In a 2008 interview Patrick Cockburn, a veteran Iraq war correspondent, describes an incident in which he was one step away of being shot by insurgents. He was traveling from Baghdad to Najaf where Muqtada al-Sadr’s militia was resisting the U.S. Marines. Believing that a serious threat would come from the Sunni Arabs, he chose to wear a red and white kufia in order to be perceived as an Arab from the distance and not be shot at while on the road. However, he had the misfortune of running directly into a militia-controlled checkpoint. Once he was spotted, the heavily armed men dragged him out of the car, ripped of his kufia and started shouting “American spy!”

“They dragged me and two Iraqis out of the car. I and the Iraqis thought: That’s it. They’re going to kill us. Tens of thousands of Iraqis have died in this way.” Fortunately, at the last moment one gunman suggested that the captives should be taken to the Sheikh at the Mosque and let him decide their fate.

“They took us there and then things gradually became better,” Patrick Cockburn said when interviewed by James Zogby on After Words.

Next time, he might not be so lucky.

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“The U.S. response, engaging in two wars, was a 20th-century reaction to 21st-century realities.”

- wrote Chuck Hagel, a former Republican senator from Nebraska, in an article for The Washington Post.

The notorious private military firm Blackwater was hired by the CIA to transfer prisoners from Guantanamo Bay to secret prisons in Asia for interrogation, informs the German newspaper Der Spiegel.

The newspaper says it has obtained a memo from two ex-Blackwater employees which writes that the CIA employed “Blackwater and its subsidiaries” to transfer detainees from Guantanamo Bay to “secret detention camps in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Uzbekistan for interrogation.”

When the book is about robotics and advanced military technology, the reader might expect a more technical writing style – the author offering the full list of specs without too much thought on the art of writing. This is certainly not the case for Wired for War. P. W. Singer actually tells the fascinating story of unmanned machines, their evolution from the time when Nikola Testla demonstrated at the Madison Square Garden that he can control a boat by using radio frequencies to the unmanned vehicle remotely steered using a PlayStation-like controller.

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The United States have failed to see the evolution of warfare and the political reality of Iraq and Afghanistan before troops moved in. Every war brings changes to society and these particular armed conflicts facilitated the rise of the private military industry. Once the private military firms deployed armed personnel, a series of legal and ethical issues appear: is the employee to be regarded as a soldier or as a civilian? Can private military firms use lethal force? Under what circumstances? If abuses are committed, is the company to be held responsible since it provided weapons and ammunition?

The government failed to provide quick and concise solutions to these problems leading to serious human rights abuses.

In a two-week visit to the United States, the UN Working Group focused on the impact that private security contractors in Afghanistan and Iraq have on human rights. The Group expressed concern about the lack of public information on the contracts as well as poor investigations into human rights abuses committed by the firms.

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Kabul, Afghanistan – Afghan and coalition forces searched a compound last night in Helmand Province, thought to belong to a key Taliban commander responsible for directing suicide and improvised explosive device attacks against both coalition and Afghan forces and the local populace.

The force targeted the compound in the Nad Ali District after intelligence indicated militant activity. The force conducted a search without incident and uncovered a hand grenade in one of the targeted buildings. Four suspected militants were detained.

Helmand Province has been plagued by Taliban violence as militants seek to disrupt governance and security in the region. Taliban commanders routinely seek strongholds in Helmand to facilitate the movement of fighters into the heart of Afghanistan.

Source: USFOR

The head of U.S. Central Command in Afghanistan warned that months of fighting lie ahead in what will likely be the biggest military operation there since the American-led invasion of 2001.

A recent AP story informs.

This is exactly what every US general will tell you: We have months ahead of tough fighting. The enemy is crippled but we have a couple of more months and we will have a decisive victory.

In my view, there is no end in sight. As Col. Thomas Hammes puts it in his book The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century, this kind of warfare (4GW) is not measured in years, but decades. Even more, it seems that the Coalition seeks a ‘decisive’ battle or a campaign to end this war once and for all. Although Operation Strike of the Sword is very promising and clearly adapted to 4GW, it may take years before the military can leave Afghanistan.

On the other side, the Taliban have no understanding of a decisive victory in Afghanistan – they will never have the firepower of the US Army. Their number are diminishing but this will only succeed in making them go deeper underground and operate even more carefully with less resources. And this will probably make our war even more expensive.

And it was about time that German solders fighting in the so-called “War on Terror” receive simbolic acknowledgment for their service.

As you probably know, the real Iron Cross was abandoned after the end of the Second World War – nobody wanted to see it anymore. I find this to be absurd. The Cross has had a long history and tens of thousands of brave men received the decoration after fighting in 19th century wars as well as in both World Wars . By eliminating this decoration, their sacrifice is ignored.

Wouldn’t it be just as absurd to cancel different American military decorations just because some officials believe that the war in Irak is illegal?

I remember a great line in the movie Black Hawk Down when a Delta Force soldier said that (I am now citing from my memory) “when the first bullet passes by your head, politics and all that don’t mean nothing.” Not all German soldiers in WW2 who received the Iron Cross were nazis, and I am sure none of them were in the Great War – not to mention those who fought in previous wars.

Besides, the WW2 Iron Cross had a little swastika in the middle. The German government could have replaced those with old fashion pre-WW2 Iron Crosses.

Anyway, the soldiers that received the now called Cross of Honor fully deserve it.

They had dragged comrades and children to safety after a suicide bomb attack in northern Afghanistan.

War on Terror News writes:

General Custer, commander of the 7th Calvary Regiment, was ill-informed on the number of Lakota and Northern-Cheyenne Indians that he would encounter during the Battle of Little Big Horn, and because the military intelligence was weeks old, he lost this battle and his life, June 26, 1876. Today, our military uses up-to-date information from weather patterns, photography, signals, and human intelligence to give commanders a clear-sight picture of what Marines will be facing when they venture outside of forward operating bases.

At least this is what they should be doing. Anyway, Lance Cpl. Skyler Camacho, an all-source intelligence analyst, intelligence section, is pretty excited about his job:

“We predict what the enemy will do, when he will do it, how he will do it, and what he will do it with all before he does it. It’s a totally sweet job!”

Alright, I am sure the Lance Clp. is good at what he is doing, I’m not contesting that. However, every time I read something about the US Intelligence Service I fail not to think of Bush and Irak’s weapons of mass destruction. Oh wait, if I remember correctly there were chemical weapons and nukes as well.

I think the guys at the Intelligence Service should sue Bush. He really damaged their image by making them look like absolute amateurs, or perhaps the “fog of war’ was so dense that all the advanced military technology couldn’t find the reality.