Fresh off exempting Yemen from any sanctions for its use of child soldiers and partly in response to this week’s attempted package bombings, the government appears to be ready to let the CIA start operating drones in Yemen.

Details are beginning to emerge in the death of an Afghan prisoner on Sunday night. According to ISAF, a US soldier is in custody and a criminal investigation is underway. Hamid Karzai issued a short statement calling the death a killing by coalition forces. The New York Times recounts that one version of the story suggests the prisoner may have been trying to escape, but other Afghans who were present at the prison disagree on that point.

Just days after a new report (pdf) was released, providing further evidence that torture of detainees in Afghanistan continues at the “secret” site at Bagram Air Base, Reuters informs us that a detainee in NATO custody has been “found dead” in his cell.

It’s hard to imagine how the United States could heap more abuse on Pakistan. We are approaching the one year anniversary since Jeremy Scahill disclosed the extensive JSOC-Blackwater secret war effort within Pakistan and yet there is no indication that either Barack Obama or David Petraeus sees a need to shut down the rogue operators there. Despite the occasional attempt to portray the US military as providing crucial relief efforts in the massive floods in Pakistan (such as in the accompanying photo), the reality is that US military relief to Pakistan has been derided as but a tiny fraction of the military relief provided in other recent world catastrophes. Last week’s sentencing of Aafia Siddiqui to eighty-six years in jail provoked massive protests across Pakistan. And now we are learning that NATO (which really means US) helicopters have killed over 50 people in air raids on the Pakistan side of the border with Afghanistan over the weekend.

Former Bush administration National Security and Central Intelligence Agencies director Gen.Michael Hayden has another tired whine at CNN about Obama’s treatment of the torture program. The entire logic of the piece is predictably silly.

While the UK Guardian and other press are reporting that Wikileaks logs are showing over 2000 people on an elite task force’s “capture or kill” hit list, the New York Times is reporting a figure of only 70.

Barry Eisler’s new novel, Inside Out, is a spy thriller that takes off from the past years’ headlines about missing CIA torture tapes. But it is something even more: it is one of the most politically astute novels of our generation. No other work of fiction has pointedly posed the alternatives for those who would seek political change in the United States in the 21st century. And what are the possibilities in a system where conspiracy is impossible because “everyone is complicit”? Political nihilism, revolutionary adventurism, martyrdom, or subornation by the Establishment.

The Rolling Stone article appears to be a McChrystal-led effort to shore up his tough guy cred. But the actual content of the story shows that tough guy cred won’t win you a war in Afghanistan.

General Stanley McChrystal’s getting hit for switching up his plan to secure the city of Kandahar. So it feels like a response when he says that his responsibilities include “listen[ing] closely” to Afghans and “adapt[ing] constantly.”

It now appears that Obama has taken the position that JSOC troops can go anywhere in the world that he wants them to go and he can order them to kill anyone he wants them to kill for whatever reason he decides. What would the world look like if other countries operated in this way?