By Jon Queally | Agencies | 04 May 2013

“It is wrong to say [Iraq is] getting close to a civil war... The civil war has already started.”

That's what one Iraqi politician tells the Independent's Patrick Cockburn as the British foreign correspondent explores the undercurrents of growing violence and political conflict in the country still reeling and destabilized from more than a decade of war and an entire generation beset by Western sanctions, military intervention, and occupation.

By Ed Pilkington | The Guardian/UK | 02 Feb 2013

Last year, more active-duty soldiers killed themselves than died in combat. And after a decade of deployments to war zones, the Pentagon is bracing for things to get much worse.

Libby Busbee is pretty sure that her son William never sat through or read Shakespeare's Macbeth, even though he behaved as though he had. Soon after he got back from his final tour of Afghanistan, he began rubbing his hands over and over and constantly rinsing them under the tap.

By Justin Elliott | ProPublica | 16 Jan 2013

Despite Bahrain's bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protesters, the U.S. has continued to provide weapons and maintenance to the small Mideast nation.

Defense Department documents released to ProPublica give the fullest picture yet of the arms sales: The list includes ammunition, combat vehicle parts, communications equipment, Blackhawk helicopters, and an unidentified missile system. (Read the documents.)

By Jasmin Ramsey | IPS | 19 Nov 2012

The world economy would bear substantial costs if the United States took steps to significantly escalate the conflict with Iran over its controversial nuclear programme, according to the findings of a Federation of American Scientists’ (FAS) special report released here Friday.

Source : HRW | Beirut | 15 May 2012

Iraq’s government has been carrying out mass arrests and unlawfully detaining people in the notorious Camp Honor prison facility in Baghdad’s Green Zone, based on numerous interviews with victims, witnesses, family members, and government officials. The government had claimed a year ago that it had closed the prison, where Human Rights Watch had documented rampant torture.

Source : Noah Shachtman and Spencer Ackerman | Danger Room | Wired.com | 10 May 2012

The U.S. military has been teaching its future leaders that a “total war” against the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims will be necessary to protect America from terrorists, according to documents released today in a stunning story in Wired's Danger Room.

By Spencer Ackerman : Danger Room|Wired.com | 13 Jan 2012

Negotiating a peace deal with the Taliban after 10 years of war in Afghanistan is hard enough. But the stalemated politics of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility risk effectively killing the negotiations before they even have the chance to end the war.

The Taliban leadership has evidently decided it wants to talk peace terms. Among the things it wants as a gesture of good faith from its U.S. adversaries: the release of five detainees from Guantanamo.

By Missy Ryan, Warren Strobel and Mark Hosenball | Reuters | Washington | 19 Dec 2011

After 10 months of secret dialogue with Afghanistan's Taliban insurgents, senior U.S. officials say the talks have reached a critical juncture and they will soon know whether a breakthrough is possible, leading to peace talks whose ultimate goal is to end the Afghan war.

by Gareth Porter : IPS | Washington | 17 Dec 2011

Defence Secretary Leon Panetta's suggestion that the end of the U.S. troop presence in Iraq is part of a U.S. military success story ignores the fact that the George W. Bush administration and the U.S. military had planned to maintain a semi-permanent military presence in Iraq.