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.

Jonathan Schell: The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger (American Empire Project)

Regarding the START Treaty between the U.S. and Russia, Jonathan Schell recently told Democracy Now this: Well, it’s sort of garden-variety, moderate, sensible, minimal arms control. I think of it as arms control maintenance. It does basically two things that have been going on for the last 30 years or 40 years, really since Richard Nixon inaugurated arms control in 1972. And that is, it shaves the arsenals a little bit, a couple of hundred warheads, also reduces the number of delivery vehicles that are allowed. And maybe more important than that, it reintroduces inspections, which have lapsed with the lapse of the START treaty, the old START treaty. So this is what’s been going on for 40 years in arms control, and it pushes it along in a kind of minimal way. It’s a little bit like paying the mortgage on your house. You know, if you pay your mortgage, it’s not a big deal. But if you don’t, the consequences could be pretty dire. And that’s pretty much the way I look at this. [...] The best way to deal with that is to roll back the technology as a whole. And that’s really where Obama’s commitment to move to a world free of nuclear weapons comes in, because the very same steps that you would take to actually eliminate nuclear weapons are the very ones that you would take to keep that technology from spreading into other hands. In other words, you’d get it under control, you would actually liquidate it so it didn’t exist. That would be an important step. And then you—so you’d solve really the two problems with one stroke. See that full transcript here. You can also download the podcast of this Democracy Now show, here. See also: The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People.

Thanassis Cambanis, Hezbollah, Terrorism, and "Engagement Hawks"

WNYC recently reported on Hezbolah, and asked Cambanis to opine on the subject. The following is a podcast summary: Veteran Middle East correspondent Thanassis Cambanis discusses the cross section of people that make up Hezbollah—part standing army, part political party, and part theological movement. >A Privilege to Die: Inside Hezbollah's Legions and Their Endless War Against Israel looks at the organization and the people it includes, and Cambanis follows a few Hezbollah families through the 2006 war with Israel in order to get a fuller understanding of the ideological and religious roots of the conflict in the Middle East.. See the WNYC webpage on this feature here. Download the podcast here. See also: Hezbollah: A Short History (Princeton Studies in Muslim Politics), Tea with Hezbollah: Sitting at the Enemies Table Our Journey Through the Middle East, Voice of Hezbollah: The Statements of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah. Cambanis recently wrote in the Boston Globe: There's an increasingly assertive group of “engagement hawks” — a group of professional diplomats, military officers, and academics — is arguing that a mindless, macho refusal to engage might be causing as much harm as terrorism itself. Brushing off dialogue with killers might look tough, they say, but it is dangerously naive, and betrays an alarming ignorance of how, historically, intractable conflicts have actually been resolved. And today, after a decade of war against stateless terrorists that has claimed thousands of American lives and hundreds of thousands of foreign lives, and cost trillions of dollars, it’s all the more important that we choose the most effective methods over the ones that play on easy emotions. See that Boston Globe article by Cambanis here.