America and Transnational Terrorism

"Britain and fellow United Nations Security Council countries are likely to be asked to help bankroll an African force of 3,200 soldiers to fight Islamists in Mali, diplomats have said."

"THE numbers tell the story: America's counter-terrorism campaign is gradually shifting from Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan to Yemen, Somalia and other parts of Africa. In just six weeks, drone attacks in Yemen against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) have killed around 90 fighters. According to the Long War Journal, a website, America launched four attacks in April, including one this week that is believed to have killed five fighters in the Azzan district of Shabwa province. In March America carried out six strikes with Predator or Reaper drones, probably flying from a still-secret new CIA airbase in the region."

"Ansar al Sharia Egypt has published its founding statement online. The group says that 'preaching and jihad are two wings that are indispensable to the spread of Islam,' according to a translation prepared by the SITE Intelligence Group. And the group outlines 16 goals with that two-pronged approach in mind."

"Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani is a moderate, pro-American infantry commander who is widely seen as commanding respect within the army and within Western circles."

"Bahraini authorities have revoked the citizenships of 31 Shia activists, among them two former members of parliament, for having 'undermined state security,' according to state news."

"At least two people were killed in Bahrain on Monday after a series of bomb blasts, just days after the kingdom clamped down on protests."

Katulis and Curtis argue whether or not it is in the United States best interest to enter Pakistan, without the country's approval, to pursue Osama Bin Laden.

"As the Pentagon begins to wind down the war in Afghanistan, the smaller conflicts elite U.S. forces are fighting around the world are heating up."

"Following one of the worst periods in the history of the relationship between the United States and Pakistan, several encouraging developments have taken place in recent months. Unfortunately, we are passing through the eye of a Pakistani storm that is almost sure to whip up again in 2013, if not sooner."

Although currently plagued by an Islamist terror threat, French authorities have made their country so inhospitable to terrorist networks that many have relocated to Germany.

"Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) are foreign organizations that are designated by the Secretary of State in accordance with section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), as amended."

"General Ashfaq Kayani, the chief of staff of the Pakistan Army, is much in the news these days. Senior foreign diplomatic officials make it a point to consult with him when in Islamabad."

Military intervention toppled Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, but it also helped create a possible Islamist haven in northern Mali ... which has prompted more calls for military intervention.

"The Obama administration struck a largely symbolic blow Friday against what it considers the most violent and intransigent enemy of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, declaring that it will add the Pakistan-based Haqqani network to its list of terrorist organizations. Ordered by Congress last month to label the Taliban affiliate an official terrorist group or explain why it didn't qualify, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton informed lawmakers that she will designate the Haqqani group the 52nd entry on the State Department's Foreign Terrorist Organizations list."

"A top ideologue for the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan urged Pakistanis living in Waziristan to continue to shelter jihadists, and said the Pakistani state has done the most damage to terror groups operating in the region."

"Ahead of the Nuclear Security Summit here next week, India today voiced concerns over Pakistan's nuclear programme saying it has 'very little confidence' on the capabilities of its western neighbour on securing its atomic assets."

"The National Police are currently trying to verify the authenticity of a letter taunting the police's anti-terror detachment allegedly written by a wanted terrorist, Jakarta Globe reported...."

"After seeing spending double over a decade, U.S. intelligence agencies are bracing for about $25 billion in budget cuts over the next 10 years that top officials said will increase security risks."

"Around the world, even more than in the United States, there is an audible sigh of relief the day after Obama won a clear mandate for a second term as president."

"Pakistan's Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani today extended the term of the country's powerful army chief by three years in a move to preserve continuity in the fight against Islamist militancy."

"A CIA drone strike in Pakistan may have killed the operational commander of the Haqqani network, the insurgent group behind some of the most high-profile attacks on Western and Afghan government targets in Afghanistan."

"A massive bomb ripped through a crowded Beirut street killed Lebanon's most senior intelligence official and at least seven others as Lebanon divisions over Syria's civil war spills over into factional conflict."

"Almost overnight, Beirut has become a city fractured and divided according to religion, and support or opposition to Syria's regime. The trigger was a car bomb that killed General Wissam al-Hassan, the Lebanese intelligence chief and a key opponent of Syria's regime, in the capital on Friday. Many Lebanese blamed President Bashar al-Assad for this assassination. Mr Assad is loyal to the Alawite sect, a strand of Shia Islam, and Lebanese Shia are tarred by association."

"But instead, the Tuaregs' struggle for an independent homeland has been hijacked by better-armed Islamists from Mali and abroad, creating a safe haven for militants in the Sahara that is already being compared to similar bastions elsewhere."

Former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf on Monday accused the U.S. of violating his country’s sovereignty by sending in special forces to kill Osama bin Laden.

"When Indonesian police arrested 11 people on suspicion of planning a series of terrorist attacks, long held suspicions that the next generation of jihadists was about to emerge had perhaps been confirmed."

"Voters in the pivotal battleground states of Ohio and Florida show strong interest in global security issues, and want to hear the candidates' views on defense, Iran and terrorism in the final presidential debate, according to a new poll conducted jointly by leading Democratic and Republican pollsters for Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs."

"Are senior Obama administration officials considering transferring to Egypt a poisonously influential Islamist cleric serving a life term in federal prison for trying to unleash a war of urban terrorism in the United States?"

"President Obama's comment to a Spanish-language television station in Miami that Venezuela doesn't pose a 'serious' threat to national security has provoked a storm of criticism from Republicans. According to Obama, 'what Mr. Chavez has done over the last several years has not had a serious national security impact on us. . . . My main concern when it comes to Venezuela is having the Venezuelan people have a voice in their affairs and that you end up ultimately having fair and free elections, which we don't always see.'"

"Pakistan's spymaster has postponed a trip to the United States in the latest sign of the dire state of relations between two supposed allies in the war against Islamist extremists."

"Congress's new Democratic majority is expanding its review of the Bush administration's push for broad executive power, as the Senate is set to look into how the Pentagon has increased its covert intelligence operations."

"The long-dormant Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) announced that it will hold its first public meeting next week and it invited members of the public to provide input to help shape the Board’s near-term agenda."

"The recent spate of attacks on Muslim historic and religious sites in the ancient city of Timbuktu calls to mind the Taliban's destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan over a decade ago. The Taliban, of course, were obliterating the icons of a rival religion, as they saw it. The Salafist militias that have lately overrun Timbuktu and Mali are obliterating a rival tradition within their own faith."

"Mitt Romney and Republicans are taking sharp issue with President Obama's assertion earlier this week that leftist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez was not much a security threat to the United States."

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld is considering ways to expand broadly the role of American Special Operations forces in the global campaign against terrorism, including sending them worldwide to capture or kill Al Qaeda leaders far from the battlefields of Afghanistan.

"Despite apprehending some of his disciples and recruits, police are still struggling to arrest Indonesia's most wanted terrorism suspect Santoso, who is believed to be plotting a lethal bomb attack in the country."

"Yesterday the Somali terror group Shabaab threatened to attack Britain for extraditing radical Muslim cleric Abu Hamza al Masri, who arrived in the US on Oct. 5 after being held for nine years in a British prison."

"Fears of a terrorist strike against Western embassies in Yemen have grown amid claims a convoy of lorries laden with explosives had been smuggled into the country's capital city, Sana'a."

"An often-repeated concern that the U.S. Patriot Act gives the U.S. government unequaled access to personal data stored on cloud services is incorrect, with several other nations enjoying similar access to cloud data, according to a study released Wednesday."

"Why hasn't President Obama intervened militarily in Syria?"

"Fighting raged in Lebanon as Syria sympathizers took on opponents in a sign that Syrian President Bashar Assad's slaughter of Sunnis is triggering violence outside his borders."

While transnational terrorists have made their capture and elimination difficult, international law also contributes to this difficulty.

In sum, the current threat environment posed by terrorism and insurgency makes a new strategy, approach and new organizational and institutional behaviors necessary.

"Over the last several years Hezbollah and its patrons in Iran have greatly expanded their operations in Latin America to the detriment of inter-American security and US strategic interests."

"For eight years, General Pervez Musharraf monopolised the limelight on the world stage, keeping his generals out of public sight in sharp contrast to his military predecessors. When last week, he nervously passed on the symbolic army baton to his successor at a special ceremony, the world knew very little about the man who now occupies his country's most powerful office."

The U.S. intelligence community has made immense strides in detecting terrorists by scrutinizing their passports and other travel documents, and U.S. immigration officials at airports and border posts need to be trained in these arcane spotting techniques.

We should really try to get into the nature of this new threat in the post September 11th environment that we face, what is it about, who are these people, what drives their ideology to be what it is, and how do we then counter that threat…what can we do and can we in fact survive that.

"And it's my pleasure today to introduce today's guest, John Brennan. He's assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism and a deputy national security adviser."

"'A quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing.'"

"The US State Department is actively negotiating with Egyptian President Morsi's government about transferring Omar Abdel-Rahman from US custody to Egyptian custody."

Someone in Pakistan had published in a newspaper there an offer of a reward to anyone who killed an American, any American. So I just thought I would write to let them know what an American is, so they would know when they found one.

"American diplomats were told that one of the key reasons why they had failed to find bin Laden was that Pakistan's security services tipped him off whenever US troops approached."

Effective conflict management and, therefore, systemic peace result from a fundamental congruence between societal-system resilience and the systemic risk factors that would otherwise 'trigger' contention and 'fuel' the escalation to violence.

It is important to recognize the efforts of the intelligence agencies in the United States, but a global network of terrorism requires cooperation from our allies and other nations in gathering and sharing information.

A genealogy of the radical ideas that underline al-Qaeda’s justification for violence shows that the development of jihadi thought over the past several decades is characterized by the erosion of critical constraints used to limit warfare and violence in classical Islam.

The SC adapted to transnational terrorism by demanding more from states and intervening deeper into their domestic realm, while at the same time offering more support with respect to implementation.

The challenge to the next US administration is to harness a vision for international cooperation on counter-terrorism and construct a roadmap for its strategic implementation.

We would do well to abandon the theory of 4GW altogether.

Americans and Pakistanis come to counterinsurgency and low-intensity conflict from different backgrounds and different experiences.

This article examines what has been learned since 11 September 2001 about the nature of twenty-first-century terrorism, the challenges that it poses, and how it must be countered.

The key to defeating the jihadi movement is identifying its strengths and weaknesses so that the former may be countered or co-opted and the latter exploited. In this article we argue that the people who know these strengths and weaknesses best are the jihadis themselves.

North Americans and Europeans have more com­mon cause in this long war than is widely assumed. Much like the Cold War, we will agree on: (1) the nature of the war, (2) the state of the threat, and (3) the character of the response.

What are the 'root causes' of terrorism? Based on history and logic, they are not what most people assume; poverty, revolutionary nationalism and oppression. Instead, there is a brutal simplicity to terrorism: Terrorism is often seen as an effective tactic.

In brief, the previously national scope of most terrorist activity is a thing of the past. Terrorism today, involving collaboration between widely separated and often ideologically divergent groups, is effectively transnational in scope.

"In an assessment on Global Water Security, U.S. Intelligence Community predicts that exploding populations in developing countries coupled with climate change would be naturally transformed into drought, floods and lack of fresh water. Followed by poor governance, this in the next 10 years would cause significant political instability that eventually would lead from social disruptions to state failures, the report released in February this year, says."

Michael Kraig defines local, state, and transnational terrorism. He also explains the differences between the three in an ideological sense and how transnational terrorism uses religious extremism to drive their efforts.

Terrorism is a transnational threat in which Europe and the United States face shared challenges.

President Obama praises those Americans who carried out the operation to kill Osama bin Laden, tells the families of the victims of September 11, 2001 that they have never been forgotten, and calls on Americans to remember the unity of that tragic day.

Ayman al-Zawahiri invited journalists and Jihadist enthusiasts to ask him questions via the primary Jihadist web forums. Zawahiri promised to personally answer some of those questions in a subsequent statement.

This paper addresses the Department of Defense (DOD) all-source, analytic intelligence apparatus and assesses its efforts to combat transnational terrorism.

In the ensuing months after the attacks, the Nation has undertook actions across all aspects of national power to defeat the global threat of transnational terrorism.

The Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair today unveiled the 2009 National Intelligence Strategy - the blueprint that will drive the priorities for the nation's 16 intelligence agencies over the next 4 years.

"An Act To provide for the implementation of the recommendations of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States."

"Congressman Jim Langevin (D-RI) today met with a bipartisan group of House leaders on the issue of congressional continuity to push his eCongress proposal, which seeks to ensure the continuity of congressional business in the event of a natural disaster or terrorist strike on Washington, D.C."

"The Narcotics Rewards Program was established by Congress in 1986 as a tool to assist the U.S. Government identify and bring to justice the major violators of U.S. narcotics laws responsible for bringing hundreds of tons of illicit drugs into the United States each year."

This document analyzes the ways in which transnational terrorists operate and how the United States can combat their efforts to attack the United States.

"The 112th Congress has focused on measures to reduce the federal budget deficit. This backdrop may continue to influence congressional debate over a top-ranking U.S. aid recipient, Pakistan—a country vital to U.S. national security interests but that some say lacks accountability and even credibility as a U.S. ally."

"The Philippine Government faces threats from several groups, some of which are on the US Government's Foreign Terrorist Organization list. Manila has waged a decades-long struggle against ethnic Moro insurgencies in the southern Philippines, which has led to a peace accord with the Moro National Liberation Front and on-again/off-again peace talks with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. The decades-long Maoist-inspired New People's Army insurgency also operates through much of the country. The Philippines faces increased tension with China over disputed territorial claims in the South China Sea."

"Recommended by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (9/11 Commission), the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) was initially established as an agency within the Executive Office of the President (EOP) in 2004. Critics, however, maintained that the board appeared to be a presidential appendage, devoid of the capability to exercise independent judgment and assessment or to provide impartial findings and recommendations."

"The Syria conflict risks setting the region 'ablaze', International peace envoy Lakhdar Brahimi has warned, as clashes broke out across the border with Lebanon."

This second edition of Terrorism provides an overview of the terrorist incidents and preventions designated by the FBI as having taken place in the United States and its territories during the years 2002 through 2005 and that are matters of public record.

This testimony primarily discusses the larger al-Qaeda Central terrorist organization, how and where they operate, and what we can do to foil their efforts against the United States and our allies.

"However, continuing advances in telecommunications technology have impaired and in some instances prevented telecommunications carriers from assisting law enforcement in conducting court-authorized electronic surveillance."

This paper examines an al-Qaida video entitled "The Power of Truth" and responses by al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri.

This morning I would like to discuss the domestic and international terrorist threat facing the United States and the measures the FBI is taking to address this threat.

The threat imposed by transnational terrorists spreads beyond the United States to nearly every corner of the globe. The Commonwealth of Australia addresses security issues related to transnational terrorism in this document.

"Honduras has traditionally been an ally of the United States."

"The United States established diplomatic relations with Uzbekistan in 1992 following its independence from the Soviet Union."

Exposes the most significant terrorist threats from the world's most dangerous terror group and its affiliates.

Analyzes the most significant dimensions of combating terrorism and insurgency, including considerations of strategic and tactical issues (hard power, soft power, and counterintelligence).

The nature and goals of terrorist organizations have changed profoundly since the Cold War standoff gave way to the current "polyplex" global system, in which the old rules of international engagement have been shattered by a new struggle for power.

Offering a nuanced sense of how Washington's counter-terrorism policy actually works, day in, day out, this is a comprehensive and scholarly study of global terrorism as it relates to the practice of US relations with the rest of the world.

Terrorism in Perspective takes a broad-based approach that emphasizes the historical, political, religious, social, and economic perceptions that underlie an understanding of both global and domestic terrorism.

The terrorist destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 was the climax of a course plotted by Osama Bin Laden to bring about his apocalyptic vision of a decisive clash between the Western and Moslem worlds.

Is the threat of an EMP a legitimate concern? What kind of infrastructural damage is an EMP capable of? How long would the consequences of such an attack last? All these questions and more will be answered in this FAQ.

"The Emerging Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee is responsible for overseeing counter-terrorism programs and initiatives and counterproliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Additionally, this subcommittee oversees U.S. Special Operations Forces, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), information technology and programs, force protection policy and oversight, and related intelligence support. It makes sure that our nation is protected against terrorist attacks and unconventional threats."

The Combating Terrorism Center at West Point contributes relevant scholarly perspectives through education, research and policy analysis to combat terrorist threats to the United States.

"The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) is first in all-source defense intelligence to prevent strategic surprise and deliver a decision advantage to warfighters, defense planners, and policymakers."

"NGA provides timely, relevant, and accurate geospatial intelligence in support of national security."

Founded in 2003, The George Washington University Homeland Security Policy Institute (HSPI) is a nonpartisan 'think and do' tank whose mission is to build bridges between theory and practice to advance homeland security through an interdisciplinary approach.