This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Where Was All The Investigative Journalism On US Airstrikes The Last 20 Years? — Caitlin Johnstone: The Pentagon doesn’t care that it snuffed out innocent lives in an airstrike; it does that all the time and its officials would do it a lot more if that’s what it took to secure their futures as lobbyists, consultants, board members and executives for defense industry corporations after they retire from the military. And the mass media don’t care either; they only cared about this one particular highly politicized airstrike during a withdrawal from a military engagement the mass media vehemently opposed. […] Think about all the murder victims we’d have known about if the news media had done its job and used their immense resources to investigate them as journalists should over the last twenty years. Think about how much harder it would have been for the war machine to inflict these evils upon the world if they had.
• A line in the water — Peter Mares, Inside Story: With the world watching in horror as the window closes on evacuation efforts at Kabul airport, it’s hard to avoid the comparison with another drama, twenty years ago, involving Afghans fleeing a Taliban regime. The window to safety was blocked back then, too, but it was closer to home, on the waters around Christmas Island.
• Dinosaur Comics — by Ryan North:
  
• Kidnapping, assassination and a London shoot-out: Inside the CIA's secret war plans against WikiLeaks — Zach Dorfman, Sean D. Naylor and Michael Isikoff for Yahoo! News: In 2017, as Julian Assange began his fifth year holed up in Ecuador’s embassy in London, the CIA plotted to kidnap the WikiLeaks founder, spurring heated debate among Trump administration officials over the legality and practicality of such an operation. Some senior officials inside the CIA and the Trump administration even discussed killing Assange, going so far as to request “sketches” or “options” for how to assassinate him. Discussions over kidnapping or killing Assange occurred “at the highest levels” of the Trump administration, said a former senior counterintelligence official. “There seemed to be no boundaries.”
• Jeff Bezos’s date with Boris Johnson didn’t prove all that taxing — David Mitchell in the Guardian: The New York meeting with Bezos was extensively trailed in advance as an occasion when the prime minister would confront the world’s richest man on the issue of taxation. “Boris Johnson to address Amazon’s tax record with Jeff Bezos,” promised the Guardian; “Johnson’s taxing questions for Amazon,” warned the Times. Brace yourselves, Manhattan, the straight-talking Etonian is on his way! It didn’t quite work out like that. For a start, Jeff Bezos and his partner, Lauren Sánchez, were late. Was it gamesmanship or traffic? Traffic was blamed and there will have been traffic, but there’s always traffic. And the lateness played well in two ways: first Johnson was left waiting so seemed junior, and second Bezos showed himself vulnerable to traffic so seemed human. Despite his stratospheric wealth, he hadn’t arrived punctually, borne by chopper or drone or sewer crocodile. For the man whose stylist appears to have last worked with Donald Pleasence on You Only Live Twice, this was a refreshingly normal look.