Latest news with #OsamaBinLaden
ITV News
16-07-2025
- Politics
- ITV News
Afghan data breach a shameful sequel to the Kabul horror story
So the Kabul horror story has a shameful sequel. I wonder does the rot stop here? A month from now will see the fourth anniversary of the fall of Kabul. The return of the Taliban and the withdrawal of Western troops marked one of the most horrendous and humiliating failures in our history. We abandoned Afghanistan more than two decades after participating in the initial offensive to topple Osama Bin Laden's hosts, the tragically ironically named Operation Enduring Freedom. For a week or so in August 2021, soldiers from the Parachute Regiment were tasked with securing the perimeter at Kabul International Airport so that a massive airlift could take place. Watching it first hand, one couldn't help but marvel as dozens of giant transport planes took off steeply and at full power, eager to evade any parting shots. And then you reminded yourself of the shame that was behind this flight and the consequences for the friends we would inevitably leave behind. The British staging post at the airport was called the Baron Hotel. One boiling afternoon that August we went to a small side entrance and saw Paras firing warning shots over the heads of hundreds of Afghans desperate to get into the compound and out of their country. Some of these people were waving UK passports, but were denied entry nonetheless because their names weren't on the approved list. That was probably the worst week of my working life. It was incredibly depressing, not least because we knew what was in store for Afghanistan. The morning after the Taliban re-entered Kabul we drove until we were stopped at one of their checkpoints. Displaying a confidence we were not feeling, we demanded 'take us to your leader'. At what had the day before been the UN headquarters, we interviewed the man now in charge of a large part of the Afghan capital. A week before he was running a suicide bomber school. Never have I said 'sorry' so often. Especially to the women we met. These were people who had bet their futures on us, only to see us cut and run. Near the entrance to the Baron Hotel that day I noticed a family of four sitting in the shade of a wall. I crouched down and asked the husband and father if he spoke English. He said he did and that he had worked as a terp (interpreter) for 42 Commando in Nad-e-Ali in Helmand Province. That struck a chord as I had embedded with the Royal Marines in that exact place. The man who had served UK forces told me he thought he had no chance of getting away. He wasn't on any list. There were tears running down my cheeks as he told me this. Ridiculously, he started consoling me. He put an arm around me and said repeatedly, 'It's ok, it's ok.' I'm thinking about that man and his family again today. Having abandoned them four years ago, has governmental incompetence placed them in even more danger? Whatever has happened to them, it's definitely not ok.
The Sun
15-07-2025
- Politics
- The Sun
Terrorists could exploit AI chatbots to spread hate and hatch plots, terrorism tsar warns
WANNABE jihadists could soon be coached to carry out atrocities by killer chatbots, Britain's terrorism tsar has warned. Extremists may exploit artificial intelligence to plan attacks, spread propaganda, and dodge detection with the help of persuasive bots, according to Jonathan Hall KC. 1 In his official 2023 annual report on terrorism, he said: 'Chatbot radicalisation is the most difficult problem.' Mr Hall warned some terrorist-themed bots are already being shared online, saying:'Terrorist chatbots are available off the shelf, presented as fun and satirical models but as I found, willing to promote terrorism.' He said much depends on what users ask the AI, explaining: 'Chatbots pander to biases and are eager to please and an Osama Bin Laden will provide you a recipe for lemon sponge if you ask.' He added: 'Even where a chatbot has had its restraining features (guardrails) removed, or is positively trained to be sympathetic to terrorist narratives, the output overwhelmingly depends on whether the bot is asked about cake recipes or murder.' He listed seven possible terrorism risks from generative AI, including attack planning, propaganda, evading online moderation, deepfake impersonation and identity guessing. Mr Hall said AI tools could make terrorist content faster and more powerful, arguing 'generative AI's ability to create text, images and sounds will be exploited by terrorists". He recommended the Government 'consider a new race-hatred based offence' to deal with potential cases that fall between terrorism and hate crime. But he warned against jumping to legislate too early: 'The absence of Gen AI-enabled attacks could suggest the whole issue is overblown.' He said there was only one known case of a chatbot engaging in a conversation about planning an attack. Jaswant Singh Chail took a crossbow into the grounds of Windsor Castle, intending to kill Elizabeth II, in 2021. It came after communication with a chatbot which sanctioned his attempt and he was jailed for nine years. Mr Hall's report also warned that online radicalisation remains a live threat on existing platforms. He highlighted the case of Mohammad Sohail Farooq, who attempted a bomb attack on St James's Hospital in Leeds in January 2023. The report stated this was 'a close-run thing' and that 'the facts suggest self-radicalisation via the internet (TikTok), personal grievances together with ideological and religious motives, a rapid escalation, and a near miss.' He argued that children and young people remain vulnerable to extremist content online. Mr Hall wrote that they are 'being seduced by online content into sharing material, expressing views, and forming intentions that can result in risk.'
Yahoo
09-07-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
How a tied shoelace will mark a turning point in US history
Deep in one of America's darkest hours, President George W. Bush warned that while the war on terror was started by others on 9/11, it would end 'at an hour of our choosing.' It took nearly a quarter of a century — but soon, one of the last tangible daily legacies of that conflict will disappear. America will extract a small measure of revenge on Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda acolytes when the final traveler shuffles through airport security in their socks or stockings. We've been taking our shoes off since 2006, when traveling by air became even more irksome amid fears of fresh terror in a nation still traumatized by the 9/11 attacks. But Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Tuesday that the requirement would end 'effective immediately.' New security technology will finally dim another memory of the global war on terror. But we are still living in an age that bin Laden wrought. Sure, the world is unrecognizable from that crisp September morning when terrorists seized airliners, transforming them into flying bombs that felled New York's World Trade Center and turned the Pentagon into an inferno. Another jet — perhaps headed for the US Capitol — was brought down by heroic passengers over Pennsylvania. A generation of Americans have grown up since. Bush's post-9/11 wars were finally ended by his successors. His vision of the struggle against radical Islamic terrorism, framed as the battle between good and evil, did not, after all, turn out to be the organizing geopolitical principle of the 21st century. Instead, a new great power struggle is underway as the United States, China and Russia battle for primacy. The controversies of the post-9/11 years — from a consuming national debate over whether torture was justified to the 'Freedom fries' served in the US Capitol when the French opposed the invasion of Iraq — are mostly forgotten. On a train headed to New York on September 11, 2001, business travelers first learned the Twin Towers had been struck on their pagers. Now, smartphones, social media and artificial intelligence are revolutionizing everyday life, the worlds of work and politics and the media. The surge of national purpose following the attacks seems unfathomable in 2025. Does anyone think another great tragedy would forge such unity now? And whereas Bush sent American troops out to force democracy at the point of a gun, democracy has more recently been threatened by his Republican successor at home. The families of those who died on the battlefields of the global war on terror — or of the firefighters who rushed into the burning skyscrapers in New York — will never fully move on. But many Americans — even those who remember the searing days of fear, the ache of national mourning and the dread of new attacks — feel 9/11's shadow less viscerally now. Dig deeper, however, and the tumultuous cultural and political changes unleashed on a day that shattered assumptions about the inviolability of the US homeland remain everywhere. Bin Laden's handiwork is embedded in the Trump administration's DNA. The 9/11 attacks and the disastrous turn of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan they bequeathed transformed this country. The 'real shock and awe' was not in Baghdad; it was at home. It is often now forgotten that the initial stage of the war on terror was a success, as the Taliban, who harbored bin Laden, were toppled in Afghanistan. And there were no more mass casualty attacks on US soil by foreign terror organizations. But the subsequent war in Iraq — which drew resources and focus from the Afghan war — changed everything. Without the quagmire, it's hard to believe that Barack Obama would have won the presidency in 2008. But the mostly unknown state lawmaker had a trump card — footage of a speech in which he blasted 'dumb wars.' And had Obama not been president, Trump probably wouldn't have been, either. The first Black presidency gave Trump the chance to kindle the racist conspiracy theory about Obama's birthplace that helped build his political base and backlash brand. Like Obama, Trump took advantage of frustration at 'forever wars' and busted nation-building in the Middle East. Many of his supporters came from rural towns that sent their kids to fight and die in Iraq and Afghanistan. Trump also fused simultaneously occurring frustration over the fallout of the 2008-2009 financial crisis to supercharge his populism and to exploit growing public frustration with the federal government, elite institutions and the Washington establishment. Almost every day in his second term harks back to this political foundation. Trump, for instance, on Tuesday won a significant victory in his effort to eviscerate the federal bureaucracy that many of his supporters despise, when the Supreme Court gave the go-ahead for mass firings in government — at least for now. And the festering distrust on the right for US intelligence agencies, which can be traced back to mass surveillance programs in the war on terror, surfaced again this week, as MAGA activists eviscerated FBI and Justice officials for refusing to support conspiracies that Jeffrey Epstein, who died while awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges, was murdered. It was a case of the revolution eating itself: Some of those officials, including FBI Director Kash Patel and his deputy Dan Bongino, had been among Trump supporters who fanned claims of skullduggery in the first place. Trump might have indulged his inner neoconservative and challenged the isolationism of the America First base with his raids on Iran's nuclear program last month. But the operation was a classic of the post-9/11 genre. Sophisticated US jets came from over the horizon to drop their bunker-busting bombs and returned to the United States. No US boots were on the ground. Trump avoided the kind of quagmire that destroyed Bush's second term, even if his claims to have 'obliterated' the Islamic Republic's nuclear program still cannot be verified. It was ironic to hear an American president who may owe his political career to skepticism of foreign wars justifying the raid on the grounds that a tyrant regime could never be allowed to get nuclear weapons. Bush said much the same in Iraq. But Trump had previously laid out his 'America First' creed during a visit to Saudi Arabia earlier this year. 'In the end, the so-called 'nation-builders' wrecked far more nations than they built — and the interventionists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves,' Trump said. Trump is not alone in his skepticism of endless foreign wars. Senior members of his Cabinet were forged by embittering experiences on foreign battlefields and amid a sense that Washington failed a generation of young Americans sent to war. In Iraq, they saw friends die in a conflict justified by faulty intelligence. In Afghanistan, the US seemed to fight the same war over and over again — and it ended with massive US sacrifices squandered after President Joe Biden's disastrous withdrawal, based on Trump's first-term timetable, left the Taliban back in charge. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth came back from Iraq critical of diversity programs he believed hampered 'warfighting' and of cases against US soldiers accused of war crimes. This shaped his approach when Trump elevated him from a Fox News sofa to run the Pentagon. Vice President JD Vance, who served in the US Marines in Iraq, came to mistrust the globalist institutions and approaches of post World War-II foreign policy. His overt isolationism gave him great credibility to reassure the Trump base after the Iran strikes. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who still serves in the US Army Reserve, is skeptical of foreign wars and the agencies she oversees. The latter dates from her opposition to war-on-terror surveillance authorities. She might have fallen out of favor in Trump's inner circle. But Gabbard — as nominally the top US spy — remains an exemplar of the Trump base's antipathy for the so-called deep state. It's hard to say how the post-9/11 generation's turn in power will itself be leavened by global events and emerging threats. But there's no sign of a course correction. And the Democratic Party has its own corps war-on-terror veterans awaiting power who are also skeptical of foreign adventurism. We might be keeping our shoes on at airports soon, but September 11's legacy will endure yet.
CNN
09-07-2025
- Politics
- CNN
How a tied shoelace will mark a turning point in US history
Deep in one of America's darkest hours, President George W. Bush warned that while the war on terror was started by others on 9/11, it would end 'at an hour of our choosing.' It took nearly a quarter of a century — but soon, one of the last tangible daily legacies of that conflict will disappear. America will extract a small measure of revenge on Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda acolytes when the final traveler shuffles through airport security in their socks or stockings. We've been taking our shoes off since 2006, when traveling by air became even more irksome amid fears of fresh terror in a nation still traumatized by the 9/11 attacks. But Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Tuesday that the requirement would end 'effective immediately.' New security technology will finally dim another memory of the global war on terror. But we are still living in an age that bin Laden wrought. Sure, the world is unrecognizable from that crisp September morning when terrorists seized airliners, transforming them into flying bombs that felled New York's World Trade Center and turned the Pentagon into an inferno. Another jet — perhaps headed for the US Capitol — was brought down by heroic passengers over Pennsylvania. A generation of Americans have grown up since. Bush's post-9/11 wars were finally ended by his successors. His vision of the struggle against radical Islamic terrorism, framed as the battle between good and evil, did not, after all, turn out to be the organizing geopolitical principle of the 21st century. Instead, a new great power struggle is underway as the United States, China and Russia battle for primacy. The controversies of the post-9/11 years — from a consuming national debate over whether torture was justified to the 'Freedom fries' served in the US Capitol when the French opposed the invasion of Iraq — are mostly forgotten. On a train headed to New York on September 11, 2001, business travelers first learned the Twin Towers had been struck on their pagers. Now, smartphones, social media and artificial intelligence are revolutionizing everyday life, the worlds of work and politics and the media. The surge of national purpose following the attacks seems unfathomable in 2025. Does anyone think another great tragedy would forge such unity now? And whereas Bush sent American troops out to force democracy at the point of a gun, democracy has more recently been threatened by his Republican successor at home. The families of those who died on the battlefields of the global war on terror — or of the firefighters who rushed into the burning skyscrapers in New York — will never fully move on. But many Americans — even those who remember the searing days of fear, the ache of national mourning and the dread of new attacks — feel 9/11's shadow less viscerally now. Dig deeper, however, and the tumultuous cultural and political changes unleashed on a day that shattered assumptions about the inviolability of the US homeland remain everywhere. Bin Laden's handiwork is embedded in the Trump administration's DNA. The 9/11 attacks and the disastrous turn of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan they bequeathed transformed this country. The 'real shock and awe' was not in Baghdad; it was at home. It is often now forgotten that the initial stage of the war on terror was a success, as the Taliban, who harbored bin Laden, were toppled in Afghanistan. And there were no more mass casualty attacks on US soil by foreign terror organizations. But the subsequent war in Iraq — which drew resources and focus from the Afghan war — changed everything. Without the quagmire, it's hard to believe that Barack Obama would have won the presidency in 2008. But the mostly unknown state lawmaker had a trump card — footage of a speech in which he blasted 'dumb wars.' And had Obama not been president, Trump probably wouldn't have been, either. The first Black presidency gave Trump the chance to kindle the racist conspiracy theory about Obama's birthplace that helped build his political base and backlash brand. Like Obama, Trump took advantage of frustration at 'forever wars' and busted nation-building in the Middle East. Many of his supporters came from rural towns that sent their kids to fight and die in Iraq and Afghanistan. Trump also fused simultaneously occurring frustration over the fallout of the 2008-2009 financial crisis to supercharge his populism and to exploit growing public frustration with the federal government, elite institutions and the Washington establishment. Almost every day in his second term harks back to this political foundation. Trump, for instance, on Tuesday won a significant victory in his effort to eviscerate the federal bureaucracy that many of his supporters despise, when the Supreme Court gave the go-ahead for mass firings in government — at least for now. And the festering distrust on the right for US intelligence agencies, which can be traced back to mass surveillance programs in the war on terror, surfaced again this week, as MAGA activists eviscerated FBI and Justice officials for refusing to support conspiracies that Jeffrey Epstein, who died while awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges, was murdered. It was a case of the revolution eating itself: Some of those officials, including FBI Director Kash Patel and his deputy Dan Bongino, had been among Trump supporters who fanned claims of skullduggery in the first place. Trump might have indulged his inner neoconservative and challenged the isolationism of the America First base with his raids on Iran's nuclear program last month. But the operation was a classic of the post-9/11 genre. Sophisticated US jets came from over the horizon to drop their bunker-busting bombs and returned to the United States. No US boots were on the ground. Trump avoided the kind of quagmire that destroyed Bush's second term, even if his claims to have 'obliterated' the Islamic Republic's nuclear program still cannot be verified. It was ironic to hear an American president who may owe his political career to skepticism of foreign wars justifying the raid on the grounds that a tyrant regime could never be allowed to get nuclear weapons. Bush said much the same in Iraq. But Trump had previously laid out his 'America First' creed during a visit to Saudi Arabia earlier this year. 'In the end, the so-called 'nation-builders' wrecked far more nations than they built — and the interventionists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves,' Trump said. Trump is not alone in his skepticism of endless foreign wars. Senior members of his Cabinet were forged by embittering experiences on foreign battlefields and amid a sense that Washington failed a generation of young Americans sent to war. In Iraq, they saw friends die in a conflict justified by faulty intelligence. In Afghanistan, the US seemed to fight the same war over and over again — and it ended with massive US sacrifices squandered after President Joe Biden's disastrous withdrawal, based on Trump's first-term timetable, left the Taliban back in charge. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth came back from Iraq critical of diversity programs he believed hampered 'warfighting' and of cases against US soldiers accused of war crimes. This shaped his approach when Trump elevated him from a Fox News sofa to run the Pentagon. Vice President JD Vance, who served in the US Marines in Iraq, came to mistrust the globalist institutions and approaches of post World War-II foreign policy. His overt isolationism gave him great credibility to reassure the Trump base after the Iran strikes. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who still serves in the US Army Reserve, is skeptical of foreign wars and the agencies she oversees. The latter dates from her opposition to war-on-terror surveillance authorities. She might have fallen out of favor in Trump's inner circle. But Gabbard — as nominally the top US spy — remains an exemplar of the Trump base's antipathy for the so-called deep state. It's hard to say how the post-9/11 generation's turn in power will itself be leavened by global events and emerging threats. But there's no sign of a course correction. And the Democratic Party has its own corps war-on-terror veterans awaiting power who are also skeptical of foreign adventurism. We might be keeping our shoes on at airports soon, but September 11's legacy will endure yet.
CNN
09-07-2025
- Politics
- CNN
How a tied shoelace will mark a turning point in US history
Deep in one of America's darkest hours, President George W. Bush warned that while the war on terror was started by others on 9/11, it would end 'at an hour of our choosing.' It took nearly a quarter of a century — but soon, one of the last tangible daily legacies of that conflict will disappear. America will extract a small measure of revenge on Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda acolytes when the final traveler shuffles through airport security in their socks or stockings. We've been taking our shoes off since 2006, when traveling by air became even more irksome amid fears of fresh terror in a nation still traumatized by the 9/11 attacks. But Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Tuesday that the requirement would end 'effective immediately.' New security technology will finally dim another memory of the global war on terror. But we are still living in an age that bin Laden wrought. Sure, the world is unrecognizable from that crisp September morning when terrorists seized airliners, transforming them into flying bombs that felled New York's World Trade Center and turned the Pentagon into an inferno. Another jet — perhaps headed for the US Capitol — was brought down by heroic passengers over Pennsylvania. A generation of Americans have grown up since. Bush's post-9/11 wars were finally ended by his successors. His vision of the struggle against radical Islamic terrorism, framed as the battle between good and evil, did not, after all, turn out to be the organizing geopolitical principle of the 21st century. Instead, a new great power struggle is underway as the United States, China and Russia battle for primacy. The controversies of the post-9/11 years — from a consuming national debate over whether torture was justified to the 'Freedom fries' served in the US Capitol when the French opposed the invasion of Iraq — are mostly forgotten. On a train headed to New York on September 11, 2001, business travelers first learned the Twin Towers had been struck on their pagers. Now, smartphones, social media and artificial intelligence are revolutionizing everyday life, the worlds of work and politics and the media. The surge of national purpose following the attacks seems unfathomable in 2025. Does anyone think another great tragedy would forge such unity now? And whereas Bush sent American troops out to force democracy at the point of a gun, democracy has more recently been threatened by his Republican successor at home. The families of those who died on the battlefields of the global war on terror — or of the firefighters who rushed into the burning skyscrapers in New York — will never fully move on. But many Americans — even those who remember the searing days of fear, the ache of national mourning and the dread of new attacks — feel 9/11's shadow less viscerally now. Dig deeper, however, and the tumultuous cultural and political changes unleashed on a day that shattered assumptions about the inviolability of the US homeland remain everywhere. Bin Laden's handiwork is embedded in the Trump administration's DNA. The 9/11 attacks and the disastrous turn of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan they bequeathed transformed this country. The 'real shock and awe' was not in Baghdad; it was at home. It is often now forgotten that the initial stage of the war on terror was a success, as the Taliban, who harbored bin Laden, were toppled in Afghanistan. And there were no more mass casualty attacks on US soil by foreign terror organizations. But the subsequent war in Iraq — which drew resources and focus from the Afghan war — changed everything. Without the quagmire, it's hard to believe that Barack Obama would have won the presidency in 2008. But the mostly unknown state lawmaker had a trump card — footage of a speech in which he blasted 'dumb wars.' And had Obama not been president, Trump probably wouldn't have been, either. The first Black presidency gave Trump the chance to kindle the racist conspiracy theory about Obama's birthplace that helped build his political base and backlash brand. Like Obama, Trump took advantage of frustration at 'forever wars' and busted nation-building in the Middle East. Many of his supporters came from rural towns that sent their kids to fight and die in Iraq and Afghanistan. Trump also fused simultaneously occurring frustration over the fallout of the 2008-2009 financial crisis to supercharge his populism and to exploit growing public frustration with the federal government, elite institutions and the Washington establishment. Almost every day in his second term harks back to this political foundation. Trump, for instance, on Tuesday won a significant victory in his effort to eviscerate the federal bureaucracy that many of his supporters despise, when the Supreme Court gave the go-ahead for mass firings in government — at least for now. And the festering distrust on the right for US intelligence agencies, which can be traced back to mass surveillance programs in the war on terror, surfaced again this week, as MAGA activists eviscerated FBI and Justice officials for refusing to support conspiracies that Jeffrey Epstein, who died while awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges, was murdered. It was a case of the revolution eating itself: Some of those officials, including FBI Director Kash Patel and his deputy Dan Bongino, had been among Trump supporters who fanned claims of skullduggery in the first place. Trump might have indulged his inner neoconservative and challenged the isolationism of the America First base with his raids on Iran's nuclear program last month. But the operation was a classic of the post-9/11 genre. Sophisticated US jets came from over the horizon to drop their bunker-busting bombs and returned to the United States. No US boots were on the ground. Trump avoided the kind of quagmire that destroyed Bush's second term, even if his claims to have 'obliterated' the Islamic Republic's nuclear program still cannot be verified. It was ironic to hear an American president who may owe his political career to skepticism of foreign wars justifying the raid on the grounds that a tyrant regime could never be allowed to get nuclear weapons. Bush said much the same in Iraq. But Trump had previously laid out his 'America First' creed during a visit to Saudi Arabia earlier this year. 'In the end, the so-called 'nation-builders' wrecked far more nations than they built — and the interventionists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves,' Trump said. Trump is not alone in his skepticism of endless foreign wars. Senior members of his Cabinet were forged by embittering experiences on foreign battlefields and amid a sense that Washington failed a generation of young Americans sent to war. In Iraq, they saw friends die in a conflict justified by faulty intelligence. In Afghanistan, the US seemed to fight the same war over and over again — and it ended with massive US sacrifices squandered after President Joe Biden's disastrous withdrawal, based on Trump's first-term timetable, left the Taliban back in charge. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth came back from Iraq critical of diversity programs he believed hampered 'warfighting' and of cases against US soldiers accused of war crimes. This shaped his approach when Trump elevated him from a Fox News sofa to run the Pentagon. Vice President JD Vance, who served in the US Marines in Iraq, came to mistrust the globalist institutions and approaches of post World War-II foreign policy. His overt isolationism gave him great credibility to reassure the Trump base after the Iran strikes. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who still serves in the US Army Reserve, is skeptical of foreign wars and the agencies she oversees. The latter dates from her opposition to war-on-terror surveillance authorities. She might have fallen out of favor in Trump's inner circle. But Gabbard — as nominally the top US spy — remains an exemplar of the Trump base's antipathy for the so-called deep state. It's hard to say how the post-9/11 generation's turn in power will itself be leavened by global events and emerging threats. But there's no sign of a course correction. And the Democratic Party has its own corps war-on-terror veterans awaiting power who are also skeptical of foreign adventurism. We might be keeping our shoes on at airports soon, but September 11's legacy will endure yet.
