Al-Qaida fighters have been using secretive chat rooms and encrypted Internet message boards for planning and coordinating attacks — including the threatened if vague plot that U.S. officials say closed 19 diplomatic posts across Africa and the Middle East for more than a week. It’s highly unlikely that al-Qaida’s top leader, Ayman al-Zawahri, or his […]
Far from being on the brink of collapse, al-Qaida‘s core leadership remains a potent threat — and one that experts say has encouraged the terror network’s spread into more countries today than it was operating in immediately after 9/11. President Barack Obama, who ordered the May 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden, has described […]
Forecasting the changing nature of threats against the U.S. for years to come, President Barack Obama says “America is at a crossroads.” And so, too, is his presidency’s counterterrorism policy, which has long struggled to balance protecting the nation from terror attacks while upholding Americans’ rights. The Obama administration this week acknowledged that four Americans […]
A year after the U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden, al-Qaida is hobbled and hunted, too busy surviving for the moment to carry out another Sept. 11-style attack on U.S. soil. But the terrorist network dreams still of payback, and U.S. counterterrorist officials warn that, in time, its offshoots may deliver. A decade of […]