National Security

As of May 7, 2013, 603 Guantanamo prisoners have been released or transferred abroad. Of those 603 we have identified 53 who are either confirmed to be or suspected of engaging in militant activities against either the U.S. or non-U.S. targets. We have placed them in the following categories:

Category 1: GTMO detainees confirmed to be engaging in militant activities against U.S. targets.

TOTAL: 17, 2.8%

Category 2: GTMO detainees suspected of engaging in militant activities against U.S. targets

The CIA drone program began quietly under President George W. Bush with one strike in Yemen in 2002, and then a smattering of strikes in Pakistan between 2004 and 2007 before a more sustained campaign in 2008. During his two terms in office, Bush authorized a total of 48 strikes in Pakistan.

This past Saturday, March 16, 2013 marked an extraordinary moment in Pakistan’s history, as this is the first time that a civilian government has served its entire five-year term (from 2008 to 2013). And, for the first time in its history, the Pakistani military appears both unwilling and unable to mount a coup against any civilian government. The military has mounted four coups since Pakistan’s independence in 1947.

This paper concludes that the most likely medium-run end state to the conflict in Syria is de facto partition of the country into a region controlled by the current regime and another region divided among various rebel factions. Of the potential end states analyzed here, de facto partition is not only the most likely, it is also the worst for U.S. interests. The analysis is based on a series of decision matrices that are standard in the Multi-Attribute Decision Making approach, a method of systematically comparing objectives across a range of national interests.

Reniqua Allen and Hannah Emple explain how and why America's racial wealth gap became a gulf. Tara Maller reveals what makes sanctions a success - or failure - and what she expects from the ones targeting North Korea and Iran. Elizabeth Weingarten hosts.

Rosa Brooks scrutinizes the leaked Justice Department memo that aims to provide legal rationale for the administration's drone program. Brigid Schulte introduces us to surprising research on how to be happier, healthier and more productive. Elizabeth Weingarten hosts.

More than 11 years after the attacks of 9/11 and nearly a decade since the rise of popular online jihadi Internet forums, there is strikingly little empirical research on the manner in which jihadi activists use the Web to propagate their cause. Whereas researchers and policy analysts have systematically collected and analyzed the primary source material produced by al-Qaeda and its allies, very little work has been done on the conduits through which that information is distributed—and even to what extent anyone is accessing that propaganda other than counterterrorism analysts.

We have seen this story of bloodthirsty extremist violence before. In Somalia, in Yemen, in Iraq, and now in Algeria. A militant group moves into an ungoverned space where government lacks will or capability, where the group purports to represent the will of the people by instituting some strict version of Islam and imposing this vision with abhorrent ruthlessness. More broadly, in more than a decade of this global counterterror campaign, we have seen this battlefield shift from Afghanistan to Pakistan, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Europe, and now Africa’s Sahel.

Barak Barfi reports on the real state of the Syrian Civil War after returning from a recent trip to the country, and Charles Kenny explains why mixing public health campaigns with covert operations is disastrous. Elizabeth Weingarten hosts.

First, the bad news. That debonair, whip-smart, multilingual, trained-in-martial-arts, computer-code-writing Ivy League grad who works around the clock to hunt down terrorists and defuse bombs just seconds before they explode? He doesn’t really exist. He’s a Hollywood invention. Most of the “spies” devoted to protecting the United States from an array of outside threats are harried, middle-class office workers struggling, like millions of other Americans, to keep the weight off, pay the mortgage, and figure out how to work their gadgets.