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The other day I was sitting in my office when my 3-year-old daughter came running in. She was sobbing, unable to catch her breath or tell me what was wrong. Her face flush, with red circles emanating from her swollen eyes, she was inconsolable. In tow came my wife, somber-faced and also on the verge [...]
The militant Islamic group of north Nigeria, known as Boko Harum, takes credit for the deadly car-bomb attack on a police station in the capital city of Abuja yesterday. You might not think of West Africa as a likely site for radical Muslim violence, but the map on the left, which I use in my [...]
Cool NYT story on the US military’s use of biometrics (eye scans, etc.) to create unforgeable identification records of roughly one-in-five fighting-age Iraqi and Afghani males, creating databases that can be perused in seconds by a handheld device at a border crossing. Naturally, there is much interest and some desire to use the same technology [...]
In my continuing role as Head Judge for the online strategy community Wikistrat‘s month-long International Grand Strategy Competition featuring roughly 30 teams from top-flight universities and think tanks around the world, I get to peruse all manner of provocative thought from some of tomorrow’s best and brightest thinkers. And yeah, full disclosure, I get paid [...]
Nice piece in WAPO about Ayman al-Zawahiri taking over al-Qaeda from the recently assassinated Osama bin Laden. Story leads with remembrances from a guy who knew him back in the day: He was arrogant, angry and extreme in his ideas,” said Azzam, 40, son of a radical Palestinian ideologue who had become bin Laden’s mentor. “He [...]
The account emerging from the Pentagon regarding Osama Bin Laden’s life in that million-dollar compound reads like the last days of Howard Hughes. The guy had been reduced to puttering around with his plots on his computer and dying his beard in anticipation of his great comeback video. He is videotaped watching himself on an [...]
A Senate report into the murderous 2009 shooting spree at Fort Hood released Thursday traces a familiar and depressing pattern: once again, as was the case in the months leading up to 9/11, dots telegraphing terror yet to come were ignored, overlooked, or slighted by federal personnel paid to detect and connect them. The report [...]
When police work doesn’t work, offer money. That’s what the FBI is doing after weeks of investigation have failed to find the person responsible for firing on the Marine museum, a Marine recruiting station (a Coast Guard recruiting station, too) and the Pentagon itself. The feds are offering “up to” $20,000 for information leading to [...]
The Army has just released its internal investigation into the Fort Hood shootings a year ago that left 13 people dead at the hands, according to eye-witnesses, of Maj. Nidal Hasan. He’s the Army psychiatrist and Muslim who shouted — according to some of those witnesses — “Allah Akbar” (“God is great”) as he methodically [...]
What does it mean when two military installations are shot at two days apart? Most likely, not much. The FBI is exploring possible links. But folks are riled, and as we have seen recently, folks who are riled like strutting around with their side arms and, who knows, maybe even taking shots at the National [...]
