Christopher Hitchens, a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, the author of the new book god Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything and the editor of the new anthology, The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever, Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, the vice president of research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the author of My Year Inside Radical Islam , which documents his time working for the extremist Al Haramain Islamic Foundation, Bruce Tefft, the Director of CRA’s Threat Assessment Center, Khalim Massoud, president of Muslims Against Sharia, an Islamic reform movement (and occasional commenter on Smooth Stone) ,
Read More +Front Page interviewed Jeffrey Denning, co-owner of Liberty Protective Solutions, LLC, a private security consulting company, and who was a former police officer, SWAT team leader and Federal Air Marshal. Denning believes …that one of the reasons ethically and civilly-minded societies fail in their approach to stop or predict terrorism at the tactical level is because we try to place our moral value system on an amoral enemy. It doesn’t work that way. You can’t do a proper threat assessment unless you can really get into the mind of the terrorist. These men and women aren’t superheroes; they are people.
Read More +An excerpt from an interview with best-selling Pakistani author Ahmed Rashid who discusses the recent Taliban attacks on NATO troops in Afghanistan and the elusive prospects of lasting peace in the Hinda Kush, via Der Spiegel: SPIEGEL: Mr. Rashid, was the recent suicide attack against German troops in Kunduz (more…) the start of a new series of attacks in the north of Afghanistan? Rashid: The Taliban are increasingly playing a political game with European members of NATO that are not on the front line. We saw how brilliantly the Taliban manipulated a government in the case of Italian journalist Daniele
Read More +Evidence of WMDs in Iraq and Syria
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Last evening or I should say overnight, Michael Shrimpton, a barrister specialising in national security and intelligence law, was interviewed by Art Bell for more than two hours on Art’s radio show, and Mr. Shrimpton gave compelling evidence that not only were WMDs in Iraq prior to 2003, they were covertly shipped out of the country via railroad and other methods into Syria. Not only that, Shrimpton also cited evidence how France and Germany were complicit in the development of the WMDs for Iraq by being providers of weapon-grade yellow-cake and other nuclear materials. If you will remember, Saddam used
Read More +A Clash of Cultures
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From A Clash of Cultures, Interview with Amnon Rubinstein by Ari Shavit: There is an Israeli-Palestinian conflict that we have to try to end. But one must also see the broad picture. There is a clash between a narrative of enlightenment versus a dark narrative. Islam is not an open society. In the terms of Karl Popper, it is the most closed society conceivable. It is an intolerant society. A well-known professor said not long ago that we have to adopt the values of the Middle East in which we live. I would like to ask him which values he
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