Afternoon Snooze Button

thepoliticalnotebook:

This Week in War. A Friday round-up of what happened and what’s been written in the world of war and military/security affairs this week. It’s a mix of news reports, policy briefs, blog posts and longform journalism.

• News this morning: Asma Al-Assad will be hit with EU sanctioning.
• The female members of Afghanistan’s High Peace Council say they are being sidelined.
• A two-part assessment of the past few months of the Afghan transitional process from the Afghan Analysts Network. (1, 2)
• There were two notable longreads pieces this week on Afghanistan, the massacre and the future of US involvement. One, by Neil Shea in The American Scholar, examines how his experiences on embed with US soldiers give insight into how the massacre happened. The other, by Matt Gallagher in the Boston Review, focuses on soldiers looking to the post-massacre political and military future.
• Here are the names of the sixteen victims of the massacre.
• I made a vision board for the Afghan war on Pinterest.
• Ahmed Rashid was interviewed about crisis and politics in Pakistan for NPR Fresh Air.
• An article on the powerful part women have played in the Libyan revolution in the Smithsonian.
• Brookings’ Saban Center has released a report that estimates the various costs of a Syrian intervention in order to be “executed properly.”
• This week marked the nine-year anniversary since the US dropped bombs over Baghdad during the now-infamous shock and awe. CNAS fellow Dr. Colin Kahl testified this week before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on the deteriorating situation in Iraq. 
• The Khawajas, a prominent revolutionary family, are under siege by the government of Bahrain.
• Some really cool crisis-mapping work: mapping the mainstream media coverage of election violence in Kenya in comparison with citizen journalist coverage.
• The International Crisis Group has warned that militarized post-war policies in Sri Lanka could re-ignite violence.
• Soldiers overthrew President Touré in a successful military coup in the West African country of Mali, previously considered a quality example of African democratic leadership.
• A really fabulous look at some climate security policy dilemmas over at Duck of Minerva.
• NPR’s Morning Edition looks at cybersecurity legislation.
• The US is boosting its cyberweapons and cyberdefense research: $500m has gone to DARPA over the past 5 years for this purpose.
• A nuclear security summit is set to start in Seoul on Monday.
• Sebastian Junger has begun an organizaton called Reporters Instructed in Saving Colleagues that provides freelance journalists with three-day training sessions in emergency medical skills. 
• The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute has updated its information on international arms transfers. Here’s a fact sheet assessing the trends and data from the 2007-11 period.
• Four female veterans are running for Congress this year! 
• According to the GAO, the Army has serious problems with its payroll system that are causing serious delays in paychecks and could prevent the Army from being audit-ready.
• Katy Perry pretended to be a Marine in her latest music video and I don’t so much know how I feel about this. Come to your own conclusions.

Photo: A Black Hawk takes off after unloading a team of Pathfinders and an Afghan patrol in Kandahar. US Army Flickr Stream.

Educate yourselves

theatlantic:

Leaked Emails Reveal Assad’s Love of LMFAO and Right Said Fred

Syrian opposition activists quietly watched President Bashar al-Assad trade crisis-management tips with Iran and order Right Said Fred songs from iTunes as they secretly accessed his email until Assad shut down his account after a totally separate hack by Anonymous. Before the account he shared with his wife Asma went dead, the activists managed to download about 3,000 messages from it, which The Guardian reported as an exclusive on Wednesday.

One email conversation that truly stands out from the reams of communication The Guardian posted, is Assad’s correspondence with iTunes, from which he ordered country singer Blake Shelton’s “God Gave Me To You” to send to his wife, Asma, the day after Syrian forces started shelling Homs. Assad also had an affinity for Chris Brown, Right Said Fred, and New Order. “In January he bought a number of songs by the popular US dance group LMFAO including their hit Sexy and I Know it,” The Guardian reported. But it’s Right Said Fred that cracks us up: Assad ordered “Don’t Talk Just Kiss“ because, we’re guessing, he already had “I’m Too Sexy.”

Read more at The Atlantic Wire.

If this doesn’t demonstrate how much of a threat data leaks are to civilized society, I don’t know what does.

inothernews:

From the New York Daily News:

Shocking new video surfaced Tuesday which suggests Syria’s desperate dictator has turned military hospitals into torture chambers — and turned the doctors into torturers.

The ghastly images obtained by a British TV station were secretly filmed by a hospital worker in the embattled city of Homs who said the abuse visited on the rebels and others who wind up there are medieval in their cruelty.

“I have seen detainees being tortured by electrocution, whipping, beating with batons, and by breaking their legs,” the unidentified worker told “Mani,” a French photojournalist who smuggled the footage out of Syria.

“They twist the feet until the leg breaks,” he said. “They perform operations without anaesthetics. I saw them slamming detainees’ heads against walls.”

And that’s just a warm up for other tortures too cruel to be described on the genitals of wounded patients, who appeared to be shackled to their beds in the stark footage.

Ever since the Syrians rose up against Assad and his gangster regime nearly a year ago, there have been rumors the hated Mukhabarat secret police was torturing civilians in military hospitals.

Well I just threw up in the back of my mouth.

timelightbox:

Feb. 6, 2012. A Syrian man hugs his seriously wounded brother in a house used as a hospital in Bab Amr, a southern neighborhood of Homs.

Syria is no longer sliding into war or staring at the abyss of warfare. Syria is at war. On assignment for TIME this week, photographer Alessio Romenzi risked his life documenting civilian casualties in Bab Amr, a district in the besieged city of Homs.

See more here.

Wow.

kateoplis:

The Only Remaining Online Copy of Vogue’s Asma al-Assad Profile

Max Fisher for the Atlantic:

In February, Vogue magazine published, for the benefit of its 11.7 million readers, an article titled “A Rose in the Desert” about the first lady of Syria. Asma al-Assad has British roots, wears designer fashion, worked for years in banking, and is married to the dictator Bashar al-Assad, whose regime has killed over 5,000 civilians and hundreds of children this year. The glowing article praised the Assads as a “wildly democratic” family-focused couple who vacation in Europe, foster Christianity, are at ease with American celebrities, made theirs the “safest country in the Middle East,” and want to give Syria a “brand essence.”Vogue’s editors defended the controversial article as “a way of opening a window into this world a little bit,” conceding only that Assad’s Syria is “not as secular as we might like.” A senior editor responsible for the story told me the magazine stood by it. A few weeks later, the article and all references to it were removed from Vogue’s website without explanation. In August, The Hill reported that U.S. lobbying firm Brown Lloyd James had been paid $5,000 per month by the Syrian government to arrange for and manage the Vogue article. […]

Sadly, Vogue’s piece of the Syrian puzzle has been almost entirely scrubbed from the internet. But, somehow, the text can still be found at a website called PresidentAssad.net, a gif-filled but meticulously updated fan page to the Syrian dictator. The site is registered to a Syrian man living in Rome named Mohamed Abdo al-Ibrahim. A personal site for Ibrahim lists him as an employee of the Syrian state-run news agency.

Rememba’ when?