ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

By Scott Stewart Vice President of Analysis The recent jihadist attack on the Tigantourine natural gas facility near In Amenas, Algeria, and the subsequent hostage situation there have prompted some knee-jerk discussions among media punditry. From these discussions came the belief that the incident was spectacular, sophisticated and above all unprecedented. A closer examination shows quite the opposite. Indeed, very little of the incident was without precedent. Mokhtar Belmokhtar , who orchestrated the attack, has employed similar tactics and a similar scale of force before, and frequently he has deployed forces far from his group's core territory in northern Mali. Large-scale raids, often meant to take hostages, have been conducted across far expanses of the Sahel. What was unprecedented was the target. Energy and extraction sites have been attacked in the past, but never before was an Algerian natural gas facility selected for such an assault. A closer look at the operation also ...

Obama Is al-Qaeda's No. 1 Recruiter In early January, the Washington Post and other news sources reported a major escalation in drone strikes being carried out by the Obama Administration in Pakistan, with some observing that President Obama thinks he has found a way to conduct warfare against America’s enemies without endangering U.S. troops on the ground. In truth, what Obama has done, with his unprecedented application of drone missile strikes, has been to vastly accelerate recruitment to al-Qaeda and related organizations—more than they could ever have done on their own. Obama’s fascination with the means of raining down terror and death from the air, with minimal risk to ground forces, is hardly something new. Since the dawn of the use of air power in World War I, utopian war planners have been obsessed with the idea of perfecting a means of killing the enemy without the grinding brutality of trench warfare (as in the First World War), or of having to risk “boots on the grou...

Don't Let the Administration Continue the Coverup! Jan. 20, 2013 (EIRNS)—On the eve of hearings in both the House and Senate this coming week, in which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will finally appear to testify on the circumstances surrounding the events of Sept. 11, 2012 in Benghazi, Libya, the Obama Administration continues to obfuscate and intentionally mislead, in an attempt to extend its ongoing coverup and prevent the truth from being revealed about who is ultimately responsible for the death of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens. Representatives of Executive Intelligence Review were informed this week, during the course of meetings conducted with the offices of members of the Foreign Affairs Committee, that the State Department had sent Patrick Kennedy to Capitol Hill to conduct a staff briefing on Benghazi which one can assume was intended as a preparatory background briefing to shape the content of next week's hearings. The content of the briefing was report...