Terrorism

The strategic partnership agreement between the United States and Afghanistan that was signed by Presidents Barack Obama and Hamid Karzai on May 1, 2012 did not address several critical questions, the most important of which is whether, and to what degree, the international community will continue to fund the Afghan government after 2014. Addressing the Afghan government’s budget needs is to be a major focus of the upcoming Chicago summit.

In a new book, a "60 Minutes" interview and other recent public statements, Jose Rodriguez, a three-decade veteran of the CIA who rose to become head of the National Clandestine Service, has stoutly defended the CIA's use of coercive interrogation techniques on al Qaeda detainees.

Rodriguez asserts, for instance, "Information obtained from senior al Qaeda terrorists, who became compliant after receiving enhanced interrogation techniques, was key to the U.S. government learning of the existence of a courier who was bin Laden's lifeline."

At a campaign event Monday in New Hampshire, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney asserted that he too would have made the decision to send a U.S. Navy SEAL team to kill Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, telling reporters, "Of course, even Jimmy Carter would have given that order."

Among the cache of documents that the SEALs captured during their raid of Osama Bin Laden’s compound last year, one in particular should make many Republican foreign-policy advisers reassess their whole approach to the “war on terror.”

It’s the letter—No. 9 of the 17 missives that the administration released this week through West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center—in which Bin Laden discusses what he calls the “very important matter” of changing the name of al-Qaida.

We climbed the stairs to the third floor, where Osama bin Laden died early in the morning of May 2, 2011. I stepped into the bedroom where he was killed and looked up at the ceiling, where you could still see the patterns of blood that had spurted from bin Laden's head when the bullet fired by a U.S. Navy SEAL tore through the terrorist leader's face.

The height of the room was low for someone as tall as bin Laden, who was 6 foot 4.

THE president who won the Nobel Peace Prize less than nine months after his inauguration has turned out to be one of the most militarily aggressive American leaders in decades.

Liberals helped to elect Barack Obama in part because of his opposition to the Iraq war, and probably don’t celebrate all of the president’s many military accomplishments. But they are sizable.

Ever wondered how FBI agents catch globe-trotting serial killers? Or how journalists report stories about imprisoned international criminals? Here’s your chance to find out: You're invited to jump — risk free — into the world of transnational crime-fighting.
 

Early on the morning of May 2, 2011, the residents of Osama bin Laden's heavily fortified compound were startled awake by the sound of explosions. Bin Laden's daughter Maryam, 20, rushed upstairs to his top-floor bedroom to ask what was going on. "Go downstairs and go back to bed," he told her. Then bin Laden told his wife Amal, "Don't turn on the light."

The gripping account of the decade-long hunt for the world's most wanted man.