ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

Only three US airports out of 70 evaluated passed the undercover testing A top US official has pledged reforms after tests found that airport screeners allowed mock explosives and weapons through security checkpoints 95% of the time. Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson on Monday called for revised security procedures in airports across the US. In one test, a screener failed to find a fake bomb taped to an agent's back despite patting the man down. The results of tests were first reported by ABC News . ABC News reported - citing people who had been briefed on a Homeland Security inspector general report - the tests were carried out at 70 US airports. Only three airports were able detect the banned weapons, the report said. Mr Johnson said security officers should be retrained and scanning equipment should be retested. He said he was taking the results of tests "very seriously". "The numbers in these reports never look good out of context but they are a critical el

By Aidan Lewis BBC News Out of media player. Press enter to return or tab to continue. Media captionWho's in charge of IS? In 90 secs In a ground mission in eastern Syria last weekend, US special forces killed Abu Sayyaf, a man they described as playing a key role in Islamic State's oil and gas operations. The American commandos were quickly engaged in a firefight, during which Abu Sayyaf was killed. But their original goal was to capture and interrogate him, apparently in an effort to improve their understanding of how IS works. It raised the question of how much is known about the structure of an organisation that rapidly overran large parts of Syria and Iraq last year, and has been able to hold onto much of that territory despite months of air strikes by a US-led coalition. On a broad level the shape of Islamic State may seem fairly clear. Islamic State has seized large swathes of territory in Syria and Iraq There are conflicting reports about the fate of Abu Bakr al-Baghda

By Washingtons Blog The International Business Times reports that the head of special forces chief in Tajikistan was trained by American mercenary company Blackwater, but has now joined ISIS . Investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill notes that Zacharias Moussaoui – the so-called “20th 9/11 hijacker” – had Blackwater’s number in his notebook . Blackwater often works for the U.S. government. For example, the Atlantic noted in 2012: President Bush gave the CIA permission to create a top secret assassination unit to find and kill Al Qaeda operatives. The program was kept from Congress for seven years. And when Leon Panetta told legislators about it in 2009, he revealed that the CIA had hired the private security firm Blackwater to help run it. “The move was historic,” says Evan Wright, the two-time National Magazine Award-winning journalist who wrote Generation Kill . “It seems to have marked the first time the U.S. government outsourced a covert assassination service to private enterprise.

Japanese troops (Reuters / U.S. Air Force / Senior Airman Sara Csurilla / Handout) Fifty-two percent of Japanese people dislike South Korea, while 78 percent of Koreans feel the same way about Japan, with 4 in 10 Koreans believing the countries will go to war in the next few years, according to an authoritative survey. In its third such annual study, Tokyo’s Genron NPO, a think tank, and Seoul’s East Asia Institute, each interviewed about 1,000 people in their respective countries, ahead of a landmark meeting between the South Korean and Japanese defense ministers. Koreans have been particularly alarmed by Japan, which has recently upped its defense budget, and whose current Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has espoused a rhetoric widely dubbed “new nationalism.” Fifty-eight percent of South Koreans said Japan posed a military threat, fewer than the 83 percent who were fearful of North Korea, but far ahead of the 38 percent who said the biggest danger emanated from Beijing. Last year, only 4

By Stelios Kouloglou " Le Monde Diplomatique " - Like the traditional Greek song, in Athens “everything changes and everything stays the same”. Four months after Syriza’s victory, the parties that had governed since the overthrow of the military dictatorship — the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (Pasok) and New Democracy (rightwing) — have been completely discredited. The first radical leftist government since the “mountain government” at the time of the German occupation is very popular ( 1 ). Although the “troika”, hated because of its responsibility for the current economic disaster, is no longer mentioned, its three “institutions” — the European Commission, European Central Bank (ECB) and International Monetary Fund (IMF) — continue their policies. With threats, blackmail and ultimatums, a new “troika” is imposing the same austerity on the government of Alexis Tsipras. With wealth generation down by 25% since 2010 and an unemployment rate of 27% (more than 50% for those u

A Hatf-VI (Shaheen-II) missile (background) is displayed during the Pakistan Day parade in Islamabad March 23, 2015. (Reuters) Saudi Arabia's seemingly ever-expanding ambitions threaten now to draw the region and the world closer to the edge of a dangerous precipice as it seeks to buy out Pakistan's nuclear power. Just as Iran and the P5+1 are set to finalize a tentative nuclear deal by June's end, offering the world a much-needed respite from talks of war and aggravated political tensions, Saudi Arabia is stretching its nuclear ambitions. The most violent, reactionary and arguably most oppressive regime, in not just the region but the world, is now has ambitions to rise to a nuclear power. It is actually much worse than that - the very state which interpretation of Islam, Wahhabism, has inspired an entire generation of radical wannabe jihadists is vying for access to nuclear weapons. If Iran's alleged nuclear race was mainly the expression of western political posturin

Remnants of an air-dropped cluster munition and unexploded BLU-97 submunitions found in the al-Nushoor and al-Maqash areas of Yemen’s northern Saada governorate on May 23, 2015. (from www.hrw.org) Download video (21.86 MB) Human Rights Watch has published new evidence alleging the Saudi Arabian-led coalition in Yemen has been using internationally-outlawed cluster bombs. The organization says innocent civilians have been targeted in the raids. The New York-based organization visited the Saada province in the north of Yemen this month in order to compile its report. Human Rights Watch says it managed to document the use of three types of cluster munitions in the country. "The Saudi-led coalition and other warring parties in Yemen need to recognize that using banned cluster munitions is very likely to harm civilians," said HRW's senior emergencies researcher Ole Solvang. "These weapons can't distinguish military targets from civilians, and their unexploded submun

Reuters / Stringer Iraq has admitted that ISIS jihadists captured huge caches of US-made weapons, including thousands of Humvees seized from Iraqi forces retreating from Mosul last year. The spoils of war have since then been used by ISIS to gain ground in Iraq and Syria. “In the collapse of Mosul, we lost a lot of weapons,” Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said in an interview with Iraqiya state TV. “We lost 2,300 Humvees in Mosul alone.” Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) captured Iraq’s second city of Mosul in June 2014, as government forces retreated from the country’s Sunni stronghold. The number of potential heavy and light weapons abandoned by Iraq’s army remains unknown but over the past decade the US sold thousands of the armed vehicles to the Iraqis, in addition to tanks and other military hardware. Just this month the Pentagon estimated that at least half a half dozen tanks were abandoned when Baghdad forces lost Ramadi, in addition to artillery pieces, and some 100 Humvee