Today's Headlines and Commentary
The New York Times reports this morning that weeks before Blackwater guards massacred 17 civilians at Bagdad's Nisour Square in 2007, the State Department abandoned an inquiry into the security contractor's operations when Blackwater's top manager threatened to kill the government's chief investigator and declared “no one could or would do anything about it as we were in Iraq.”
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The New York Times reports this morning that weeks before Blackwater guards massacred 17 civilians at Bagdad's Nisour Square in 2007, the State Department abandoned an inquiry into the security contractor's operations when Blackwater's top manager threatened to kill the government's chief investigator and declared “no one could or would do anything about it as we were in Iraq.”
Thousands of Iraqi troops attacked the northern city of Tikrit on Saturday, in a major offensive that included air strikes on ISIS insurgents. The BBC has details. On Sunday, the Associated Press reported that the Islamic State of Iraq had formally declared the creation of a new Islamic state, running from northern Syria to the Iraqi province Diyala, and had called on all Muslims to swear loyalty to ISIL chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. That declaration has sparked some combination of condemnation and ridicule from rival rebel groups and authorities in Baghdad and Damascus, says the AP. The Times reported yesterday that Russian experts have arrived in Iraq to assist the army in mobilizing 12 Russian warplanes in the fight against Sunni extremists.
Also in the Times, Robin Wright draws from her personal experience of living through five years of Lebanon's civil war to urge Iraqis to overcome sectarian differences and "reverse course, reallocate power and repair political rifts." She warns that "[t]he alternative is the Lebanon situation, in which politics was hijacked by warlords, security forces were marginalized by law-defying militias, the economy survived off smuggling, and daily life was Darwinian."
On Saturday Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov criticized the U.S. for encouraging Ukraine to take a "confrontational path," reported the Guardian. And over the weekend German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Francois Hollande, and Russian President Vladimir Putin asked Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to extend the truce in the country's east in a four-way teleconference. See the Al Jazeera America story. Speaking of which: Is Ukraine's Poroshenko a match for "political fox" and "master tactician" Russian President Vladimir Putin? Here's the recent Reuters profile of the chocolate tycoon.
Yesterday the Israeli military conducted air strikes on the Gaza Strip in retaliation for six rockets from Gaza that struck Israel on Saturday. Here's Al Jazeera America.
Al Jazeera reports that the Pakistani army has evacuated almost half a million people and launched a ground offensive against rebel strongholds near the Afghan border after discovering what a military statement described as underground tunnels and bomb-making factories in the capital of North Waziristan.
On Friday the Times ran an op-ed smuggled from the maximum-security wing of a Cairo prison where Khaled al-Qazzaz, secretary on foreign relations under former Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, has been detained for a year. Al-Qazzaz, a permanent resident of Canada, asks why the international community has remained silent about the Morsi government officials who have been "disappeared" by the military in the wake of the ouster.
Louisa Lombard also has an op-ed in the Times criticizing journalists for wasting time highlighting the insensitivity of safari hunters traveling to the Central African Republic for fun during the country's horrible conflict and "playing the old game of making a few ignorant white people out to be more meaningful or worthy of outrage than they are." She writes:
The white faces stand out amid the black ones, even though the crisis in the Central African Republic, like so many issues in Africa, is not about white people at all. And attention paid to a few white hunters is at best a distraction from the more important matter of examining the roots of the crisis of political legitimacy that is ripping the country apart.Last week North Korea hit the headlines when Pyongyang promised "merciless countermeasures" if the U.S. government "allows and defends" the showing of Seth Rogen and James Franco's new comedy, about CIA recruits commissioned to assassinate Kim Jong Un. On Sunday, the AP cited a South Korean official who stated that North Korea had fired two short-range missiles into its eastern waters. And today North Korea announced that it will be trying two Americans, Matthew Todd Miller and Jeffrey Edward Fowle, for allegedly carrying out hostile acts against the country, writes the AP. President Obama is expected to nominate Bob McDonald, former chief of Procter & Gamble, as the next secretary of veterans affairs. The Times has details. In an interview with ABC that aired yesterday, President Obama stated that terrorists are "gaining strength in some places," highlighting concerns about Europeans who travel to Syria to fight alongside extremists and then enter the U.S. without visas. On Saturday Abu Khattala appeared in court for a ten-minute hearing, where he entered a not-guilty plea to a conspiracy charge, reported the Washington Post. On Friday the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released its "transparency report," on the scope of some of its most sensitive foreign intelligence collection efforts and revealing that the U.S. targeted some 90,000 foreign persons and organizations for surveillance last year; here's the Post coverage. In a Friday interview, Adm. Michael S. Rogers, who has headed NSA and Cyber Command for less than three months, described the steps the agency was taking to prevent future Snowdens from stealing large volumes of system data. See details on the front page of the Times this morning. Corporate boards are taking measures to fight cyberthreats into their own hands after a number of high-profile data breaches and warnings. That's the word from WSJ. Wired has a piece on U.S. defense contractor OshKosh Defense's development of TerraMax, an autonomous driving technology designed to sweep for roadside bombs without putting soldiers at risk. We'd be remiss not to mention that this weekend saw the centenary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, understood by fifth graders the world over and the BBC as the event that triggered World War I. The Vienna Philharmonic played in Sarajevo, notes the Times, in a symbolic concert boycotted by Serbian leaders, according to the Guardian. Email the Roundup Team noteworthy law and security-related articles to include, and follow us on Twitter and Facebook for additional commentary on these issues. Sign up to receive Lawfare in your inbox. Visit our Events Calendar to learn about upcoming national security events, and check out relevant job openings on our Job Board.
Jane Chong is former deputy managing editor of Lawfare. She served as a law clerk on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and is a graduate of Yale Law School and Duke University.
