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Terrorism Tag

Posted by William A. Jacobson on April 23, 2009 6 Comments

By trickling out bits and pieces of top secret memoranda regarding interrogation of al-Qaeda terrorists, Barack Obama thought he would have the best of all worlds. Obama believed that exposing the dark side of the war on terror would ingratiate us with the world. At...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on April 21, 2009 3 Comments

I don't think Jay Bybee (or Alberto Gonzales or John Yoo or Stephen Bradbury) are criminals. At worst, they expressed legal opinions on interrogation of terrorism suspects which a court may someday declare to be wrong. Bybee's being wrong, if indeed he was, contributed to...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on April 20, 2009 13 Comments

The debate over interrogation of the three top-level al-Qaeda leaders who were subjected to waterboarding is entering the honest phase. The first phase was the "this is the worst thing that has happened in the history of the earth" handwringing on the left. The second...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on April 20, 2009 10 Comments

Matthew Yglesias on the new tape released by Ayman al-Zawahri telling Muslims not to be fooled by Obama:Perhaps the best thing that ever happened to the relatively small group of people known as al-Qaeda was the rise to power of George W. Bush, whose brutality,...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on April 16, 2009 25 Comments

The Obama administration released today four memoranda detailing the legal analysis regarding interrogation techniques, most notably involving Abu Zubaydah. There is a lot of outrage regarding the interrogation techniques approved, but those are mostly non-legal issues. Some of the techniques approved, such as grabbing the...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on April 13, 2009 1 Comment

I'm thrilled that the Somali pirates were killed, and the Maersk ship captain is safe. The Obama administration is claiming credit for giving the go-ahead for military action. But this presents Obama with a problem.There are two choices when negotiating with hostage takers/pirates....

Posted by William A. Jacobson on April 07, 2009 12 Comments

Posted April 8, 2009 Newsweek magazine's cover proclaims The Decline and Fall of Christian America, while the article inside the cover proclaims The End of Christian America. The substance of the article doesn't really prove the headline, but the goal of whichever editor wrote the headline...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on April 04, 2009 3 Comments

A bill pending in Congress, The Cybersecurity Act of 2009, sponsored by John Rockefeller (D) and Olympia Snowe (R) attempts to deal with very real threats to the nation's cyber-infrastructure. Attacks on military, government and civilian cyber-infrastructure are all too real, and it is time...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on March 29, 2009 1 Comment

During the primary campaign against Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama attempted to prove intentions to keep us safe by insisting that he, unlike the Bush administration, would send troops into Pakistan without Pakistani approval:In a strikingly bold speech about terrorism Wednesday, Democratic presidential candidate Illinois Sen....

Posted by William A. Jacobson on March 29, 2009 4 Comments

The Washington Post story, titled “Detainee's Harsh Treatment Foiled No Plots,” about how the interrogation of Abu Zubaida did not prevent a single terrorist attack, is old news. The story ran this morning, which is like so last century in the blogosphere. But the Post...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on March 24, 2009 0 Comments

Tristan Anderson was seriously injured earlier this month while participating in violent protests against the security barrier built by Israel in response to a wave of suicide bombers from the West Bank:Every Friday for the past seven months, the villagers of Nilin, bolstered by foreign...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on March 21, 2009 0 Comments

A large-scale car bomb attack outside a mall in Haifa, Israel, has been prevented after the car failed to fully detonate. According to reports, a small explosion alerted police, who then realized that the car was loaded with explosives. If the car had exploded outside...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on March 20, 2009 3 Comments

Richard Falk is a long-time anti-Israel (and often anti-American) polemicist. A retired Princeton professor, Falk has dedicated much of his life to blaming Israel and the United States for the world's woes, while coddling extremism everywhere else in the world. Not surprisingly, Falk also is...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on March 10, 2009 3 Comments

Obama's new Taliban policy explained:We will bring the people watching the execution into the government because they are moderate, but not the person firing the weapon, because he is not moderate.Unfortunately, the Taliban disagree that there are any moderates among them:"This does not require any...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on March 09, 2009 0 Comments

What to Do About John C. Yoo? That is the question posed in a Wall Street Journal Law Blog post. The post is quite fair and balanced; after all, it's not a NY Times post. But the post does discuss a front-page NY Times article...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 31, 2009 6 Comments

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who heads an Islamist party, recently ripped into Shimon Peres, President of Israel at the Davos forum, telling Peres "when it comes to killing, you know well how to kill.” Peres gave it right back to Erdogan, accusing Erdogan...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 27, 2009 0 Comments

James G. Lindsay, the former General Counsel of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), has issued a detailed 84-page report harshly critical of UNRWA's policies with regard to Palestinian refugees. The report is titled "Fixing UNRWA...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 27, 2009 0 Comments

Hamas set off a massive roadside bomb at the Gaza border, killing an Israeli soldier and wounding several on the Israeli side of the border. In return fire, one Palestinian was killed. So how do British papers report the story? Here are the headlines:The Guardian:...

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