News stories by Gareth Porter*, page 8

In March 1997, FBI Director Louis Freeh got what he calls in his memoirs 'the first truly big break in the case': the arrest in Canada of one of the Saudi Hezbollah members the Saudis accused of being the driver of the getaway car at Khobar Towers.

In the last week of October 1996, the Saudi secret police, the Mabahith, gave David Williams, the FBI's assistant special agent in charge of counter-terrorism issues, what they said were summaries of the confessions obtained from some 40 Shi’a detainees.

On Jun. 25, 1996, a massive truck bomb exploded at a building in the Khobar Towers complex in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, which housed U.S. Air Force personnel, killing 19 U.S. airmen and wounding 372.

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s refusal to share with other agencies even the most basic data on the bombing attacks by remote-controlled unmanned predator drones in Pakistan’s northwestern tribal region, combined with recent revelations that CIA operatives have been paying Pakistanis to identify the targets, suggests that managers of the drone attacks programmes have been using the total secrecy surrounding the programme to hide abuses and high civilian casualties.

President Barack Obama and other top officials in his administration have made it clear that there can be no military solution in Afghanistan, and that the non-military efforts to win over the Afghan population will be central to its chances of success.

The U.S. programme of drone aircraft strikes against higher-ranking officials of al Qaeda and allied militant organisations, which has been touted by proponents as having eliminated nine of the 20 top al Qaeda leaders, is actually weakening Pakistan’s defence against the insurgency of the Islamic militants there by killing large numbers of civilians based on faulty intelligence and discrediting the Pakistani military, according to data from the Pakistani government and interviews with senior analysts.

When U.S. troops and Apache helicopters joined Iraqi forces in putting down an uprising by Sunni 'Sons of Iraq' militiamen in central Baghdad last weekend, it was a preview of the kind of combat the U.S. military is likely to see increasingly over the next three years unless a policy decision is made in Washington to avoid it.

Despite President Barack Obama’s statement at Camp LeJeune, North Carolina Feb. 27 that he had 'chosen a timeline that will remove our combat brigades over the next 18 months,' a number of Brigade Combat Teams (BCTs), which have been the basic U.S. Army combat unit in Iraq for six years, will remain in Iraq after that date under a new non-combat label.

U.S. Special Operations forces in Afghanistan, whose commando raids and airstrikes against suspected Taliban targets have caused large numbers of civilian casualties that have angered Afghans, have quietly been put under the 'tactical control' of the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, for the first time.

After Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called in October 2005 for an end to the state of Israel, Israeli leaders began stepping up talk of an 'existential threat' to the country.