Search: “9/11”

When it comes to terrorism I suppose the mantra that most people hold to is somewhat akin to that found in the real estate industry: location, location, location. Attacks that happen in countries most cannot find on a map, or have no intention of ever visiting, or frankly don’t really care about (as harsh as […]

This piece appeared in The Hill Times on April 1, 2019. If you are like me – and I really hope you are not for many, many reasons! – you probably read the news with a certain slant and through a certain filter. In my case, I read almost everything via a terrorism lens – […]

I see that the US State Department has elected to list the Pasdaran – the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps or IRGC – as a “foreign terrorist organisation/state sponsor of terrorism”. In a tit for tat move, Iranian lawmakers have prepared legislation that would label the US military as a terrorist group, according to Iran’s state-run […]

Imagine the following scenario. You arrive at the airport to check in for a flight to take you to your vacation. You give your passport to the attendant and wait for your boarding pass. The attendant swipes your documentation and suddenly furrows her/his brow. The passport is swiped again. More furrows. The attendant asks you […]

I know I have written about this before but some things just bear repeating, even if that repetition is repetitive. An act of terrorism is an act of serious violence carried out for political, religious or ideological reasons. The first part of that is usually fairly easy to distinguish. After all, serious violence is an […]

This piece appeared in The Hill Times on March 25, 2019. When important events occur this is news. People want to know what is happening as it is happening: that is how reporting the news works. We want to know more, not less, and we want to know it NOW. We want as many details […]

As I have written on many occasions in the past, we have ‘terrorism on the brain’. I wish I could write otherwise, but in a world where something happens somewhere on almost a daily basis it would be disingenuous of me to say that terrorism is not a frequent scourge, and hence it is on […]

As the nation which suffered the single greatest terrorist attack in history – 9/11 – the US has a vested interest in developing a counter terrorism policy so that these events do not happen again, especially in the US. To be honest there is also a completely understandable desire for bringing the perpetrators to justice, […]

This piece appeared in The Hill Times on March 11, 2019 We have laws for a reason, right? Over the centuries the Western world has developed a series of traditions such as presumed innocence, the need to establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, the right to be tried before one’s peers, the right to a […]

It has been two days or so since the massacre in New Zealand and I have already lost track of how many articles, op-Ed’s, tweets, FaceBook postings and other material have called for more action to prevent acts of that nature. Everyone seems to think that governments, and especially security intelligence and law enforcement agencies, […]