Today, the American Security Project released an interim update as part of its ongoing “Are We Winning?” study, which found several discouraging trends, including an increase in worldwide Islamic violence and a dampening of the so-called “Obama Effect” in the Muslim world, among other issues.
Click here to listen to audio of a conference call held [...]

UPDATE: Roxana Saberi was released today and is reportedly free to leave Iran after her sentence was reduced and suspended.  You can read more here. 
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It is now a deeply entrenched conventional wisdom that the decision to “abandon” Afghanistan after the Cold War was a tragic mistake. In the oft-told story, our “abandonment” led to civil war, state collapse, the rise of the Taliban, and inevitably terrorist attacks on American soil. This narrative is now reinforced by dire [...]

In an article written on April 20th for Defense News, ASP Executive Director Dr. Jim Ludes makes the case that while the F-22 may not be a necessary aircraft to continue producing for the United States military, it is the perfect model to sell to Australia and Japan.
This comes on the heels of Robert Gates’ [...]

Coming on the heals of the imposition of Sharia rule in the Swat Valley in Pakistan comes news that the Pakistani Taliban has seized a foothold in the Buner district, a mere 70 miles from the capital Islamabad. Worse, the Pakistani military seems largely unwilling to confront this rising Islamist tide.
From the New York [...]

Ali Soufan, a supervisory special agent in the FBI from 1997 to 2005, writes a compelling op-ed in today’s New York Times, in which he rebuts claims that the use of torture on Abu Zubaydah produced actionable intelligence where traditional methods had failed. 
He writes:
It is inaccurate, however, to say that Abu Zubaydah had been uncooperative. [...]

The Senate Armed Services Committee today released the declassified version of its investigation into the treatment of detainees in U.S. custody since the start of the so-called “War on Terror.”  You can read the whole report here.
What they found, in a bipartisan report, is striking and horrifying.  In essence, the United States government adopted techniques [...]

Blogger Andrew Sullivan has likened torture to a cancer on America’s democracy, that “metastasizes quickly and poisons everything it touches.” Today’s Washington Post has a story about likely investigations in Europe of torture during the Bush Administration:
European prosecutors are likely to investigate CIA and Bush administration officials on suspicion of violating an international ban on [...]

American Security Project Adjunct Fellow Dr. Evelyn Farkas appears on MSNBC on Friday, April 17th to discuss President Obama’s release of the CIA torture memos and U.S. policies towards Pakistan.  You can view Dr. Farkas’ interview on our website here.

On Tuesday, April 14th, Dr. Bernard I. Finel, ASP Senior Fellow and frequent contributor to The Flash Point Blog, will be giving a presentation entitled “The War on Terrorism: Whether or Not We are Winning and How to Measure That” to an undergraduate class on terrorism at The University of Texas at Dallas.
The professor, Dr. [...]