Phi Beta Iota: a 59 page memorandum is rocketing around the Internet, entitled Collateral Damage: U.S. Covert Operations and the Terrorist Attacks on September 11, 2001. Read the report, which includes very specific details and charts with head and shoulder photos. This material is substantiated not just by the sources cited in the endnotes, but by many other sources such as those reviewed at 9-11 Truth Books & DVDs (23) and (indirectly) at Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback (145).
Phi Beta Iota: The Counterterrorism Center (CTC) at West Point has been doing extraordinary work of very high value to the U.S. Central Command, with an emphasis on understanding.
Click on the title for the three-page article by itself, and on the journal name for the full issue containing the article.
The author opens with the four kinds of jihad (heart, mind, tongue, sword), and the lists the seven historically-driven politically-defined jihads of the sword, and closes with a discussion. Over three pages, this is first class thinking.
In recent years, a serious academic discussion about the al-Qaeda (or AQC – al Qaeda Central) organization has been underway, once that has also found its way into the popular media. It has focused on whether AQC has ceased functioning as an active organization and turned into an icon only, and whether its role as leader of the global jihad has been assumed by a mass movement run by a network of people, groups, and organizations whose members have undergone a process of self-radicalization. A response to this question may be found in an analysis of the activities of al-Qaeda and its affiliates, but also depends on understanding the concept of struggle according to al-Qaeda and its relationship with its affiliates.
U.S. Needs Hit Squads, ‘Manhunting Agency’: Spec Ops Report
Noah Shachtman November 3, 2009
CIA director Leon Panetta got into hot water with Congress, after he revealed an agency program to hunt down and kill terrorists. A recent report from the U.S. military’s Joint Special Operations University argues that the CIA didn’t go far enough (.pdf). Instead, it suggests the American government should set up something like a “National Manhunting Agency” to go after jihadists, drug dealers, pirates and other enemies of the state. . . . . . . .
Such a group wouldn’t just go after terrorists. “Human networks are behind narcotics trafficking, arms proliferation, piracy, hiding war criminals from authorities, human trafficking, or other smuggling activities,” Crawford writes. “Human networks also lie at the core of national governments, offering an increased potential to nonlethally influence state actors with precision. A robust manhunting capability would allow the United States to interdict these human networks.”
THE GRISLY subject of torture is back with us again, with fresh allegations of CIA misconduct. It is a subject which first came to occupy my thoughts when I was writing a book on the Algerian War, A Savage War of Peace, back in the 1970s. It has never left me.
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YET NOT everyone was to become an apologist. Slowly, dissent and discord would rise. General Jacques de la Bollardière, a distinguished senior officer, highly decorated for his courage during World War II and sentenced to death in absentia by the collaborationist Vichy regime, was one such voice. . . .
The terrible danger there would be for us to lose sight, under the fallacious pretext of immediate expediency, of the moral values which alone have, up till now, created the grandeur of our civilisation and of our army.
To date we have identified over 80 and mapped 50 such Black Spots and begun to assess the types of interactions going on in these areas as well as the various kinds of insecurity that they are exporting and the directions in which it is or may be going. We continually scan the globe for other areas where conditions seem right for the presence of a Black Spot. Using published materials, news-scanning software, formal and informal interviews, and, where feasible, visits to the areas, we piece together a picture of the Global Black Spots, their nature, and their interactions with the outside world.
The International Workshop on Counterterrorism and Open Source Intelligence is one of the most significant events in the field of counterterrorism and open source intelligence today.
The workshop is an opportunity for researchers, professionals, law enforcement officers, intelligence agencies, and industry decision makers to establish professional relationships and serves as a platform for the formation of international cooperation.