The suspected gunman who took a Texas synagogue hostage on Saturday has reportedly demanded the release of Aafia Siddiqui, who was convicted of attempting to kill US personnel in Afghanistan. While the identity of the hostage taker is yet to be confirmed, ABC News and NBC News reported, citing US …
Read More »
The 41-year-old Majid Khan, who was detained nearly two decades ago and later admitted to having been an Al-Qaeda affiliate, spent three years in the CIA’s secret overseas prisons, known as ‘black sites’. In 2006, the high value detainee was moved to Guantanamo Bay, the United States’ infamous detention center …
Read More »
“We have no indications of civilian casualties as a result of the strike, which was conducted using an MQ-9 aircraft,” CENTCOM spokesman Major John Rigsbee said in a statement on Friday evening. Though the Rigsbee put the strike in “northwest” Syria, CENTCOM named Suluk – a town in the north, …
Read More »
The US Central Command announced on Thursday that it conducted a “kinetic counterterrorism strike” targeting Abu-Ahmad, on a stretch of road in the Syrian desert. “Initial indications are that we struck the individual we were aiming for, and there are no indications of civilian casualties as a result of the …
Read More »
There’s an old saying, “once bitten, twice shy,” that captures the uncertainty of a person who has suffered through a bad experience, only to find his or herself once again on a path they believe is leading to a similar ordeal. This idiom captures the essence of current US thinking …
Read More »
A previously secret report authored in January 2000 by senior members of the White House’s then-national security team, which concluded that US intelligence was ill equipped and ineffective in the face of a major and ever-growing domestic terror threat, has at last been declassified. Dubbed the ‘Millennium Alert After Action …
Read More »
In the early 1990s, Mohamedou Ould Slahi had a romantic notion of pursuing a noble cause, wanting to risk his life for something greater than himself. He traveled from Germany to Afghanistan with plans to join the Mujahideen. At the time, the Afghan Islamists were hailed as heroic freedom fighters, a ‘David’ …
Read More »
The conventional wisdom, oft-repeated in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, is that it is extremely difficult to recruit informers and deploy infiltrators against Al-Qaeda, due to its extremely compartmentalised cell structure. In reality, in the run-up to 9/11, British, French and American intelligence all had spies capable of …
Read More »
Panetta, who headed the CIA between 2009 and 2011 before moving to replace Robert Gates at the helm of the Pentagon, went on CNN to predict a forever war on terrorism in America’s forceable future, including in Afghanistan. “I understand that we’re trying to get our troops out of there. …
Read More »
As the world watches the humanitarian crisis unfolding in and around Kabul International Airport, where thousands of American soldiers, airmen, sailors, and Marines struggle to facilitate the evacuation of tens of thousands of US citizens and designated Afghan citizens out of Afghanistan, the question that comes to mind first and …
Read More »