Unlike the infamous December 7th date that baby boomers would forever be conditioned to remember and respect by their forebears, September 11th is becoming less and less of a date to “revere” and more and more of a “thing” to meme. And, although the attack on the World Trade Center hasn’t even yet reached its twenty-fifth anniversary, it’s already but “fodder” for a generation that was barely coherent, if even born at all, when the calamity occurred. Thus, it’s easy to find “levity” in the incongruous images from that immortal day (including a screen grab of an advertisement for Mariah Carey’s doomed movie, Glitter, against the backdrop of the smoking towers).
And oh, how Gen Z has found quite the substantial amount of levity in 9/11. As a recent article from Rolling Stone characterized this phenomenon, “To be on social media in 2024 is to be swimming in jokes and memes about 9/11. Things that might once have been whispered among friends are now shared by meme accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers. On TikTok, videos contrasting the year 2024 with 2001 (often ending with someone reacting to the planes hitting towers) frequently went viral.” An Instagram account called always_forget_never_remember (a “tasteless 9/11 Meme Dealer”) describes the latest glut of memes about the tragedy as having “the effect of exorcising the event from America’s collective consciousness.” While some might view that as a “positive” form of “healing,” others are aware of the long-term damage it can cause to “forget” (hence, the long-standing 9/11 urging to “never forget”—especially if you still have the non-presence of mind to live in New York).
Germany didn’t make the mistake of “forgetting” about World War II and Adolf Hitler’s dangerous, life-destroying demagoguery. Ergo, the reason why its ratio of neo-Nazis is actually far smaller than the one in the United States, where the history taught in schools is often not exactly “on the level.” Therefore, making it easy to forget the lessons that are theoretically supposed to be imparted by history. If 9/11 was meant to impart any such lesson, it’s that hubris will be the U.S.’ ultimate undoing. And yet, Gen Z has instead seen fit to take up allegiance with Osama bin Laden in the matter after his “Letter to America” went viral on TikTok. Mainly because part of his “logic” for killing thousands of people stemmed from the U.S.’ de facto support of Israel’s occupation of Palestine. But, as the aphorism goes, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” Especially Gen Z—blind to the severity and unprecedented nature of this event that has continued to negatively impact people’s lives to this day.
And not just the lives of those who lost loved ones in the most brutal and unfathomable manner, but to those still living who were subjected to the toxic materials of the aftermath. As the CDC phrases it, 9/11 “created massive dust clouds that filled the air and left hundreds of highly populated city blocks covered with ash, debris and harmful particles, including asbestos, silica, metals, concrete and glass.” Consequently, many people, young and old alike, were subjected to toxins that would result in ongoing health issues or even death.
Indeed, according to the Mesothelioma Center, “more people have now died from this toxic exposure than in the 9/11 attacks [themselves].” But that is of no importance to Gen Z, who could give a goddamn about anything (except looking young and excoriating those who don’t). Perhaps Rue Bennett (Zendaya), the ultimate numb/disaffected Gen Zer in Euphoria, puts it best when she narrates in the series’ pilot episode, “I was born three days after 9/11. My mother and father spent two days in the hospital, holding me under the soft glow of the television, watching those towers fall over and over again, until the feelings of grief gave way to numbness.” In a sense, she’s not just talking about her parents’ numbness, but also referring to the osmosis of those images—played ad nauseam until they meant nothing anymore—contributing to her own eventual numbness. Not just to 9/11 and its “weight,” but to life itself.
While there are those who would take up the defense of Gen Z (including Gen Z itself) by saying it’s not their fault they didn’t live through the catastrophe in order to be “appropriately sad” enough about it (therefore not make totally callous memes about it), others are aware of the growing sociopathy that exists within each new generation—and yes, it arguably started with baby boomers themselves, the generation first accused of being selfish and sociopathic via an illustrious 1976 article by Tom Wolfe for New York Magazine called “The ‘Me’ Decade.” And yet, while boomers might have been quick to join cults and indulge in many a bad acid trip, one can’t imagine them ever creating content that eradicated the entire emotional meaning of December 7, 1941.
Undoubtedly, Gen Z, in contrast, comes across as particularly sociopathic because they are the first generation to “forget” about 9/11. Not, however, the first generation to have the internet-oriented platforms to mock it. That would be millennials. But millennials were in the trenches when it happened, affected by the news coverage and anti-Middle East rhetoric that followed in such a way as to not even dream of poking fun at such a serious moment in the culture. After all, this was when people were still even taking Rudy Giuliani seriously. As for previous generations that were made aware of somber historical events, baby boomers didn’t have the means to mock Pearl Harbor (the event consistently likened to 9/11 because it was the only other large-scale attack on U.S. soil), nor did Gen X didn’t have the means to mock, say, the Kennedy assassination or the Vietnam War. At least not in a manner that could be disseminated to so many thousands of people.
The irony, of course, is that Gen Z is known for being the most “sensitive” generation yet—even though everything about them and their reactions to things connotes the exact opposite. Treating 9/11 like nothing more than a “trend” or meme to fill the internet space is, thus, but part and parcel of this generation’s highly limited capacity for empathy. Oh sure, there’s using humor as a coping mechanism, as many did try to in the wake of the events of September 11, 2001 (which meant being “canceled” before that was a term). But that’s not what it’s about with Gen Z, who has no emotional attachment whatsoever to that day. Nor do they seem to have much of an emotional attachment to anything (again, except to looking hot). Leading some to ask the question: can you blame them? After all, they live in a post-Empire world—how can they trust that it’s even worth it to attach to something, knowing how ephemeral it all is. The decimation of the Twin Towers certainly proves that, if nothing else, to Gen Z, so overexposed to tragedy and trauma at this point that their desensitization can be “justified.” As anything can be when it suits a purpose…sort of like bin Laden justifying the attacks.
The National Security Agency is revealing aspects it never disclosed before about its role in helping the U.S. government track down Osama bin Laden, the al Qaeda founder and terrorist who orchestrated numerous deadly strikes on U.S. and Western targets including, most notoriously, the attacks of September 11, 2001.
In a new podcast series called “No Such Podcast” that debuted this week, current and former senior NSA officials who were involved in the decade-long search for bin Laden after 9/11 describe how the highly secretive operation unfolded before culminating in the 2011 raid on a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where Bin Laden had fled.
“I remember late night meetings in the fall of 2001, we’d sit around a table and say, ‘How do we find him?’” recounts Jon Darby, former NSA director of operations, according to a transcript of the first episode released by the agency. “And one of the early theories was a courier, somebody that’s going to be taking care of him. But that was 2001.”
Darby described the operation as “ultra-compartmented,” with no more than 50 of the tens of thousands of NSA employees aware of the effort until after the day of the Abbottabad raid.
“So the government had decided to carry out this special forces raid. So what’s NSA’s role at that point? Our job is to make sure there are no threats to those choppers that are flying in and on the way out,” Darby said, in an apparent allusion to the risk that the two Black Hawk helicopters that had secretly entered Pakistan’s airspace could be intercepted. “So we had people poised, you know, ready to provide any indications and warning of threats to those helicopters,” he said.
NSA aided Ukraine after Russia’s invasion
Natalie Laing, the current director of operations at NSA who was also interviewed for the podcast, offered an overview of the fundamentals of signals intelligence, the NSA’s core focus, and described more recent examples of the agency’s role in informing U.S. policymakers, foreign partners, and the Ukrainian government about the imminence of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Signals intelligence is information about targets obtained from electronic signals and communications from those targets such as phone calls, texts, radio waves and other things that create digital data.
“[W]e collected those signals and we were able to see that Russia had the plans and intentions to invade Ukraine before they invaded,” she said, adding that personnel from U.S. Cyber Command, which works hand-in-glove with the NSA, were dispatched overseas to help Kyiv strengthen its cyber defenses.
“Cyber Command was able to send before the invasion, again, a small team over to Ukraine to help them look through their networks and point to some activity that seemed to be Russian activity there, so they could shore up their networks from a cybersecurity perspective,” Laing said.
She also explained how signals intelligence collected by NSA helped the U.S. government determine the Chinese origins of a chemical used to synthesize fentanyl, whose illicit influx into the country American agencies have deemed a national security threat.
U.S. intel agencies pulling back the curtain more
Once so secretive its very existence was classified, the NSA has sought in recent years to pull back the curtain on some of its operations and to share more cybersecurity information with non-government entities and the public.
In launching its own podcast, the NSA joins other American intelligence agencies – including the CIA, which started a podcast, “The Langley Files,” in 2022, and the Defense Intelligence Agency, whose podcast “Connections” was released in 2020 in an effort to demystify some of their work, albeit through carefully choreographed, in-house productions.
Efforts to better shape the public narrative surrounding the NSA’s activities follows the 2013 disclosures by former contractor Edward Snowden of classified U.S. government mass surveillance programs, which ignited a firestorm of controversy that intelligence officials have acknowledged did lasting damage to the reputation of the American intelligence community.
“Because it’s sensitive, we can’t talk about some of our work, but it’s time to start telling more stories that we can talk about, sharing more of that expertise, and highlighting these incredible public servants,” Sara Siegle, NSA’s Chief of Strategic Communications, said in a statement.
The NSA aims to release six more episodes on major podcast platforms through next month.
On May 2, 2011, Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was killed by US Special Forces during an early morning raid at a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
– Built in approximately 2006. – Significantly larger than other homes in the area, and worth a reported $1 million. – Lacked telephone and internet service. – Residents burned their trash rather than having it picked up. – Approximately 24 people lived at the house. – Surrounded by 12- to 18-foot walls topped by barbed wire. – Had two security gates. – Bin Laden and his family’s living quarters were on the second and third levels. – The third floor terrace had a seven-foot privacy wall. – Located only about a mile from the Pakistan Military Academy.
US forces retrieved numerous items from bin Laden’s compound, including 10 hard drives, five computers and more than 100 storage devices, such as disks, DVDs and thumb drives, according to a senior US official.
2007 (approx.) – US intelligence uncovers the name of one of bin Laden’s most trusted couriers.
2009 (approx.) – Intelligence sources identify the area of Pakistan where the courier and his brother live.
August 2010 – US intelligence sources identify the Abbottabad compound as the home of the courier and his brother, who have no obvious means of affording a $1 million home.
September 2010 – The CIA informs President Barack Obama that bin Laden may be living in the Abbottabad compound. They base this on the size and price tag of the compound as well as the elaborate security.
February 2011 – The intelligence on the Abbottabad compound is considered strong enough to begin planning action.
March 14, 2011 – President Obama chairs the first of five National Security Council meetings to discuss an operation to raid bin Laden’s compound.
March 29, 2011 – Second National Security meeting.
April 12, 2011 – Third meeting.
April 19, 2011 – Fourth meeting.
April 28, 2011 – Last of the National Security Council meetings on the bin Laden raid.
April 29, 2011 – At 8:20 a.m. ET, President Obama gives the order to raid bin Laden’s compound.
May 2, 2011 – In the early morning hours (mid-afternoon on May 1 in the United States), a group of 25 Navy Seals raid the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. – They arrive outside the compound in two Black Hawk helicopters. – The operation takes 40 minutes total. – US Special Forces breach the outer walls of the compound before fighting their way through the ground floor of the three-story building. The firefight then moves to the second and third floors. – In the last 5-10 minutes of the firefight, bin Laden is killed by a gunshot wound to the head. – Three men, including a son of bin Laden, are killed as well as one woman. – Bin Laden’s body is identified by one of his wives. Facial recognition is also used.
May 2, 2011 – Bin Laden is buried at sea off the deck of the USS Carl Vinson in the Arabian Sea. – He is buried within 24 hours according to Islamic law. – The hour-long ceremony aboard the USS Carl Vinson is conducted according to Islamic law.
May 2, 2011 – A DNA test is done on a sample from the body, confirming that it is bin Laden.
May 3, 2011 – White House Press Secretary Jay Carney offers new details on the raid. He clarifies that the woman killed was on the first floor, not with bin Laden, and was killed in the crossfire. Carney also says that bin Laden was not armed but did put up resistance.
May 3, 2011 – A congressional source tells CNN that bin Laden had approximately $745 and two telephone numbers sewn into his clothing.
May 3, 2011 – Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mojahed releases a statement, “Obama has not got any strong evidence that can prove his claim over killing of the Sheikh Osama bin Laden… And secondly, the closest sources for Sheikh Osama bin Laden have not confirmed” the death.
May 4, 2011 – White House Press Secretary Carney announces that President Obama has decided not to release photos of bin Laden’s body.
May 6, 2011 – Al Qaeda confirms bin Laden’s death, in a statement on jihadist forums.
May 12, 2011 – US officials confirm to CNN that US authorities have interviewed three of bin Laden’s wives.
May 13, 2011 – It is revealed that a large amount of pornography was seized from the Abbottabad compound during the raid. It is unclear to whom it belonged.
May 13, 2011 – A US military official tells CNN the Navy Seal team who carried out the bin Laden raid wore helmet-mounted digital cameras that recorded the mission.
May 17, 2011 –Senator John Kerry announces that Pakistan will return the tail of the US helicopter damaged during the raid.
May 18, 2011 – Admiral Mike Mullen and Defense Secretary Robert Gates tell reporters there is no evidence that the senior Pakistani leadership knew of bin Laden’s presence in Pakistan.
May 26, 2011 – A team of CIA forensic specialists is granted permission by the Pakistani government to examine the compound.
June 15, 2011 – Pakistan’s intelligence agency arrests several people suspected of assisting the CIA before the raid.
June 17, 2011 – The US Justice Department formally drops terrorism-related criminal charges against bin Laden.
July 11, 2011 – Pakistani security forces detain a doctor suspected of helping the CIA attempt to collect the DNA of bin Laden’s family members through a vaccination drive.
October 6, 2011 – Pakistan’s information ministry says the doctor suspected of helping the CIA target bin Laden will be charged with treason. Also, bin Laden’s compound will be turned over to city officials.
February 2012 – Pakistani authorities begin to demolish the compound.
May 9, 2012 – Citing that it is of national security interest, a federal judge has denies Judicial Watch’s Freedom of Information request regarding the release of bin Laden death photos.
May 23, 2012 – Shakeel Afridi, the Pakistani doctor accused of helping the CIA track down bin Laden, is fined $3,500 for spying for the United States and sentenced to 33 years in prison for treason by a tribal court.
September 4, 2012 – The memoir “No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission that Killed Osama bin Laden” by former US Navy SEAL Matt Bissonnette, written under the name Mark Owen, is published.
February 11, 2013 – Conflicting information about which Navy SEAL killed bin Laden appears when Esquire magazine reports on an unnamed former Navy SEAL who says he fired the kill shot, not the point man as told in Bissonette’s book “No Easy Day.”
May 21, 2013 – A three-judge federal appeals court panel rejects an appeal from a conservative legal group, ruling that the release of post-mortem images of bin Laden’s body could result in attacks on Americans.
November 7, 2014 – Former Navy SEAL Robert O’Neill says in an interview with The Washington Post that he was the one who fired the shot that killed bin Laden.
May 10, 2015 – In a published report, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh contends the Obama Adminstration lied about the circumstances surrounding the killing of bin Laden. The White House later dismisses the report as “baseless.”
April 2023 –Newly released photos, obtained from the Obama Presidential Library via a Freedom of Information Act request by The Washington Post, offer a window into the meticulous planning – and tension – among the highest-ranking members of the US government on May 1, 2011.
Smoke pours from the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center after they were hit by two hijacked airliners in a terrorist attack in New York City, Sept. 11, 2001.
Robert Giroux | Getty Images
Two victims who perished in the World Trade Center have been identified more than two decades after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, New York City’s chief medical examiner said Friday.
The names of the victims, a man and a woman, are being withheld at the request of their families, officials said. They are the 1,648th and 1,649th victims whose remains have been identified since 2001.
The remains of 1,104 victims, or 40% of those who died in the attacks, still have not been found nearly 22 years after al-Qaida terrorists hijacked commercial airlines and crashed them into the Twin Towers in lower Manhattan.
The towers were destroyed in the attacks, leaving more than 2,700 people dead.
Dr. Jason Graham, New York City’s chief medical examiner, described the painstaking effort to identify the victims’ remains as “the largest and most complex forensic investigation” in U.S. history.
Investigators have spent decades using DNA testing to identify tens of thousands of remains recovered from the Ground Zero disaster site. More than 30% of the remains recovered are still unidentified, according to the medical examiner’s office.
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Graham said in a statement Friday that the medical examiner’s office has made a “solemn pledge” to return the remains of those who perished to their loved ones.
The identification of the man was confirmed through DNA testing of remains recovered in 2001. The woman was identified through the testing of remains recovered in 2001, 2006 and 2013.
The announcement that two victims were identified comes three days before the anniversary of the attacks. The man and the woman are the first new identifications since September 2021.
Less than an hour after the attacks on the Twin Towers, al-Qaida terrorists crashed a third commercial airliner into the Pentagon, killing 184 people.
Passengers in a fourth hijacked airliner heading for the nation’s capital fought for control of the plane. United Airlines Flight 93 crashed in a field outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing all 40 people on board.
In the wake of the attacks, the U.S. went to war in Afghanistan, where the leader of al-Qaida, Osama bin Laden, was sheltered by the Taliban. The Bush administration subsequently invaded Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein, who had no connection to the attacks.
More than 6,700 U.S. troops died in those wars.
Bin Laden was killed by U.S. forces during a raid in Pakistan in 2011. The Biden administration withdrew the U.S. military from Afghanistan in 2021 and the Taliban returned to power after the collapse of the U.S.-backed government in Kabul.
After back-to-back oral arguments this week, the Supreme Court appears reluctant to hand down the kind of sweeping ruling about liability for terrorist content on social media that some feared would upend the internet.
On Wednesday, the justices struggled with claims that Twitter contributed to a 2017 ISIS attack in Istanbul by hosting content unrelated to the specific incident. Arguments in that case, Twitter v. Taamneh, came a day after the court considered whether YouTube can be sued for recommending videos created by ISIS to its users.
The closely watched cases carry significant stakes for the wider internet. An expansion of apps and websites’ legal risk for hosting or promoting content could lead to major changes at sites including Facebook, Wikipedia and YouTube, to name a few.
For nearly three hours of oral argument, the justices asked attorneys for Twitter, the US government and the family of Nawras Alassaf – a Jordanian citizen killed in the 2017 attack – how to weigh several factors that might determine Twitter’s level of legal responsibility, if any. But while the justices quickly identified what the relevant factors were, they seemed divided on how to analyze them.
The court’s conservatives appeared more open to Twitter’s arguments that it is not liable under the Anti-Terrorism Act, with Justice Amy Coney Barrett at one point theorizing point-by-point how such an opinion could be written and Justice Neil Gorsuch repeatedly offering Twitter what he believed to be a winning argument about how to read the statute.
The panel’s liberals, by contrast, seemed uncomfortable with finding that Twitter should face no liability for hosting ISIS content. They pushed back on Twitter’s claims that the underlying law should only lead to liability if the help it gave to ISIS can be linked to the specific terrorist attack that ultimately harmed the plaintiffs.
Here are the takeaways from Wednesday:
The justices spent much of the time picking through the text of the Anti-Terrorism Act, the law that Twitter is accused of violating – especially the meaning of the words “knowingly” and “substantial.”
The law says liability can be established for “any person who aids and abets, by knowingly providing substantial assistance, or who conspires with the person who committed such an act of international terrorism.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor seemed unpersuaded by Twitter attorney Seth Waxman’s arguments that Twitter could have been liable if the company were warned that specific accounts were planning a specific attack, but that those were not the facts of the case and Twitter was therefore not liable in the absence of such activity and such warnings.
Chief Justice John Roberts grappled with the meaning of “substantial” assistance: Hypothetically, he asked, would donating $100 to ISIS suffice, or $10,000?
“Substantial assistance” would hinge on the degree to which a terror group actually uses a platform such as Twitter to plan, coordinate and carry out a terrorist attack, Waxman said at one point. The existence of some tweets that generally benefited ISIS, he argued, should not be considered substantial assistance.
The justices alluded to the gravity of the dilemma as they drew analogies to other industries that have grappled with related claims.
“We’re used to thinking about banks as providing very important services to terrorists,” said Justice Elena Kagan. “Maybe we’re not so used to, but it seems to be true, that various kinds of social media services also provide very important services to terrorists,” the liberal justice said. “If you know you’re providing a very important service to terrorists, why aren’t you [said to be] providing substantial assistance and doing it knowingly?”
Eric Schnapper, an attorney representing the Alassaf family – who had also argued on behalf of the plaintiffs in Tuesday’s Supreme Court arguments in Gonzalez v. Google – again struggled to answer justices’ questions as they sought to find some limiting principle to constrain the scope of the Anti-Terrorism Act.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh asked Schnapper to respond to concerns that a ruling finding Twitter liable for the ISIS attack — even when the tweets it hosted had nothing to do with it — would negatively affect charities and humanitarian organizations that might incidentally assist terrorist organizations through their work.
Schnapper suggested those groups might be insulated from liability due to the law’s “knowledge” requirement, but did not offer the justices a way to draw a bright-line distinction.
Justice Clarence Thomas hinted at the potential expansiveness of what Schnapper was proposing in calling for Twitter to be held liable for the ISIS tweets.
“If we’re not pinpointing cause-and-effect or proximate cause for specific things, and you’re focused on infrastructure or just the availability of these platforms, then it would seem that every terrorist attack that uses this platform would also mean that Twitter is an aider and abettor in those instances,” Thomas said.
“I think in the way that you phrased it, that would probably be, yes,” Schnapper replied, going on to suggest a test involving “remoteness and time, weighed together with volume of activity.”
Several justices asked the parties to respond to hypotheticals about what liability a business would have for dealing with Osama bin Laden. Their reliance of the terrorist in their examples seemed to get at the “knowing” requirement of the law.
However, the court is being asked to issue an opinion that will guide lower courts in cases that likely will not involve such high-profile figures.
Kagan invoked bin Laden’s name when she put forward a hypothetical for US Deputy Solicitor General Edwin Kneedler about a bank that offered services to a known terrorist that were the same services it provided its non-terrorist clients. Kneedler, arguing that Twitter should not be found liable under the anti-terrorist law in this case, said that in that scenario, the bank could be sued under the law.
Other exchanges during the hearing revolved around the liability for a business that sold bin Laden a cell phone, with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson asking if the business could be sued even if bin Laden did not use the cell phone for the terrorist attack that injured the plaintiff. Schnapper said that bin Laden would not need to use the cell phone in an attack for the seller to be found liable.
Gorsuch put forward a theory for why Twitter should prevail in the case but neither Twitter nor the US Justice Department took him up on it.
Gorsuch gave Waxman a chance to reframe his arguments for why Twitter shouldn’t be liable, based on language in the law suggesting a defendant is liable for assistance provided to a person who commits an act of international terrorism. Gorsuch noted the lawsuit against Twitter doesn’t link Twitter to the three people involved in the 2017 attack on the Istanbul nightclub.
Waxman declined to fully adopt that view, arguing instead that the “aid and abet” language in the statute should be tied to the terrorist activity that gives rise to a suit.
When Kneedler was up to podium, Gorsuch offered up the theory again, implying it would be a way for Twitter to avoid liability in this case.
“It seems to me that that’s a pretty important limitation on aiding and abetting liability and conspiracy liability … that you have to aid an actual person,” Gorsuch said. “It’s not just a pedantic point. It has to do with the idea that you’re singling somebody out, and that is different than just doing your business normally, and that does help limit the scope of the act.”
Jackson later hypothesized why Twitter and the US government were reluctant to endorse Gorsuch’s interpretation of the law, suggesting it was not the limitation Gorsuch thought it was.
“I’m wondering whether the concern about that is, if you’re focusing on the person [who committed a terrorist act]… that it seems to take the focus away from the act itself,” she told Kneedler. “You could ‘aid and abet’ a person who committed the act, even if it’s not with respect to that act.”
Justice Kagan voices concern on whether Supreme Court should step in. Listen why
The Taamneh case is viewed as a turning point for the future of the internet, because a ruling against Twitter could expose the platform – and numerous other websites – to new lawsuits based on their hosting of terrorist content in spite of their efforts to remove such material.
While it’s too early to tell how the justices may decide the case, the questioning on Wednesday suggested some members of the court believe Twitter should bear some responsibility for indirectly supporting ISIS in general, even if the company may not have been responsible for the specific attack in 2017 that led to the current case.
But a key question facing the court is whether the Anti-Terrorism Act is the law that can reach that issue – or alternatively, whether the justices can craft a ruling in such a way that it does.
Rulings in the cases heard this week are expected by late June.
This story has been updated with Wednesday’s developments.
BERLIN — On a balmy September evening last year, an Azeri man carrying a Russian passport crossed the border from northern Cyprus into southern Cyprus. He traveled light: a pistol, a handful of bullets and a silencer.
It was going to be the perfect hit job.
Then, just as the man was about to step into a rental car and carry out his mission — which prosecutors say was to gun down five Jewish businessmen, including an Israeli billionaire — the police surrounded him.
The failed attack was just one of at least a dozen in Europe in recent years, some successful, others not, that have involved what security officials call “soft” targets, involving murder, abduction, or both. The operations were broadly similar in conception, typically relying on local hired guns. The most significant connection, intelligence officials say, is that the attacks were commissioned by the same contractor: the Islamic Republic of Iran.
In Cyprus, authorities believe Iran, which blames Israel for a series of assassinations of nuclear specialists working on the Iranian nuclear program, was trying to signal that it could strike back where Israel least expects it.
“This is a regime that bases its rule on intimidation and violence and espouses violence as a legitimate measure,” David Barnea, the head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, said in rare public remarks in September, describing what he said was a recent uptick in violent plots. “It is not spontaneous. It is planned, systematic, state terrorism — strategic terrorism.”
He left out one important detail: It’s working.
That success has come in large part because Europe — the staging ground for most Iranian operations in recent years — has been afraid to make Tehran pay. Since 2015, Iran has carried out about a dozen operations in Europe, killing at least three people and abducting several others, security officials say.
“The Europeans have not just been soft on the Islamic Republic, they’ve been cooperating with them, working with them, legitimizing the killers,” Masih Alinejad, the Iranian-American author and women’s rights activist said, highlighting the continuing willingness of European heads of state to meet with Iran’s leaders.
Alinejad, one of the most outspoken critics of the regime, understands better than most just how far Iran’s leadership is willing to go after narrowly escaping both a kidnapping and assassination attempt.
“If the Islamic Republic doesn’t receive any punishment, is there any reason for them to stop taking hostages or kidnapping or killing?” she said, and then answered: “No.”
Method of first resort
Assassination has been the sharpest instrument in the policy toolbox ever since Brutus and his co-conspirators stabbed Julius Caesar repeatedly. Over the millennia, it’s also proved risky, often triggering disastrous unintended consequences (see the Roman Empire after Caesar’s killing or Europe after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo).
And yet, for both rogue states like Iran, Russia and North Korea, and democracies such as the United States and Israel — the attraction of solving a problem by removing it often proves irresistible.
Even so, there’s a fundamental difference between the two spheres: In the West, assassination remains a last resort (think Osama bin Laden); in authoritarian states, it’s the first (who can forget the 2017 assassination by nerve agent of Kim Jong-nam, the playboy half-brother of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, upon his arrival in Kuala Lumpur?). For rogue states, even if the murder plots are thwarted, the regimes still win by instilling fear in their enemies’ hearts and minds.
That helps explain the recent frequency. Over the course of a few months last year, Iran undertook a flurry of attacks from Latin America to Africa. In Colombia, police arrested two men in Bogotá on suspicion they were plotting to assassinate a group of Americans and a former Israeli intelligence officer for $100,000; a similar scene played out in Africa, as authorities in Tanzania, Ghana and Senegal arrested five men on suspicion they were planning attacks on Israeli targets, including tourists on safari; in February of this year, Turkish police disrupted an intricate Iranian plot to kill a 75-year-old Turkish-Israeli who owns a local aerospace company; and in November, authorities in Georgia said they foiled a plan hatched by Iran’s Quds Force to murder a 62-year-old Israeli-Georgian businessman in Tbilisi.
Whether such operations succeed or not, the countries behind them can be sure of one thing: They won’t be made to pay for trying. Over the years, the Russian and Iranian regimes have eliminated countless dissidents, traitors and assorted other enemies (real and perceived) on the streets of Paris, Berlin and even Washington, often in broad daylight. Others have been quietly abducted and sent home, where they faced sham trials and were then hanged for treason.
While there’s no shortage of criticism in the West in the wake of these crimes, there are rarely real consequences. That’s especially true in Europe, where leaders have looked the other way in the face of a variety of abuses in the hopes of reviving a deal to rein in Tehran’s nuclear weapons program and renewing business ties.
Unlike the U.S. and Israel, which have taken a hard line on Iran ever since the mullahs came to power in 1979, Europe has been more open to the regime. Many EU officials make no secret of their ennui with America’s hard-line stance vis-à-vis Iran.
“Iran wants to wipe out Israel, nothing new about that,” the EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell told POLITICO in 2019 when he was still Spanish foreign minister. “You have to live with it.”
History of assassinations
There’s also nothing new about Iran’s love of assassination.
Indeed, many scholars trace the word “assassin” to Hasan-i Sabbah, a 12th-century Persian missionary who founded the “Order of Assassins,” a brutal force known for quietly eliminating adversaries.
Hasan’s spirit lived on in the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the hardline cleric who led Iran’s Islamic revolution and took power in 1979. One of his first victims as supreme leader was Shahriar Shafiq, a former captain in the Iranian navy and the nephew of the country’s exiled shah. He was shot twice in the head in December 1979 by a masked gunman outside his mother’s home on Rue Pergolèse in Paris’ fashionable 16th arrondissement.
In the years that followed, Iranian death squads took out members and supporters of the shah and other opponents across Europe, from France to Sweden, Germany, Switzerland and Austria. In most instances, the culprits were never caught. Not that the authorities really needed to look.
In 1989, for example, Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou, a leader of Iran’s Kurdish minority who supported autonomy for his people, was gunned down along with two associates by Iranian assassins in an apartment in Vienna.
The gunmen took refuge in the Iranian embassy. They were allowed to leave Austria after Iran’s ambassador to Vienna hinted to the government that Austrians in his country might be in danger if the killers were arrested. One of the men alleged to have participated in the Vienna operation would later become one of his country’s most prominent figures: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s president from 2005 until 2013.
Not even the bad publicity surrounding that case tempered the regime’s killing spree. In the years that followed, the body count only increased. Some of the murders were intentionally gruesome in order to send a clear message.
Fereydoun Farrokhzad, for example, a dissident Iranian popstar who found exile in Germany, was killed in his home in Bonn in 1992. The killers cut off his genitals, his tongue and beheaded him.
His slaying was just one of dozens in what came to be known as Iran’s “chain murders,” a decade-long killing spree in which the government targeted artists and dissidents at home and abroad. Public outcry over the murder of a trio of prominent writers in 1998, including a husband and wife, forced the regime hard-liners behind the killings to retreat. But only for a time.
Illustration by Joan Wong for POLITICO
Then, as now, the dictatorship’s rationale for such killings has been to protect itself.
“The highest priority of the Iranian regime is internal stability,” a Western intelligence source said. “The regime views its opponents inside and outside Iran as a significant threat to this stability.”
Much of that paranoia is rooted in the Islamic Republic’s own history. Before returning to Iran in 1979, Khomeini spent nearly 15 years in exile, including in Paris, an experience that etched the power of exile into the Islamic Republic’s mythology. In other words, if Khomeini managed to lead a revolution from abroad, the regime’s enemies could too.
Bargaining chips
Given Europe’s proximity to Iran, the presence of many Iranian exiles there and the often-magnanimous view of some EU governments toward Tehran, Europe is a natural staging ground for the Islamic Republic’s terror.
The regime’s intelligence service, known as MOIS, has built operational networks across the Continent trained to abduct and murder through a variety of means, Western intelligence officials say.
As anti-regime protests have erupted in Iran with increasing regularity since 2009, the pace of foreign operations aimed at eliminating those the regime accuses of stoking the unrest has increased.
While several of the smaller-scale assassinations — such as the 2015 hit in the Netherlands on Iranian exile Mohammad-Reza Kolahi — have succeeded, Tehran’s more ambitious operations have gone awry.
The most prominent example involved a 2018 plot to blow up the annual Paris meeting of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, an alliance of exile groups seeking to oust the regime. Among those attending the gathering, which attracted tens of thousands, was Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor and then-U.S. President Donald Trump’s lawyer.
Following a tip from American intelligence, European authorities foiled the plot, arresting six, including a Vienna-based Iranian diplomat who delivered a detonation device and bombmaking equipment to an Iranian couple tasked with carrying out an attack on the rally. Authorities observed the handover at a Pizza Hut in Luxembourg and subsequently arrested the diplomat, Assadollah Assadi, on the German autobahn as he sped back to Vienna, where he enjoyed diplomatic immunity.
Assadi was convicted on terror charges in Belgium last year and sentenced to 20 years is prison. He may not even serve two.
The diplomat’s conviction marked the first time an Iranian operative had been held accountable for his actions by a European court since the Islamic revolution. But Belgium’s courage didn’t last long.
In February, Iran arrested Belgian aid worker Olivier Vandecasteele on trumped-up espionage charges and placed him into solitary confinement at the infamous Evin prison in Tehran. Vandecasteele headed the Iran office of the Norwegian Refugee Council, an aid group.
Following reports that Vandecasteele’s health was deteriorating and tearful public pleas from his family, the Belgian government — ignoring warnings from Washington and other governments that it was inviting further kidnappings — relented and laid the groundwork for an exchange to trade Assadi for Vandecasteele. The swap could happen any day.
“Right now, French, Swedish, German, U.K., U.S., Belgian citizens, all innocents, are in Iranian prisons,” said Alinejad, the Iranian women’s rights campaigner.
“They are being used like bargaining chips,” she said. “It works.”
Amateur hour
Even so, the messiness surrounding the Assadi case might explain why most of Iran’s recent operations have been carried out by small-time criminals who usually have no idea who they’re working for. The crew in last year’s Cyprus attack, for example, included several Pakistani delivery boys. While that gives Iran plausible deniability if the perpetrators get caught, it also increases the likelihood that the operations will fail.
“It’s very amateur, but an amateur can be difficult to trace,” one intelligence official said. “They’re also dispensable. They get caught, no one cares.”
Iranian intelligence has had more success in luring dissidents away from Europe to friendly third countries where they are arrested and then sent back to Iran. That’s what happened to Ruhollah Zam, a journalist critical of the regime who had been living in Paris. The circumstances surrounding his abduction remain murky, but what is known is that someone convinced him to travel to Iraq in 2019, where he was arrested and extradited to Iran. He was convicted for agitating against the regime and hanged in December of 2020.
One could be forgiven for thinking that negotiations between Iran and world powers over renewing its dormant nuclear accord (which offered Tehran sanctions relief in return for supervision of its nuclear program) would have tamed its covert killing program. In fact, the opposite occurred.
In July of 2021, U.S. authorities exposed a plot by Iranian operatives to kidnap Alinejad from her home in Brooklyn as part of an elaborate plan that involved taking her by speedboat to a tanker in New York Harbor before spiriting her off to Venezuela, an Iranian ally, and then on to the Islamic Republic.
A year later, police disrupted what the FBI believed was an attempt to assassinate Alinejad, arresting a man with an assault rifle and more than 60 rounds of ammunition who had knocked on her door.
American authorities also say Tehran planned to avenge the assassination of General Qassem Soleimani, the head of its feared paramilitary Quds Force who was the target of a U.S. drone strike in 2020, by seeking to kill former National Security Adviser John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, the former Secretary of State, among other officials.
Through it all, neither the U.S. nor Europe gave up hope for a nuclear deal.
“From the point of view of the Iranians, this is proof that it is possible to separate and maintain a civilized discourse on the nuclear agreement with a deceptive Western appearance, on the one hand, and on the other hand, to plan terrorist acts against senior American officials and citizens,” Barnea, the Mossad chief said. “This artificial separation will continue for as long as the world allows it to.”
Kremlin’s killings
Some hope the growing outrage in Western societies over Iran’s crackdown on peaceful protestors could be the spark that convinces Europe to get tough on Iran. But Europe’s handling of its other favorite rogue actor — Russia — suggests otherwise.
Long before Russia’s annexation of Crimea, much less its all-out war against Ukraine, Moscow, similar to Iran, undertook an aggressive campaign against its enemies abroad and made little effort to hide it.
Russian police investigators stand near the body of killed Russian opposition leader and former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov | Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images
The most prominent victim was Alexander Litvinenko. A former KGB officer like Vladimir Putin, Litvinenko had defected to the U.K., where he joined other exiles opposed to Putin. In 2006, he was poisoned in London by Russian intelligence with polonium-210, a radioactive isotope that investigators concluded was mixed into his tea. The daring operation signaled Moscow’s return to the Soviet-era practice of artful assassination.
Litvinenko died a painful death within weeks, but not before he blamed Putin for killing him, calling the Russian president “barbaric.”
“You may succeed in silencing me, but that silence comes at a price,” Litvinenko said from his deathbed.
In the end, however, the only one who really paid a price was Litvinenko. Putin continued as before and despite deep tensions in the U.K.’s relationship with Russia over the assassination, it did nothing to halt the transformation of the British capital into what has come to be known as “Londongrad,” a playground and second home for Russia’s Kremlin-backed oligarchs, who critics say use the British financial and legal systems to hide and launder their money.
Litvinenko’s killing was remarkable both for its brutality and audacity. If Putin was willing to take out an enemy on British soil with a radioactive element, what else was he capable of?
It didn’t take long to find out. In the months and years that followed, the bodies started to pile up. Critical journalists, political opponents and irksome oligarchs in the prime of life began dropping like flies.
Europe didn’t blink.
Angela Merkel, then German chancellor, visited Putin in his vacation residence in Sochi just weeks after the murders of Litvinenko and investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya and said … nothing.
Even after there was no denying Putin’s campaign to eradicate anyone who challenged him, European leaders kept coming in the hope of deepening economic ties.
Neither the assassination of prominent Putin critic Boris Nemtsov just steps away from the Kremlin in 2015, nor the poisoning of a KGB defector and his daughter in the U.K. in 2018 and of opposition leader Alexei Navalny in 2020 with nerve agents disabused European leaders of the notion that Putin was someone they could do business with and, more importantly, control.
‘Anything can happen’
Just how comfortable Russia felt about using Europe as a killing field became clear in the summer of 2019. Around noon on a sunny August day, a Russian assassin approached Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, a Chechen with Georgian nationality, and shot him twice in the head with a 9mm pistol. The murder took place in a park located just a few hundred meters from Germany’s interior ministry and several witnesses saw the killer flee. He was nabbed within minutes as he was changing his clothes and trying to dispose of his weapon and bike in a nearby canal.
It later emerged that Khangoshvili, a Chechen fighter who had sought asylum in Germany, was on a Russian kill list. Russian authorities considered him a terrorist and accused him of participating in a 2010 attack on the Moscow subway that killed nearly 40 people.
In December of 2019, Putin denied involvement in Khangoshvili’s killing. Sort of. Sitting next to French President Emmanuel Macron, Merkel and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy following a round of talks aimed at resolving the conflict in Ukraine, the Russian referred to him as a “very barbaric man with blood on his hands.”
“I don’t know what happened to him,” Putin said. “Those are opaque criminal structures where anything can happen.”
Early on October 19 of last year, Berlin police discovered a dead man on the sidewalk outside the Russian embassy. He was identified as Kirill Zhalo, a junior diplomat at the embassy. He was also the son of General Major Alexey Zhalo, the deputy head of a covert division in Russia’s FSB security service in Moscow that ordered Khangoshvili’s killing. Western intelligence officials believe that Kirill Zhalo, who arrived in Berlin just weeks before the hit on the Chechen, was involved in the operation and was held responsible for its exposure.
The Russian embassy called his death “a tragic accident,” suggesting he had committed suicide by jumping out of a window. Russia refused to allow German authorities to perform an autopsy (such permission is required under diplomatic protocols) and sent his body back to Moscow.
Less than two months later, the Russian hitman who killed Khangoshvili, was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. Russia recently tried to negotiate his release, floating the possibility of exchanging American basketball player Brittney Griner and another U.S. citizen they have in custody. Washington rejected the idea.
The war in Ukraine offers profound lessons about the inherent risks of coddling dictators.
Though Germany, with its thirst for Russian gas, is often criticized in that regard, it was far from alone in Europe. Europe’s insistence on giving Putin the benefit of the doubt over the years in the face of his crimes convinced him that he would face few consequences in the West for his invasion of Ukraine. That’s turned out to be wrong; but who could blame the Russian leader for thinking it?
Iran presents Europe with an opportunity to learn from that history and confront Tehran before it’s too late. But there are few signs it’s prepared to really get tough. EU officials say they are “considering” following Washington’s lead and designating the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a vast military organization that also controls much of the Iran’s economy, as a terror organization. Last week, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock spearheaded an effort at the United Nations to launch a formal investigation into Iran’s brutal crackdown against the ongoing protests in the country.
Yet even as the regime in Tehran snuffs out enemies and races to fulfil its goal of building both nuclear weapons and missiles that can reach any point on the Continent, some EU leaders appear blind to the wider context as they pursue the elusive renewal of the nuclear accord.
“It is still there,” Borrell said recently of the deal he has taken a leading role in trying to resurrect. “It has nothing to do with other issues, which certainly concern us.”
Today is Monday, Nov. 7, the 311th day of 2022. There are 54 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History:
On Nov. 7, 2013, shares of Twitter went on sale to the public for the first time; by the closing bell, the social network was valued at $31 billion. (The company would go private again in October 2022 after Elon Musk purchased the social media platform for $44 billion.)
On this date:
In 1917, Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution took place as forces led by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin overthrew the provisional government of Alexander Kerensky.
In 1940, Washington state’s original Tacoma Narrows Bridge, nicknamed “Galloping Gertie,” collapsed into Puget Sound during a windstorm just four months after opening to traffic.
In 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt won an unprecedented fourth term in office, defeating Republican Thomas E. Dewey.
In 1972, President Richard Nixon was reelected in a landslide over Democrat George McGovern.
In 1973, Congress overrode President Richard Nixon’s veto of the War Powers Act, which limits a chief executive’s power to wage war without congressional approval.
In 1989, L. Douglas Wilder won the governor’s race in Virginia, becoming the first elected Black governor in U.S. history; David N. Dinkins was elected New York City’s first Black mayor.
In 1991, basketball star Magic Johnson announced that he had tested positive for HIV, and was retiring. (Johnson would go on to play again, in the NBA and the Olympics.)
In 2001, the Bush administration targeted Osama bin Laden’s multi-million-dollar financial networks, closing businesses in four states, detaining U.S. suspects and urging allies to help choke off money supplies in 40 nations.
In 2011, a jury in Los Angeles convicted Michael Jackson’s doctor, Conrad Murray, of involuntary manslaughter for supplying a powerful anesthetic implicated in the entertainer’s 2009 death. (Murray was sentenced to four years in prison; he served two years and was released in October 2013.)
In 2015, the leaders of China and Taiwan met for the first time since the formerly bitter Cold War foes split amid civil war 66 years earlier; Chinese President Xi Jinping and Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou hailed the meeting in Singapore as a sign of a new stability in relations.
In 2018, a gunman killed 12 people at a country music bar in Thousand Oaks, California, before apparently taking his own life as officers closed in; the victims included a man who had survived the mass shooting at a country music concert in Las Vegas.
In 2020, Democrat Joe Biden clinched victory over President Donald Trump as a win in Pennsylvania pushed Biden over the threshold of 270 Electoral College votes; the victory followed more than three days of uncertainty as election officials sorted through a surge of mail-in ballots. Trump refused to concede, threatening further legal action on ballot counting. Chanting “This isn’t over!” and “Stop the steal,” Trump supporters protested at state capitols across the country, echoing Trump’s baseless allegations that the Democrats won by fraud.
Ten years ago: One day after a bruising election, President Barack Obama and Republican House Speaker John Boehner (BAY’-nur) both pledged to seek a compromise to avert looming spending cuts and tax increases that threatened to plunge the economy back into recession. A 7.4-magnitude earthquake killed at least 52 people in western Guatemala.
Five years ago: Democrats Ralph Northam in Virginia and Phil Murphy in New Jersey were the winners in their states’ gubernatorial elections. President Donald Trump arrived in South Korea, saying efforts to curb the North’s nuclear weapons program would be “front and center” of his two-day visit. Former star baseball pitcher Roy Halladay died when the small private plane he was flying crashed into the Gulf of Mexico; the 40-year-old was an eight-time All-Star for the Blue Jays and Phillies. Twitter said it was ending its 140-character limit on tweets and allowing nearly everyone 280 characters to get their message across.
One year ago: Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi survived an attack by armed drones on his residence in Baghdad; officials said seven of his security guards were wounded. Dean Stockwell, a former child actor who gained new success in middle age in the sci-fi series “Quantum Leap,” died at 85. Eighty-three-year-old M.J. “Sunny” Eberhart of Alabama strode into the record books as the oldest hiker to complete the Appalachian Trail. John Artis, who was wrongly convicted with boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter in a triple murder case made famous in a song by Bob Dylan and a film, died at his Virginia home at age 75.
Today’s Birthdays: Former U.S. Sen. Rudy Boschwitz of Minnesota is 92. Actor Barry Newman is 84. Actor Dakin Matthews is 82. Singer Johnny Rivers is 80. Former supermodel Jean Shrimpton is 80. Singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell is 79. Former CIA Director David Petraeus is 70. Jazz singer Rene Marie is 67. Actor Christopher Knight (TV: “The Brady Bunch”) is 65. Rock musician Tommy Thayer (KISS) is 62. Actor Julie Pinson is 55. Rock musician Greg Tribbett (Mudvayne) is 54. Actor Michelle Clunie is 53. Documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock is 52. Actor Christopher Daniel Barnes is 50. Actors Jeremy and Jason London are 50. Actor Yunjin Kim is 49. Actor Adam DeVine is 39. Rock musician Zach Myers (Shinedown) is 39. Actor Lucas Neff is 37. Rapper Tinie (TY’-nee) Tempah is 34. Rock singer Lorde is 26.
ISLAMABAD — Pakistan pushed back Saturday against a comment by President Joe Biden in which he called the South Asian country “one of the most dangerous nations in the world.”
Biden was at an informal fundraising dinner at a private residence in Los Angeles on Thursday sponsored by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee when he made the comment. Speaking about China and its leader Xi Jinping, he pondered the U.S.’s role in relation to China as it grapples with its positions on Russia, India and Pakistan.
“How do we handle that?” he said, according to a transcript on the White House web page. “How do we handle that relative to what’s going on in Russia? And what I think is maybe one of the most dangerous nations in the world: Pakistan. Nuclear weapons without any cohesion.”
Pakistan’s current prime minister and two former prime ministers rejected the statement as baseless, and the country’s acting foreign secretary summoned the U.S. ambassador on Saturday for an explanation of Biden’s remarks.
“Pakistan’s disappointment and concern was conveyed to the US envoy on the unwarranted remarks, which were not based on ground reality or facts,” said the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari said earlier in Karachi that he believed it was the sort of misunderstanding that was created when there was a lack of engagement, apparently referring to the former government of Imran Khan and its perceived lack of engagement in international diplomacy.
“When Pakistan has nuclear assets we know how to keep them safe and secure, how to protect them as well,” Zardari said.
Pakistani Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif in a statement rejected Biden’s remarks calling them factually incorrect and misleading. He said Pakistan over the years has proved itself to be a responsible nuclear state, and its nuclear program is managed through a technically sound command and control system. He pointed to Pakistan’s commitment to global standards including those of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Sharif said Pakistan and the U.S. have a long history of friendly and mutually beneficial relations. “It is our sincere desire to cooperate with the U.S. to promote regional peace and security,” he said.
Zardari, speaking to reporters, said if there is any question about nuclear weapons security in the region, it should be raised with Pakistan’s nuclear-armed neighbor, India. He said India recently fired a missile that landed accidentally in Pakistan.
Pakistan and India have been arch-rivals since their independence from British rule in 1947. They have bitter relations over the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir, which is divided between them and claimed by both in its entirety. They fought two of their three wars over Kashmir.
Two former prime minsters took to Twitter to respond to Biden’s comments.
Former premier Nawaz Sharif, the current prime minister’s brother, said Pakistan is a responsible nuclear state that is perfectly capable of safeguarding its national interests while respecting international law and practices. Pakistan became a nuclear state in 1998 when Sharif was in power for the second time.
“Our nuclear program is in no way a threat to any country. Like all independent states, Pakistan reserves the right to protect its autonomy, sovereign statehood and territorial integrity,” he said.
Former premier Imran Khan tweeted that Biden is wrong about the security of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, saying he knows for a fact that they are secure. “Unlike US which has been involved in wars across the world, when has Pakistan shown aggression especially post-nuclearization ?”
Khan was ousted in April in a no-confidence vote in parliament and has put forward, without giving evidence, a claim that he was ousted as the result of a U.S.-led plot involving Sharif. The U.S. and Sharif deny the accusation.
Zardari noted that Biden’s statement was not made at any formal platform like a news conference but at an informal fundraising dinner. “I don’t believe it negatively impacts the relations between Pakistan and the U.S.,” he said.
Pakistan and the U.S. have been traditional allies but their relations have been bumpy at times. Pakistan served as a front-line state in the U.S.-led war on terror following the 9/11 attacks. But relations soured after U.S. Navy Seals killed al-Qaeda leader and 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden at a compound in the garrison city of Abbottabad, not far from Pakistan’s military academy in May 2011.
Today is Friday, Oct. 7, the 280th day of 2022. There are 85 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History:
On Oct. 7, 1991, University of Oklahoma law professor Anita Hill publicly accused Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of making sexually inappropriate comments when she worked for him; Thomas denied Hill’s allegations and would go on to win Senate confirmation.
On this date:
In 1765, the Stamp Act Congress convened in New York to draw up colonial grievances against England.
In 1916, in the most lopsided victory in college football history, Georgia Tech defeated Cumberland University 222-0 in Atlanta.
In 1949, the Republic of East Germany was formed.
In 1982, the Andrew Lloyd Webber-Tim Rice musical “Cats” opened on Broadway. (The show closed Sept. 10, 2000, after a record 7,485 performances.)
In 1985, Palestinian gunmen hijacked the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro (ah-KEE’-leh LOW’-roh) in the Mediterranean. (The hijackers shot and killed Leon Klinghoffer, a Jewish-American tourist in a wheelchair, and pushed him overboard, before surrendering on Oct. 9.)
In 1989, Hungary’s Communist Party renounced Marxism in favor of democratic socialism during a party congress in Budapest.
In 1992, trade representatives of the United States, Canada and Mexico initialed the North American Free Trade Agreement during a ceremony in San Antonio, Texas, in the presence of President George H.W. Bush, Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney (muhl-ROO’-nee) and Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari.
In 1996, Fox News Channel made its debut.
In 1998, Matthew Shepard, a gay college student, was beaten and left tied to a wooden fencepost outside of Laramie, Wyoming; he died five days later. (Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney are serving life sentences for Shepard’s murder.)
In 2001, the war in Afghanistan started as the United States and Britain launched air attacks against military targets and Osama bin Laden’s training camps in the wake of the September 11 attacks.
In 2003, California voters recalled Gov. Gray Davis and elected Arnold Schwarzenegger their new governor.
In 2020, President Donald Trump returned to the Oval Office for the first time since he was diagnosed with COVID-19; he credited an experimental drug treatment with helping his recovery. Debating from behind plexiglass shields, Vice President Mike Pence and Democrat Kamala Harris zeroed in on Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, with Harris labeling it “the greatest failure of any presidential administration” while Pence defended the overall response.
Ten years ago: Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez won re-election for the third time. (Chavez died in March 2013 at age 58 after a two-year battle with cancer; he was succeeded by Vice President Nicolas Maduro.)
Five years ago: Country music star Jason Aldean, who had been on stage at an outdoor concert in Las Vegas less than a week earlier when a gunman opened fire on the crowd, paid tribute to the victims and to the late Tom Petty by opening “Saturday Night Live” with Petty’s song, “I Won’t Back Down.” Protesters rallied across Russia in a challenge to President Vladimir Putin on his 65th birthday; heeding calls from opposition leader Alexei Navalny to pressure authorities into letting him enter the presidential race.
One year ago: Abortions quickly resumed in at least six Texas clinics after a federal judge halted the most restrictive abortion law in the nation. (A federal appeals court would allow the law to go back into effect the following day.) The Senate dodged a U.S. debt disaster, voting to extend the government’s borrowing authority into December and temporarily avert an unprecedented federal default. (The House would approve the extension days later.) Google said it would crack down on digital ads promoting false claims about climate change, in hopes of limiting revenue for climate change deniers and stopping the spread of misinformation.
Today’s Birthdays: Author Thomas Keneally is 87. Comedian and talk-show host Joy Behar is 80. Former National Security Council aide Lt. Col. Oliver North (ret.) is 79. Rock musician Kevin Godley (10cc) is 77. Actor Jill Larson is 75. Country singer Kieran Kane is 73. Singer John Mellencamp is 71. Rock musician Ricky Phillips is 71. Russian President Vladimir Putin is 70. Actor Mary Badham (Film: “To Kill a Mockingbird”) is 70. Rock musician Tico Torres (Bon Jovi) is 69. Actor Christopher Norris is 67. Cellist Yo-Yo Ma is 67. Gospel singer Michael W. Smith is 65. Olympic gold medal ice dancer Jayne Torvill is 65. Actor Dylan Baker is 64. Actor Judy Landers is 64. Recording executive and TV personality Simon Cowell is 63. Actor Paula Newsome is 61. Country singer Dale Watson is 60. Pop singer Ann Curless (Expose) is 59. R&B singer Toni Braxton is 55. Rock singer-musician Thom Yorke (Radiohead) is 54. Rock musician-dancer Leeroy Thornhill is 53. Actor Nicole Ari Parker is 52. Actor Allison Munn is 48. Rock singer-musician Damian Kulash (KOO’-lahsh) is 47. Singer Taylor Hicks is 46. Actor Omar Miller is 44. Neo-soul singer Nathaniel Rateliff (Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats) is 44. Actor Shawn Ashmore is 43. Actor Jake McLaughlin is 40. Electronic musician Flying Lotus (AKA Steve Ellison) is 39. MLB player Evan Longoria is 37. Actor Holland Roden is 36. Actor Amber Stevens is 36. MLB outfielder Mookie Betts is 30. Actor Lulu Wilson is 17.
