• Scapegoating of Jews for the 1969 Al-Aqsa Arson Continued as Usual in 2022

    August 21 marked the 53rd anniversary of the 1969 al-Aqsa Mosque arson and the ongoing disinformation campaigns scapegoating Jews and Israel for the attack. The culprit, Denis Michael Rohan – a Protestant extremist from Australia who believed his actions would prompt the Second Coming of Jesus – but Middle Eastern outlets have been publishing inaccurate reports of the event to this day.

  • Guantanamo Bay: Twenty Years of Counterterrorism and Controversy

    The U.S. military detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has generated intense debate for two decades, raising enduring questions about national security, human rights, and justice.

  • Let’s Stop Being Cavalier About Civilian Control of the Military

    The message of a remarkable open letter by former secretaries of defense and former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, published last week, is straightforward: The United States needs to review the basic principles of civilian control of the military and recommit to best practices in civil-military relations. Peter Feaver and Michèle Flournoy write that the statement dismisses what might be called the naïve theory of civilian control — the idea that every whim of the president should be immediately executed as a direct order without any further thought. “In a democracy, that can be as dangerous as rank insubordination, if a president is reckless,” they write. “It is hard not to think of President Trump and the way his impulsive, idiosyncratic approach to the commander-in-chief role made this rearticulation of first principles necessary.”

  • California Dreaming? Nope.

    Expert welcomes aggressive move toward electric vehicles, but sees one ‘huge mistake’ policymakers need to avoid and a surefire way to anger drivers.

  • No End in Sight to “Beginning of Putin’s End”

    The first predictions that Vladimir Putin’s reign was about to end – the wording often referred to “the beginning of the end” of Vladimir Putin’s regime – were made in 2002, three years after his ascension to power in December 1999. The number and frequency of such predictions have increased since the launch of the botched invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. The staff of Russia Matters examined thirty-eight of these predictions and the context in which they were made.

  • 9/11 Survivors’ Exposure to Toxic Dust and the Chronic Health Conditions That Followed Offer Lessons That Are Still Too Often Unheeded

    After the 9/11 attack, more than 100,000 responders and recovery workers from every U.S. state – along with some 400,000 residents and other workers around ground zero – were exposed to a toxic cloud of dust that fell as a ghostly, thick layer of ash and then hung in the air for more than three months. The World Trade Center dust plume consisted of a dangerous mixture of cement dust and particles, asbestos and a class of chemicals called persistent organic pollutants. The dust also contained heavy metals that are known to be poisonous to the human body and brain, such as lead and mercury, and PCB.

  • China Intensifying Its Global Push for Media Influence

    The Chinese government’s media influence efforts, turning to more covert and aggressive tactics, have increased since 2019 in most of the 30 countries under study by a new report, but democratic pushback has often curbed their impact.

  • Iran Nuclear Weapons Breakout Time Remains at Zero

    A new report from the Institute for Science and International Security summarizes and assesses information in the (IAEA) quarterly safeguards report for 7 September 2022. The main finding: Iran’s breakout time, that is, the time between a political decision to produce a nuclear weapon and the completion of such weapon, remains at zero.

  • U.S. Moves to Keep Advanced Semiconductor Technology Out of China

    Companies that accept U.S. funding under the CHIPS Act — a plan to build up America’s computer chip-making capacity — will be barred from establishing advanced fabrication facilities in China for 10 years. The CHIPS Act is a response not just to the computer chip shortage that snarled global supply chains during the pandemic but also to the perceived national security threat that a lack of domestic semiconductor manufacturing presents.

  • The Oath Keepers Data Leak: Unmasking Extremism in Public Life

    A data leak revealed the information of thousands of people whose names were in an Oath Keepers database as having paid for a membership at some point. The Oath Keepers are an anti-government extremist group associated with the militia movement.

  • Two Constables, Four Police Chiefs and More Than 3,000 other Texans Were Members of the Oath Keepers: Report

    A recent analysis of Oath Keepers’ membership rolls leaked last year found that Texas had more members of the far-right extremist group than any other state — and the most who worked as elected officials, law enforcement officers or members of the military.

  • How the Midterms Could Weaken U.S. Election Security

    Candidates who support former President Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election would, if elected in November, gain the power to open up access to their states’ voting machines. Eric Geller writes that this is a prospect which election security experts and cybersecurity analysts describe as potentially catastrophic for American democracy.

  • Does the U.S. Economy Benefit from U.S. Alliances and Forward Military Presence?

    To what extent does conflict in other regions affect the U.S. economy, even when the United States remains a nonbelligerent state? To what extent does U.S. military engagement abroad suppress conflict? To what extent does U.S. military engagement abroad impact U.S. peacetime trade and investment with other countries? To what extent does U.S. military engagement abroad increase U.S. economic welfare?

  • The Mysterious Deaths of Russian Oligarchs

    Last week, on 1 September, Ravil Maganov joined a long list of Russian oligarchs and businessmen who died under mysterious circumstances since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine on 24 February.

  • Reliance on Dual-Use Technology is a Trap

    The current approach to promoting the use of emerging technology by the Pentagon is for emerging technology companies to work with the Department of Defense is to build commercial applications first and only then move into defense. But the notion of developing “technologies for the commercial market first and only then slap some green paint on them so that they can begin exploring the U.S. defense market” is untenable, Jake Chapman writes. “A better solution would enable entrepreneurs to focus on solving defense challenges by making the Department of Defense a better customer.”