The Taliban spent the past 5 months building a 1,060 foot underground tunnel that led directly into Sarposa Prison in Khandahar and broke out 575 inmates, including about 100 Taliban commanders.

Their tunnel operation was not discovered. They were able to bypass checkpoints and main roads. When asked how the Taliban were able to build the tunnel and effect the breakout, Gov. Tooryalai Wesa said only, "It's under investigation."

This is one of the prisons at which the U.S. has been providing training and funding to strengthen the Afghan secuirty guards.

The facility has undergone security upgrades and tightened procedures following a brazen 2008 Taliban attack that freed 900 prisoners. Afghan government officials and their NATO backers have regularly said that the prison has vastly improved security since that attack.

All the prisoners had left through the tunnel, taking 4.5 hours to do so, before anyone knew they were gone.

Guess they are still not ready for prime-time. How much more will it cost us to stay longer and re-train them?

The New York Times and other media outlets have major reports tonight on leaked classfied documents regarding Guantanamo detainees. You can view several of the leaked documents, courtesy of Wikileaks, here. the Times reports some of the leaked files pertain to detainee suicides.

[A] collection of secret detainee assessment files obtained by The New York Times reveal that the threat of suicide has created a chronic tension at the prison — a tactic frequently discussed by the captives and a constant fear for their captors.

[More...]

The DEA will be continuing its Most Excellent African Adventures plan in 2011 and beyond.

Next up: It will open an office in Nairobi, Kenya. Why? Because, like with Liberia and Ghana, it wants to stop drugs from going from South America to Africa and then Europe. From the State Departments 2011 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report:

The principal U.S. counternarcotics objective in Kenya is to interdict the flow of narcotics to the United States. A related objective is to limit the corrosive effects of narcotics-related corruption in law enforcement, the judiciary, and political institutions. ....In support of this effort, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration is in the process of opening a country office in Nairobi. Personnel from the DEA Pretoria Country Office offered support to the Government of Kenya in counter-narcotics over the course of FY 2010.

For information about all our drug enforcement efforts around the world, the full report is here. How much is this costing us? The State Department's 2011 international drug control budget runs 221 pages and is available here. Total: $2,136 million. [More...]

I hope everyone is having a terrific Easter.

This is an open thread, all topics welcome.

Arizona, which approved medical marijuana in November, began accepting applications from patients last week. The application process is done online. At the end of week 1, 579 of 718 applications were approved. Those rejected can re-apply. By the numbers:

About 78 percent of them were men, and the largest age group, at 37 percent, was people 51 and older. The next largest age group, at 22 percent, was people between 41 and 50 years old. Diseases reported included cancer, Hepatitis C, glaucoma, HIV/AIDS and Crohn's disease,

I am about to get on a plane so no blogging for me.

Open Thread.

Via McClatchy:

Washington has spent billions of dollars to help push drug cartels out of Colombia, and to confront them in Mexico. Now they've muscled their way into Central America, opening a new chapter in the drug war that almost certainly will exact further cost on U.S. taxpayers as American authorities confront drug gangs on a new frontier.

The Zetas are teaming up with Guatamela's Kaibiles to train the gang members, military style. And the U.S. military, including the Navy and Green Berets, is training the Guatamalan military. Background here. This is hardly new. The reports on the Kaibiles teaming up with the Zetas have been around since at least 2005. [More...]

Photo by SplashNewsOnline.

TMZ is reporting live on Lindsay Lohan's preliminary hearing on a felony theft charge.

Lindsay's lawyer, Shawn Holley, will be arguing the charge should only be a misdemeanor due to the value of the necklace at issue. Shawn had the necklace appraised: [More...]

John Judis:

[2012] is most likely [to be] a situation similar to that faced by George H.W. Bush in 1992: a sluggish economy that is improving, but at a sufficiently slow rate to leave a gap between fact and perception that rival politicians will attempt to fill.

So far, Obama has not done very well in filling that gap. He has allowed Republicans to make a case that things are getting worse, and he has cooperated with them in taking measures that will actually make things worse. He has allowed Republicans to set the terms of the debate. It has been about the perils of deficits and debt. That is not just bad economics; it also leads Democrats into a political cul-de-sac.

Ezra Klein writes:

So in 1978, Dick Gephardt quite sensibly tied the debt ceiling to the budget: Once Congress decided how much we were going to tax, spend and borrow, the Treasury Department was authorized to carry out those instructions. In 1995, House Republicans wanted leverage over President Bill Clinton, so they brought the debt ceiling back. It’s easier to get people to listen to you if you threaten to destroy their credit rating if they don’t. And now, in 2011, they’re doing it again.

Indeed they are. Here is how Clinton handled their threats in 1995:

Clinton Vetoes Borrowing Bill -- Government Shutdown Nears As Rhetoric Continues To Roil

WASHINGTON - With the clock ticking toward a midnight shutdown, President Clinton vetoed a temporary borrowing bill today and prepared to close most government operations in a jolting political fight with Congress. [. . .] "This is not the time or the place for them to backdoor their budget proposals," [Clinton] said.

After raising taxes on the rich in 1993 and standing up to the GOP on the debt ceiling in 1995, President Clinton won reelection in 1996 in a landslide.

Speaking for me only

In a column critiquing Paul Ryan's plan for Medicare, Paul Krugman writes:

“Consumer-based” medicine has been a bust everywhere it has been tried. To take the most directly relevant example, Medicare Advantage, which was originally called Medicare + Choice, was supposed to save money; it ended up costing substantially more than traditional Medicare. America has the most “consumer-driven” health care system in the advanced world. It also has by far the highest costs yet provides a quality of care no better than far cheaper systems in other countries. [. . . T]here’s something terribly wrong with the whole notion of patients as “consumers” and health care as simply a financial transaction.

Health insurance is inextricably intertwined with the delivery of health care. If markets do not work for health care, they will not work for health insurance either. Controlling health care costs through health insurance exchanges will not work. This is the fatal flaw of the reforms in the Obama health bill.

Speaking for me only

NYTimes:

Security forces in Syria fired tear gas and live ammunition Friday to disperse crowds of demonstrators who took to the streets of Damascus and other cities after the noon prayers that have been a focus of uprisings across the Arab world, according to protesters, witnesses and accounts posted on social networking sites.

The authorities had deployed police officers, soldiers and military vehicles in two of the country’s three largest cities ahead of a call for nationwide protests testing the popular reception of reforms decreed by President Bashar al-Assad as well as the momentum that organizers have sought to bring to the five-week uprising.

The main problem with "humanitarian" interventions in foreign civil wars is that they do not work unbless you accept that you are deciding to go to war, I think Libya is proving that point. OF course even if you accept you are going to war, then you can have an Iraq Debacle on your hands.

Speaking for me only