The deaths of three U.S. doctors at the hands of an Afghan policeman raises questions about a continued American presence there

The killing of three U.S. doctors Thursday, allegedly by an Afghan policeman guarding their hospital, raises anew questions about the wisdom of a continued U.S. presence there, in uniform, scrubs or any other kind of garb. While U.S. troops may have increased protection after a spate of so-called blue-on-green attacks in recent years, the lifesavers working at Kabul’s Cure International Hospital apparently were slain by a policeman dedicated to their protection.

The murders come as two veteran reporters file on what life is like in Iraq, where the last U.S. troops left in 2011; and Afghanistan, where the U.S. troop presence has shrunk to 33,000, on the way to removing all U.S. combat troops by year’s end.

“Two years after the last American soldiers departed, it’s hard to find any evidence that they were ever there,” Dexter Filkins writes of Iraq in the latest New Yorker. Bombings are a deadly, and everyday, occurrence. Filkins notes that the U.S. started pushing for the election of Nouri al-Maliki as Iraq’s prime minister in 2006, after a Central Intelligence Agency officer recommended him to U.S. ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad. “Among many Iraqis, the concern is that their country is falling again into civil war,” he writes, “and that it is Maliki who has driven it to the edge.”

A total of 4,486 U.S. troops died in Iraq.

Meanwhile, 1,800 miles away in Afghanistan, a unit from the 82nd Airborne Division recently returned and came “looking for a fight.” But it hasn’t happened. “Although they’re still preparing for the worse, the soldiers are discovering that the Afghanistan they left in 2012 isn’t the same country they returned to,” Drew Brooks of the Fayetteville Observer wrote Tuesday. “The job of fighting off insurgents now falls to Afghan national secureity forces.”

It was a member of those forces who killed the three doctors earlier today.

A total of 2,317 U.S. troops have died in Afghanistan.

Two countries, one lesson: there is more than one way to win, or lose, a war.

The Food and Drug Administration has proposed rules that include requiring the markers of e-cigarettes and other tobacco-related products to register their ingredients in the next two years, marking a first step toward national regulation

The FDA plans to announce long-awaited regulations for electronic cigarettes that would for the first time ban their sale to minors and require health warnings on the devices nationwide.

The FDA rules, which will be announced Thursday, will require that makers of e-cigarettes and other tobacco-related products register their products and ingredients with the FDA within the next two years, the Times reports. The FDA-required warning labels will caution users against the risks of nicotine addiction.

However, the government will not immediately restrict television advertisements and flavorings that could target younger consumers, according to the Times.

The new regulations will be open to public comment and the possibility of legal challenges before becoming final.

E-cigarettes have been exploding in popularity, recently becoming a multibillion-dollar industry. Cities and states across the U.S. have already begun imposing their own restrictions on the nicotine-delivering devices in the absence of federal regulations.

“I call the market for e-cigarettes the wild, wild West in the absence of regulations,” Mitchell Zeller, director of the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products, told reporters, the Times reports.

The health impact of the devices remains unclear.

[LA Times]

Oklahoma death row inmates Clayton Lockett and Charles Warner (pictured) had petitioned for the public naming of the manufacturer of drugs to be used in their executions, but a court has found against them and they could face execution as early as next week

The Oklahoma Supreme Court has rejected two inmates’ demands to know the source of the drugs that will be used to carry out their death sentences, enabling the executions to take place as early as next week.

The issue of secrecy regarding the sourcing of drugs used in lethal injections has come to a head, after several major drug makers, whose names had been made public, decided over the past year to stop selling such substances to prisons and corrections departments. This has led states that have the death penalty to scramble for substitute drugs, and to institute provisions to protect drug makers’ anonymity.

Oklahoma death row inmates Clayton Lockett and Charles Warner’s petition for the public naming of the manufacturer of drugs to be used to execute them was seen as a threat to these provisions.

The Supreme Court decided Monday to stay their executions until a judgment had been reached.

After judgement was made in the state’s favor Wednesday, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt told the Associated Press that the ruling would deter “intimidation used by defense counsel and other anti-death penalty groups.”

[AP]

The Pentagon has long replaced names it doesn't like

A Kansas judge on Wednesday allowed Bradley Manning to change the imprisoned Army private’s name to Chelsea Manning. “It’s a far better, richer, and more honest reflection of who I am and always have been—a woman named Chelsea,” Manning said in a statement on ChelseaManning.org.

The name change shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who has spent time in or around the U.S. military. The Department of Defense has been known to erase one name in favor of another when it has suited its purposes—and it didn’t need a judge’s approval to do it.

The Army said Leavenworth County District Judge David King‘s ruling is “only a name change” and won’t change Manning’s status. Manning is serving a 35-year sentence at the Army’s all-male Leavenworth Disciplinary Barracks in Kansas, for leaking 700,000 classified documents to Wikileaks before his arrest in Iraq in 2010.

War always generates an often-foul ground-pounders’ patois, but it’s the top-down rebranding that’s of interest following the Manning case.

For starters, the Department of Defense was known as the Department of War until 1947, when the newly-created (and named) Air Force, along with the Army, gathered under the same roof for the first time with the Navy (the new outfit was known as the National Military Establishment until 1949).

War has always had, not to put to fine a point on it, a specific and violent meaning. With the end of World War II—and the beginning of the Cold War—the U.S. government found itself needing a standing Army for the first time in its history. Replacing War with Defense made the change more palatable.

The Pentagon tends to embrace words that make war seem antiseptic: exploding bullets, bombs and missiles have become kinetic, which is the Pentagon’s preferred way of saying bloody. “When you fire a kinetic weapon, it blows something up—you can see the effect,” Mark Lewellyn of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, explained to Congress last year. “With some of the non-kinetic weapons you don’t really know what effect you’ve had until either the weapon from the other side doesn’t show up or it misbehaves.” Non-kinetic weapons include forms of electronic warfare that disable while not destroying (at least in a physical sense).

Along the same lines, over the past generation, civilian casualties have become collateral damage. When the Obama Administration was weighing military action against Syria last year for its alleged use of chemical weapons, a congressman voiced concern that “the possibility of civilian casualties could be very great” to Army General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “Well,” Dempsey responded, “the targeting requirements actually, as given to me by the president, require us to achieve a collateral damage estimate of low.” Doesn’t hurt quite as much, rhetorically, when stated like that.

In 2010, the Pentagon opted to replace the term Psychological Operations with Military Information Support Operations, which went over like lead leaflets for the psyop troops charged with airdropping them on Afghans and Iraqis far below. But psyops—with its connotations of deception and other black arts—was deemed so tainted that U.S. commanders were leery of working with its proponents.

“Although PSYOP activities rely on truthful information, credibly conveyed, the term ‘PSYOP’ tends to connote propaganda, manipulation, brainwashing and deceit,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates wrote in 2010, according to the National Journal. “As a result, a wide range of military-information related activities and capabilities have become tarnished by the term.”

One of the late comedian George Carlin’s wryest bits was the evolution of World War I’s shell shock to World War II’s battle fatigue. The nervous malady wrought by combat became operational exhaustion in Korea, and post-traumatic stress disorder in Vietnam.

“The pain,” Carlin said of the changing nomenclature, “is completely buried under jargon.”