09 Terrorism – Page 57 – Public Intelligence Blog

2013/08/272013/08/27

Berto Jongman: Accessing Terrorism Literature in the Digital Age Plus 230 Online Sites for Terrorism Research

ENHANCING SECURITY THROUGH COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH

Perspectives on Terrorism is a journal of the Terrorism Research Initiative and the Center for Terrorism and Security Studies

Volume 7, Issue 3, pp. 84-98

The Art of Searching: How to Find Terrorism Literature in the Digital Age

Judith Tinnes

Abstract

This guide provides an overview on information retrieval techniques for locating high-quality literature on terrorism and counter-terrorism. Starting from general considerations on conducting a literature search – taking into account the specifics of terrorism studies – instructions are provided on how to find particular literature types by using different search methods and information retrieval systems, followed by information on how to refine a search by employing focused search strategies. The explanations are enriched with numerous links to recommendable resources. The included examples are focused on terrorism studies, but the general search mechanics can be applied to other research domains as well.

Full Text: PDF HTML

III. Resources

230 Websites and Blogs for Terrorism Research

Compiled and selected by Judith Tinnes

Abstract

This resource collection lists 230 websites and blogs which are deemed to be valuable information sources for serious researchers in the field of (counter-) terrorism studies. The first part lists websites run by academic, governmental, non-governmental, and private institutes, organisations, companies, as well as individual experts. The second part of the collection comprises blogs, many of them containing analyses of primary source materials as well as up-to-date news.

Access the Index (Live Links)

2013/08/212013/08/21

NIGHTWATCH: Sanctioning the Pakistani Training Schools for Suicide Terrorists

09 Terrorism

US-Pakistan: The US Treasury on Tuesday set economic sanctions on a Pakistan Islamic school it branded a ‘terrorist training center' supporting al-Qaida and the Taliban. The Treasury said the Ganj madrassah in Peshawar was being used as a training and recruiting base by two militant groups, as well as the radical Lashkar-e-Taiba blamed for the November 2008 Mumbai attacks that killed 166 people.

Special comment: NightWatch has observed during the last 12 years that anti-terrorist initiatives have seldom targeted recruitment and indoctrination of youth in the processes of terrorism. The main thrust has been on decapitation, which is never a permanent solution to terrorism, and on total destruction of terrorist groups which is always impossible.

Attacks on the reproductive systems of Islamic terrorism require pressure on madrassahs and specific rabble-rousing imams in order to dissuade Muslim kids from embracing violent jihad. The reproductive subsystems of a terrorist organization are always poorly protected and, thus, vulnerable to disruption at low cost. This self-evident truth seems to have been lost on Western counter-terror targeteers and analysts.

Numerous attacks in Afghanistan, for example, have been executed with the assistance and resources of jihadis trained at madrassahs in Pakistan. A madrassah in Multan, Pakistan, for years has maintained connections with several madrassahs in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, for the purpose of supplying suicide bombers and violent jihadis, according to published Afghan police interrogation reports. Suicide bombings in Afghanistan tend to be an international enterprise, invariably rooted in Pakistan.

Little attention has been paid to disrupting the reproductive/recruitment building blocks of violent jihadism in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Madrassahs in the heart of Pakistan are at least as anti-American as those in Peshawar, but receive little attention. Those in Peshawar always have links to the more prosperous mosque communities in eastern Pakistan. Sanctions on a madrassah in Peshawar are a good start , but only a start.

Neutering a living system by disrupting its ability to regenerate and to reproduce is a permanent solution to an infection, such as terrorism. Bravo for the US Treasury Department; it needs to do more quickly.

2013/08/20

SchwartzReport: War and Hate

01 Poverty, 02 Infectious Disease, 03 Environmental Degradation, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 06 Genocide, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Proliferation, 09 Justice, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, 10 Transnational Crime, 11 Society, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Deeds of War, Military, Officers Call

Endless war is the basis for the abrogation of our civil liberties, the suspension our legal guarantees, and the assault on journalism. It is the cancer that is destroying our democracy, and our passivity is what makes it possible.

Legal War?
WILLIAM BOARDMAN – Nation of Change

We are in the endless war because of the stupidity of American foreign policy beginning with the Reagan Administration, which was notably inept. And, thanks to Dick Cheney and the Neocons, we have transformed what was once a deep affection for Americans in the Arab world, which I experienced in the two years I lived in Egypt in the 70s, into! a deep and abiding hatred which will endure for generations.

They Hate Us, They Really Hate Us
MARC LYNCH, Associate Professor of Political science and International Affairs at George Washington University – Foreign Policy

2013/08/152013/08/15

Former CIA Spy Jose Rodriguez’s Truly Sociopathic ’60 Minutes’ Interview

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Terrorism, 11 Society, Corruption, Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, IO Deeds of War, Media, Officers Call

Former CIA Spy Jose Rodriguez’s Truly Sociopathic ’60 Minutes’ Interview

By: Kevin Gosztola

dissenter.firedoglake.com, Monday April 30, 2012

Former head of the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) Counterterrorism Center and its former Deputy Director of Operations Jose Rodriguez appeared on CBS’ “60 Minutes” to flaunt his new book Hard Measures, which details how he came to be in charge of CIA torture against terror suspects at “black site” prisons, why he believes torture was effective and why it should not be vilified.

The segment with Lesley Stahl has the same title as Rodriguez’s book. The title sounds like the name of a film starring an action movie star like Chuck Norris or Steven Seagal, which makes it appropriate because each answer from Rodriguez is dripping with bravado. From Rodriguez’s first answer to the last, one cannot help but realize he believes it is somehow unmanly to be concerned that torture of terror suspects violates the rule of law. He appears in his sleek white Camaro rolling down the highway to the CIA. And he says at one point, “We needed to get everyone in government to put their big boy pants on and give us the authorities we needed.”

Of course, like most establishment media interviews, the torture is not called torture. It is called “harsh techniques.” Or the official term Cheney coined for it—“enhanced interrogation techniques.”

*Here are both parts of the interview: Part 1 / Part 2

The first words in the segment are, “After the attacks of 9/11…” That phrase is all one needs to hear to know that this is going to be a tireless exercise in explaining away acts that historically have been considered war crimes when carried out.

Read full post with quotes and links.

2013/08/13

F. William Engdahl: The Stark Reality Behind Obama’s Russian ‘Statesmanship’

02 Diplomacy, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 05 Iran, 06 Genocide, 06 Russia, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Proliferation, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Terrorism, 10 Transnational Crime, 11 Society, Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, IO Deeds of War, IO Impotency, Officers Call

The Stark Reality Behind Obama’s Russian ‘Statesmanship’

By F. William Engdahl

F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant, author and lecturer. He is author of the best-selling book on oil and geopolitics, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order. It has been published as well in French, German, Chinese, Russian, Czech, Korean, Turkish, Croatian, Slovenian and Arabic. In 2010 he published Gods of Money: Wall Street and the Death of the American Century, and in 2011, Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order, completing his trilogy on the power of oil, food and money control.

With a diplomatic attitude more reminiscent of a spoiled brat grabbing his toys and leaving the room, US President Obama has resorted to diplomatic snubs and childish criticisms of Russian behavior as if the Russian leaders were small children.

In a press conference Obama described the Russian President as having a “slouch…looking like that bored schoolboy in the back of the classroom.” Yet behind the childish form of the latest White House refusal to meet President Putin before the G-20 St. Petersburg Summit is a grim reality:

Washington is rapidly losing its way to impose its will in the world on multiple fronts and the Putin snub is an impotent reflection of that loss of power. The real issues in US-Russian relations go far deeper.

Read rest of long detailed article — strongly recommended.

2013/08/12

Berto Jongman: Terrorists’ Psywar Strikes Fear From Middle East To Mindanao

04 Inter-State Conflict, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Terrorism, Military

Terrorists' Psywar Strikes Fear From Middle East To Mindanao

The Ramadan holiday is done and the threat to U.S. diplomats in most of the middle east is over. Or at least they can return to their embassies and consulates with enough confidence to think the Al Qaeda bombers are not going to strike right away and anyway they’ll be safe and secure behind their barricades.

Al Qaeda, though, is the winner, having made clear their psywar strategy works. They can strike fear among Americans, and others, merely by sending out messages for the U.S. intelligence machine to monitor and distribute with dire warnings.

Meanwhile, from disputed borders between India and Pakistan in Kashmir to the middle east, terrorists of one stripe or another, maybe Al Qaeda, maybe the Taliban, maybe lesser groups inspired by them, go on in a wave of killings to which there seems no end. A splurge of slaughter in Iraq over the final Ramadan weekend, normally a time for joy and celebration, showed the failure of the hundreds of billions invested there and the tens of thousands of lives lost. Now U.S. forces face frustration in Afghanistan — and President Obama warily avoids a serious commitment to still more mayhem in Syria.

In this cauldron of suffering, it’s gone largely unnoticed that the U.S. ever so slowly is on the verge of expanding a commitment to the Philippines from which enormous U.S. navy and air bases had to shut down in the early 1990′s after the Philippines refused to extend the bases agreement in a surge of anti-Americanism. The Philippines faces a local version of the type of militant forces that are plaguing the middle east and Pakistan. That’s on top of worries about China’s claims to the entire South China Sea, including islands and shoals that are clearly Philippine territory.

Continue reading “Berto Jongman: Terrorists' Psywar Strikes Fear From Middle East To Mindanao”

2013/08/122013/08/12

4th Media: Saudis Pour Money Into Militants

01 Poverty, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Terrorism, Corruption, Government, IO Deeds of War, Peace Intelligence

Saudi Rulers Pour Money Into Arming Militants in Region

If Saudi rulers had more brains, they might be formidably dangerous. Even with lackluster intelligence assets, they are already causing enough havoc and bloodshed across the Middle East and North Africa regions, pouring millions-of-dollars-worth of weaponry into Al Qaeda and other Takfiri networks that are destroying once proud civilizations in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Libya through nihilistic sectarianism.

And if the Saudi paymasters of terrorism could have it all their way, they would salivate at the chance of extending this destruction to Iran – the Shia power that they fear as their nemesis.

Fortunately, the Saudi rulers’ agenda of covert terrorism – an agenda that serves its Western masters – is not well concealed. This is because “Saudi state intelligence” is something of an oxymoron and leaves a trail of self-incriminating clues wherever it goes.

This uncovering of the real authors of regional violence and their motives curtails the plotters and will lead eventually to their downfall through their own damnation.

Take the latest disclosure that the Saudis tried to bribe Russia into abandoning its long-time ally, Syria. Given their own venal form of feudal rule, the Saudis seem to think that everyone else can be bought at a price. Apparently, Saudi Arabia’s intelligence chief Prince Bandar bin Sultan dangled a $15-billion arms deal in front of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin if the latter would jettison his country’s strategic alliance with Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad.

Read rest of article.