World and Nation

Shorts (left)

Hero dog from fghan base is killed by mistake in Arizona

FLORENCE, AZ — When a suicide bomber entered a U.S. military barracks in Afghanistan in February, it was not American soldiers but Afghan stray dogs that confronted him. Target and two other dogs snarled, barked and snapped at the man, who detonated his bomb at the entrance to the facility but did not kill anyone.

The dogs were from the Dand Aw Patan district, in the eastern Paktia province near the Pakistani border. One died of wounds suffered in the blast, and months later, Target and the other dog were flown to the United States by a charity and adopted by families. Target — who received a hero’s welcome, including an appearance on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” — went to live with the family of Sgt. Terry Young, 37, an Army medic who witnessed the animals’ bravery that night and helped treat the dogs and several U.S. soldiers who were wounded.

The glory, though, was short-lived. Target, after learning to get along with the Young family’s other dog in Arizona, becoming accustomed to dog food and to using a doggie door to relieve herself, escaped from her yard. She was captured last week and euthanized by mistake.

“My 4-year-old keeps saying: ‘Daddy, bring Target home. Daddy, get the poison out,’” Young, a father of three, said in a telephone interview, his voice choking with emotion. “Obviously, at first there was extreme anger and horror. Now that a couple of days have passed, the anger has been replaced by sorrow.”

—Marc Lacey, The New York Times

Masked military man is superhero for troops

WASHINGTON — Faster than a fleeting bullet point in an Army briefing slide. Able to leap Pentagon jargon in a single bound. While he’s not a classic superhero like the Man of Steel, he’s certainly a man of irony.

Meet Doctrine Man, an Army officer’s cartoon creation, a caped crusader whose escapades battling military bureaucracy have attracted an Internet cult following, small but devoted and expanding among troops around the globe.

It is penned anonymously and posted to a Facebook page, but the comic strip can be seen taped to cubicles at the Pentagon and at military headquarters by those who identify with Doctrine Man’s campaign against large institutions flying on autopilot over a rapidly changing and dangerous world.

And, unexpectedly, Doctrine Man has become host of an unofficial Web forum helping young soldiers navigate the military system — most queries are on how to manage new assignments and new commanders — while offering a few chuckles along the way.

—Thom Shanker, The New York Times

Civilian trial of terror suspect lent no stage on torture

One of the striking aspects of the case of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, the first former Guantanamo detainee tried in a civilian court, was how little the federal jury in New York City heard about the issues that had made his case so fiercely debated.

The jurors heard nothing about the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where Ghailani had been held, nor about the secret overseas “black site” run by the CIA, where, his lawyers say, he had been tortured.

The jury also was not told about statements Ghailani had made to interrogators before he was brought into the civilian court system, statements that prosecutors say “amount to a confession” of his role in the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa, killing 224 people.

—Benjamin Weiser and Charlie Savage, The New York Times