“They are screwing these two guys,” the first U.S. defense official said of the field commanders.
“They were looking for heads,” the second American defense official said. “It’s a travesty.”
Penalizing the pair is even more egregious, the U.S. defense officials and the former NATO official said, because their plans to close the outposts were consistent with [...]

A major new report on secret detention policies (.doc) around the world, conducted by four independent UN human rights experts, concludes that, “On a global scale, secret detention in connection with counter-terrorist policies remains a serious problem,” and, “If resorted to in a widespread and systematic manner, secret detention might reach the threshold of a crime [...]

It’s a question that rarely gets asked: from where does the Obama administration locate the legal authority to launch missiles from the CIA’s unmanned drones into Pakistani (and, this week, Afghan) territory? The ACLU wants to know.
The civil liberties group today filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the CIA and the Departments of [...]

As Sachs wrote last May in The Guardian newspaper of London, U.S. foreign policy “has failed in recent years mainly because the U.S. has relied on military force to address problems that demand development assistance and diplomacy. Young men become fighters in places such as Sudan, Somalia, Pakistan and Afghanistan because they lack gainful employment. [...]

In any event, the ICC’s very existence is already changing the way Western nations fights wars. Mr. Ocampo recounted how a legal adviser to NATO told him that troops these days are trained to realize that, in case of transgressions, they could be arrested and brought to the ICC on war crimes charges with the help of evidence [...]

Months after the controversial presidential election that many Afghans consider stolen, there is no cabinet, and parliament is threatening to go on recess before confirming a new one because the president is unconstitutionally late in presenting the names. There are grave suspicions that some past and present cabinet members have engaged in the embezzlement of [...]

Look, there’s Dick – the guy who had absolutely no clue or care about Afghanistan for eight years – attacking Obama for supposedly employing the Bush administration’s strategy there, or at least one “bearing a striking resemblance to the strategy we passed to them”.
Really? Does that mean Obama will appropriate other groundbreaking national security stratagems [...]