Militants attack Pakistan army post

Dozens of militants attacked a Pakistani security outpost Saturday in an area near the Afghan border, leaving 18 people dead in an area where the military previously claimed it had driven out the militants.

At a time when Pakistan's army has gone on the offensive against Taliban fighters spreading out from the Swat Valley, the attack called into question how effective and long-lasting some of its efforts may be.

The army said that about 100 insurgents attacked the Spinal Tangi post before sunrise. The area is strategically important given its proximity to Peshawar, the capital of the North-West Frontier Province.

In an interview with CNN, due to air today, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the militants' expanding reach in the northwest of Pakistan posed an "existential threat to the democratic government in Pakistan."

The Obama administration is moving toward reviving the military commission system for prosecuting Guantanamo detainees, which was much criticized during the Bush administration, including by Barack Obama himself.

Officials said the first public moves could come as soon as this week, perhaps in filings to military judges at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, outlining an administration plan to amend the Bush administration's system to provide more legal protections for terrorism suspects.

Continuing the military commissions in any form would probably prompt sharp criticism from human rights groups as well as some of the president's political allies because the troubled system became an emblem of the effort to use Guantanamo to avoid the American legal system.

Obama administration officials -- and Obama himself -- have said in the past that they were not ruling out prosecutions in the military commission system. But senior officials have emphasized that they prefer to prosecute terrorism suspects in existing American courts. When the president suspended Guantanamo cases after his inauguration on Jan. 20, many participants said the military commission system appeared dead.

But "the more they look at it," said one official, "the more commissions don't look as bad as they did on Jan. 20."

A gunman wearing an Iraqi army uniform killed two American soldiers and wounded three others on Saturday near the troubled northern city of Mosul, the U.S. military and Iraqi police said. According to the Iraqi police, the gunman was an Iraqi soldier who fled into the surrounding countryside after opening fire on the Americans. The U.S. military, however, said the assailant had been killed after the attack.