53 Results

Nicola Roxon’s efforts to establish a process for expanding national security powers has suffered a hiccup, with the powerful Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security asking her to redraft it.

The government has moved to expand national security powers as we integrate further into America’s War on Terror.

David Frum helped to write George W Bush’s iconic “Axis of Evil” speech a decade ago. That speech was heavily criticised at the time, but Bush’s claims have all been proved true, says Frum.

There’s a way to calculate how much value we’ve got from our war on terror spending. The result isn’t encouraging.

Our $16.7 billion spending on the war on terror had ended up in some interesting hands — and hasn’t necessarily reduced the threat of terrorism.

Crikey readers have their say.

Prime Minister Gillard’s and Opposition leader Abbott’s words on Lance Corporal Andrew Jones and Lieutenant Marcus Case showed the strange twilight nature of the war.

For more than three decades defence lawyer Gareth Peirce has represented high profile defendants in war on terror cases, arguing they have been miscarriages of justice. She’s all too often been proved right, writes Colin Murphy.

There’s been a bit of talk in the last couple of weeks about what a blow the wave of Middle Eastern revolutions has been to al-Qaeda and its terrorist agenda.

Remember how the Eiffel Tower was evacuated recently? Plans for a Mumbai-style terror attack on Britain, France, and Germany were intercepted by international intelligence organisations and then foiled by missile drones on Pakistan militants last week.

Officially the US and its international troops in Afghanistan are not fighting a war in Pakistan. But with air strikes launching into Pakistan last week, Pakistan is angry with the cross-border invasion. The Atlantic Wire wraps the latest.

The US National Security Strategy was announced last week, finally bringing an official end to the War of Terror. The war strategy shows Barack Obama as a very different president to his predecessor, writes Waleed Aly.

US government and military leaders have been obsessed with capturing Osama bin Laden for ten years now. They’re wasting their time, says Rafia Zakaria: it won’t make one iota of difference in the war on terrorism.

Sending targeted missiles into Pakistan to kill individual terrorists isn’t just legally dubious — it’s counterproductive, explains Robert Wright: they’ll just be replaced by newer, angrier terrorists.

A former senior aide to Colin Powell says Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld knew that “the vast majority of Guantánamo detainees were innocent”, but thought releasing them would harm their case for war in Iraq.

Although Kevin Rudd and Barack Obama lead supposedly more progressive governments than their predecessors, national security and terrorism policies have remained essentially the same, writes Gerard Henderson.

It’s been a year since Bush left the White House, yet so much about his “War on Terror” is still unknown: what did Cheney really know? Where have all the CIA’s prisoners gone? Who forged the Yellowcake documents?

Formerly an avowed supporter of Bush’s “war on terror”, NYT columnist Thomas Friedman explains why he can’t support Obama’s decision yesterday to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan.

Documents leaked to the Telegraph have revealed Tony Blair mislead British MPs in 2002 by claiming that his goal in invading Iraq was “disarmament, not regime change” and that the military action was unplanned.

A human rights lawyer claims that under the Bush administration, the CIA tortured some terror suspects so badly during interrogation sessions, it had to keep them alive so they could continue being tortured.

For many on the Left, opposing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was really about opposing George W. Bush, says Byron York. Even though the US still has hundreds of thousands of troops fighting in the Middle East, without Dubbya, anti-war campaigners are now struggling to find support.