John Avlon

The World Trade Center is again the tallest building in New York one year after the killing of Osama bin Laden and more than 10 years after the attacks that brought them down.

It is still a work in progress: The hulking steel structure known as the Freedom Tower is still 500 feet shorter than it will be when complete. But it is already a tribute to American resilience, a reminder that whatever devastation we face, we can still come back bigger and better than before.

My wife and I live two blocks from ground zero. The transformation of our neighborhood over the past decade has been inspiring, if comparatively unheralded. The streets that were once covered in ash and smoke are now teeming with life. Read More…

“I resent the idea that Israel is part of the political agenda in United States’ campaigns, really,” says Tzipi Livni, the Israeli opposition leader and head of the centrist party Kadima.

She is fresh off a flight from Tel Aviv, sitting in a living room of a hotel suite near Lincoln Center, where she’s come to attend the Women in the World Summit.

“I believe Israel is and should be bipartisan—as we always were,” she says, hinting toward the widely reported tensions between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Obama. “I don’t question any American president in terms of his commitment to the security of the state of Israel.” Read More…

I have never been so happy to hear that someone is dead.

It’s not bloodlust — it’s justice.

Ten years ago at this time, Osama bin Laden was in Afghanistan planning the terrorist attacks that killed more than 3,000 of our fellow Americans in cold blood.

Now he is dead and the families of his victims can have a measure of comfort. The healing can deepen. And if there’s a celebration in the streets outside the White House and ground zero — just as there was celebration after the death of Adolf Hitler was announced on May 1, 1945 — it is deserved. It is 10 years overdue.

Read More…

Terrorism is always one bad day away from being the most important issue in America. With election-eve cargo plane bombing plots disrupted by information from a repentant al Qaeda member who was also an ex-Guantanamo detainee, a timely new counter-terrorism report analyzes the most effective means for achieving the “reverse radicalization” of terrorists in prison. Among the countries whose efforts it examined was Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation, where President Obama landed Tuesday morning on his Asian tour.

The report, “Risk Reduction for Countering Violent Extremism,” was unveiled at the Qatar International Academy of Security Studies on Monday—making it one of the first major counter-terrorism studies sponsored by an Arab nation. The president and secretary general of Interpol attended the briefings on site as well as senior representatives from the U.S. State Department, Department of Defense, FBI, NCIS and the U.S. Marshals Service. It was staffed by an international team of national security experts including Ali Soufan, the former FBI special agent in charge of the USS Cole bombing investigation who came to prominence thru a post-9/11 New Yorker profile and his subsequent criticism of the effectiveness of interrogation techniques such as water-boarding by the Bush administration. Read More…

First your cellphone doesn’t work. Then you notice that you can’t access the Internet. Down on the street, ATMs won’t dispense money. Traffic lights don’t function, and calls to 911 don’t get routed to emergency responders. Radios report that systems controlling dams, railroads and nuclear power plants have been remotely infiltrated and compromised. The air-traffic control system shuts down, leaving thousands of passengers stranded or rerouted and unable to communicate with loved ones. This is followed by a blackout that lasts not hours but days and even weeks. Our digital civilization shudders to a halt. When we emerge, millions of Americans’ data are missing, along with billions of dollars.

This scenario may sound like the latest doomsday blockbuster to come out of Hollywood. But each of the elements described above has occurred over the past decade as the result of a cyber attack. Cyber attacks are an accelerating threat, still without generally accepted terminology, effective deterrents or comprehensive legal remedies. They are weapons of mass disruption, used by adversaries cloaked in anonymity, that could prove at least temporarily crippling to the digital infrastructure of modern society. This kind of attack is attractive to America’s enemies, not only because it allows weaker entities to take on far stronger ones but because it turns our technological strength into a weakness. Read More…