War on Terror news stories on Newser

Our Dirty Drone War Must End

Evann Gastaldo — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 13:13:37 CST

Before 9/11, if the US president had announced that the government was going to "play God, reaching down from our high-tech heaven to kill whoever we want, whenever we want, wherever we want"—including US citizens, without a trial—the news would have been met with uproar. But that is...

US Restarts Drone Attacks, Kills 4 in Pakistan Strike

Kevin Spak — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 07:10:44 CST

The US' drone war in Pakistan is back on. The US launched its first strike last night since a November attack that killed 28 Pakistani soldiers and ratcheted the already fraught tensions between the two nations to a new high. The attack hit a North Waziristan home just before midnight,...

Obama Signs Defense Bill Despite 'Reservations'

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 17:42:43 CST

President Barack Obama signed a wide-ranging defense bill into law today despite having "serious reservations" about provisions that regulate the detention, interrogation and prosecution of suspected terrorists. The bill also applies penalties against Iran's central bank in an effort to hamper Tehran's ability to fund its nuclear enrichment program. The...

Obama Throws Away Civil Liberties With Defense Bill

Kevin Spak — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 13:58:25 CST

President Obama is taking a lot of heat today for dropping his threat to veto a controversial defense bill that could allow the military to capture and indefinitely detain American citizens on US soil. In a fiery editorial, the New York Times today called it "a complete political cave-in, one...

Angry Pakistan Orders US to Vacate Air Base

Mark Russell — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 17:03:29 CST

Pakistan reacted to a NATO airstrike that killed up to 28 Pakistani soldiers today by telling the US to evacuate an air base it uses to stage military operations, MSNBC reports. Fuming over the violation of sovereignty, Pakistan also halted convoys of fuel and equipment headed to NATO bases in...

Commando-Style DEA Squads Fight Cartels Abroad

Evann Gastaldo — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 07:31:10 CST

The war on drugs meets the war on terror: In 2008, George W. Bush started a DEA program called FAST (Foreign-deployed Advisory Support Team), meant to investigate Afghanistan drug traffickers linked to the Taliban. The program continued under President Obama, and now includes five military-trained squads of special agents that...

Amnesty International to Canada: Bust Bush

Rob Quinn — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 04:35:00 CDT

George W. Bush is visiting Canada next week and international law requires the country to arrest him for torture and war crimes ... according to Amnesty International. The group has sent a thousand-page memorandum to Canadian authorities explaining why the former president should be behind bars, Politico reports. Bush's own memoirs...

US to Build Huge New Prison in Afghanistan

Kevin Spak — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 12:30:05 CDT

The Obama administration is supposedly determined to cut hundreds of billions in spending, so it struck Glenn Greenwald of Salon as ironic when he noticed that the military last week started soliciting bids for the construction of a massive prison in Bagram, Afghanistan. The facility is to hold approximately 2,...

US Did Not 'Overreact' to 9/11

John Johnson — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 11:18:38 CDT

Charles Krauthammer issues an emphatic rebuttal to what he calls the "new conventional wisdom" about 9/11—that the US overreacted and brought upon itself a ruinous decade of war and financial misery. "Rubbish," he writes in the Washington Post . Al-Qaeda is on the brink of failure and Osama bin Laden...