On Blackwater The Book
I concur with MountainRunner’s assessment, Jeremy Scahill’s book is, at its very core, sensationalist and irrelevant.
COIN + Gravity Wells
Grim draws the parallels to astrophysics and makes a pretty decent primer to COIN.
Walls In Iraq
WP – Oil-spot to the extreme?
The U.S. military is walling off at least 10 of Baghdad’s most violent neighborhoods and using biometric technology to track some of their residents, creating what officers call “gated communities” in an attempt to carve out oases of safety in this war-ravaged city.
Turkey Prepares For Iraq
MENL –
Turkey was said to have drafted plans for a major military operation in northern Iraq over the next few weeks.
Turkish sources said a force of at least 10,000 troops, backed by main battle tanks, armored vehicles, helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft, was being formed for the invasion. They said the operation could take place in May.
On April 20, Turkey’s NTV television said the Turkish military has set a “specific timetable” for the offensive against the Kurdish Workers Party in Iraq. NTV said the proposed force would attack PKK camps in the Kandil mountains.
NTV said the military would monitor the PKK insurgency campaign until May. At that point, the military would be ready to send forces into Iraq.
Systemic Breakdown Of White House Security
ABC – I would go so far as to say that information is more valuable than personnel at the WH and as such should be more of a priority than personnel security. But this doesn’t seem to be a view shared by many:
Among the lapses cited by the security officers, who spoke to the committee anonymously, are multiple instances of breaches being reported to the security office that were ignored and never investigated. Several of those instances allegedly involved the mishandling of SCI (Sensitive Compartmentalized Information), which is the highest level of classified information.