Fret not, drone strike naysayers -- John Brennan has a list, and he's checking it twice:

White House counterterror chief John Brennan has seized the lead in guiding the debate on which terror leaders will be targeted for drone attacks or raids, establishing a new procedure to vet both military and CIA targets.

The move concentrates power over the use of lethal U.S. force outside war zones at the White House.

The process, which is about a month old, means Brennan's staff consults the Pentagon, the State Department and other agencies as to who should go on the list, making a previous military-run review process in place since 2009 less relevant, according to two current and three former U.S. officials aware of the evolution in how the government targets terrorists.

In describing Brennan's arrangement to The Associated Press, the officials provided the first detailed description of the military's previous review process that set a schedule for killing or capturing terror leaders around the Arab world and beyond. They spoke on condition of anonymity because U.S. officials are not allowed to publicly describe the classified targeting program.

One senior administration official argues that Brennan's move adds another layer of review that augments rather than detracts from the Pentagon's role. The official says that in fact there will be more people at the table making the decisions, including representatives from every agency involved in counterterrorism, before they are reviewed by senior officials and ultimately the president.

Yep. Nothing beats normalizing the unthinkable via bureaucratic smoke & mirrors. Apparently Arendt's keystone work is to Obama as Orwell's was to W: not a cautionary tale, but, rather, a user's guide.

h/t Roland Paris

John O'Brennan cuts to the heart of the Eurozone crisis, outlining the political consequences of issuing aloof, one-size-fits-all austerity requirements from afar:

The European crisis is as much a crisis of politics as economics. The current paralysis of the Greek political system demonstrates the point very clearly. EU policy has actively contributed to this crisis by effectively sealing off discussion of the political problems thrown up by austerity.

Budgetary policy is at the core of traditional democratic politics in Europe but the management of the euro zone is increasingly being effected not through democratic institutions but via a centralised and depoliticised form of technocratic fiat. The “stability” narrative has triumphed over the need for legitimacy as the crisis in Europe has deepened.

Ivan Krastev, the eminent political scientist, argues that we have now arrived at a point where national governments have politics but are no longer in control of policy, including budgetary policy, which is moving via the fiscal treaty and other measures to the EU level.

On the other side of this divide the European Union has policies but no politics, since decisions are increasingly being made by technocratic managers rather than directly elected representatives of the European public. The euro zone crisis has thus amplified an existing problem – the absence of both a European citizenry and a transparent European level political process.

The whole thing. Read.

h/t RCW.

The Uptake:

Tracey Pollock, a credentialed photographer for The UpTake, is attacked by police in Chicago during an anti-NATO protest on Saturday. Before the attack, police were using their bicycles as weapons to force back the crowd which was staging a march without a permit.
Police had formed a barricade; as you can see from the video, there was some sort of incident along the barricade. Pollock tried to get closer to see what was happening when a police officer reached up, grabbed her lens and tried to rip her camera away. The officer then pushed her over some bicycles.

Pollock was wearing a large press badge and as you can hear from the audio, even bystanders could tell she was part of the press. Protesters behind the bicycles pulled her to safety.

Pollock was bruised in the incident but not seriously injured. She says she never crossed the police barricade.

McClatchy has the 411:

Blind Chinese legal activist Chen Guangcheng, whose daring escape to the American embassy in Beijing last month sparked a diplomatic crisis, left China for the for the United States Saturday afternoon.

Chen’s departure – reportedly to Newark, N.J., on United Airlines -- brought to an end a nearly month-long saga that began on April 22 with Chen slipping away from his village in eastern China, where he’d been held in extra-judicial house detention for 19 months.

A U.S.-brokered deal earlier this month to allow Chen to leave the U.S. embassy after he hid there for six days brought considerable controversy and criticism from activists in China. There were widespread doubts about Beijing’s initial guarantees to safeguard Chen’s wellbeing and allow him to study at a Chinese university. That agreement shifted to one in which Beijing said it would accept Chen’s application for travel documents; New York University announced a fellowship awaited him.

The news on Saturday finally answered questions about whether China planned to live up to its end of the bargain. Efforts to reach Chen by phone on Saturday were unsuccessful, though he was quoted as telling the Associated Press from the airport that, “thousands of thoughts are surging to my mind.”

Auntie Beeb's Martin Patience has it right in my estimation: "[B]oth Beijing and Washington will want to put this affair behind them." But, as Patience further notes, despite a broader diplomatic crisis having largely been averted, this dispute "highlights profound differences between a superpower and a rising power on how they view the world." One assumes it will not be the last time.

Update: Apparently the US (via the Philippines) & China have profound differences on how they view the Scarborough Shoals (though beware simplistic, perpetually-revolutionary narratives from over-eager Trots -- the facts on the ground

are never quite that cut & dried, natch).

(Title corrected - mb)

Props to McClatchy Newspapers & special correspondent Jon Stephenson for doing what should have been done weeks ago by a major US news outlet: interviewing survivors of US Army Staff Sgt Robert Bales' notorious massacre in Afghanistan earlier this year:

“I told the women inside our room: ‘Let’s run! Let’s get out of here,’ ” recalled Rafiullah, who like many Afghans goes by only one name. In the next compound, a short distance from the house where Rafiullah had been sleeping, Haji Mohammad Naim awoke to the sound of dogs barking wildly in the street.

“Then there was shooting, and the dogs stopped barking,” said Naim, who’s in his 50s.Shortly afterward, there was pandemonium at Naim’s front door as Rafiullah and a handful of terrified women and children poured into his yard, seeking shelter. Minutes later, another woman and a young girl emerged from the darkness.

“She was screaming and crying,” Naim said of the woman. “She said, ‘My husband has been martyred,’ ” meaning that he’d been killed.

Forget Hallmark and Big Flora -- Mother's Day is (and always has been) for radicals:

Mother’s Day began in America in 1870 when Julia Ward Howe wrote the Mother’s Day Proclamation. Written in response to the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War, her proclamation called on women to use their position as mothers to influence society in fighting for an end to all wars. She called for women to stand up against the unjust violence of war through their roles as wife and mother, to protest the futility of their sons killing other mothers’ sons.

Howe wrote:

Arise, then, women of this day!

Arise, all women who have hearts, Whether our baptism be of water or of tears!

(Updated for clarity, h/t JPD)

David Patrikarakos on why, when it comes to Iran's alleged nuclear weapons program, isolation, increased economic sanctions, and (especially) bellicose threats of military action by the West are ultimately fruitless unless supplemented (or, re: military force, supplanted) with a promise of "real, sustained engagement":

The reality is that hardliners in Iran believe the West is in decline, and that the United States, so recently bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, won’t risk a third war in a time of financial crisis. Israeli threats are a concern, but Tehran calculates (probably correctly) that Israel doesn’t have the means to effectively strike its nuclear facilities. In fact, many hardliners welcome an attack. Damage would likely be limited and it would give them the excuse to go for a bomb. Perhaps more importantly, in a time of increasing domestic oppression following the 2009 fraudulent elections, not to mention the severe financial hardship many Iranians are facing, it would give them an excuse to rally an understandably hostile populace to their cause in the face of a common enemy.

Military action is not the solution, but nor will merely increasing financial pressure on the Islamic Republic stop the nuclear program. Khamenei and those around him have staked too much political legitimacy on it to climb down now without risking a dangerous loss of credibility. An increased inspector presence and supervised, limited enrichment (to civil levels – 5 percent) on Iranian soil have all been suggested and are workable and sensible solutions. But they don’t deal with the real issue, which is not a technical but a wider political problem between Iran and the West.

Iran isn’t North Korea; it resents international isolation, which it views as an affront to its great history and self-perceived role as a major international player. “We are a great nation with 5,000 years of history” Iran’s Ambassador to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, pointed out to me in 2010. This statement goes to the heart of what drives Iran and its foreign policy.

And this offers hope because in the end, what Iran wants is greater involvement. Sanctions are effective, but they are only half the battle and they are only ever a short-term measure. In the long-term, only real and sustained engagement will work because re-integrating Iran back into the international fold is the only real solution. Involving Iran in regional discussions on wider issues affecting the Middle East, and assisting it with securing membership of international organizations (like recent U.S. and Israeli support for its World Trade Organization membership) have also been suggested and must be pursued.

50 years ago student protest movement leaders published the Port Huron Statement, a key foundational document in the then-embryonic counterculture. Decades later, the global Occupy movement has finally taken the next step and crafted a manifesto of its own. That occupiers have decided to establish a foundation for the movement by building a stable to fill up all the ponies they want should not diminish the import of this announcement.

Sure, some may scoff at the seemingly glacial pace at which Occupy has reached what most would consider a key initial step in shaping a social movement. But as anyone who is at all familiar with the theory of inclusive democracy, the pace is drastically different when you're trying to work out so many issues on such a vast scale via a consensus-based model like Occupy is doing. Entrenching these practices in the public consciousness is clearly a vital step before anything truly concrete can take place.

Though the myriad equine proposals contained within will likely never be corralled exactly as specified, that really isn't the point. As Steve noted via FB chat, these sorts of documents "aren't final words but meant to stimulate debate to get to a later more realistic one, which is then a spingboard again," a fact acknowledged by occupiers in the intro:

The statement below does not speak on behalf of everyone in the global spring/Occupy/Take the Square movements. It is an attempt by some inside the movements to reconcile statements written and endorsed in the different assemblies around the world. The process of writing the statement was consensus-based, open to all, and regularly announced on our international communications platforms. It was a hard and long process, full of compromises; this statement is offered to people's assemblies around the world for discussions, revisions and endorsements. It is a work in progress.

David Wearing at New Left Project reviews Belén Fernández's recent book, The Imperial Messenger – Thomas Friedman At Work, noting how Friedman's banal pro-imperialist bloviation reflects -- and helps to further -- an all-too entrenched broader mentality:

Friedman puts the Iraqi public’s failure to appreciate the benefits of foreign occupation down to “the wall in the Arab mind”. As Fernández notes, “the Orientalist tendency to anchor Oriental subjects in antiquity, where they remain in perpetual need of civilisation by the West and its militaries, is viewable time and again in Friedman’s discourse”. Arabs and Muslims are “backward”. Iraqis “hate each other more than they love their own kids”. Shortly after the invasion of 2003, he opines that “it would be idiotic to even ask Iraqis here how they felt about politics. They are in a pre-political, primordial state of nature”.

For the American missionaries, the noble mission of raising the savages out of the swamp is not without its dangers. “While we would like an Iraqi national movement – building Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis – to coalesce, we don’t want it coalescing in opposition to us”. Evidently then there is a limit to which even this staunch advocate of enlightened Western values will support democracy, the limit being whether the liberated people then bow before the might of western power.

All of this would be of limited relevance were Friedman an isolated figure, rather than the ugly face of ideas and assumptions which have a much wider currency. His complaint that American occupying forces in Iraq “are baby-sitting a civil war” is a direct echo of Barack Obama’s promise during the 2007 presidential election campaign that “we're not going to babysit a civil war”, as though the bloodbath engulfing the country was attributable to the infantilism of its people and not to the effects of it being violently invaded by a foreign power. Elsewhere, Friedman’s likening of the US occupation of Afghanistan to the adoption of a “special needs baby” bears more than a passing resemblance to Donald Rumsfeld’s description of Washington’s role in teaching Iraqis how to run their own country:

“Getting Iraq straightened out was like teaching a kid to ride a bike: 'They're learning, and you're running down the street holding on to the back of the seat. You know that if you take your hand off they could fall, so you take a finger off and then two fingers, and pretty soon you're just barely touching it. You can't know when you're running down the street how many steps you're going to have to take. We can't know that, but we're off to a good start.”

The flip side of this casual racism is of course the chauvinistic view of the nature of Western civilisation; the paternal figure to the Iraqi and Afghan infants. For Friedman, “without a strong America holding the world together, and doing the right thing more often than not, the world really would be a Hobbesian jungle”, a faith in the benevolence of Western power which is shared right across the spectrum of mainstream intellectual opinion.

Related: If you have not yet done so, please read--nay, experience--Matt Taibbi's legendary takedown of The World is Flat. If snark were whiskey we'd all be shit-faced before breakfast.

David Cole on the latest example of forward-thinking re: the Bush/Cheney torture regime:

Sometimes I think being American means never having to say you’re sorry. On Wednesday, May 2, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, a federal appeals court in San Francisco, unanimously dismissed a lawsuit against former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo by José Padilla, the US citizen picked up at O’Hare Airport and held in military custody as an “enemy combatant” for three and a half years, during which he says he was subject to physical and psychological abuse.

As an official in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel from 2001 to 2003, Yoo wrote multiple memos designed to deny “enemy combatants” legal protections that might get in the way of our holding them incommunicado, depriving them of sleep, slamming them into walls, forcing them into painful stress positions, and waterboarding them. Padilla alleged that Yoo’s memos provided the basis for his years in detention, of which twenty-one months were in incommunicado isolation, and authorized his captors to subject him to abuse. As a result, he claims, he was threatened with death and serious physical abuse; shackled in painful stress positions for hours at a time; administered psychotropic drugs; denied medical care; and exposed to extreme temperatures.

The court dismissed the case before the truth of these allegations could be tested. It reasoned that even if Padilla’s allegations were true, it was not “clearly established” that his treatment violated the Constitution, and therefore the suit must be dismissed. John Yoo could not even be sued for the nominal damages of one dollar that Padilla and his mother sought as a way of emphasizing that their desire was for vindication of their rights, not remuneration.

How did the court reach such a cognitively dissonant constitutional conclusion?

[The 9th Circuit's reasoning] relied on the doctrine of “qualified immunity,” which holds government officials immune from personal liability for constitutional violations unless the violations were “clearly established” at the time. The idea is that government officials should not be held personally responsible where the law is murky and they have to make difficult judgment calls.

In other words: if you muddy up the waters enough, all options are on the table (barring organ failure and/or death, natch).

Related: CSM on how US government torture drove Padilla insane (but remember: he's tainted by AQ cooties, which make him worse than Pedobear or something); Meanwhile, in GITMO...

Just Foreign Policy does its best to decapitate once and for all any lingering zombie illusions re: consensus on Iran among teh NATSEC elite:

Listening to many politicians and pundits in the US and Israel, you may be led to believe that there is a consensus around the ideas that Iran is irrational, that it poses an existential threat to Israel, that it's currently trying to acquire a nuclear weapon, and that a military strike can help buy time to prevent such an outcome. But what many former and current top Israeli and other Western security officials are saying is precisely the opposite. We've collected some quotes to show you what these officials really think.

1. Iran's leadership is rational.
2. Iran does not pose an existential threat to Israel.
3. Iran has not made the decision to acquire a nuclear weapon.
4. Attacking Iran would make Iran more likely to acquire a nuclear weapon, not less so.
5. Attacking Iran would ignite a regional conflict.
6. Attacking Iran would not be in US or Israeli national interests.
7. There is time to pursue non-military options.
8. The West needs to talk to Iran.

Keep this in mind as (bull)shit starts to hit the electoral fan after Bibi flips the switch...

h/t

Related: Another rundown of the latest on-the-record statements re: Iran from key members of the Israeli security establishment, courtesy CSM's Dan Murphy.

Update: Via Tina in comments -- it's on like Donkey Kong:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called for an early general election in four months' time.

The vote is expected to take place in September, a year before he is required by law to seek a new mandate.

Mr Netanyahu leads a centre-right coalition which includes his own Likud and ultra-nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu.

Mr Netanyahu has been prime minister since 2009. Opinion polls suggest that he is by some distance the most popular politician in Israel.

Killing the messenger may (still) be an ineffectual means of addressing and mitigating serious problems. But, as a recently-unearthed internal Pentagon report from May 2011 notes, career-killing reprisals on Defense Department whistleblowers are all-too common. R. Jeffrey Smith and Aaron Mehta of the Center for Public Integrity explain how Defense Department officials charged with investigating reprisal claims showed "persistent sloppiness and a systematic disregard for Pentagon rules meant to protect those who report fraud, abuses and the waste of taxpayer funds":

A three-person team of investigators, assigned to review the performance of the Directorate for Military Reprisal Investigations, concluded that in 2010, the directorate repeatedly turned aside evidence of serious punishments inflicted on those who had complained.

The actions included threatened or actual discharges, demotions, firings, prosecutions and a mental health referral. At least one of the alleged reprisals was taken because the complainer had written to Congress, an act that Pentagon regulations say is a “protected communication” immune from retaliation. Some of the other whistleblowers had alleged discrimination, travel violations and “criminality,” the report states.

In all, investigators disputed the directorate’s dismissal of more than half of the 152 whistleblowing cases it reviewed and called for it to revamp its procedures and start enforcing the protective rules.

Related: Paul Harris outlines what he contends is a sharp escalation under Obama in the war on whistleblowers:

Over the past three and a half years the Obama White House has instead shown a ferocious hostility to many whistleblowers and earned itself the ire of progressive columnists like Salon's Glenn Greenwald and whistleblower defence groups like the Project on Government Oversight and the Government Accountability Project.

Danielle Brian, of the PGO, has said the US department of justice in the Obama administration "sent a clear of message of fear and intimidation" to whistleblowers in the national security field. This is how the GAP's Jesselyn Raddack – herself a former whistleblower at the DoJ – put it: "While the Bush administration treated whistleblowers unmercifully, the Obama administration has been far worse. It is actually prosecuting them," she wrote recently.

To do that it is using the bluntest of tools: the Espionage Act, a first world war-era law intended to combat the threat from spies, not internal dissenters. So far six whistleblowers have been charged under the draconian law with the last one – CIA veteran John Kiriakou – being indicted on 3 April.

Flashback: Jane Mayer on Obama's aggressive contribution to the seemingly neverending quest for tighter secrecy in DC -- and what it all means for American democracy.

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Michael Hudson asks: "In light of the enormous productivity gains since the end of World War II – and especially since 1980 – why isn’t everyone rich and enjoying the leisure economy that was promised?"

The answer (per Hudson) is painfully obvious, but bears repeating (ad infinitum):

What was applauded as a post-industrial economy has turned into a financialized economy. The reason you have to work so much harder than before, even when wages rise, is to carry your debt overhead. You’re unable to buy the goods you produce because you need to pay your bankers. And the only way that you can barely maintain your living standards is to borrow even more. This means having to pay back even more in years to come.

That is the Eurozone plan in a nutshell for its economic future. It is a financial plan that is replacing industrial capitalism – with finance capitalism.

Industrial capitalism was based on increasing production and expanding markets. Industrialists were supposed to use their profits to build more factories, buy more machinery and hire more labor. But this is not what happens under finance capitalism. Banks lend out their receipt of interest, fees and penalties (which now yield credit card companies as much as interest) in new loans.

The problem is that income used to pay debts cannot simultaneously be used to buy the goods and services that labor produces. So when wages and living standards do not rise, how are producers to sell – unless they find new markets abroad? The gains have been siphoned off by finance. And the financial dynamic ends up in austerity.

And to make matters worse, it is not the fat that is cut. The fat is the financial sector. What is cut is the bone: the industrial sector. So when writers refer to a post-industrial economy led by the banks, they imply deindustrialization. And for you it means unemployment and lower wages.

As they say, read the whole damn thing.

And weep.

h/t

Originally posted at bastard.logic

(Image: jesse.millan, Flickr)

Jim Hruska is decidedly underwhelmed by the Enduring Strategic Partnership Agreement between the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan and the United States of America:

Without the advice and consent of the Senate, Mr. Obama and Mr. Karzai's partnership lacks even the heft of a Civil Union, and is therefore not worth the paper on which it is written. Where are the references to the imperative for a Senate vote? The lack of discussion suggests that the United States has something to gain from this "agreement", which make Afghanistan into a major non-NATO ally."

Which suggests the question: How can the 3rd poorest and most corrupt nation in the world, with a Gross National Product of $16 billion, morph into a major ally? Exactly what does "security and defense cooperation"actually translate into in definable parameters? How did the security and defense of Afghanistan become a strategic objective of U.S.policy? Why would we even care?

[Insert requisite noun, verb, & 9/11 here.]

Related: Ex-State Dept spokesperson PJ Crowley: "The strategic partnership agreement makes sense from a policy standpoint...but the odds of success are no better than 50-50."

Update: JPD, in comments, outlines the 2nd rule of holes:

Ask yourself one simple question: When you're going to wallpaper over the hole in the wall and leave, what's more credible in helping deny the existence of the hole? Cheap wallpaper, or expensive wallpaper?

Sonia Verma offers a decent (if somewhat cursory) outline in today's Globe and Mail of the actually-existing geopolitical landscape post-OBL (which stands in contrast to Peter Bergen's recent proxy-Obama2012 victory lap breathlessly commemorating POTUS' alpha-male action movie moment):

One year after Operation Neptune Spear, al-Qaeda still exists, though in a more fractured form. The group’s ability to carry out large-scale attacks has been compromised. Meanwhile, America’s counterterrorism campaign is gradually shifting from Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan to Yemen and the Horn of Africa. The shaky alliance between the West, led by the United States, and Pakistan, has been plunged into a crisis from which it has not yet recovered. Since Mr. bin Laden’s death, each side has viewed the other with simmering suspicion. But perhaps the most enduring legacy of Mr. bin Laden’s killing is that no one who helped him hide for so long, essentially in plain sight, has been held accountable – and that may have poisoned relations between Pakistan and its Western allies for the foreseeable future.

Standard read-the-whole-damn-thing rules apply.

Related: Navy SEALs for Truth? C'mon. You knew it was coming.

Update: CFR's Linda Robinson further unpacks lingering OBL blowback, specifically re: US/Pakistan relations.

The most direct impact of bin Laden's death on Afghanistan was actually the crisis the Abbottabad raid caused in the already troubled U.S.-Pakistan relationship, and the spillover effects from that. It threw the Pakistan military and the political system into crisis, causing Pakistan to react with more anti-Americanism and more hostility and suspicion along the border. Attacks from Pakistan into Afghanistan quadrupled last year, though they are down again now. So the net effect was to make cross-border cooperation more difficult and increase Pakistan's tendency to pursue its own agenda. That includes things like the Haqqani network's attacks in September in Kabul on ISAF and the U.S. embassy, and the giant truck bomb in Wardak against the U.S. coalition base in Sayed Abad.

[...]

U.S. officials estimate that maybe 100 AQ fighters come and go from Afghanistan across the Pakistan border. Afghanistan is not much of a safe haven for al-Qaeda, though it still has some distance to go to become stable and capable of defending itself against attempts to reestablish an al-Qaeda safe haven. Most Taliban fighters on the ground are not directly connected to the al-Qaeda organization, and it is possible that at some point the Taliban senior leadership will find it in its interest to repudiate its formal ties to al-Qaeda. It is Pakistan that is the cause for greatest concern because al-Qaeda there is mixed up with a stew of various insurgent groups that do actively combine forces and cooperate on an operational level.

Nothing really all that new here. Still, the ugly (if familiar) truth certainly bears repeating, especially in light of the empty football spike sloganeering ("...and GM is alive!") that dominates the campaign discourse.

Charli Carpenter (h/t) & Robert Farley discuss FP's insta-notorious "swimsuit issue":

Related: Mona Eltahawy hits #nerdland to discuss her recent FP cover story on misogyny in the Muslim world, and address criticisms from Harvard prof Leila Ahmed:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Update: Liberated from comments: Yakin Ertuk:

Culturalising the problem of women’s rights diverts attention from the unequal gendered structures, as well as from the wider economic and political environment in which these developments are taking place.

According to Merry, “Blaming culture for the disadvantages faced by women, minorities, and other vulnerable groups is an appealing ideology for proponents of contemporary neoliberal globalisation. It blames the havoc wreaked by expansive capitalism and global conflicts on the culture of the other”.

Hence, the cultural authenticity discourse provides a perfect alibi for the traditional patriarchs to evade any responsibility to accommodate women’s rights claims; cultural interpretation of women’s subordination relieves rich countries of the responsibility for dispossessions caused by capitalism, neoliberalism, militarism, occupation and armed conflicts.

Ethan Zuckerman throws a cold bucket of reality onto some of the more idealistic notions re: information, interconnectivity, and ye olde series of tubes (aka, the panacea that wasn't):

A central paradox of this connected age is that while it’s easier than ever to share information and perspectives from different parts of the world, we may be encountering a narrower picture of the world than we did in less connected days. During the Vietnam War, television reporting from the frontlines involved transporting exposed film from Southeast Asia by air, then developing and editing it in the United States before broadcasting it days later. Now, an unfolding crisis such as the Japanese tsunami or Haitian earthquake can be reported in real time via satellite. Despite these lowered barriers, today’s American television news features less than half as many international stories as were broadcast in the 1970s.

The pace of print media reporting has accelerated sharply, with newspapers moving to a “digital first” strategy, publishing fresh information online as news breaks. While papers publish many more stories than they did 40 years ago (online and offline), Britain’s four major dailies publish on average 45 percent fewer international stories than they did in 1979.

Why worry about what’s covered in newspapers and television when it’s possible to read firsthand accounts from Syria or Sierra Leone? Research suggests that we rarely read such accounts. My studies of online news consumption show that 95 percent of the news consumed by American Internet users is published in the United States. By this metric, the United States is less parochial than many other nations, which consume even less news published in other countries. This locality effect crosses into social media as well. A recent study of Twitter, a tool used by 400 million people around the world, showed that we’re far more likely to follow people who are physically close to us than to follow someone outside our home country’s borders, or even a few states or provinces away. Thirty-nine percent of the relationships on Twitter involve someone following the tweets of a person in the same metropolitan area. In the Twitter hotbed of São Paulo, Brazil, more than 78 percent of the relationships are local. So much for the death of distance.

Martin Shaw provides a common-sensical (if somewhat understated) note of caution re: Obama's new Atrocities Prevention Board (chaired by 'Atrocities Czar' [sic] Samantha Power):

It is clear that counter-atrocity policy, now institutionalised in a way that entrenches its role as a "national interest", is taking ever-stronger shape under Obama. However, genocide campaigners should beware functioning as the administration’s cheerleaders. Even if atrocity-prevention is a national interest, that hardly means it will trump other national interests - strategic and commercial, for example. The fate of the "ethical dimension" of New Labour’s foreign policy is a warning: it remained just a dimension, and an increasingly subordinate one at that.

[...]

Although the administration sees atrocity-prevention as multilateral rather than unilateral, it makes no commitment to consistent multilateral action against atrocity. It is one thing to sanction your enemies in the name of fine ideals, but if you don’t mobilise the United Nations to do the same against your allies, these ideals are tarnished. Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s hesitation over acting against Hosni Mubarak and his military successors in Egypt, and against the repression carried out by the Saudi and Bahraini monarchies, suggests a strong danger in tying "atrocity" campaigning closely to official US policy.

Update: Ellen Brun and Jacques Hersh:

The problem with the conceptual framework of humanitarian interventionism is related to its abstraction from geoeconomics and geopolitics as well as disregard for the disparity of power and influence in the world. Notwithstanding the appeal of this discourse, the international system is not a level playing field. In a world where “might makes right,” the acceptance of Responsibility to Protect as the norm in inter-state relations gives the hegemonic powers ideological legitimization for intervening in weaker countries against noncompliant regimes.

Historical experience shows that there are good reasons to doubt the prevalence of humanitarian concerns as the foreign policy motivation of most nation-states. Not the least of which is the tendency of the big powers to cloak their foreign policy behind high-sounding moralistic discourses. The mixing of humanism and war on the part of an imperialist power is, and remains, an oxymoron.

For those unwilling to pony up for a TIME sub to bypass the Great Paywall of Luce, the New America Foundation has kindly posted the full text of Peter Bergen's big OBL last days of disco cover piece. Where does the line between truth & fiction fall? That, dear friends, is above my pay grade, though I'm sure there are many here who can/will do their goddamndest to liberate subtextural reality from the margins.

A brief excerpt to whet your appetites:

Bin Laden was always scheming about how to grab more media attention. He instructed his team, "The 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attack is coming and due to the importance to this date, the time to start preparing is now. Please send me your suggestions on this." He proposed reaching out to the correspondents of both al-Jazeera English and al-Jazeera Arabic and wondered if he could get a hearing on an American TV network: "We should also look for an American channel that can be close to being unbiased such as CBS."

Until the end, bin Laden remained fixated on mounting another large-scale attack on the U.S., prodding one deputy, "It would be nice if you could nominate one of the qualified brothers to be responsible for a large operation against the U.S. It would be nice if you would pick a number of the brothers not to exceed 10 and send them to their countries individually without any of them knowing the others to study aviation."

Have at it, Agonist massif.

Update: Marcy Wheeler:

When I read about the imprisonment of journalists like Abdulelah Haider Shaye, or the wiretapping of Lawrence Wright and Christiane Amanpour, I think back to Bergen, who in the days after 9/11 was an important, reliable source who knew more about al Qaeda than many of the people taxpayers were paying to keep us safe. I’ve always thought, as our government targets journalists covering Islamic extremists, we’re handcuffing the next Peter Bergen, that journalist who is right now collecting the information our intelligence community is neglecting.That Peter Bergen is likely to be imprisoned, like Shaye, for talking directly to a terrorist.

And what has Bergen become, along the way? The outlet for officially leaked information–one more tool in the President’s toolbox of information asymmetry.

Speaking of tools, Brian Williams of NBC News... ok, I'll just stop right there and just let you clicky-clicky yourself. Because seriously-- what more needs to be said?

h/t jo6pac in comments

Stop me if you've heard this one before, Canuckistan:

Stephen Harper is leaving the door open once again to extending Canada’s military participation in the costly Afghanistan war.

When the Official Opposition NDP pressed the Prime Minister on Wednesday about reports the United States has asked Canada to stay in Afghanistan beyond 2014, Mr. Harper said the government would “examine all options.”

[...]

If the Prime Minister extended Canada’s military deployment beyond 2014, it would be the fourth time he has prolonged the soldiering commitment to Afghanistan – including 2006, 2008 and 2010.

Speaking in the Commons on Wednesday, Mr. Harper denied reports the United States has asked Canada to keep special forces soldiers in Afghanistan past 2014, his latest promised date for withdrawal.

As our new Leader of the Official Opposition aptly noted during Question Period yesterday, Canadians "want this mission to end. It was supposed to end in 2006. It was supposed to end in 2009. It was supposed to end in 2011. It is supposed to end in 2014. When will it finally end?”"

Oh, and that last excerpted bit I highlighted, where the PM denies reports that Uncle Sam is trying to keep Canada in the Great Game for another Friedman or three? Methinks Mr. Harper is being a little coy. Mealsothinks that it's a damn good thing Afghanistan is (for now, anyway) almost completely under the Campaign 2012 Village radar.

Because, considering the collective combat exhaustion of the USian polity, the last thing the Obama team needs are ill-timed reports that it's secretly planning to continue America's excellent (and highly unpopular) imperial Central Asian misadventure past it's latest expiration date.

Kristin Rawls has a great piece up at GlobalComment on how the quick, tidy resolution of Ted Nugent's now-infamous insurrectionist meltdown on behalf of Mittens at this year's NRA convention stands in stark contrast to serious attention paid on the seemingly innocuous left-ish types that have been or are currently under federal surveillance.

Excerpts cannot do justice, but I think her conclusion deserves highlighting (with a strict caveat to, as they say, read the whole damn thing):

Ultimately, we know that government surveillance has increased tremendously since September 11, 2001 altogether. So, it is hard to make a definitive claim as to whether or not government investigations have a rightwing bias that specifically targets leftist activists. It seems as if the government may simply have stepped up its investigations of us all. But considering the magnitude of rightwing crime in the United States, the infiltration of vegan potlucks and peace groups seems pretty overzealous. Not only that, but the public money poured into such investigations seems, at best, wasteful. And in a time of debt crisis, surely we should be casting a critical gaze on this kind of federal spending. Maybe the question isn’t really: “Does government investigation have a rightwing bias?” Perhaps we should instead be asking, “Should the government be investigating today’s almost uniformly non-violent leftwing movements at all?”

Alas, such nagging, all-too inconvenient questions of government surveillance, civil liberties, & homeland (in)security are(still) entirely out-of-step with the noun-verb-9/11 DC zeitgeist -- domestically, at least (cough).

ICYMI:

The Senate Intelligence Committee has been reviewing the post-9/11 detention and interrogation practices of the Central Intelligence Agency for four years and is still not finished. But the end appears to be in sight.

“The review itself is nearing completion — before the end of summer — but is not over yet,” a spokesperson for the Committee said. “The release date should be not too far thereafter, but is not set.”

“This review is the only comprehensive in-depth look at the facts and documents pertaining to the creation, management, and effectiveness of the CIA detention and interrogation program,” according to Sen. Jay Rockefeller, who was chairman of the Intelligence Committee when the review began in 2008.

Committee staff are said to have reviewed millions of pages of classified documents pertaining to the CIA program.

Well, well, well. After 4 years and several million sheets of classified debasement, it sounds like the report may finally see daylight juuust in time to be placed under the blinding glare of the Campaign 2012 spotlight -- assuming the Village can tear itself away from teh horserace, of course (ooh, shiny).

h/t Daphne Eviatar

Related: Larry Siems of The Torture Report, who has compiled his exhaustive analysis of over 120,000 pages of CIA torture documents in a new book, gives his informed take on what W & co. wrought in the preceding decade:

Our highest government officials, up to and including President Bush, broke international and U.S. laws banning torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment. Worse, they made their subordinates in the military and civilian intelligence services break those laws for them.

When the men and women they asked to break those laws protested, knowing they could be prosecuted for torture, they pretended to rewrite the law. They commissioned legal opinions they said would shield those who carried out the abuses from being hauled into court, as the torture ban requires. “The law has been changed,” detainees around the world were told. “No rules apply.”

As they say, read the whole damn thing.

Ongoing border disputes between Sudan and South Sudan over unresolved oil revenue issues have reached a violent, near-critical mass in recent days (three guesses who's bearing the brunt of the clashes). So it's not surprising that China, a key patron & trading partner of both warring states (and very much concerned with keeping investments in local energy infrastructure stable & on track), is highly uncomfortable with the burgeoning tension. As South Sudan president Salva Kiir Mayardit reportedly cuts short his diplomatic mission to Beijing to deal with the growing crisis at home, Beijing (with a li'l help from Washington -- lead from behind, baby) has stepped up diplomatic efforts to stabilize the situation.

Your facepalm of the day, courtesy "a senior member of Germany's Pirate Party," via Der Spiegel:

Martin Delius, parliamentary floor leader of the Pirates in the Berlin city parliament, told SPIEGEL: "The rise of the Pirate Party is as fast as that of the NSDAP between 1928 and 1933." NSDAP refers to the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, the Nazi party.

But wait -- there's more:

The Berlin politician is the second in his party to make a controversial comment involving Nazis in recent days. Hartmut Semken, the regional party leader for the city-state of Berlin, last week argued strongly against expelling members who espouse far-right views. He argued that the last party that had enjoyed "huge success" with the persecution of people was the Nazi party, Semken also apologized.