Word: iraq
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Closing the prisons will put an end to a major distraction. But it shouldn't stop there. If Panetta can get away with it at the White House, he needs now to slash the CIA stations in Iraq and Afghanistan - by at least half. The stories I hear from Baghdad and Kabul all run in the same direction: people falling over each other chasing a few sources, all frustrated that they are not allowed to get out more because of the very real risk of kidnapping or assassination...
...either Iraq or Afghanistan is helping to train a new generation of officers. Sallying forth from Baghdad's Green Zone in a heavily armored SUV, surrounded by phalanx of contractors carrying M-4's, and picking up a source on a dark street corner is not classical espionage. As one CIA officer put it, "People coming back from Baghdad and Kabul have to unlearn everything they learn there." (See Pictures of U.S. Troops Patrolling Afghanistan's Deadly Korengal Valley...
...There's also the problem that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are ripping apart families. A CIA officer posted in a war zone for three or four successive one-year tours risks coming home to face divorce - or the alternative of leaving the CIA. It's a shame because the CIA right now is actually attracting the best and the brightest, possibly the best recruits since its founding in 1947. (Read Six Ways...
...Ordinarily, even those initial few missteps might not hurt Obama's standing among Catholics. After all, he got 54% of their votes not because of his positions on social issues but because of concerns about the economy, health care and Iraq. Indeed, Catholics are more natural partners for Democrats than has been clear over the past three decades. A Gallup poll released in late March showed that Catholics are more liberal than other Americans when it comes to accepting a wide range of matters, such as homosexuality, gambling and out-of-wedlock births, and are far more likely to oppose...
...reasons why relations between the U.S. and Latin America deteriorated under George W. Bush. But the most serious was Bush's petulant assumption that the region didn't back his war on terrorism, especially after most Latin American governments refused to bless his invasion of Iraq. But Latins argue that they had a hard time taking the Bush crusade seriously when he himself was harboring a suspected terrorist. That would be Luis Posada Carriles, a Cuban exile suspected and arrested in various countries, and once convicted (though later pardoned), for crimes that included the 1976 bombing of a Cuban jetliner...