John Stephenson for McClatchy reports that Afghan army chief Gen. Sher Mohammad Karimi, the chief Afghan investigator in the killing of 17 civilians with which U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales has been charged, says “there’s strong evidence that only one killer was involved, a view that puts him at odds with Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai.”

A U.S. defense official said “such speculation was ‘commonplace, especially in small villages and especially about something as horrific as an event like this.’” Referring to a relative of victims, Karzai said: “‘In his family, in four rooms people were killed — children and women were killed — and then they were all brought together in one room and then set on fire. That, one man cannot do.’” Full story »

“Objectivity” in reporting and analysis has developed a bad rep in recent years. The mainstream media is often blamed, but they’ve long considered it their responsibility to pit the two prevailing positions against each other. You could say it’s not the media’s fault that said positions, far from conservative and liberal, are most often center right to extreme right. But in the perceived need for access to power, the media too often accepts how far right well-funded conservative groups have slid the Overton Window.

When the spotlight is trained on reporting and analysis on our perceived enemies, the issue of objectivity is more deeply illuminated. In the spring issue of the Journal of Psychohistory (print only), psychoanalyst and Journal of Psychohistory assistant editor David Lotto explains in an article titled “On the Pot Calling the Kettle Black: The Perils of Psychohistorical Partisanship.” Full story »

At the Seoul Nuclear Security Summit on Monday (March 26), the Washington Post reported that camera crews caught President Obama and outgoing Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, apparently unaware of the presence of the all-seeing media eye, speaking with each other.

“On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved, but it’s important for him to give me space,” Obama can be heard telling Medvedev, apparently referring to incoming Russian president — and outgoing prime minister — Vladi­mir Putin.

First impression: That was the only chance they had to meet one on one at the summit? Whatever the case, conservative Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post said:

This is a stunning gift to Romney from the Obama camp. The legitimate concern that Obama will take his re-election as a mandate to head left is likely to become an all-purpose weapon. Full story »

From Wednesday, March 21, 2012:

‘The Daily Show’s’ Advantage Over the MSM: An Eye for the Absurd

Political satirists sometimes enjoy wider latitude than journalists. It’s a distinct and vital genre for a reason. The press would nevertheless do well to step back, if only occasionally, and to look at the world as its [sic] seen from the Daily Show writers room, or the Onion headline writing desk. Satirists have a knack for hitting on angles that reporters miss due to excessively narrow framing. And deliberate temperamental irreverence is helpful if your job is to dispassionately observe.* In the aftermath of The Daily Show’s UNESCO piece, its angle and value added has been praised in numerous journalistic outlets. Going forward, the press should try to recognize absurdity ahead of the satirists, and bring to ensuing coverage the rigor that is the journalistic comparative advantage. Full story »

Many of us in the West wonder how Islamist extremists can find virtue in killing. In the East and West, killing an enemy has long been glorified. But when Islamist extremists kill Muslims because, say, they’re Shi’ite not Sunni, or they justify the deaths of innocent bystanders on the principle that, if they’re righteous, their ascent into heaven is expedited, they stretch the definition of the noble warrior beyond the breaking point.

Of course, neither do elements of fundamentalist Christianity have a problem with killing Muslims, who are viewed as heathens standing in the way of history (holding up the apocalypse by failing to cede full ownership of Jerusalem to the Jews). What’s less known is that while Christianity certainly had no monopoly on slaughter — when you consider how much smaller the world’s population was in his day, Genghis Khan was like Hitler, Stalin and Mao Zedong combined — it once attached no virtue to killing in war. Full story »

“As possible military action against Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons program looms large in the public arena, far more international concern should be directed toward Syria and its weapons of mass destruction,” writes the American Federation of Scientists’ Charles P. Blair at Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. “Syria likely has one of the largest and most sophisticated chemical weapon programs in the world.”

Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile is thought to be massive. One of only eight nations that is not a member of the Chemical Weapons Convention – an arms control agreement that outlaws the production, possession, and use of chemical weapons — Syria has a chemical arsenal that includes several hundred tons of blistering agents along with likely large stockpiles of deadly nerve agents, including VX, the most toxic of all chemical weapons.  Full story »

In his report on the Oval Office meeting between President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu for the New York Times, Mark Landler writes:

Mr. Netanyahu, according to the official, argued that the West should not reopen talks with Iran until it agreed to a verifiable suspension of its uranium enrichment activities — a condition the White House says would doom talks before they began.

In other words, don’t hold talks until a goal of the talks has been reached before the talks themselves. In the United States we’re familiar with that practice from the Bush administration. It also parallels the Iran Threat Reduction Act of 2011 which prohibited U.S. diplomacy with “any Iranian official who poses a threat to the United States.” Full story »

Recently I wrote a post that said Mitt had a spine made of surgical tubing, which provoked this response from a conservative friend: “May I remind you that there is a fine line between sharp humor and bile, and this time you have crossed the line.”

Bile? That’s bile?

This same friend regularly listens to Rush Limbaugh, and laughs when I criticize Mullah Rush. (Although I suspect he might feel differently this week.) Now this fellow is no fool. He has degrees from Cambridge and Harvard and is a very successful CEO. But over the last fifty years, the right has methodically and relentlessly moved not only policy but the language of debate to the right. Right-speak has become “fair and balanced,” center-speak has become socialist, and left-speak has become bile. And we on the left have been either too lazy or too smug or too polite to stop it.

Full story »

Southern Indiana, 5:30 a.m.

My wife and I each schedule one drill per month, and do not tell each other when it will be. On this cold, February morning, the alarm goes off and she sits straight up in bed, confused.

“It’s time,” I say, “Plan B. Go.” Full story »

“American officials who have assessed the likely Iranian responses to any attack by Israel on its nuclear program believe that Iran would retaliate by” not only firing missiles at Israel, but, write Thom Shanker, Helene Cooper, and Ethan Bronner in a New York Times articles titled U.S. Sees Iran Attacks as Likely if Israel Strikes, “terrorist-style attacks on United States civilian and military personnel overseas.”

Gen. James E. Cartwright, former commander of U.S. Strategic Command (which includes nuclear weapons) told the authors:

The Iranians have been pretty good masters of escalation control. … The balance [they] will try to strike is doing damage that is sufficiently significant, but just short of what it would take for America to invade. Full story »

This nugget of a sentence—one of the best sentences I’ve ever come across, I believe—was contained in an exhibit at Stampex yesterday called Parachuting with Dolly Shepherd, a clever history of parachuting as told by real parachuting pioneer Dolly Shepherd through the usual tools of stamp collectors—stamps, envelopes, letters, buttressed by photos and newspaper clippings. This is one of the cool things about stamp shows—the exhibits, which are often a delight. Dolly Shepherd’s life, intertwined with a history of parachuting, was very cleverly done. But it wasn’t even the best one—that kudo goes to Denmark’s Internment Camps in WWII, which held both British and American civilians after it was occupied by Germany. And you learn so much—who knew the Danish Police were so uncooperative that the entire Police Force was replaced by the occupying government in one fell swoop, sending 2000 Danish police to Buchenwald? I do now.

This is why I love stamp shows, and keep going, even though their attendance keeps declining, and I still manage to bring the average age down at each one I go to. Full story »

Recently, a left-wing colleague described his vision of where America is headed over the next forty years–breakdown of government, mass starvation, roving bands of marauders, etc. It’s interesting that this is exactly the same vision shared by those on the far right who star in the new TV show Doomsday Preppers, about people who are stockpiling cases of beans in their suburban basements, while asking themselves, “What load would Jesus shoot?” Maybe the visions of both left and right are so similar because that future has been portrayed so many times in movies.

Of course, we could end up like that. But we probably won’t.

Full story »

As regular readers know, we’ve been tracking the progress of the design and construction of a new nuclear facility (the CMRR-NF) at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. As we posted yesterday … Nuclear Pit Boondoggle at Los Alamos Temporarily Scuttled due to a combination of the economic climate and the efforts of the Los Alamos Study Group (LASG), which has been educating the public, lobbying Washington, and filing two suits to halt the CMRR-NF on environmental grounds.

But sociologist Darwin BondGraham, who is on the LASG Board of Directors, is in no mood to gloat about the victory. In an elegiac article for Counterpunch titled Starving the Real Beast, he writes

The war machine has begun to eat itself for the sake of preserving hyper-inequalities resulting directly from the less progressive tax code instituted a decade prior, and the multitude of shelters capital now hides behind. Full story »

The new budget for fiscal year 2013 (which begins on October 1) just released, reports Chris Schneidmiller for Global Security Newswire, calls for the

Energy Department’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration to receive $11.5 billion. … just shy of 5 percent above the amount allocated in the current budget … The budget would provide $7.6 billion for NNSA efforts to “maintain a safe, secure, and effective nuclear deterrent.”

The other $2.5 billion …

… is proposed for NNSA initiatives to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and related materials. [Nonproliferation, in other words. -- RW] That amount, if approved, would constitute a $163 million boost from the amount allocated for this year.

All in all …

… the administration is seeking $372 million less for weapons programs than it had anticipated requesting as of 2011.  Full story »

On February 8 I posted about an online dialogue on evangelical Christians and nuclear disarmament. In March of last year, at A Deeper Story: Tales of Christ and Culture, site administrator Nish shared emails with Reverend Tyler Wigg-Stevenson, founder of the Two Futures Project, a groundbreaking evangelical disarmament group, as well as with commenters.

One of the commenters addressed what constitutes a sticking point about disarmament for evangelicals, as well as fundamentalists. To wit, many of them either look forward to the End Times or see no way of avoiding it. No matter how familiar we may be with this line of thinking, for progressives — secular or religious — chancing upon evangelicals and fundamentalists actually discussing it is surpassingly strange. Full story »

The primary U.S. thermonuclear weapon is designated B61. When we hear the modifier thermonuclear, aka H-bomb, we think end of the world.  But this bomb, delivered by bombers and fighters, as opposed to missiles, can function as either an intermediate “strategic” — blow up a specific part of the world — or ”tactical” — just the battlefield — nuclear weapon.

The B61 is what’s known as a variable-yield bomb. First, it’s not one weapon per se, but a category of weapons based on one design. Second, some of the B61s come equipped with a dial. Bet you didn’t know that the destructive force of a nuclear bomb could be adjusted like an appliance. Full story »

The Institute for Science and International Security is dedicated to preventing nuclear proliferation and its president, David Albright, is often quoted in the mainstream media. Much of its energy is spent in raising the alarm about Iran, though — thank goodness for small favors — it doesn’t call for an attack.

For example ISIS declared that the recent International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report on Iran contained “the most comprehensive detail and analysis to date [of] evidence of nuclear weaponization-related activities conducted by Iran.” Nevertheless, it concluded, “Notably absent … is any assessment by the IAEA of Iran’s capability to make a nuclear explosive device based on what it learned through these activities.” Full story »

“I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong… No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.” Full story »

Not that they’re related, but the more or less concurrent rise of libertarian Ron Paul and demise of prominent atheist Christopher Hitchens give one pause. The sympathy that this author, as a progressive, feels for libertarians’ anti-war stance parallels that I feel for atheists’ anti-religion stance. But I not only lack sympathy for, but am fundamentally opposed to, what motivates those beliefs on both their parts.

Libertarians’ opposition to war is motivated by the belief that that a state should keep its gaze and its money within its own borders, no matter the carnage overseas. Atheists’ opposition to religion is motivated by the lack of belief in — however one cares to describe it — God, a higher power, or a greater intelligence. Full story »

The U.S. House of Representatives recently voted to pass — with only six nays — the Iran Threat Reduction Act of 2011. At the Hill’s Congress Blog, Jamir Abdi explains that (as you may have heard) it contains “a provision—inserted without debate in committee after garnering the majority of its cosponsors—that would outlaw contact between U.S. government employees and certain Iranian officials.”

Abdi reveals how dire the consequences of such a policy can be.

This would not just tie the hands of our diplomats, it would prevent U.S. troops in the field—particularly members of the U.S. Navy operating in the tense Persian Gulf—from making military to military contacts with their Iranian counterparts. … If an Iranian vessel were to approach aggressively a U.S. vessel – as happens all too often – our sailors would be legally barred from making contact with the offending ship.  Our sailors would have to send a request up the chain of command to the President, who would have to submit a waiver to Congress. They would then need to wait 15 days for the waiver to take effect before they would have permission to communicate with the Iranian vessel. These sailors barely have fifteen minutes to defuse these situations, let alone fifteen days. Full story »