Word: pentagonals
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Kyrgyzstan is as strange as the sound of its name. For one thing, it's the only nation in the world to host military bases for both the U.S. and Russia. And while it sought - and eventually won - a nearly fourfold rent increase from the Pentagon last year for continued American use of the Manas air base, outside the capital, Bishkek, there was another condition: that the U.S. military stop calling it a base. The U.S. agreed, and so since last summer the busy hub has been officially known as the Transit Center at Manas - a Greyhound bus terminal...
...Pentagon has for years allowed the world an occasional peek through its keyhole as U.S. aircraft generated video while bombing their targets. But the military was always able to cover that keyhole when it wanted, allowing outsiders a look only when public viewing was deemed to serve the Pentagon's interests. All of that apparently changed on Monday, after at least one Pentagon insider leaked a bloody video that appeared to show the killing of two reporters by a U.S. helicopter gunship in Baghdad to WikiLeaks, an independent website...
...light. WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange said his organization got the videotape of "the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people" and verified its authenticity from "a number of military whistle-blowers"; the videotape was ultimately confirmed as genuine by U.S. military officials. There was as much irritation inside the Pentagon at whoever leaked the videotape as there was for WikiLeaks' posting of it. (See pictures of U.S. troops in Iraq...
...Several hours after WikiLeaks posted the video, the Pentagon fired back with large pieces of its own 2007 investigations into the attack. It concluded that the Reuters employees had joined up with several armed insurgents on a day that had been filled with attacks on U.S. troops in the vicinity. One knelt to take a photograph, without wearing any vest or other apparel indicating he was a reporter. From the Apache, the camera was mistaken for an RPG launcher. The Apache crews had "neither reason nor probability to assume that neutral media personnel were embedded with enemy forces," a probe...
...Reuters, in a statement, didn't criticize the Pentagon, instead saying that its employees' deaths "were tragic and emblematic of the extreme dangers that exist in covering war zones." But Assange said the attack was unjustified. "If those killings were lawful under the rules of engagement," he told reporters at the National Press Club in Washington, "then the rules of engagement are wrong...