Love, Peace, & Psychology

third-round-charm:

I am in the 47% of Americans that Mitt Romney’s job is to not care about.

I’m a Sergeant in the United States Army.

I am a combat veteran, have been awarded the Purple Heart, and the Distinguished Service Cross, and I make so little money that I pay no income tax.

“There are 47 percent of the people who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it — that that’s an entitlement… These are people who pay no income tax… [M]y job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

(via kaalinfantry)

This Week in War. A Friday round-up of what happened and what’s been written in the world of war and military/security affairs this week. It’s a mix of news reports, policy briefs, blog posts and longform journalism.

• Reports of a new massacre in Syria, this time of more than 200 people in the village of Tremseh near Hama.
• Alarmingly, the US believes that Syria has begun to move part of its chemical weapons stockpile out of storage facilities.
• The Syrian ambassador to Iraq has defected.
• The video Syria Through a Lens pays tribute to the life and work of slain young Syrian filmmaker Bassel Shahade. He was a 22-year-old Fulbright scholar studying at Syracuse University.
• The Atlantic posted a story about Women Under Siege’s crowdsourced project to map the use of rape as a weapon in the war in Syria.
• At Russia’s arms bazaar in June, TIME followed around the delegation from Syria. The story is available to subscribers only, but the LightBox blog has a write-up and photo slideshow.
• According to the office of the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights, violence by settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank has increased roughly 150 percent each year since 2008.
• Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi has agreed to abide by a court ruling that struck down his order to reconvene parliament.
• Wartime Prime Minister and leader of the moderate liberal National Forces Alliance Mahmoud Jibril has taken a huge landslide lead over the Islamists in Libya’s elections.
• Jailed Moroccan rapper El Haqed announced a hunger strike through a friend earlier this week.
• The UN special tribunal for the 2005 assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri has decided to push ahead with trials in absentia of four suspects.
• Omani author Hammoud Rashedi and poet Hamad al-Karusi have been sentenced for defamation of the sultanate.
• UN peacekeepers have been redeployed to Goma in the DRC to protect the city from mutineers.
• Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga was sentenced to 14 years by the Hague for recruiting child soldiers.
• Aid workers in Kenya’s Dadaab refugee camp, the world’s largest, are appealing for help, saying they are running out of funds and tens of thousands are at risk as a result.
• Ibrahim al-Qosi, a convicted member of Al Qaeda, has been repatriated from Guantánamo Bay prison to Sudan.
• South Sudan marked the first anniversary of its independence.
• The US granted Afghanistan special ally status.
• Afghan President Hamid Karzai called on Taliban chief Mullah Omar to give up fighting, saying he could return and even run for office as long as he gave up violence.
• An Afghan women’s affairs official in Laghman, Hanifa Safi, was assassinated in a car bombing today, which has left her husband and daughter critically injured.
• Matthieu Aikins investigated the rash of poisonings of Afghan schoolgirls and came up with evidence that the recent suspected poisonings were collective psychogenic illness brought on by fear. He gets lots of points for never once referring to the girls as hysterical.  
• A few extracts from Michael Semple’s interview with a senior Taliban official. You can read the full interview in the print edition of The New Statesman.
• The US will apparently retain control over non-Afghan detainees at Bagram.
• In a letter to opposition activist Mohammed Nourizad, an anonymous former general from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps gave insight into dissent and fracture among the IRGC’s ranks and accused the Ayatollah of having blood on his hands.
• The U.S. has announced a tightening of sanctions against Iran, seeking to plug loopholes and impose further measures. Fears of violence in the Persian Gulf as a result of sanctioning have driven oil prices up.
• The US has deployed tiny underwater drones to the Persian Gulf to clear Iranian mines.
• The FBI is investigating a top Chinese maker of phone equipment for selling spy gear to Iran.
• Bahraini activist Nabeel Rajab and president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights was jailed for a tweet against Prime Minister Khalifah Ibn Sulman al-Khalifah.
• The U.S. formally eased sanctions on Myanmar.
• Secretary Clinton became the first Secretary of State to visit Laos since John Foster Dulles in 1955, the first high-ranking official to visit since the Vietnam War era.
• Satellite imagery shows increased activity at a North Korean nuclear facility.
• Bosnia marked the anniversary of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, where 8000 and more Muslim men and boys were killed by Bosnian Serb forces, with a mass reburial of 500 victims.
• Between 2001 and 2006, Boston College recorded interviews with current and former members of the I.R.A. on the condition that the recordings would not be shared in the interviewees’ lifetimes. A court has now ordered the college to turn over the tapes of Dolours Price’s interviews to assist with an investigation into the 1972 killing of Jean McConville.
• The notoriously grueling Marine Corps’ Infantry Officer Course will open to women in September. The commander of the Basic School says that he has no more concern with women than with men and that he expects they will be well-trained upon entering the course. 
• A letter home from a 22-year-old Kurt Vonnegut, writing home from a repatriation camp in 1945 after his stint as a P.O.W. in a Dresden work camp known as Slaughterhouse 5. He survived the bombing of Dresden.

Photo: Camp Leatherneck, Helmand Province, Afghanistan. June 2, 2012. A Marine removes a bandolier of ammo from his neck during a shooting lesson for Afghan Uniformed Police. Adek Berry/AFP/Getty. Check out the rest of The Atlantic’s collection of photography from the month of June in Afghanistan. 

(via taco-man-andre)