National Security

Among the cache of documents that the SEALs captured during their raid of Osama Bin Laden’s compound last year, one in particular should make many Republican foreign-policy advisers reassess their whole approach to the “war on terror.”

It’s the letter—No. 9 of the 17 missives that the administration released this week through West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center—in which Bin Laden discusses what he calls the “very important matter” of changing the name of al-Qaida.

THE president who won the Nobel Peace Prize less than nine months after his inauguration has turned out to be one of the most militarily aggressive American leaders in decades.

Liberals helped to elect Barack Obama in part because of his opposition to the Iraq war, and probably don’t celebrate all of the president’s many military accomplishments. But they are sizable.

Ever wondered how FBI agents catch globe-trotting serial killers? Or how journalists report stories about imprisoned international criminals? Here’s your chance to find out: You're invited to jump — risk free — into the world of transnational crime-fighting.
 

Early on the morning of May 2, 2011, the residents of Osama bin Laden's heavily fortified compound were startled awake by the sound of explosions. Bin Laden's daughter Maryam, 20, rushed upstairs to his top-floor bedroom to ask what was going on. "Go downstairs and go back to bed," he told her. Then bin Laden told his wife Amal, "Don't turn on the light."

The North Koreans can be such a pain, so wearying, you wish that you could just ignore them. So let’s do that. Let’s ignore them. For the moment, it might be, strategically, the best thing we can do.

Their latest escapade, which some analysts have since hyped as a threat and harbinger of crisis, was the attempt on April 13 to launch a missile into space. (Pyongyang’s foreign ministry insisted that the payload was merely a peaceful satellite, but this was a ruse and, in any case, irrelevant: A rocket that can spin a satellite into orbit can also release a nuclear warhead.)

The short fallings of US internet policy and national security rhetoric in a world where information and technological developments are more easily collected and shared around the world are topics for this week’s episode of The Sidebar.  Host Pamela Chan is joined by Thomas Gideon from the Open Technology Initiative and Konstantin Kakaes from the Schwartz Fellows Program. 

In my last post, I wrote about the recent National Intelligence Council report on global water security. Here’s the gist of it:

The gripping account of the decade-long hunt for the world's most wanted man.

"An electronic curtain has fallen around Iran," U.S. President Barack Obama warned in a recent video message marking the Persian New Year. Government censorship and surveillance, he said, make it more difficult for Iranians to "access the information that they want," denying "the rest of the world the benefit of interacting with the Iranian people."