Dissension over Adm. Mike Mullen’s accusation that the Haqqani network of Afghan insurgents is a "veritable arm" of Pakistan’s intelligence agency and the revelation that a U.S. official met with a Haqqani official have provided new evidence of a long-simmering struggle within the Barack Obama administration over how to deal with the most effective element …
Continue reading “Debate on Haqqani: Military or Political Solution?”
The Latest in Guarding the Empire
If it is actually true that those whom the gods seek to destroy they first make mad, it would seem that the insanity process has at its epicenter the White House. How else to explain the various bits and pieces of counterterrorism policy that have been revealed over the past two weeks? A Sept. 15 …
Continue reading “Robo-Death: Made in the USA”
Justin Raimondo on the drone wars
From the coups that ousted Mohammed Mossadegh, Jacobo Arbenz, and Salvador Allende in the Cold War to the waterboarding of suspected terrorists in the Global War on Terror, the CIA has built a solid reputation as an extralegal agent of international sabotage and murder. Since the agency’s creation in 1947, successive U.S. presidents and their …
Continue reading “The CIA’s Selective Secrecy”
When David Petraeus walks into the Central Intelligence Agency today, he will be taking over an organization whose mission has changed in recent years from gathering and analyzing intelligence to waging military campaigns through drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. But the transformation of the CIA did not simply follow the expansion of the …
Continue reading “CIA’s Push for Drone War Driven by Internal Needs”
For decades the U.S. military has waged clandestine war on virtually every continent on the globe, but for the first time, high-ranking Special Operations Forces (SOF) officers are moving out of the shadows and into the command mainstream. Their emergence suggests the U.S. is embarking on a military sea change that will replace massive deployments, …
Continue reading “Shadow Warriors: Movin’ On Up”
ISLAMABAD — Pakistani civilian and military leaders are insisting on an effective veto over which targets U.S. drone strikes hit, according to well-informed Pakistani military sources here. The sources, who met with IPS on condition that they not be identified, said that such veto power over the conduct of the drone war is a central …
Continue reading “Why Pakistan Demands a Veto on Drone Strikes”
As the Pakistani public grows increasingly outraged at the United States’ drone attacks in the northwest region of the country, a recent study by the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism is contradicting U.S. officials’ insistence that "not a single civilian life" has been claimed in the covert war. Led by British investigative journalist Chris Woods …
Continue reading “Study Rebuts US Claims of ‘No Civilian Deaths’ in Pakistan Drone Strikes”
The expansion (and contraction) of great empires has long been driven by tactical and strategic “asymmetries” in the conduct of war. Norman archers overcame sword- and spear-wielding Anglo-Saxons at Hastings in 1066. Musket- and rifle-bearing Europeans slaughtered Native Americans opposing them with bows and arrows. And vast fleets of heavy bombers laid both Japan and …
Continue reading “Perfect Asymmetry: The Predator and the Suicide Bomber” 
