Global News Journal
Beyond the World news headlines
Security: Never safer, or close to the civil liberties abyss?
As an air crash survivor I know how long jitters about safety can last. Eighteen years ago I crashed in an old Dakota in a remote corner of Africa, where such tragedies are sadly still not that rare.
The worst moment was when I was trapped for 20 seconds in the burning fuselage before being rescued by a fellow journalist. My physical injuries cleared up within months and I resumed flying, but mentally it was difficult. It took me about four years to recover my composure on planes.
The point about this story is that there was a good reason for my nervousness – even back then, we knew about post-traumatic stress. But these past few years, anxiety has come back into my travelling life. And while there is certainly a reason for this, I’m not sure it’s a good one.
This time the stress is far less intense and less personal but a lot more insidious. And it’s not just related to travel. You could call it security anxiety, a subliminal uneasiness aroused by the messages I am bombarded with day in day out about an array of alleged security risks. My job is reporting on security and counter-terrorism so my inbox is awash with this material.
Other rumbles in the Iran nuclear storm
In the sound and fury following the U.N. nuclear governors’ censure of Iran last week for its cover-up of a second uranium enrichment site, and Tehran’s rejection of a nuclear cooperation deal with world powers, a broader, festering issue was obscured.
That is the question of “alleged military dimensions” to Iran’s nuclear programme — that is, whether Tehran illicitly coordinated projects to process uranium, test high explosives and revamp the cone of a missile to fit a nuclear payload.
Israel’s “Jewish Division”: Northen Ireland redux?
By Dan Williams
A Reuters investigation into how the Israeli domestic intelligence service Shin Bet is tackling threats from Jewish ultranationalists has raised intriguing parallels with Britain’s handling of the sectarian “troubles” in Northern Ireland.
Radical Jewish settlers who might turn to violence in a bid to wreck Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking are, increasingly, the quarry of the Shin Bet’s shadowy “Jewish Division”, whose operatives draw on a range of spying and interrogation tactics.
Al Qaeda and the financial crisis
The global financial crisis has become a topic of feverish debate for al Qaeda sympathisers on militant Internet forums.
According to the U.S.-based SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors al Qaeda-linked propaganda on the Web and translates it for the benefit of security analysts and counter-terrorism officials, the militant chat rooms have been buzzing for weeks with excited comment.
Ex-U.S. spy recalls years on no-fly list
Posted by Randall Mikkelsen
ORLANDO, Fla – Decades of passing lie detector tests and the most stringent background checks count little when it comes to the U.S. no-fly terrorist watch list, the Pentagon’s former spy chief recalled on Monday.
Retired Lt. Gen. Patrick Hughes, once the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and a top Homeland Security Department intelligence official, said after he entered the private sector in 2005 he was denied boarding on a flight because his name was on the no-fly list. It has taken him ever since to clear up the confusion.
