“The days and weeks surrounding the anniversary are a moment for all Bahrainis in all segments of society to come together to move beyond the pain of last year and begin to forge a more peaceful, prosperous future through genuine dialogue,” Michael Posner, U.S. assistant secretary of said on Thursday.

But actions are louder than words, and the Bahraini dictatorship surely heard Obama’s $1 million dollars in arms sale louder than the urge for restraint.

The Obama administration has quietly moved forward with a new package of arms sales to the regime in Bahrain, after international pressure forced them to delay its planned $53 million arms sale. Using legal loopholes that only require congressional authorization for sales of $1 million or more, the administration split the arms package and moved forward with the new sales without notifying the public.

Human Rights Watch has condemned Obama’s support for this repression, saying in a press release that the “decision to move forward on a $1 million arms sale to Bahrain sends the wrong signal to a country that is engaged in serious human rights abuses.”

U.S. support for Bahrain has remained assertive throughout its violent repression of Arab Spring protesters, allocating another $26 million in aid for 2012. Bahrain is the host of the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet, which directs operations in the Persian Gulf and patrols the Straits of Hormuz, through which 40 percent of the world’s seaborne oil passes.

Instead, the number of terror indictments is actually dropping, to the point where they are nearly non-existent: 20 in 2011. Perhaps the most high profile domestic terrorism case of 2011 was a man making an online threat against the creators of South Park. The rest are even less impressive.

Click here to read more on terror hysteria at Christian Science Monitor

US Marines were more than half of the cases, reflecting their increased deployment on the ground in Afghanistan, where IED attacks continue to be a major source of casualties.

The Pentagon, as ever, tried to put a silver lining on the amputation cloud, saying that the number of soldiers losing limbs reflected improvements in medical treatment on the battlefield that made this “the most survivable war in the history of combat.”

Click here to read more from Stars and Stripes

The Philippine Senate forced the closure of major U.S. military bases in the country, but the U.S. military presence in the Philippines has not gone away since then. A 1999 agreement allowed hundreds of American troops to return in 2002 to train and arm Filipino soldiers fighting domestic militants allegedly linked to al-Qaeda.

The Obama administration initiated an effort with the Filipino government with the aim of increasing access for U.S. warships and air force and possible for joint war drills, although reports say full U.S. bases will not be reopened.

This is part of a broader imperial plan to counter China’s regional influence and an expanded military presence in the region with bases, troops, and navy warships in Australia and Singapore. The announcement also coincides with diplomatic and military friction in the South China Sea over its oil-rich Spratly Islands, which are subject to disputed claims by China, the Philippines and other Southeast Asian nations.

Protecting an oil rig will actually be one of the exercises the Philippines performs with the U.S. military starting this spring. ”This area is vital to the United States,” Chief of U.S. Naval Operations Admiral Jonathan Greenert said recently. “It’s been an area vital to our navy and our focus for decades, because of… the trade routes, the large economies.”

Maintaining U.S. military and economic hegemony in Asia-Pacific has been a rising concern of the national security establishment for some time now. The U.S. currently has key military bases in South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, Guam, and now Australia.

Many types of weapons went missing. The Tuareg mercenaries showed up in northern Mali sporting shiny new assault rifles for their insurgency. For the US, however, the focus has been on the SA-24 shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles.

The SA-24s are portable and designed to target aircraft. This has made them a much desired commodity for the various militant groups in the region. Experts say that Libya had enough of these weapons to turn the northern half of Africa into one big no-fly zone.

The US scrambled, getting officials on the ground to try to find the weapons. But the short answer is they never did find them, and claims that it was “mostly secured” appear not to have been true.

And while the US will probably keep looking just for lack of anything better to do, State Department officials are now conceding that they “probably never will” know how many missiles went missing or where they ended up. At least until those weapons start being used against aircraft in the area.

Ghozlan says the junta should acknowledge the results of the parliamentary elections and appoint a representative of the Brotherhood-run Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) as prime minister, charged with forming a new government.

The FJP overwhelmingly won the parliamentary election, and would theoretically, in a parliamentary system, be charged with forming a government. The problem is Egypt isn’t necessarily a parliamentary system, and until the constitution is penned it isn’t really clear what the system actually is.

The junta has used the ambiguous form of Egypt’s system of government to justify keeping a tight grip on power. Even the parliamentary election, nominally to pick people to write the absent constitution, has been rejected by the junta as “non-representative.”

In November, U.S. airstrikes destroyed a Pakistani outpost killing 24 Pakistani soldiers. Following that, the government in Islamabad closed NATO’s ground supply routes in southeastern Pakistan in a punitive move to impede America’s ability to provide for the troops occupying neighboring Afghanistan.

Munter also said on Thursday that there should to be a mechanism in place to stop a future mistake like the one that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers, reiterating that the attack was not pre-planned and was unintentional.

But the continued use of Pakistani territory, in contravention of the spirit of Islamabad’s initial closure of the supply routes, is exactly the kind of disrespect for Pakistani sovereignty that Islamabad blames the November attack on and has been so angry about in the past.

Supply routes are not the only issue Pakistan has expressed anger about. They also object, at least publicly, to America’s drone war in the northwest frontier provinces, arguing it violates their sovereignty. The Obama administration has harmed diplomatic relations with Pakistan considerably since taking office, which has helped the war in Afghanistan remain a stalemate.

Violence is undoubtedly on the rise in Syria, but the actual story on the ground is almost impossible to divine, with the opposition telling tales of wholesale slaughter of civilians and Syrian state media claiming regular terrorist attacks, and the battles between the two getting almost no press in favor of stories that will play better in speeches at the UN.

In many ways, the truth on the ground is not only shrouded in mystery but is very much beside the point, and an incipient civil war between the Turkey-backed FSA and the Assad regime is really neither here nor there for policymakers. The decision to intervene has already been made, and whatever stories rhetorically necessary to transform the local dictator into some reasonable facsimile of Hitler or Stalin will be found.

The formula is, despite some claims to the contrary from hawks, very much a redux of Libya. Indeed, those who haven’t quite come to concede what a train wreck the Libya intervention proved to be are still unapologetically citing it as an example to be applied to Syria.

While just a few days ago everyone was insisting the military option was very much “off the table,” the Pentagon is hard at work preparing for the war many see as inevitable. Turkey, the NATO member nation most eager to send ground troops, has already rejected sanctions as “pointless” while condemning Russia for backing Assad.

The extent to which Syria is “not Libya” is that Libya has already happened and does not seem so good for the hawks in retrospect. Russia and China went from being skeptical on Libya to appalled at how quickly the mission morphed to full regime change, and are determined not to see a repeat in Syria. This has made selling the war harder for hawks, but has not changed the basic strategy.

The attack was the second strike in two days, with another on Wednesday that killed 8 people. The back-to-back strikes could signal a complete end to the hiatus that occurred after American airstrikes killed 24 Pakistani soldiers in November. The Obama administration halted drone strikes for about six weeks, and has slowly restarted them since January.

The identities of the 11 people killed in two days are not known publicly. U.S. policy is typically to refer to anyone who has been killed by drones as “terrorists,” whether they are or not.

The drone program kills large numbers of civilians and creates significant tension between the U.S. and Pakistani governments. Islamabad demanded Washington stop bombing their country immediately after the political fallout resulting from the November airstrikes on Pakistani outposts.

The Obama administration has launched hundreds of strikes in the past few years, despite the drone campaign resting on very shaky legal and moral ground. Naz Modirzadeh, Associate Director of the Program on Humanitarian Policy and Conflict Research (HPCR) at Harvard University,  was interviewed by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and said killing people at a rescue site may have no legal justification.

“Not to mince words here, if it is not in a situation of armed conflict, unless it falls into the very narrow area of imminent threat then it is an extra-judicial execution,” she said. “We don’t even need to get to the nuance of who’s who, and are people there for rescue or not. Because each death is illegal. Each death is a murder in that case.”

NATO would only “confirm there has been a situation,” while promising to send a “joint NATO assessment team” to find out exactly what happened and how. So far the nationality of the warplane has not been identified.

The details of the attack are not entirely clear. Kapisa Governor Mehrabuddin Safi said the strike hit the Giawa village, and other officials said there may have been a night raid in the area shortly before the strike.

Karzai has deployed his own team to the district to investigate the killings, promising a “all-out probe” in a statement released earlier today. A number of MPs are part of the delegation being sent, and it is just one more in a long line of embarrassing incidents straining Afghan-NATO ties.