Thursday, June 05, 2014
Wednesday, June 04, 2014
Can Bowe Bergdahl Be Tied to 6 Lost Lives? Facts Are Murky - NYTimes.com
" All across Afghanistan, that period was a time of ferocious fighting. President Obama had decided to send a surge of additional troops to improve security, but they had not yet arrived. In Paktika, the eight deaths during that period were up from five in the same three months the previous year. Across Afghanistan, 122 Americans died in that period, up from 58 in 2008.
In addition, a senior insurgent commander known as Mullah Sangeen, who was part of the Taliban-linked Haqqani network, had been carrying out attacks in the area for several years. A joint military statement by American and Afghan security forces released a month before Sergeant Bergdahl vanished warned that the mullah had brought in “hundreds of foreign fighters.”
Two soldiers died during the most intense period of the search after Sergeant Bergdahl’s June 30 disappearance. Both were inside an outpost that came under attack, not out patrolling and running checkpoints looking for him. The other six soldiers died in late August and early September.
Facts are often obscured in the fog of the battlefield, witnesses have incomplete vantage points and the events are five years in the past now. But an archive of military reports logging significant activities in America’s war in Afghanistan offers a contemporaneous written record of events in Paktika that summer. The archive was made public by Chelsea Manning, formerly known as Pvt. Bradley Manning, who is serving a 35-year prison sentence for the leak.
The first two deaths the critics link to Sergeant Bergdahl involved a major assault by insurgents on a combat outpost called Zerok on July 4, 2009. Their view is that the Taliban knew the Americans were stretched thin by the search mission and took advantage of that opportunity to try to overrun it.
Mr. Bethea, the soldier who wrote the essay in The Daily Beast, said the company executive officer for the unit at Zerok believed that “the attack would not have happened had his company received its normal complement of intelligence aircraft: drones, planes, and the like. Instead, every intelligence aircraft available in theater had received new instructions: find Bergdahl. My friend blames Bergdahl for his soldiers’ deaths.”
Military officials, speaking in recent days, have countered that additional surveillance aircraft had been brought in from other areas to help in the search, so air traffic in the region was intensified, not diminished, by the search.
Separately, context supplied by the leaked logs complicates claims that insurgents attacked the outpost because of the hunt.
Insurgents had been shooting at the outpost with escalating intensity in the preceding months. A June 24 log described a mortar attack inside its perimeter and cited intelligence that insurgents were planning a “complex ambush” of the outpost.
And a log recounting the July 4 attack said it confirmed “recent reporting regarding Mullah Sangeen’s desire to conduct a spectacular attack” against the outpost. The log did not mention the hunt for Sergeant Bergdahl. Still, one soldier from Sergeant Bergdahl’s battalion said that response time after the attack had been slow, and argued the issue was not if the outpost was going to be attacked, but rather when insurgents chose to attack it.
The first and most intense phase of the search operation wound down after July 8. But former soldiers say and the logs show that the hunt continued sporadically as patrols were sent out to chase rumors that Sergeant Bergdahl had been spotted.
The other six American deaths in Paktika that summer occurred from Aug. 18 to Sept. 5, which Sergeant Bergdahl’s critics link to him as well.
“You see a lot of anger because we lost guys not only at Zerok, but a decent amount of good guys looking” for him, said a soldier from his unit who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Where those events are identifiable in the logs, they do not mention any link to Bergdahl search operations, although the logs are terse and contain few contextual details.
Mr. Bethea wrote that of the six men killed in August and September, two died in a roadside bombing while on a reconnaissance mission, a third was shot during a search for a Taliban political leader and three others were killed while conducting patrols — two in an ambush and one who stepped on a mine.
He suggested some connection to Sergeant Bergdahl for several of the deaths, saying the Taliban leader and a village that was in the area of one of the patrols were “thought affiliated with Bergdahl’s captors.” He also said a village in the areas of the other patrol was “near the area where Bergdahl vanished.”
Still, those villages and insurgents were in the overall area of responsibility for the soldiers, and the logs make clear that the region was an insurgent hotbed. A log on May 21, 2009, for example, said it had historically been a “safe haven” for the Taliban.
A retired senior American military officer, who was briefed at the time on the search for Sergeant Bergdahl, said that even though soldiers were instructed to watch for signs of the missing American, they would have been conducting patrols and performing risky operations anyway."
Tuesday, June 03, 2014
Monday, June 02, 2014
Saturday, May 31, 2014
Wednesday, May 28, 2014
Tuesday, May 27, 2014
A Cable Merger Too Far - NYTimes.com
"There are good reasons the Justice Department and the Federal Communications Commission should block Comcast’s $45 billion acquisition of Time Warner Cable. The merger will concentrate too much market power in the hands of one company, creating a telecommunications colossus the likes of which the country has not seen since 1984 when the government forced the breakup of the original AT&T telephone monopoly.
The combined company would provide cable-TV service to nearly 30 percent of American homes and high-speed Internet service to nearly 40 percent. Even without this merger and the proposed AT&T-DirecTV deal, the telecommunications industry has limited competition, especially in the critical market for high-speed Internet service, or broadband, where consumer choice usually means picking between the local cable or phone company."
Saturday, May 24, 2014
Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro 8.4 review: great screen, disappointing battery life
"We often tease Samsung about the seemingly arbitrary way it divvies up its tablet offerings -- not content with round numbers, it's released tablets that are 10.1 inches wide instead of 10, 8.9 instead of 9, 7.7 instead of 8, and so on. And so too is the case with the Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro 8.4, whose extra 0.4 inch seems unnecessarily tacked on. Yet, this results in a 16:10 aspect ratio that makes it well-suited for watching movies, which makes us willing to forgive its silliness. Plus, even if that weren't enough to sway us, there's so much else to like about Tab Pro 8.4 that the odd screen size is but a minor detail. Indeed, while Samsung released its latest Galaxy Tab Pro line of tablets in both 10.1 and 12.1 inches, it's the 8.4-inch model that's likely to win the hearts of most."
Google Nexus 7 vs Google Nexus 10 Comparison - Reliable tablets?
Google Nexus tablets have been leading sales charts in many parts of the world, mainly due to a large offering of different tablets with different specs, prices and sizes. Most of them are good, or great, but is this the case with the Google Nexus 10 and Google Nexus 7? Let’s find out!
Read more: http://www.gamerheadlines.com/2014/05/google-nexus-7-vs-google-nexus-10-comparison-reliable-tablets/#ixzz32fYc3m4o
With Pro 3, Can Microsoft's Surface finally break through? - CNET
" It's been just over six months since Microsoft unveiled the Surface Pro 2. It was the second iteration in the Surface line, a series of devices meant to take all the things we love in our tablets, and all the things we need out of our laptops, and merge them into one happy device that's all things to all people. That was the intent two years ago when the first generation was launched, and today, at the unveiling of the Surface Pro 3, it was the same story.