The notorious private military firm Blackwater was hired by the CIA to transfer prisoners from Guantanamo Bay to secret prisons in Asia for interrogation, informs the German newspaper Der Spiegel.

The newspaper says it has obtained a memo from two ex-Blackwater employees which writes that the CIA employed “Blackwater and its subsidiaries” to transfer detainees from Guantanamo Bay to “secret detention camps in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Uzbekistan for interrogation.”

An Afghan journalist working for a series of international media outlets was killed in northwest Pakistan. The region is one of the most dangerous spots in the world for the media as journalists are targeted directly.

Reports inform that the 40-year-old Janullah Hashimzada was returning from Afghanistan when militants attacked his vehicle near Jamrud, a town located in the Khybar tribal district known to host many Taliban militants.

Rehan Gul Khatok, assistant administrative agent in Jamrud said that the gunmen stopped the vehicle and shot the journalist dead. He also mentions that Hashimzada was very critical of the Taliban and had valuable information regarding the militans. Even more, “his reporting was unacceptable both to Pakistani and Afghan governments and intelligence agencies,” he told the Vienna based International Press Institute.

And here’s part II

Journalists are in the dock now for their role in provoking the wars of the 1990s across former Yugoslavia that left more than 100,000 dead.

“We’re analysing the influence of certain Serbian media on war crimes committed in the 1991-95 wars,” Bruno Vekaric, spokesman for the Special War Crimes Prosecutor in Belgrade told IPS. “The analysis deals with the atmosphere and ambience within the media at the time.”

Examination of the criminal responsibility of media began after some people were sentenced last year for the execution of close to 200 Croatian prisoners of war in Vukovar town in 1991.

“One of them clearly said he watched TV and then went to ‘give those (Croats) what they deserved’,” Vekaric said.

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I have started this blog a few days ago, probably one week or so, maybe more, to analyze and comment current conflicts and military history. However, one interesting feature of this blog is the book reviews section.

There will be plenty of book reviews, but at the moment I’m cought up in work and trying to prepare a research project for my MA.

Anyway, the first review will be published in a few days and it will be Bad for Democracy: How the Presidency Undermines the Power of the People by Dana D. Nelson.

Britain has revoked licences for the sale of military components to Israel after conducting an export review in the wake of Israel’s war on Gaza, officials have said.

Five arms-export licences have been cancelled out of 182 that Britain had granted to companies, an Israeli official said on Monday.

The licences all involved parts for the Saar Corvette, a boat used in Israel’s 22-day military offensive on the Palestinian territory in December and January.

The British embassy in Tel Aviv said that a “small number” of export licences had been revoked but said no arms embargo on Israel is in place.

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Saddam with Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in the late 1970s

Shortly after his arrest in December 2003, former Iraqi president Saddam Hussain was interrogated by the FBI.

The secret interrogation documents, which were made public only recently by the National Security Archive, an independent non-governmental research institute in the US, shed light on the state of mind of Saddam, executed in December 2006.

In this series, Gulf News is running the transcripts of the 20 formal interrogation sessions and five ‘casual conversations’ he had with a senior FBI agent. In the third session, Saddam dwells on the roots of the Palestinian issue and the Arabs’ wars with Israel.

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The Pentagon and its NATO allies have launched the largest combat offensive to date in their nearly eight-year war in South Asia – Operation Khanjar (Strike of the Sword) with 4,000 US Marines, attack helicopters and tanks and Operation Panchai Palang (Panther’s Claw) with several hundred British engaged in airborne assaults – in the Afghan province of Helmand.

The American effort is the largest ground combat operation conducted by Washington in Asia since the Vietnam War.

Other NATO and allied nations have also boosted or intend to increase their troop strength in Afghanistan, with German forces to exceed 4,000 for the first time, Romanian troops to top 1,000 and contingents to be augmented from dozens of other NATO member and partner states, including formerly neutral Finland and Sweden.

The US, NATO, NATO’s Partnership for Peace and Contact Countries and other allied nations – states as diverse as Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, the United Arab Emirates and Macedonia – have some 90,000 troops in Afghanistan, all under the command of America’s General Stanley A. McChrystal, former head of the Joint Special Operations Command in Iraq and a counterinsurgency master hand. The Afghan-Pakistani war theater resembles the Vietnam War in more than one manner.

The US troop contingent has nearly doubled since last year, more than quintupled in five years, and will be in the neighborhood of 70,000 soldiers by year’s end.

Concurrent with the ongoing offensive the US has fired missiles from aerial drones into Pakistan in the two deadliest strikes of the type ever in that country, killing 65 and 50 people in two recent attacks.

Large-scale government military operations on the Pakistani side of the border, coordinated with the Pentagon through its new Pakistan Afghanistan Coordination Cell and with NATO through the Trilateral Afghanistan-Pakistan-NATO Military Commission, have uprooted and displaced well in excess of two million civilians, the largest population dislocation in Pakistan since the 1947 partition of British India.

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Longtime Minnesota college professor Reidar Dittmann recalls how the Nazi invasion of his native Norway led to his involvement in the Norwegian Resistance and a 15-month incarceration at the notorious Buchenwald concentration camp. The twist of world events led him to Minnesota where he made his new life.

Click here to watch the video interview