Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Photo: AP With the government shutdown, Donald Trump has been looking for ways to distract the public from his failure to BUILD THE WALL, and a trip to Iraq seemed like a publicity slam dunk for his image at a critical time. Surely he couldn’t fuck this up, right? Unfortunately for the administration, any goodwill…
On the evening of Jan. 21, 2012, attorney Neal Puckett stood on a balcony in Oceanside, California, and delivered an ultimatum to the United States Marine Corps. A few days earlier, Puckett had reached a deal with military prosecutors that would have let his client — a Marine staff sergeant facing nine counts of manslaughter…
First Family Jared Kushner, White House C.E.O. and Trump Princeling, Visits Iraq The First Son-in-Law cements his power in the White House with a surprise trip to Baghdad. Jared Kushner prior to a meeting with automobile industry leaders in the Roosevelt Room, January 24, 2017. From AP Photo. It was a mostly sunny, milder-than-average 70…
President Trump during a meeting in the Roosevelt Room of the White House last week. Credit Al Drago/The New York Times WASHINGTON — President Trump signed an executive order on Monday blocking citizens of six predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States, the most significant hardening of immigration policy in generations, even with changes…
According to a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers assessment, “Mosul Dam is the most dangerous dam in the world.”CreditPhotograph by Victor J. Blue for The New Yorker Barrier Status: ‘none’ On the morning of August 7, 2014, a team of fighters from the Islamic State, riding in pickup trucks and purloined American Humvees, swept out…
At least 17 people have been killed by a car bomb in the central Iraqi town of Khalis, officials say. The explosion, about 49 miles (80km) north-east of the capital, Baghdad, was “very strong” a provincial official told a private TV station. Hospital sources said the death toll was expected to rise, Reuters reports. The…
VICE reporter Ben Anderson talks about facing captured ISIS soldiers and more in tonight’s VICE on HBO Debrief of “Fighting ISIS.” VICE returns on Friday, February 5 at 11PM, exclusively on HBO Watch Season 1: http://bit.ly/VICE-HBO-S1Watch Season 2: http://bit.ly/VICE-HBO-S2-E1 Click here to subscribe to VICE: http://bit.ly/Subscribe-to-VICE Check out our full video catalog: http://bit.ly/VICE-VideosVideos, daily editorial…
During Iraq’s long summer of 2004, one of the many prisoners who arrived at the American-run facility at Camp Bucca in southern Iraq was a young jihadist who fought under the name Abu Ahmed. Though he’d feared prison, Abu Ahmed found, to his surprise, a kind of jihadist salon, as extremist fighters locked up together…
Sun Tzu, generally considered a reliable source on Good War Ideas, said something along the lines of, “You’ve got to know your enemy in order to beat him, because some dudes hate being kicked in the junk and others seem to enjoy it.” The difficulty we’ve had defeating ISIS suggests that, maybe, we don’t really…
ISIS — the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria — is one of the least funny organizations on the planet. From child trafficking to attempted genocide, everything they touch turns into a big steaming pile of tragedy. Things seem to be going pretty well for them, too. The West’s new boogeymen captured the city of…