The commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan has delivered his long-awaited review of the war to his bosses in Brussels and the Pentagon. Gen. Stanley McChrystal says success can be achieved, but with a revised strategy. The call for a new strategy comes as US forces continue to suffer casualties, with August being [...]
The way I see it, President Obama has a couple of months to turn his failing administration around. The war in Afghanistan is going south, and within a couple of weeks, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, Obama’s version of Lyndon Johnson’s General William Westmoreland, will be coming to him asking for more troops. Things are getting hairier in Iraq too.
President Barack Obama has staked his presidency on winning his “necessary” war in Afghanistan. Coming into office, one of his first acts, on Feb. 18, was to boost US troop levels in that country by 17,000, bringing the total number of soldiers and Marines in the country to about 57,000, to which one must also [...]
The United States is stepping up its military offensives in Afghanistan; however, a recent attack on a Taliban-held town in Southern Afghanistan was met with fierce resistance, signifying that the Taliban probably knew about the American attack beforehand. This may not come as a surprise, considering top US commanders say that the Taliban is gaining [...]
Rejecting arguments from both the Bush and Obama administrations, a federal judge has ordered the release of an Afghani who may have been as young as 12 when he was detained 6 ½ years ago for allegedly wounding two U.S. soldiers and an Afghan translator by throwing a grenade at their unmarked jeep. U.S. District [...]
Faced with impending defeat in a U.S. District Court habeas corpus case, the Obama administration devised a new strategy for continuing the detention of Mohammed Jawad, an Afghani who may have been as young as 12 in 2002 when he allegedly wounded two U.S. soldiers with a grenade. Justice Department lawyers announced Friday that they [...]
A prominent human rights group is calling on the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate why the administration of former President George W. Bush blocked three different probes into war crimes in Afghanistan where as many as 2,000 surrendered Taliban fighters were reportedly suffocated in container trucks and then buried in a mass grave by [...]
A new report documenting the torture of more than two-dozen former prisoners held at Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan between 2002 and 2008 comes several months after a bipartisan congressional committee linked the murder of two detainees held at the same prison facility to policies enacted by George W. Bush and ex-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. [...]
Editor’s note: In a world exclusive, Andy Worthington, author of the groundbreaking book The Guantánamo Files, reveals new information, from a source in Libya, about Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the former US “ghost prisoner” who died in a Libyan jail last month, focusing, in particular, on the prisons in which he was held, and the ways [...]
