- All 251,287 U.S. cables obtained by Wikileaks are now available at its website. New finds get published at WL Central and a good search engine for the cables, though not yet current, is available at CableSearch.org
- The CIA believes that the situation in Afghanistan is in a stalemate.
- Movies and documentaries by Afghans about Afghanistan: The Fruit of Our Labor – Afghan Perspectives in Film (scroll down)
- The Washington Post has a lengthy piece about the CIA’s paramilitary killer force, the Counterterrorism Center. With such an unaccountable organization not bound by law one thing is always assured. It will end in a huge failure and a widely damaging scandal (see: Pigs, Bay of).
- UN Report on the Flotilla Incident (pdf)
Five of those killed had bullet wounds indicating they had been shot from behind: Cengiz Akyüz, Çetin Topçuoğlu, Necdet Yıldırım, Furkan Doğan and İbrahim Bilgen. This last group included three with bullet wounds to the back of the head: Cengiz Akyüz, Çetin Topçuoğlu and Furkan Doğan. İbrahim Bilgen was killed by a shot to the right temple.
Civil-military relations under Gates were more dysfunctional than any time since the early days of the Civil War. Though it may seem hyperbolic to some, the reality is that the accumulated transgressions of civil-military norms by senior military leaders far outstrip the misconduct of Gen. Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War.
During the Gates years, senior military leaders intervened in domestic politics; actively lobbied for policy preferences; waged sophisticated information operations against the American public; blocked the development of alternative options requested by the president and sought to punish those in uniform who were willing to respond to presidential requests; and created command environments in which contempt for civilian leaders was widespread. And Gates was either absent or an accomplice in most of these transgressions.
