NY Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel publish classified, internal US military documents obtained by Wikileaks regarding the war in Afghanistan. The findings, as summarized by the Guardian, include:

• Hundreds of civilians have been killed by coalition troops in unreported incidents

• A recent, steep rise in Taliban bomb attacks on NATO forces

• US commanders openly worry Pakistan's ISI intelligence agency is aiding Taliban fighters

• A secret "black" unit of special forces hunts down Taliban leaders for "kill or capture" without trial.

• The United States covered up evidence that the Taliban have acquired deadly surface-to-air missiles (of the kind used against Soviet forces by the CIA-backed mujahideen during the 1980s).

• The coalition is increasingly using deadly Reaper drones to hunt and kill Taliban targets by remote control from a base in Nevada.

• The Taliban have caused growing carnage with a massive escalation of their roadside bombing campaign, which has killed more than 2,000 civilians to date.

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Tulsa + Muslims + The Economist = "A backlash against imaginary perils"

There are only 30,000 Muslims in Oklahoma, a state of 3.7m people, making them well under 1% of the population. That’s still enough to worry some people, though. Rex Duncan, a Republican member of Oklahoma’s House of Representatives, has just had a measure placed on the November ballot that would ban local courts from consideringsharia, or Islamic law, in their judgments, a dubious first for the nation.

Mr Duncan describes his proposed measure, which would also bar courts from considering any other forms of international law, as a “Save Our State” constitutional amendment. He cites Britain, and the alleged readiness of its courts to consider sharia(though in fact it is only applied in some civil and family cases when both parties agree, and the primacy of the law of the land remains paramount in all cases) as an example of how prevalent Islamic law might become. Mr Duncan calls it a “cancer upon the survivability of the UK”, and declares that “this is a war for the survival of America.”

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