Defense & Security Archive

U.S. authorities are pushing forward with a newly designed system of special military tribunals to try suspected terrorists detained at the U.S. Naval Base Guantanamo Bay. With the first cases expected to be announced this month, it remains to be seen whether such high-level suspects as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the accused mastermind behind the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, will be on the docket. Congress passed legislation calling for the new system in September, after President George W. Bush announced the transfer of KSM to Guantanamo, and after the U.S. Supreme Court deemed an earlier tribunal system set up […]

When Joe Mason’s 10-year-old daughter saw electricity for the first time in her life, she danced. The years of war, 1989 to 2003, ruined the public power supply in this capital. Liberians with means relied on generators; those without money, however, lived in the dark. Given her father earns $90 a month as a hotel clerk, Mason’s daughter could not have known what electricity was until President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf turned it on in July 2006, illuminating the lamps on Monrovia’s major streets. “A new day,” Mason said. But more than six months later, the electricity that powers those lights […]

The Bush administration’s current suspicion that Iran plans to manufacture nuclear weapons is not the first time that Washington has faced such intentions from Tehran, but earlier the circumstances were different. In the late 1970s, U.S. intelligence learned that Iran’s ruler, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, had secretly set up a nuclear weapons development program. According to the Washington-based Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, between 1974 and 1978 the Iranians were carrying out “laboratory experiments in which plutonium was extracted from spent [nuclear] fuel using chemical agents.” Plutonium is an ingredient for nuclear weapons. The difference between then and now […]

On Jan. 17, 2007, Philippines military chief Gen. Hermogenes Esperon confirmed that Abu Sulaiman, a senior leader of the Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG), died the previous day during a fierce gun battle with government troops on Jolo Island. His death represents a major blow to one of the world’s most notorious terror organizations. Abu Sayyaf (“Father of the Sword”) is primarily an indigenous movement based in the Muslim-dominated regions of the southern Philippines. Its stated goal is to promote an independent Islamic state encompassing western Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago, areas of the southern Philippines heavily populated by Moro Muslims, […]

Despite flat oil exports and a struggling economy, Iraq has embarked on a comprehensive program to re-arm its embattled security forces. The country is buying American patrol planes, Italian naval vessels, Russian helicopters and armored vehicles co-produced by American and British firms. The new equipment is utilitarian stuff — optimized for patrols in and over Iraq’s teeming cities and on its smuggler-infested waters rather than for attacks on external foes — and reflects the complete inward focus of Iraq’s military. But the purchases do little to solve the forces’ nearly complete lack of logistics capability. In early January, working through […]