• The Fight Against White Nationalism Is Different

    Experts who have focused on both types of extremism—Islamist and white nationalist—tell me that a fundamental change in the way America views the latter would indeed help combat it, freeing up law-enforcement resources to address the growing problem. FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress last month that the bureau made about 100 domestic-terrorism arrests in the past nine months, putting it on pace to surpass the total from the previous year, and that the majority of the suspects were motivated by white supremacism. Since 9/11, far-right extremists have killed more people on American soil than Islamist terrorists have.

  • Post-9/11 Intel Center Now Going After Domestic Terror

    As white supremacist violence surges, a major hub for American intelligence has quietly expanded its focus on domestic terrorism, according to a senior U.S. counterterrorism official who spoke with The Daily Beast. It’s a small shift that draws accolades from veteran national-security officials. The shift also concerns civil-liberties advocates, who say it may point to an erosion of the boundary between law enforcement and America’s spies.

  • U.S. Troop Withdrawal from Syria Would Give ISIS New Life: DoD Report

    U.S. plans to keep just a residual force in Syria to ensure the enduring defeat of the Islamic State may be on the verge of backfiring, with some military officials warning the strategy is giving the terror group new life. The doubts, raised in a Defense Department Inspector General report released Tuesday, come as Washington has struggled to secure additional on-the-ground help in Syria from allies and amid renewed warnings that while IS may have lost control of its self-declared caliphate, the group’s fighters are far from defeated.

  • Mass Shootings as a Contagion

    Research shows that mass-shooting incidents usually occur in clusters and tend to be contagious. Moreover, contagion correlates with the level of intensity of media coverage: the more intense the coverage, the more likely it is that contagion will occur, researchers say.

  • From Across the Globe to El Paso, Changes in the Language of the Far-Right Explain Its Current Violence

    In the past decade, the language of white supremacists has transformed in important ways. It crossed national borders, broadened its focus and has been influenced by current mainstream political discourse. I study political violence and extremism. In my recent research, I have identified these changes and believe that they can provide important insights into the current landscape of the American and European violent far-right. The changes also allow us to understand how the violent far-right mobilizes support, shapes political perceptions and eventually advances their objectives.

  • Crush This Evil

    During the Cold War, Ian Fleming observed that “once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, the third time it’s enemy action.” So it is here. It would be both too glib and too simplistic to smother the details of these attacks beneath a single word such as “horror” or a catch-all euphemism such as “senseless.” In America, as abroad, we see our fair share of inexplicable violence. But the patterns on display over the last few years have revealed that we are contending here not with another “lone wolf,” but with the fruit of a murderous and resurgent ideology — white supremacy — that deserves to be treated by the authorities in the same manner as has been the threat posed by militant Islam.

  • U.S. Military Calls ISIS in Afghanistan a Threat to the West. Intelligence Officials Disagree.

    Senior United States military and intelligence officials are sharply divided over how much of a threat the Islamic State in Afghanistan poses to the West, a critical point in the Trump administration’s debate over whether American troops stay or withdraw after nearly 18 years of war. American military commanders in Afghanistan have described the Islamic State affiliate there as a growing problem that is capable of inspiring and directing attacks in Western countries, including the United States. But intelligence officials in Washington disagree.

  • Killed: Hamza bin Laden, son and heir of Osama bin Laden

    Hamza bin Laden, the son and heir of al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden, has been killed in a U.S.-supported operation, according to different media reports. U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, on Wednesday confirmed the death of Hamza bin Laden, who was in his early 30s. The younger bin Laden had been killed within the past two years, in an operation in which the United States was involved in some capacity. U.S. refused to provide any details on the operation.

  • Facebook Isn’t Responsible as Terrorist Platform, Court Says

    Facebook Inc. doesn’t have to face a lawsuit by victims of Hamas attacks and their relatives who claimed that the social network unlawfully assisted the terror group, a federal appeals court ruled. the lawsuit was among several around the U.S. testing whether victims of terrorist attacks and their families can hold social-media companies to account for allowing violent extremists to use their platforms to recruit followers. The terrorism victims attempted for the first time to argue that social-media companies could be held liable under the U.S. Anti-Terrorism Act.

  • Food Festival Shooter Promoted Obscure Social Darwinist Screed

    In an Instagram post made not long before he attacked a food festival in California on 28 July, Santiago Legan quoted the book Might is Right, and urged people to read it. The book, originally published in 1896, has had an enduring history on the fringes of American thought and ideology. The book’s most appreciative modern audience, however, may be white supremacists.  Though Might is Right is not itself a work designed to promote or advance white supremacy, it contains many passages full of racist and anti-Semitic vitriol.

     

  • UN Warns Islamic State Leader Plotting Comeback from Iraq

    The Islamic State terror group’s self-declared caliphate may be dead, but its leaders are hanging on in Syria and Iraq, dreaming of the day when they can again direct attacks on targets around the world. The conclusion is part of a sobering assessment in a newly released quarterly United Nations report on IS which warns the epicenter for the terror group’s budding renaissance is Iraq, “where Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and most of the ISIL leadership are now based.”

  • Americas’ Longest-Running Insurgency: Lessons for U.S. Longest-Running War

    In 2016, Colombia achieved a remarkable success by seemingly bringing to an end the Western Hemisphere’s longest-running insurgency. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) has been at war with government forces for more than fifty years. And yet here was a negotiated settlement by which two parties that had been fighting for generations agreed to lay down their arms—by which the guerrilla organization itself would be brought into the government’s formal power structures. The case raises important questions—not least for a U.S. government that watches the clock on its own counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan tick ever closer to two decades. How was this possible? And are there lessons that can be exported and applied to other intransigent conflicts, like Afghanistan?

  • Sounding the Alarm about Another Kind of 9/11

    Richard Clarke knows some things about clear and present dangers. As the first U.S. counterterrorism czar, he tried to alert important White House decision-makers before September 11 about the threat of a terrorist attack on U.S. soil, but those warnings were largely ignored; afterwards, he famously apologized publicly for the government’s failures. These days, Clarke is trying to get people to think hard about the next big attack—the cyber version—and all the ones that have already happened.

  • Using Social Media to Analyze, Thwart Terrorist Activity

    It is known that much terrorist activity utilizes the power and immediacy of online social media and social networking tools to coordinate its attacks, rally support and spread the various agendas of the different groups and networks. Researchers explains how we might turn the tables on the terrorists and use those tools to analyze terrorist activity and make predictions about future scenarios, and so have the tools to thwart them in their deadly endeavors.

  • Women and the War on Terror: An Insider Account

    A new book by a former CIA analyst is an important contribution to our understanding of the intelligence wars that erupted in 2001 over Iraq’s alleged connections to the 9/11 attacks and the George W. Bush administration’s bungled efforts to stabilize Iraq after the 2003 invasion.