Terrorism Archive

On CBS News’ 60 Minutes tonight, Scott Pelley interviewed German resident Murnat Kurnaz about his time held by the U.S. military as an unlawful enemy combatant, including several years at Guantanamo Bay. Pelley’s report leaves the impression that the Kurnaz case is, pure and simple, the story of a completely innocent man caught up in a corrupt and arbitrary system of U.S. military justice. Writing in World Politics Review in June 2007, John Rosenthal describes how Kurnaz’s case received similar treatment in the German media. Facts that cast doubt on Kurnaz’s credibility, and several aspects of his claims of innocence, […]

The recent decline in violence in Iraq is not synonymous with progress in the war on terror. Instead, the debate over the success of the Iraq surge strategy is a dangerous distraction from the “long, hard slog” that awaits us in the fight against violent extremism. Four-and-a-half years ago, then-U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld used that phrase to refer to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in a notorious 2003 memo titled “Global War on Terror.” In that same internal dispatch, Rumsfeld also stated that “we lack the metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war […]

BOGOTÁ, Colombia — The death of FARC commander Raúl Reyes is being seen here as a significant turning point in Colombia’s internal armed conflict with Latin America’s oldest insurgency, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. While the killing of Reyes on Ecuadorian soil has sparked a diplomatic crisis between Colombia and its neighbors, it is the impact of his death on the country’s conflict that will be noted in the annals of Colombian history. Colombian President Álvaro Uribe was elected to power with a mandate to crush the rebels. For the last six years, the government’s counterinsurgency campaign, bankrolled largely […]