Small-scale terrorism attacks may be here to stay but with al Qaeda reeling from Osama bin Laden’s death, the United States could deliver a “knockout” blow to the terror group if several of its senior leaders are captured or killed, according to homeland security experts who spoke in Aspen last week.
The world has the story of the mission that delivered death to Osama bin Laden. It has the details of his burial at sea. It has clunky animated video reenactments of the raid at his Abbottabad compound. It has the realtime twitterized witness account and the New York Times narrative of events. It has the cable news punditry and it has President Obama’s speech after the fact. It does not have the photos of Bin Laden’s corpse because it does not need the photos and because releasing the photos is not at all the kind of thing the Obama administration would do. If we didn’t know that before the death of Bin Laden, we know better now.
Tomorrow New York Republican Rep. Peter King will open his Homeland Security Committee hearings on the question of whether or not Muslim-Americans are doing enough to help safeguard the nation from terrorism. The hearings have been pilloried as an exercise in attention-grabbing ethnic-baiting and scapegoating and as an essentially unfair government-sanctioned exercise in Islamophobia. After all, what ethnic group in America is doing enough to safeguard the nation from terrorism? Could any group — much less a loosely affiliated ethnic or religious group– do enough to safeguard the nation from terrorism? King has responded to such criticism by doubling down. He has rearranged the committee schedule to ratchet up its partisan circus quality and he has dismissed his own past as an unabashed supporter of the terrorist Irish Republican Army.
If you tune in the NBA All-Star game today to get a last happy look at Carmelo Anthony as a Denver Nugget, you will also be asked to join the front lines of American anti-terrorism work.
The Denver Post editorial board Tuesday upbraided Republican U.S. Senate candidate Ken Buck for referring to birthers as “dumbasses.” Answering questions posed by a Democratic operative, Buck asks: “Will you tell those dumbasses at the Tea Party to stop…
U.S. Senate candidate Jane Norton is pushing controversial positions on terrorism and the war in Afghanistan in a foreign-policy statement posted at her website. The statement will likely give conservative voters concerned with the national debt and the authority…
John Brennan has a tough rhetorical job ahead of him Wednesday morning. Speaking to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Brennan, President Obama’s most influential terrorism and intelligence adviser, will attempt to reconcile the harder edges of Obama’s escalation in Afghanistan and his enthusiastic embrace of drone-enabled assassinations of terrorists with the broader approach to grand strategy that the White House will finally unveil this week. Some wonder if that reconciliation is even possible.
Fox News and ABC are reporting the Aurora shuttle bus driver at the center of an FBI investigation into a suspected bombing plot has admitted to ties with the al Qaeda terrorist network and is negotiating a plea…
Here comes just about the perfect Fox News story line. As the Obama Administration boosts stimulus money for smart-grid installation, National Grid, a utility company installing the new technology in New York state, says the energy delivery and monitoring technology may provide prime information to evildoers looking to carry out “targeted attacks” on the nation’s “critical infrastructure.”
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) cares about your privacy. Really. And to prove it, the secretive agency established for “preserving our freedoms” recently released a report assessing the job of fusion centers — the intelligence-sharing operation that mashes national security data with suspicious-activity law enforcement reports for state, local and federal authorities.
In an interesting moment of synchronicity with civil liberties advocates, DHS admits, yeah, there may be a few problems.
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