Quietly approved and deployed.......

President Obama announced in March that he would be sending 21,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. But in an unannounced move, the White House has also authorized -- and the Pentagon is deploying -- at least 13,000 troops beyond that number, according to defense officials. The additional troops are primarily support forces, including engineers, medical personnel, intelligence experts and military police. Their deployment has received little mention by officials at the Pentagon and the White House, who have spoken more publicly about the combat troops who have been sent to Afghanistan. The deployment of the support troops to Afghanistan brings the total increase approved by Obama to 34,000. The buildup has raised the number of U.S. troops deployed to the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan above the peak during the Iraq "surge" that President George W. Bush ordered, officials said...Link

George Shultz on the Drug War..........

When George P. Shultz took office as Ronald Reagan's secretary of state in 1982, his first trip out of the country was to Canada. His second was to Mexico. "Foreign policy starts with your neighborhood," he told me in an interview here in the Canadian capital last week. "I have always believed that and Ronald Reagan believed that very firmly. In many ways he had [the 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement] in his mind. He paid a lot of attention to both Mexico and Canada, as I did." Mr. Shultz, now a co-chair of the North American Forum—which pulls together members of the business and government community for an annual pow-wow—is still paying a lot of attention to the American neighborhood...Link

Ecstasy research looks for benefits.......

An article in Monday's editions of The Sun on a study of the potential therapeutic benefits of the illegal drug Ecstasy cited the views of Harvard psychiatrist John Halpern. Dr. Halpern says he is a proponent of research into the drug's medicinal properties but does not favor its widespread use in psychiatry. The government-authorized study in Charleston, S.C. is trying to determine whether Ecstasy can help trauma victims heal their emotional wounds...Link

The horns of a dilemma...................

A new poll shows a substantial majority of Americans have resigned themselves to the reality of our nation's perpetual foreign wars. They don't like it, but they see it happening and know there is nothing they can do about it. The poll, conducted by Clarus Research Group, showed that 68 percent of us agree with idea that we won't either win or lose the war in Afghanistan, now eight years long, but will instead just remain there. The image of flies and flypaper again swirls in my head, just as it did at the time of the invasion of Iraq. We invaded these places and now we're stuck there, and President Barack Obama is likewise stuck, not on flypaper, but on the horns of a dilemma: Does he send tens of thousands of additional troops to Afghanistan, as his area commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, has publicly demanded, or does he change strategies a la Joe Biden and rely more on special ops and drones to harass the Taliban and kill whatever members of al-Qaeda we can find?...Link

I won Nobel for not being Bush.

NBC's Saturday Night Live spoofed President Barack Obama for the second week in a row on Saturday, declaring in a sketch that the president won the Nobel Peace Prize for not being George W. Bush...Link

Barack Obama ready to pay Afghan fighters...

The Obama administration is considering outbidding the Taliban to persuade Afghan villagers to lay down arms as it struggles to find a new approach to a war that is fast losing public and congressional support. Despite five war councils in two weeks, President Barack Obama has so far failed to come up with a strategy for the conflict that may define his presidency. Fierce infighting continues between his own generals and advisers. Obama has been handed three options by General Stanley McChrystal, commander of the US forces in Afghanistan. These range from 20,000 to 60,000 more troops, which would almost double the US military presence. McChrystal is said to favour an increase of 40,000 men, without which he warns the mission will fail...Link

Obama, Congress prepare to thwart ACLU.

In the continuing legal battle over 21 photographs showing terror war prisoner abuse, the U.S. government has not seen much success arguing for nondisclosure in federal court. So, the Obama administration -- which once promised to make public this shameful chapter of the Bush administration -- has hatched a new strategy to keep the scenes of torture from being released. "The Obama administration believes giving the imminent grant of authority over the release of such pictures to the defense secretary would short-circuit a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union under the Freedom of Information Act,"...Link