(Published 28 November 2017)

The British Foreign Office held a meeting about Yemen, with the participation of the Saudi Arabia, UAE, Oman, U.K. U.S. and Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, United Nations Special Envoy for Yemen will take part in the meeting. It is funny that Yemenis did not attend this meeting. Where most of those present have their hands stained with Yemenis blood.

(15.Februar) CIA argued that the court is wrong to think that limited, selective disclosures of classified information are prohibited or unauthorized by law. The National Security Act only requires protection of intelligence sources and methods from “unauthorized” disclosure, not from authorized disclosure. And because the disclosures at issue were actually intended to protect intelligence sources and methods, they were fully authorized, CIA said. “The CIA properly exercised its broad discretion to provide certain limited information to the three reporters.”

Few in America have connected the dots between military indoctrination and firearms instruction on the one hand, and the propensity for training mass killers, whether their crimes are committed as enlisted soldiers in atrocities overseas or in American high schools.

Laut Wikipedia hat Politico in den USA 350 Mitarbeiter. Seit 2015 erscheint als Gemeinschaftsprojekt mit dem Axel Springer Verlag eine europäische Politico-Ausgabe. Bisher hat sich weder Mikrosoft noch die Universität Chicago zu dem unglaublichen Text geäußert. Von Konsequenzen für die Politico-Chefredaktion ist bisher nichts bekannt.

Face recognition—fast becoming law enforcement’s surveillance tool of choice—is being implemented with little oversight or privacy protections, leading to faulty systems that will disproportionately impact people of color and may implicate innocent people for crimes they didn’t commit, says an Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) report released today.

Face recognition is rapidly creeping into modern life, and face recognition systems will one day be capable of capturing the faces of people, often without their knowledge, walking down the street, entering stores, standing in line at the airport, attending sporting events, driving their cars, and utilizing public spaces. Researchers at the Georgetown Law School estimated that one in every two American adults—117 million people—are already in law enforcement face recognition systems.

The Pentagon has been pretty clear that US ground troops in Iraq aren’t going anywhere, with the deployment more or less permanent. Apparently, they’d just as soon have company, and have convinced NATO to come along.

The US “aid” offered by Tillerson is a financial package from the U.S. Export-Import Bank in the amount of $3 billion in loans, loan guarantees, and insurance funds to American firms investing in Iraq.

I’m not dissing Petraeus here. He himself admitted his “gains” in Iraq as well as Afghanistan were both “fragile and reversible.” And so they proved. The U.S. fought in Iraq and Afghanistan and lost thousands of troops and trillions of dollars for gains that truly were ephemeral. Despite this disastrous and tragic reality, Petraeus remains the sage on the stage, the go-to guy for analysis of our never-ending wars on PBS, Fox News, and elsewhere.

Sicher, Petraeus hat noch keine Kriege gewonnen. Aber er hat sich eine Goldmedaille in der Öffentlichkeitsarbeit verdient. In Schönreden. Im Jahr 2007 drehte er die Truppenaufstockung als großen US-Sieg im Irak hin. (Die temporäre Stabilität, die zu einem so hohen Preis gekauft wurde, erwies sich in der Tat als zerbrechlich und reversibel.) Eine spätere Aufstockung in Afghanistan ließ sich nicht so gut präsentieren, aber auf merkwürdige Weise schaffte es seine ehebrecherische Affäre, ein persönliches Versagen, sein militärisches zu übertünchen.