After capturing and killing Guevara (Marxist revolutionary),before bury him in a secret tomb, the Bolivian army showed this photograph to prove that he was dead. His death dealt a death blow to the socialist revolutionary movement in Latin America and the Third World.
The picture actually made him a legend, his admirers said he had a forgiving look on his face and compared him with Jesus.
Published on GlobalPost (http://www.globalpost.com)
By Nichole Sobecki
Subhead:
More people dying in clash between Turkey and Kurdish rebels than in Afghan war.
Turkey funeral [1]
Caption:
Soldiers, family members and friends attend a funeral ceremony for 17-year-old Buse Sraiyag, in her hometown of Elmadag, near Ankara on June 23, 2010. Buse Sraiyag was killed along with four soldiers in a bomb attack by suspected Kurdish rebels in Istanbul. (Adem Altan/AFP/Getty Images)
DIYARBAKIR, Turkey — The shadow of war is again hanging heavily over Turkey.
After breaking a 14-month ceasefire this June, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party has stepped up bomb attacks and attacks on the Turkish military. At least 100 fighters, including 30 Turkish soldiers, have been killed over the past few weeks — many more than the casualties reported from the Afghan war for the same period.
“This is about to explode big time,” said Henri Barkey, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. “It’s going to be messy and it’s going to be all over the country.” (Continued)
Ben Juda July/August 2010source
Dushanbe is not a real city. It isn’t a real capital and Tajikistan is not a real country. The northern neighbour of Afghanistan is a failure with a flag, shiny passports and a gang of savvy criminals that calls itself a government. This buffer between the empires fell apart a long time ago.
Downtown Dushanbe: A hodge-podge of mosques, telephone poles and tiny whitewashed homes
The city has leafy boulevards laid out in an almost utopian socialist grid. The streets are quiet but on balmy Asian nights the streets come alive with drug mega-barons racing their SUVs, blaring out rap music and tossing a few coins at the impoverished police officers — teenagers in uniform — if anybody gets in their way. These boulevards are a Soviet mirage, a Potemkin city which was initially named after a dictator — Stalinabad. It became Dushanbe in 1961 as part of Khruschev’s de-Stalinisation.
Dushanbe is a hodge-podge of dirt tracks, sodden sewage holes, tiny whitewashed homes with corrugated-iron roofs. It swarms with under-fives, their veiled mothers, jobless dads, chickens and a nocturnal orchestra of wild dogs. Dushanbe is a slum for more than 650,000 people and the capital of a country where 70 per cent live in abject rural poverty. Tajikistan has soaring birth-rates, rising illiteracy, fraudulent elections, de-urbanisation and a 1,200km border with Afghanistan.
Rakhmatillo Zoirov has vacant pale eyes. His slacks are fraying. He lives in a dilapidated, garbage-strewn row of flats overlooking a desolate motorway. Repairmen have been absent since the fall of communism and children play gangsters in courtyards of broken glass. No one takes schooling here seriously. Zoirov is the only opposition politician publically to criticise the dictatorial leader Emomali Rakhmon.
There are other disturbing statistics here, after the obligatory expressions of shock from the neighbors. “American-Bred Terrorists Causing Alarm For Law Enforcement,” by Jason Ryan, Pierre Thomas, and Xorje Olivares for ABC News, July 22:
A Virginia man charged with providing material support to terrorists abroad appeared in court today requesting an attorney be appointed to him.
Zachary Chesser, 20, is accused of trying to join Al-Shabaab, a Somali-based Islamist militant group suspected in the recent bombing attacks in Uganda that left 73 dead and dozens more injured as they watched the World Cup final. (Continued)
One of the worst maritime disasters in European history took place a decade ago. It remains very much in the public eye. On a stormy night on the Baltic Sea, more than 850 people lost their lives when a luxurious ferry sank below the waves. From a mass of material, including official and unofficial reports and survivor testimony, our correspondent has distilled an account of the Estonia’s last moments—part of his continuing coverage for the magazine of anarchy on the high seas
By William Langewiesche
After midnight, in the first hours of September 28, 1994, the ferry Estonia foundered in the waves of a Baltic storm. The ship was the pride of the newly independent Estonian nation, recently arisen from the Soviet ruins. It was a massive steel vessel, 510 feet long and nine decks high, with accommodations for up to 2,000 people. It had labyrinths of cabins, a swimming pool and sauna, a duty-free shop, a cinema, a casino, a video arcade, a conference center, three restaurants, and three bars. It also had a car deck that stretched from bow to stern through the hull’s insides. In port the car deck was accessed through a special openable bow that could be raised to allow vehicles to drive in and out. At sea that bow was supposed to remain closed and locked. In this case, however, it did not—and indeed it caused the ship to capsize and sink when it came open in the storm and then fell entirely off.
MORE.
News of the imminent stoning of one Iranian woman for alleged adultery galvanized a global movement to save her. But sadly, her case was not an anomaly.
Huang Ping and Mao Mao in their dorm room at the ‘Night Cat’ in Changsha, China, 2007
Rian Dundon (b.1980, USA) earned a B.F.A. in Photography and Imaging from New York University in 2003. Rian’s photographs and writing have been featured in publications including The Irish Times Magazine, Newsweek, OUT, Time, Stern, and Swindle Magazine. He is a contributor at New America Media, the leading national advocate for ethnic media in the United States. In 2007 he received a Tierney Fellowship in support of his work on fringe youth culture in interior China. Rian has exhibited in solo and group shows at Beijing Photo Spring, The Camera Club of New York, The New York Photo Festival, and The Angkor Photography Festival. He has lived in Mainland China since 2005 and is currently based in Beijing.
About the Photograph:
“This is a picture of Huang Ping (sitting) and Mao Mao in the employee dormitory of the underground gay nightclub where they worked in Changsha, Hunan province, China. Huang Ping was unsuccessfully attempting to wake Mao Mao for a rehearsal of their nightly dance routine. The club was called the ‘Night Cat’ and was Changsha’s first gay bar to open after homosexuality was decriminalized in 1997. Huang Ping, who I followed for about a year as part of a larger project on young Chinese, was at the time a pre-op transsexual. Six months later, after the bar had been closed, Huang Ping reemerged with a new, male identity complete with short hair and fashionable boys clothes. I think this story is an apt illustration of the transience in Chinese society. The kids who worked at the ‘Night Cat’ were all migrants, rural youth who had traveled to the city to find work as dancers or wait staff. They were also gay, which made staying in their hometowns unbearable. In the city they could be somewhat open with their sexuality. They could be free.” (Continued)
For the first time since 2001, there is real and building momentum to include caps or even reductions in defense spending as part of the bipartisan drive to address the United States’ runaway deficits.
Defense spending, which has more than doubled since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, has always been the third rail of congressional funding debates. After Defense Secretary Robert Gates said last year that "the spigot of defense funding opened by 9/11 is closing," there was widespread skepticism in Washington that either party would take up the cause.
Gates is directing all the military services to tighten their belts, and Pentagon sources say that every shop is looking for things it can do without. But as part of Gates’s plan to incentivize the military to get rid of waste, he’s instituted a policy that services can "keep what they catch," so that initiative won’t lower budgets all by itself.
But now, a growing chorus of congressional Democrats, along with a smattering of Republicans, is feeling more confident that 2011 could be the year when actual limits on defense funding, or even cuts to the defense budget, might be imposed.
[here, a gallery of the initial explosion and rush to contain the fire and rescue workers in the BP disaster]
[you have probably read at my site and a number of other places how the government took down a lot of blogs because there was at this site [no longer there], videos on how to make bombs at home! Unfortunately, for all the great things we can now get on the net, there is on the darker side, this sort of evil, evil which would destroy our freedoms, our hopes, our enjoyment of the riches of life. Here is a photo of what appeared. Of course no instructions follow]
U.S. Secret Service agents stands watch as President Barack Obama eats coconut ice cream during a visit to Mount Desert Island Ice Cream in Bar Harbor, Maine, Friday, July 16, 2010. AP
A memorial to Pfc. Brandon King, from the 1-320th Alpha Battery, 2nd Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division, who was killed on July 14 at COP Nolen in the volatile Arghandab Valley, Kandahar, Afghanistan, Tuesday, July 20, 2010. AP
One Saturday afternoon, Gail Boykewich was in a small shed in the woods behind her parents’ house, in Oakland, New 
Jersey, inflating a blow-up doll with a very loud machine. When she was done, she placed the doll, which had no facial features, next to a cluster of others that had already been dressed and made up with wigs and masks.
“If you overinflate, you can create leaks,” Boykewich said. She is twenty-nine, and she heads up East Coast operations for Inflatable Crowd, a Santa Monica-based company that offers movie directors a cheaper alternative to hiring real-life extras. “I’ve never seen a doll explode,” she said, “but if you don’t close the valves correctly they will probably stay inflated for a few hours, and then, after you dress them and bring them to the set, you’ll have a whole stadium of deflated dolls.”
Boykewich, who has short black hair and a matter-of-fact air, walked from the studio into her parents’ house and switched on a laptop. She played a clip from “Gridiron Gang,” a 2006 movie that stars Dwayne (the Rock) Johnson and is exactly the kind of film that Inflatable Crowd is made for. “That one looks a little funny,” Boykewich said, pointing to an inflatable in the stadium whose face looked as if it were about to blow off. (Wind is a big problem on set with inflatables.) As Boykewich talked, her dog, a shepherd mix named Remy, wandered in. (Her mother said the dog was “terrified” of the inflatables at first.) (Continued)
In something of a warning to all wannabe online mujahedeen, a 20-year-old student from northern Virginia was arrested today on charges of providing material support to al-Shabaab, the al-Qaida-aligned Somali extremist group.
Zachary Adam Chesser is the guy’s given name. But he went by several others: Abu Talhah, Abu Talhah Al-Amrikee. But Chesser’s highest profile appears to be online, where his sobriquets included TeachLearnFightDie and AlQuranWaAlaHadith. He posted on an apparently defunct blog called Themujahidblog.com and Revolutionmuslim.com, according to the affidavit of FBI Special Agent Mary Brandt Kinder, and he threatened the lives of the South Park creators for their portrayal of the prophet Mohammed. Searches for his uploaded videos led to the discovery of him getting pwned by one of the Jawa Report guys. (More on that below.)
Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/07/student-online-terrorist-flunkie-arrested-in-virginia/#more-28174#ixzz0uVCVbSUk
By Niall Firth
More than 100 planets that are a similar size to Earth have been discovered in just the past few weeks, it has been announced.
The discovery was made by the space telescope Kepler which has been scanning the skies for planets that are orbiting stars since it was launched in January last year.
The breakthrough raises the tantalising prospect that we may not be alone in the Universe.
Scientists now believe that there are likely to be around 100 million planets in the Milky Way that harbour exactly the right conditions for life.
And they expect to be able to identify around 60 of these habitable Earth-like planets within the next two years.
More.
For last summer’s college break, I was looking for work that would lead to lots of “networking” and “opportunity.” I ended up at a retirement home, washing dishes at minimum wage for sixty hours a week. I trained and was then replaced by a deaf, mentally challenged gentleman.
This summer, I’m an intern at an international, multi-billion dollar company. I’m not sure exactly how this happened. I do know it started on the Internet. I blogged about a product I liked—right as the product’s creators simultaneously started their initial online advertising campaign.
They latched on to me as a poster boy for their first success story, proclaiming ‘YOUNG PEOPLE LOVE US’ and ‘LOOK HOW MUCH THE COOL WE ARE!!! DOT COM!!!’
Some time later I drove to one of their offices and was quickly hustled from meeting to meeting, speaking to executives about “effective marketing strategies for engaging millennials,” regurgitating info I’d crammed into my brain the previous night and dropping the few buzzwords I remembered from my Intro to Marketing class.
A foreign accent undermines a person’s credibility in ways that the speaker and the listener don’t consciously realize, new research shows.
Because an accent makes a person harder to understand, listeners are less likely to find what the person says as truthful, researchers found. The problem of credibility increases with the severity of the accent.
“The results have important implications for how people perceive non-native speakers of a language, particularly as mobility increases in the modern world, leading millions of people to be non-native speakers of the language they use daily,” says Boaz Keysar, a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago.
via MORE
An infant’s intelligence is shaped more by family environment than by the amount of omega 3 fatty acid from breast milk or fortified formula, new research shows.
Scientists followed 241 children from birth until they reached four years of age to investigate the relationship between breastfeeding and the use of DHA–fortified formula in infancy and performance in tests of intelligence and other aspects of brain function.
via MORE
Now, 20 years after her photograph helped transform public perception of the disease, LIFE spoke with Frare about that picture; the international controversy its sparked when United Colors of Benetton used it in a 1992 ad; and the never-before-published photographs she took before and after David Kirby’s death — photos that reveal the untold story behind one of the 20th century’s most heart-breaking, indelible images.
To read more and see more images ,A HREF=”http://www.life.com/image/ugc1063731/in-gallery/45701/the-photo-that-brought-aids-home”>CLICK HERE
It has been known for quite some time that exercise promotes neurogenesis, but now a study by Leuner, Glasper, and Gould, published by PLoS ONE this month, claims that the most intimate form of exercise – sexual activity – can produce the same effects. And better yet- having multiple, repeated sexual experiences results in a greater positive effect than a single experience alone. Added bonus: it reduces anxiety as well. I love that kind of data!
A lot of bloggers have been buzzing about this study for a few days now. I mean, understandably so. Who doesn’t want to hear that lots of sex is beneficial on multiple cognitive levels? I can practically hear the cheers rising up from college campuses everywhere.
Here’s a question to ponder: If sex makes you smarter via changes in synaptic strength following the act, can you get the same benefit from virtual sex, as long as your brain is convinced it is real at the time? I’ll discuss this idea in a bit, but first let’s look at the methods and the data from the actual study. (Continued)
July 23, 2010
Thoreau, Taxes, Disobedience
On this day in 1846, Henry David Thoreau was jailed for not paying his poll tax. Thoreau was almost exactly half-way through his Walden stay, and had come to Concord to pick up a shoe at the cobblers; this came to the attention of Sam Staples, tax collector and warden of the county jail, who was under orders from the town fathers to confront and, if necessary, confine this most contrary of its sons. Thoreau was willing to pay his highway taxes, and generally felt himself to be “as desirous of being a good neighbor as I am of being a bad subject,” but he saw no choice with tax dollars that might buy “a man, or a musket to shoot one with.” Sam Staples had similarly jailed Bronson Alcott three years earlier — “I believe it was nothing but principle,” concluded Sam, “for I never heard a man talk honester” — but he offered Thoreau a neighborly loan just in case. This Thoreau refused; and he was not happy to hear, the next morning, that his tax had been anonymously paid for him. Now released, he was again left with no choice: “I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour — for the horse was soon tackled — I was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.” (Continued)
This picture was taken in 1938, and shows two streamlined locomotives. What a site these trains must have been, if you were used to the old style locomotives.
Scarborough Fair: Martin Carthy
This is from his first album, Martin Carthy. It was released in 1965. It’s an all acoustic album of pure, simple folk music. Maybe you recognize a few of the chords.
via tune at link/a>
Cyrille Sur L’Herbe
In 2006, to celebrate its 20th anniversary, the Musée d’Orsay gave carte blanche to five members of the Vu Agency to photograph the museum’s staff in front of their favorite paintings inside museum. It let the staff and the photographers to choose a painting and staging. The British photographer Rip Hopkins and the museum security employee named Cyril collaborated to pose in front of Edouard Manet’s Le dejeuner Sur l’herbe. Cyril’s naked pose was a direct response to that of the young woman in the painting.
(Continued)
Something is profoundly wrong with the way we think about how we should live today.
In Ill Fares The Land, Tony Judt, one of our leading historians and thinkers, reveals how we have arrived at our present dangerously confused moment. Judt masterfully crystallizes what we’ve all been feeling into a way to think our way into, and thus out of, our great collective dis-ease about the current state of things.
As the economic collapse of 2008 made clear, the social contract that defined postwar life in Europe and America — the guarantee of a basal level of security, stability and fairness — is no longer guaranteed; in fact, it’s no longer part of the common discourse. Judt offers the language we need to address our common needs, rejecting the nihilistic individualism of the far right and the debunked socialism of the past. To find a way forward, we must look to our not so distant past and to social democracy in action: to re-enshrining fairness over mere efficiency.
bread lines in the 1970s
St. Louis — St. Louis residents queue up at one of the city’s food stamp distribution centers. The long lines are caused by a number of factors, including the closing of city offices for Columbus Day; some 9,000 United Auto Workers union members out on strike, and the short 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. hours of the center. (1970)
via
During the test, the Navy’s Laser Weapon System (LaWS), guided by Raytheon’s Phalanx Close-In Weapon System sensors, engaged and destroyed four UAV targets flying over water near the Navy’s weapons and training facility on San Nicolas Island in California’s Santa Barbara Channel, about 120 kilometers west of Los Angeles. The Phalanx—a rapid-fire, computer-controlled, radar-guided gun More..system—used electro-optical tracking and radio frequency sensors to provide range data to the LaWS, which is made up of six solid-state lasers with an output of 32 kilowatts that simultaneously focus on a target.
bread line during Great Depression
(Picture from the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration.)
Q: WHAT ARE THE SMALL BUMPS AROUND A WOMAN’S NIPPLES FOR?
A new study from American Cancer Society researchers finds it’s not just how much physical activity you get, but how much time you spend sitting that can affect your risk of death. Researchers say time spent sitting was independently associated with total mortality, regardless of physical activity level. They conclude that public health messages should promote both being physically active and reducing time spent sitting. The study appears early online in the American Journal of Epidemiology.
(VIA NY TIMES)
One afternoon in the spring of 2006, for reasons unknown to those who knew him, Mitchell Henderson, a seventh grader from Rochester, Minn., took a .22-caliber rifle down from a shelf in his parents’ bedroom closet and shot himself in the head. The next morning, Mitchell’s school assembled in the gym to begin mourning. His classmates created a virtual memorial on MySpace and garlanded it with remembrances. One wrote that Mitchell was “an hero to take that shot, to leave us all behind. God do we wish we could take it back. . . . ” Someone e-mailed a clipping of Mitchell’s newspaper obituary to MyDeathSpace.com, a Web site that links to the MySpace pages of the dead. From MyDeathSpace, Mitchell’s page came to the attention of an Internet message board known as /b/ and the “trolls,” as they have come to be called, who dwell there.
/b/ is the designated “random” board of 4chan.org, a group of message boards that draws more than 200 million page views a month. A post consists of an image and a few lines of text. Almost everyone posts as “anonymous.” In effect, this makes /b/ a panopticon in reverse — nobody can see anybody, and everybody can claim to speak from the center. The anonymous denizens of 4chan’s other boards — devoted to travel, fitness and several genres of pornography — refer to the /b/-dwellers as “/b/tards.”
Measured in terms of depravity, insularity and traffic-driven turnover, the culture of /b/ has little precedent. /b/ reads like the inside of a high-school bathroom stall, or an obscene telephone party line, or a blog with no posts and all comments filled with slang that you are too old to understand.
via IN FULL.
presented in so intelligent a manner that even I can understand this!!!
To artists and intellectuals, the twentieth century has posed no questions more vexing than these:
First, can art make sense of the Holocaust? And second, why do the French love Jerry Lewis?
The first question can’t really be answered, at least not in the space allotted here.
As for the second, it’s my own opinion that the French have confused sloppy, uneven filmmaking
with Godardian anti-formalism. Regardless, raising these two issues on the same page is not just
a pointless exercise in non-sequitur. Because Jerry Lewis, like Elli Wiesel and Primo Levi
before him — not to mention the producers of the NBC ministeries Holocaust –
has transformed the incomprehendible into art.
He did this two decades ago, in 1972, a year of cultural ferment that also saw a black man,
Sammy Davis Jr., snuggle Richard Nixon on national television. It was Lewis’ 41st film
(but his first to deal with the mass destruction of European Jewry), and it turned out to be the most
notorious cinematic miscue in history — unfinished, unreleased, said by the few who’ve seen it to be
almost unwatchable. Oh, there are also Von Stroheim’s Queen Kelly and Welles’ Don Quixote,
among other busts. But no other film, seen or unseen, can boast both Nazi death camps
and the auteur responsible for The Nutty Professor.
There is only one The Day the Clown Cried.
Were it ever released, the film would surely provoke as great a stir as a rediscovered Balanchine
ballet or an unearthed Van Gogh — if not on the pages of the Arts & Leisure section, then at least
among scores of sitcom writers, apprentice film editors, clerks in comic book stores, and others who
are expected to wear high top sneakers to work and whose fascination with Jerry Lewis transcends
easy irony. But so far, The Day the Clown Cried hasn’t surfaced, and it likely never will.
Only a handful of people have ever seen it. And as they grow older …
To preserve their memories for future generations, SPY has tracked down and recorded the
impressions of eight people who have seen The Day the Clown Cried or who participated in it’s
creation. You and I may never watch in mute wonderment as the lost gem lights up the screen
before us, but now, at least, we can know what it felt like for those who were there.
But first, the back story.
U.S. Special Operations Forces have begun venturing out with Pakistani forces on aid projects, deepening the American role in the effort to defeat Islamist militants in Pakistani territory that has been off limits to U.S. ground troops.
The expansion of U.S. cooperation is significant given Pakistan’s deep aversion to allowing foreign military forces on its territory. The Special Operations teams join the aid missions only when commanders determine there is relatively little security risk, a senior U.S. military official said, in an effort to avoid direct engagement that would call attention to U.S. participation.
[SOFPAK] Xinhua/Zuma
Pakistani troops earlier this month in South Waziristan, where the country has tried to quell militant groups.
The U.S. troops are allowed to defend themselves and return fire if attacked. But the official emphasized the joint missions aren’t supposed to be combat operations, and the Americans often participate in civilian garb.
Pakistan has told the U.S. that troops need to keep a low profile. "Going out in the open, that has negative optics, that is something we have to work out," said a Pakistani official.”This whole exercise could be counterproductive if people see U.S. boots on the ground.”
Room Images at ImageHousing.com
Love Hotels, Soaplands, and Hostess Bars are somewhat unique to Japan, growing out of a culture with an unusual approach to sexuality and relationships.
Love Hotels cater to young couples with no other place to frolic, offering cheap rates for ‘Rests’ of a few hours. Soaplands are for the single man, interested in being soaped down by a young naked girl in a sleazy version of an onsen bath-house. Hostess Bars are for busy salarymen with no time to forge real relationships, happy to settle for paid-for compliments from attentive young girls in dark bars.
Whatever you may think of these places live, they make great haikyo.[ruins]
Check out my Top 5 Ruins of Japanese Sex Industry article for more.
NOWY TARG, Poland – With every step toward the gate, Jerzy Bielecki was certain he would be shot.
The day was July 21, 1944. Bielecki was walking in broad daylight down a pathway at Auschwitz, wearing a stolen SS 
uniform with his Jewish sweetheart Cyla Cybulska by his side.
His knees buckling with fear, he tried to keep a stern bearing on the long stretch of gravel to the sentry post.
The German guard frowned at his forged pass and eyed the two for a period that seemed like an eternity — then uttered the miraculous words: "Ja, danke" — yes, thank you — and let Jerzy and Cyla out of the death camp and into freedom.
* Researchers used proton beams to analyze tiny pieces of the Dead Sea scroll.
* The study analyzed parts of the Temple Scroll segment.
* X-rays emitted by the parchment suggest the scroll was manufactured near where the document was found in Qumran.
Raffi Khatchadourian / New Yorker / Aug 2009
The shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later culture of the 101st Airborne Division, an execution of captured Iraqi prisoners, and how far up the chain of command responsibility lies.
Three years ago, at a hastily built command center in the Iraqi desert, near Samarra, a U.S. Army colonel knelt over a dust-caked body bag. Inside were the remains of a man who had just been killed by soldiers in the colonel’s brigade, which was engaged in a vast air-assault mission called Operation Iron Triangle. The soldiers had been hunting for militants in nearby villages and crumbling Baathist-era buildings, some of which had been constructed by Saddam Hussein to serve the Al Muthanna chemical-weapons complex-a series of dirt-covered bunkers that rise from the desert like Babylonian temples. After the Gulf War, soldiers working for the United Nations and the U.S. military had sealed the bunkers with concrete. Farmers and herders began occupying the surrounding villages, and after Saddam’s overthrow, in 2003, they were joined by Al Qaeda fighters, who came to the remote area to train or hide. The colonel, looking at the corpse, saw that it was that of an old man who had been shot in the chest-he was unshaved but not bearded, and a white dishdasha that clothed his body was blood-soaked. A pair of dentures, loosened from his gums, protruded from his jaw.
The colonel, Michael Dane Steele, was a man of daunting physical stature and reputation. Forty-five years old, with an angular face and cropped graying hair, Steele had grown up on a farm near Athens, Georgia. He played college football as a walk-on offensive lineman, at the University of Georgia, and eventually earned an athletic scholarship there, practicing so relentlessly that his coach named an award for perfect attendance after him. (Nobody has since managed to win it.) Within the Army, he was best known for his actions in Somalia, where, in 1993, he commanded a company of Rangers that engaged in a fifteen-hour gunfight in Mogadishu. When he landed in Iraq, in 2005, Steele was the only brigade commander there to have experienced sustained urban warfare before 9/11. He arrived with a clear sense of purpose: to subdue violence with violence, to hunt down and kill insurgents in a region of roughly ten thousand square miles within Salah ad Din province, which includes the cities of Samarra, Tikrit, and Bayji. Steele had memorized the faces of dozens of high-value targets in the region-Al Qaeda operatives and other militants-and he inspected the bodies of people his soldiers killed, looking for tattoos and other identifying marks. He personified the motto that his brigade, numbering nearly four thousand men, had adopted during the war: “We give the enemy the maximum opportunity to give his life for his country.”
Steele asked another officer to photograph the corpse for intelligence purposes. A tag attached to the body bag indicated that the man’s name was Jasim Hassan Komar-Abdullah, and that he was seventy years old. Steele walked away. About an hour later, three more body bags arrived by helicopter. These contained the bodies of Akhmed Farhim Hamid al-Jemi-a thin, bearded man wearing a green dishdasha-and two boys, whose tags indicated that they were under sixteen years old. None of them were known militants, either. Their remains had been disfigured by bullet wounds, and engineering tape had been loosely wrapped around their eyes, to blindfold them; around their wrists were severed black plastic zip ties-used by American soldiers to handcuff detainees.
Helicopters were landing nearby, and wind kicked up by their blades caused the unzipped body bags to flap wildly. Using a pocketknife, Steele removed the tape from the face of a corpse, so that it could be properly photographed. A few soldiers, seeing the bodies, sensed that something had gone wrong. Steele’s intelligence officer asked, “Why would we shoot somebody, and then put a blindfold on them?” The brigade had been conducting the operation with members of the Iraqi Army, and the officer wondered if there was a ritual significance to the blindfolds. Steele thought for a moment, and said, “They must have had the blindfolds on when they got shot.”
By the end of the day, it had become apparent that members of Steele’s brigade had fatally shot eight Iraqi men, all of them apparently unarmed, and that they might have killed more had some soldiers not disobeyed a platoon leader’s orders to gun down farmers digging in a field and men gathered near a gas station. Like the 2005 massacre at Haditha-when, in a near-spontaneous response to the death of an American soldier, marines killed twenty-four Iraqi civilians-the killings that occurred during Operation Iron Triangle suggested a grave problem within the chain of command. Determining what went wrong has proved exceedingly difficult; the case is still being debated in review boards and appellate courts, and truth has become obscured by rumor and apocrypha. A number of soldiers, among them General Peter Chiarelli, the Army’s Vice-Chief of Staff, believe that Steele set the conditions for a massacre by cultivating reckless aggressiveness in his soldiers, and by interpreting the rules of engagement in a way that made the killing of noncombatants likely. Shortly after the operation was completed, Chiarelli issued Steele a severe reprimand, effectively ending his career.
Steele has since entered Army folklore as a cautionary figure-a man who travelled to a murderous place believing, as Conrad’s Mr. Kurtz did, that with the “simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded,” but ultimately concluding it necessary to “exterminate all the brutes.” Thomas Ricks, in his recent book on Iraq, “The Gamble,” portrays Steele as a soldier whose actions “directly led to atrocities.” At the Army’s Command and General Staff College, Steele has been compared to William Calley, the lieutenant who, during the Vietnam War, led the massacre of villagers in My Lai. Yet Steele is not a convicted war criminal, as Calley was, and at least seven retired or active-duty generals who have worked closely with him, or are familiar with his leadership in Iraq, believe that he is an exemplary, misunderstood military leader. A senior officer who served under him told me, “He’s the soldier you keep behind the panel-the one that reads, ‘Break glass in case of war.’ ” Major General Michael Oates, who, as the 101st Airborne Division’s deputy commander, was one of Steele’s immediate supervisors in 2006, wrote to me from Iraq to say that Steele was “one of the very best combat commanders I have seen in three tours over here.” Even as top leaders in the Army reprimanded Steele, his immediate superiors praised him for running the best brigade in his division, and the military’s Central Command issued his unit an award for combatting terrorism.
Operation Iron Triangle began on May 9, 2006, and lasted for three days, but it emerged from a way of thinking and a set of tactics that were developed more than a year earlier, when Steele first assumed leadership of his brigade. The debate over Steele’s leadership touches upon larger questions about the ethics of modern warfare: about the distinction between killing and murder on the battlefield; about the culpability of officers when their soldiers do wrong; about the kind of force that is necessary to fight an insurgency. As General Oates told me, “The story of Colonel Steele and Operation Iron Triangle is about a fundamental difference of opinion about how to prosecute the war in Iraq.”
The person on the chair was one Ruth Snyder, a woman convicted of killing her husband for insurance money. It was the sensational story followed by a tragic verdict–Ruth Snyder would become the first woman to be electrocuted since 1899. [Her adulterous partner Gray met the same fate]. “Ruthless Ruth,” the press called her; her story would become a Hollywood blockbuster with ‘Double Indemnity’. However, it was “the most famous tabloid photo of the decade” (as TIME-Life put it) that immortalized Ruth Snyder.
[THIS IS PART THREE OF WASHINGTON POST REPORT ON GOVT SECRETS AND SECRECY]
The brick warehouse is not just 
a warehouse. Drive through the gate and around back, and there, hidden away, is someone’s personal security detail: a fleet of black SUVs that have been armored up to withstand explosions and gunfire.
Along the main street, the signs in the median aren’t advertising homes for sale; they’re inviting employees with top-secret security clearances to a job fair at Cafe Joe, which is anything but a typical lunch spot.
The new gunmetal-colored office building is really a kind of hotel where businesses can rent eavesdrop-proof rooms.
Even the manhole cover between two low-slung buildings is not just a manhole cover. Surrounded by concrete cylinders, it is an access point to a government cable. "TS/SCI," whispers an official, the
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