Syria Analysis: Huge Stories, Small Headlines, and the Future of Insurgency

Insurgents use a BMP armoured vehicle to attack regime tanks in Jabal Zawiyah in Idlib Province

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This is a stalemate, but it is a corrosive one, one that constantly eats at the strength of the Assad regime, while the humanitarian crisis and threat to infrastructure grows with every exploding barrel bomb and tank shell. The "massacres" and the escalating death toll bear out the claims made by the opposition that the regime does not believe that it is winning this fight.

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Britain Feature: Police "Made Up Evidence" Against Student Held as Terrorist Suspect

Rizwaan Sabir with University of Nottingham Security, May 2011Four years ago, University of Nottingham postgraduate candidate Rizwaan Sabir was held for seven days without charge. The reason for suspicion? As part of his dissertation research on tactics and discourse of "terrorism", he had downloaded a publicly-available training manual from Al Qa'eda.

Sabir was never charged and eventually moved to Ph.D. study at the University of Bath, with the police paying him $20,000 compensation in September 2011. However, his friend Hicham Yezza, an administrator at Nottingham, was also interrogated and then held for months, under threat of deportation, on an immigration charge. 

Now the results of the internal investigation over the police's handling of the case indicates officers "created" details of an interview with Dr Rod Thornton, the University of Nottingham's speciaist on terrorism.

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Syria Snap Analysis: Who Is Behind Thursday's Damascus Bombs?

Smoke rises from a highway in Damascus after two car bombs exploded on Thursday, killing at least 55.

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Another car bombing, more contrasting claims of who's responsible. What does the evidence tell us about who conducted these attacks, and what does that mean for the conflict ahead?

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Syria Special: Syrian Ambassador to US Responds to Accusations

As we noted yesterday, the Syrian Ambassador to the United Nations, Imad Moustapha, spoke on NPR, and he tells a very different story than the evidence that we have collected here. In our conversation with NPR's Andy Carvin and Foreign Policy's Blake Hounshell, none of us have seen any video evidence that would support the Syrian government's claims, despite the fact that Moustapha claims there are hundreds of videotapes that the Syrian government has collected which show armed gangs killing innocent civilians.

Below we have posted the audio, one of our favorite excerpts (of which we have hundreds or thousands of counterexamples), and a link to the full transcript.

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Yemen Special: Al Qaeda Making Ricin? (Schmitt/Shanker)

You might have thought it was safe to wander back into the world now that Osama bin Laden is dead. But then you haven't noticed, amidst political instability in Yemen, the convergence of interest between the Yemeni regime and US counter-terrorism officials...

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American counterterrorism officials are increasingly concerned that the most dangerous regional arm of Al Qaeda is trying to produce the lethal poison ricin, to be packed around small explosives for attacks against the United States.

For more than a year, according to classified intelligence reports, Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen has been making efforts to acquire large quantities of castor beans, which are required to produce ricin, a white, powdery toxin that is so deadly that just a speck can kill if it is inhaled or reaches the bloodstream.

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Terrorism Special: Taking Apart the Myth about the 2005 London Bombing and "Multi-Culturalism"

Kenan Malik's mono-causal explanation in The New York Times for the atrocity of six years ago is simplistic, divorced from history, ignorant of the scholarship on violent extremism, and oblivious to the evidence around the 7-7 bombings, including from the British security service MI5.

Official multiculturalist policies may indeed be a problem for western societies (although it is of interest that Malik omits from his analysis a country, Canada, that is more diverse than the UK and which for decades has embraced multiculturalism as an official aspect of its national identity), but it was not the sole cause of 7-7 or other post-9/11 acts of terrorism.

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"Terrorism" & Academia Follow-Up: 67 Academics Call for Reinstatement of University of Nottingham Lecturer

We write as academics deeply concerned by the suspension of Dr Rod Thornton, a lecturer in counter-terrorism in the school of politics and international relations at the University of Nottingham. We understand that Dr Thornton's suspension is the result of a whistle-blowing investigative research paper that was presented at the annual British International Studies Association conference and subsequently published on its website. In his research, Dr Thornton carefully details what appear to be examples of serious misconduct from senior university management over the arrest of two university members (The "Nottingham Two") under the Terrorism Act 2000 in May 2008.

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Terrorism and Marriage: Don't Like the Wife Now? Put Her on a No-Fly List

Ms EA points --- presumably because of her interest in terrorism and not for any other reason --- to this article from Justin Penrose, writing for the Sunday Mirror in Britain:

An immigration officer put his own wife on a terrorist watch list – ­so she could not get home from a trip to Pakistan.

The officer was so sick of his partner that when she was visiting family overseas he added her name to the register of people banned from flights into the UK.

When she went to the airport to get her return flight back, officials told her she could not board the plane and did not ­explain why.

She called her husband, who ­promised to look into it – but left her stuck in Pakistan for THREE YEARS. He was sacked after bosses found out about his antics.

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Terrorism Weekly: The Lessons of the Moscow Airport Attack

Around the world, there is free access before passengers with tickets are checked by security. Anyone can enter lugging a suitcase or wearing a heavy jacket without generating suspicion. There are numerous areas where groups of people congregate, including check-in gates, the arrivals area, and parking lots, before reaching security checkpoint. Any attack in these areas will be easier than one near airplanes but it will still draw attention and have a substantive impact on air travel, even if casualties are lower than in the case of a bombing of an aircraft.

What options do governments have? It certainly would be possible to protect an entire airport by creating a perimeter around the airport and searching the thousands of vehicles and individuals who enter this. But imagine now the cost and resources this would involve and the impact that this would have on air travel. This is why it is impractical and why airports will remain vulnerable to those determined to take lives through terrorism.

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Terrorism Weekly: A Plot for Christmas

“Yes, Virginia, there is a terrorism threat.”

Whether on the "left" or "right", the British media love a good terrorism plot. The timing of this one, in the notoriously slow period just before Christmas made it even more enthralling --- the same way that the Pakistani student bomb plot during the Easter break of 2009 similarly grabbed the headlines before turning out, for various reasons, to be a damp squib.

So for the last few days we have been treated to repeated stories about the arrest of 12 men for an alleged bomb plot. Note the word “alleged” in the previous sentence, for it is one that does not often appear in the assured British media when it comes to reporting terrorism. In the current example, the news has gone beyond noting g the arrests of the men to listing their alleged targets: from Big Ben to Westminster Abbey to the London Stock Exchange to the American Embassy, from celebrities to pubs and restaurants.

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