Seven U.S. troops have died in weekend attacks in Afghanistan's embattled southern and eastern regions, NATO said Sunday.
U.S. and Afghan troops repelled attackers wearing American uniforms and suicide vests in a pair of simultaneous assaults before dawn Saturday on NATO bases near the Pakistani border, including one where seven CIA employees died in a suicide attack last year.
The Obama administration on Friday accused an analyst who worked at the State Department of leaking top secret information about North Korea to a reporter.
Russia turned on the switch to Iran's first nuclear power plant on Aug. 21 after repeated delays and more than 15 years of construction. The hard-liners in Iran celebrated it as a victory over "the Great Satan," repeating the famous phrase by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, father of the Islamic revolution. Their message: America can't do a damned thing.
The Pakistani-based militant organization Lashkar-e-Taiba is being viewed increasingly by U.S. political and military leaders as a global terrorist threat. But most Pakistanis remain unaware of the group's activities and agenda and continue to give it significant support.
The Pentagon is officially ending its seven-year combat mission in Iraq on Aug. 31, but the remaining 50,000 U.S. troops will still carry out missions against terrorists and the CIA will continue cooperation with Iraq's now-unified intelligence service.
The discovery of tapes of Sept. 11 plotter Ramzi Binalshibh being interrogated in Morocco has drawn the attention of Justice Department investigators. The tapes were made in 2002 at a facility the CIA used near Rabat and purportedly were found "under a desk" at the CIA's Counterterrorism Center. Ninety-two other such tapes are said to have been destroyed.
For the first two weeks of August, the Internet buzzed with "inside knowledge" of an Israeli air strike against Iran's nuclear facilities before the end of the month. One of most quoted warnings came from Philip Giraldi, a polyglot former CIA operative who writes for the American Conservative and is no friend of Israel.
Israel's long-anticipated attack on Iran's nuclear program may come as soon as Friday. Yesterday, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton said Israel had eight days to strike Iran's nuclear facility at Bushehr before it would become operational. He revised the timeline to three days after word came that nuclear fuel would begin loading on Friday. We're now down to two days and counting.
