In yet another dose of doublespeak from the US military, Admiral Mike Mullen said of the recent increase in violence in southern Afghanistan, There are going to be these kinds of spikes, in particular these spectacular assassinations. There are some who believe this...
Human Rights Watch recently drew our attention to a recent spate of killings by armed groups in Colombia, gone virtually unreported here. On July 2, members of the Marxist guerrilla group Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) murdered seven civilians. FARC is...
As I've written earlier, al-Shabaab is competing for the title of "Terror Group of the Month" with al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Thanks to America's collective, short-term memory loss, the Underwear Bomber and printer bomb plot have been all but forgotten....
A couple weeks ago, Human Right Watch issued a report calling for a criminal investigation of Bush administration officials for the illegal regime of torture and detainee mistreatment implemented following the attack of September 11th. The report recommends the...
Jason Ditz reported today on the contradictory claims simultaneously coming from the government about al Qaeda's strength or weakness now and going forward. Chris Preble has a related post up at Cato: A front-page story in today’s Washington Post reports that al Qaeda...
In yet another attempt at destabilizing Iran, Hillary Clinton will soon announce a decision by US State Department on whether or not to remove Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), or "the people's holy warriors," from its terrorism registry. Trita Parsi, president of the National...
Last week I reported on an "audit by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction [which] concluded that lack of oversight or control of where money is disbursed has left vast sums of U.S. aid “vulnerable to fraud or diversion to insurgents.” Today...
Arguments both for and against, say the war in Iraq, or in Afghanistan, tend to get clouded by whatever tangential political vocabulary is popular in any given week or month (surgical determinations of troops levels, robustness of U.S.-trained security forces,...
Der Spiegel has an account of the ideological roots and political networks from which Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivek was influenced: Such blogs provide a window into a strange scene: pro-Western, exceedingly pro-American and friendly to Israel -- but extremely...
It's now almost two months since the sternest congressional resolution against Obama's war in Libya and against the pathetic legal argument employed to circumvent the War Powers Resolution failed, losing out to John Boehner's resolution asking Obama to pretty please...
