Tag: intelligence

Judge: Defendants “do not present a high level of danger.”

A group of at least a dozen CIA spies working in Iran and Lebanon have been captured, leading US government officials to surmise that the intelligence failure has – or will – lead to their deaths and the debilitation of intelligence in the two countries.

In the 1980s, I was an unrefined adolescent from blue-collar Butler, Pennsylvania. I knew nothing and cared nothing about politics. I had no idea if I was a conservative or a liberal, Democrat or Republican, or much of anything else.

It is perhaps the ultimate irony that the Bus 300 affair recently popped up again in the Israeli media just days after the al-Qaeda terrorist with the U.S. passport, Anwar al-Awlaki, was liquidated by a drone in Yemen, and shortly before the Netanyahu government agreed to release more than a thousand terrorists for the kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.

For many years, autism was considered to be a rare, mysterious and severely disabling condition. But in recent years, due at least in part to a broadening of its medical definition, the incidence of the diagnosis of autism and related disorders has risen to about 1 in every 150 babies born in this country.

Former CIA Director To White House: Stop Blabbering    White House officials should have "kept their mouths shut" about the reported treasure trove of material...

The European Union is determined to convince Israel to cooperate with a peace plan that has already proved dead on arrival.

Everyone is telling us there is nothing to worry about. The international scandal over the assassination of Hamas military commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh will eventually evaporate, explain Israel's intelligence veterans. After all, this is not the first time that undercover security agencies used foreign passports. The main thing is that Mabhouh has been eliminated, and that all of our forces (according to foreign reports, of course) are safely back home.

   The only action that can stop Iran from building nuclear weapons is an Israeli strike on Tehran's nuclear facilities, argued John Bolton, the...

Over the past few weeks we have been focusing on how necessary it is, especially today, that parents take an active role in teaching their children the Torah’s view on sexuality and modesty. We have pointed out how important it is that first images to fill a child’s mind in regards to these concepts be appropriate ones.

In Washington, there has been little learned from lessons of the past.

The George W. Bush years are now behind us. But Barack Obama, while still waging an American war on terror, will almost certainly remain committed to a so-called "Two-State Solution" in the Middle East.

Chaim Schwartz* is the recognized genius of the class. He gets 100% on every test, understands the most difficult Gemaras and makes complicated math computations in his head in seconds. But for all his genius he can't seem to make a single friend.

My daughter once worked on a kibbutz near Eilat, so the suicide bombing on January 29 in that normally tranquil Red Sea resort is especially sobering. This Palestinian "freedom fighter" struck a small bakery, killing three shoppers who had stopped by for bread and cakes. The two groups taking responsibility for the terror, Islamic Jihad and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, were ecstatic about the success of their "military operation."

Concluded in mid-September, the sixth annual International Conference on Global Terrorism in Herzliya, Israel, underscored the growing threat of mega-terror. To a large extent, this existential threat to Israel is made worse by the always-deliberate insertion of terrorist personnel and assets in the midst of civilian populations.

For the president of Iran, threats to annihilate Israel are now a daily ritual. Were it not for his country's complementary capacity to inflict genuinely existential harms, these threats would not be worrisome. But Iran's capacity to become fully nuclear is now more imminent than had ever been recognized by our own intelligence communities. It follows that a persistent refrain of genocidal intent issuing from Tehran must now be taken with utmost seriousness in Jerusalem.

"There is but one truly serious philosophical problem," says Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus, "and that is suicide." Nowhere is Camus' observation currently more correct than in the darkly reciprocal relationship between Israel and Hamas.

Israel would be entirely correct that the Declaration of Principles (DOP) was intended to establish an "autonomy," not a state. Further (according to Ambassador Shoval), "Palestinian statehood is contingent on the Palestinians destroying their terrorist infrastructure, of which Hamas itself is an integral part." However, the Palestinians themselves will certainly understand something very helpful to their cause. That is: there are applicable norms supporting statehood that exist outside the narrow legal context of the specific Israeli-Palestinian agreements.

For the moment, fears of a nuclear war in the Middle East remain focused narrowly and correctly on Iran. In the coming months, before that country is able to deploy a fully operational nuclear capability, Israel will have to preemptively destroy essential parts of the Iranian nuclear infrastructure.

Shlomo Ben Ami was Israel's foreign minister under Ehud Barak and served as the lead Israeli negotiator at the Camp David summit in 2000.

Brian Ross of ABC News reported last week that the FBI was poised to capture Osama bin Laden back in 1998, but the plan was quashed by then-Attorney General Janet Reno.

Democrats and their allies in the media who thought they could use those pre-Sept. 11 intelligence reports and FBI memos to diminish President Bush's standing with the American people were in full retreat this week, as a slew of polls gave Bush continued high marks, both for his overall job performance and his handling of the war on terror.