After years of stonewalling, the U.S. Defense Department has released the names of people imprisoned at the notorious Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. Made available in response to an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, the...
I spent Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday in Washington, D.C., as part of the Witness Against Torture fast, which campaigns to end all forms of torture and has worked steadily for an end to the indefinite detention of people imprisoned in Guantanamo, Bagram, and...
A just-released U.S. State Department inspector general's report [.pdf] on Blackwater's work in Afghanistan reveals that Blackwater is proposing increasing its private armed forces in Afghanistan, particularly in Mazar-e-Sharif and Herat where the U.S. is opening...
Parts I and II discussed how our counterinsurgency doctrine's requirements for a reliable host-nation government, a reliable host-nation security force, and reliable intelligence are impossible to achieve in our present wars. The third and final part of the series...
President Barack Obama is said to feel he is in trouble politically because his enemies in Congress and among the Washington journalists who decide what the "mood" of Washington is on any given day say he is not tough enough. This is the kind of mind reading...
The U.S. military's fabled counterinsurgency field manual (FM 3-24) is an authoritative-sounding 281-page volume of balderdash. Even the legend of its origin is a fabrication. Gen. David Petraeus, former commander of forces in Iraq and now in charge of Central...
The quiet American was the hero of Graham Greene's novel about the first Vietnam War, the one fought by the French. He was a young and naïve American, a professor's son who had enjoyed a good education at Harvard, an idealist with all the best intentions. When he...
It was a Christmas and New Year's from hell for American intelligence, that $75 billion labyrinth of at least 16 major agencies and a handful of minor ones. As the old year was preparing to be rung out, so were our intelligence agencies, which managed not to connect...
Afghanistan and the U.S. military escalation in the civil war there dominated foreign-related news coverage by the three major U.S. television networks in 2009, according to the latest annual review by the authoritative Tyndall Report. Despite the continued presence...
