position:defence analyst

Ferguson ‘taste of things to come’, by Nafeez Ahmed
▻http://mondediplo.com/blogs/ferguson-taste-of-things-to-come

The shooting of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, a district of St. Louis County in Minnesota, and the spate of civil unrest that followed, could set a precedent for the future of American society according to a senior Iraq war veteran and Pentagon defence analyst. Terron Sims, an African American active in local Democratic politics who had previously served five years in the United States Army, told me during an interview last month that without a fundamental cultural and institutional change in American policing across the country, the US could see more Ferguson-type events in the near future.

L’#OTAN adopte de nouveaux plans pour la défense des #pays_baltes, notamment suite au retournement de position de l’Allemagne, traditionnellement méfiant sur cette question. #cablegate

WikiLeaks cables reveal secret Nato plans to defend Baltics from Russia | The Guardian
►http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/06/wikileaks-cables-nato-russia-baltics

But the bottom line is that there is enough political will in Nato now to do defence plans for the Baltic states. The opposition has melted away over the past 18 months," said Tomas Valasek, defence analyst at the Centre for European Reform. He worked with Madeleine Albright, the former US secretary of state, on drafting Nato’s new “strategic concept” this year.In a meeting last December in Brussels with the Nato ambassadors from Poland, the three Baltic states and the Nato secretary-general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, together with the US and German ambassadors, Ivo Daalder and Ulrich Brandenburg, secured agreement on the new policy.

“Ambassador Daalder acknowledged in these meetings that Germany had initiated the proposal,” says another secret cable. The east Europeans were delighted. Paul Teesalu, a senior Estonian diplomat, described the policy shift as “an early Christmas present” when told last December in Tallinn, according to a cable.