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BEIRUT — Syrian opposition activists say a drone attack has been conducted on an oil facility in eastern Syria housing American troops and a U.S. base in a nearby area. There was no immediate word on casualties and the U.S. military didn’t immediately respond to requests for confirmation. Omar Abu Layla, a Europe-based activist who heads the Deir Ezzor 24 media outlet, said that three drones with explosives struck the Conoco COP, +0.90% gas field in the eastern province of Deir el-Zour that borders Iraq on Thursday. Rami Abdurrahman of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition war...

Update from Ukraine | Zelensky announced the counterattack | The Main order was given | Date Unknown https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dm7BPCkHtw ****NEW SUMMARY Military MAPS & COMMENTS here: Invasion Day 460 – Summary Jerome – May 29, 2023. https://militaryland.net/news/invasion-day-460-summary/ 5-28-2023- Ukraine is forming a new mechanized brigade of the Ground Forces. https://militaryland.net/news/new-mechanized-brigade-is-being-formed/ Ukrainian Army is being expanded by a new brigade, 44th Mechanized Brigade. The unit is currently at the stage of formation. As photos on social media suggest, it’s one of the Polish-trained Ukrainian brigades.The brigade received military number A4723 and at least one battalion is equipped with Polish-donated BMP-1 infantry fighting...

BRITISH forces launched a drone strike in Syria to kill three Islamic State terrorists who had plotted to kill the Queen and other members of the royal family by detonating a huge bomb at the country’s VJ Day celebration, Prime Minister David Cameron has revealed. “There was a terrorist directing murder on our streets and no other means to stop them,” Mr Cameron said about the lethal Aug. 21 drone attack — the first UK military action in the Syrian civil war. Two of the cutthroats were Britons, he said, who had helped hatch the twisted scheme to assassinate Queen...

Folks.  Ross Perot was lambasted for using the term.  Now the president uses it as often as the “you can keep…” and “period” verbiage.  As always and forevermore, it is not what is said, but who says it. Folks.  As if those who went through enhanced interrogations were snatched from a Norman Rockwell scene and placed on a waterboard.  Hardly.  The president, and the attorney general, still seem bent on proving that the Bush administration engaged in “torture.”  We seem to forget the moment in history in which the procedures in question were conducted.  Did Obama and Holder see the...

Sen. Rand Paul has warned Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) that he will place a hold on one of President Obama’s appellate court nominees because of his role in crafting the legal basis for Obama’s drone policy. Paul, the junior Republican senator from Kentucky, has informed Reid he will object to David Barron’s nomination to the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals, unless the Justice Department makes public the memos he authored justifying the killing of an American citizen in Yemen. -SNIP- The ACLU has sided with Paul, who has a handful of Democratic allies. “No senator should be voting...

Not surprisingly, most of the folks on MSNBC have being having a field day Thursday ridiculing Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) for his historic filibuster the day before. Doing his part on the Martin Bashir show was MSNBC political analyst David Corn who said that Attorney General Eric Holder’s letter to Paul “had a very silent FU in it” (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):

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The US policy of using aerial drones to carry out targeted killings presents a major challenge to the system of international law that has endured since the second world war, a United Nations investigator has said. Christof Heyns, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, summary or arbitrary executions, told a conference in Geneva that President Obama's attacks in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere, carried out by the CIA, would encourage other states to flout long-established human rights standards. In his strongest critique so far of drone strikes, Heyns suggested some may even constitute "war crimes". His comments come amid rising...

It was not a theoretical question: Mr. Obama has placed himself at the helm of a top secret “nominations” process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, of which the capture part has become largely theoretical. .... underscored just what a moral and legal conundrum this could be. Mr. Obama is the liberal law professor who campaigned against the Iraq war and torture, and then insisted on approving every new name on an expanding “kill list,” .... it is the president who has reserved to himself the final moral calculation. “He is determined that he will make these decisions about...

It seems safe to assume that the meeting between CIA chief Leon Panetta and his counterpart in Pakistan’s ISI didn’t go terribly well. Yesterday, the CIA called the talks “productive” and declared the relationship between the two intelligence agencies “on solid footing.” Today, news reports have Pakistan demanding an end to drone attacks against Taliban and al-Qaeda leadership in Pakistan: Pakistan has privately demanded the Central Intelligence Agency suspend drone strikes against militants on its territory, one of the U.S.’s most effective weapons against al Qaeda and Taliban leaders, officials said. …The U.S. strategy in the war in Afghanistan hinges...

On October 21, we told you that a DoD official had leaked the findings of a confidential investigation into Michael Furlong and his highly successful Force Protection program to the New York Times. The leak was authorized in an effort to embarrass Furlong and “make him go away.” The New York Times subsequently held off on the story, but a week later someone else ran with it. On October 29, Kimberly Dozier of the Associated Press published a piece entitled Pentagon Says Intel Contractors Went Too Far. Here’s what’s troubling.