ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

On April 2, terrorists committed one of the worst terrorist attacks in Kenya. Up to 150 people were murdered by masked al-Shabaab terrorists who raided the Garissa University College campus. (1) A few dozen people were wounded. Hundreds of hostages were freed as a result of special operation conducted by government security forces. A wave of terrorist attacks hit Kenya after Somalia collapsed as a unified state with large swathes of its territory going out of government control. Al-Shabab is a leading Somalian terrorist group. On September 21, 2013, its gunmen attacked the upmarket Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi, the capital of Kenya. The attack resulted in at over 80 deaths. The Garissa attacks in many respects resemble the Nairobi terrorist act. The al-Shahab militants killed only those who said they were Christians while letting go the people who said their faith was Islam. The Nairobi slaughter was organized on the eve of Catholic Good Friday. Al-Shabab (2) is a Wahhabi terroris...

The world of private defence contractors, the modern version of the fabled Condottiere without the flags and the city-state veneration, received a blow with the handing down of stiff sentences on four former Blackwater operatives. Last year, the four in question, part of Blackwater’s Support Team Raven 23, were convicted in the Washington, D.C. federal court for killing 17 Iraqis in Baghdad’s Nisour square in 2007. The sentences of Paul A. Slough, Dustin L. Heard, Nicholas A. Slatten, and Evans S. Liberty, damn a certain form of warfare, but they do not reverse it. The convictions have, instead, been taken as justification about a certain type of warfare, one waged in the US courtroom in the name of pleasing others and soothing consciences. “This verdict,” argued US attorney Ronald C. Machen Jr., “is a resounding affirmation of the commitment of the American people to the rule of law, even in times of war.”[1] In other words, killing must be executed with principle, and such a mass...

Enlarge Noam Chomsky (Credit: AP/Nader Daoud) This article originally appeared on Jacobin . Earlier this month, Dan Falcone and Saul Isaacson, both high school educators, sat down with Noam Chomsky in his Cambridge, MA office. In a brief conversation, edited and condensed here for clarity, they covered a wide range of topics — the projection of US power abroad and the stories told to justify it; COINTELPRO and domestic repression; the failures of the mainstream media; the West’s posture toward Putin; and much more. As always , we’re happy to publish Professor Chomsky’s invaluable insights. Dan Falcone I was recently in correspondence with a good friend of yours, Richard Falk , and we were discussing Juan Cole ’s idea of “essentialism” as it pertains to the Muslim world. And this led me to think about how essentialism is present in liberal education. For instance, take a good and appropriate cause like education for Muslim girls and how they face Taliban oppression. This is important t...

Reuters/Ints Kalnins There was a sharp increase the intensity of the training of NATO troops near the borders of Russia last year, Russian General Staff said. “In 2014, the intensity of NATO’s operational and combat training activities has grown by 80 percent,” said Lieutenant General Andrey Kartapolov, head of the Main Operation Directorate of General Staff. The leadership of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization made no effort to hide the clear anti-Russian orientation of these activities, he added. “During this period, NATO created a grouping of its member states’ forces in the Baltic States, consisting of over 10,000 troops, about 1,500 armored vehicles, 80 planes and helicopters and 50 warships,” Kartapolov said during the IV Moscow Conference on International Security. Read more Iran urges India, China & Russia to counter NATO missile system According to the Lieutenant General, strategic bombers from the US Air Force were used to perform strategic tasks during those exercise...

USS Higgins with Aegis interceptor systems (Reuters / Atef Safadi) Iran has announced its readiness to cooperate with Russia, China and India on the issue of NATO’s missile shield and related threats from the military bloc, the head of its defense ministry said in Moscow. “I'd like to support the idea of developing multifaceted defense cooperation between China, Iran, India and Russia to counter NATO eastwards expansion and installing a missile shield in Europe,” Hossein Dehghan said on Thursday, at an international security conference in Moscow. Hours later Dehghan was cited by RIA Novosti as saying that Russia, China and Iran may hold tri-party defense talks. "We discussed certain aspects of regional security. It was proposed to hold a trilateral meeting of Russia, Iran and China,"Dehghan said after meeting with Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu. Despite a deal on Tehran's nuclear program, the US is still going to site its missile defense installations in Europ...