Tag: IRAQWAR

Yesterday, Wikileaks published its long awaited 'Iraq War Logs,' a collection of nearly 400,000 classified military documents covering the controversial war in Iraq. According to the Guardian, the logs consist of verified first-hand accounts from coalition soldiers on the ground, and give a chilling "glimpse into the secret history of the war that the United States government has been privy to ...

In an effort to exert greater control over militant groups in Afghanistan, several governmental ministries, in conjunction with NATO forces, are now hoping to issue biometric ID cards to over 1.65 million Afghan citizens by May. Local and foreign forces have already begun compiling biometric files on policemen, criminals, insurgents and normal citizens, and are currently collecting information ...

James Bridle has compiled the editing history of the Iraq War Wikipedia entry from December 2004 and November 2009 into a twelve-volume collection "the size of a single old-style encyclopaedia." With relevant and irrelevant additions, defacements and debates, Bridle presents not the history of the war, but the way in which we remember it. "This is historiography. This is what culture actually ...

We like to believe that the U.S. military knows a thing or two more than the rest of us. Your devoted Switched team, for example, would be hard pressed to dismantle an IED, no matter how many times we've seen 'The Hurt Locker.' But it turns out that the men and women in uniform are entangled in the simplifying software magic known as PowerPoint, no different from the soporific strategy meetings ...

We'll bypass both the criticisms and the flag waving for now, and establish one simple fact about the Iraq war: we found and captured Saddam Hussein. It's a success that is often lost in the sea of critiques (deserved and otherwise) and overshadowed by our failure to do the same with Osama Bin Laden. What makes this success particularly interesting, however, is how the military utilized what were, ...