Beirut Rules: The Murder Of A CIA Station Chief And Hezbollah's War Against America

Joshua Sinai offers a good review in the Washington Times of Fred Burton and Samuel M. Katz’s Beirut Rules: The Murder of a CIA Station Chief And Hezbollah’s War Against America.

On March 16, 1984, William Buckley, the CIA station chief in Beirut, Lebanon, was kidnapped by Hezbollah operatives just as he had left his apartment building at 6:45 am and started driving his car to his office at the United States embassy compound, a two-minute drive away. The two cars driven by the Hezbollah kidnappers quickly blocked Mr. Buckley’s car and their operatives overwhelmed him with their firearms and hurled him into one of their cars, driving him to their hidden place of captivity. Mr. Buckley had been in his position since June 1983, and contrary to standard security practice, he was not accompanied by an embassy-provided driver or bodyguard. Mr. Buckley reportedly died in Hezbollah captivity in June 1985, despite the numerous measures the United States had employed to attempt his rescue.

Taking this high-profile kidnapping as its central focus, this book is a dramatic and engaging account of the American backchannel intelligence and military efforts to help restore order to Lebanon’s protracted Hobbesian civil war, with the Iranian- and Syrian-backed Hezbollah’s Shi’ite insurgency the primary antagonist.

Hezbollah’s insurgency took the form of systematically kidnapping and assassinating Westerners in Lebanon, whether academics, United Nations officers, Christian humanitarian aid officials and journalists. During Mr. Buckley’s brief tenure at the U.S. embassy, Hezbollah also organized two spectacular truck-driven suicide bombing attacks in Beirut on Oct. 23, 1983, with the first explosion killing 241 U.S. Marine Corps personnel at their barracks by the Beirut Airport, and the second killing 58 French peacekeeping personnel and six civilians.

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/oct/30/book-review-beirut-rules-by-fred-burton-and-samuel/ 

'United States of Jihad: Investigating America's Homegrown Terrorists'

Joshua Sinai, a fellow contributing editor at The Journal of Counterterrorism & Homeland Security International, offers a good review in the Washington Times of Peter Bergen's United States of Jihad: Investigating America's Homegrown Terrorists.

Peter Bergen's “United States of Jihad: Investigating America’s Homegrown Terrorists” is a gripping account of the motivations and activities of a tiny proportion of Muslim Americans (including converts to Islam) who have become jihadist terrorists since Sept. 11, 2001 on behalf of global terrorist groups such as al Qaeda and ISIS, and the measures the U.S. government employs to counter their plots and attacks domestically and overseas. Mr. Bergen, a prominent journalist on terrorism issues, is the author of several best-selling books on al Qaeda.

Mr. Bergen’s analysis, overall, is sound and revealing, especially when he discloses new details about many of these terrorist plots and attacks, and the way law enforcement agencies such as the FBI, the NYPD and others have attempted to counter them. At the same time, however, his argument that the threat posed by American jihadists (or by foreign jihadists against America) is often hyped and “overestimated” by politicians and opinion makers could have benefited from a closer look.

Mr. Bergen claims that “since 2001 [up to the end of 2015] 45 Americans have been killed by jihadist terrorists in the United States.” Yet, what he does not mention is that during this period, if certain major plots and operations by such jihadists had not been thwarted by U.S. law enforcement agencies or by the sheer luck that their explosives did not detonate, hundreds of Americans would have lost their lives. These include a failed operation by Najibullah Zazi who attempted to conduct a suicide bombing with two associates of the New York City subway system in September 2009, which had been masterminded by al Qaeda in Pakistan; the attempt by Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to set off an explosive bomb on board a Northwest Flight 253 over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009, which had been masterminded by the Yemeni branch of al Qaeda; and Faisal Shazad’s attempted bombing of Times Square on the evening of May 1, 2010, with his explosive-laden SUV car failing to detonate, in a plot masterminded by the Taliban, an al Qaeda-affiliate in Pakistan.

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/mar/7/book-review-united-states-of-jihad/

The Hunt For KSM: Inside The Pursuit And Takedown Of The Real 9/11 Mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

Josua Sinai at the Washington Times offers a good review of Terry McDermott and Josh Meyer's The Hunt for KSM: Inside the Pursuit and Takedown of the Real 9/11 Mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

"The Hunt for KSM: Inside the Pursuit and Takedown of the Real 9/11 Mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed” by veteran investigative reporters Terry McDermott and Josh Meyer, is a gripping account of how KSM, one of al Qaeda’s most prominent terrorist “entrepreneurs,” played such a crucial role in one of the deadliest terrorist operations in history. It is also a dramatic account of how the decade-long persistence and hard work of FBI and CIA investigators eventually succeeded in tracking and bringing KSM and his associates to justice, although, as described in great detail by the authors, it took a painstakingly long time in their global pursuit to finally identify him, pinpoint his location and roll up much of his network.

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/mar/30/book-review-the-hunt-for-ksm/