Word: qaeda
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...returning home overland from a business trip to Hong Kong. One, in a Harley-Davidson cap, showed me two toy remote-control U.S. military helicopters he had bought in Shenzhen for his young sons. Beaming, he professed his love for America. But he also applauded the Taliban and al-Qaeda and how they "looked after" his Muslim brethren. It's just such a paradoxical pose, at once insular and international, Islamist and secular, that befuddles those outside Pakistan's porous borders, and which is at the crux of Hanging Fire, a survey of contemporary art from a nation known more...
...painful fact is that the Taliban's growing influence in the countryside has severely narrowed the CIA's field of operations. And although no one has said as much, the purpose of al-Qaeda's attack on the CIA in Khost was to force it to retreat. The agency has vowed to fight on all the harder, and it will do so. But the attack in Khost will force the CIA to draw back farther and farther behind the wire in order to protect its officers. The CIA is a civilian organization that's not built to sustain casualties like...
...According to the report, intelligence-community leadership, presumably including top brass Leon Panetta at the CIA, Michael Leiter at the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) and Dennis Blair at the office of the Director of National Intelligence, "did not increase analytic resources" to address the threat of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), even after it became clear that the group was planning attacks on U.S. targets...
...suicide bombing that killed seven CIA officers in Khost, Afghanistan, underscores just how difficult a mission the agency - and the U.S. as a whole - faces in the country. Given the size of the CIA, the loss it suffered when a Jordanian assumed to have been an asset penetrating al-Qaeda instead detonated an explosives belt at a gathering of agency personnel, was the equivalent of the Army losing a battalion. It was a major setback for the CIA after eight years at war, not to mention the fact that it coincided with a moment when the Agency is under political...
...Given al-Qaeda's love of head fakes, the official wonders what percentage of the 550,000 names on the U.S. terrorism watch list might be decoys intended to jam American databases and allow more furtive or budding extremists to get lost in the mass of information. But even if there is a high number of errant names on such lists, he acknowledges, they are a necessary evil - for now. Although the U.S. intelligence systems are imperfect and occasionally get swamped, casting as wide a net as possible is still the best hope for identifying the largest number of would...