Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab

One of the key initiatives that President Obama announced during the State of the Union address was a freeze on federal spending increases, and one key area of spending he made a point of exempting was the defense budget.   That reminded me of this essay on US military spending by the Cato Institute’s Doug Bandow.  He does a fine job of listing the threats the United States faces in the world and our analyzing our ability to meet them, but one statistic jumped out at me: for 2010 the Pentagon budget will be roughly $700 billion, this, Bandow notes, is only a little more than the inf

The CIA investigation of the U.S. Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan’s November 5 murder of 13 soldiers at a military base in Fort Hood, Texas, and the December 25 failed attempt by a Nigerian man, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, to detonate a bomb inside a 300-passenger plane in Detroit has revealed links between these terrorists and a spawning Al-Qaeda network in Yemen. Major Hasan reportedly exchanged e-mails and sought spiritual guidance from a radical U.S.-born Islamic cleric, Anwar Al-Awlaki, who grew up in Yemen. Mr. Abdulmutallab said he received training and explosive devices from the Al-Qaeda operatives during his four-month stay in Yemen last year.