The Burden of Knowledge

Anwar al-Awlaki is a dual Yemeni-American citizen who has emerged in recent years as a leading English-language proponent of violent jihad, including explicit calls for the indiscriminate murder of Americans. According to the US government, moreover, he also has taken on an operational leadership role with the organization al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), recruiting and directing individuals to participate in specific acts of violence. Does international law permit the US government to kill al-Awlaki in these circumstances? Part 1.2 opens with a discussion of what we know about AQAP, about al-Awlaki himself, and about the US government’s purported decision to place him on a list of individuals who may be targeted with lethal force in certain circumstances. Part 1.3 then explores objections to killing al-Awlaki founded in the UN Charter’s restraints on the use of force in international affairs. I conclude that a substantial case can be made, at least for now, both that Yemen has consented to the use of such force on its territory and that in any event the conditions associated with the right of self-defense enshrined in Article 51 can be satisfied. Part 1.4 then turns to objections rooted in IHL and IHRL, beginning with the question whether an attack on al-Awlaki would fall within IHL’s field of application. I conclude that the threshold of armed conflict has been crossed in two relevant respects. First, it has been crossed in Yemen itself as between AQAP on one hand and the US and Yemeni governments on the other. Second, it has been crossed as well with respect to the United States and the larger al Qaeda network—and not only within the geopolitical borders of Afghanistan. Building from these premises, I then proceed to consider whether al-Awlaki could be targeted consistent with IHL’s principle of distinction. I conclude that he can be if he is in fact an operational leader within AQAP, as this role would render him a functional combatant in an organized armed group. Should the analysis instead turn on IHRL, however, the central issue becomes the requirement of necessity inherent in IHRL’s protection for the right-to-life, and in particular the notion of temporal necessity. I conclude that this requirement is not an obstacle to attacking al-Awlaki insofar as (i) there is substantial evidence that he is planning terrorist attacks, (ii) there is no plausible opportunity to incapacitate him with non-lethal means, and (iii) there is not good reason to believe that a plausible non-lethal opportunity to incapacitate him will arise before harm to others occurs. A second question then arises, however. Must al-Awlaki be linked to a specific plot to carry out a particular attack, or is it enough that the evidence establishes that he can and will attempt or otherwise be involved in attacks in the future without specificity as to what the particulars of those attacks might be? The former approach has the virtue of clarity, yet could rarely be satisfied given the clandestine nature of terrorism. The latter approach necessarily runs a greater risk of abuse and thus perhaps justifies an especially high evidentiary threshold, but in any event it is a more realistic and more appropriate approach (particularly from the point of view of the potential victims of future terrorist attacks).KeywordsTargeted killingDronesPredatorContinuous combat functionOrganized armed groupDirect participation in hostilitiesLex specialisSelf-defenseNecessity

The explosive triacetone triperoxide (TATP), which can be prepared from commercially readily available reagents following an easy synthetic procedure, is one of the most common components of improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Molecularly-imprinted polymer (MIP) electrochemical sensors have proved useful for the determination of different compounds in different matrices with the required sensitivity and selectivity. In this work, a highly sensitive and selective molecularly imprinted polymer with electrochemical capabilities for the determination of TATP has been developed. The molecular imprinting has been performed via electropolymerisation onto a glassy carbon electrode surface by cyclic voltammetry from a solution of pyrrole functional monomer, TATP template and LiClO4. Differential Pulse Voltammetry of TATP, with LiClO4 as supporting electrolyte, was performed in a potential range of −2.0 V to +1.0 V (vs. Ag/AgCl). Three-factor two-level factorial design was used to optimise the monomer concentration at 0.1 mol·L−1, template concentration at 100 mmol·L−1 and the number of cyclic voltammetry scan cycles to 10. The molecularly imprinted polymer-modified glassy carbon electrode demonstrated good performance at low concentrations for a linear range of 82–44,300 μg·L−1 and a correlation coefficient of r2 = 0.996. The limits of detection (LoD) and quantification (LoQ) achieved were 26.9 μg·L−1 and 81.6 μg·L−1, respectively. The sensor demonstrated very good repeatability with precision values (n = 6, expressed as %RSD) of 1.098% and 0.55% for 1108 and 2216 μg·L−1, respectively. It also proved selective for TATP in the presence of other explosive substances such as PETN, RDX, HMX, and TNT.

Fighting Terrorism* Lee H. Hamilton (bio) It is my pleasure to be with you today. I want to share some thoughts on the work of the 9/11 Commission and how we can pursue a more effective counter-terrorism strategy. Terrorism is the primary national security challenge confronting the United States and will be for many years. We have not been attacked, at home, since 9/11. But that does not mean the threat is fading. There have been twice as many terrorist attacks since 9/11 as in the three years prior to 9/11. To win the war on terrorism, we must focus on five essential elements-the "five I's"-identification, integration, international, intelligence, and implementation. By that I mean: 1. identifying the threat, so that the strategy is designed to confront the enemy; 2. integrating all of the tools of American power, so that the strategy is comprehensive; 3. getting international cooperation because every single action that we take in counterterrorism is strengthened by international help; 4. getting better intelligence, so that we can prevent attacks; and 5. implementation, so that policy is effectively carried out. [End Page 379] I. Identify First, how should we identify the threat? Who is the enemy? It has been several years since 9/11, and it is still not clear who we are fighting. Many hard questions are not fully answered: • Are we fighting an enemy that poses a lethal and ongoing threat to Americans? Or are we fighting a phantom enemy-a vastly overrated extremist group, mortally wounded by our assault on Afghanistan? • Are we fighting an enemy acting out of hatred for America and our values of freedom and democracy? Or an enemy acting out of hatred for American policies: our support for Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Israel, and our invasion of Iraq? • Are we fighting a single, global organization, uniquely powerful and coordinated by hidden leadership in Pakistan and Afghanistan? Or are we fighting countless organizations around the world-acting on their own, but drawing inspiration from Osama bin Laden? Pick up a newspaper and you see the problem. In Iraq alone, you'll see references to terrorists, insurgents, Saddam-loyalists, al Qaeda-affiliates, Islamists, Baathists, foreign fighters, and Iraqi nationalists-just to name a few. No one can be all of those things at once. The outgoing Deputy Secretary of State, Richard Armitage, puts it bluntly: "We can't even agree on who we are fighting." The same is true globally. Is somebody who blows up a nightclub in Bali trying to change something in Indonesia, or are they part of a global conspiracy against the United States? What about somebody who sets off a bomb in Pakistan, Israel, Madrid, Morocco, or Chechnya? Getting this right is critical. We have limited resources. How we define the enemy affects how we attack the enemy. If al Qaeda is simply a group of people intent on destroying America, then we can hunt them down and capture or kill them-one by one. If al Qaeda is part of a kind of jihadist international-a consortium of groups with grievances against the United States that wants to drive the United States out of Islamic nations, overthrow governments, and establish fundamentalist regimes-then killing one terrorist does little good if another always rises to take his place. We spent a lot of time looking at these questions on the 9/11 Commission. We found an enemy motivated by disagreement with specific U.S. policies, and [End Page 380] by the desire to create theocratic government in Islamic lands-a present day Islamic "caliphate." This enemy can be identified as: 1. al Qaeda, a stateless terrorist network, led by Osama bin Laden, that hit us on 9/11. The inner core of al Qaeda is a relatively small group of several hundred, with perhaps a cadre in the few thousands who are closely affiliated; and 2. a radical ideology, inspired in part by al Qaeda, that has spawned terrorist groups and attacks around the globe. These people identify with the jihadist cause and its ideology, and may number in the millions. Beyond these groups there are 1.3 billion Muslims around...

Yemen and al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula

22. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula

Zero Dark Thirty: A Nephrologist at the Movies

The Young and the Normless: Al Qaeda’s Ideological Recruitment of Western Extremists Thérèse Postel * The Boston Marathon bombings on 15 April 2013 brought terror to the finish line of one of the United States’ oldest athletic events, and returned terror

The killing of Osama bin Laden by US Special Forces on 2 May 2011 raises several questions of international law with regard to the legality of this particular operation and the permissibility of targeted killings of international terrorists in general. In this article it will be argued, on the basis of an analysis of the applicable international law, that the killing of bin Laden cannot be justified under international humanitarian law because there is no armed conflict between the United States and Al Qaeda. Even if one were to assume the existence of such an armed conflict, bin Laden's killing would only have been lawful if Al Qaeda were to be considered an organised armed group within the meaning of international humanitarian law and bin Laden could have been killedquamembership of this group. Otherwise, his killing could only have been lawful if he was (still) taking a direct part in hostilities. In any case, in the absence of an armed conflict, under the applicable legal regime of peacetime, the killing could only be justified in a situation of self-defence or an immediate danger for others. As this situation apparently did not exist, the killing of bin Laden amounted to an extrajudicial execution. On another note, the operation may also have violated international law by failing to respect Pakistan's territorial sovereignty. Ultimately, this depends on the recognition of a (pre-emptive) right to self-defence under Article 51 of the UN Charter, in particular taking into account the immediacy criterion.

In the prevailing world, among the many tools of terrorists, explosives are the most potent and popular. Technological developments and the easy availability of information exhibit rapid transformation from the dependence on conventional explosive devices to the designing of improvised chemical devices. The security forces and the law enforcement agencies find it difficult to counter the Improvised Explosive Devices (IED) menace without a complete and detailed knowledge about their characteristics and potential. Hence, in this review paper, the author have made sincere efforts to review the work reported by the energetic materials community in the area of improvised energetic materials and the technologies involved in their detection methodologies which are appropriate to defeat the menace. This paper also discusses the common chemicals and precursor chemicals reported in literature and their use in the improvised explosive devices. Keywords : Improvised energetic materials (IEMs), Ammonium nitrate fuel oil (ANFO), Triacetone triperoxide (TATP), Improvised explosive devices (IEDs), Pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN)

This article addresses the factors leading to Al Qaeda’s continued fragmentation and the collapse of its efforts to create a jihadi state in the Levant. It does so in two parts. First, we look at Al Qaeda’s development of its far enemy strategy that deviated from past jihadi warfare strategies. Second, we examine Al Qaeda’s dysfunctional response to the Arab Spring. The protests untethering of Mideast states and its inflammation of sectarian tensions accelerated Al Qaeda’s transformation into a fractured network committed to localized (increasingly sectarian) insurgencies. After bin Laden’s 2011 killing, Zawahiri in September 2013 released his General Guidelines for the Work of Jihad to tie Al Qaeda’s branches localized insurgencies to a wider struggle against the Zionist-Crusader dominated world order.1 He failed to do so. Upon exploring jihadism’s splintering into three discordant factions represented by Al Qaeda’s far enemy focus, ISIS sectarianism and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s (HTS) localized insurgencies, this article concludes that this development has led to an ineffective but dangerously resilient global jihadi movement. Key words: Jihadism, extremism, sectarianism, insurgency Received: 2022-12-17 Revised: 2023-01-15

In his introduction to Al Qaeda in Its Own Words, a new collection of jihadi texts, Gilles Kepel – a French scholar of contemporary Islam who has written extensively on Muslim militancy – describes a new “science of terrorism” that has emerged in the United States, a kind of cottage industry that props up wobbly theories while doing little to advance actual knowledge of the jihadi phenomenon.

The media often portray women as caught up in a situation of terrorism—not as protagonists but as bystanders or victims. Osama bin Laden’s wives, discussed in Chap. 1, are often discussed collectively, along with their children, as a being influenced by terrorism but not related to it. In 2012, Pakistan placed three of bin Laden’s wives, who were present during the Abbottabad raid, under house arrest for having illegally entered Pakistan. After serving their sentence, it was unclear where these women and children would go. While they were not believed to be active in Al Qaeda, their home countries, Saudi Arabia and Yemen, did not jump to get them back from Pakistan. The two Saudi wives, Khairiah Sabar and Siham Sabar, lost their citizenship along with Osama bin Laden in the 1990s, yet, on humanitarian grounds, Saudi Arabia eventually accepted them and bin Laden’s younger, Yemenese wife, Amal Ahmed al-Sadah. These women and their children were portrayed as passive, bending to the will of governments. In a sense, they were “victims” of association with bin Laden, not actors with their own agency.

In last several months, U.S. administration has aimed its most extreme rhetoric person of Osama bin Laden. In his public statements, President George Bush has routinely referred to bin Laden as the Evil and the Evildoer, and he has used phrases like wanted dead or alive and we'll smoke him out of his hole to indicate administration's resolve in bringing bin Laden to justice. The rhetorical excess evidenced in statements about bin Laden stands in marked contrast to restraint administration has exercised in relation to Afghan people, Muslims and Islamic religion in general, for all of which White House has gone out of its way to signal its respect. While administration has been trying to isolate bin Laden rhetorically, we also hear reports that al Qaeda leader is viewed very differently by many in Middle East and South Asia. We can't speak in terms of percentages, but news reports make it clear that many see bin Laden as a hero on horseback, intent on righting wrongs committed against Muslim people. It is uncertain if those who demonstrate on street in support of bin Laden know much about his political views or would be pleased to live in an Islamic state of sort Taliban established in Afghanistan, but that doesn't really seem to matter. At a time of general discontent with political and economic situation in Middle East, bin Laden offers image of someone who stands up for his beliefs and is incorruptible and unblinking before those in power. One dimension of rhetorical divide between how bin Laden is perceived in Muslim world and in United States concerns manner in which his demise might come to be understood in Muslim world. In this regard, recollecting an event from an earlier era might be instructive because of parallels it shares with America's pursuit of Osama bin Laden in mountains of Afghanistan. The earlier episode took place in summer of 1897 on frontier between what was then called India and Afghanistan.1 An Afghan religious leader known as Mulla of Hadda organized Pakhtun tribal people of border area to join a jihad whose goal was to force British out of India. For several months, British came under tremendous pressure, as garrisons up and down frontier were placed under attack. These assaults awoke in British minds memories of so-called Mutiny of 1857 when hundreds of British had been killed, and newspaper commentators of time spread fear that jihad would spread like a contagion, affecting an ever wider circle of Muslims in India, including native regiments, who would be inspired to join in general insurrection. One of those who recognized seriousness of situation was young Winston Churchill, who finagled a job as a stringer with a London newspaper so he could accompany British expeditionary force sent out to deal with Mulla of Hadda and his allies. For Churchill, this was not simply a local uprising. It was, for him, as conflict with bin Laden is for many in this country, a clash between civilization and barbarism. Great Britain was, in Churchill's words, pursuing a course marked out ... by an all-wise hand ... of bearing civilization and good government to uttermost ends of earth.2 The Mulla of Hadda, or the Mad Mulla, as he was often referred to in press, represented forces of superstition, intent on keeping people of India cloaked in darkness. The Mulla of Hadda did not have access to al Jazeera satellite television to spread his message, but he did have services of religious students, known as taliban who, according to one pair of contemporary British commentators, were at bottom of all mischief in country, instigators and often perpetrators of bulk of crime. They use their religious status to live free on people, who are too superstitious to turn them out, even when they destroy peace of family circle. …

The practice of trauma surgery in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing took place within the walls of the multiple Boston Level I trauma centers, as well as several adjacent community hospitals. The approach to these patients reflected the general philosophy of rapid damage control, abbreviated surgery, frequent returns to the operating room in a staged fashion, and high-ratio blood transfusions. The real lesson for surgeons, however, is learned from careful examination of the prehospital treatment of the injuries resulting from the two improvised explosive devices detonated on Boylston Street during the running of the 117th Boston Marathon at 14:49 on April 15, 2013: damage control starts at the point of wounding.

(1) Background: Police forces and security administrations are nowadays considering Improvised explosives (IEs) as a major threat. The chemical substances used to prepare IEs are called precursors, and their presence could allow police forces to locate a bomb factory where the on-going manufacturing of IEs is carried out. (2) Methods: An expert system was developed and tested in handling signals from a network of sensors, allowing an early warning. The expert system allows the detection of one precursor based on the signal provided by a single sensor, the detection of one precursor based on the signal provided by more than one sensor, and the production of a global alarm level based on data fusion from all the sensors of the network. (3) Results: The expert system was tested in the Italian Air Force base of Pratica di Mare (Italy) and in the Swedish Defence Research Agency (FOI) in Grindsjön (Sweden). (4) Conclusion: The performance of the expert system was successfully evaluated under relevant environmental conditions. The approach used in the development of the expert system allows maximum flexibility in terms of integration of the response provided by any sensor, allowing to easily include in the network all possible new sensors.