by Bud Goodall Sunday night President Barack Obama officially declared Osama bin Laden dead.  He began his speech with these words: Good evening.  Tonight, I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of al Qaeda, and a [...]

by Chris Lundry In our work identifying and tracking the use of Islamist narratives here at the CSC, the second most frequently invoked among Islamist extremists in our research (after Nakba or Palestine) has been the Crusader master narrative. The use of this term among Islamists connotes religious war, subjugation by Western Christians, injustice, and eventual colonization. [...]

The president announced that we were “turning the page” on Operation Freedom; but what he failed to do was close the book.

by Jeffry R. Halverson In the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, Indian novelist and activist Arundhati Roy wrote an opinion piece in the British daily The Guardian, stating: [Bin Laden] has been sculpted from the spare rib of a world laid to waste by American foreign policy: its gunboat diplomacy, its nuclear arsenal, its [...]

by Steven R. Corman At his final news conference yesterday President Bush responded to a question about whether the nation’s image needs repairing given the “damage that Gitmo, that harsh interrogation tactics that  [members of the incoming administration] consider torture, how going to war in Iraq without a UN mandate have damaged America’s moral standing [...]

by Steven R. Corman Last week I noted that the U.S. had decided to stop calling the Bad Guys “jihadis.”  Well as Jeffrey Imm over at CT Blog points out, there’s just one little problem:   Apparently the State Department and the President didn’t get that memo.  Imm details 30 uses of the word or [...]

by Steven R. Corman About a year ago, Ian Dirk did a post on COMOPS about a Palestinian children’s story hour where the featured stories included a tale of a Jewish woman who tried to poison the Prophet (moral: “the Jews are a people of treachery and betrayal.”), and the story of a little kid [...]

By Bud Goodall Pardon my rant. I say that in advance but without apology. Today’s New York Times article about the United States Senate vote to approve President Bush’s plan to grant legal protection to telephone companies for cooperating with illegal wiretaps on American citizens as well as to expand existing government spy powers on [...]

By Matthew Morris In early March, President Bush embarked on a five-nation tour of Latin American with the goal of advancing America’s image in the region. According to the White House website, the message of this tour was clear: The President Is Committed To Helping Democracies In The Western Hemisphere: Build government institutions that are [...]