Latest Articles

How Dangerous Is a Terrorist with a Twitter Handle?

June 7, 2013  •  Foreign Policy

Sensational reports in the Guardian and Washington Post recently blew the lid off of the National Security Agency's (NSA) electronic surveillance efforts, which have harvested everything from phone calls to Facebook posts for intelligence purposes.

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Palestine's Nothing Man

June 4, 2013  •  Foreign Policy

"President [Mahmoud] Abbas has asked me to form a new government and I have accepted," said Rami Hamdallah, the president of Al-Najah University in the West Bank city of Nablus, on Sunday.

In many ways, the announcement was a surprise. After all, Hamdallah is a relatively obscure academic with absolutely no hands-on experience in governing. He was never viewed a frontrunner in the Palestinian prime minister derby -- a horserace that began with the April 13 resignation of reformist premier Salam Fayyad. If anything, Abbas was expected to tap his economic advisor and close ally Mohammed Musafa. And if he didn't make that move, some expected the Palestinian president to name himself.

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In Iran, Two Bombing Suspects Run for President

May 27, 2013  •  The Atlantic

After disqualifying a number of presidential candidates from the June 14 elections, Iran's Guardian Council has pared the list down to eight. Remarkably, two of the remaining candidates -- Mohsen Rezai and Ali Akbar Velayati -- are suspects in the 1994 bombing of the Argentina Israelite Mutual Association (AMIA) headquarters in Buenos Aires that killed 85 and wounded 300.

Until recently, this might have been seen as problematic for a presidential candidate. But the Argentine government's May 20 establishment of a joint commission to re-investigate the attack makes it all but certain that the two men (and their accomplices) will be exonerated.

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How Iran Benefits From an Illicit Gold Trade With Turkey

May 17, 2013  •  The Atlantic

Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has arrived in Washington, D.C. for a much-anticipated summit with President Barack Obama. The timing of the visit -- amid reports of chemical weapons usage in Syria and an attack against a Turkish border town by alleged Syrian agents -- will make it hard to talk about anything other than the civil war in Syria.

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U.N. for Combating Terror Finance to Convene in Sudan, a State Sponsor of Terror

April 27, 2013  •  Weekly Standard Blog

On Sunday, the leading experts on terrorism finance in the Middle East and North Africa will convene for a five-day conference. The Financial Action Task Force is essentially the United Nations for combating terror finance, and MENAFATF ranks among its most important regional bodies. So why is the group meeting, in all places, in Khartoum?

Sudan was designated as a state sponsor of terrorism in 1993 by the Clinton administration for providing support to a wide range of terrorist organizations. Sudan remained on the list because it provided a safe haven to Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda in the early 1990s.

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Books by Jonathan Schanzer