American soldiers often have a tough time with Arabic names, so to guards, he was just "Gus.'' To the world outside Abu Ghraib prison, he became an iconic figure, a naked, prostrate Iraqi prisoner crawling on the end of a leash held by Private Lynndie England, the pixyish Army Reserve clerk who posed in several of the infamous photographs that made the name Abu Ghraib synonymous with torture. Now, it emerges, there may be another dimension to Gus' story and ...

Shiloh Morrison spent two months as a truck gunner in Iraq before transferring to Kuwait in 2007 to work at the mortuary that takes in every U.S. military casualty killed in theater. There were 423 on her watch. During her four months in the morgue, the Marine corporal went only one 24-hour period without helping prepare a body for autopsy. It was her job to give the commands to play taps and to salute those heading home ...

The seven men who will go on trial in Bahrain on Thursday will make history as the country's first-ever civilians to be tried before a military court. Facing the death penalty, they've been sequestered in an unknown location for weeks and accused of murdering two policemen by running them over with a car. They've had no communication with family or friends since being taken into custody last month. Human rights activists fear they have been subjected to ...

With a military stalemate increasingly likely in Libya, U.S. and European politicians have been eyeing an oil blockade against Muammar Gaddafi as a way of breaking his determination to keep fighting and avoiding a drawn-out war. But the West might want to rethink that idea: Five weeks after NATO air strikes began pummeling his regime's military installations, Gaddafi appears to have adapted to the ongoing conflict, in part by tapping a dependable spigot of fuel for his ...

In a tragic place scented by tropical blooms, it was the simplest of gestures. On Nov. 13, as Aung San Suu Kyi peered out of the crumbling villa complex where she has been confined for much of the past two decades, one of the thousands of well-wishers gathered to mark her moment of freedom handed her a nosegay of flowers. Smiling, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate received the fragrant benediction and tucked the blossoms in her hair. "We haven't seen ...

Battling terrorism on the home front could forever be tangled up in politics, but what if it weren't? Suppose it were up to the antiterrorism pros alone to decide when to warn the public, what to say about the source of their intelligence and the actions the government is taking to neutralize the threat. Is there an obvious way to handle the sudden evidence that terrorists have plans to strike? Probably not. Few people could disagree last week with ...

In the movie reel of his imagination, he sees himself standing alone in the desert, silhouetted against the moon, swathed in traditional Bedouin robes, a farsighted prophet of Islam and the mighty creator of the Great Arab Nation, stretching from the warm Persian Gulf to the dark Atlantic Ocean--a nation that would eclipse the West in power and glory and purity. Muammar Gaddafi is not a man of modest ambitions. Nor one without a sense of backlighting. But his messianic ...

They called him by fanciful code names -- Top Hat, Bourbon, Donald, Roam -- and on the days when his latest cache of secrets would arrive at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, a CIA officer says, "it was like Christmas." There was something for everyone. The names of four U.S. military officers working as spies for the Soviet Union. Hard evidence of Beijing's deepening animus toward Moscow, which President Nixon exploited to forge his 1972 opening to China. Technical data ...

For years, Iraq's increasingly pro-Iranian government has threatened to evict the 3,400 Iranian members of the Mujahedin-e Khalq , a fiercely anti-Tehran group, from its sprawling former military base at Camp Ashraf, some 40 miles from Baghdad, the Iraqi capital, and 50 miles from the Iranian border. Despite the heated rhetoric, however, Baghdad has never fully articulated how it will uproot the exiles — who refuse to leave their decades-old enclave — beyond saying it ...

The tale sounded really too bizarre to be believed. The U.S. conniving at arms shipments to Iran? Sending a secret mission to palaver with the mullahs? Trying to keep the whole thing from Congress and most of the U.S. Government? And all over Iran, of all places! The country that held Americans hostage for 444 days beginning in 1979, the land whose fanatical leader, Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, has never ceased to denounce America as the "Great Satan," the state widely ...