Not Even the White House Knows the Drones' Body Count

Government officials claim they're ultra-precise killing machines that never, ever miss their targets. Outside groups say they're covered in children's blood. The fact is no one has a clue exactly how many militants and how many innocents have been slain in the U.S. drone war that spans from Pakistan to Somalia. Remember that before you start your next Twitter feud about the drone war.

Neither the American government nor the independent agencies have the consistent presence on the ground needed to put together true assessments of the damage drone strikes do. Most of the evidence is third-hand, whispered from a local soldier to a far-off reporter. The death toll claims, which vary wildly, are all educated guesswork.

It's one of many conclusions in a new report on the covert, robotic air war that doesn't fit neatly into the dominant narratives about the drone campaign, pro or con. (The report is due to publish at midnight GMT on Sunday.) Using interviews with dozens of people in northwest Pakistan ' one of the epicenters of the unmanned air assaults ' The Center for Civilians in Conflict and Columbia Law School's human rights clinic have crafted a nuanced view of the civilian impact of this most controversial component of the Obama administration's counterterror efforts. Table your preconceived notions about the drone war before you read ' starting with the notions about who the drones are actually taking out.

In May, an administration official told The New York Times that civilian casualties from the Pakistan drone war were in the 'single digits.' Perhaps that official only meant for one year. Meanwhile, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates the minimum civilian death toll to be 447 during the campaign. One of the many costs of secret wars is that 'nobody knows how many civilians have been killed by covert drone strikes. Nobody ' that means the Obama Administration, the Pakistan government, and the media,' emails Sarah Holewinski, the executive director of the Center for Civilians in Conflict.

'There are few boots on the ground to do an investigation after a strike, aerial surveillance is through a soda straw so can miss a lot and ' unlike the military which has relatively transparent assessments and investigations in Afghanistan ' the CIA and Special Forces are a black hole,' she adds. 'The Obama administration says civilian casualties are 'not a huge number.' If that's true, evidence could put the debate to rest, but we haven't seen any.'

The drone campaign's impact can be measured in more than just body counts, however. There's the psychological impact of drones constantly buzzing overhead.  An investigator at the UK charity Reprieve met a man, Tariq Aziz, shortly before he was killed in a March 17, 2011 strike. 'I asked him, 'Have you seen a drone,' and I expected him to say, 'Yes, I see one a week.' But he said they saw 10 or 15 every day,' the investigator notes. 'And he was saying at nighttime, it was making him crazy, because he couldn't sleep.' (One reason why, perhaps, is that the Obama administration considers every military-aged male in a hostile region to be legitimate targets.)

The CIA relies on local informants to help guide the strikes; that sows suspicion in these communities, pitting one neighbor against the next. The fear and backbiting sometimes causes villages to largely empty out ' which creates its own cascade of problems. 'Drone-related displacement disrupts long-term stability by decreasing the capacity of local people to respond through civil society initiatives that foster stability, democracy and moderation and increase displaced people's vulnerability to insurgent recruitment,' Lisa Schirch of 3P Human Security explains in the report.

The covert nature of the drone campaign produces strange imbalances in the ways civilians are treated from warzone to warzone. If an American aircraft drops a bomb on your house in Afghanistan, U.S. officers will usually offer some kind of financial compensation for your loss. It may not be much, but at least it's a recognition of the harm done. If an American aircraft drops a bomb on your house in neighboring Pakistan, however, you get nothing. There are no American officers in the vicinity ' at least not officially. There's no one to provide that financial or psychological recompense.

The report relates the tale of Usman Wazir, who 'was at his job selling fruits when a drone hit his house, killing his younger brother, his wife, their 15-year-old son, and 13-year-old daughter.' He wanted some kind of payback. But there is 'no known process in Pakistan, Yemen, or Somalia by which they can apply for compensation'. The secrecy surrounding the drone program, combined with its operation in many areas that are inaccessible, has meant that civilians harmed by drones have no recourse and no point of contact to hold accountable for the sudden devastation they face. This vacuum of accountability can lead to anger, despair, and even hatred, directed at their own government or at the U.S.'

Sometimes, innocents caught in the robotic crossfire get punished a second time. The drones are believed to be beyond-precise, which naturally leads to the conclusion that whoever has been targeted must be bad. 'Victims face the double burden of dealing with the physical attack and also clearing their name,' according to the report. Meanwhile, the rest of us take our best guesses about the toll of these shadow wars.

And that's its own problem. The drone strikes, the centerpiece of the Obama administration's counterterrorism efforts, inspire heated opinions in the United States. That's as it should be: Wars ought to be debated. But by keeping the drone war, and especially its consequences, wrapped in secrecy, the Obama administration and its foreign enablers shut off the basis for that debate. Second-order questions (Would other tactics be more or less brutal? Do the drones breed more radicalization than dead radicals?) that are necessary to intelligently assess the wisdom of the drone war can't be answered. And so various factions yell at each other, each convinced they've grasped the truth of a war that has practically none to offer.

'I Am Nakoula': Anti-Islam Moviemaker Now Cult Hero

Nakoula Basseley Nakoula is many things: a huckster, a convenient scapegoat, a terrible filmmaker. But to the members of America's Islamophobic fringe, the producer of 'The Innocence of Muslims' is something altogether different. He's a victim.

Nakoula is a man being punished by the Muslim extremists who have infiltrated the White House, and now want to criminalize any criticism of the Prophet, according to anti-Islam crusaders like Robert Spencer. 'He is a political prisoner,' Spencer says.

Never mind the fact that Nakoula seems to have tricked his actors into making a viral video that depicted Muhammad as a child molester. Never mind Nakoula's conviction for bank fraud, which earned him a 21-month sentence in federal custody and a ban on using assumed identities, after he used 14 different aliases. Never mind the fact that Nakoula not only appeared to violate that probation by using the identity 'Sam Bacile' when producing his video, or the fact the he doesn't even seem to have been convicted under his real name. (In court Friday, he said he was really Mark Basseley Youssef. He changed it back in 2002 because 'Nakoula is a girl's name and it cause me troubles,' he claimed.)

To his defenders, it may even be kind of appropriate for Nakoula to go by so many names. To them, he's become less of a man and more of a symbol ' a prism for projecting a thousand conspiracy theories about a Muslim president gone mad with power, ready to unleash his scimitared hordes.

'He has been arrested not for the technicality of the probation violation, but for insulting Muhammad. His arrest is a symbol of America's capitulation to the Sharia,' Spencer writes.

'I am Nakoula Basseley Nakoula,' blogger Scott Johnson adds.

'Hillary Clinton, I insist that you have me arrested. I am thinking of making a movie about Mohammed,'  declares Roger L. Simon, who continues, 'Any Jews who now vote for Obama are 'useful idiots' beyond anything ever conceived by Lenin.'

Is there a First Amendment critique to be made of the White House's handling of Nakoula and his video? There sure is. At first, the Obama administration tried to put the blame for the current unrest in the Middle East on Nakoula ' a charge we now know to be unfair. Then the Pentagon's top general tried in vain to talk one of the video's promoters into abandoning 'Innocence.' And the White House unsuccessfully asked YouTube to pull the video from its servers.

Afterward, ACLU executive Ben Wizner said the civil liberties group was 'concerned' by the federal government's apparent attempt to 'throw its weight behind a request for self-censorship.' That didn't stop Investors' Business Daily from fuming that 'Americans might as well be living under Islamic blasphemy laws, yet the nation's champion of free speech ' the ACLU ' is AWOL. That's because it's now largely run by Muslims.'

The rhetoric only heated up with Nakoula's arrest on Thursday. 'He was hunted down like an animal,' wrote Pamela Geller, a prominent member of the anti-Islam camp. 'He is being jailed for blasphemy. This is Obama sharia enforcement in America.'

It's a bit of an odd accusation, considering that Nakoula directly contradicted his terms of probation (.pdf), which explicitly forbade him from 'us[ing], for any purpose or in any manner, any name other than his/her true legal name or names without the prior written approval of the Probation Officer.'

But what makes the Obama comment particularly odd is that U.S. Magistrate Judge Suzanne H. Segal (.pdf), who ordered that Nakoula be taken into custody, was appointed to the federal bench in 2002 ' during the administration of George W. Bush.

Of course, it's not surprising that Geller would come to the defense of Nakoula and his film. She's a political ally of one of the men who helped make the movie.

Joseph Nassralla Abdelmasih is the president of Media for Christ, a Duarte, California-based broadcasting concern. He not only obtained the permits to shoot 'Innocence' and allowed Nakoula to use his soundstage. Media for Christ's Arabic-language television channel, 'The Way TV,' also hosts a regular segment by 'Innocence' consultant Steve Klein, who uses the platform to let loose a series of anti-Muslim diatribes. (A sample: 'We're just telling the truth about Muhammad being a pedophile and a murderer. Why do you want to kill us? Why do you want to come to America? Why do you want to replace our Constitution? Why do you want to replace our church?')

Nassralla appeared alongside Geller, Rober Spencer, and 'Innocence'-promoter Morris Sadek at a pair of rallies protesting a Muslim center in downtown Manhattan. 'I come from Egypt. Egypt was Coptic, was Christians. From one thousand four hundred years, Islamic conquer our country with their lies [sic],' Nasralla declared at the 2010 event.

After portions of 'Innocence' aired on Egyptian television, and rioters seized on the film as an excuse to storm the American embassy there, Nasralla published a statement on Geller's blog saying he was 'shocked' that Nakoula has turned the film into an anti-Muhammad diatribe. 'The work of my ministry and my television station is to expose the brutal ideology of sharia and terrorism'. We never insult anyone.'

In February of this year, Geller used her blog to promote a movie not unlike 'Innocence.' The idea was to make a film so devastating to Muhammad, it would shatter the religion of his followers. 'To get rid of Islam we need to reveal the truth about it,' the blog noted. ' We need to make a motion picture about Muhammad ' a biopic that reveals the details of his life. The Devil is in the details.'

The post was written long after Nakoula began casting 'Innocence.' But it's not hard to see why Geller would rush to the defense of the film, and its maker. She had a similar notion herself.

Anti-Islam Film Producer Thrown Back In Jail For Online Antics

When federal snitch and convicted fraudster Nakoula Basseley Nakoula was released from custody in the summer of 2011, he swore that he wouldn't use a computer without checking with his probation officer first. Barely a month later, he began producing a movie, which announced its casting calls online. A year after that, a trailer for the film, 'The Innocence of Muslims,' was uploaded to YouTube ' and quickly became the focus of protests in Islamic communities worldwide for its depictions of a child-molesting Prophet Muhammad. And that's why, on Wednesday night, a federal magistrate order Nakoula back to jail.

Nakoula not only has a 'lengthy pattern of deception,' Judge Suzanne H. Segal said. He poses 'some danger to the community.'

It's only the latest in a 21 year-long series of run-ins with the law for Nakoula. In August of 1991, Nakoula, who owns a gas station, was convicted on two counts of selling watered-down fuel. Six years later, he was arrested on charges related to the manufacture of PCP.  Then came the 2009 arrest for using 14 different identities ' including 'Kritbag Difrat' and 'P.J. Tobacco' ' to pass off bogus checks. Afterwards, Nakoula turned informant against the supposed ringleader of the check kiting ring, and in received a relatively light penalty for participation in the scheme: a $794,700 fine, 21 months in federal custody, and an order to keep his hands off of the keyboard and mouse.

Nor is Nakoula's legal jeopardy contained to the criminal courts. Cindy Lee Garcia, one of the actresses in Nakoula's film, is suing the producer. She's one of many performers who say they were duped during the making the movie. They thought they were making a standard, if shlocky, Middle Eastern adventure flick. Only later ' after selective editing and conspicuous overdubbing ' did 'The Innocence of Muslims' become anti-Muhammad agitprop.

In a federal complaint, Garcia says she never signed a contract giving up her intellectual property rights to the film.  And even if she did, 'any such release is invalid because, no matter what its terms, it was procured by Defendant Nakoula's fraud, deception, and misrepresentation.' (.pdf)

Judge Segal, it seems, has come to a similar conclusion.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called the film 'disgusting and reprehensible' after protesters emerged in Cairo and Benghazi to decry it. (Islamic extremists then apparently used the cover of those protests to launch a complex attack on the U.S. consultate in Benghazi, which eventually killed the American ambassador and three others.) Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, placed a call to the anti-Islam pastor Terry Jones to see if Jones would rescind support for the movie; Jones said no. The Obama administration asked YouTube to yank the video; the company executives declined, although they blocked it in Libya and Egypt. Eventually, Obama defended the rights of Nakoula and the other filmmakers to produce 'Innocence,' even if the president disagreed with the message.

By then, Nakoula and his family were in hiding, with a 'for sale' sign hanging outside their Cerritos, California home. He may not be back for a while.

 

Whatever Pentagon Says, U.S. Patrols With Afghans Aren't 'Normal' Yet

The U.S. defense chief announced on Thursday that the U.S. troops have returned to their 'normal partnered operations' with their Afghan counterparts, after a recent policy shift put a big layer of bureaucracy in between Americans and Afghans. Only that policy remains in place, the Pentagon confirms.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told reporters on Thursday that 'temporary adjustments' to low-level joint U.S.-Afghan patrols, enacted in the wake of widespread protests over an anti-Islam video, had mostly come to an end. 'I can now report to you that most [U.S. and allied] units have now returned to their normal partnered operations at all level,' Panetta said.

The shift was intended, as Panetta said, to 'protect our forces' ' not just from anger at the video, but from a broader problem. Afghan forces have killed at least 52 of their American mentors this year. The NATO military command in Afghanistan isn't totally sure why, and blames a mix of specific Afghan grievances and Taliban infiltration. So last week, the command decreed that the two-star generals at regional headquarters have to approve all joint U.S.-Afghan operations below the battalion level ' which accounts for most of them.

Yet although Panetta said the tempo of operations has mostly returned to normal, the two-stars still have to approve the operations themselves. 'The FRAGO [fragmentary order] that directed approval for partnered operations below the battalion level be maintained at the R.C. [Regional] Commander-level remains in effect,' says Air Force Lt. Col. Jack Miller, a Pentagon spokesman. Marine Col. David Lapan, the spokesman for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, confirmed that the directive is still on the books.

If that sounds bureaucratic, it should. The reason for the shift is to create a layer of protection for U.S. troops against the newly urgent 'insider' threat from the Afghan troops they mentor. If the threat is so great that a general in charge of securing vast swaths of Afghanistan thinks an operation at the company, platoon or squad level needs to be shut down, the theory goes, that ought to save American lives.

And it might. But it also creates a complication for the U.S. ticket out of Afghanistan. An unknown but large number of those operations occur below the battalion level, and they occur precisely so that the Afghans will be proficient enough soldiers by 2014 as to take over the war from the Americans. Placing a thick layer of bureaucracy between Afghans and Americans ' it's a big jump between battalion-level command and regional command ' 'makes no sense if you're on the ground,' a former U.S. Army mentor to the Afghans told Danger Room last week.

The Pentagon and the NATO military command in Afghanistan have portrayed the edict as a temporary measure in response to the video riots. But they've also conceded it's about the deeper problem of Afghan troops attacking their American mentors. The former is a limited problem that will fade over time. The latter shows no sign of going away. And the persistence of the insider threat goes a long way toward explaining why the NATO military command will still require two-stars to approve joint operations for captains and lieutenants.

It's possible that the problem remains hypothetical. Maybe the generals can move swiftly enough not to impede the Afghans' hands-on training. Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who returned from a trip to Afghanistan on Wednesday, said there's no daylight between Afghans and Americans on ending the insider threat. 'As one Afghan army commander told me, insider attacks are an affront to their honor, at odds with their culture and their faith,' Dempsey told reporters.

Not every Afghan agrees. A 20-year old Afghan soldier told The New York Times on Wednesday, 'We would have killed many of [the U.S. troops] already, but our commanders are cowards and don't let us.' That's the kind of quote that gets a two-star general racing to review his low-level commanders' schedule for patrolling, eating, and sleeping alongside the Afghans.

Chinese Smuggler Tried to Sneak Carbon Fiber for Fighter Jets, Feds Claim

The U.S. has busted up a plot to smuggle tons of carbon fiber to China, where the material would ostensibly be used in the construction of new fighter planes. That might seem worrying, but if the allegations are true, it's probably a comforting sign. That's because if Beijing needs to illegally import the ultra-tough polymers from America, that means we don't have to worry too much about China's upgraded air force.

The case involves a 40-year-old Chinese man named Ming Suan Zhang. On Wednesday, Zhang was charged in federal court in the Eastern District of New York with 'attempting to illegally export aerospace-grade carbon fiber' from the U.S. to China, according to the criminal complaint and affidavit (.pdf) unsealed in court this week. Zhang pleaded not guilty, according a report by The New York Times, and his lawyer said Zhang was a sports equipment manufacturer who believed he was 'caught in something he didn't fully understand but he believed to be legal.'

But federal prosecutors allege Zhang was the mastermind behind the plot to illegally export $4 million worth of the military-grade material. Prosecutors also allege Zhang told undercover agents the material would be used for an upcoming Oct. 5 test flight of a 'new Chinese fighter jet.' If convicted, Zhang faces up to 20 years in prison.

Aerospace-grade carbon fiber isn't just simple plastic. It's a specialized ' and expensive ' polymer used in nuclear plants and to build the fuselages of military aircraft like the F-22 Raptor stealth fighter. $4 million would buy about two tons' worth of M60JB carbon fiber, the type prosecutors allege Zhang sought to acquire. And as Zhang is likely now well aware, the U.S. government is not pleased when people attempt to export the material without a license.

But the case doesn't just involve Zhang. According to the complaint, the plot began on April 25 when two of Zhang's unnamed accomplices ' who have not been charged with a crime and are listed in the criminal complaint as only 'John Doe' and 'Jane Doe' ' contacted from Taiwan a representative of a company they believed dealt with 'commodities with aerospace and military applications.' In reality, the company was a front business controlled by Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the investigatory arm of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. The company representative wasn't a commodities trader, either, but an undercover agent.

During an April teleconference, the buyers told the agent they wanted to ship 'multiple tons of carbon fiber' from the U.S. to China through a third country in order to skip having to acquire an export license, and that acquiring the carbon fiber was 'problematic' because it was related to a 'military matter.' When the offer to use a middleman was rebuffed, the buyers asked if the carbon fiber could be mislabeled as something else, thereby sneaking past federal authorities. The agent told the buyers that what they were doing was quite illegal.

But shortly thereafter, the undercover agent decided to play along. On May 8, John and Jane Doe wired $1,000 to a bank account provided by the agent, and traveled to the U.S. in July to meet with the agent at a hotel room, where they were provided with a sample of M60JB.

Later that month, on July 17, the two buyers received an email from a Chinese email account about the carbon fiber. The email's author 'stated that he found an end user for the carbon fiber, and that it was needed for a test flight of a new Chinese fighter jet.'

The complaint doesn't state whether the author was Zhang. But the next day, Zhang and John Doe spoke over the phone and talked about difficulties getting carbon fiber from Japan, and Doe mentioned he found a new seller in America. A second undercover agent then contacted Zhang, who told the agent the carbon fiber was for a 'fighter plane,' and arranged to travel to the U.S. earlier in September, where he was arrested.

Now let's assume all of this is true ' that Zhang did attempt to buy polymers headed into China's defense and aerospace industry. If so, it doesn't reflect well on Beijing's air force.

U.S. defense officials worry about China's stealth fighters like the J-20 or the recently unveiled J-21. But if China has trouble even acquiring the polymers to build fighter jet fuselages ' let alone the sophisticated electronic gear needed for a fully modern fighter ' then they probably don't need to worry that much. It's pretty difficult to manufacture the jets without the basic, necessary plastics.

If China is resorting to smuggling the stuff, then it's going to be a long, long time before its airpower can challenge America's.

Pentagon Tobacco Might One Day Stop Syria's Nerve Gas

Back in July, when the Syrian regime announced that it might be willing to use its load of chemical weapons, it set off alarm bells around the planet. The only way to safeguard people against a Syrian nerve gas attack would be with heavy protective gear ' and there's not nearly enough to go around.

The Pentagon's extreme science branch believes there may be a way to ward off nerve gas attacks before they're ever launched. The answer lies in a close cousin of tobacco. Earlier this month, Darpa gave out a $2.7 million contract to Kentucky Bioprocessing, LLC to get going on this potential pre-treatment, which could be given to troops prior to a deployment into a war zone with a credible threat of chemical weapon use.

When nerve agents enter the human body, they stop certain enzymes from working. Specifically, they stop the ones that break down the nerve signaling molecule, acetylcholine. When acetylcholine concentrations get too high, the whole nervous system essentially overburdens itself.

Symptoms include diarrhea, nausea, irregular heart rates, convulsions, and death. At the moment we don't have a way of preventing this from happening. We can only lessen and treat the effects once the damage has been done.

However, back in mid February, Darpa announced that it was looking to provide financial assistance to a company that could extract an enzyme called butyrylcholinesterase (rBuChE) from a plant closely related to tobacco, called Nicotiana benthamiana.

The rBuChE protein is also found within the human liver and is thought to be what is colloquially known as a 'bioscavenger.' The rBuChE flows through the blood stream, just waiting to happen upon a hostile agent ' or so goes the theory. Should it come into contact with a nerve agent molecule, it will bind to it and break it down into sub-particles, hence preventing it from wreaking havoc on the nervous system.

The aim of the Darpa-funded project, as stated in the grant proposal, is to produce significant amounts of rBuChE from the Nicotiana benthamiana plant, enough to be able to create 'a drug that can protect the warfighter from chemical threat agent exposures.' The hope is that the rBuChE harvested from the plant will act just as if the liver had synthesized it.

Assuming that the good people at Kentucky Bioprocessing, LLC are successful in extracting the enzyme from Nicotiana benthamiana, the next stage will be to figure out a way of practically administrating it to what might presumably be a large number of soldiers. Darpa suggests the consideration of two techniques: injection and intravenous application ' an obvious preference towards a vaccine, given the impracticalities of placing a large number of people on an IV drip.

It sounds hard to believe, but within a few years we might see Virginian farmers switching their crop from conventional cigarette tobacco so they can harvest the answer to America's future geo-political woes.

Military's Own Report Card Gives Afghan Surge an F

The U.S. troop surge in Afghanistan ended last week. Conditions in Afghanistan are mostly worse than before it began.

That conclusion doesn't come from anti-war advocates. It relies on data recently released by the NATO command in Afghanistan, known as ISAF, and acquired by Danger Room. According to most of the yardsticks chosen by the military ' but not all ' the surge in Afghanistan fell short of its stated goal: stopping the Taliban's momentum.

Of course, that's not ISAF's spin. The command notes that enemy attacks from January to August 2012 are slightly lower, by five percent, from that period last year; and that the past two Augusts show a reduction in attacks of 30 percent. But the more relevant comparison is to 2009, when Afghanistan looked like such a mess that President Obama substantially increased troop levels. And compared to 2009, Afghanistan does not look improved.

The chart above measures the various attacks the Taliban and associated insurgents launched against NATO forces, month by month. In August 2009, the peak of the fighting season and the height of the internal Obama administration debate over a troop surge, insurgents attacked U.S. and allied troops ' using small-arms fire, homemade bombs, mortars and more ' approximately 2700 times. In August 2012, they attacked just shy of 3000 times.

In August 2009, insurgents used just under 600 homemade bombs on U.S.-aligned forces. They used just over 600 homemade bombs on U.S.-aligned forces in August 2012.

The same trend holds for every other month in 2009 compared to every month in 2012 for which there is data: the insurgency launched more attacks this year. In some cases, substantially more: insurgents attacked about 2000 times in July 2009 and a shade over 3000 times in July 2012. ISAF registered about 475 attacks from homemade bombs in July 2009; and about 625 in July 2012.

Other data provided by ISAF, measuring the changes in attack patterns during the summer fighting seasons, show that the 30,000-plus surge troops cumulatively suppressed summer attacks in 2011 and 2012. 2012's summer attacks have maintained 2011 levels ' something recently acknowledged by Marine Gen. John Allen, who cautioned that any dip from 2011 'may not be statistically significant.'

But that suppressive force provided by the surge did not tamp down insurgent activity to levels seen in 2009, when Afghanistan looked sufficiently dire that a bipartisan consensus of Washington policymakers came to believe that a surge was necessary.

There are statistical exceptions to the rule reflected in the data. ISAF troops caused substantially fewer civilian casualties in 2012 than in 2009: in August 2012, for instance, ISAF judged itself responsible for perhaps 25 innocent deaths and injuries, compared to about 50 in August 2009. And civilian casualties caused by insurgents are also down somewhat from their 2009 levels, a sign that added U.S. troops helped protect Afghan lives. This data is consistent with patterns found independently by the United Nations.

And while it's too soon to tell if a trend has developed, attacks in eastern Afghanistan ' which the surge largely neglected ' appear to be down from 2009 levels. At the same time, that might also be attributable to a change in insurgent attack patterns toward the massive, occasional assaults that the main insurgent operation in the east favors.

But now the surge is over, and debate on what it added up to begins. The end of direct U.S. combat in Afghanistan is scheduled for 2014, proposed by President Obama and endorsed as a 'goal' by Republican challenger Mitt Romney, although the U.S. plans to keep substantial forces in Afghanistan beyond then. Meanwhile, the pathway 'out' of Afghanistan, training Afghan forces, is imperiled by Afghan troops turning their guns on their U.S. mentors. There is little to no appetite within the country for another U.S. troop surge in what is now the U.S. longest war ' and an unpopular one.

And there's a number missing from ISAF's latest set of war data. That's 988 ' the number of U.S. troops killed in action in Afghanistan or who died from their combat wounds since Obama announced the troop surge.

Air Force's Secret Space Plane Prepped for New Launch

The Air Force's mysterious X-37B space plane is now readying for its third space mission, slated to begin in October. And perhaps not surprising for the hush-hush orbital drone, the third time into space remains as secretive as the first two.

Next month, the X-37B will blast off again aboard an Atlas 5 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The exact timing of the October launch is unknown and subject to change due to weather conditions, and there's no telling how long the drone will stay in orbit. 'Preparations for launch at Cape Canaveral have begun,' Major Tracy Bunko, an Air Force spokesperson, told Space.com.

While it'll be the third flight for the robotic space plane program as a whole, it's only the second for this particular craft. Four months ago, X-37B's second of two planes returned from its first flight and a record-breaking 469 days in orbit ' more than double the first mission's total.

Will the OTV-3 try to break that record? The military, naturally, hasn't said; calls to the Air Force were not immediately returned. Nor does the public know what exactly it'll be doing once it's up there. Its mysterious mission has fueled speculation it could be a spy. China fears it could be an experimental weapons platform or a means to disable satellites.

What we do know about the X-37B is that it's a smaller, unmanned version of the now-retired space shuttle and is ostensibly used for Air Force research missions of an indeterminate nature. The manned space shuttle, we know, was retired last summer and just completed a three-day ferry flight across the United States. The X-37B is like a lighter robotic version, and can stay up for more than a year at a time ' far longer than the manned shuttles ever could. The drone measures 29 feet long and 15 feet wide, weighs 11,000 pounds and is about a fourth the weight of the space shuttle, and launches into orbit on a conventional rocket but glides back down to Earth like a plane. Inside the plane is a payload bay roughly the size of a pickup truck bed. It costs around an estimated billion dollars.

The done has also received attention from secretive sources. The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), America's secret spy satellite agency, has shown interest in using reusable launch vehicles like the X-37B to carry sensors. Right now the X-37B happens to be the only reusable space plane currently in service by the U.S. military, which narrows the NRO's options.

The Air Force is also considering a shift of the craft's landing site from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California ' where the two previous X-37B flights touched down ' to Kennedy Space Center near Cape Canaveral. The Space Center's Shuttle Landing Facility was used for most of the old shuttle landings, which would be a way to use leftover infrastructure and save money by leveraging 'previous space shuttle investments,' said Bunko.

Trying to find a way to reduce costs is crucial if the X-37B is to survive, and promoting the X-37B as an affordable replacement for the shuttle has figured prominently in statements from Boeing. There have been recurring questions as to why the Air Force needs a new reusable orbiter when contrasted with existing ' and cheaper ' conventional satellites. The facility, called Building 31, has been the center of a fractious labor dispute between Boeing managers and engineers.

There's also increasing competition from the private space industry pushing the Pentagon and Boeing to find cheaper alternatives to get into space. Paul Rusnock, Boeing's vice president of Government Space Systems, has said the return of the first X-37B to space will demonstrate that it's 'an affordable space vehicle that can be repeatedly reused.'

Which means the space plane must impress ' albeit in a rather secretive way.

Update 5:00 p.m.: 'We are on track to launch the third X-37B OTV mission in late October,' Lt. Col. Tom McIntyre, the X-37B program manager at the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office, tells Danger Room. The plane is designed to stay up for nine months, but 'actual duration will depend on test objectives, on-orbit vehicle performance, and conditions at the landing site.'

'The focus of the program 'and of this upcoming mission ' remains on testing vehicle capabilities and proving the utility and cost effectiveness of a reusable spacecraft,' McIntyre said.

McIntyre added that the Air Force is evaluating the feasability of landing at the Kennedy Space Center, which 'has the potential to save program costs.' But for now, the Air Force is still planning to land the plane at Vandenberg, per usual.

Retired Generals Fear That Kids Are Too Fat for War

At the intersection of fat-shaming and war-mongering comes a bizarre public health campaign: an effort by retired generals and admirals to ban sugary sodas and snacks from public schools. The kids today, say the former brass, are too fat to fight for their country. Welcome to the sum of all libertarian fears: a Nanny State that packs an M4 rifle.

Those officers, part of a group called 'Mission: Readiness,' argue in a new report called 'Still Too Fat to Fight' that unhealthy snacks, particularly in schools, endanger national security. 'No other major country's military forces face the challenges of weight gain confronting America's armed forces,' they fret. (Well, except for the Chinese, but whatever.)

'It's clear to us that our military readiness could be put in jeopardy given the fact that nearly 75 percent of young Americans are unable to serve in uniform,' write two former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff involved with 'Mission: Readiness,' retired Army Gens. Hugh Shelton and John Shalikashvili.

There's a legitimate readiness issue here. In 2009, the military found that 75 percent of American 17- to 24-year-olds would be declared unfit to serve, for reasons involving obesity. Mission: Readiness estimates that something like 7 million military-aged youth are too fat for the military. Beyond that, Americans have an obesity problem in general, no matter how people act offended when Michelle Obama encourages kids to eat healthily.

But it's less of a readiness issue than it was in the past. In 2009, there were over 100,000 troops in Iraq and would soon be that many more in Afghanistan. Now, the Army and Marine Corps are slowly leaving Afghanistan and shedding themselves of approximately 100,000 soldiers and marines. Recruitment and retention in the services are once again high, although the all-volunteer force is certainly strained. And, real talk: Lots of jobs in the military require little physical prowess. Can't do 20 pushups in a minute? There's a headquarters-staff job for you, while you get your sorry ass in shape.

Still, it's hard not to be cynical about this effort. Much as patriotism is the last bastion of scoundrels, national security is the last bastion of heavy-handed government rationales for social engineering. The military will not fail to protect the country because the lunchroom at P.S. 114 in Canarsie lets kids wash down their personal pizzas with chocolate milk. Will Mission: Readiness next advocate for greater public-school funding, since dumb recruits are greater military liabilities than fat ones ' and, for that matter, because healthier school meals are more expensive? Public health ought to be debated on its own merits, rather than shoehorned into a jingoistic framework of military jeopardy.

Besides, if all else fails, we have robots ' slender, deadly, efficient robots ' to protect us.

The Pokemon Plot: How One Cartoon Inspired the Army to Dream Up a Seizure Gun

In 1998, a secret Army intelligence analysis suggested a new way to take out enemies: blast them with electromagnetic energy until their brains overload and they start to convulse. Amazingly, it was an idea inspired by a Pokemon episode.

Application of 'electromagnetic pulses' could force neurons to all fire at once, causing a 'disruption of voluntary muscle control,' reads a description of a proposed seizure weapon, contained in a declassified document from the Army's National Ground Intelligence Center. 'It is thought by using a method that would actually trigger nerve synapses directly with an electrical field, essentially 100% of individuals would be susceptible to seizure induction.'

This wasn't the only method the Center suggested for taking down combatants. Other exotic, less-lethal weapons included a handheld laser gun for close-range 'antiterrorist special operations roles'; a 'flood' of network traffic that could overload servers and 'elicit a panic in the civilian population'; and radio frequencies that could manipulate someone's body temperature and 'mimic a fever.'

The military needed weapons like these because TV news had hamstrung the military's traditional proclivities to kill its way to victory: It now lived in a world where 'You don't win unless CNN says you win,' the report lamented. But while the Pentagon still laments the impact of the 24/7 news cycle on the U.S. military, it hardly thinks less-lethal weapons are a solution to it. In fact, the U.S. has kept most of its electromagnetic arsenal off of the battlefield, in part because the idea of invisible pain rays would sound so bad coming out of an anchor's mouth.

Danger Room acquired this secret study on nonlethal technologies thanks to a private citizen, who filed a Freedom of Information Act request, and now wishes to remain anonymous. By coincidence, Sharon Weinberger wrote a 2008 Danger Room report after independently acquiring a piece of the document ' an addendum that described using a 'Voice of God' weapon, powered by radio waves, to 'implant' a suggestion in someone else's mind. It wasn't even close to the strangest suggestion made for exotic weaponry.

Perhaps the most disturbing item on the Army's nonlethal wish list: a weapon that would disrupt the chemical pathways in the central nervous system to induce a seizure. The idea appears to have come from an episode of Pokemon.

The idea is that seizure would be induced by a specific electrical stimulus triggered through the optic nerve. 'The onset of synchony and disruption of muscular control is said to be near instantaneous,' the 1997 Army report reads. 'Excitation is directly on the brain.' And '100% of the population' is supposed to be susceptible to the effects ' from distances of 'up to hundreds of meters' ' '[r]ecovery times are expected to be consistent with, or more rapid than, that which is observed in epileptic seizures.'

That's not a lot of time ' the Army's analysis noted that a grand-mal seizure typically lasts between one and five minutes. But the analysis speculated that the seizure weapons could be 'tunable with regard to type and degree of bodily influence' and affect '100% of the population.' Still, it had to concede, 'No experimental evidence is available for this concept.'

The document cautioned that the effectiveness of incapacitating a human nervous system with an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) 'has not been tested.' But the analysis speculated that '50 to 100 kV/m free field of very sharp pulses' would likely be 'sufficient to trigger neurons or make them more susceptible to firing.' And a weapon that harnessed an EMP-induced seizure could conceivably work from 'hundreds of miles' away. The idea might as well have been stamped 'As Seen on TV.'

'The photic-induced seizure phenomenon was borne out demonstrably on December 16, 1997 on Japanese television when hundreds of viewers of a popular cartoon were treated, inadvertently, to photic seizure induction,' the analysis noted. That cartoon was Pokemon, and the incident received worldwide attention. About 700 viewers showed symptoms of epilepsy ' mostly vomiting ' an occasional, if strange, occurrence with TV shows and videogames due to rapid, flashing lights.

The Army's interest in the technology doesn't appear to have gone anywhere. When Danger Room asked the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate, the command overseeing the Pentagon's weapons that can't kill you, if they had ever developed or explored developing an EMP seizure ray, spokeswoman Kelley Hughes flatly replied, 'No.' But at a minimum, it's bizarre that the U.S. military would entertain the idea of neurological weaponry.

The seizure ray was just one of several futuristic nonlethal weapons the National Ground Intelligence Center envisioned. Another favorite: 'handheld laser weapons' for blasting focused light against nearby terrorists. These weren't supposed to be the sorts of lasers that can burn through steel ' after all, nearly 15 years after the Army intel report, the Navy still doesn't have a laser cannon small enough to mount on a ship. The 'point and shoot' lasers were supposed to be dazzlers, to disrupt sensors or even blind assailants from up to 50 meters away. Alas, the paper lamented, causing 'permanent blindness' was prohibited by binding international treaties, so development of handheld dazzlers would likely be restricted. (As it would turn out, 'gross mismanagement' by U.S. military bureaucracy would be the larger obstacle.)

Then came the cyberweapons. The Army intel report presciently predicted using 'information technology as a nonlethal weapon.' It had in mind 'a campaign to disrupt a nation's infrastructure so that they feel they are not ready for a formal conflict.' No, the Army wasn't thinking of any kind of proto-Stuxnet. It had in mind sending torrents of traffic to 'flood' foreign servers until 'a panic in the civilian population,' now without internet access, 'persuades the [adversary] military not to execute a planned attack.' Pay attention, Darpa and U.S. Cyber Command. Alternatively, the military might disrupt an enemy's ability to control its forces by flooding the internet with tons of inaccurate information ' 'either through distribution of disinformation or illegally altering web pages to spread disinformation.' It isn't clear if the report meant to restrict that 'illegal' activity to foreign web pages.

And then came the fever. The report speculated that blasts of radio frequency waves could 'mimic a fever' to the point of incapacitating an enemy. ('No organs are damaged,' it assured.) 'Core temperatures of approximately 41 degrees Celsius are considered to be adequate' ' the equivalent of a 105.8 degree fever, which is frighteningly close to inducing a coma or brain damage.

The idea would involve a 'highly sophisticated microwave assembly' that could induce 'carefully monitored uniform heating' in '15 to 30 minutes,' depending on someone's weight and the wavelengths employed. 'The subjective sensations caused by this buildup of heat are far more unpleasant than those accompanying fever,' the report assured. Yet the military would have to be careful not to cause any 'permanent' organ damage with such a weapon ' which would take careful monitoring, as the report noted that increasing someone's body temperature a single degree Celsius beyond the envisioned 42 degrees would probably be fatal.

As it turned out, the military would develop a microwave weapon ' the Active Denial System. That's a microwave gun that, as I learned first-hand one fateful afternoon, makes victims feel like they've stepped into a blast furnace. But its frequencies are too shallow to penetrate the skin, and can't even pop a bag of popcorn. (It's been tried.) Still, the idea of being heated with something like that for 15 minutes to a half hour is unbearable: I lasted maybe two seconds before my reflexes forced me to jump out of the way of its beam. And in 2010, the device was recalled from Afghanistan when commanders realized it was a PR nightmare. It has one of the many downsides to these weapons that the Army's 1998 that report didn't consider. Of course, few things age worse than predictions for the future.

Syrian Tanks Pummel Rebel City as Satellites Watch

Three successive overhead snapshots by orbiting civilian satellites provide the best, unclassified, big-picture view to date of the more than two-month-old battle for one of Syria's key cities. Since late July troops loyal to embattled Syrian president Bashar Al Assad have waged a relentless air and ground campaign against rebels in Aleppo, a city of two million near the border with Turkey.

In the satellite photos, a tank appears then disappears, leaving a ruined building in its wake. Scorch marks, craters and debris chart the progression of brutal urban fighting. Makeshift defensive positions proliferate as the assault escalates.

These details and more are visible in commercial satellite images dated Aug. 9 and 23. Researchers  at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, based in Washington, D.C., compared the August snapshots to each other and to an October 2011 Google Earth image in order to understand the scale and evolution of the fighting.

The images 'largely corroborate on-the-ground reports of heavy artillery assaults by the Syrian army moving through neighborhoods,' Susan Wolfinbarger, an AAAS senior program associate, said in a statement.

AAAS' satellite-based assessment of nearly 200 square kilometers of dense urban terrain belies the growing power of independent observers to monitor civil fighting ' and the paucity of on-the-ground reporting in embattled Aleppo, 18 months into Syria's bloody civil war, which has killed 17,000 people including nearly 12,000 non-combatants.

Of the civilian satellites AAAS had access to, DigitalGlobe's Quickbird-2 was the first to photograph Aleppo on Aug. 9. GeoEye's IKONOS satellite followed two weeks later.

The first pass spotted what appeared to be a heavy armored vehicle in the city's Ard As Sabbagh district. 'The vehicle was no longer present by Aug. 23, and most of a nearby building had been destroyed,' Wolfinbarger noted.

'In the northern district of Ayn At Tal, 84 makeshift structures appeared to have been burned in the parking lot of an industrial facility,' Wolfinbarger added. 'Scorch marks also were visible on buildings and craters had appeared in the streets.'

Researchers counted 102 'intact fortifications' in Aleppo and 72 'locations where roadblocks had been dismantled during the timeframe of the study,' Wolfinbarger wrote.

Aleppo is not the first conflict zone to get the remote-sensing treatment. In 2007 AAAS used commercial satellite imagery to track human rights abuses in Burma. Three years later the association's analysts helped assess, from above, the  earthquake devastation in Haiti. Actor George Clooney's Satellite Sentinel Project has spied on repression in Sudan, eliciting laughable threats from dictator Omar Al Bashir.

And in July, civilian satellites spotted Al Assad's fleet of drone aircraft.

However wide, the overhead view is far from perfect. 'AAAS emphasized that its image analysis was limited by the high-population density of Aleppo ' and shadows cast by many tall buildings,' Wolfinbarger wrote. 'In the Salaheddine neighborhood, for instance, smoke could be seen above an urban area too tightly packed to reveal street-level changes.'

But a sometimes murky lens is better than no lens at all when it comes to Syria's grinding civil war.

$2 Billion Later, Bloated Spy Blimp Finally Kills a Cruise Missile

For the first time, one of the Pentagon's spy blimps successfully detected and tracked an anti-ship cruise missile, which the Navy then proceeded to blast out of the sky. But it's only a marginal success for the once-hyped blimp program. Once sweeping in scale and designed to use radars to help shoot down enemy missiles ' a threat we could potentially face during a war with Iran ' the blimps have seen drastic cuts after nearly $2 billion in development costs and years of delays.

The Raytheon-designed spy blimps, called the Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor or JLENS, used its radars to hone in on a test cruise missile during a demonstration Friday at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. After the blimps detected the test missile, the Navy fired a Standard Missile-6 interceptor and shot the incoming missile down. 'It was a very successful intercept, and I'm pleased to say lots of pieces of the target scattered over the desert,' Mark Rose, Raytheon's program director, told reporters during a teleconference Monday.

And on paper, the blimps sound better than in practice. Seventy-five meters long and almost as wide as a football field, a JLENS is actually not one ' but two ' blimps touted as a missile-defense radar in the sky. The Pentagon has hoped for years to field the blimps ' designed to float at 10,000 feet for up to a month at a time ' as a tool for tracking missiles, planes and boats.

In the event of a war with Iran, the blimps are designed to float calmly above the Persian Gulf, while defending against incoming missiles that could sink ships. The blimps' sensor range ' about 342 miles ' reaches farther than the Air Force's E-3 Sentry early-warning plane, while staying on guard for longer and using less fuel and manpower. The sensor range also reaches far enough that it could cover a sizable chunk of the Gulf including the strategic Strait of Hormuz waterway.

But the JLENS also has an inglorious history. First proposed in 1998, the Pentagon had by 2007 planned to build 28 blimps ' divided into 14 pairs of two when deployed ' at a total cost of $1.4 billion. By 2012, the military had already spent $1.9 billion, more than the original cost, and didn't have a single blimp ready to go. The program also needed another sum of $6 billion to field all the blimps by the year 2014.

The program was also running into problems. A mobile mooring station, which anchored the blimps, was delayed; it needed  more armor than originally envisioned. The software powering the radars was also incompatible with a similar Army air defense system, which forced another delay so the military could standardize the two networks. In the fall of 2010, a prototype was destroyed when a commercial airship crashed into it after becoming unmoored during inclement weather. That further added to costs as the Army built a replacement.

This year, the Pentagon all but killed it. The 14 pairs of blimps turned into two, which is expected to save $2 billion in costs. A March report from the Government Accountability Office noted the JLENS now has a 'stable design' (.pdf) after fixing bugs with the software, but noted that design changes still pose a risk that the whole project could be canceled.

But the two survivors, including the one tested last week, are still slated to be completed. The blimp's developer has also pushed hard to sell it. The blimps are 'significantly less expensive to operate than a fixed-wing surveillance aircraft because it takes less than half the manpower to operate and has a negligible maintenance and fuel cost,' Raytheon vice president David Gulla said in September.

Which is correct. But the cost isn't so negligible given the billions spent, and the billions more required to field them in any substantial number. It's still a wonder how they've managed to survive for this long.

Obama Defends Free Speech After Asking YouTube to 'Review' Anti-Islam Movie

As riots across the Mideast targeted U.S. embassies and consulates, the White House quietly asked YouTube to 'review' whether an anti-Islam film allegedly fueling the chaos violated any terms of use. Now, in front of the United Nations, President Obama insisted that the only answer to offensive speech is 'more speech.'

It's not that Obama thinks that the Prophet Mohammed ought to be maligned by a filmmaker who uses tons of aliases and was once busted for PCP. There's a principle at stake, he told the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday morning: 'Our Founders understood that without such protections, the capacity of each individual to express their own views, and practice their own faith, may be threatened.' The calls for censoring the video emanating through the Muslim world are ultimately futile, as well: 'When anyone with a cell phone can spread offensive views around the world with the click of a button, the notion that we can control the flow of information is obsolete.'

True enough. But his administration's response to the video and the anti-American protests continues to whipsaw. The U.S. Embassy in Cairo tweeted condemnations of the film on September 11 and stuck by them as mobs outside stormed the embassy gates. Obama basically deleted those tweets in his speech. He challenged offended Muslims to 'also condemn the hate we see when the image of Jesus Christ is desecrated, churches are destroyed, or the Holocaust is denied.' And Obama dismissed the idea that the anti-Islam film was the true cause of this month's assaults on U.S. embassies, locating it in 'intolerance' instead. Even Obama critics like Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol conceded that the president's speech was 'conventionally unobjectionable.'

But it was also, at the least, unmoored from the way Obama previously handled the crisis. 'If we are serious about upholding these ideals, it will not be enough to put more guards in front of an Embassy; or to put out statements of regret, and wait for the outrage to pass,' Obama said. 'If we are serious about those ideals, we must speak honestly about the deeper causes of this crisis.'

At the same time if we are serious about those ideals, we also have to acknowledge that the White House asked Google to 'review' the 14-minute trailer for the anti-Mohammed video to see if it violated YouTube's terms of use. (It didn't.) And if we are serious about those ideals, we also have to acknowledge that Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, placed a call to the anti-Islam pastor Terry Jones to see if Jones would rescind support for the movie. (He woudn't.) Let's be clear ' there's a world of difference between those requests and government demands for censorship. But they're still a far cry from combatting hateful speech with more speech.

Obama's United Nations speech was another indicator that his administration's approach to this month's anti-American violence is under revision. First the administration attributed the deadly assault on the Benghazi consulate to mob violence; then to a terrorist attack; and Obama declined to attribute blame for it at Turtle Bay. That might be fairly chalked up to the fog of war. But information doesn't just want to be free, it wants to be accurate. And it should lead to a consistent response.

Regrown Bones, Transplanted Faces: This Chemist Is Remaking Military Medicine

Dr. Joachim Kohn has never seen combat. He has never retaliated enemy fire, deployed with a platoon to some foreign, war-ravaged nation, or ridden shotgun in a tank. But from his first years of childhood to his military-funded, revolutionary scientific innovations, Kohn's life has been indelibly marked by armed conflict.

'One of my earliest memories is at three years of age, making a playground out of bombed-out buildings,' Kohn, now a spry 60 years old, recalls. 'Houses, offices, these shells of buildings that were simply everywhere.'

In fact, Kohn's playground was the urban carcass of Munich, Germany, where he was born to Jewish parents shortly after the end of World War II. Having lost much of his extended family, including grandparents and seven aunts and uncles, during the Holocaust, Kohn grew up with an intimate understanding of war's human toll.

And the understanding seems to have stuck: More than five decades later, Kohn, a chemist, is at the helm of a $250 million, Pentagon-funded exploit into regenerative medicine called AFIRM. His goal: to take those people ravaged by war, and help put them ' quite literally ' back together.

Kohn himself pioneered a new class of degradable compounds that are now used inside the body to provide controlled drug delivery, as well as for tissue engineering and regenerative processes like bone and nerve repair. And during his leadership of the AFIRM program, scientists under Kohn's guidance have already completed an array of futuristic therapies to heal wounded soldiers: Among them are the country's first-ever face transplant; lab-grown ears nearly ready for human transplantation; and an engineered skin substitute that will soon be tested on soldiers with extensive burns.

When he emerges from his office, tucked into a wing on the first floor of Rutgers University's sprawling Life Sciences building, Kohn looks more like a lawyer or an accountant than he does a chemist. Clad in a gray suit and tie, his cellphone ' which vibrates incessantly ' clipped to his belt, Kohn is trying to rub the glare of a computer screen from his eyes.

Before the launch of AFIRM in 2008, Kohn spent most of his career in the lab. But in his role as an AFIRM director, he now spends '99.9 percent' of his time managing the monumental undertaking from the confines of his campus office.

AFIRM, short for the Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine, was established by Pentagon brass to do what, just four short years ago, seemed nearly impossible: target the most common, debilitating injuries from this generation's wars, including burns, lost limbs and invasive wounds, and use cutting-edge medical technology to heal them utterly and completely. Instead of prosthetic arms, create flesh-and-blood replacements. Rather than burned skin partially repaired with a messy patchwork of grafts, replace that skin using sheets of lab-grown epidermis. And in lieu of acquiescing to bones, muscles and nerves that will be permanently missing, spur the soldier's body to regrow what they'd lost.

Not only that, but do it quickly: The Pentagon intended for AFIRM to accelerate the rate of regenerative medicine progress by decades, and later infused a handful of promising projects with extra money to garner even speedier results. 'Ten years doesn't satisfy any of us,' former Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen told AFIRM researchers in 2010 of the impetus to fast-track regenerative medicine from the lab into the human body.

To do it, the Pentagon assembled two consortia of scientists. One of them, the Rutgers-Cleveland Consortium, is directed by Kohn. He oversees dozens of research projects, performed by nearly 150 scientists at 21 different institutions, including Harvard, the Mayo Clinic and the Massachusetts General Hospital.

Plenty of the consortium's projects remain firmly in the lab, but a handful are either already treating wounded soldiers, or are expected to enter clinical trials within the next few years. 'Our field of regenerative medicine is today wildly overhyped,' Kohn says. 'We have done very impressive things, but I don't want to make promises about therapies that maybe work in a lab, but [end up] not working in a person.'

But with six clinical trials already under way or slated to start soon, the team is already treating some injured servicemembers. At the University of Virginia, surgeons are using transplants of a patient's own fat to accelerate the healing of burn wounds ' which account for 12 percent of injuries among today's soldiers ' and prevent rampant scarring that was once inevitable. At the Cleveland Clinic, doctors continue to hone extensive facial transplants, and are actively enrolling and operating on soldiers and civilians who qualify for the extreme procedure.

Other therapies will soon be tested on patients. Among them is a procedure developed at the University of Cincinnati, which will grow fresh reams of skin within the lab ' a process that takes merely three weeks ' and use the skin to replace a patient's burned flesh. Yet another, nearly underway at the Mayo Clinic, will one day restore sensation lost to devastating injuries by using an implanted scaffold to spur nerve regeneration across large gaps.

Kohn is responsible for keeping those projects on-track. 'The man is the single best research manager I have ever met,' says Col. (Dr.) Bob Vandre, who spearheaded and later directed the AFIRM program. 'Under him, [this research] is already looking to make a huge difference for patients.'

Kohn's role in AFIRM successes actually started decades ago: That was when, thanks to a lab experiment gone serendipitously wrong, Kohn invented an entirely new class of polymers that are ideal for use in the human body.

In 1972, Kohn left Germany for what he intended to be a one-year exchange program at Israel's Hebrew University. 'Of course,' he smiles, 'Then I met a girl.'

One year in Israel turned into 11, that girl became his wife, and Kohn completed his undergraduate degree and Ph.D. in the country.

Midway through his studies, Kohn was conscripted into two years of mandatory military service, though he never endured combat. Instead, a 25-year-old Kohn found himself working in the Army Surgeon General's office during the aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

He remembers seeing soldiers suffering from often-deadly burn wounds ' the signature injury of that conflict. Shortly thereafter, Kohn started the scientific investigations that would one day, albeit unintentionally, catalyze regenerative treatments for the very same affliction.

'I never set out thinking, 'Oh, in my career I want to treat these war injuries,'' he says. 'Somehow, though, that's the path I found myself taking.'

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Air Force Video Compares Facebook, iPhone to Atom Bombs

The world of tomorrow is going to be a dark and sinister place, according to a group of Air Force futurists. One reason why it'll be so scary: Facebook.

In an foreboding web video entitled 'Welcome to 2035'the Age of Surprise,' produced by the U.S. Air Force's Center for Strategy and Technology, the pace of human advancement races forward ever faster until the distinction between man and machine all but disappears and the dangers to those cyborgs are omnipresent. Social media, apparently, is a major step on the road to this dystopia.

The video is part of a USAF-led effort called 'Blue Horizons,' which is tasked with producing a series of annual reports to attempt to predict the future's technology. Blue Horizons tries to determine what air, space and cyberspace will look like in the next 20 years or so. It seeks to anticipate how the technology will change and who will have access to emerging technologies. But given their predictions, you'd be forgiven if you came away from the video with an impulsive need to burn your iPhone, deactivate your Facebook account and soberly promise never to go on YouTube again ' wait, can I fit all that in a tweet?

The video sets the mood with a rather somber Einstein quote: 'Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.' Then it charts the development of ever more sophisticated and terrifying technology along a curve, which begins with da Vinci in the 1500s and continues into the era of the Wright Brothers.

As the curve rises, it reaches a turning point in 1945 with the dawning of the atomic age. The A-bomb doesn't just level cities; it increases the pace of change goes from gradual to geometric.

As it passes over the space race, the technology becomes more complex. Stealth planes fly in, cyber conflict takes its place, bio-warfare too, the curve is reaching its apex and becoming vertical. Technology is now advancing as fast as possible, the tension is palpable, what human-life-destroying technology is next on the curve? Facebook.

Wait, what? Facebook? OK, seems strange to put that in there, but we'll let it slide as a nod to today's technological fashion. Next on the curve we have the Chinese computer hackers that wreaked havoc in the U.S. and Europe with the 'Titan Rain' online attacks. Then comes Twitter and YouTube, the iPhone and iPad ' this is getting awkward now. What's wrong with Twitter, Facebook and YouTube? This video seems to be the ramblings of an irate Luddite reminiscing of a childhood where milk was delivered each morning, wars were fought in trenches, and no one felt the need to update their friends and followers about it.

But where's the curve going? What does Blue Horizons predict? The Air Force futurists don't say exactly. But let's just say there are some pictures of chips implanted into brains glowing green and red.

In fact, the group the future is ultimately kind of unknowable. 'We can predict broad outlines,' the video says, 'but we don't know the ramifications.' They're merely foreseeing that they won't be able to foresee.

So don't go burning your smartphones just yet (at least wait until iPhone 5 comes on sale) ' 2035 is set to be an age of surprise and for us 'super empowered individuals with domains' ' it's very much up for grabs. As the Futurist Thomas Frey said, 'our greatest motivation in life comes from not knowing the future.'

Iranian Cult Is No Longer Officially a Terrorist Group

Washington's favorite Iranian terrorist group has likely won. By a forthcoming edict of the State Department, you can now no longer call the Mujahideen-e Khalq ' formerly Saddam Hussein's proxies against the Iranian regime ' a terrorist organization. Erasing its status as a cult is a different story.

The State Department is set to remove what everyone simply calls the MEK from its list of terrorist groups, in advance of a court-imposed deadline for a decision. That will leave the organization free to fundraise and operate without attracting the attention of the FBI. The impact on U.S.-Iranian relations may be marginal, but the symbolism is enormous: As tensions with Iran over its nuclear program remain high, the Obama administration is wiping away the stigma from a cultish group that wants to overthrow the Iranian regime so badly it has attacked Iranian and other civilians to advance its agenda. And it comes after a long and deep-pocketed lobbying effort attracted a host of Washington politicos to advocate for the group.

'The delisting of the MEK, following a well-funded political lobby campaign, creates the dangerous impression that it is possible for terrorist organizations to buy their way off the [terrorism] list,' says Mila Johns of the University of Maryland's National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism.

The MEK's questionable practices extend beyond attacks on Iranian civilians. In a 2004 New York Times Magazine story, Elizabeth Rubin documented the group's cult-like behavior. 'Every morning and night, the kids, beginning as young as 1 and 2, had to stand before a poster of Massoud and Maryam, salute them and shout praises to them,' a former member told Rubin, referring to the 'husband-and-wife cult' of leaders Massoud and Maryam Rajavi. Life in the MEK, Rubin reported, means enforced celibacy and public confessions of sexual desires. 'Mujahedeen members have no access to newspapers or radio or television,' Rubin wrote, 'other than what is fed them.'

Originally founded as a student organization in the 1960s to overthrow the Shah, the MEK attacked Western targets in pre-revolutionary Iran, and their victims included three U.S. Army officers. But they fell out of step with the Islamic radicals that took control of Iran in 1979, and turned their weapons on the new regime. Saddam Hussein became their sponsor during the Iran-Iraq war, yet the leadership moved to Paris. For over a decade, the MEK carried out bombings and hijackings on regime targets inside and outside Iran, including an audacious April 1992 coordinated raid on 13 Iranian diplomatic facilities around the world. The State Department listed them as a Foreign Terrorist Organization in 1997.

But it's been years since the MEK attempted a terrorist attack. Most of its operations have centered around endearing itself to the U.S. by portraying itself as an advocate for a democratic Iran, a source of information on Iran's nuclear program and an implacable enemy of Washington's Tehran enemies. It turned over its weapons at a training camp in Iraq after the U.S. invasion that until recently was a de facto U.S. protectorate called Camp Ashraf. In Washington, supporters have spent years and millions of dollars waging a lobbying campaign to remove the group's terrorist status, holding rallies outside of Congress and slathering the sides of buses with pro-MEK posters.

The sources of that money remain undisclosed. But it purchased prominent D.C. lobbying firms like Akin Gump and advocates like Reagan administration veteran Victoria Toensing. And it got an odd collection of supporters, from former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani on the right to former Vermont Governor Howard Dean on the left, plus retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark, ex-CIA director Michael Hayden, ex-FBI director Louis Freeh, ex-Obama national security adviser James Jones and a host of other notables.

The Iranian government, having been on the receiving end of MEK attacks, thinks the group still plans violence against it. Accordingly, some consider the MEK a diplomatic obstacle to resolving the Iranian nuclear question. The MEK also has support among U.S. Legislature who want to see the U.S. take a more bellicose turn toward Iran, so it's possible that the group will rocket from the terrorist list to the halls of Congress.

Chances are, the State Department decision will merely entrench the impasse between Washington and Tehran. 'I don't think the world really looks that much different after the MEK delisting,' says Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. 'U.S.-Iran relations will remain hostile, and the MEK will remain a fringe cult with very limited appeal among Iranians.'

Don't Panic, But China Mingles Its Nukes with Regular Missiles

It turns out that China's been mixing its nuclear missiles in with its conventional ones at the same military bases. Not really, uh, advisable: that makes it really hard for other countries to figure out if a Chinese missile launch is just a conventional one or the beginnings of a nuclear Armageddon. But fret not ' while China's missile mingling may not be very sensible, it's not going to cause World War III.

In what's thought to be the first comprehensive, non-governmental report on China's nuclear warplans, John Lewis, a professor of Chinese politics at Stanford University, reveals that China stores its nuclear and conventional missiles in the same locations. Writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Lewis warns that the intermingling could trigger a nuclear launch: once another nation watched a Chinese missile blast off, it might trigger a nuclear retaliation from a confused, panicked Russia or United States. And then, should the Chinese see their nuclear assets targeted and destroyed, they might conceivable launch their surviving nuclear warheads.

Nor is Lewis convinced that China's military policies are characterized by restraint. 'The notion that China only acts in self defense is wrong,' he tells Danger Room. 'Their whole war plan is aimed at attacking Taiwan.'

That said, even Lewis thinks China's missile ambiguity is unlikely to result in a nuclear exchange. (In fact, he emphasizes that the Chinese government actually encouraged him to write his piece ' as a gesture of transparency.) And other experts agree that the Chinese missile move is merely stupid, not suicidal.

Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear weapons analyst at the Monterrey Institute of International Studies, says the de facto presumption in the case of a missile launch is that China isn't going nuclear. The People's Republic has a declared no-first-use policy; China isn't going to nuke, say, Japan over the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu islands.

And James Dobbins, a former U.S. ambassador to a host of conflict zones, thinks the U.S. isn't buckwild enough to go nuclear over a confusing missile launch. 'I don't believe the U.S. would launch a nuclear strike on warning in response to a Chinese ballistic attack on U.S. or allied targets,' Dobbins tells Danger Room.

So why would China group its nuclear and conventional missiles together? Experts largely agree that the decision was a logistical one and 'practical, not rational,' says Monterrey's Jeffrey Lewis. Another theory: the Chinese think launching a conventional weapon from a nuclear base would prevent a counterattack, since an adversary is unlikely to take the risk of bombing a nuclear weapons base.

There's also another possibility: a lumbering, dumb bureaucracy keeps the missiles group together out of inertia. The Chinese may make bad missile decisions. But under that theory, at least their reasons for those bad decisions will be familiar to the Pentagon.

Kanye West Really Did Meet With Ex-CIA Director

Kanye West may have taken some 'poetic license' with a reference on his latest record to former CIA director George Tenet, but Tenet's camp confirms to Danger Room that the rap star did in fact meet with the one-time U.S. spy chief.

On 'Clique,' a standout track from this week's Kanye West Presents G.O.O.D. Music: Cruel Summer, Yeezy relates an anecdote so unexpected and specific that it had several listeners suspending disbelief about rapper boasts: 'Yeah, I'm talking business, we talking CIA/ I'm talking George Tenet, I seen him the other day/ He asked me about my Maybach, think he had the same/ Except mine tinted and his might have been rented.'

Verdict: partly true. To adapt the chorus for a second, George Tenet really was, uh, interacting with the clique. 'There is some truth to that story,' longtime Tenet spokesman Bill Harlow tells Danger Room. That's a better track record than most rappers can claim ' and, for that matter, most CIA analysts.

Harlow explains that a 'few months ago,' Tenet was leaving a business meeting in a New York City building when, unexpectedly, Kanye West entered. 'They bumped into each other,' Harlow said, and someone in the various entourages introduced the rapper to the former intelligence chief, who left government service in 2004 after infamously vouching for the claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

'They chatted briefly,' Harlow says. 'The next thing you know, it's recorded history.' This should add grist to the online conspiracy theory that Kanye is a member of the Illuminati.

Only one thing: 'There was no discussion of Maybachs,' Harlow says. Tenet doesn't drive one ' rented, leased, owned or otherwise. (Notice, however, that Kanye doesn't claim Tenet has one; he merely speculates.)

Not that the ex-CIA director's crew has a problem with Kanye's characterization: 'I think it's poetic license.' Nor is Tenet inclined to fact-check a rap song. 'It's not his genre,' Harlow continues. 'He's more of a Bruce Springsteen guy.'

Still, now Tenet is immortalized in pop culture as a baller, without any reference to Iraq or WMDs.

Home page photo: NRK P3 /Flickr

Submarine Commander Faked Own Death to Escape Lover

Ending a romantic affair by faking your own death is usually a bad idea for ' I don't know ' everyone. What's an even worse idea? Faking your own death weeks before taking command of the Navy's nuclear submarine U.S.S. Pittsburgh. Now you can read the Navy's internal report that tells the sordid story.

On Sept. 5, Navy Cmdr. Michael P. Ward II was found guilty of conduct unbecoming of an officer and a gentleman, dereliction of duty and adultery (an offense in the uniformed services) after staging his death to deceive a younger lover with whom he was having an affair, according to a Navy investigative report (.pdf) obtained by Danger Room through a Freedom of Information Act request. As punishment, Ward received the punitive letter of reprimand and has been relegated to administrative duties at Naval Submarine Base New London, the home port of the Pittsburgh.

The Navy wouldn't comment on whether or not Ward will be kicked out of the service. But the 43-year-old former submarine commander's naval career is now more or less over. 'Commander Ward's dishonesty and deception in developing, maintaining, and attempting to end his inappropriate relationship ' were egregious and are not consistent with our Navy's expectations of a commissioned officer,' Capt. Vernon Parks, the head of Submarine Development Squadron 12, wrote in the report.

The story, first reported by the Connecticut newspaper The Day, began last October, when Ward met a 23-year-old woman from Virginia ' whose name was redacted from the report ' on a dating website. They began to have an affair. Ward was married and had children, but didn't reveal that to his mistress. At the time, Ward worked for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the two saw each other when he came down for classes at the Joint Forces Staff College. He also communicated with her over e-mail using the phony name 'Tony Moore,' and falsely told her he was a special forces operator.

In June, Ward apparently wanted out of the affair. So he ' in a striking further display of bad judgement ' concocted another false identity, this time a supposed friend named 'Bob,' and sent an e-mail telling his mistress that he had died, according to the report. 'He asked me to contact you if this ever happened,' the e-mail said, according to The Day. 'I am extremely sorry to tell you that he is gone. We tried everything we could to save him. I cannot say more. I am sorry it has to be this way.'

Three days later, the woman drove from her home in Chesapeake to Ward's house in Burke, Virginia to pay her respects. Instead, she was greeted by a new owner who told the family that Ward 'had not actually died, but rather had moved to Connecticut to take command of a U.S. Navy submarine,' the report said.

Then, Ward learned his former lover was pregnant. He resumed contact ' after he faked his death. In late July, Ward traveled to Washington D.C. for a medical appointment and met with her to discuss 'how to handle the pregnancy.' She then lost the baby due to complications and the illicit relationship came to an end. But the ex-couple kept up contact which the Navy believes impaired 'his ability to take full responsibility' for the sailors under his command.

The Navy didn't find out, though, until a relative of Ward's ex-mistress got in touch with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS). Wad was then booted from his post one week after taking command of the Pittsburgh.

'Cmdr. Ward's actions directly contradict Navy standards, especially the high standards of conduct expected of our commanding officers,' says Lt. Cmdr. Jennifer Cragg, a spokeswoman for the submarine group. 'Leaders who fail to meet these standards, like Cmdr. Ward, are removed from leadership positions and referred for appropriate disciplinary or administrative action.'

It's an exceptionally awful story, and frankly bizarre. But it's difficult to detect a trend in commander firings represented by Ward's dismissal. Ward appears to be the seventeenth Navy commander relieved of duty in 2012, according to the Navy.  'That's less than one percent of the total personnel that we have serving in Navy commanding officer billets,' says Lt. Cmdr. Chris Servello, a Navy spokesman. 'The vast majority of our commanding officers serve with distinction.'

It's more than the 13 commanders cashiered in all of 2010, but short of the 23 commanders fired last year and still down from a record high of 26 sacked officers in 2003. Among 2012's cashiered commanders include officers fired for falsifying administrative records (Cmdr. Corrine Parker, April 16); 'inappropriate personal behavior' (Capt. Jeffrey Riedel, program manager of the Littoral Combat ship program, January 27); and creating 'a poor command climate' (Cmdr. Dennis Klein, May 1). In June, the Navy sacked Capt. Chuck Litchfield of the U.S.S. Essex amphibious assault ship after the ship collided with an oiler off the California coast.

Most of the firings, though, involved 'personal misconduct,' with the true nature of the offenses left undefined. But Ward's misconduct, we now know, was one of the more extreme cases ' one that involved manipulating loves ones for the sake of a career now in tatters. It was also one of the most idiotic.

Soldier Who Taught 'Total War' Against Islam Threatens to Sue Top Military Officer

The Army officer who once taught that the U.S. ought to consider 'Hiroshima tactics' for a 'total war' on Islam has put America's top general on notice for a possible lawsuit. Lt. Col. Matthew Dooley is accusing the government of concealing 'the truth about Islam' at a time when proponents of his view of an inevitable clash between Islam and the West have succeeded at fanning precisely those flames.

On Thursday, attorneys for Dooley told Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey that Dooley is considering 'a potential civil action,' said Marine Col. David Lapan, a spokesman for Dempsey. The written notice does not indicate that they've actually filed a lawsuit against Dempsey.

But Dooley's lawyers, who have defended one of the most prominent anti-Islam voices in the United States, aren't just flirting with legal action against the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. They're launching a PR strike as well. A press release announcing that Dooley has retained them accuses Dempsey of compromising 'the final bastion of America's defense against Islamic jihad and sharia, the Pentagon' to 'the enemy.' And it's language that comes as Americans worry about Islamic radicals targeting U.S. embassies in the Middle East.

As Danger Room first reported in April, Dempsey shut down an elective course Dooley taught at the Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia, which is under the auspices of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The course instructed senior officers at the lieutenant colonel, commander, colonel and Navy captain level that 'there is no such thing as 'moderate Islam,'' and that wartime protections against civilians of Islamic countries were 'no longer relevant.'

Materials distributed by Dooley's guest lecturers suggested inaccurately that President Obama is a Muslim. Similar material taught to the FBI in 2011 compared Islam to the Death Star in Star Wars. Dooley himself taught, 'Your oath as a professional soldier forces you to pick a side here.'

Dooley considered the reduction of Islam to a 'cult status' an acceptable outcome of what he considered a civilizational war. Accordingly, his instructional material is reminiscent of The Innocence of Muslims, the anti-Islam video that was used as a pretext in the Middle East over the past week for anti-American protests. Dooley was removed from the college and received an administrative reprimand for teaching material that Dempsey called 'totally objectionable, against our values and it wasn't academically sound.'

The course Dooley taught and its parallels in the FBI has become something of a cause celebre in certain right-wing American precincts. Congresswoman and former presidential candidate Michele Bachmann lamented to Glenn Beck in July, 'They are purging everything from our military, from our FBI. So we're not even teaching what the Muslim Brotherhood stands for. We're not teaching what radical Islam even is.' Bachmann attracted derision this summer when she accused a top aide to Hillary Clinton of nebulous 'ties' to the Muslim Brotherhood based on the aide's heritage.

Dooley's attorneys, at the Michigan-based Thomas More Law Center, have been sympathetic to such arguments. They've defended the Florida Pastor Terry Jones, whose burning of the Koran prompted violent protests in Afghanistan last year. They didn't return Danger Room's calls, but they're portraying Dooley as another free-speech martyr.

'Rather than thinking and acting bravely, PC'er's [sic] strike at our cherished First Amendment in a vain hope of buying friendship with a force we still do not understand that neither respects us nor appreciates civility,' reads a statement from the Center.

The press release goes on to blast Dempsey for 'personally attack[ing] LTC Dooley, a subordinate Army officer who honorably served our Nation.' That 'prejudicial public statement' about the content of Dooley's course determined the contours of a then-ongoing investigation Dempsey had ordered into the class, the Center argues: '[H]ow then could LTC Dooley ever be given a fair and impartial inquiry following the command influence from the nation's highest members of the military chain of command?'

The Law Center also accuses Dempsey of capitulation to radical Islam. Its press release quotes a former CIA agent named Claire Lopez saying: 'The final bastion of America's defense against Islamic jihad and sharia, the Pentagon, fell to the enemy in April 2012, with the issuance of a letter from General Martin E. Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, re-issuing his earlier order that all Department of Defense (DoD) course content be scrubbed to ensure no lingering remnant of disrespect to Islam.' Dempsey and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta have 'acquiesced to a Muslim Brotherhood takeover of U.S. military education,' the press release states.

It's worth noting that Dempsey recently asked Pastor Terry Jones to rescind his support for The Innocence of Muslims video. That phone call came after the U.S. embassy in Egypt came under attack last week, ostensibly by people angered by the video. At practically the same time, the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, was assaulted, killing four U.S. nationals, in what the Obama administration is now calling a terrorist attack. Islamic radicals and their anti-Islamic critics are citing one another as justification for their shared belief that the two cultures are irreconcilable.

Dempsey's comments about Dooley's course came at a May 10 Pentagon news conference. The general did not mention Dooley by name, referring instead to 'the individual' who taught the course. Dempsey also said the focus on the inquiry was to determine how the Joint Forces Staff College or other military educational institutions embraced that class or others similar in content to it.

The Thomas More Law Center contends in its press release that Dooley's academic freedom was violated, although it does not specifically blame Dempsey for that. It doesn't say what specific outcome Dooley seeks by hiring attorneys. But the press release accuses the government of 'applying Islamic Sharia law to prevent any criticism of Islam' and says, 'Officers and instructors see what has happened to LTC Dooley, and will refrain from telling the truth about Islam.'

Lapan, the spokesman for Joint Chiefs Chairman, declined to respond to any of the release's criticisms, citing the potential of imminent legal action proceeding.

Digital-Camera Scopes vs. Cluster Bombs in Syria's Lopsided Civil War

On one side of the Syrian rebellion: guns that use digital camera zooms for their scopes; soldered lengths of pipe transformed into explosive shells; Howitzers rescued from the scrap heap. On the other side: what appear to be bombs that ignite the air around them; seeming cluster munitions; and Iranian weapons flown in through the airspace of the supposedly pro-U.S. government of Iraq.

The Syrian resistance supposedly has a weapons pipeline flowing through Turkey. But that's not preventing rebels from homebrewing their own weapons. While it may have taken the rebellion some time to move beyond manufacturing homemade bombs, its machinists weld machine guns onto pickup trucks and create crude flamethrowers. A host of social media, from YouTube videos to Facebook pages, disseminate basic weapons tutorials to green rebel recruits.

But C.J. Chivers of The New York Times provides a new look into the rebels' weapons foundries. These are weapons of pure necessity. Insurgents stripped out the disc brake of a motorcycle to stabilize a 14.5-millimeter machine gun so it doesn't jostle on the back of a pickup truck. But the real innovation comes from a small mount on the gun for digital camera lens pointing down the barrel. The camera's zoom function becomes a makeshift scope ' especially in video mode. 'The man firing the weapon [can] observe the path of the tracers relative to an aircraft or distant vehicle much more closely than he otherwise would,' Chivers reports.

That's not all. The rebels turn metal piping into shells about the size of a 16-ounce soda can, filling them with explosives and firing them through a salvaged Howitzer with a 65-inch barrel. (See the results in the video above.) Chivers marvels that the shells have scored grooves running around their diameter, so that they'll spiral in flight in a stable manner, suggesting 'a more than rudimentary understanding of ballistics.' On the other hand, the weapon, nicknamed the Fat Man, has a paltry 2-kilometer range, and its manufacturers try to position themselves well away from it when they fire, suggesting that the barrel isn't stable and could injure the amateur artilleryman firing it.

These are not concerns that dictator Bashar Assad's forces have.

The Brown Moses blog is a clearinghouse of reports on the weaponry used in Syria's bloody civil war. And it shows just how uneven the conflict is. A report from earlier this month suggests that Assad's air force drops thermobaric bombs on Syrian villages ' that is, bombs that light the air itself on fire, creating a massive shockwave. This post, using stills from an August YouTube video, seems to show a thermobaric detonation over one such village.

Similarly, Brown Moses collects evidence of cluster bombs used this summer by Assad. (See the video above.) While it's hardly a surprise at this point that Assad would use weapons that cause a mass amount of civilian damage ' and, in fairness, the U.S. military used cluster munitions in the early phases of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars ' it's still noteworthy to document what look like PTAB-2.5m cluster bomblets showing up unexploded in Syrian rebel areas. The world is plagued by neglected cluster bombs that detonate years after conflicts end, maiming and killing innocents. (Although it should also be said that there's evidence the Syrian rebels are conducting mass executions of captured Assad soldiers.)

Despite international sanctions on Assad, it doesn't look like he's running out of weapons. The Obama administration slapped a new round of penalties Wednesday on key parts of Assad's deadly supply chain in Belarus and Iran. But the Iranians are hardly giving up on their Syrian proxy: New intelligence reports indicate they're flying in weapons over Iraq, a charge that the Iraqis publicly deny. Sen. John Kerry, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, warned Iraq that acquiescence to the Iranian aid to Assad will jeopardize its U.S. aid, a disturbing coda to the Iraq war.

It remains to be seen how the U.S. and its allies can stanch the flow of weapons to Assad. Even if they can, the Syrian rebel foundaries still appear overmatched.

More Than a Dozen Senior U.S. Officials Were in on Mexican Gunwalking Plan

A disastrous plan by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to allow guns to 'walk' into Mexico wasn't the fault of a few misguided officials, a new investigation from the Justice Department's internal watchdog finds. The gun-walking plan, known as Operation Fast and Furious, compromised the integrity of more than a dozen senior officials and three agencies. Attorney General Eric Holder has been cleared of allegations he knew about Fast and Furious. Many of his subordinates were not so fortunate.

'Our investigation made clear that the failures within ATF, which included a long term strategy in Operation Fast and Furious that was fully supported by the U.S. Attorney's Office, were systemic and not due to the acts of only a few individuals,' (.pdf) wrote Inspector General Michael Horowitz. Those conclusions partially vindicate what Holder's defenders have long maintained, that the botched gun-walking operation was isolated to the ATF Phoenix Field Division and then-U.S. attorney for Arizona Dennis Burke. The report also doesn't go as far as Holder's critics would have liked.

Much of the political acrimony over Fast and Furious has revolved around what Holder knew and when about Fast and Furious while serving as the top dog at the Justice Department. But according to the report, Holder only found out about Fast and Furious after it was leaked to the public, the time he's maintained. Meanwhile, the attorney general received reports about Fast and Furious, which the ATF was attempting to use in building cases against the cartels, but was never told about its problems or had the plot ' buried within the stacks of reports received by the agency each week ' brought to his attention.

The date Holder has said he finally became aware, Jan. 31, 2011, was less than a week after the botched operation became public information, and after the ATF and U.S. Attorney's Office in Phoenix moved to squash the plan. 'We found no evidence that Attorney General Holder was informed about Operation Fast and Furious, or learned about the tactics employed by the ATF' before that date, Horowitz writes.

Critics had alleged a cover-up, and Holder was found in contempt of Congress in June for not turning over documents requested by congressional investigators. The House Oversight Committee filed a civil lawsuit against Holder over the contempt charge in August. Though, a lawsuit could take years to work out, and a criminal case against Holder doesn't have much of a chance, considering it's asking Holder to essentially prosecute himself.

A sticking point, though, was whether Holder was informed of the link between the December 2010 shooting of Border Patrol tactical agent Brian Terry in Arizona, and at least one semi-automatic AK-47 rifle linked to the operation discovered at the scene and used by border bandits to kill Terry. According to the report, Holder was not told about the discovery of the operation-linked weapon until after the case went public, though he was told about the shooting within hours after it happened.

On the other hand, there were other senior officials who did know, and didn't tell Holder. The report cited former ATF acting director Kenneth Melson, and William Newell, the head agent in charge the ATF branch in Phoenix. Deputy Assistant Attorney General Jason Weinstein, who resigned Tuesday night, didn't intervene to stop the operation, and never told Holder about it.

'In the course of our review, we identified individuals ranging from line agents and prosecutors in Phoenix and Tucson to senior ATF officials in Washington, D.C., who bore a share of responsibility for A.T.F.'s knowing failure in both these operations to interdict firearms illegally destined for Mexico, and for doing so without adequately taking into account the danger to public safety that flowed from this risky strategy,' the report said.

The report issued several recommendations calling on the Justice Department to review that the ATF's 'policies on law enforcement operations to ensure that they are in compliance with Department of Justice guidelines and policies.' The report also calls on the agencies to figure out how to re-evaluate the way they carry out investigations on gun trafficking. Because, you know, thousands of guns wound up in the hands of the cartels and nearly sacked the Attorney General.