Today's Headlines and Commentary

The Obama administration confirmed yesterday that the Haqqani militant network's #3 was killed by a drone strike in Pakistan last week. Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post reports. In two incidents in Afghanistan Wednesday and Thursday, five Australian soldiers were killed by what appeared to be rogue Afghan soldiers. The Washington Post reports on the deadliest 24 hours for Australian soldiers in Afghanistan, as do Richard Oppel and Matt Siegel of the New York Times. Peter Bergen reviews Mark Bissonnette's book on the UBL raid at the Washington Post. Quote from the book sure to be in almost every other review:

He hadn’t even prepared a defense. . . . He had no intention of fighting. He asked his followers for decades to wear suicide vests or fly planes into buildings, but he didn’t even pick up his weapon.

Eric Schmitt of the New York Times also provides some additional details from the book, as does the Associated Press. Mark Thompson of Time's Battleland blog wonders why we care about whether or not UBL fought back during the Navy SEAL raid. The AP tells us that India's Supreme Court has upheld the death sentence for the only survivor of the individuals responsible for the 2008 Mumbai attacks. He can still ask for a reprieve from India's president. Read yesterday's live blog of the Bradley Manning pretrial hearing yesterday over at Firedoglake. Amidst UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's memoir are details of meetings he had with then-Secretary of State Colin Powell regarding his skepticism of the existence of WMDs in Iraq. Rick Gladstone of the Times writes on Annan's account. Senator John Kerry will be delivering the main foreign policy address at the Democratic National Convention, a sign that he may be Obama's pick for the Secretary of State should Obama win re-election. Julien Pecquet of The Hill  reports. Ben already solved the mystery over the Guantanamo Bay Museum of Art and History, and Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic gives us the run-down on the creators' reasoning. Update: Former NJ Governor and past head of the EPA Christine Todd Whitman has this op-ed in the  New York Times on the vulnerability of chemical plants in the U.S. that we've known about for years but that Congress has yet to step up and deal with. Yikes:

The current chemical security statute is inadequate to the task. The policy bars the Department of Homeland Security from requiring some specific security measures, like the use of safer chemical processes, and exempts thousands of dangerous chemical facilities, including all water treatment plants and refineries located on navigable waters, from complying with even the weakest security measures. Since 2009, both the E.P.A. and the D.H.S. have been asking Congress for authority to require safer chemical processes and eliminate these wholesale exemptions.

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