Kevin Jon Heller writes,
John Bellinger, the head of the Office of the Legal Adviser at the State Department, will be guest-blogging at Opinio Juris the week of January 15th (Monday to Friday). To the best of our knowledge, this will be the first time that anyone at the State Department — particularly someone in such a critical position — will have blogged in their official capacity.
Should be interesting! The OJ crowd have also invited some academic guests to participate in the conversation.
The Left Coaster's new military affairs contributor USAF Col. Sam Gardiner (ret.) starts off his blogging with a disturbing account of the US actions aimed at Iran, Pieces in Place for Escalation
The pieces are moving. They'll be in place by the end of February. The United States will be able to escalate military operations against Iran.
The second carrier strike group leaves the U.S. west coast on Tuesday. It will be joined by naval mine clearing assets from both the United States and the UK. Patriot missile defense systems have also been ordered to deploy to the Gulf.
Maybe as a guard against North Korea seeing operations focused on Iran as a chance to be aggressive, a squadron of F-117 stealth fighters has just been deployed to Korea.
This has to be called escalation.
There's lots more, including this:
As one of the last steps before a strike, we’ll see USAF tankers moved to unusual places, like Bulgaria. These will be used to refuel the US-based B-2 bombers on their strike missions into Iran. When that happens, we’ll only be days away from a strike.
The White House could be telling the truth. Maybe there are no plans to take Iran to the next level. The fuel for a fire is in place, however. All we need is a spark. The danger is that we have created conditions that could lead to a Greater Middle East War.
Is there no one in the GOP who can shake some sense into the madmen in the White House?
TheStar.com – News – U.S. retracts spy coins claim
It seems there’s no danger of your spare change spying on you after all.
A U.S. government defence agency has suddenly retracted its claim that Canadian coins containing tiny transmitters were planted on at least three American contractors who visited Canada.
It’s the latest twist in an intriguing cash caper.
…
In a statement posted late Friday on its website, the Defense Security Service said the coin claims were based on a report provided to the agency.
“The allegations, however, were found later to be unsubstantiated following an investigation into the matter,” the statement said, adding that “the 2006 annual report should not have contained this information.”
The service’s acting director has ordered an internal review of the circumstances leading up to publication of the information “to prevent incidents like this” from recurring.
A spokeswoman for the agency was unavailable Saturday.
As recently as Wednesday, the Defense Security Service insisted the risk was genuine.
“What’s in the report is true,” agency spokeswoman Martha Deutscher told The Associated Press. “This is indeed a sanitized version, which leaves a lot of questions.”
Earlier item, Is that a Loonie in Your Pocket or is Someone Else Glad to See Me?.
I never thought I would care anything about the British royal family one way or another, but I’m actually starting to feel sorry for the woman who attracts this sort of press coverage:
Kate, as she is fast becoming known by the English (actress Kate Winslet and model Kate Moss are still two-namers), is a middle-class descendant of a coal-mining family, with an art history degree and conservative hemlines.
She is as English as thickly buttered toast, and roughly as controversial. Her courtship with William is chronicled by the press the way lions chronicle antelopes.
I think it’s that metaphor what did it.
And I imagine that I’ll get over it.
I love Pandora, but it has done two strange things recently.
I recently took the Secunia Software Inspector out for a spin, and it in addition to finding all sorts of obscure software that it thought needed updating, and I thought needed deleting, it also found multiple outdated copies of Java and the flash player. So I deleted them all except the newest. Alas, now that I had only the newest version of the Flash player, Pandora stopped working — it was convinced I was blocking the flash player from storing its data locally, even when I wasn’t. I laboriously followed the directions in Pandora’s FAQ and went through the flash privacy panel (I hate that obscure thing) and gave Pandora the rights to everything short of my first-born, but no dice. I eventually had to uninstall version 9.x of the flash player and downgrade to 7.x to make Pandora work again. This is odd.
And then there’s the station I created with Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy”. That’s one weird station.
Charles Stimson, deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, says there should be a boycott of law firms defending Gitmo detainees. Too bad one of those firms, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison is representating Scooter Libby in his trial that starts Monday.
Guess Scooter won’t be honoring the boycott.
The widespread pushback against Stimson’s little piece of thuggery has been amazing. One more way in which this administration is alienating even its allies in the ruling establishment.
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