ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

From: "Chapter 8; Foreign Terrorist Organizations," Country Reports on Terrorism 2005, US Department of State, April 30, 2006. HAMAS a.k.a. Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya; Islamic Resistance Movement; Izz al-Din al Qassam Battalions; Izz al-Din al Qassam Brigades; Izz al-Din al Qassam Forces; Izz al-Din al-Qassim Battalions; Izz al-Din al-Qassim Brigades; Izz al-Din al-Qassim Forces; Students of Ayyash; Students of the Engineer; Yahya Ayyash Units Description HAMAS was formed in late 1987 as an outgrowth of the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Various HAMAS elements have used both violent and political means, including terrorism, to pursue the goal of establishing an Islamic Palestinian state in Israel. HAMAS maintains a political wing that manages the group's overall policy and a highly compartmentalized military wing, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, that conducts terrorist activities. Activities HAMAS terrorists have conducted many a

IPT News November 16, 2012 Fighting between Palestinian terrorists in Gaza and Israeli troops all but guarantees civilian casualties. With the fighting comes heart-wrenching photos of the dead and wounded, along with their grieving loved ones. Each death represents a human tragedy. But sometimes, reality is not enough. Some Palestinians have been caught faking images or appropriating them from other conflicts. This form of propaganda has been dubbed "Pallywood," and the nascent conflict already has several examples. Tablet Magazine's Adam Chandler exposed one , a terrible image of a grieving father holding his dead child as mournful doctors look on helplessly. Hamas's military wing, the Al-Qassam Brigade, sent the picture out on Twitter. It's a dead child all right, but it took place in Syria, not Gaza, and had nothing to do with this week's violence. It's powerful to see the wounded being rushed into ambulances, and in the crucial battle f

By  NICOLE PERLROTH Published: November 16, 2012 If  David H. Petraeus  couldn’t keep his affair from prying eyes as director of the Central Intelligence Agency, then how is the average American to keep a secret? Megan Piontkowski Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times "Everyone is reading everyone else’s e-mails," says Dan Kaminsky, an Internet security expert, "because it’s just so easy to do." In the past, a spymaster might have placed a flower pot with a red flag on his balcony or drawn a mark on page 20 of his mistress’s newspaper. Instead, Mr. Petraeus used Gmail. And he got caught. Granted, most people don’t have the Federal Bureau of Investigation sifting through their personal e-mails, but privacy experts say people grossly underestimate how transparent their digital communications have become. “What people don’t realize is that hacking and spying went mainstream a decade ago,” said Dan Kaminsky, an Internet security res

A rare look inside the C.I.A.’s secret interrogation program. BY  JANE MAYER In March, Mariane Pearl, the widow of the murdered  Wall Street Journal  reporter Daniel Pearl, received a phone call from Alberto Gonzales, the Attorney General. At the time, Gonzales’s role in the controversial dismissal of eight United States Attorneys had just been exposed, and the story was becoming a scandal in Washington. Gonzales informed Pearl that the Justice Department was about to announce some good news: a terrorist in U.S. custody—Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the Al Qaeda leader who was the primary architect of the September 11th attacks—had confessed to killing her husband. (Pearl was abducted and beheaded five and a half years ago in Pakistan, by unidentified Islamic militants.) The Administration planned to release a transcript in which Mohammed boasted, “I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew Daniel Pearl in the city of Karachi, Pakistan. For those who wou

Since  its announcement last week , the book “No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama bin Laden,” written by a pseudonymous member of that Navy SEAL team mission, has stirred up unintended controversies over its author’s right to disclose the details of the operation; his identity; and any perceived political motives behind its publication. Meanwhile, a fictional counterpoint to that book is deliberately trying to catch hell. A new novel by Weston Ochse, called “SEAL Team 666″ and being published by Thomas Dunne Books on Dec. 11, is positioning itself as “SEAL Team 6 meets Stephen King,” according to the publisher’s catalog copy, in which a cadet named Jack Walker is brought into a special-ops squad that fights “demons, possessed humans, mass-murdering cults and evil in its most dark and ancient form.” Mr. Ochse, whose book “Scarecrow Gods” won a  Bram Stoker Award  in 2005 for best first novel, said that he was inspired to write “SEAL Team 666″ last

RIA Novosti 03:01 11/11/2012 MEXICO, November 11 (RIA Novosti) - WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, sheltering inside Ecuador’s embassy in London, should not remain there any longer as his health condition might begin worsening, his lawyer Baltasar Garzon said. Assange, 41, has been hiding at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London since June to avoid his extradition to Sweden, where he faces a case in a rape trial that he calls politically motivated. “If his stay at the embassy continues we will encounter with [Assange’s] serious health and psychological problems,” said Spanish ex-judge Garzon, who is currently on a visit to Brazil. Assange stays in a studio room that has space for little more than a mattress on the floor, a rickety shelving unit, a small round table with leatherette chairs. There is also a running machine and he runs between three and five miles each day. He maintains a strict exercise regime, seeing a personal trainer every other day, but his health condition, a

November 02, 2012 by Matthew Hilburn Researchers at Cornell University have developed a flying robot they say is “as smart as a bird” because it can maneuver to avoid obstacles. They say it eventually could be used in search-and-rescue operations because of its ability to maneuver through forests, tunnels or inside damaged buildings. “Most previous robots assumed perfectly known location of obstacles,” said Ashutosh Saxena, assistant professor of computer science who led the team developing the robot. “Some of the recent ones used 3-D cameras to navigate indoors. However, these techniques did not apply to outdoor environments with unstructured obstacles like trees, branches and poles. In that sense, this is a first one that can learn to avoid such obstacles.” Miniature Aerial Vehicles are commonly used today for a variety of tasks, but they are mostly guided by humans using Global Positioning System (GPS) technology. Saxena’s team wanted to program the robot to recognize obst