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The foiling of a new al-Qaeda attempt to bring down a passenger airliner — apparently a knock-off of the failed “underwear bomb” plot that nearly brought down a Northwest flight landing at Detroit on Christmas Day, 2009 — has been a good-news, bad-news story.
By now everyone knows that Mitt Romney doubted back in 2007 whether killing Osama bin Laden was really worth the trouble. The Romney camp has dredged up a more bloodthirsty quote that muddies the issue, but if we’re going to rewind the tape, a couple of other interesting quotes turn up. Like the way that, [...]
After last year’s bin Laden raid I wrote a few of posts about the operation’s original intent–namely, whether the objective had always been to kill the al-Qaeda leader, or whether capture had ever been a viable option. The White House gave unclear and shifting answers on this point, but nothing I’ve seen since last May [...]
As U.S. Navy Seals burst into his fortress-like compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, nearly one year ago, Osama bin Laden turned to the youngest of his four wives and said his last words: “Don’t turn on the light.”
Here’s an excerpt from a White House briefing at the Nuclear Security Summit. I found the description by NSC spokesman Ben Rhodes of a nuclear excavation program in Kazakhstan are really interesting, but feel free to skim down to the first press question that follows. You’d think preventing nuclear terrorism–the core subject of the entire [...]
Writing at CNN.com, former CIA Director Michael Hayden, an adviser to Mitt Romney, makes a provocative point. If Barack Obama’s threat of military action to stop Iran from developing a nuclear weapon is serious, doesn’t that amount to a policy of… pre-emption?
In their speeches to AIPAC today, the Republican presidential candidates made clear that they consider an Iranian nuclear weapon a nightmare that must be stopped at all costs. Yet however potentially dangerous Iran may be, there’s something askew about the emphasis on its nuclear program to the near-exclusion of the many other nuclear threats America [...]
The Senate and House conferees on the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act issued their compromise version of the bill late Monday night. That means it’s crunch time for the controversial law and its provision requiring the military detention of terrorism suspects. The White House and liberal Senate Democrats are battling a coalition of centrist Senate [...]
The White House is threatening to veto a long-awaited defense funding bill over a perennial policy dispute: whether the President can prosecute terrorists in civilian courts, or must transfer them to military custody. The battle has raged since the very first day of Barack Obama’s presidency, but this time Obama’s opponent is not the GOP. [...]
Last week Omar Farouk Abdulmutallab pleaded guilty in a Michigan court to conspiring to blow up Detroit-bound Northwest Airlines flight 253 on Christmas Day 2009 using a bomb sewn into his underpants. The plea, which came on the second day of the trial and surprised prosecutors, was quickly touted by Attorney General Eric Holder as [...]
