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01 Dec 09

Project Syndicate - Inside Thailand’s Hidden War

  • Thailand’s former prime minister, Chavalit Yongchaiyudh, recently ignited a furor when he proposed that the separatist campaign in his country’s Muslim-majority southern provinces might be solved politically, with a form of self-rule. Thailand’s ruling Democrat Party immediately called Chavalit’s remarks “traitorous.”
  • Armed mainly with machetes and kitchen knives, 106 attackers perished that day, 32 of them inside Pattani’s historic Krue-Ze mosque, where they had taken refuge. Five members of the Thai security forces were also killed.
23 Nov 09

A Talking Point Built Of Straw - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

  • To see how false this claim is, all anyone ever had to was look at the Classified Information Procedures Act, a short and crystal clear 1980 law that not only permits, but requires, federal courts to undertake extreme measures to ensure the concealment of classified information, even including concealment from the defendant himself.

Schneier on Security: Al Qaeda Secret Code Broken

  • Between them, the code-breakers speak all the dialects that form the basis for the code. Several of them have high-value skills in computer technology. The team worked closely with the U.S. National Security Agency and its station at Menwith Hill in the north of England. The identity of the code-breakers is so secret that not even their gender can be revealed.
21 Nov 09

The Jihadists Who Have Recanted I - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

  • A wave
    of young British Islamists who trained to fight – who cheered as their
    friends bombed this country – have recanted. Now they are using everything
    they learned on the inside, to stop the jihad.


    Seventeen former radical Islamists have "come out" in the past 12
    months and have begun to fight back. Would they be able to tell me the
    reasons that pulled them into jihadism, and out again? Could they be the key
    to understanding – and defusing – Western jihadism? I have spent three
    months exploring their world and befriending their leading figures. Their
    story sprawls from forgotten English seaside towns to the jails of Egypt's
    dictatorship and the icy mountains of Afghanistan – and back again.

  • As he watched the news of the Luxor massacre in Egypt or Hamas
    suicide-bombings of pizzerias in Tel Aviv, "It just became more and
    more difficult to justify that." He found himself thinking about the
    Jewish friends he had made at school. "They were just like me – human
    beings. And we had a lot in common. The dietary laws, and the identity
    issues, and the fear of racism." As he heard the growing Islamist
    chants at demonstrations – "The Jews are the enemy of God,"
    they yelled – something, he says, began to sag inside him.
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Yglesias Award Nominee - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

  • "[T]here is no question about the legitimacy of U.S. federal courts to incapacitate terrorists. Many of Holder’s critics appear to have forgotten that the Bush administration used civilian courts to put away dozens of terrorists, including “shoe bomber” Richard Reid; al-Qaeda agent Jose Padilla; “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh; the Lackawanna Six; and Zacarias Moussaoui, who was prosecuted for the same conspiracy for which Mohammed is likely to be charged. Many of these terrorists are locked in a supermax prison in Colorado, never to be seen again,"
  • Jim Comey and Jack Goldsmith, deputy attorney general and assistant attorney general under George W. Bush, respectively.
18 Nov 09

Lacking Evidence, Hoekstra Blames Obama Admin. For Fort Hood | TPMMuckraker

  • At a press conference today, where he was joined by several GOP colleagues, Hoekstra, the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence committee, called for an immediate congressional investigation into the shootings, to determine whether the intelligence community needs enhanced tools to combat terror. Hoekstra and his colleagues also suggested, without citing evidence, that the administration had restricted the use of crucial terror-fighting tools that could have been used to stop the attacks.
17 Nov 09

Schneier on Security: Beyond Security Theater

  • Unfortunately for politicians, the security measures that work are largely invisible. Such measures include enhancing the intelligence-gathering abilities of the secret services, hiring cultural experts and Arabic translators, building bridges with Islamic communities both nationally and internationally, funding police capabilities -- both investigative arms to prevent terrorist attacks, and emergency communications systems for after attacks occur -- and arresting terrorist plotters without media fanfare. They do not include expansive new police or spying laws. Our police don't need any new laws to deal with terrorism; rather, they need apolitical funding. These security measures don't make good television, and they don't help, come re-election time. But they work, addressing the reality of security instead of the feeling.

Matthew Yglesias » Criminals and Warriors

  • but if you have to put the whole thing in either the “crime” box or the “war” box, there’s a pretty strong case for erring on the side of crime.
  • In political terms, the right likes the war idea because it involves taking terrorism more “seriously.” But in doing so, you partake of way too much of the terrorists’ narrative about themselves. It’s their conceit, after all, that blowing up a bomb in a train station and killing a few hundred random commuters is an act of war. And war is a socially sanctioned form of activity, generally held to be a legally and morally acceptable framework in which to kill people.
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11 Nov 09

Re: Was It Terrorism? - Jonah Goldberg - The Corner on National Review Online

  • Again, I'd like to make it clear that just because I am raising the possibility that terrorism isn't necessarily the right word doesn't mean I am trying to diminish the evil of what this guy did.
10 Nov 09

Casey vs. Lieberman on Ft. Hood Massacre | The Cable

  • rmy Chief of Staff George Casey
    took to the airwaves Sunday to warn the public not to overemphasize
    unconfirmed reports about anti-American and religious statements
    allegedly made by alleged Fort Hood gunman Major Nidal Hasan.

  • Meanwhile, Senator Joseph Lieberman, I-CT, was on Fox news talking all about Hasan's motivations and warning that the attack could be a new model of terrorism on U.S. soil.

    "It's
    clear that he was, one, under personal stress and, two, if the reports
    that we're receiving of various statements he made, acts he took, are
    valid, he had turned to Islamist extremism," Lieberman said, "And
    therefore, if that is true, the murder of these 13 people was a
    terrorist act and, in fact, it was the most destructive terrorist act
    to be committed on American soil since 9/11."

29 Oct 09

Global Warming Could Create a Legion of 'Climate Terrorists' : TreeHugger

  • One man who has made such a consideration is Dr. Greg Austin. The provocative piece he wrote for New Europe called Climate Terrorists: They Will Come is especially foreboding. Austin notes that 40% of the world lives in tropical areas, where even incremental rises in temperatures can have disastrous effects.
  • Developing nations comprise the vast majority of these tropical states, many of which have exploding populations, a growing youth bulge, and increasing problems with hunger and health.
28 Oct 09

Hillary Clinton visits Pakistan in bid to improve relations - washingtonpost.com

  • rising anti-Americanism and convincing Pakistanis that the United States wants a relationship based on more than counterterrorism.
  • a wave of suicide bombings, assassinations and attacks in Pakistani cities.
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24 Oct 09

Why Al Qaeda Wants a Safe Haven | Foreign Policy

  • He's wrong. Although the group has been significantly
    weakened since late 2001, the only chance al Qaeda has of rebuilding its
    capability to conduct a large-scale terrorist operation against the United States is under
    the Taliban's umbrella of protection.
  • But all the e-mail accounts, chat rooms, and social media
    available will never account for the human touch. There is simply no substitute
    for the trust and confidence built by physically meeting, jointly conceiving,
    and then training together for a large-scale, complex operation on the other
    side of the world.
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22 Oct 09

Al-Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban: “Diametrically Opposed”? | Foreign Policy

  • Mullah Omar's Afghan
    Taliban and al-Qaeda's senior leaders have been issuing some very
    mixed messages of late, and the online jihadi community is in an
    uproar, with some calling these developments "the beginning of the end
    of relations" between the two movements. 
  • Afghan Taliban's
    Quetta-based leadership has been emphasizing the "nationalist"
    character of their movement
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21 Oct 09

New U.N. report: Opium's not just an Afghan problem | The AfPak Channel

  • But too few take note of the fact that the vast majority of
    profits are actually earned outside
    Afghanistan.
  • The report notes, for example, that Afghan farmers earn an
    estimated $1 billion annually off the country's 7,000 metric ton opium crop.
    Sounds like a lot, right? Not really: By the time they reach their final
    destinations, global sales of Afghan opiates are now believed to top $58
    billion, according to the report. "We take three percent of the revenue,"
    President Karzai is quoted as saying, "and 100 percent of the blame."
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