#fb "We entered Afghanistan and tried to make it comply with our fantasy, ignorant of its already complex realities."

Former TSA head speaks out.

No comment necessary.

What being on the TSA watches is like.

On gloating over Gaddafi's corpse.

Originally posted in February.

"Islamic militants are normal people who are often incompetent, not particularly well informed, not particularly well prepared and certainly not the classic vision of the Islamic terrorist"

Ten years on, Osama bin Laden’s caliphatist dream is not one step closer to being realised, and his nihilist vision of Islam never gained support from anything more than a miniscule fringe of his intended audience. Muslims were simply not interested, and by the time he was killed in his hideout in Pakistan, the Arab world was too busy pursuing pos…

Eager hands caressed the small of her back, made their way over the crest of her buttocks, and temporarily cupped them like a pair of cantaloupes. Sadly, this isn’t an exerpt from a cheesy Harlequin romance, it’s airport security in 2011. The buttocks were mine and I didn’t enjoy the experience at all.

"It is only through sensationalism and fear mongering that the topic of Islamic terrorism is allowed to be used to demonize a religious community that happens to be a minority in the West. "

"The very move towards more representative governance will raise huge popular hopes of socio-economic improvement, many of which will be impossible to fulfil. In addition, we see few (if any) circumstances in which an Israeli government of any conceivable stripe would seriously entertain a just settlement for the Palestinians."

The problems of the recent Supreme Court ruling

"The US military has fought five large-scale wars in the past fifty years, resulting in a draw in Korea, a defeat in Vietnam, and three inconclusive outcomes in Iraq (twice) and Afghanistan. That’s a record that makes the worst inner-city public school look pretty good. At least the majority of students, even at the worst schools, end up more…

Alex reckons that today's terrorists are Desperate, Incompetent, Converts, Kids, Harmless, Economically insignificant, Aimless, Disconnected, and Suicidal.

Excellent article. "In the 1980s we did not overreact. We did not stage ill-fated invasions of distant countries. People did not cease traveling and the airline industry did not fall into chaos. We were lazy in enacting better security, perhaps, but as a country our psychological reaction, much to our credit, was calm, measured and not yet se…

Iraq Body Count has patiently and consistently tabulated recorded deaths since the invasion. It has now conducted a preliminary analysis of a sample of the incidents recorded in the documents (including all the larger ones) (see Paul Rogers, “The harvest of war: from pain to gain”, 28 October 2010).This concludes that the logs both confirm the maj…

Interesting legal question - if someone attaches something to your car, is it still theirs?

Article summarising the launch of the report I linked the other day.

London is no longer the epicentre of global Jihadist terrorism... The report however challenges notions of a ‘leaderless jihad’ and shows that ‘homegrown’ Jihadism does not exist independently of the international movement.

Except it wasn't. There was no planned Islamist assassination attempt against the Pope.

...or rather, why the EU doesn't do that as well as perhaps it could