Today's Headlines and Commentary

Rajiv Chandrasekaran of The Washington Post reports that the Taliban is increasingly focusing on “conducting audacious attacks against prominent targets across the country, including the U.S. Embassy and well-fortified NATO bases.” BBC tells us that NATO is dramatically scaling down joint operations with Afghan security forces in response to the threat that “green-on-blue” insider attacks will tick up amid tensions over that video. Matthew Rosenberg at the New York Times has more, and Jeremy Herb and Carlo Muñoz at the Hill also have details. Mike Mount of CNN’s Security Clearance blog reports on the continuing violence in Afghanistan. Sens. Joe Lieberman, Lindsey Graham, and John McCain have called for a suspension of U.S. troop withdrawals from Afghanistan. The White House has said “that the timeline in Afghan would not be changed as a result of [NATO’s] suspended operations.” Jeremy Herb at the Hill has the story. Bruce Riedel of Brookings has this op-ed in the Daily Beast about the tortured U.S-Pakistan relationship in the wake of Dr. Shakil Afridi’s phone interview with Fox News last week. Micah Zenko of Foreign Policy has a long piece on John Brennan, President Obama’s counterterrorism advisor, on Brennan’s “half-truths and direct contradictions between stated U.S. policies and actual practices.” From the Department of Let’s Poke a Not-Quite-Sleeping Dragon in the Eye: A French magazine has published cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, according to Reuters. Ed Payne at CNN says that France has banned protests in Paris and the Associated Press tells us that security has been increased at some embassies in response to the cartoons. Sean Gardiner of the Wall Street Journal reports that Ahmed Ferhani, a Queens resident who is accused of plotting to blow up synagogues, has been offered a plea deal for less than the 25 years he currently faces if he is convicted under state terrorism laws. Eric Schmitt and David D. Kirkpatick of the Times have this story about “whether Al Qaeda has been reinvigorated amid the chaos of the Arab Spring or instead merely lives on as a kind of useful boogeyman, scapegoat or foil.” Carrie Johnson of National Public Radio reminds us that the ACLU will face off against the government tomorrow regarding its FOIA request about the CIA’s targeted killing program. For more interesting law and security-related articles, follow us on Twitter, visit the Georgetown Center on National Security and the Law’s Security Law Brief, Fordham Law’s Center on National Security’s Morning Brief, and Fordham Law’s Cyber Brief. Email us noteworthy articles we may have missed at wakeman.lawfare@gmail.com and singh.lawfare@gmail.com, and check out the Lawfare Events Calendar for upcoming national security events.