A Nato air strike in the Libyan capital, Tripoli, has killed the son and three grandsons of the Libyan leader, Colonel Gaddafi, a government spokesman has said

The Blackwater Nisour Square shooting prosecution may be back on for now, but I would not be surprised in the least to see the case dismissed again. Here is why.

The Independent reveals what we’ve always known: the Iraq War was about oil. Or rather, there were significant discussions in Fall 2002–the period when the US and UK were busy lying us into war–about who would get Iraq’s oil. (h/t Susie) The article describes BP’s judgment that Iraq was “the big oil prospect. BP is [...]

There was a weird period last spring, as all the fearmongering in the country focused on the underwear bomber sitting in a jail just nineteen miles from me, after the autopsy of an African American imam in Detroit raised new questions about FBI’s pursuit of him as a terrorist, and after some of the only [...]

Today, David Cloud portrays the vignette of the cold, detached remote killing in the Afghanistan countryside. Tomorrow it will be open ground in the vicinity of Nogales, Ciudad Juarez, Tijuana or Key West. Hammers like this, once set in motion and cravenly unrestrained by the men in American political leadership and White House, always find more nails. Stay tuned, drone life and remote enforcement is coming to a city and town near you.

I’m going to have more to say about the Libya memo the Administration released yesterday. But I just wanted to point out something about the structure of it. Here’s the first paragraph: This memorandum memorializes advice this Office provided to you, prior to the commencement of recent United States military operations in Libya, regarding the [...]

CNN is reporting that Curt Weldon, the ethically and legally challenged former Congressman with ties to Manucher Ghorbanifar, has gone to Libya to try to negotiate with Muammar Qaddafi. In a NYT op-ed, Weldon makes the case for why he’s the guy to persuade Qaddafi to step aside. Seven years later I am back in [...]

At first, when I read this story describing how Hamid Karzai’s government is insisting that a bunch of security contractors pay back taxes before he’ll recertify them to work in Afghanistan, I though it was just out of a desire to get rid of contractors. The Afghan government issued its unexpected tax demand last month, [...]

This is horrible. Protesters angered by the burning of a Koran by a fringe American pastor in Florida mobbed offices of the United Nations in northern Afghanistan on Friday, killing ten foreign staff members and beheading two of the victims, according to an Afghan police spokesman. Five Afghans were also killed. The attack began when [...]

Mark Hosenball, who yesterday broke the news that Obama had issued a Finding authorizing the CIA to operate covertly in Libya in the last 2-3 weeks, today says “intelligence operatives” were on the ground before Obama signed that Finding. U.S. intelligence operatives were on the ground in Libya before President Barack Obama signed a secret [...]