The Common Ills: Pentagon caught in lie, former DC fun boi shakes it for the NSA

Wednesday, April 22, 2015

Pentagon caught in lie, former DC fun boi shakes it for the NSA

The Press Trust of India reports 10 dead from Baghdad bombings today. And this after 244 people were killed in Iraq in one day.

For those who worry US officials and former officials don't even notice the deaths anymore, stop worrying.

Former US House Rep and forever DC fun boi Mike Rogers has noticed the deaths and decided on how to use them. Rory Carroll (Guardian) reports:

Mass surveillance should be retained because of the prospect of Islamic State attacks within the United States, a key Republican ally of the National Security Agency has claimed.
Mike Rogers, the former chairman of the House intelligence committee, said the NSA needed to preserve its wide powers in case Isis used its bases in Syria and Iraq to unleash atrocities on the US homeland.

Poor Mike, a fun boi puts on a few too many years and even night fall in Du Pont Circle can leave a boi looking like yesterday's hag. But those earlier glory days will always be well documented by the US government's own little branch of Scientology known as the CIA, right, Mike?

While Mike bumps and grinds it for those in charge of the US intelligence community, the Pentagon learns that you can get away with a lie for just so long.

'ISIS is being turned back.'

The Pentagon is forever insisting that.

But Tim Mak (Daily Beast) reports:

But the information from the Pentagon is, at best, misleading and incomplete, experts in the region and people on the ground tell The Daily Beast. They said the map misinforms the public about how effective the U.S.-led effort to beat back ISIS has actually been. The map released by the Pentagon excludes inconvenient facts in some parts, and obscures them in others.
The Pentagon’s map assessing the so-called Islamic State’s strength has only two categories: territory held by ISIS currently, and territory lost by ISIS since coalition airstrikes began in August 2014. The category that would illustrate American setbacks—where ISIS has actually gained territory since the coalition effort began—is not included.

“Taken in isolation, the map definitely gives an impression that anti-ISIS efforts have succeeded in pushing the group back along a northern and north-eastern peripheries, but it fails in one huge respect—it fails to specifically identify territory gained by ISIS during the same period,” said Charles Lister, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Doha Center.

The following community sites -- plus Z on TV and The Diane Rehm Show -- updated: