Tag Archives: Saudi Arabia

But the obfuscation, or confusion–it’s your call–in the Boston Bomber case is masterful. Now we hear reports that Ali Alharbi the young Saudi national in Boston on a student visa, the same young man authorities released after questioning him so he could ‘get back to classes'(and who issued the order to release him is still unknown)is under a DHS-issued deportation order based on an investigation that determined he has ‘suspicious terrorist ties’ and has been determined by the US government to be ‘a security risk.’ (Please see my blog of February 26–“ICE Agents Claim Napolitano Forcing Them to Violate U.S. Law–New Immigration Directives Invitation to Terrorists and Cartels.”

QED: let’s assume enforcement officials used the fact that Ali Alharbi had been investigated and was scheduled for deportation, and that it was this information, that the young man had already been tagged as a ‘national security risk,’ that helped authorities convince a judge that a search warrant was in order.

So what’s happening now? Will the Saudi student with the black backpack be retained in the US while enforcement officials continue to work with him to obtain more information? Keep him around, look for connections, leads, associations? Makes sense, don’t you think?

Not to the FBI, apparently, nor to Janet Napolitano, who heads the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). DHS, it is rumored, is said to be following through with Alharbi’s deportation and getting ready to send him back home to Saudi Arabia.

The administration wants that boy gone.

The idea of arming the Syrian rebels is being chatted up once again.  The debate will wander and focus in many theoretical directions. Yet essentially the decision will focus on one key pivot: is the goal a short-term or long-term victory? The safe bet: short-term considerations will win out. The U.N. proclamation that the one […]

    Saudi Arabia is perhaps the only remaining country in the world that takes its name from a ruling family — the Al Saud.  It has vast hydrocarbon resources that feed the world’s insatiable hunger for energy.  It also is an absolute monarchy founded upon religious principles of Wahhabi Islam.  The alliance of the Al Saud […]

Perhaps appropriately (as it contains ‘Black Friday’) this has been somewhat of a dark week. The Church of England decided against allowing women to become bishops, and Saudi Arabia (according to Al Arabiya/AFP) now sends husbands an SMS when their wives leave the country.

Three days ago Adulateef Al-Mulhim, a writer at ArabNews.com and a former Royal Saudi Naval officer, wrote a ground breaking op-ed called the “Arab Spring and the Israel Enemy.” In it he calls for the Arab population and their governments to stop demonizing and blaming Israel as the source of their problems. “The Arab world […]

Back in the swing of things. “Iraq could overtake Russia as the world’s second-largest oil supplier behind Saudi Arabia by the 2030s, nearly tripling its current output, according to a report from the International Energy Agency.” (h/t The LA Times) “Iraq has signed contracts to buy Russian arms worth $4.2bn (£2.6bn; 3.2bn euros) this year, […]

Iran today is well-positioned to leverage the Arab world’s difficult political transition to religious-based politics and influence this transition to suit its geopolitical interests. After a 15-month hiatus marked by mutual distrust and reciprocal accusations of insincerity to negotiate, on April 14 Istanbul hosted a new round of negotiations between Iran and the world’s major powers […]

From John R. Bradley, the Middle East correspondent and writer who correctly predicted the Egyptian revolution, comes a new message about the Arab Spring: “everything we have been told about it is wrong”. John R. Bradley sat down with Reza Akhlaghi of Foreign Policy Association to discuss his latest book: ‘After the Arab Spring: How Islamists Hijacked the […]

It took NATO 46 years and eight months before it intervened with military force to protect innocent civilians from harm and manage a conflict on its periphery. Can we truly expect the Arab League to move any quicker in dealing with problems in its neighborhood? Probably not. When NATO finally heeded the call from those […]

  Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud, Chairman of the Alwaleed Bin Talal Foundation and Princess Ameerah Al-Taweel, Vice-Chair woman of the Alwaleed Bin Talal Foundation, hosted an historic gathering of leading scholars on Islam and the West at The Alwaleed Bin Talal Islamic Studies Program at Harvard University, Wednesday, February 8th, 2012. The […]

In the end, Terry, Diaz and Meyer found themselves on the sharp end of the stick for their efforts: the US Department of Justice, agencies like DHS and the Department of State, and the usual entourage of corporate and political underwriters, including the government of Mexico, all had a hand in creating scenarios designed to transform good guys into villains, narratives that ended in Terry’s death at the hands of a cartel gunman, Diaz’s imprisonment for ‘exercising excessive force’ during the arrest of a suspected drug trafficker, and in Meyer’s case, the loss of a high-paying job with a multinational defense contractor, and blowback that now has this decorated young veteran on the ropes in the court of public opinion. Let me tell you something. The only ‘mental problem’ from which Meyer suffers is a chronic case of integrity, an inability to distort the truth to accommodate political reality.

Consider–if Terry, Diaz and Meyer had ‘occupied Wall Street’ instead of the killing zones along our SW border and in Afghanistan, they might have been poster boys for the March of History, and on top of it all, alive, free, and gainfully employed.

I recently came across two worthwhile pieces on Persian Gulf states punching above their weight. The first is a New York Times analysis of Qatar, the lil’ oil rich country that could: Qatar is smaller than Connecticut, and its native population, at 225,000, wouldn’t fill Cairo’s bigger neighborhoods. But for a country that inspires equal […]

Has America exhibited moral courage by addressing change, or the lack there of, in the world? Or has it squandered our hope for a principled effort to rid American foreign policy of its realist inclinations and desire to cling to paradigms? Many of us have placed our trust in America (i.e., President Obama) to challenge […]

Osama bin Laden: killed and al Qaeda: on the run. That’s the balance sheet — more or less — that the U.S. has to share with the world. Meanwhile, its biggest ally in the War on Terror — Pakistan — has nothing to present except that its own people have been terrorized by militants, with […]

The following is a contributing piece from guest writer Ladan Yazdian. Ms. Yazdian is a foreign affairs and Middle East specialist. She holds a BA and an MA in political science. She is currently a Ph.D. student at Virginia Tech, working on global security, foreign policy, international relations, and human rights. In the wake of […]