Al-Qaeda Is Still Worst Terrorist Threat: US

Five DC-area men suspected of trying to join extremist groups

(NEWSER) - Pakistan is expected to deport the five Americans who allegedly came to the country to join terrorist groups. The five, all from the DC area, were arrested after telling undercover investigators they were trying to find fighters in the al-Qaeda network. Pakistani police revealed that the father of one of the men fathers was detained along with the group, though his role in their plans isn't clear. More»

(NEWSER) - CIA-directed air raids into Pakistan have “decimated” al-Qaeda’s senior leadership, killing up to a dozen high-level targets, senior US military officials tell NPR. They say a “complete al-Qaeda defeat” there is now entirely possible. “The enemy is really, really struggling,” says one official. “These attacks have produced the broadest, deepest, and most rapid reduction in al-Qaeda senior leadership that we’ve seen in several years.” More»

Bin Laden's terror group enters third decade losing war, but 'legacy will endure'

(NEWSER) - Two decades after its founding, al-Qaeda's golden years are over, argues Peter Bergen in the Washington Post. Osama bin Laden's plan has largely backfired: 9/11 neither resulted in US withdrawal from the Middle East, or in the defeat of "impious" Middle Eastern regimes. But while al-Qaeda discredited itself in Iraq and jihadists are less centralized than in 2001, the organization still poses a threat to the West. More»

It may be creating more terrorists than it's killing: Gary Kamiya

(NEWSER) - Before 9/11, if the US president had announced that the government was going to "play God, reaching down from our high-tech heaven to kill whoever we want, whenever we want, wherever we want"—including US citizens, without a trial—the news would have been met with uproar. But that is indeed what we are doing today with our drones, "and nobody cares," writes Gary Kamiya in an extensive piece on Salon . As long as the government kills for the good of national security, the majority of Americans apparently have no problem with it, Kamiya writes. But how did this come about? He traces the shift in attitude back to the war in Afghanistan—which he calls "justified" in the wake of 9/11. Once the US established a precedent of killing Taliban members wherever they were found in Afghanistan or Pakistan, "it was a small step to killing bad guys in Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, and Libya." More»

Court gives prosecutors two weeks to prepare case

(NEWSER) - Five Americans detained in Pakistan denied today that they planned to carry out terrorist attacks, as a court granted police two weeks to prepare terrorism charges against them, their defense lawyer said. The men, all Muslims aged 19 to 25 from the Washington, DC, area, were arrested in early December in the eastern Pakistani city of Sargodha. During their court appearance today, they denied any ties with al-Qaeda or other militant groups. More»