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Every day in Washington, President Bush gets multiple briefings on Iraq: a military update at 7 a.m., an intelligence report after that, political briefings through the day and finally a memo from his staff before he goes to bed. But during his recent surprise visit to al-Asad air base in the middle of Iraq's Anbar province, the President got an altogether different kind of report. In a concrete building sheltered from the 110°F (45°C) heat outside, Captain Lee Hemming, a Marine Cobra helicopter pilot, stood nervously opposite his Commander in Chief and a phalanx of fellow...
...correspondent was summoned to a Starbucks in downtown Washington, where he was informed of the Iraq mission - and then prohibited from telling anyone other than his spouse and his boss. At dusk on Sunday, Sept. 2, passengers boarded Air Force One inside its massive hangar at Andrews Air Force Base. Once darkness fell, the hangar doors opened, and the plane pushed out onto the runway for takeoff, its lights off and its window shades drawn. Laptops were returned in midflight, but their owners had to disable the wireless functions to prevent the President's plane from being tracked across...
...martyr-like fame abroad, but their grand ideals of freedom and democracy resonated less with a public just struggling to feed itself. Yet in recent months, the opposition has started addressing such bread-and-butter issues more effectively - and that could turn the current economic protests into a future base of political support. "Most Burmese have only known dictatorship, so when you talk about democracy it means nothing to them," says Mark Farmaner, acting director of Burma Campaign U.K. "But the opposition is now starting to explain, 'Democracy means accountability from leaders, and that means that generals can't drive...
...Welcome to Diego Garcia - 6,720 acres of restricted military base on a low-lying, depopulated atoll 1,000 miles from the nearest continent. Back in 1966, the U.S. signed a secret agreement with Great Britain allowing the Pentagon to use the Indian Ocean territory as an airbase in exchange for a big discount on Polaris nuclear missiles. Three years later, hundreds of Navy seabees arrived by ship and began pouring out the 12,000-foot runway that would become a bulwark of American Cold War strategy in the region, and a key launching pad for the first and second...
...Unfortunately, the Americans who built the base crossed the line from efficiency to cruelty. First, they killed the islanders' dogs. That is, they loaded the pets into sealed sheds, gassed them, and cremated them, according Prof. David Vine, a public anthropologist at American University in Washington who has studied the island's colonization by the U.S. Then the British loaded the inhabitants, known as Chagossians, onto ships and sent them off to Mauritius and the Seychelles, 1,200 miles to the west across the Indian Ocean, where they live to this day. A court case is under way in Britain...