Article: The US has blood on its hands in the Libyan flood - This article talks about the latest developments in Libya and suffering of the Libyan people because of the Libyan floods and the US invasion 2011
manufacturing construction start to come back more? you know, you talk about the issue of real estate. that is that key leg that has been pulling back the economy. at what point will we see jobs actually benefit the rl estate maet wh a youseeing? what numbers do we need to see? the housing market has been this real drag for some time. this last round of housing data has been pretty weak so it doesn t look like construction is going to be a driver of growth for sometime to come. maybe the end of this year, early next year we might see some momentum. but it s not there yet. we re waiting for that. neil irwin, thank you so much. thanks, richard. nato takes control of the air strikes in libya, questions are being raised right now about exactly what role will the cia be playing on the ground there? more importantly, can the intelligence agency avoid negative comparisons to its previous operations in the middle east? well, the national security correspondent for the national journa
we were hearing earlier that the president had signed an authorization for secret aid to the rebels over the last three weeks. what do you know about what he did sign there? he signed what s known as a presidential funding. which is a classified memorandum basically that allows to do things that they couldn t do publicly. it seems in this case what he s authorized is nonlethal aid. so money, communications gear, computers, walkie talkies, but not weaponry. not explosives, not missiles. that might come in a later finding. theoretically that would be shoved into this one, as well. does this authorization also mean action or just the possible ilgt of an option value basically? right now it s a possibility of action. an interesting detail is that the cia teams that are on the ground in libya, they didn t just arrive there.
that s exactly right. typically the cia will have people at the embassy who are undercover in a literal sense, but practically speaking are there just going to dinner parties, trying to make contact and monitor the libyan government. then they have paramilitary operatives. they function kind of like what we think of in the movies of guys going in behind enemy plains and plain clothes with long beards. the guys are on the ground with libya now are the bearded variety. not the sitting behind the desk rather. help me with this. we ve also heard reports that the cia officers and special ops have helped to identify targets using handheld equipment during this no-fly zone enforcement. what do you know about that? and how involved are they? you know, it s very interesting. because that s a close parallel as we think back about a decade to how the afghan war started. you had cia operatives on horseback riding off with the northern alliance, using what are called laser spotters. these are
i just found out a short time ago that they arrived there several weeks ago, which means that while the debate was happening back here about should the u.s. get involved, how should the u.s. get involved, there were already cia personnel on the ground in libya what were they doing there? a lot of it was outreach. frankly, we know so little about who these rebels are. a lot of what we know is worrisome. they come from a part of libya that is known for being a hotbed of islamic extremism. they re known for having sent foreign fighters to iraq to fight american forces. so there s a lot of concern about our lack of knowledge about who these rebels actually are. so assessing who the rebels are, and i heard reports that they have determined that they do not have a high composition of islamic radicals, at least that s what one report says. also with relation to these officers being on the ground, they were there after the u.s. embassy was evacuated. was that a different type of cia re