Longreads Pick
Once in Venezuela, other teams were put up in nice hotels, but the Iranian team, at the insistence of its country’s officials, was forced to stay in military barracks. Abedi was in a room with his brother’s best friend, Asgari. Quietly in the showers or in private moments between matches, Abedi began sharing his intentions with a few teammates. Two other wrestlers, both named Abbas, confirmed that they, too, would not return.
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Published: May 13, 2011
Length: 18 minutes (4,666 words)
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Longreads Pick
David Packouz and Efraim Diveroli had picked the perfect moment to get into the arms business. To fight simultaneous wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the Bush administration had decided to outsource virtually every facet of America’s military operations, from building and staffing Army bases to hiring mercenaries to provide security for diplomats abroad. After Bush took office, private military contracts soared from $145 billion in 2001 to $390 billion in 2008. Federal contracting rules were routinely ignored or skirted, and military-industrial giants like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin cashed in as war profiteering went from war crime to business model. Why shouldn’t a couple of inexperienced newcomers like Packouz and Diveroli get in on the action? After all, the two friends were after the same thing as everyone else in the arms business — lots and lots and lots of money.
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Published: Mar 17, 2011
Length: 43 minutes (10,854 words)
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Longreads Pick
Eight years ago, an [REDACTED] Afghan kid—some say he was [REDACTED] years old, others say he was 12—was grabbed in a Kabul marketplace after a grenade attack on two American soldiers. He was interrogated, [REDACTED], and then taken to Guantánamo. He spent his teenage years there, seven in all, confined in a [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] with the supposed “worst of the worst.” But then, thanks ot the superhuman efforts of his defense team and one intense [REDACTED] military lawyer, the government’s case against him disintegrated. Now he’s back in Afghanistan, free as a badly damaged bird, in a [REDACTED] country he barely recognizes, wondering where you go when you grew up nowhere
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Published: Feb 1, 2011
Length: 36 minutes (9,063 words)
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A Declaration of Cyber-War
In the end, the most important thing now publicly known about Stuxnet is that Stuxnet is now publicly known. That knowledge is, on the simplest level, a warning: America’s own critical infrastructure is a sitting target for attacks like this. That aside, if Stuxnet really did attack Iran’s nuclear program, it could be called the first unattributable act of war. The implications of that concept are confounding. Because cyber-weapons pose an almost unsolvable problem of sourcing—who pulled the trigger?—war could evolve into something more and more like terror. Cyber-conflict makes military action more like a never-ending game of uncle, where the fingers of weaker nations are perpetually bent back. The wars would often be secret, waged by members of anonymous, elite brain trusts, none of whom would ever have to look an enemy in the eye. For people whose lives are connected to the targets, the results could be as catastrophic as a bombing raid, but would be even more disorienting. People would suffer, but would never be certain whom to blame.
By Michael Joseph Gross, Vanity Fair
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Longreads Pick
Such an outpouring of rage at a 40-year-old woman, mother to a toddler, who was convicted in her mid-20s of abetting a terrorist plot that never took place, is a measure of the degree to which Peruvians are still traumatized by the violence that convulsed their country during the years when the Shining Path warred with the military and nearly 70,000 Peruvians were killed. It also underscores the fact that terrorism, all but defunct in Peru for more than a decade, is still a hot political issue.
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Published: Mar 2, 2011
Length: 34 minutes (8,601 words)
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Longreads Pick
I went ahead and dedicated my new book to Maj. Harold Hering because Maj. Hering sacrificed his military career to ask a Forbidden Question about launching nuclear missiles. A question that exposed the comforting illusions of the so called fail-safe system designed to prevent “unauthorized” nuclear missile launches. How can any missile crewman know that an order to twist his launch key in its slot and send a thermonuclear missile rocketing out of its silo—a nuke capable of killing millions of civilians—is lawful, legitimate, and comes from a sane president?
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Published: Feb 28, 2011
Length: 17 minutes (4,362 words)
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Army Deploys Psy-Ops on U.S. Senators
theatlantic:
This is like something right out of “The Manchurian Candidate”:
The U.S. Army illegally ordered a team of soldiers specializing in “psychological operations” to manipulate visiting American senators into providing more troops and funding for the war, Rolling Stone has learned – and when an officer tried to stop the operation, he was railroaded by military investigators.
The orders came from the command of Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, a three-star general in charge of training Afghan troops – the linchpin of U.S. strategy in the war. Over a four-month period last year, a military cell devoted to what is known as “information operations” at Camp Eggers in Kabul was repeatedly pressured to target visiting senators and other VIPs who met with Caldwell. When the unit resisted the order, arguing that it violated U.S. laws prohibiting the use of propaganda against American citizens, it was subjected to a campaign of retaliation.
“My job in psy-ops is to play with people’s heads, to get the enemy to behave the way we want them to behave,” says Lt. Colonel Michael Holmes, the leader of the IO unit, who received an official reprimand after bucking orders. “I’m prohibited from doing that to our own people. When you ask me to try to use these skills on senators and congressman, you’re crossing a line.”
Read the full story at Rolling Stone
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Longreads Pick
The orders came from the command of Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, a three-star general in charge of training Afghan troops – the linchpin of U.S. strategy in the war. Over a four-month period last year, a military cell devoted to what is known as “information operations” at Camp Eggers in Kabul was repeatedly pressured to target visiting senators and other VIPs who met with Caldwell. When the unit resisted the order, arguing that it violated U.S. laws prohibiting the use of propaganda against American citizens, it was subjected to a campaign of retaliation.
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Published: Feb 24, 2011
Length: 8 minutes (2,235 words)
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