Michael Scheuer: Osama Bin Laden

Michael Scheuer, a former CIA head of the that monitored Bin Laden, recent opined on the distribution of Al Qaeda media: However, Scheuer said it is unlikely there is much hand-carrying of tapes anymore. For the first few years following the 9/11 attacks, tapes from al-Zawahiri and bin Laden were physically delivered to Al-Jazeera TV or other Mideast broadcast outlets, but more recently the tapes have been seen mostly on the Al-Shabab website. Scheuer said the electronic transmission of messages makes it much more secure for the al Qaeda leaders. "A tape made in Peshawar (Pakistan) can be sent electronically through Sweden and onto Bolivia before appearing on a website," said Scheuer. This was from a feature on CNN in November of 2010; you can find that full story here. See also: Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq, Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror.

George Friedman: The Next Decade: Where We've Been... and Where We're Going

In September, 2010, the author opined within the context of an NPR story on U.S. foreign policies and the Obama Administration; James Traub writes: George Friedman, head of the global intelligence firm Stratfor, recently wrote that "the most significant effect of 9/11" was that "the United States became obsessed with a single region." He concedes that this was inevitable in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. Today, though, he argues, it is necessary to ask: "What does the United States lose elsewhere while it focuses on the future of Kandahar?" Friedman shares the Afghanistan Study Group's skepticism about the consequences of military failure there, but he also makes the cold-blooded assertion that "the United States cannot subordinate its grand strategy to simply fighting terrorism even if there will be occasional terrorist attacks on the United States." Kibitzers like Friedman, or me, don't have to deal with U.S. public opinion, of course. Another terrorist attack would make it even harder than it already is for Obama to advance a post-post-9/11 strategy. And I don't think Friedman is right in claiming that, for example, Russia exploited U.S. preoccupation with the Middle East to attack Georgia in 2008. But there are undeniably grave costs to that preoccupation, and not only in blood and treasure. Doubling down in Afghanistan has further ratcheted up the public sense of menace — they'll attack us here if we don't stop them there — while the failure to make headway has deepened public cynicism about America's capacity to shape a better world. Obama has adopted from Bush the premise that the United States must find a way to tame the Islamic world, though he has tried to go about it in a very different way. But though this may be true in the long run, in the short run it has turned out to be a thankless task. Read that full NPR story here.