The Exquisite Contrarian

The GOP meme: if you say it’s not luck enough times, it’s not luck. Using words like ‘socialist’ of course have the same impact.  Just remember, kids, all you need to do is say something enough times and it becomes reality.  If you have any questions regarding how this works, in Dick Cheney’s absence Sarah [...]

From Slate: Cheney lambasted the Obama administration’s efforts to try these sorts of terrorists as criminals in civilian court when they should be treated as “enemy combatants” and hauled before a military tribunal, preferably at Guantanamo.  ”It’s very important,” Cheney said, “to go back and keep in mind the distinction between handling these events as [...]

Apparently OBL’s used wording in his most recent tape that implies an imminent attack.  Not sure if this is why the UK alert level has been raised, but definitely hit the radars of most western nations.  Here’s more from The Telegraph.

Osama bin Laden purportedly claimed responsibility for the attempt to bomb a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas in a new audio message released Sunday threatening more attacks on the United States. Scared?

We’re still asking questions about what went on at Gitmo, and that’s never the wrong thing to do.  However, make no mistake, its inhabitants were brought there as suspected mass murderers. Now we’re hearing there was another site that’s been kept under wraps.  More on the previously undisclosed location and the suicides of 2006 in [...]

a detailed review of the episode by The New York Times, including more than two dozen interviews with White House and American intelligence officials and with counterterrorism officials in Europe and Yemen, shows that there were far more warning signs than the administration has acknowledged. The full story can be found here.

Al-Qaeda has successfully restructured its global network and now has the capability to carry out a wide range of terror attacks against Western targets, according to a detailed U.S. intelligence assessment that has been conducted in the wake of the failed Christmas Day Detroit bomb plot. Here’s the full story.

Cringely contends it’s unfathomable that multiple government agencies can’t do in an hour what credit card companies do in seconds: separate the good from the bad. I, Cringely » Blog Archive » Predict Me, I’m from the Government – Cringely on technology.

‘Al-Balawi’s case is a study in the radicalization of someone who is well-educated, economically well-off, devout, and disciplined. Such people may not fit into the public's stereotypical idea of a terrorist, but the profile is increasingly familiar to police and intelligence officers involved with counterterrorism. Many of Al Qaeda's most successful attacks, from 9/11 to [...]

‘Among other things, writes professor Hoffman, Al Qaeda “seeks to flood our already information-overloaded national intelligence systems with myriad threats and background noise … has stepped up a strategy of economic warfare … is still trying to create divisions within the global alliance arrayed against it by targeting key coalition partners … is aggressively seeking [...]