Chávez Plans to Loot $29B in Venezuelan Reserves

Chávez Plans to Loot $29B in Venezuelan Reserves

By Roger Noriega

 

A secret document unveiled this morning by an opposition Venezuelan congressman discloses the extraordinarily risky decision by Venezuela’s ailing dictator Hugo Chávez to transfer all of Venezuela’s $29 billion in gold and cash reserves from Swiss, British, and U.S. banks to accounts in China and Russia. Such an unprecedented move could destroy international confidence in Venezuela, wipe out citizens’ savings, and suffocate an already faltering economy.

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AEI Debate Prep: Neutralizing the Iranian threat in Latin America

By Roger Noriega

 

This post is part of an ongoing series preparing for the AEI/CNN/Heritage National Security & Foreign Policy GOP presidential debate on November 22. See the rest of the posts here.
Iran is using Venezuela as a platform to project its asymmetrical warfare into the Western Hemisphere and to sustain its illicit nuclear program. According to documents of the regime of anti-American radical Hugo Chávez, Iran has laundered about $30 billion through the Venezuelan economy to evade international sanctions.

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AEI Debate Prep: Is this the only path to victory in Afghanistan?

By Frederick W. Kagan

 

What do we need to achieve in Afghanistan in order to protect the security of the United States and its allies?
That core question should shape any discussion of our strategy in Afghanistan or the resources we devote to executing it. But that question is too often obscured.
Many say that pursuing any kind of “success” in Afghanistan, the supposed “graveyard of empires,” is sheer folly. Others say that is has become irrelevant, and that the death of Osama bin Laden has deprived the war in Afghanistan of continued meaning.

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AEI Debate Prep: We need a terrorist detention and interrogation policy

By Marc Thiessen

 

This post is part of an ongoing series preparing for the AEI/CNN/Heritage National Security & Foreign Policy GOP presidential debate on November 22. See the rest of the posts here.

The willingness of so many Republican presidential candidates to speak out in defense of waterboarding is encouraging. But the Bush administration only waterboarded three high-value terrorists out of more than 100 held by the CIA. The problem today is not simply that America is no longer waterboarding the Khalid Skeikh Mohammeds of the world; it is that, outside the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, we are no longer capturing, detaining, and interrogating the Khalid Sheikh Mohammeds of the world at all.

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Counterterrorism in America and the Jose Pimentel case

By Gary Schmitt

 

This past Sunday, New York City’s Police Department arrested 27-year-old Jose Pimentel on state charges of plotting a bomb attack. According to the NYPD and the prosecuting Manhattan district attorney, Pimentel maintained a jihadist website, published materials on how to make bombs, tried to reach out to Anwar al-Awlaki (the American-Yemini terrorist leader whom the United States recently killed with a drone strike), talked about killing American marines and soldiers and bombing sites around New York, and was nearing completion of making at least three pipe bombs.

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By Marc Thiessen

As Michael notes, the Obama administration wants to open peace talks with the Taliban and reward them before they even come to the table by releasing  senior Taliban leaders  held at Guantanamo Bay. Fox News reports that a senior U.S. official has confirmed that “Mullah Mohammed Fazl is among the prisoners being considered for release.”
So who is this Mullah Mohammed Fazl?
Last year, WikiLeaks released a trove of documents it dubbed the “Gitmo Files” with assessments of hundreds of Guantanamo detainees—including Fazl. According to his official record, Fazl is a war criminal who has massacred thousands of people, has close relationships with al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, is involved in narcotics trafficking, and is so senior in the Taliban hierarchy that he once threatened the Taliban’s supreme leader, Mullah Omar. He is considered to pose a “high risk” to American forces and our allies if released.

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Mitt Romney and the future of Gitmo

By Marc Thiessen

The focus of the media coverage of today’s 10^th anniversary of Guantanamo Bay has been largely on President Obama’s failure to close the facility and speculation about how long it will take before the United States finds some way to dispose of the 171 detainees still held there.
But the real question is not what did not happen on January 20, 2010 (the date set by Obama for Gitmo’s closure) but rather what will happen with Guantanamo come January 20, 2013, if a new Republican president takes office.

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Al Qaeda terror training manual found at Gitmo

By Marc Thiessen

Authorities at Guantanamo Bay recently began reading privileged attorney-client communications in an effort to prevent terrorists from passing messages and receiving unauthorized information from their brethren on the outside. Detainee advocates have responded with outrage, but we may now have learned what sparked the new procedures—an al Qaeda terrorist training manual has been found at Gitmo.
The Miami Herald reports this morning:

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