War, Intelligence, & Terrorism
Talking Points Memo | One of the things that puzzles me about the Dubai assassination and all the speculation and publicty about it is the total lack of any American reporter's interest in the American connection to this event. As has been well publicized, most of the Mossad operatives used cred...
Cause of Terrorism | As the United States continues what it calls its “war against terrorism,” one can’t help but wonder if such a war is misguided. After all, if the United States is truly looking to eradicate terrorism, perhaps it should direct ...
Tech Dirt | For years and years we've been hearing about the supposed threats of "cyberwar" and "cyberterrosism." For nearly a decade we've questioned whether this was all hype, and the story hasn't changed.
Counterpunch | Reports out of Canada suggest that far from creating such a military and police force, the so-called International Security and Assistance Force (ISAF) is turning a blind eye to the thuggish criminality of those organizations, both to avoid growing opposition in ISAF member countr...
Prison Planet | Since the establishment media is convinced that tea party members, 9/11 truthers, libertarians, Ron Paul supporters, and basically anyone with a dissenting political opinion is a likely domestic terrorist, they should be celebrating the fact that a new bill would allow the govern...
BBC | What could be more fitting in the cool afternoon of an English country lane than a group of cycling tourists steadily pedalling their way from one historic site to another, stopping to camp overnight in fields along the way.
Baltimore Chronicle | Post-9/11, Dick Cheney warned of wars that won't end in our lifetime. Former CIA Director James Woolsey said America "is engaged in World War IV, and it could continue for years....This fourth world war, I think, will last considerably longer than either World Wars I or II...
Newsweek | The unmanned spy plane that Lebanon's Hizbullah sent buzzing over Israeli towns in 2005 was loud and weaponless, and carried only a rudimentary camera. But the surprise flight by a regional terror group still worried U.S. analysts, who saw it as a sign that the unmanned vehicles were ...
Seven Days | The Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing Friday to delve into the recent report issued by the Department of Justice regarding the so-called "torture memos" authored by the Bush administration's Office of Legal Counsel.
After Downing Street | Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) today issued the following statement after the House of Representatives voted 235 to 168 to pass the Intelligence Authorization Act:
Informed Comment | Pajhwok News Agency reports that on Tuesday, the Afghanistan senate deplored the foreign airstrikes that killed 21 innocent civilians in the province of Daikundi on Sunday, and demanded that NATO avoid any repetition of this sort of error.
The Independent | Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman yesterday flatly rebuffed David Miliband's request for cooperation with an investigation into the use of forged British passports in the assassination of a Hamas leader.
Washington Independent | Employees of the CIA-connected private security corporation Blackwater diverted hundreds of weapons, including more than 500 AK-47 assault rifles, from a U.S. weapons bunker in Afghanistan intended to equip Afghan policemen, according to an investigation by the Senate A...
Washington Post | Americans who turn to terrorism and plot against the U.S. are now as big a concern as international terrorists, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said Sunday. The government is just starting to confront this reality and does not have a good handle on how to prev...
Washington Times | How did 200,000 tons of steel disintegrate and drop in 11 seconds? A thousand architects and engineers want to know, and are calling on Congress to order a new investigation into the destruction of the Twin Towers and Building 7 at the World Trade Center.
Washington's Blog | You may ask yourself "why should I care?" You should care because terrorism harms the economy. Specifically, a study by Harvard and the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) points out...
PBS | Late last summer, while reporting a story for FRONTLINE, veteran Afghan journalist Najibullah Quraishi through channels put out word that he would like to interview one of the new Taliban commanders leading a growing insurgency in the country's northern provinces.
Wired | Victor Ostrovsky, who wrote a controversial book about his four years with the Mossad in the 1980s, says that many of the details in the surveillance video of an alleged 11-person assassination team indicate that the operation was likely rushed, and that the use of aliases belonging...
Jerusalem Post | Interpol said it had placed the alleged hit squad members on its most-wanted list to prevent them from traveling on forged passports. The international police organization acknowledged in its notice it “does not believe that we know the true identities of these wanted per...
Informed Comment | It appears that, the International Atomic Energy Agency is at least allowing for the possibility that documents allegedly found on a laptop some years ago --but discounted by the US Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency as of dubious provenance and i...
Breit Bart | Richard Gage, AIA, architect and founder of the non-profit Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, Inc. (AE911Truth), will announce a decisive milestone today at a press conference in San Francisco, as more than 1,000 worldwide architects and engineers now support the call for a...
New World Order Report | We promote revolution through peaceful means and the event which took place in Austin is exactly what is not supported by New World Order Report. These kinds of events to not represent the tea party, end the fed, 9/11 truth or tenth amendment movements.
Guardian | Israel's Mossad secret service, more formally known as the Institute for Espionage and Special Tasks, has a long history of carrying out clandestine operations, including several spectacular assassinations.
Independent | Security sources say that Mahmoud al-Mabhouh had changed his travel plans, leaving behind his bodyguards, for a "meeting" which may have been organised by Mossad, who had been tracking him for days before his death.
Antiwar | Underscoring the very real threat that remains of an American war against Iran, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs today declared that the Obama Administration will not rule out attacking Iran over its decision to enrich uranium to 20 percent.
Guardian | Decades after Richard Nixon tried to end the trafficking of cocaine from Colombia, success seems as elusive as ever. Matthew Bristow spent two years documenting the cocaine industry in Colombia. In the first of three films, he meets the farmers
Huffington Post | Reuters spoke to an unamed police official at the scene who said the device, "was a time-bomb outside JP Morgan's offices at the second floor of an Athens building," and added "the explosion damaged the door, furniture, computers and smashed some windows."
Telegraph | Other suspects were wearing tennis clothes and false beards and carried tennis rackets. They were shown entering and exiting the al-Bustan Rotana hotel, where the victim stayed. Four of the group are then shown using an electronic device to open the door of a hotel room.
Finding Dulcinea | As the United States allied with Pakistan after World War II, the Soviet Union maintained a close strategic relationship with neighboring Afghanistan. But running the country proved challenging for Afghan King Mohammed Zahir Shah, who had difficulty maintaining a central govern...
Times Online | A former British Army mole in the IRA has claimed that MI5 arranged a weapons-buying trip to America in which he obtained detonators, later used by terrorists to murder soldiers and police officers.
Alternet | On Sunday, Cheney pronounced himself "a big supporter of waterboarding," a near-drowning technique that has been regarded as torture back to the Spanish Inquisition and that has long been treated by U.S. authorities as a serious war crime, such as when Japanese commanders were prosecu...
MSNBC | In many respects, the directive, as described to NBC News, outlined essentially the same war plan that the White House, the CIA and the Pentagon put into action after the Sept. 11 attacks. The administration most likely was able to respond so quickly to the attacks because it simply had ...
Sydney Morning Herald | The kohl-eyed Hakimullah Mehsud probably is dead. He was the target for a missile fired last month from an unmanned aircraft hovering over the Afghan-Pakistani border - but launched by an operator in the US.
Reuters | The agency said in a statement the test took place at 8:44 p.m. PST (11:44 p.m. EST) on Thursday /0444 GMT on Friday) at Point Mugu's Naval Air Warfare Center-Weapons Division Sea Range off Ventura in central California.
Associated Press | A Republican gubernatorial candidate said Thursday she has questions about whether the U.S. government was involved in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — a statement she swiftly backed away from and one that drew immediate criticism from her better-known rivals in the race.
Guardian | Nuclear Armageddon has always had its funny side. But the US military wasn't laughing in the early 1960s as Americans, freshly shaken by the Cuban missile crisis, lapped up Stanley Kubrick's classic satire, Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
BBC | Top US officials - including Vice-President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner - had contacted MEPs in recent days to urge them to consider "the importance of this agreement to our mutual security", the Associated Press news agency ...
Daily Mail | In an outspoken interview in the U.S., the former prime minister dismissed the inquiry as part of a ' continual desire to sort of uncover some great conspiracy'. Speaking on Fox News he said critics of the war were obsessed with conspiracy theories, and refused to accept that hi...
Huffington Post | "Blackwater Worldwide's legal woes haven't dimmed the company's prospects in Afghanistan, where it's a contender to be a key part of President Barack Obama's strategy for stabilizing the country," the AP reported recently.
Washington Post | Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair acknowledged Wednesday that government agencies may kill U.S. citizens abroad who are involved in terrorist activities if they are "taking action that threatens Americans."
Times Online | The discovery of three American soldiers among the dead in a suicide bombing at the opening of a girls’ school in the northwestern Pakistan town of Dir last week reignited the fears of many Pakistanis that Washington was set on invading their country.
IPS | In an admission that took the intelligence community and its critics by surprise, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair acknowledged in a congressional hearing Wednesday that the U.S. may, with executive approval, deliberately tar...
Salon | That proposition should be intrinsically understood by any American who completed sixth grade civics and was thus taught that a central prong of our political system is that government officials often abuse their power and/or err and therefore must prove accusations to be true (with test...
BBC | They told me: "If you do it you will go to paradise long before us." I replied: "Why don't you tell me I will go to hell long before you?" Every day they used to tell me this. Every day. I was very young when they started telling me this.
Daily Mail | Video has surfaced showing Peruvian fighter jets opening fire on the light Cessna carrying Jim and Veronica Bowers and their children Cory, 6, and adopted baby Charity, who was just seven months, as well as pilot Kevin Donaldson.
Guardian | A Pakistani neuroscientist trained at an elite American university has been found guilty of two charges of attempted murder after she tried to kill US agents in Afghanistan in 2008. The conviction, which could see Aafia Siddiqui sentenced to life in prison, is the latest chapter...
Slate | One bit of good news: Defense Secretary Robert Gates is more honest than his recent predecessors about how much money he's really requesting. The figure for FY 2011 is $708.2 billion—consisting of $548.9 billion for the "baseline" budget plus $159.3 billion to pay for "overseas contingen...
Alternet | "When a nation becomes obsessed with the guns of war, social programs must inevitably suffer," Martin Luther King Jr. pointed out. "We can talk about guns and butter all we want to, but when the guns are there with all of its emphasis you don't even get good oleo. These are facts of ...
Press TV | Despite tighter screening processes since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Northwest Airlines Flight 253 experienced no delays in takeoff. According to the Mathaba News Agency “It is evident that clearing the terrorist with higher-ups took a matter of a minute or so and the Indian man, wh...
Antiwar | Yet the Marines are still on Okinawa. But, in 2006, the United States negotiated a $26 billion deal to move 8,000 to Guam and the other Marines from the Futenma air base in the south to the more isolated town of Nago on the northern tip. Okinawans have long protested the crime,...