Terrorism News Stories
Below are key excerpts of revealing news articles on terrorism from reliable news media sources. If any link fails to function, a paywall blocks full access, or the article is no longer available, try these digital tools.
For further exploration, delve into our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center.
A Navy SEAL's firsthand account of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden pulls back the veil on the secret operations conducted almost nightly by elite American forces against terrorist suspects. Former SEAL Matt Bissonnette's account contradicted in key details the account of the raid presented by administration officials in the days after the May 2011 raid in Abbotabad, Pakistan. Bissonnette wrote that the SEALs spotted bin Laden at the top of a darkened hallway and shot him in the head even though they could not tell whether he was armed. Administration officials have described the SEALs shooting bin Laden only after he ducked back into a bedroom because they assumed he might be reaching for a weapon. Bissonnette wrote the book, No Easy Day, under the pseudonym Mark Owen, as one of the men in the room when they killed bin Laden. In [one] scene, a terrified mother clutches her child and a young girl identifies the dead man as Osama bin Laden. The SEAL author says he did "not disclose confidential or sensitive information that would compromise national security in any way."
Note: Isn't it interesting that the SEAL team "spotted bin Laden at the top of a darkened hallway and shot him in the head." If it was a darkened hallway, how did they know it was bin Laden? The articles states "a young girl identifies the dead man as Osama bin Laden." Is that really how they ID'd this guy? And why did they then dump his body into the ocean, so that there could never be definitive proof that the body was indeed bin Laden? So many questions remain. For more evidence bin Laden was not killed by SEALs, click here.
The days of secrecy at the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) may be coming to an end. Its a widely held belief that the agencys hasty embrace of expensive, X-rated x-ray machines has more to do with closed-door lobbying efforts of manufacturers than a deliberate consideration of the devices merits. The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) [has] pushed for some transparency by asking the D.C. Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals to compel the agency to hold a public notice-and-comment period on the use of pornographic scanners, as the law requires. EPIC has a good case because on July 15, 2011, the D.C. Circuit issued a ruling insisting TSA promptly come into compliance with Administrative Procedure Act requirements regarding public hearings. TSA believed it wasnt subject to such rules because the virtual strip-searching of women, children and the elderly is an essential security operation. The last thing TSA wants is the public-relations disaster of having to collect and publish the horror tales from Americans subjected to humiliation from the nude photography and intrusive pat-down groping sessions. Its time to admit the post-Sept. 11 experiment in having the government take over airport screening duties has been a colossal flop. TSA has defied the Administrative Procedures Act, an appellate court, the public will and common decency. Its not enough just to pull the plug on the scanners; the plug should be pulled on TSA itself.
Note: According to this PBS report, "European Union regulators recently banned any body scanner that uses X-rays, 'in order not to risk jeopardizing citizens' health and safety.'" It also states, "The TSA tested the devices behind closed doors, without scrutiny from independent scientists." For lots more on this topic important to all air travelers, click here.
The man who gave the Black Panther Party some of its first firearms and weapons training which preceded fatal shootouts with Oakland police in the turbulent 1960s was an undercover FBI informer, according to a former bureau agent and an FBI report. One of the Bay Areas most prominent radical activists of the era, Richard Masato Aoki was known as a fierce militant who touted his street-fighting abilities. He was a member of several radical groups before joining and arming the Panthers. But unbeknownst to his fellow activists, Aoki had served as an FBI intelligence informant, covertly filing reports on a wide range of Bay Area political groups, according to the bureau agent who recruited him, [Burney Threadgill Jr.]. Aokis work for the FBI ... was uncovered and verified during research for the book, Subversives: The FBIs War on Student Radicals, and Reagans Rise to Power. The FBI ... released records about Aoki in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. A Nov. 16, 1967, intelligence report on the Black Panthers lists Aoki as an informant with the code number T-2. Aoki gave the Panthers some of their first guns. As [Bobby] Seale recalled in his memoir, Seize the Time, the group approached Aoki, a Third World brother we knew, a Japanese radical cat. He had guns .357 Magnums, 22s, 9mms, what have you. In early 1967, Aoki joined the Black Panther Party and gave them more guns, Seale wrote. Aoki also gave Panther recruits weapons training.
Note: For a Democracy Now! video report on the discovery that Aoki was an FBI infiltrator, informer and provocateur, click here. This is more solid evidence that elements within government have consistently instigated violence within progressive movements in order to discredit them. Sadly, this policy appears to continue up to the present.
Two Portland residents say they will appear before a federal grand jury in Seattle Thursday in an investigation of anarchist activity, according to a statement they released on [August 1]. Grand jury subpoenas have also been served to activists in Olympia and Seattle ... according to the Seattle Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, which identifies itself as an association of progressive lawyers. The guild urged the U.S. Attorneys Office to drop the subpoenas [because] they were being used as a pretext for harassing political activists. It concerns us any time there are law-enforcement raids that target political literature, first amendment-protected materials, [guild spokesman Neil] Fox said. Two weeks before a heavily armed, July 25 FBI raid that Dennison Williams and Leah-Lynn Plante said took place at their Portland home, the Seattle Police Department SWAT team seized evidence connected to the May Day investigation from a Judkins Park apartment of Occupy Seattle members. In both cases, those searched told media that law-enforcement charged into their homes [with a battering-ram] early in the morning and used a stun grenade, a non-lethal object that creates a disorienting loud bang and bright light. Williams told The Oregonian that the FBI took his laptop computer, cell phone, two thumb drives, multiple pieces of black clothing, and a T-shirt that read on the front Multi Death Corporations.
Note: Amazingly, the FBI raids on political activists in Seattle and Portland have gone completely unreported by the mass media. For analysis of the FBI's attacks on dissenters, click here, here and here. For a Democracy Now! video report, click here. For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on civil liberties, click here.
I [Tangerine Bolen] am one of the lead plaintiffs in the civil lawsuit against the National Defense Authorization Act, which gives the president the power to hold any US citizen anywhere for as long as he wants, without charge or trial. In a May hearing, Judge Katherine Forrest issued an injunction against it; this week, in a final hearing in New York City, US government lawyers asserted even more extreme powers the right to disregard entirely the judge and the law. On Monday 6 August, Obama's lawyers filed an appeal to the injunction a profoundly important development that, as of this writing, has been scarcely reported. In the earlier March hearing, US government lawyers had confirmed that, yes, the NDAA does give the president the power to lock up people like journalist Chris Hedges and peaceful activists like myself and other plaintiffs. Government attorneys stated on record that even war correspondents could be locked up indefinitely under the NDAA. In this hearing ... Obama's attorneys refused to assure the court, when questioned, that the NDAA's section 1021 the provision that permits reporters and others who have not committed crimes to be detained without trial has not been applied by the US government anywhere in the world after Judge Forrest's injunction. In other words, they were telling a US federal judge that they could not, or would not, state whether Obama's government had complied with the legal injunction that she had laid down before them. I, like many in this fight, am now afraid of my government. We have good reason to be.
Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on civil liberties, click here.
[Trapwire is] a CCTV surveillance system that recognises people from their face or walk and analyses whether they might be about to commit a terrorist or criminal act. According to documents released online by WikiLeaks [it] is being used in a number of countries to try to monitor people and threats. Founded by former CIA agents, Trapwire uses data from a network of CCTV systems and numberplate readers to figure out the threat level in huge numbers of locations. The documents outlining Trapwire's existence and its deployment in the US were apparently obtained in a hack of computer systems belonging to the intelligence company Stratfor at the end of last year. Documents from the US department of homeland security show that it paid $832,000 to deploy Trapwire in Washington DC and Seattle. Stratfor describes Trapwire as "a unique, predictive software system designed to detect patterns of pre-attack surveillance and logistical planning". It serves "a wide range of law enforcement personnel and public and private security officials domestically and internationally", Stratfor says. Some have expressed doubts that Trapwire could really forecast [future] acts based on data from cameras. The claims might seem overblown, but then the idea that the US could have an international monitoring system seemed absurd until the discovery of the Echelon system, used by the US to eavesdrop on electronic communications internationally.
Note: For more on the growing use of this secret technology, click here. For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on privacy, click here.
The FBI, for the first time, has admitted publicly that it knew the radical Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki was returning to the U.S. in October 2002 and that an FBI agent discussed the American's return with a U.S. attorney before he was detained and then abruptly released from federal custody. Al-Awlaki, who would become the first American targeted for death by the CIA, eventually was killed last September in Yemen by a U.S. drone strike. Mark Giuliano, the FBI's assistant director for national security, testified [on August 1] that the FBI knew in advance that he was making his way back to the United States. Al-Awlaki was detained at New York City's JFK airport because a customs database flagged him based on an outstanding arrest warrant. Former FBI agents say there are only likely two explanations: The bureau let the cleric into the country to track him for intelligence, or the bureau wanted to work with him as a friendly contact. The FBI has never explained why it let al-Awlaki walk free at a time when dozens of young Muslim men were being held in detention centers on material witness warrants in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Al-Awlaki was under a full FBI investigation by the Washington office when he was invited to lunch at an executive dining room at the Pentagon in February 2002.
Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on the hidden realities of intelligence agencies, click here.
A new report from [FBI] inspector general, Michael Bromwich [says] that much of the vaunted laboratory's work was amateurish, and, worse, that lab officials who appeared at trials were overly eager to help the prosecution. It discovered, among other things, substandard performances by the laboratory's explosives, chemistry-toxicology and materials analysis units, forcing F.B.I. officials to review several hundred past and current cases -- including the Oklahoma City bombing case -- to determine how many might have been jeopardized by unprofessional work. The inquiry found numerous instances in which untrained F.B.I. agents had been allowed to take part in scientific work. In some cases lab reports were inadequately documented and exaggerated the evidence against defendants. Supervisors provided only the most cursory oversight, giving their subordinates freedom to reach unsupported findings, which then went unchallenged. Specifically, the F.B.I. apparently offered cooked testimony in at least two major cases. In the 1993 World Trade Center bombing case, an examiner in the explosives lab, David Williams, gave inaccurate testimony that ''exceeded his expertise, was unscientific and speculative, was based on improper nonscientific grounds and appeared to be tailored to correspond with his estimate of the amount of explosive used in the bombing.'' That should have been cause for Mr. Williams's dismissal. Instead he was assigned to the Oklahoma City bombing, where, the inspector general found, he committed ''many of the same errors.''
Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on the hidden realities of intelligence agencies, click here.
On February 2, 2011, President Obama called Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh. The two discussed counterterrorism cooperation and the battle against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. At the end of the call, according to a White House read-out, Obama expressed concern over the release of a man named Abdulelah Haider Shaye, whom Obama said had been sentenced to five years in prison for his association with AQAP. It turned out that Shaye had not yet been released at the time of the call, but Saleh did have a pardon for him prepared and was ready to sign it. But ... Abdulelah Haider Shaye is not an Islamist militant or an Al Qaeda operative. He is a journalist. Shaye risked his life to travel to areas controlled by Al Qaeda and to interview its leaders. He also conducted several interviews with the radical cleric Anwar al Awlaki. Shaye did the last known interview with Awlaki just before it was revealed that Awlaki, a US citizen, was on a CIA/JSOC hit list. We were only exposed to Western media and Arab media funded by the West, which depicts only one image of Al Qaeda, recalls his best friend Kamal Sharaf, a well-known dissident Yemeni political cartoonist. But Abdulelah brought a different viewpoint. Shaye had no reverence for Al Qaeda, but viewed the group as an important story, according to Sharaf.
Note: We generally avoid using sources with a strong bias like The Nation, but as none of the other major media have touched this most important story, we're including it here. For more on this revealing story, click here and here
The head of Germany's domestic intelligence service resigned on [July 2] after admitting that his agency had shredded files on a neo-Nazi cell whose killing spree targeting immigrants rocked the country late last year. Heinz Fromm's resignation is the latest in a series of embarrassing setbacks for Germany's security services over their handling of the "National Socialist Underground" (NSU), which went undetected for more than a decade despite its murder of 10 people, mostly ethnic Turkish immigrants. German lawmakers said there was no suggestion that Fromm had ordered the destruction of the files but that he was taking responsibility for others' failures. German media have said an official working in the intelligence agency is suspected of having destroyed files on an operation to recruit far-right informants just one day after the involvement of the NSU in the murders became public. Fromm told the Spiegel weekly that the shredding of files in the case had done "grave damage to the reputation" of his agency, known in Germany as the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. Germans, burdened by their Nazi past, were mortified by last year's news that three neo-Nazis had been behind the killings of eight ethnic Turks, an ethnic Greek and a police officer in a period running from 2000 to 2007. The NSU cell's culpability only came to light after two of the neo-Nazis committed suicide following a botched bank robbery last autumn.
Note: For insightful reports from reliable major media articles on the dark operations of intelligence agencies, click here.
Revelations that top officials are targeting people to be assassinated abroad, including American citizens, are only the most recent, disturbing proof of how far our nations violation of human rights has extended. This development began after [9/11] and has been sanctioned and escalated by bipartisan executive and legislative actions. While the country has made mistakes in the past, the widespread abuse of human rights over the last decade has been a dramatic change from the past. With leadership from the United States, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted in 1948 as the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world. This was a bold and clear commitment that power would no longer serve as a cover to oppress or injure people, and it established equal rights of all people to life, liberty, security of person, equal protection of the law and freedom from torture, arbitrary detention or forced exile. It is disturbing that, instead of strengthening these principles, our governments counterterrorism policies are now clearly violating at least 10 of the declarations 30 articles, including the prohibition against cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. Recent legislation has made legal the presidents right to detain a person indefinitely on suspicion of affiliation with terrorist organizations or associated forces, a broad, vague power that can be abused without meaningful oversight from the courts or Congress. This law violates the right to freedom of expression and to be presumed innocent until proved guilty, two other rights enshrined in the declaration.
Note: For revealing reports from major media sources on war crimes committed by US forces in the "global war on terror," click here.
Malaysia is brave to organise a war crimes tribunal and to recognise former United States president George W. Bush and his associates as war criminals. In a public forum entitled "9/11 and the Ecological Crisis", renowned theologian, scholar and author Professor David Ray Griffin praised Malaysia for having the courage to bring these prominent figures to justice and to expose their crimes to the international community. "Someone has to get started somewhere, and this is a good start, Malaysia is ideally placed in this aspect and hopefully the international community will take notice," he said. In his lecture, Griffin also explained his theory on the Sept 11 attacks, claiming that it was a "staged event" and could not have been the work of Muslim terrorists. He explained that the rigid steel columns of the (World Trade Center) twin towers made it impossible for them to crumble unless they had been rigged with explosives. Griffin added that the fires could not have come within 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit of the temperature needed to melt steel. He also alleged that the hijackers had minimal competence to fly single-engine aircraft, let alone be able to handle commercial jets. Griffin noted that more than any others, Muslims have paid the greatest price as a result of 9/11 that later launched the war on terrorism. "We have started something called Consensus 9/11 where we have gathered several experts to provide the world with a clear statement, based on expert independent opinion, of some of the best evidence opposing the official narrative about 9/11."
Note: The New Straits Times is Malaysia's oldest newspaper, founded in 1845. This article is a rare example of objective mainstream press coverage of alternative interpretations of the 9/11 events. WantToKnow team member Prof. David Ray Griffin's most recent book on 9/11 is 9/11 Ten Years Later.
If you thought that the fires at the World Trade Center twin towers, set off by the horrific jetliner impacts of September 11, 2001, were the cause of the destruction of those iconic skyscrapers, you may be mistaken. Experts now cite evidence showing that high-temperature incendiaries and explosives were planted throughout the twin towers and the lesser-known 47-story Building 7, also destroyed later the same day. So says a group of architects and engineers nearly 1700 strong, represented by Richard Gage, AIA, founder of Architects & Engineers For 9/11 Truth and the director/producer of a new documentary. Two years in the making, the documentary "9/11: Explosive Evidence - Experts Speak Out - FINAL EDITION " officially debuted today. The film features 43 experts in building engineering, physics, chemistry, and other technical fields, plus a half-dozen psychologists who discussed the denial of the evidence that the AE911Truth engineers have been seeking to get attention to since the founding of the nonprofit organization in 2007. The group's petition, signed by 14,000 concerned citizens in addition to the architectural and engineering experts, calls upon the U.S. Congress to initiate a new independent investigation. "The official story about the attacks of September 11 falls apart when you look squarely at the facts and apply basic scientific principles to interpret them," says Gage.
Note: For an early version of this powerful documentary, click here. See our 9/11 Information Center for lots more information on the realities behind 9/11.
A U.N. investigator has called on the Obama administration to justify its policy of assassinating rather than capturing al Qaeda or Taliban suspects, increasingly with the use of unmanned drone aircraft that also take civilian lives. Christof Heyns, U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, urged Washington to clarify the basis under international law of the policy, in a report issued overnight to the United Nations Human Rights Council. The U.S. military has conducted drone attacks in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen, in addition to conventional raids and air strikes, according to Heyns, a South African jurist serving in the independent post. Citing figures from the Pakistan Human Rights Commission, he said U.S. drone strikes killed at least 957 people in Pakistan in 2010 alone. Thousands have been killed in 300 drone strikes there since 2004, 20 percent of whom are believed to be civilians." Although figures vary widely with regard to drone attack estimates, all studies concur on one important point: there has been a dramatic increase in their use over the past three years," Heyns said. Human rights law requires that every effort be made to arrest a suspect, in line with the "principles of necessity and proportionality on the use of force", the investigator said.
Note: For lots more from reliable sources on the warcrimes committed by the US military, click here.
Most Americans have gotten used to regular news reports about military and CIA drones attacking terrorist suspects including US citizens in Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere abroad. But picture thousands of drone aircraft buzzing around the United States. By some government estimates, as many as 30,000 drones could be part of intelligence gathering and law enforcement here in the United States within the next ten years. Operated by agencies down to the local level, this would be in addition to the 110 current and planned drone activity sites run by the military services in 39 states, reported this week by the Federation of American Scientists, a non-government research project. Civil libertarians warn that unmanned aircraft carrying cameras raise the prospect of a significant new avenue for the surveillance of American life, as the American Civil Liberties Union put it in a report last December. The technology is quickly becoming cheaper and more powerful, interest in deploying drones among police departments is increasing, and our privacy laws are not strong enough to ensure that the new technology will be used responsibly and consistently with democratic values, reported the ACLU. In short, all the pieces appear to be lining up for the eventual introduction of routine aerial surveillance in American life.
Note: For deeper analysis of the threats posed to American citizens by military and police drones in the skies, click here. For information on a federal recent law compelling the Federal Aviation Administration to allow drones to fly in US skies, click here. For more information on the use of drones by police in the US, click here. For lots more from reliable sources on surveillance in the US, click here.
Military researchers are at work on another revolution in the air: shrinking unmanned drones ... to the size of insects and birds. The drones in development ... are designed to replicate the flight mechanics of moths, hawks and other inhabitants of the natural world. Were looking at how you hide in plain sight, said Greg Parker, an aerospace engineer, as he held up a prototype of a mechanical hawk that in the future might carry out espionage or kill. An explosion in aerial drones is transforming the way America fights and thinks about its wars. Predator drones ... are by now a brand name, known and feared around the world. But far less known is the sheer size, variety and audaciousness of a rapidly expanding drone universe, along with the dilemmas that come with it. The Pentagon now has some 7,000 aerial drones, compared with fewer than 50 a decade ago. Within the next decade the Air Force anticipates a decrease in manned aircraft but expects its number of multirole aerial drones like the Reaper the ones that spy as well as strike to nearly quadruple, to 536. Already the Air Force is training more remote pilots, 350 this year alone, than fighter and bomber pilots combined. Its a growth market, said Ashton B. Carter, the Pentagons chief weapons buyer. The Pentagon has asked Congress for nearly $5 billion for drones next year, and by 2030 envisions ever more stuff of science fiction: spy flies equipped with sensors and microcameras to detect enemies
Note: Ashton B. Carter, CIA director John Deutch, and executive director of the 9/11 Commission Philip Zelikow co-authored a 1998 article in the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, Foreign Affairs, titled "Catastrophic Terrorism". It predicted, years in advance, a massive attack on the World Trade Center that would result in loss of civil liberties, detention without charge, torture, and endless wars abroad. The Pentagon's weapons-buying spree, now including billions of dollars for drones to be used over US soil, and for which Carter is the "chief weapons buyer," would have been impossible without the 9/11 attacks.
Drone aircraft spy on and attack terrorists with no pilot in harm's way. Small teams of special operations troops quietly train and advise foreign forces. Viruses sent from computers to foreign networks strike silently, with no American fingerprint. It's war in the shadows, with the U.S. public largely in the dark. The high-tech warfare allows Obama to target what the administration sees as the greatest threats to U.S. security, without the cost and liabilities of sending a swarm of ground troops to capture territory; some of them almost certainly would come home maimed or dead. But it also raises questions about accountability and the implications for international norms regarding the use of force outside of traditional armed conflict. "Congressional oversight of these operations appears to be cursory and insufficient," said Steven Aftergood, an expert on government secrecy issues for the Federation of American Scientists, a private group. "It is Congress' responsibility to declare war under the Constitution, but instead it appears to have adopted a largely passive role while the executive takes the initiative in war fighting," Aftergood said in an interview. That's partly because lawmakers relinquished their authority by passing a law just after the Sept. 11 [attacks]. In this shroud of secrecy, leaks to the news media of classified details about certain covert operations have led to charges that the White House orchestrated the revelations to bolster Obama's national security credentials and thereby improve his re-election chances.
Note: For deeper analysis of the threats posed to American citizens by military and police drones in the skies, click here. For information on a federal recent law compelling the Federal Aviation Administration to allow drones to fly in US skies, click here. For more information on the use of drones by police in the US, click here. For lots more from reliable sources on surveillance in the US, click here.
New evidence shows that the September 11th activities of former President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were falsely reported by official sources. The 20-member 9/11 Consensus Panel analyzed evidence from press reports, FOIA requests, and archived 9/11 Commission file documents to produce eight new studies, released today. The international panel also [determined] that four massive aerial practice exercises traditionally held in October were in full operation on 9/11. The largest, Global Guardian, held annually by NORAD and the U.S. Strategic and Space Commands, had originally been scheduled for October 22-31 but was moved, along with Vigilant Guardian, to early September. Although senior officials claimed no one could have predicted [the use of] hijacked planes as weapons, the military had been practicing similar exercises on 9/11 itself -- and for years before it. Official sources claimed neither Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Joint Chiefs of Staff Acting Chairman General Richard Myers (filling in for General Hugh Shelton), nor war-room chief General Montague Winfield were available to take command until well after the Pentagon was struck about 9:37. Yet emerging documents and memoirs show that top leaders were engaged earlier -- and later discussed a shootdown of [United Airlines] Flight 93 before debris was scattered widely around its alleged Shanksville, Pennsylvania crash site. Most intriguing is the mystery of who was running the Pentagon's war-room during the critical early hours.
Note: To examine the evidence presented by the 9/11 Consensus Panel which refutes the questionable accounts of the whereabouts and activities of key political and military leaders provided by The 9/11 Commission Report, as well as the best evidence concerning other claims of the official story of 9/11, click here.
The Kuala Lumpur Tribunal's indictment of President George W. Bush and his deputies for war crimes sets a new precedent. The [tribunal] ruled in the second week of May that George W. Bush, former President of the United States, and six members of his administration were guilty of war crimes. The tribunal, after recording eyewitness accounts of torture victims in a trial that lasted five days, pronounced that Bush, his Vice-President, Dick Cheney, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and five senior officials who had sought to provide legal cover for the [invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq] were guilty of war crimes. The American invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan has resulted in the death of more than a million people.. Richard Falk, Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, observed that [only] leaders from countries that opposed the interests of the West were held accountable to international criminal law. He pointed out that the ICC's Special Court on Sierra Leone had been financed by the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and the Netherlands. Companies from these countries have big interests in the diamond trade. With Taylor now out of the scene, Western companies are back in the lucrative diamond trade. Falk ... observed that the U.S., more than any other country in the world, holds itself self-righteously aloof from accountability on the main ground that any judicial process might be tainted by political motivations. The U.S. has signed with over 100 countries agreements that prohibit the handing over of any U.S. citizen to the ICC.
Note: For an insightful analysis of the cooptation of the ICC by imperial powers, click here.
Mr. Obama has placed himself at the helm of a top secret "nominations" process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, of which the capture part has become largely theoretical. Mr. Obama ... insisted on approving every new name on an expanding "kill list," poring over terrorist suspects' biographies. When a rare opportunity for a drone strike at a top terrorist arises -- but his family is with him -- it is the president who has reserved to himself the final moral calculation. In interviews with The New York Times, three dozen of his current and former advisers described Mr. Obama's evolution since taking on the role, without precedent in presidential history, of personally overseeing the shadow war. They describe a paradoxical leader who shunned the legislative deal-making required to close the detention facility at Guantnamo Bay in Cuba, but approves lethal action without hand-wringing. When he applies his lawyering skills to counterterrorism, it is usually to enable, not constrain, his ferocious campaign ... even when it comes to killing an American cleric in Yemen, a decision that Mr. Obama told colleagues was "an easy one." Beside the president at every step is his counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, who is variously compared by colleagues to a dogged police detective, tracking terrorists from his cavelike office in the White House basement, or a priest whose blessing has become indispensable to Mr. Obama, echoing the president's attempt to apply the "just war" theories of Christian philosophers to a brutal modern conflict.
Note: For further analysis of Obamas role in the selection of drone missile targets, click here.
Important Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.
