Want to learn how Jack Bauer ought to get terrorists to divulge information against their interests? Check out Interrogations Central, a website launched last week by “Matthew Alexander,” a pseudonymous interrogator whose non-torturous interrogations contributed to the successful hunting and killing of the Iraq-based terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in More…
Buried on page B-2 of an annex in Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s Aug. 30 strategic assessment of the Afghanistan war is a vague promise about how he will run it. “Draft C2 guidance for command and control of special operations forces will be issued soon,” McChrystal writes. That forthcoming order will More…
The following quote was emailed to me by Matthew Alexander, the pseudonym of a military interrogator and vocal torture opponent who helped track down Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq killed in 2006. A veteran of three wars and the Special Forces community, Alexander claims to More…
Two senior military officers from the shadowy world of Special Operations are playing a large and previously unreported role in shaping the Obama administration’s Afghanistan and Pakistan strategy, a move that underscores that the internal debate has moved past a rigid choice between expansive missions to provide security for Afghan More…
For a different take on the Beitullah Mehsud killing, commenter Abujeeyun has a great series of observations counterbalancing my own. We got into a bit of a discussion comparing Mehsud’s death to the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi of al-Qaeda in Iraq.
Here’s Abujeeyun’s comment in full:
A long,
I truly hope that CIA drones actually did kill Beitullah Mehsud. As leader of the Pakistani Taliban, he has a massive amount of blood on his hands. But I think my friend Annie Lowery is wrong about this:
If Mehsud is dead (and keep in mind, it’s been
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