A pair of US drone strikes in the North and South Waziristan tribal agencies of Pakistan killed 22 people today. Many of them appear to have been militants, but at least four of them were also children. The attacks, the first of President Obama’s fledgling administration, and the responses in their aftermath suggest that, in [...]
“The time is right for Marines to leave Iraq,” US Marine Corps Commandant General James Conway told reporters today, complaining that the situation in Iraq is “a nation-building kind of environment” and “that is not what we do.” Instead Conway believes the roughly 22,000 Marines in Iraq should be withdrawn, with the vast majority of [...]
A pair of missile strikes from American drones into Pakistan’s North and South Waziristan Agencies have killed at least 20 people, and injured an unknown number of others. This marks the first cross-border attack by US forces since President Obama took office on Tuesday. Three missiles were fired at a house and another nearby building [...]
The Sri Lankan military continues to press its advantage in the long-standing conflict against the separatist north, and while they seem to be gaining considerable momentum, an increasingly bloody military victory seems likely to complicate attempts to quiet the separatist sentiment. The latest complain today came from Sri Lankan health officials, who say that the [...]
Even if President Obama’s order to close the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay will have at best a superficial effect on America’s detention program, the news of its eventual closure was greeted by a worldwide expression of relief. In another year, one of America’s most public embarrassments in the war on terror will be nothing [...]
Promising that “a new era of American leadership is at hand,” President Barack Obama has promised that the United States “will not torture” detainees. A series of presidential orders will outlaw rendition flights, order the closings of the CIA’s “black sites,” and outlaw the use of coercive interrogations, physical abuse, and waterboarding. The move has [...]
As recently as yesterday, Obama aides were treating the president’s campaign promise for a 16-month timetable to withdraw from Iraq as a working plan. It didn’t take long for what many voters assumed was a firm commitment to become, in the parlance of the previous administration, an aspirational time horizon. Indeed, while his Defense Secretary [...]
UN human rights expert and retired Princeton law professor Richard Falk said today that there is compelling evidence that Israel violated the laws of war by “conducting a large-scale military operation against an essentially defenseless population.” “There needs to be an investigation carried out under independent auspices as to whether these grave breaches of the [...]
The United Nations is pressuring Israel for a more plausible explanation for why so many of their facilities were attacked during the 22-day war on the Gaza Strip. Those attacks caused scores of civilian casualties, just some of the thousands of civilians killed and injured, and there is no shortage of Gazans who are waiting [...]
Updated 1/22/09 12:00 PM EST A newly drafted executive order signed by President Barack Obama will fulfill a campaign promise to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay. The order will require the facility to close within a year. The facility where detainees were held often on little if any evidence was a symbol of [...]
