Early Bird summary
US presidents will likely take a more cautious approach before launching preemptive attacks after the intelligence failures of the Iraq war, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said, according to the lead item in Thursday’s Early Bird, from Agence France Presse."The lessons learned with the failure to find the weapons of mass destruction and some of the other things that happened will make any future president very, very cautious about launching that kind of conflict or relying on intelligence," Gates told PBS television in an interview.Any future president is "going to ask a lot of very hard questions and I think that hurdle is much higher today than it was six or seven years ago," he said. A full transcript of Secretary Gates’ interview with PBS is available at this link.
Afghanistan's ambassador to the United States attacked Western governments fighting in and providing billions in aid to his country, saying that those who claim the international community is not winning the war against extremists there "should know that they never fully tried," according to the Washington Post."We never asked to be the 51st state," Ambassador Said T. Jawad said, a reference to a suggestion last month by Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) that the United States should concentrate on "realistic goals" and its "original mission" of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, the Boston Globe reports that Jawad said last night that the West could negotiate effectively with the Taliban only from a position of strength, which he said would demand major new investments of troops and resources in Afghanistan.In an address at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, Jawad said Afghanistan welcomed President Obama's strategy review for Afghanistan. He said it would allow the United States and its allies a chance to correct errors that have left the Taliban able to challenge Afghan and Western forces in several southeastern provinces - and making them less likely to want to negotiate.Jawad, who was named Afghan envoy to Washington in December 2003, said a revised strategy would benefit from Obama's promise of an additional 17,000 US forces, in addition to the 38,000 already on the ground, as well as greater numbers of NATO troops. He said a surge in US forces would not only put more pressure on the Taliban but also allow faster training of Afghan soldiers to take on more of the combat duties.
The Washington Post reports that the United States is seeking new supply routes for the war in Afghanistan that would bypass Russia, and has even had logistics experts review overland roads through Iran that might be used by NATO allies, according to military planners and Pentagon officials.The effort is aimed at developing reliable alternatives to routes through the Khyber Pass in Pakistan, where convoys have come under increasing attack by the Taliban, and to prepare for the possible loss of an important air base in Kyrgyzstan. The planning also reflects growing concern that Russia could use its clout to restrict American and allied shipments that would be passing in greater amounts through its territory on the way to staging areas in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan en route to Afghanistan.
An Iraqi court sentenced the country's former foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, and Ali Hassan al-Majeed, a senior adviser to Saddam Hussein, to 15 years in prison Wednesday for their roles in what the court deemed a crime against humanity, the 1992 killings of 42 merchants accused of profiteering, according to the Washington Post.The sentence was the first for Aziz, 73, a fluent English speaker who was the international face of Hussein's government before turning himself in to U.S. authorities a month after the Iraqi government fell in April 2003. It comes less than two weeks after Aziz was acquitted by the same court, Iraq's highest, in another case.
Also in the Washington Post was the news that President Nicolas Sarkozy announced Wednesday that France has decided to return as a full-fledged member of the 26-nation military pact, the North Atlantic Alliance, which came together under U.S. leadership at the start of the Cold War in 1949 and has served as the basis for U.S.-European security relations since.Casting aside Gaullist dogma long cherished in France, Sarkozy declared that rejoining the U.S.-led integrated command in Brussels will not diminish the independence of France's nuclear-equipped military and, on the contrary, will open the way for more French influence in deciding what NATO's new missions should be after the Cold War.
CNN reports that the federal government is backing away from two very expensive aircraft projects. The transcript of that report is available at this link.
Media summary
1. Leading newspaper headlines: The New York Times leads with a look at how fraud prosecutions will be coming soon to a courtroom near you. (Slate Magazine)
2. USMC developing UAV to re-supply combat forces: By this summer, combat troops in Afghanistan could be getting re-supplied by giant unmanned aerial vehicles, a Marine Corps general told Congress Wednesday.(Army Times)
3. Dozens dead in Baghdad bombing: At least 33 people, including a local army chief, have died and 46 have been injured in a suicide attack on the western edge of Baghdad, officials say. (BBC)
4. Al-Qaeda accused faces U.S. court: An alleged al-Qaeda agent has appeared in a US criminal court after more than five years in military custody. (BBC)
Leading newspaper headlines
The New York Times leads with a look at how fraud prosecutions will be coming soon to a courtroom near you. Attorneys general across the country have started to get the ball rolling, and the federal government is expected to get in on the action soon. The Washington Post leads with the Obama administration's call to boost the International Monetary Fund's war chest, which also came with a push to get other countries, particularly in Europe, to boost their stimulus spending. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Congress will be asked to approve $100 billion more to the IMF's fund to help struggling nations.
The Wall Street Journal leads its world-wide newsbox with President Obama's signing of what he described as an "imperfect" $410 billion omnibus spending bill that will fund most government agencies for the rest of the fiscal year. He criticized the bill for containing more than 8,500 pet projects inserted by lawmakers worth around $7.7 billion. The president said the bill should "mark an end to the old way of doing business" and outlined a set of proposals to curb earmarks in the future. The Los Angeles Times devotes its top nonlocal spot to a look at how the gunmen who killed three British security personnel over the last week in Northern Ireland may have reinforced how much the area's residents yearn to move on from their troubled past. Thousands took the streets yesterday to condemn the shooting and even hard-liners have spoken up against retaliation. "These attacks not only represent a setback, but they can represent an opportunity in further entrenching the peace process," an expert on Northern Ireland said. USA Today leads with word that federal, state, and local law-enforcement agencies are being swamped by job applicants, many of whom are highly experienced. The FBI has received 227,000 applications for 3,000 openings, "the largest such response in history."
The Obama administration still hasn't said much about its plans to file federal civil or criminal charges against financial wrongdoers, but the president's proposed budget suggests there will be a stronger focus on the issue in the coming months. Apparently Attorney General Eric Holder is working on devising a course of action and might set up a task force to deal with all the cases. Even though it now seems common to see Wall Street executives doing a perp walk, the NYT points out that "any concerted legal attack on the financial sector would have little precedent." In order to be successful in its prosecutions, the government would have to prove that the crisis was a direct result of law-breaking, rather than just dumb mistakes made by supposed financial wizards. Defense attorneys who specialize in white-collar clients say that it would be relatively easy for most executives to claim they were just following the industry and didn't realize the risks involved. "We'll all sing the stupidity song," one lawyer said.
In a sign that the decrease in global demand is getting worse, new data from China show that exports decreased a whopping 25.7 percent in February. Geithner said it's imperative for leading economies to work together in order to bring an end to the global crisis. The question of how the world's leading economies should be acting to try to arrest the growing crisis is likely to produce much heated debte when the G-20 finance ministers meet outside London this weekend.
So far, European governments have been reluctant to increase their stimulus packages, leading many analysts to say that the continent's leaders aren't doing enough to deal with the downturn. "They are in denial, and hoping that something from the U.S. will come along to help them out," a European economist tells the NYT. And while European governments seem open to the idea of increasing IMF funding, they disagree with the United States over how much they should give. The additional money from the United States is far from a done deal, either. It's unclear whether Congress would support a boost in IMF funding at a time when everyone expects the administration to ask for billions more to help ailing financial institutions as well as a possible second stimulus package.
Even though earmarks account for less than 2 percent of the discretionary budget, they have become "a lightning rod for critics," as the WP puts it, who say it illustrates how the government wastes taxpayer money. In order to curb their use, Obama said he wants lawmakers to post any earmark requests in advance on their Web sites, and agencies would be able to review them and classify proposals as inappropriate. Obama also wants all earmarks directed at a private company to be subject to competitive bidding. Republicans and Democrats alike said Obama's efforts would have little effect unless he also promises to veto bills that carry lots of earmarks.
Besides approving the spending bill, Obama also issued his first signing statement that declared several provisions in the bill could be ignored because they're unconstitutional. This came a few days after Obama ordered a review of his predecessor's signing statements and vowed to issue them only "with caution and restraint."
The NYT and WP front a look at the events that led up to Charles Freeman Jr. removing his name from consideration to chair the National Intelligence Council. The NYT notes that the White House was surprised when it learned that Freeman, a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, would be appointed to such a high-level position, and administration officials worried the selection would lead to an unnecessary controversy. When he withdrew, Freeman didn't mince words and characterized himself as a victim of "the Israel Lobby." As soon as his name was floated, many bloggers attacked the selection due to his past criticism of Israel as well as some statements about China that Freeman insists were taken out of context. Although only a few Jewish organizations publicly came out against Freeman, the WP notes that "a handful of pro-Israeli bloggers and employees of other organizations worked behind the scenes" to raise complaints about the appointments with key lawmakers, who then pressured the White House to resolve the issue. Freeman said he withdrew out of fear that he would "be used as an excuse … to disparage the quality and credibility of the intelligence."
The WP points out that U.S. media weren't alone in paying little attention to the Tuesday's attack in Iraq that killed 33 people. "In 2003, when America began its occupation, bombings with half the casualties of Tuesday's suggested the United States might not prevail," writes the WP's Anthony Shadid. Yesterday, the government newspaper didn't even put the news on its front page. "No one values the victims anymore," a relative of one of the victims said. It's all part of the odd way of life in Iraq, where "hundreds of people still die every month, even as a sense of the ordinary returns," notes the Post.
The NYT takes a look at how the grass-mud horse has become the latest Internet sensation in China. The mythical creature, which was created as a little protest against government censorship, is what "passes as subversive behavior" in China. A music video that tells the story of the grass-mud horse's victory over invading "river crabs" may sound and read like an innocent-enough fable, but "their spoken names were double entendres with inarguably dirty second meanings." The "grass-mud horse" sounds like an insult in Chinese, as does the desert where these alpacalike animals live. Meanwhile, the "river crab" that invades the desert sounds a lot like "harmony," which has become a code word for Internet censorship. As is usually the case with these types of stories, it's a little confusing to understand what on earth the NYT is talking about since it doesn't want to offend readers' sensibilities by publishing the "inarguably dirty second meanings." But this time TP can't really criticize since even he is uncomfortable typing the double-meaning of Ma Lee Desert. Luckily, the China Digital Times has published an uncensored guide to the song.
In the NYT's op-ed page, William Cohan writes that it's about time "to debunk the myths" that many Wall Street executives want the public to believe about how the financial crisis occurred. These "tall tales" usually imply the Wall Street firms were "victims" of a "once-in-a-lifetime tsunami," when in reality many top bankers "made decision after decision, year after year, that turned their firms into houses of cards." Confidence in the country's banking system won't return "until Wall Street comes clean," writes Cohan. "If the executives responsible for what happened won't step forward on their own, perhaps a subpoena-wielding panel along the lines of the 9/11 commission can be created to administer a little truth serum."
To top of document
USMC developing UAV to re-supply combat forces
By Matthew Cox - Staff writerPosted : Wednesday Mar 11, 2009 18:33:07 EDT
Top of Form
Bottom of Form
By this summer, combat troops in Afghanistan could be getting re-supplied by giant unmanned aerial vehicles, a Marine Corps general told Congress Wednesday.
The Marines are working with industry to build a cargo-carrying UAV capable of hauling up to 1,200 pounds of battlefield essentials — such as ammunition, water and batteries — to ground troops in remote places, Assistant Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. John Amos told the House Appropriations Committee’s subcommittee on defense.
The move is part of a short-term plan to find new ways to reduce the weight Marines carry into combat. Details are sketchy, but Amos said “I’m looking for something now. We want to get a solution into Afghanistan by this summer.”
Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Chiarelli, who also testified at the hearing, told Army Times in an interview that he was unsure if the Army will use cargo UAVs in the future. He said that the Army has been able to deliver up to 26,000 pounds of supplies a day using precision air drop.
To top of document
'Dozens dead' in Baghdad bombing
While the targets were senior officials, the young were also caught in the blast
At least 33 people, including a local army chief, have died and 46 have been injured in a suicide attack on the western edge of Baghdad, officials say.
The attack took place in the Abu Ghraib municipality, and appeared to target a group of dignitaries as they left a national reconciliation conference.
Violence levels have declined in Iraq recently, but this is the third major attack in the last few days.
More than 30 died in an attack on a police recruitment centre on Sunday.
On Thursday, a car bomb exploded at a cattle market in Babel province killing 10.
The BBC's Mike Sergeant in Baghdad says it is too soon to say whether the attacks constitute a pattern but they show that life in Iraq is still dangerous.
But he says that if the violence of recent days continues, a timetable announced by US President Barack Obama to withdraw most combat troops by mid-2010 could be increasingly hard to maintain.
Troop reductions
The bomb exploded as delegates came out of the conference, attended by a large number of VIPs.
The hall which hosted the conference is about 25km (15 miles) from the centre of Baghdad, and close to the Abu Ghraib prison facility, which came under scrutiny because of the abuse of prisoners by US troops.
One witness, the owner of a car repair shop, described how the bomb went off as the delegates began a walking tour of Abu Ghraib's market.
To top of document
Al-Qaeda accused faces US court
Mr Marri is said to have met Osama Bin Laden
An alleged al-Qaeda agent has appeared in a US criminal court after more than five years in military custody.
Following a review of his case ordered by President Barack Obama, Ali al-Marri was charged with supporting terrorism and conspiracy.
The 43-year-old confirmed he understood the charges at a brief hearing in South Carolina, and is now expected to be transferred to Illinois for trial.
Mr Marri, a joint Saudi-Qatari national, has not yet entered a plea.
He denies the charges, his lawyers say.
'Momentous' hearing
He was arrested shortly after the attacks on New York and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001 and charged with credit card fraud.
Two years later, the US authorities deemed him an enemy combatant and under powers allowing the then US President, George W Bush, to detain terrorism suspects indefinitely without charge, he was transferred to a naval jail in South Carolina.
The US authorities have alleged that he met Osama Bin Laden and volunteered for a suicide mission while he was a student in Illinois.
Lawyers for Mr Marri had appealed against his continuing detention in a military jail, but the Obama administration moved to head off the challenge by bringing charges and moving him into civilian custody.
He had been labelled the last enemy combatant to be held on US soil - as opposed to Guantanamo Bay.
Before the hearing, his lawyer, Andy Savage, welcomed the court date as "momentous".
He told journalists his client was finally being given the "most fundamental rights granted to all citizens and lawful residents of the United States".
"He believes that this will result in his repatriation to his homeland [of Qatar] and return to his family, a goal that he has pursued for more than seven years," the lawyer said.
The charges he faces carry a maximum of 30 years in jail.
He will appear before judges again on 18 March.
To top of document
US presidents will likely take a more cautious approach before launching preemptive attacks after the intelligence failures of the Iraq war, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said, according to the lead item in Thursday’s Early Bird, from Agence France Presse."The lessons learned with the failure to find the weapons of mass destruction and some of the other things that happened will make any future president very, very cautious about launching that kind of conflict or relying on intelligence," Gates told PBS television in an interview.Any future president is "going to ask a lot of very hard questions and I think that hurdle is much higher today than it was six or seven years ago," he said. A full transcript of Secretary Gates’ interview with PBS is available at this link.
Afghanistan's ambassador to the United States attacked Western governments fighting in and providing billions in aid to his country, saying that those who claim the international community is not winning the war against extremists there "should know that they never fully tried," according to the Washington Post."We never asked to be the 51st state," Ambassador Said T. Jawad said, a reference to a suggestion last month by Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) that the United States should concentrate on "realistic goals" and its "original mission" of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, the Boston Globe reports that Jawad said last night that the West could negotiate effectively with the Taliban only from a position of strength, which he said would demand major new investments of troops and resources in Afghanistan.In an address at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, Jawad said Afghanistan welcomed President Obama's strategy review for Afghanistan. He said it would allow the United States and its allies a chance to correct errors that have left the Taliban able to challenge Afghan and Western forces in several southeastern provinces - and making them less likely to want to negotiate.Jawad, who was named Afghan envoy to Washington in December 2003, said a revised strategy would benefit from Obama's promise of an additional 17,000 US forces, in addition to the 38,000 already on the ground, as well as greater numbers of NATO troops. He said a surge in US forces would not only put more pressure on the Taliban but also allow faster training of Afghan soldiers to take on more of the combat duties.
The Washington Post reports that the United States is seeking new supply routes for the war in Afghanistan that would bypass Russia, and has even had logistics experts review overland roads through Iran that might be used by NATO allies, according to military planners and Pentagon officials.The effort is aimed at developing reliable alternatives to routes through the Khyber Pass in Pakistan, where convoys have come under increasing attack by the Taliban, and to prepare for the possible loss of an important air base in Kyrgyzstan. The planning also reflects growing concern that Russia could use its clout to restrict American and allied shipments that would be passing in greater amounts through its territory on the way to staging areas in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan en route to Afghanistan.
An Iraqi court sentenced the country's former foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, and Ali Hassan al-Majeed, a senior adviser to Saddam Hussein, to 15 years in prison Wednesday for their roles in what the court deemed a crime against humanity, the 1992 killings of 42 merchants accused of profiteering, according to the Washington Post.The sentence was the first for Aziz, 73, a fluent English speaker who was the international face of Hussein's government before turning himself in to U.S. authorities a month after the Iraqi government fell in April 2003. It comes less than two weeks after Aziz was acquitted by the same court, Iraq's highest, in another case.
Also in the Washington Post was the news that President Nicolas Sarkozy announced Wednesday that France has decided to return as a full-fledged member of the 26-nation military pact, the North Atlantic Alliance, which came together under U.S. leadership at the start of the Cold War in 1949 and has served as the basis for U.S.-European security relations since.Casting aside Gaullist dogma long cherished in France, Sarkozy declared that rejoining the U.S.-led integrated command in Brussels will not diminish the independence of France's nuclear-equipped military and, on the contrary, will open the way for more French influence in deciding what NATO's new missions should be after the Cold War.
CNN reports that the federal government is backing away from two very expensive aircraft projects. The transcript of that report is available at this link.
Media summary
1. Leading newspaper headlines: The New York Times leads with a look at how fraud prosecutions will be coming soon to a courtroom near you. (Slate Magazine)
2. USMC developing UAV to re-supply combat forces: By this summer, combat troops in Afghanistan could be getting re-supplied by giant unmanned aerial vehicles, a Marine Corps general told Congress Wednesday.(Army Times)
3. Dozens dead in Baghdad bombing: At least 33 people, including a local army chief, have died and 46 have been injured in a suicide attack on the western edge of Baghdad, officials say. (BBC)
4. Al-Qaeda accused faces U.S. court: An alleged al-Qaeda agent has appeared in a US criminal court after more than five years in military custody. (BBC)
Leading newspaper headlines
The New York Times leads with a look at how fraud prosecutions will be coming soon to a courtroom near you. Attorneys general across the country have started to get the ball rolling, and the federal government is expected to get in on the action soon. The Washington Post leads with the Obama administration's call to boost the International Monetary Fund's war chest, which also came with a push to get other countries, particularly in Europe, to boost their stimulus spending. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Congress will be asked to approve $100 billion more to the IMF's fund to help struggling nations.
The Wall Street Journal leads its world-wide newsbox with President Obama's signing of what he described as an "imperfect" $410 billion omnibus spending bill that will fund most government agencies for the rest of the fiscal year. He criticized the bill for containing more than 8,500 pet projects inserted by lawmakers worth around $7.7 billion. The president said the bill should "mark an end to the old way of doing business" and outlined a set of proposals to curb earmarks in the future. The Los Angeles Times devotes its top nonlocal spot to a look at how the gunmen who killed three British security personnel over the last week in Northern Ireland may have reinforced how much the area's residents yearn to move on from their troubled past. Thousands took the streets yesterday to condemn the shooting and even hard-liners have spoken up against retaliation. "These attacks not only represent a setback, but they can represent an opportunity in further entrenching the peace process," an expert on Northern Ireland said. USA Today leads with word that federal, state, and local law-enforcement agencies are being swamped by job applicants, many of whom are highly experienced. The FBI has received 227,000 applications for 3,000 openings, "the largest such response in history."
The Obama administration still hasn't said much about its plans to file federal civil or criminal charges against financial wrongdoers, but the president's proposed budget suggests there will be a stronger focus on the issue in the coming months. Apparently Attorney General Eric Holder is working on devising a course of action and might set up a task force to deal with all the cases. Even though it now seems common to see Wall Street executives doing a perp walk, the NYT points out that "any concerted legal attack on the financial sector would have little precedent." In order to be successful in its prosecutions, the government would have to prove that the crisis was a direct result of law-breaking, rather than just dumb mistakes made by supposed financial wizards. Defense attorneys who specialize in white-collar clients say that it would be relatively easy for most executives to claim they were just following the industry and didn't realize the risks involved. "We'll all sing the stupidity song," one lawyer said.
In a sign that the decrease in global demand is getting worse, new data from China show that exports decreased a whopping 25.7 percent in February. Geithner said it's imperative for leading economies to work together in order to bring an end to the global crisis. The question of how the world's leading economies should be acting to try to arrest the growing crisis is likely to produce much heated debte when the G-20 finance ministers meet outside London this weekend.
So far, European governments have been reluctant to increase their stimulus packages, leading many analysts to say that the continent's leaders aren't doing enough to deal with the downturn. "They are in denial, and hoping that something from the U.S. will come along to help them out," a European economist tells the NYT. And while European governments seem open to the idea of increasing IMF funding, they disagree with the United States over how much they should give. The additional money from the United States is far from a done deal, either. It's unclear whether Congress would support a boost in IMF funding at a time when everyone expects the administration to ask for billions more to help ailing financial institutions as well as a possible second stimulus package.
Even though earmarks account for less than 2 percent of the discretionary budget, they have become "a lightning rod for critics," as the WP puts it, who say it illustrates how the government wastes taxpayer money. In order to curb their use, Obama said he wants lawmakers to post any earmark requests in advance on their Web sites, and agencies would be able to review them and classify proposals as inappropriate. Obama also wants all earmarks directed at a private company to be subject to competitive bidding. Republicans and Democrats alike said Obama's efforts would have little effect unless he also promises to veto bills that carry lots of earmarks.
Besides approving the spending bill, Obama also issued his first signing statement that declared several provisions in the bill could be ignored because they're unconstitutional. This came a few days after Obama ordered a review of his predecessor's signing statements and vowed to issue them only "with caution and restraint."
The NYT and WP front a look at the events that led up to Charles Freeman Jr. removing his name from consideration to chair the National Intelligence Council. The NYT notes that the White House was surprised when it learned that Freeman, a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, would be appointed to such a high-level position, and administration officials worried the selection would lead to an unnecessary controversy. When he withdrew, Freeman didn't mince words and characterized himself as a victim of "the Israel Lobby." As soon as his name was floated, many bloggers attacked the selection due to his past criticism of Israel as well as some statements about China that Freeman insists were taken out of context. Although only a few Jewish organizations publicly came out against Freeman, the WP notes that "a handful of pro-Israeli bloggers and employees of other organizations worked behind the scenes" to raise complaints about the appointments with key lawmakers, who then pressured the White House to resolve the issue. Freeman said he withdrew out of fear that he would "be used as an excuse … to disparage the quality and credibility of the intelligence."
The WP points out that U.S. media weren't alone in paying little attention to the Tuesday's attack in Iraq that killed 33 people. "In 2003, when America began its occupation, bombings with half the casualties of Tuesday's suggested the United States might not prevail," writes the WP's Anthony Shadid. Yesterday, the government newspaper didn't even put the news on its front page. "No one values the victims anymore," a relative of one of the victims said. It's all part of the odd way of life in Iraq, where "hundreds of people still die every month, even as a sense of the ordinary returns," notes the Post.
The NYT takes a look at how the grass-mud horse has become the latest Internet sensation in China. The mythical creature, which was created as a little protest against government censorship, is what "passes as subversive behavior" in China. A music video that tells the story of the grass-mud horse's victory over invading "river crabs" may sound and read like an innocent-enough fable, but "their spoken names were double entendres with inarguably dirty second meanings." The "grass-mud horse" sounds like an insult in Chinese, as does the desert where these alpacalike animals live. Meanwhile, the "river crab" that invades the desert sounds a lot like "harmony," which has become a code word for Internet censorship. As is usually the case with these types of stories, it's a little confusing to understand what on earth the NYT is talking about since it doesn't want to offend readers' sensibilities by publishing the "inarguably dirty second meanings." But this time TP can't really criticize since even he is uncomfortable typing the double-meaning of Ma Lee Desert. Luckily, the China Digital Times has published an uncensored guide to the song.
In the NYT's op-ed page, William Cohan writes that it's about time "to debunk the myths" that many Wall Street executives want the public to believe about how the financial crisis occurred. These "tall tales" usually imply the Wall Street firms were "victims" of a "once-in-a-lifetime tsunami," when in reality many top bankers "made decision after decision, year after year, that turned their firms into houses of cards." Confidence in the country's banking system won't return "until Wall Street comes clean," writes Cohan. "If the executives responsible for what happened won't step forward on their own, perhaps a subpoena-wielding panel along the lines of the 9/11 commission can be created to administer a little truth serum."
To top of document
USMC developing UAV to re-supply combat forces
By Matthew Cox - Staff writerPosted : Wednesday Mar 11, 2009 18:33:07 EDT
Top of Form
Bottom of Form
By this summer, combat troops in Afghanistan could be getting re-supplied by giant unmanned aerial vehicles, a Marine Corps general told Congress Wednesday.
The Marines are working with industry to build a cargo-carrying UAV capable of hauling up to 1,200 pounds of battlefield essentials — such as ammunition, water and batteries — to ground troops in remote places, Assistant Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. John Amos told the House Appropriations Committee’s subcommittee on defense.
The move is part of a short-term plan to find new ways to reduce the weight Marines carry into combat. Details are sketchy, but Amos said “I’m looking for something now. We want to get a solution into Afghanistan by this summer.”
Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Chiarelli, who also testified at the hearing, told Army Times in an interview that he was unsure if the Army will use cargo UAVs in the future. He said that the Army has been able to deliver up to 26,000 pounds of supplies a day using precision air drop.
To top of document
'Dozens dead' in Baghdad bombing
While the targets were senior officials, the young were also caught in the blast
At least 33 people, including a local army chief, have died and 46 have been injured in a suicide attack on the western edge of Baghdad, officials say.
The attack took place in the Abu Ghraib municipality, and appeared to target a group of dignitaries as they left a national reconciliation conference.
Violence levels have declined in Iraq recently, but this is the third major attack in the last few days.
More than 30 died in an attack on a police recruitment centre on Sunday.
On Thursday, a car bomb exploded at a cattle market in Babel province killing 10.
The BBC's Mike Sergeant in Baghdad says it is too soon to say whether the attacks constitute a pattern but they show that life in Iraq is still dangerous.
But he says that if the violence of recent days continues, a timetable announced by US President Barack Obama to withdraw most combat troops by mid-2010 could be increasingly hard to maintain.
Troop reductions
The bomb exploded as delegates came out of the conference, attended by a large number of VIPs.
The hall which hosted the conference is about 25km (15 miles) from the centre of Baghdad, and close to the Abu Ghraib prison facility, which came under scrutiny because of the abuse of prisoners by US troops.
One witness, the owner of a car repair shop, described how the bomb went off as the delegates began a walking tour of Abu Ghraib's market.
To top of document
Al-Qaeda accused faces US court
Mr Marri is said to have met Osama Bin Laden
An alleged al-Qaeda agent has appeared in a US criminal court after more than five years in military custody.
Following a review of his case ordered by President Barack Obama, Ali al-Marri was charged with supporting terrorism and conspiracy.
The 43-year-old confirmed he understood the charges at a brief hearing in South Carolina, and is now expected to be transferred to Illinois for trial.
Mr Marri, a joint Saudi-Qatari national, has not yet entered a plea.
He denies the charges, his lawyers say.
'Momentous' hearing
He was arrested shortly after the attacks on New York and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001 and charged with credit card fraud.
Two years later, the US authorities deemed him an enemy combatant and under powers allowing the then US President, George W Bush, to detain terrorism suspects indefinitely without charge, he was transferred to a naval jail in South Carolina.
The US authorities have alleged that he met Osama Bin Laden and volunteered for a suicide mission while he was a student in Illinois.
Lawyers for Mr Marri had appealed against his continuing detention in a military jail, but the Obama administration moved to head off the challenge by bringing charges and moving him into civilian custody.
He had been labelled the last enemy combatant to be held on US soil - as opposed to Guantanamo Bay.
Before the hearing, his lawyer, Andy Savage, welcomed the court date as "momentous".
He told journalists his client was finally being given the "most fundamental rights granted to all citizens and lawful residents of the United States".
"He believes that this will result in his repatriation to his homeland [of Qatar] and return to his family, a goal that he has pursued for more than seven years," the lawyer said.
The charges he faces carry a maximum of 30 years in jail.
He will appear before judges again on 18 March.
To top of document
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