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Review: We Meant Well in The Nation
Founded in 1865, The Nation is one of America’s oldest magazines. It recently ran a review of We Meant Well, that while behind a paywall, I can share here with you.
The Nation said about We Meant Well:
Despite the risks of such frankness for Van Buren—he is currently the subject of a State Department investigation—he writes with the sardonic candor of a man too intent on recounting the absurdities he has witnessed to worry about what he has to lose.
The virtue of the telling is, of all things, its hilarity, the politically incorrect, pop-inflicted gallows humor exposing the litany of bungles through the damning lens of farce. “It is like I am standing naked in a room with a big hat on my head,” Van Buren quotes an Iraqi as saying. “Everyone comes in and puts flowers and ribbons on my hat, but no one seems to notice that I am naked.”
If the image suggests a tea party held at Abu Ghraib, it may prove as representative of the flippancy and ineptness of a State Department-run Iraq as the photos of torture were of an earlier phase of a shapeless, unnecessary war.
Read the entire review to learn more, or grab the current issue of The Nation at your fave bookstore.
Copyright © 2013. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, the Department of Defense or any other entity of the US Government. The Department of State does not approve, endorse or authorize this blog or book. Follow us on Twitter!
You Haven’t Read This: CIA Secret Prison in Somalia
Never having learned any lessons, it appears that the US continues to operate secret prisons around the world to hold “terrorists” without the unpleasant need for trial, courts or rules. The semi-secret facilities in Afghanistan have been around for awhile, and we learned that US Navy ships are used as floating gulags.However, The Nation reports on a full-on mini-Guantanamo run by the CIA in Somalia. Read the story and realize that shutting down Guantanamo (which hasn’t happened anyway) was just an Obama ruse to continue yet another horrendous Bush policy.
This is what has happened to our country, what America has been reduced to doing.
Bonus!
Want a career in government service? Practice torturing a human being to death with this actual online game.
The photo show above comes from the French, who tortured terrorists in Algeria as part of their counterinsurgency plan. Didn’t work there either. See more.
Copyright © 2013. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, the Department of Defense or any other entity of the US Government. The Department of State does not approve, endorse or authorize this blog or book. Follow us on Twitter!
Occupying Iraq, State Department-Style: A Frat House With Guns in Baghdad
If you did not have a chance to read my article, Occupying Iraq, State Department-Style: A Frat House With Guns in Baghdad, yesterday at TomDispatch, or work at the Department of State where TomDispatch is still blocked because it once had some Wikileaks spunge on it, you can catch up at one of your fave sites, below:
Copyright © 2013. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, the Department of Defense or any other entity of the US Government. The Department of State does not approve, endorse or authorize this blog or book. Follow us on Twitter!
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