Africa

Washington, DC, January 9, 2014 – Twenty years ago this week, the commander of United Nations peacekeeping forces in Rwanda (UNAMIR) wrote a "Most Immediate" cable to his superiors in New York that has come to be known as the "Genocide Fax." Dated January 11 but received in New York at 6:45 p.m. on January 10, the fax from General Romeo Dallaire cited information from "a top-level trainer" for a pro-regime militia group known as the Interahamwe, and warned of an "anti-Tutsi extermination" plot.

Washington, D.C., April 3, 2013 – The U.S. government's Freedom of Information Act reviewers produced four different versions of the same State Department document over a 12-year period, releasing different information each time, according to the National Security Archive's posting today of the documents obtained by author and journalist Michael Dobbs.

Washington, D.C., April 26, 2012 – The former Liberian president Charles Taylor today became the first head of state since Nuremberg convicted by an international court for crimes against humanity, for his role in the decade-long Sierra Leone civil war; and his human rights abuses in Liberia from 1990 to 2003 were likely even more systematic, according to declassified U.S. government documents posted today by the National Security Archive at www.nsarchive.org. The U.S.

Washington, DC, August 17, 2011 - A secret June 25, 2004 Department of State memo entitled “Genocide and Darfur” written by William Taft IV, the legal advisor to Secretary of State Colin Powell, stated that “a determination that genocide has occurred in Darfur would have no immediate legal--as opposed to moral, political or policy--consequences for the United States.” Writing for The Atlantic, National Security Archive Fellow Rebecca Hamilton argues that the memo’s determination that calling the conflict in Darfur genocide would yield no “legal consequences” influenced Secretary of State Co

Washington, DC, February 1, 2011 - The U.S. government’s opposition to the International Criminal Court held up deployments of peacekeeping forces in Sudan and slowed the eventual indictment of Sudanese leaders who perpetrated genocide in Darfur, according to the new book, Fighting for Darfur, by Rebecca Hamilton, and documents she obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, posted today by the National Security Archive. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations predicted a “train wreck” on Darfur policy in January 2005 because the U.S.

Washington D.C., August 20, 2008 - On the tenth anniversary of U.S. cruise missile strikes against al-Qaeda in response to deadly terrorist attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, newly-declassified government documents posted today by the National Security Archive (www.nsarchive.org) suggest the strikes not only failed to hurt Osama bin Laden but ultimately may have brought al-Qaeda and the Taliban closer politically and ideologically. A 400-page Sandia National Laboratories report on bin Laden, compiled in 1999, includes a warning about political damage for the U.S.

Washington DC, September 10, 2007 - In the spring of 1991, leaks to the Washington Times on intelligence community discussions of the nuclear activities of the Algerian government and a Chinese reactor sale to that country stimulated a flap within the George H. W. Bush administration over the possibility that Algiers had started a nuclear weapons program. NSC and State Department documents published for the first time today by the National Security Archive shed light on the internal U.S. debate over Algeria's capabilities and intentions, on U.S.