Today, the National Security and Foreign Affairs Subcommittee of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform held a hearing called “The Rise Of The Drones II: Examining The Legality Of Unmanned Targeting.”* The hearing addressed the legality of the use of unmanned systems (i.e. drones) in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Pakistani border regions, and elsewhere. The [...]

The father of Anwar al-Awlaki, a Yemeni religious scholar who has reportedly been added to a US hit list, says his son will halt his anti-US messages if Washington removes him from the list. Al-Awlaki, accused by the US of having links to al-Qaeda’s Yemeni offshoot, was added to the CIA’s list of targets to be killed [...]

Anwar al-Aulaqi, a U.S.-born and educated citizen now residing in Yemen, has become the first American to be placed on a CIA assassination list targeting suspected terrorists. Al-Aulaqi surfaced as a controversial figure after it was learned that the Fort Hood shooter, U.S. Army Major Nidal Hasan, had corresponded with him. He also praised Hasan after [...]

Aside from the underlying issues–such as that some if not most of the interrogators in question are contractors who were working for Mitchell and Jessen, the fact that their identities are obvious enough for hippie human rights lawyers to discover them, and the fact that (contrary to Gertz’ use of the word “terrorist” throughout) some [...]

The theological justification for al Qaeda’s wholesale slaughter of civilians was provided by Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, also known as Dr. Fadl, one of the founding fathers of al Qaeda. Because the murder of innocents is forbidden in Islam and the murder of Muslims in particular, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden required some sort of [...]

Dick Cheney seems to have a kind of Tourette’s problem, where he blurts out ugly words about Obama for no reason other than perhaps a medical one. He has Politico on speed dial and just erupts. The latest is his familiar terrorphobe tune, this time about Yemen. True: We and the world have a problem. [...]

The suicide bomber who killed eight people at a CIA compound in Afghanistan last week was a Jordanian who had been recruited by that nation’s intelligence service to help U.S. spy agencies penetrate Al Qaeda, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official. [...] The disclosure that the most deadly incident in recent CIA history [...]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yR1APfnXsY0[/youtube] Alan Grayson talks about health care and the wars, costs in terms of money and lives ($3T and thousands of lives, American and others), Al Qaeda, and the perpetuation of death and debt. “How do we ask an American soldier to be the last to die in Afghanistan and Iraq?” he asks, paraphrasing the same [...]

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 [...]

President Barack Obama appears set to approve a dramatic increase in troops in Afghanistan. The original goal of the U.S. effort there was to find and capture Osama bin Laden. Why is Washington not still seeking the man who allegedly masterminded the attack on American on Sept. 11, 2001? In an Oct. 7, 2008, debate, [...]

At a covert forward operating base run by the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, members of an elite division of Blackwater are at the center of a secret program in which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, “snatch and grabs” of high-value [...]