Tag Archives: Counterterrorism Centre

How Russia Manipulates Islamic Terrorism

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on September 8, 2015

Shamil Basayev and Murad Margoshvili (a.k.a. Muslem al-Shishani)

Shamil Basayev and Murad Margoshvili (a.k.a. Muslem a-Shishani)

Last year I wrote about the murky role Russia was playing in the Syrian war, bolstering the Assad tyranny while facilitating the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS) and other Salafi-jihadists as a means of dividing and discrediting the Syrian opposition. Moscow’s action were in line with the strategy it had used to defeat the separatist movement in Chechnya, infiltrating the insurgency, driving it into extremism, and facilitating the arrival of al-Qaeda jihadists who displaced the Chechen nationalists. In Syria, Russia’s actions accord with the strategy adopted by the regime and its Iranian masters to present Assad as the last line of defence against a terrorist takeover of Syria and a genocide against the minorities. New evidence has emerged to underline these points. Continue reading →

The Other Side of the “Torture” Debate

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on December 11, 2014

As a final act while the Democrats hold their majorities in Congress, the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) released a report on December 9, the “Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program”, known to the Twitterverse as the “Torture Report”. This has reignited the debate about America’s use of harsh interrogation methods, the so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” (EITs), against al-Qaeda operatives in the shadow of the 9/11 massacre. The politics surrounding this matter—even on basic questions, such as whether discomfort works to induce cooperation in detainees—are poisonous, and the publication of this partisan Committee Study has done nothing to assist this environment. One means of trying to get at the truth is to examine a counterpoint, the 2012 book, Hard Measures: How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives, a memoir by Jose Rodriguez, the man who oversaw the Central Intelligence Agency’s Counterterrorism Centre from 2001 to 2004. Continue reading →