OUR PICKSWe Have No Nuclear Strategy | Al Qaeda Isn’t Dead Yet | Help Wanted: State Misinformation Sheriff, and more

The Texas Grid Is Designed to Fail  (Neel Dhanesha, Vox)
Faulty infrastructure is only a symptom of a larger problem.

We Have No Nuclear Strategy (Tom Nichols, The Atlantic)
The U.S. can’t keep ignoring the threat these weapons pose.

Japan Terrorist Group Founder Freed After Serving Time  (Yuri Kageyama, AP)
Fusako Shigenobu, who co-founded the terrorist group Japanese Red Army, was released from prison Saturday after serving a 20-year sentence, and apologized for hurting innocent people. “I feel strongly that I have finally come out alive,” she said, welcomed by her daughter and a crowd of reporters and supporters in Tokyo. “I have hurt innocent people I did not know by putting our struggles first. Although those were different times, I would like to take this opportunity to apologize deeply,” said Shigenobu, who wore a black hat and gray suit. Shigenobu was convicted of masterminding the 1974 siege of the French Embassy in the Hague, the Netherlands. She was arrested in 2000 in Osaka in central Japan, where she had been in hiding. The Japanese Red Army, formed in 1971 and linked with Palestinian militants, took responsibility for several attacks including the takeover of the U.S. Consulate in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in 1975. The group is also believed to have been behind a 1972 machine-gun and grenade attack on the international airport near Tel Aviv, Israel that killed 28 people, including two terrorists, and injured dozens of people. Shigenobu was not physically present in the attacks. A year after her arrest, she declared the group dissolved. Japanese media reports said Shigenobu had undergone surgery for cancer during her incarceration.

Al Qaeda Isn’t Dead Yet  (Lynne O’Donnell, Foreign Policy)
The United States, under then-President Donald Trump, made a peace pact in 2020 with the Taliban under the pretense that they would break ties with al Qaeda. It didn’t happen then, it hasn’t happened since, and now the group that blew up the twin towers is enjoying Taliban hospitality while remaining the dominant ideological and operational influence for jihadis from South Asia to North Africa. U.S. officials, in both the Trump and Biden administrations, saw the Islamic State rather than al Qaeda as the biggest threat to the American homeland. Al Qaeda, it was argued, was a spent force, especially after the forehead-tap elimination of leader Osama bin Laden in a raid by U.S. special forces in Pakistan in 2011. The reality is that al Qaeda remains the driving force of international terrorism, more than the locally focused Islamic State has ever been, and continues to inspire terrorist groups from Syria and Somalia to Mali and Mozambique. “Al Qaeda is ultimately the more dangerous enemy,” Bill Roggio, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies told Congress. “Al Qaeda continues to maintain effective insurgencies in multiple countries while using these bases to plot attacks against our homeland and our allies,” he told the House Committee on Homeland Security this year.

Young British Terror Offenders Being Inspired by US School Shootings, Police Counterterror Lead Warns  (Lizzie Dearden, Independent)
Young terror offenders in the UK are being inspired by school shootings in the US, with some wanting to commit mass murders themselves, counterterrorism police have warned. The concerning trend has emerged alongside a steep increase in prosecutions of teenagers with neo-Nazi leanings over the past five years. Earlier this month, a boy who claimed to be acquiring guns to commit an atrocity similar to the 1999 Columbine High School massacre was sentenced for terror offences. The Darlington teenager, who is Britain’s youngest known terror offender, was aged just 13 when he wrote online that he wanted “to do a Columbine here”, while consuming neo-Nazi propaganda. Dean Haydon, the senior national coordinator for Counter Terrorism Policing, said the consumption of material relating to school shootings had become a “trend” in terror cases. “If people start consuming propaganda material in the terrorism and extremism space, they just want to consume everything. If it’s violent they want to consume it,” he told The Independent. “If you look at people like Anders Breivik, Brenton Tarrant, the Buffalo shooter, they become icons in their own right, and heroes in their own community, particularly the right-wing community. “Others then seek to emulate it, they consume that material, and you’ve got this copycat attack issue.

Securing Critical Infrastructure to the Cloud: Why Federal Operators Need Hardware-Enforced Cyber Defense  (Dennis Lanahan, HSToday)
From a regulatory and oversight perspective, several governing entities reinforce the value of this approach.

Cold War Catastrophes the U.S. Can Avoid This Time  (Anatol Lieven, The Atlantic)
Containing Russia is a good idea. Crusading against it is not.

Help Wanted: State Misinformation Sheriff  (Cecilia Kang, New York Times)
Several states are putting more money and effort into combating false and misleading information about elections.