DC Up Close

Wikileaks released thousands of military field reports
from six years of the war in Afghanistan, including
several asserting that representatives of Pakistan’s
Inter-Services Intelligence met with Taliban leaders to
coordinate attacks against American troops and plan
assassinations of Afghan leaders, and that the Taliban has
been using heat-seeking missiles provided to the
mujahideen by the United States during Afghanistan’s
Soviet occupation. The reports also describe widespread
corruption among Afghanistan’s military and police. “I
asked the seven patrolmen we detained to sit and relax
while we sorted through a problem without ever mentioning
why they were being detained,” one report reads. “Three of
the patrolmen responded by saying that they had only taken
money from the truck drivers to buy fuel for their
generator.” Another report describes what happened after
an Afghan civilian protested the rape by a police
commander of a 16-year-old girl. “The district commander
ordered his bodyguard to open fire on the AC [Afghan
civilian],” it says. “The bodyguard refused, at which time
the district commander shot [the bodyguard] in front of
the AC.” “The United States strongly condemns the
disclosure of classified information,” said National
Security Adviser General James Jones. “Look,” said a
spokesman for Afghan President Hamid Karzai about the
reports, “this is nothing new.” At least 45 Afghan
civilians were killed in Helmand province when a NATO
rocket hit a mud house in which they had taken shelter
from fighting between NATO and Taliban forces. A stampede
during the Love Parade, an electronic music festival in
Germany, killed eighteen people, and an Arab Israeli was
sentenced to 18 months for rape after he slept with a
woman under the pretense that he was an eligible Jewish
bachelor.

President Barack Obama signed into law the Restoring
American Financial Stability Act, which expands federal
regulation to derivatives markets and other previously
unregulated areas of the financial system and creates a
panel to monitor risks to the financial system. “These
reforms represent the strongest consumer financial
protections in history,” Obama said. Analysts estimated
that three quarters of the bill’s substance would be
determined later, and congressional Democrats and labor
leaders pushed for Elizabeth Warren, the architect of the
consumer financial protection bureau created by the bill,
to be named its first head. “Symbolically, it does seem
incredibly important to pick somebody who not only
invented the idea,” said Stephen Lerner of the Service
Employees International Union, “but someone who doesn’t
claim to be a neutral.” The Senate Judiciary Committee
voted 13 to 6 to approve Elena Kagan’s nomination to the
Supreme Court, sending her candidacy to the full Senate
for confirmation. South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham
was the lone Republican to vote in favor of Kagan. “No one
spent more time trying to beat President Obama than I
did,” said Graham, who was also the only Republican
committee member to vote for Sonia Sotomayor. “But
President Obama won.” BP’s board met to decide the future
of CEO Tony Hayward, and the rock band Kings of Leon
abandoned the stage three songs into a concert in
St. Louis after a pigeon shat in their bass player’s
mouth.

Forensic scientists in Romania dug up the official graves
of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu to determine whether the
bodies of the former dictator and his wife are really
buried there. Amazon.com announced that it was selling
more ebooks than hardcovers for the first time, and the
Library of Congress, which oversees the U.S. Copyright
Office, ruled that iPhone owners can legally “jailbreak”
their phones to download software that is not approved by
Apple. Officials revealed that prisoners in a northern
Mexican prison had been allowed out at night to moonlight
as hitmen using vehicles and weapons provided by prison
guards. A British hedge-fund manager spent roughly $1
billion on 240,000 tons of cocoa beans in an effort to
corner the world cocoa market, and scientists in England
were developing Ecobot III, a self-sustaining robot that
feeds on biomass, digesting it in an artificial gut and
excreting waste into a litter tray. “Diarrhea-bot would be
more appropriate,” said the director of the lab working on
the project. “It’s not exactly knocking out rabbit
pellets.”

– Christopher R. Beha