Charles Faddis

According to a new CIA assessment, Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen is now a more dangerous threat to the United States than is the core group based in Pakistan.   A recently released report written by the heads of the 9/11 Commission states that the threat from homegrown Islamic terrorism inside the United States is significant and growing.  Meanwhile the United Nations notes that violence in Afghanistan is soaring despite, or perhaps because of, the presence of close to 100,000 American troops. (more)

You can hardly read the newspaper these days without tripping across some reference to the dangerous nexus between terrorism and Somalia.  American youth of Somali descent are being recruited to engage in jihad abroad.  Al Shabaab, the most deadly Somali terrorist group, has entered into a strategic alliance with Al Qaida.  Perhaps most terrifying of all, there are repeated reports of Somali extremists crossing our southern border and making their way into the United States. (more)

Late Monday evening, agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation pulled Faisal Shahzad, a 30-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen off of a plane at John F. Kennedy International airport in New York. Faisal, wanted in connection with the attempted bombing of Times Square on Saturday night, is now sitting in jail and charged with five counts, including attempting to detonate a weapon of mass destruction. Questions about how close Faisal came to escape aside, we must applaud the impressive performance by federal, state and local law enforcement that the lead to this rapid arrest. (more)

Early morning on March 29, 2010, two female suicide bombers detonated the explosive devices they were carrying on subway trains in Moscow. Initial reports indicate that 37 individuals were killed and that 73 were injured. These attacks, likely the work of Chechen separatists, produced panic amongst passengers, disrupted service on Moscow’s massive subway system and brought a flood of police and special forces personnel out into the streets of the city. (more)

Sharif Mobley is a New Jersey native arrested in early March in Yemen along with a number of other suspect members of al-Qaida as part of ongoing security operations in that nation. Prior to his departure for the Middle East in 2008 Sharif was also employed inside of at least five separate nuclear power plants in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Maryland over a six-year period. (more)