Search Results for: Pakistan

On former News of the World editor Colin Myler, who was blamed by Rupert Murdoch for the phone-hacking scandal. He’s now taking on Rupert as editor of the New York Daily News, the tabloid rival of the Murdoch-owned New York Post:

The fun is going to be in competing against a man who first saved his career, then nearly ruined it. When Rupert Murdoch brought Myler to the Post, in late 2001, the move was a step down. For a decade, he’d been editor-in-chief of one British tabloid or another, most recently the Sunday Mirror, playing the Fleet Street game with brio. But then he crossed a line. In April 2001, in the midst of the trial of two soccer players accused of assaulting a Pakistani fan, Myler published an article that suggested racism as a possible motive. The problem was that the judge had prohibited consideration of a racial motive, and in England there are strict laws about honoring such prohibitions—’Journalism 101,’ says one of Myler’s Fleet Street colleagues. The judge in the case immediately called for a retrial, and even though Myler had consulted company lawyers, he was pushed out in disgrace.

“The Tabloid Turncoat.” — Steve Fishman, New York magazine

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The Tabloid Turncoat

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On former News of the World editor Colin Myler, who was blamed by Rupert Murdoch for the phone-hacking scandal. He’s now taking on Rupert as editor of the New York Daily News, the tabloid rival of the Murdoch-owned New York Post:

“The fun is going to be in competing against a man who first saved his career, then nearly ruined it. When Rupert Murdoch brought Myler to the Post, in late 2001, the move was a step down. For a decade, he’d been editor-in-chief of one British tabloid or another, most recently the Sunday Mirror, playing the Fleet Street game with brio. But then he crossed a line. In April 2001, in the midst of the trial of two soccer players accused of assaulting a Pakistani fan, Myler published an article that suggested racism as a possible motive. The problem was that the judge had prohibited consideration of a racial motive, and in England there are strict laws about honoring such prohibitions—’Journalism 101,’ says one of Myler’s Fleet Street colleagues. The judge in the case immediately called for a retrial, and even though Myler had consulted company lawyers, he was pushed out in disgrace.”

Published: Apr 23, 2012
Length: 19 minutes (4,778 words)

How the U.S. drone program became central to the Obama administration’s counterterrorism efforts. The president has presided over 268 covert drone strikes, five times what George W. Bush ordered:

But the implications of drones go far beyond a single combat unit or civilian agency. On a broader scale, the remote-control nature of unmanned missions enables politicians to wage war while claiming we’re not at war – as the United States is currently doing in Pakistan. What’s more, the Pentagon and the CIA can now launch military strikes or order assassinations without putting a single boot on the ground – and without worrying about a public backlash over U.S. soldiers coming home in body bags. The immediacy and secrecy of drones make it easier than ever for leaders to unleash America’s military might – and harder than ever to evaluate the consequences of such clandestine attacks.

‘Drones have really become the counterterrorism weapon of choice for the Obama administration,’ says Rosa Brooks, a Georgetown law professor who helped establish a new Pentagon office devoted to legal and humanitarian policy. ‘What I don’t think has happened enough is taking a big step back and asking, “Are we creating more terrorists than we’re killing? Are we fostering militarism and extremism in the very places we’re trying to attack it?” A great deal about the drone strikes is still shrouded in secrecy. It’s very difficult to evaluate from the outside how serious of a threat the targeted people pose.’

“The Rise of the Killer Drones: How America Goes to War in Secret.” — Michael Hastings, Rolling Stone

See also: “Predators and Robots at War.” — Christian Caryl, New York Review of Books, Sept. 20, 2011

The Rise of the Killer Drones: How America Goes to War in Secret

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How the U.S. drone program became central to the Obama administration’s counterterrorism efforts. The president has presided over 268 covert drone strikes, five times what George W. Bush ordered:

“But the implications of drones go far beyond a single combat unit or civilian agency. On a broader scale, the remote-control nature of unmanned missions enables politicians to wage war while claiming we’re not at war – as the United States is currently doing in Pakistan. What’s more, the Pentagon and the CIA can now launch military strikes or order assassinations without putting a single boot on the ground – and without worrying about a public backlash over U.S. soldiers coming home in body bags. The immediacy and secrecy of drones make it easier than ever for leaders to unleash America’s military might – and harder than ever to evaluate the consequences of such clandestine attacks.

“‘Drones have really become the counterterrorism weapon of choice for the Obama administration,’ says Rosa Brooks, a Georgetown law professor who helped establish a new Pentagon office devoted to legal and humanitarian policy. ‘What I don’t think has happened enough is taking a big step back and asking, “Are we creating more terrorists than we’re killing? Are we fostering militarism and extremism in the very places we’re trying to attack it?” A great deal about the drone strikes is still shrouded in secrecy. It’s very difficult to evaluate from the outside how serious of a threat the targeted people pose.'”

Source: Rolling Stone
Published: Apr 20, 2012
Length: 27 minutes (6,935 words)

A look into the lives of female war correspondents Christiane Amanpour, Marie Colvin, Janine di Giovanni, Maggie O’Kane, and Jacky Rowland:

Amanpour and her colleagues are reporters, they insist, not women reporters, as rugged as any man, and they’ve got the war stories to prove it. Take Afghanistan alone. Amanpour discovered what she believes were “mini– training camps” and a trove of documents about how to make chemical and nuclear weapons. The BBC’s newest sensation, a confident and exuberant 37-year-old Brit, Jacky Rowland, completed her mission of being one of the first Western correspondents into that country after September 11. “We left CNN and their equipment on the tarmac [in Tajikistan], which was a sheer delight,” says Rowland. During the first few days of the U.S. bombing, The Guardian’s Maggie O’Kane—a disheveled human tornado from Ireland who now lives in Edinburgh—endured a weeklong trek from Pakistan into Afghanistan, traversing “Horse Killer Pass.” Janine di Giovanni, an Italian-American with Jessica Rabbit looks, who writes for the London Times (and is a contributing editor at this magazine), vigorously dodged al-Qaeda fire while in Tora Bora. The only member of the group not to have recently visited Afghanistan is the toughest of them all, Marie Colvin, an American who writes for The Sunday Times of London. Instead, she was relearning to negotiate stairs after losing sight in one eye to shrapnel. She now wears a black pirate’s patch. She also has a beaded, sparkly one that was given to her by her friend Helen Fielding, who wrote Bridget Jones’s Diary. “It’s my party patch,” says Colvin as she brings her shaky match to her Silk Cut cigarette. “I never thought in my life I’d be the woman with the patch. But there you are, life changes.”

“The Girls at the Front.” — Evgenia Peretz, Vanity Fair, June 2002

See also: “4 Times Journalists Held Captive in Libya Faced Days of Brutality.” — Anthony Shadid, Lynsey Addario, Stephen Farrell and Tyler Hicks, The New York Times, March 22, 2011

The Girls at the Front

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A look into the lives of female war correspondents Christiane Amanpour, Marie Colvin, Janine di Giovanni, Maggie O’Kane, and Jacky Rowland:

“Amanpour and her colleagues are reporters, they insist, not women reporters, as rugged as any man, and they’ve got the war stories to prove it. Take Afghanistan alone. Amanpour discovered what she believes were ‘mini– training camps’ and a trove of documents about how to make chemical and nuclear weapons. The BBC’s newest sensation, a confident and exuberant 37-year-old Brit, Jacky Rowland, completed her mission of being one of the first Western correspondents into that country after September 11. ‘We left CNN and their equipment on the tarmac [in Tajikistan], which was a sheer delight,’ says Rowland. During the first few days of the U.S. bombing, The Guardian’s Maggie O’Kane—a disheveled human tornado from Ireland who now lives in Edinburgh—endured a weeklong trek from Pakistan into Afghanistan, traversing ‘Horse Killer Pass.’ Janine di Giovanni, an Italian-American with Jessica Rabbit looks, who writes for the London Times (and is a contributing editor at this magazine), vigorously dodged al-Qaeda fire while in Tora Bora. The only member of the group not to have recently visited Afghanistan is the toughest of them all, Marie Colvin, an American who writes for The Sunday Times of London. Instead, she was relearning to negotiate stairs after losing sight in one eye to shrapnel. She now wears a black pirate’s patch. She also has a beaded, sparkly one that was given to her by her friend Helen Fielding, who wrote Bridget Jones’s Diary. ‘It’s my party patch,’ says Colvin as she brings her shaky match to her Silk Cut cigarette. ‘I never thought in my life I’d be the woman with the patch. But there you are, life changes.'”

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Jun 1, 2002
Length: 20 minutes (5,008 words)

A look at hundreds of pages of internal White House documents, and what they reveal about the president’s decision-making process:

One Cabinet official made it clear that she did not share the President’s growing commitment to coupon-clipping: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She rejected the White House’s budget for her department, and wrote the President a six-page letter detailing her complaints. Some in the White House saw the long letter as a weapon, something that could be leaked if Clinton didn’t get her way. ‘At the proposed funding levels,’ Clinton wrote, ‘we will not have the capacity to deliver either the full level of civilian staffing or the foreign assistance programs that underlie the civilian-military strategy you outlined for Afghanistan; nor the transition from U.S. Military to civilian programming in Iraq; nor the expanded assistance that is central to our Pakistan strategy.’

“The Obama Memos.” — Ryan Lizza, New Yorker

More Lizza: “Inside the Crisis.” New Yorker, Oct. 12, 2009

The Obama Memos

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A look at hundreds of pages of internal White House documents, and what they reveal about the president’s decision-making process:

“One Cabinet official made it clear that she did not share the President’s growing commitment to coupon-clipping: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She rejected the White House’s budget for her department, and wrote the President a six-page letter detailing her complaints. Some in the White House saw the long letter as a weapon, something that could be leaked if Clinton didn’t get her way. ‘At the proposed funding levels,’ Clinton wrote, ‘we will not have the capacity to deliver either the full level of civilian staffing or the foreign assistance programs that underlie the civilian-military strategy you outlined for Afghanistan; nor the transition from U.S. Military to civilian programming in Iraq; nor the expanded assistance that is central to our Pakistan strategy.'”

Author: Ryan Lizza
Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jan 23, 2012
Length: 44 minutes (11,245 words)

If you survey informed Americans, you will hear Pakistanis described as duplicitous, paranoid, self-pitying and generally infuriating. In turn, Pakistanis describe us as fickle, arrogant, shortsighted and chronically unreliable.

Neither country’s caricature of the other is entirely wrong, and it makes for a relationship that is less in need of diplomacy than couples therapy, which customarily starts by trying to see things from the other point of view. While the Pakistanis have hardly been innocent, they have a point when they say America has not been the easiest of partners.

“The Pakistanis Have a Point.” — Bill Keller, New York Times Magazine

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Depending where you fall on the spectrum between civil liberties absolutism and homeland security lockdown, Palantir’s technology is either creepy or heroic. Judging by the company’s growth, opinion in Washington and elsewhere has veered toward the latter. Palantir has built a customer list that includes the U.S. Defense Dept., CIA, FBI, Army, Marines, Air Force, the police departments of New York and Los Angeles, and a growing number of financial institutions trying to detect bank fraud. These deals have turned the company into one of the quietest success stories in Silicon Valley—it’s on track to hit $250 million in sales this year—and a candidate for an initial public offering. Palantir has been used to find suspects in a case involving the murder of a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement special agent, and to uncover bombing networks in Syria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. “It’s like plugging into the Matrix,” says a Special Forces member stationed in Afghanistan who requested anonymity out of security concerns. “The first time I saw it, I was like, ‘Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap.’”

“Palantir, the War on Terror’s Secret Weapon.” — Ashlee Vance and Brad Stone, BusinessWeek

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