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Inspired by a legendary senior operator, our 58-year-old author signed up for an intense, three-and-a-half-week-long course with students half his age. Here's what he experienced. Recently while doing research on paramilitary operators, I came across a book written by Annie Jacobsen titled Surprise, Kill, Vanish – The Secret History of CIA Paramilitary Armies, Operators, and Assassins. I was delighted to discover that more than half the book was about the exploits of one of my long-time mentors, Sergeant Major Billy Waugh (retired). Now 90, Waugh had 25 years in Special Forces as a leader of the elite Military Assistance Command-Vietnam...

After 15 years, the US's counter-terror strategy has 'unequivocally failed' Apple and Google, two of the country’s biggest employers, don’t mess around with failure. Leaders either produce or they’re gone. Major League Baseball and National Football League teams have one standard for their leaders: get us into the playoffs or you’re fired. The government’s foreign policy elites, however, don’t have to succeed to keep their jobs. Unlike the rest of America, when U.S. leaders in foreign policy fail, they are rewarded or promoted, while the 330 million Americans living outside the Washington beltway foot the bill.

The idea of pulling nearly all American troops out of Afghanistan in 2016 suddenly seems pretty lousy, after so much of Iraq has collapsed under a similar scenario. When President Obama announced his plan to leave Afghanistan by the end of 2016, U.S. intelligence said it could be done safely. Now, intelligence and military leaders are privately warning that the U.S. counterterrorism forces could be needed there for much longer. During the internal administration debate earlier this year over the way forward in Afghanistan, the CIA supported a plan to degrade al Qaeda to the point that America could withdraw

This is very important Security Briefing by Terrorist Analyst Expert Major Stephen Coughlin of the Center for Security Policy. I have collected about 20 learning video series on Islam here at this site,, and this is in the top 3 in importance, Coughlin and this brief are awesome. There are a total of 4 hours of lecturing in the 5 videos. To see the most important video series on this site, see AMERICA IN CRISIS: Intelligence Briefing On The Muslim Brotherhood In America by John Guandolo. Stephen Coughlin, Part 1: Lectures on National Security & Counterterror Analysis (Introduction) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhZe7eZK4dw Stephen...

The communications director of President Obama’s reelection campaign today denied a report in the New York Times that he had sat in on weekly White House meetings on terrorism. On Tuesday the paper said that after the failed 2009 Christmas Day “underwear bombing,” David Axelrod started attending the discussions with Obama and top national security advisers. The article reads: ”David Axelrod, the president’s closest political adviser, began showing up at the ‘Terror Tuesday’ meetings, his unspeaking presence a visible reminder of what everyone understood: a successful attack would overwhelm the president’s other aspirations and achievements.”

Russia's National Anti-Terrorism Committee said on Friday a prominent rebel leader responsible for a series of high-profile acts of "sabotage and terrorism" had been killed in a raid by security forces in the volatile North Caucasus republic of Ingushetia earlier in the day. Dzhamaleim Mutaliyev, 35, known as Adam, was a leader of Caucasus Emirate, a loose umbrella organization of militant groups operating in the North Caucasus, and a close associate of notorious North Caucasus warlord Shamil Basayev who was killed in July 2006, the committee said in a statement. Mutaliyev is believed to be a mastermind of a several...

(Wired) -- A California student got a visit from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation this week after he found a secret GPS tracking device on his car, and a friend posted photos of it online.

Remember back in the dark ages when Bush-Hitler wanted to look at the emails of potential terrorists and civil liberties groups were up in arms? Well, Obama wants to do something similar. Only, Obama's plans seem to be even more sweeping -- not looking at individual emails or Blackberry messages but ordering the redesigning of all systems so intel and law enforcement could look at them if they wanted to. Sure, a few ACLU types will be up in arms. But my guess is that this will be passed with overwhelming majorities and will outrage almost no one that matters....

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A senior counterterrorism official said on Wednesday his agency lacks "Google-like" search capability that could have identified the suspect in the attempted Christmas Day airline bombing. The National Counterterrorism Center, the agency charged with reviewing disparate data to protect against attacks, does not have a computer search engine that could have checked for various spellings of the alleged bomber's name and his birthplace in Nigeria, the center's chief told a Senate hearing on security reform. "We do not have that exact capacity," said Michael Leiter, adding that the agency is working on solutions that could be in...

WASHINGTON – With thousands of fraud investigations under way, the FBI is considering shifting agents away from counterterrorism work to help sort through the wreckage of the financial meltdown. FBI Deputy Director John Pistole told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday that the bureau may reassign some of the positions that were reallocated to anti-terrorism work after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Such a move would be a further sign of the government breaking with the Bush administration's priorities, which pledged to assign every available resource to averting another terrorist attack.

Counterterrorism, like espionage and covert action, isn’t a spectator sport. The more a country practices, the better it gets. France has become the most accomplished counterterrorist practitioner in Europe. Whereas September 11, 2001, was a shock to the American counterterrorist establishment, it wasn’t a révolution des mentalités in Paris. Two waves of terrorist attacks, the first in the mid-1980s and the second in the mid-1990s, have made France acutely aware of both state-supported Middle Eastern terrorism and freelancing but organized Islamic extremists. In comparison, the security services in Great Britain and Germany were slow to awaken to the threat from...

A scientist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has discovered a way to literally catch terrorists red-handed. A new chemical spray detector developed by Prof Joseph Almog of the Hebrew University's Casali Institute of Applied Chemistry detects the home-made explosive urea nitrate. When sprayed on cotton swabs taken from the hands of an individual who has had recent contact with urea nitrate, the chemical will turn a blood red hue. Urea nitrate is a powerful improvised explosive, frequently used by Palestinian terrorists in Israel. It was also used in the first World Trade Center bombing in New York in 1993....

Seven months after the attack on September 11, 2001, Todd Beamer was honored in his hometown of Cranbury, New Jersey. Todd as you recall, was the man on flight 93 over Pennsylvania who called on his cell phone to alert an operator from United Airlines about the hijacking. When he learned of the other three passenger planes that had been used as weapons, Todd dropped his cell phone and uttered the words Let’s roll, which authorities believe was a signal to other passengers to confront the terrorist hijackers. In one hour a transformation (had) occurred among the passengers, athletes, business...

THE success of PhD papers by Oxford University students is usually gauged by the amount of dust they gather on library shelves. But there is one that is so influential that General George Casey, the US commander in Iraq, is said to carry it with him everywhere. Most of his staff have been ordered to read it and he pressed a copy into the hands of US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld when he visited Baghdad in December. Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife (a title taken from TE Lawrence - himself no slouch in guerilla warfare) is a study...

TORONTO - Canadian counter- terrorism investigators have dismantled a suspected terrorist cell in Toronto whose members included an al-Qaeda-trained explosives expert, the National Post has learned. The cell consisted of four Algerian refugee claimants who had lived in Canada for as long as six years and were alleged members of a radical Islamic terror faction called the Salafist Group for Call and Combat. The central figure of the Toronto-area cell was a former al-Qaeda training camp instructor who studied bomb-making at Osama bin Laden's Al Farooq and Khaldun training camps in eastern Afghanistan. The group was watched by intelligence officers...

If you read the papers or watch TV , you’ve probably heard that an Army Intelligence unit called Able Danger (may have) identified four of the 9/11 hijackers as much as a year before they struck – but was unable to pass the information on to the FBI because Pentagon lawyers said it would be a “no-no”….but shouldn’t Richard Clarke have known about it ? Richard Clarke was President Clinton’s Counter-terrorism Director- but I suspect he was kept “out of the loop” as far as any real or valuable intelligence was concerned. I believe, had he known about Able Danger,it...

NEW YORK (AP) - The burly FBI agent in the pinstriped suit stepped to the front of the mosque and looked out over a sea of Pakistani men in white kufi caps and women in brightly colored headscarves. "A-salaam aleikum," said Charles Frahm, special agent-in-charge of the FBI's New York counterterrorism division. "It's a great honor to be here today in the capacity of a friend." Frahm has become a frequent presence in the mosques and social clubs of New York's Arab and Muslim neighborhoods, trying to ease tensions where law-enforcement scrutiny has spawned some anger and much anxiety. On...

Jeff Baxter played psychedelic music with Ultimate Spinach, jazz-rock with Steely Dan and funky pop with the Doobie Brothers. But in the last few years he has made an even bigger transition: Mr. Baxter, who goes by the nickname "Skunk," has become one of the national-security world's well-known counterterrorism experts. A wiry man who wears a beret to many of his meetings, Mr. Baxter, who is now 56 years old, has gone from a rock career that brought him eight platinum records to a spot in the small constellation of consultants paid to help both policy makers and defense contractors...

In a large-scale counter-terror offensive, the IDF killed at least 11 Arab terrorists, injured dozens more before withdrawing its forces Saturday night. The offensive was aimed at stopping the constant terrorist firing of rockets and mortar shells upon the communities of Gush Katif and the western Negev. The Army pulled back soldiers from the PA-controlled city of Khan Yunis, in Gaza, following a 48-hours operation termed, "Orange Iron," which targeted and destroyed munitions factories and sites used by terrorists to launched rockets and mortar shells. No serious injuries to IDF soldiers were reported during the entire operation. Despite the IDF's...

The new national counterterrorism center established by President Bush under an executive order is to begin operations in early December, at about the same time that Congress may be debating whether to approve a law that would create a different version of the same agency. The center would be the "primary organization in the United States government for analyzing and integrating" all intelligence "pertaining to terrorism and counterterrorism, excepting purely domestic counterterrorism information." The center's director is to supervise correlation of the terrorism intelligence and produce reports to be sent to the president and other senior officials. It would operate...