ON THE FIGHT
The Obama administration has increasingly preferred to leverage paramilitaries and shadow armies in Africa known to be in direct violation of human rights laws, the Washington Post reports.
A member of a Syrian rebel force was caught on video ripping out the heart of a Syrian soldier…and eating it..
ON THE FORCE
Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel is expected to announce a final furlough number of 11 days, and new exemptions for essential personnel tomorrow. The drop in days comes after Hagel promised to look for ways to reduce the number, initially expected to be 22.
Spouses of the fabled 160th were allowed to participate in a Pink Platoon course to familiarize themselves with the day-to-day training regimen for some of America’s most elite pilots.
ON TECH
DISA has launched the Enterprise White Pages. According to DISA, “the DoD Enterprise White Pages allows users to quickly and easily locate contact information for all DoD personnel. It offers data from authoritative sources, presents the data to users in an intuitive fashion, and features a clean and easy-to-use interface”
ON SECRECY – OR LACK THEREOF
An alleged CIA officer was briefly detained in Moscow for trying to recruit a Russian intelligence officer. He was allegedly caught with wigs, multiple eyeglasses, and large amounts of cash in sandwich bags (so he must be a spy). The man was held overnight before being released to U..S officials, Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) said. Photos have emerged of the man, said to be an employee of the U.S. embassy, being held face down on the ground. Named as Ryan Fogle, he is said to be third political secretary at the US embassy. There was no comment from the embassy.
The Department of Justice secretly obtained phone records for reporters and editors who work for the Associated Press news agency, including records for the home phones and cell phones of individual journalists, according to the AP, in what the agency characterized as “serious interference with AP’s constitutional rights to gather and report the news.” The records, covering all of April and May 2012, were seized by the DoJ earlier this year and covered more than 20 separate phone lines. The records listed outgoing calls for both the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, as well as the general phone lines for AP bureaus in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and a main number used by AP reporters in the House of Representatives.
