War

Boko Haram kills 32 and kidnaps 100 women and children in Nigeria.

Nigeria sentences 54 soldiers to death.

"Nigeria on Wednesday sentenced 54 soldiers to death for mutiny, assault, cowardice and refusing to fight Islamic extremists.
The court-martial charges all were connected to the soldiers' refusal to deploy to recapture three towns seized by Boko Haram in August, according to the charge sheet."

More evidence for my suspicion Boko Haram controls the military or is the military.

US sends another 1,500 troops to Iraq.

"The top U.S. commander for the mission in Iraq and Syria said Thursday the next wave of American troops will begin moving into Iraq in a couple of weeks, and cautioned that it will take at least three years to build the capabilities of the Iraqi military."

We heard that for the first nine years of the last war in Iraq.

US troops actively combating ISIS in Iraq. These are combat troops. These are boots on the ground.

What were the harsh interrogations all about?

"They say they were after al-Qaeda’s alleged plans to carry out further strikes on the US homeland and American facilities abroad, but there is evidence in the report that their purpose was much more specific. Major Charles Burney, a psychiatrist who served at the Guantanamo Bay facility, told the committee that "a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq.""

No wonder they didn't get an actionable intelligence.

"That Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon posed a seemingly insoluble problem for the interrogators: however, the failure to produce results did not impress higher-ups in Washington. The torturers were told to get rougher: As Burney testified: "There was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results.""

That suggests more involvement from the top.

""[F]or most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld were also demanding proof of the links between al-Qaeda and Iraq. … There was constant pressure on the intelligence agencies and the interrogators to do whatever it took to get that information out of the detainees, and when people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people to push harder."" 

Not Bush though.