Iran: Leaks abound relating to Iran. Is Washington “genuis punditocracy” putting pressure on Israel relating to nukes and sanctions? EA’s Scott Lucas’ reaction is here : he wonders whether the policy may be “too clever by half” but guest writer Gary Sick praises President Obama’s “strategic leaking”.
We have a guestcommentary from Babak Siavoshy of Georgetown University which defends Mir Houssein Mousavi’s “5-Point Plan”. Meanwhile, five expatriateIranian intellectuals have followed Mousavi’s statement with their own 10-point list of demands from the Iranian Government.
Saeed Habibi from the Committee of Human Rights Reporters is in hiding in Iran. Britain’s C4 News interviewed him last night, see have the video here.
All the latest news is on our timeline blog which also includes links to other stories from EA and other news media.
Israel: There was a hullabuloo in the Channel 1 studio last Thursday when Jamal Zahalka was removed following a heated argument with host Dan Margalit. See the programme video here. Zahalka subsequently accused the state media of “surrendering to the state”.
Yesterday President Obama spoke to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Phoenix, Arizona. The headline was “Obama Defends War in Afghanistan“, as the President explained that the US intervention was a “war of necessity” (as opposed to the Bush Administration’s “war of choice” in Iraq), two days before the Afghan Presidential vote. Obama, however, also spoke more widely about other theatres of US operations and about the relationship between military and non-military power.
Last week the New York Timespublished an article detailing the Pentagon’s plan to shift focus away from international terrorism, known under the previous administration as the Global War on Terror, towards larger strategic threats to the United States such as destabilized governments and mass refugee crises provoked by climate change. Most in the defense establishment welcome this shift in strategy, but the threat from terrorism still remains.
This time, however, there is a difference. The terror threat comes largely not from foreign nationals but from Americans.
In 2009 almost 70 Americans, including police officers and medical personnel, have been killed by domestic terror attacks. This is a breathtakingly sharp rise from 2008, when only two people lost their lives, both of whom died at the hands of anti-Liberal terrorist Jim D. Adkisson in Tennessee. The first attack in 2009 was in Samson, Alabama, when Michael McLendon went on a cross-county shooting rampage that killed 11 people including himself. The most recent was on June 10, when James von Brunn opened fire inside the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, killing one guard and wounding several others.
While each of these attacks is unique, they can be roughly broken down into a handful of categories. In this piece, we will explore these terrorist archetypes, the ecosystem that produced them, as well as common tactics, both harmful and helpful, used to counter them. The intention is to provide students, analysts and researchers, with a sound and coherent image of the domestic terror threat facing the United States.
Iran: Leaks abound relating to Iran. Is Washington “genuis punditocracy” putting pressure on Israel relating to nukes and sanctions? EA’s Scott Lucas’ reaction is here : he wonders whether the policy may be “too clever by half” but guest writer Gary Sick praises President Obama’s “strategic leaking”.
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