An organization with the fun name of Transparency International has created a list ranking nations according to “perceived levels of corruption in the public sector,” as the BBC put it, and Somalia appears to be the worst of the bunch.
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wfp.org
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Global hunger is a “world emergency” now, if it wasn’t before, with the number of hungry people rising to a record 1 billion, according to the United Nations. Given this scary statistic, it’s not looking good for a goal, set in 2000, to reduce the number of people going hungry worldwide by half by 2015.
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AP photo / Elizabeth Williams
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Whether or not Abduwali Abukhadir Muse is 15, as his father claims, he will be tried in New York as an adult for his alleged role in holding an American ship captain as a hostage. Muse’s mother, on the other side of the world, has asked President Obama for mercy, or to at least let her be with her son.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The president insists that the U.S. can’t achieve great objectives on its own. This may break with George W. Bush’s style, but it is in keeping with the traditions of Roosevelt, Truman and George H.W. Bush.
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Emad Hajjaj, Jordan —
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U.S. Marine Corps / Lance Cpl. Megan E. Sindelar
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By William Pfaff — Obama’s promise that the U.S. and its allies will put an end to Indian Ocean piracy had the forceful ring to it that good American citizens like to hear, but half the NATO navies aren’t going to change the desperate circumstances that turned Somalia’s fisherman into pirates.
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Jimmy Carter was ultimately undone by a hostage crisis and the word Somalia still haunts Bill Clinton’s legacy. While the weekend rescue of a hostage held by Somali pirates was of a much smaller scale and under totally different circumstances than those events, President Obama must be relieved that it is behind him, a success. And now that it’s over, it seems the president was more involved than he initially let on.
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The economy’s not the only thing that “Left, Right & Center” co-conspirators Matt Miller, Tony Blankley and Robert Scheer are thinking about this week, but it’s a biggie again, as are the Obama administration’s announcement about defense spending and the changes under way in American foreign policy. Also: Somali pirates!
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U.S. Navy / Spc. Jason R. Zalasky
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A U.S. Navy vessel boarded an alleged pirate skiff and arrested seven suspects Wednesday after a merchant ship radioed that it was under attack. The USS Vella Gulf is part of a U.S. task force launched to curb Somali piracy in the Gulf of Aden. The Navy says it will hand the suspects over to Kenyan authorities.
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Flickr / DavidDennisPhotos
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A Yemeni freighter has become the 39th vessel seized by Somali pirates this year. Such hijackings have become a common occurrence off the coast of Somalia. Ship owners have called on the U.N. to police the affected waters.
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AP photo / Newsis via Daewoo shipping yards
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A huge Saudi-owned oil tanker, the Sirius Star, was seized by pirates on Saturday as it headed toward the U.S. with 2 million barrels of oil and 25 crew members on board. The tanker is now on its way to Somalia.
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U.S. Navy / Cmdr. Michael Junge
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Piracy has gotten so bad off the coast of Somalia that the European Union is prepared to form an anti-piracy force to police the region. The unresolved seizure of a freighter loaded with Russian tanks is the most recent in a spate of incidents involving more than 60 vessels and $30 million in ransom so far this year.
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msnbc.msn.com
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Just before the seventh anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, al-Qaida has released a lengthy videotape featuring the group’s second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahri, providing updates about how the holy war is faring around the globe and laying into Iran for “cooperating with the Americans” and with the American-approved governments in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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commons.wikimedia.org
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By James Harris — Emira Woods, co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus, argues for a more humane foreign policy and explains why American airstrikes in Somalia and elsewhere are about more than terrorism.
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commons.wikimedia.org
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Emira Woods, co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus, argues for a more humane foreign policy and explains why American airstrikes in Somalia and elsewhere are about more than terrorism.
Posted on May 6, 2008
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The U.S. military carried out an overnight airstrike in Somalia, targeting the country’s primary al-Qaida cell—and by Thursday morning the man considered the group’s leader, Aden Hashi Ayro, was confirmed dead, along with 10 others.
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socom.mil
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The United States launched its second air assault in Somalia in as many days, according to a representative from the Somali government, who told Reuters: “As we speak now, the area is being bombarded by the American air force.”
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nytimes.com
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The Islamists have fled, the transitional government and its Ethiopian allies have reclaimed Mogadishu as Somalia’s capital and the prime minister has banned guns and called for peacekeepers. Will the stability last, or will guerrilla warfare and clan violence tear the country apart for another 15 years?
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theepochtimes.com
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Despite a vow to fight to the death, Islamist leaders and their troops have mysteriously vanished from the streets of Mogadishu, according to residents there. The Ethiopian army, in support of the powerless transitional government, had driven the Somali fighters back to their stronghold and the nation’s traditional capital after a wave of devastating attacks.
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aljazeera.net
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Despite a brief flirtation with peace, the fighting that has ravaged Somalia in recent days appears likely to continue. The Union of Islamic Courts has advanced to the transitional government’s last remaining base of power, Baidoa, where fighting with Ethiopian troops has led to heavy casualties. Update: After finally admitting to its role in the conflict, Ethiopia has bombed two Somalian airports.
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Another issue stemming from the Clinton-Wallace interview: Wag the Dog. The National Review’s Jonah Goldberg claims that only a handful of right-wingers accused Clinton of using his 1998 missile attacks on bin Laden to draw attention away from the Lewinsky scandal. That’s simply false, as evidenced here.
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Fox News’ Chris Wallace claimed on Sunday that Osama bin Laden was emboldened by Bill Clinton’s pulling out from Somalia after the “Black Hawk Down” incident. But Wallace is dead wrong: Clinton kept U.S. troops there for six months—over the strenuous objections of GOP’ers. Fact-check it.
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Remember the scene toward the end of “The American President” in which Michael Douglas, playing President Andrew Shepherd, delivers a stand-up-and-cheer tongue-lashing of his critics? Watch as Bill Clinton demolishes Fox News’ Chris Wallace in a similar manner.
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flickr.com
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The Ethiopian army has crossed into Somalia as tensions build between the transitional Somali government and the Islamic militia that controls Mogadishu.
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From ThinkProgress
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Some of the warlords we are supporting—purportedly to keep Al Qaeda from establishing a beachhead in the African nation—were the same ones who helped to bring down American Blackhawk helicopters in 1993.
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Does Anything Change in Los Angeles With Election of New Mayor?
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