Al Qaeda

9/11: A Memorial to FBI Failure

Featured image Editors’ note: We are pleased to announce a new regular contributor to our pages: Lloyd Billingsley. Lloyd is the author of Hollywood Party: How Communism Seduced the Film Industry in the 1930s and 40s and other books. His work has appeared in countless newspapers and magazines, and he served as a correspondent for the Washington Times and The Spectator (London). Among many projects over his long career, Lloyd collaborated with »

Zawahiri zapped

Featured image President Biden took off his mask and emerged from isolation to announce that the CIA had zapped al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zahawiri in a drone strike conducted by the CIA on his Kabul balcony over this past weekend. The White House has posted the transcript of Biden’s remarks here. Reuters has a good story on the drone strike here and more on the operation here. Biden said the strike occurred »

Bin Laden’s Secrets Revealed

Featured image You no doubt recall that the Navy Seals who executed Osama bin Laden also made off with a treasure trove of al Qaeda documents. Whatever happened to them? The Telegraph recounts the story: With their strict 30-minute deadline almost up, the Seals requested more time on the ground because they had found “a whole s— ton of computers and electronic gear on the second floor”. Permission was granted, and during »

After the Taliban’s triumph

Featured image I hear some conservatives saying that we should have gone into Afghanistan, defeated the forces that attacked us on 9/11, and then left. The obvious problem with this view is that as soon as we left, the forces that attacked us or collaborated in the attack would have returned to power. Sure, we would have killed and captured some bad guys, but basically we would have been back where we »

Remembering Biden’s bum advice on the bin Laden raid

Featured image On the tenth anniversary of the raid that took out Osama bin Laden, it’s worth remembering that Joe Biden recommended against undertaking the raid. Biden told President Obama, “Mr. President, my suggestion is: Don’t go.” Somewhere in his many decades in public life Biden must have been right about an important issue of foreign policy/national security. I just can’t think of when that was. It certainly wasn’t when Biden criticized »

Terrorists can’t hide from Israel and couldn’t hide from Trump

Featured image In August of this year, Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah, also known as Abu Muhammad al-Masri, was shot and killed by motorcycle-riding Israeli agents on the streets of an upscale Tehran suburb. Al-Masri was one of the masterminds behind the deadly 1998 attacks on American embassies in Africa, and was on the FBI’s “Most Wanted Terrorist” list. He was considered al Qaeda’s number two man. Also killed in the attack was al-Masri’s »

Ilhan Omar explained

Featured image Taking issue with one of President Trump’s comments yesterday in the controversy of the moment, CNN explains that Rep. Ilhan Omar didn’t actually praise al Qaeda in her 2013 comments (video below). CNN devotes two reporters to the task of reconstruction and offers this grudging concession: “It is possible to argue that Omar was making light of al Qaeda’s crimes in suggesting that its name itself is what makes people »

From the bin Laden files

Featured image Yesterday the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and FDD’s Long War Journal hosted a panel discussion of the massive cache of Osama bin Laden documents released on November 1 courtesy of CIA Director Mike Pompeo. The conversation featured the incredibly dogged New York Times reporter Rukmini Callimachi as well as FDD’s Tom Joscelyn and Bill Roggio, who were given the opportunity to preview the records, images, audio, and video files »

From the bin Laden files (2)

Featured image The current issue of the Weekly Standard highlights the release of the bin Laden files that were so jealousy guarded by the Obama administration. Editor in chief Steve Hayes has long called for the release of the documents. He now reports “The big reveal: The story of how 470,000 documents from Osama bin Laden’s compound finally got into the open.” What was the Obama administration hiding? The related editorial explores »

From the bin Laden files

Featured image The Obama administration suppressed the release of the trove of al Qaeda documents seized in the May 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden’s Abbotabad lair. It released a grand total of 571 documents and sat on the rest. Why so shy? Today the Trump administration released hundreds of thousands of the documents as well as images and computer files recovered in the raid. Tom Joscelyn and Bill Roggio provide an »

How Trump inadvertently helps al Qaeda in Syria

Featured image I’ve discussed how President Trump’s collaboration with Russia in Syria is helping Iran. Marc Thiessen shows that it is also inadvertently aiding al Qaeda. Thiessen cites the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) and the American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project (CTP). They find that “current U.S. strategy empowers al-Qaeda, which has an army in Syria, is preparing to replace ISIS,. . . [and] is more dangerous than ISIS.” How so? »

Will Team Trump air Obama’s Iran secrets?

Featured image For years, Republicans and conservatives have charged that President Obama has shielded embarrassing intelligence and other information regarding Iran in order to limit opposition to the Iran nuclear deal and Obama’s conciliatory approach to Tehran. The charge seems well-founded. After all, it took Sens. Tom Cotton and Rep. Mike Pompeo to discover secret side agreements attached to the nuclear deal. Eli Lake suggests that the Trump administration may well stop »

The Taliban: al Qaeda’s ally; Hillary’s peace partner

Featured image I believe it’s widely known, though also widely forgotten, that then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton orchestrated “peace talks” with the Taliban. Clinton discussed her role in some detail in her book, Hard Choices. Robert Potts at the American Thinker provided a good summary of Clinton’s involvement, as described by her, in this article. Clinton’s goals were to “shatter the alliance between the Taliban and al Qaeda, end the insurgency, and »

ISIS and al Qaeda — same sport, same level, different strategies

Featured image President Obama famously characterized ISIS as al Qaeda’s jayvee. This bit of idiocy will long be remembered, to the detriment of Obama’s legacy. But how should we compare ISIS and al Qaeda? A year ago, if I recall correctly, conventional wisdom had it that ISIS was preoccupied with securing and expanding its regional caliphate (sort of like Stalin’s “socialism in one country”), whereas al Qaeda was more internationally focused (Trotsky »

Bin Laden had the book on Obama

Featured image Being on bin Laden’s bookshelf has become, in a way, the modern version of being on Richard Nixon’s enemies list. Bob Woodward gets a special award. He gained both distinctions, if that’s the right word. Politico contacted some of the authors in question for comment. Warning: Greg Palast’s response is nausea-inducing. What should we make of the bookshelf? Above all, it confirms that bin Laden was obsessed with the United »

Bin Laden’s Correspondence

Featured image Today the Director of National Intelligence declassified and posted on the DNI web site 103 documents that were recovered during the raid on Osama bin Laden’s Pakistan compound, along with a variety of other materials. Among those other items is a list of 39 books in English that were found at the compound. Let’s start with the books. While there are some legitimate works of history, the list is heavy »

Tide turns against Assad in Syria

Featured image The Assad regime has suffered a series of setbacks in its fight against rebel forces to the point that its ability to retain power appears to be in jeopardy, the Washington Post reports. Walter Russell Mead concurs. Both the Post and Mead cite Robert Ford, the former U.S. ambassador to Syria. He says “we may be seeing signs of the beginning of the end.” The most important signs are on »