The Pentagon says cyberspace is an operational domain on par with land, sea, air and outer space, and there is little doubt that a global cyberarms race is getting underway. The United States is already well engaged in this race, as evidenced by reports of the computer worm Stuxnet, used to attack Iran’s nuclear enrichment equipment. But so far these efforts have largely been kept secret and conducted as intelligence operations.

DARPA’s workshop points again to the need for more transparency. The United States still has no open, overarching doctrine to govern a cyberweapons program. A good place to start would be a declaratory policy that would lay out when and under what circumstances offensive weapons such as Stuxnet might be used. After that, an open discussion is needed about rules of engagement for this complex new field, along with additional study of such issues as how and whether the military should protect non-military assets in government and the private sector.

Read it all.

The greatest risk to US financial markets stems from other countries’ willingness (or lack thereof) to continue to hold dollar reserves as the value depreciates. If those nations suspect that the US cannot maintain the strength of our currency, they will begin to drain assets from American banks ”“ seeking safer havens for their wealth. That could entail trading US treasury bonds for perceived “safer” currencies such as those of New Zealand or Canada or even switching to an entirely different asset class such as gold or silver.

While there may not be any significant signs of capital flight yet, just look east. The Chinese are the largest, external holder of US debt. And they’re already heading down this path ”“ dropping the share of their portfolio comprised of US dollar assets from 74 to 54 percent in the last five years. It may very well be a harbinger of what’s to come.

Attempting to counter fears fanned by trends like this, Bernanke talks of a “soft landing…”

Read it all.

Israeli military experts Sunday worked around the clock to examine the remains of a mysterious drone that was shot down after penetrating Israeli airspace from the Mediterranean Sea.

The Israeli military announced Saturday that the unmanned aerial vehicle was shot down over the northern Negev Desert. They say the drone did not take off from Gaza, leading them to consider the possibility that it originated in Lebanon.

Israeli security experts point the finger at Israel’s longstanding rival Hezbollah, the Shiite militia based in southern Lebanon.

Read it all.

How does a president bring the war in Afghanistan to an end? There are 68,000 American troops serving in the country as the war enters its 12th year.

The war hasn’t been a major issue in the presidential campaign, and polls show American voters are tiring of the war. But the next commander in chief will find the Afghan war among the most difficult of many foreign policy challenges.

Read or listen to it all.

Events in recent days have illustrated just how quickly the violence in Syria could spiral into a regional war. After Syrian mortar bombs once again fell on Turkish soil, this time killing five civilians, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan felt compelled to act. The Turkish military’s retaliation on Wednesday and Thursday startled the international community.

With its actions, Turkey obviously proceeded with caution: It answered the repeated attacks from Syria with a few artillery shots — not missiles. And the permission for further military action granted to Erdogan by his parliament is intended primarily as an intimidation measure. There is no apparent intent to declare all-out war — at least for the time being. The United Nations Security Council, meanwhile, has strongly condemned the Syrian attack on Turkish soil and called on both sides to show restraint.
The fact of the matter is that the longer Syrian civil war continues, the more often incidents like that seen earlier this week will occur — particularly in Turkey and Lebanon. A large part of the border region around Syria has already become a war zone. Previously, the international community had worried that a military intervention could fuel a regional wildfire, but now it is being forced to look on as this increasingly appears to be the reality — without it ever even having gotten involved.

Read it all.

Greece is teetering on the edge of collapse with its society at risk of disintegrating unless the country’s near-empty public coffers are shored up with urgent financial aid, the country’s prime minister has warned.

Almost three years after the eruption of Europe’s debt drama in Athens, the economic crisis engulfing the nation has become so severe that democracy itself is now imperiled, Antonis Samaras said.

“Greek democracy stands before what is perhaps its greatest challenge,” Samaras told the German business daily Handelsblatt in an interview published hours before the announcement in Berlin that Angela Merkel will fly to Athens next week for the first time since the outbreak of the crisis.

Read it all.

When a senior Iraqi intelligence official traveled to Tehran in the summer of 2007 to meet with the Iranian leadership, he quickly figured out who was in charge of Iran’s policy toward its neighbor to the west.

It was not the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It was Qassim Suleimani, the shadowy commander of Iran’s paramilitary Quds Force, who calmly explained that he was the “sole authority for Iranian actions in Iraq,” according to an account the Iraqi official later provided to American officials in Baghdad.

A soft-spoken, gray-haired operative who carries himself with the confidence that comes from having the backing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, General Suleimani is the antithesis of the bombastic Iranian president. Now a major general ”” the highest rank in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps ”” after a promotion last year, he has been the mastermind behind two central Iranian foreign policy initiatives, exerting and expanding Tehran’s influence in the internal politics of Iraq and providing military support for the rule of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria.

Read it all.

It has never been easier to become a cybercriminal, Foreign Secretary William Hague is to warn an international conference in Budapest.

He will tell delegates that cybercrime is “one of the greatest global and strategic challenges of our time.”

Mr Hague is highlighting the UK’s determination to be a world leader in cyber security – it is spending £2m setting up a cybercrime centre.

Read it all.

After spending 18 of the last 30 years in Egypt, I am not a romantic when it comes to the realities of religious intolerance, social discrimination and sectarian violence experienced by many Christians due to religious fanatics who claim to be Christian, Jewish or Muslim. I have overheard various “men of religion” refer to Christians using the religious “M” word, “mushrik” meaning polytheist and idolater or “K” word “kafr” meaning infidel. I’ve heard it all and seen a lot. While two wrongs never make a right, Christians of most denominations should never fail to recall the violence, discrimination and persecution we have been guilty of during our own 2,000 year history “in the name of God and Jesus Christ”.

I cannot speak for Muslims outside of Egypt, but I can try to explain the reactions of many to such a film without equating these reasons to being justifications. Most Americans get quite upset when we watch the American flag being burned or trampled on. We at least get upset if someone desecrates the Bible and Catholics get very upset if someone desecrates the Eucharist. Maybe we don’t burn those who do or torture them anymore, but we have in the past. We claim to be “one nation under God with liberty and justice for all” and yet we have always found at least one race, nationality, religion or orientation to focus on and “go after”.

Western societies that profess “freedom of religion” have moved toward “freedom FROM religion”. Personally, even as a Catholic priest, I feel that “religion” in civil democracies have the obligation to form and educate the individual and collective conscience of its followers and to be “a voice of conscience” in society. However, I oppose any religion dictating to government how it should legislate morality according to any particular religious belief system. At the same time, this is NOT the current reality in the Muslim world whether I/we like it or not. Cultural sensitivity must include religious and social sensitivity.

Read it all.

“The Spanish were a bit hesitant but now they are ready to request aid,” a senior European source said. Three other euro zone senior euro zone sources confirmed the shift in the Spanish position, all speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to discuss the matter.

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble has said Spain is taking all the right steps to overcome its fiscal problems and does not need a bailout, arguing that investors will recognise and reward Spanish reforms in due course.

Privately, several European diplomats and a senior German source said Chancellor Angela Merkel preferred to avoid putting more individual bailouts for distressed euro zone countries to her increasingly reluctant parliament.

Read it all.

At least 32 people have been killed in Iraq as car bomb attacks targeted security forces and Shia pilgrims around the country, police say.

In Taji, a mainly Sunni town north of the capital, Baghdad, four car bombs went off within minutes of each other, killing at least eight people.

In the southern town of Madain, a bomb exploded near a Shia shrine and Iranian pilgrims were among the injured.

Read it all.

The Spanish government Saturday said the effort to clean up an ailing banking system will have a big impact on its finances, widening its budget gap and increasing its debt load.

Budget Minister Cristobal Montoro said the government forecasts its budget deficit will stand at 7.4% of gross domestic product this year. Excluding the impact of measures to help banks to digest a massive pile of toxic real-estate assets, he said Spain will comply with the deficit target of 6.3% of GDP for 2012 it has committed to with the European Union.

The new budget projections come at a time of uncertainty about the country’s solvency amid soaring borrowing costs. Many analysts expect the government’s effort to lower a budget gap to below the 3%-of-GDP limit for EU countries by 2014 to go off track also because of a deep recession that is pushing the unemployment rate to a record high of almost 25%.

Read it all.

[BOB ABERNATHY]I want to explore that with Kim Lawton, managing editor of this program, and Haris Tarin, director of the Washington office of the Muslim Public Affairs Council.

Haris, how are you trying to persuade, how are American Muslims trying to persuade other Muslims around the world that putting any kind of limit on free speech is dangerous?

HARIS TARIN (Muslim Public Affairs Council): Well, I think the first way we’re trying to convince fellow Muslims of this is the fact that the idea of free speech is a foundational part of the Quran itself. We don’t only believe that in terms of Americans and our belief in the Constitution , but the Quran challenges folks to engage in dialogue and in discourse, challenges people of the same faith and various different faiths, as well. So it’s foundational to the text of Islam, we believe. The Quran actually records insults to the Prophet Muhammad himself and challenges people to engage in that discourse. So I think it’s foundational not only to the Constitution but to our sacred texts, as well.

Read or watch it all.

Just one week after Pope Benedict XVI ended his successful visit to Lebanon, the country’s most senior Catholic leader called for a United Nations resolution “that will ban denigrating religions.”

Meanwhile in Pakistan, the country’s only Catholic cabinet member, Minister of Harmony Paul Bhatti, this week told an interfaith gathering in Lahore that he will press U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon to pass a UN resolution that condemns “defamation and contempt against religions.” Bhatti said “we must not allow anyone to break our harmony” between Christians and Muslims.

Both moves are understandable in light of increasingly popular efforts in predominantly Muslim countries to outlaw blasphemy or defaming religion. But they could prove problematic for the Vatican as it fights to protect the rights of Christian minorities around the world.

Read it all.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu drew his “red line” for Iran’s nuclear program on Thursday despite a U.S. refusal to set an ultimatum, saying Tehran will be on the brink of a nuclear weapon in less than a year.

By citing a time frame in an address to the U.N. General Assembly, Netanyahu – who has clashed with President Barack Obama over the urgency of military action against Iran – appeared to suggest no Israeli attack was imminent before the November 6 U.S. presidential election….

Read it all.

…Rajoy is the victim of his electoral success: his majority government, ironically, is weaker for not including regionalist partners. The Catalan government sees the dissatisfaction with Madrid’s handling of the crisis as an opportunity: it may give the regionalists enough of a boost at the polls to force Madrid to hand them more autonomy, in other words, control of taxes. If Catalonia had control over its own taxes, the argument goes, the region would not have needed a bailout.

Rajoy’s choices are limited: he either refuses Catalan demands for more autonomy and risks enflaming Catalan nationalist sentiment, or agrees to increased autonomy, and risks enflaming Spanish nationalist sentiment.

Read it all.

Civilians are being “terrorised” 24 hours a day by CIA drone attacks that target mainly low-level militants in north-west Pakistan, a US report says.

Rescuers treating the casualties are also being killed and wounded by second drone strikes, says the report by Stanford and New York Universities.

Drone attacks are thought to have killed hundreds of militants in Yemen and Afghanistan as well as Pakistan.

Read it all.

On the 11th anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, al Qaeda affiliates staged a series of attacks against U.S. diplomatic missions in the Middle East. Inciting protests against the film, “Innocence of Muslims,” or possibly taking advantage of existing demonstrations, militants with alledged links to Al Qaeda burned the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, and killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens, Foreign Service information management officer Sean Smith and two contracted American security personnel. Within days, violent protests sprung up in over two dozen countries across the Muslim world. In Sana’a, Yemen, protestors forcibly entered the U.S. Embassy compound and burned the American flag, replacing it with a black flag bearing the Islamic shahada.

Since the Benghazi attack, Al Qaeda and Hezbollah have threatened U.S. personnel and facilities. In light of Ambassador Stevens’ death, and remembering the 52 Americans held hostage for 444 days by “protestors” in Iran, there is growing concern about the ability of Americans to protect themselves inside diplomatic missions. While Marines from Fleet Anti-Terrorist Security Teams (FAST) have been deployed to Yemen, questions remain as to why Marines or other U.S. military forces have not been sent to other embassies. Before we discuss the operational details of what U.S. forces are available, it is imperative that we understand the political context in which our military is used to protect U.S. diplomatic missions abroad.

Read it all.

But during the conference, sponsored by the USCCB and Catholic Relief Services, …[Cardinal Timothy Dolan] also called on Catholics to deepen their knowledge of this issue and register their concerns with their elected representatives.

“Americans generally, and our Catholic brothers and sisters especially, need to become better informed of the systematic challenges to the fundamental right of religious freedom in far too many countries,” the cardinal urged.

The first freedom, which we too often take for granted in our own nation, even as we are vigilant in its defense, is under often violent attack.

Read it all.

An overwhelming majority of Greeks believe new austerity measures the government has promised its international lenders in exchange for more financial aid are unfair and hurt the poorest sections of society, a poll showed on Saturday.

Near-bankrupt Greece needs the European Union and International Monetary Fund’s blessing on measures worth nearly 12 billion euros ($16 billion) to unlock its next tranche of aid, without which it faces default and a potential exit from the euro zone.

Read it all.

At least 19 people have died as violent protests erupted on the streets of Pakistan’s main cities in anger at an anti-Islam film made in the US.

Fourteen people were killed in the port city of Karachi and a further five died in the north-western city of Peshawar, hospital officials said.

Protesters clashed with police outside the diplomatic enclave in the capital, Islamabad, near the US embassy.

Makes the heart sad–read it all.

Anger over a film trailer mocking a sanctified Muslim religious figure has sparked violent protests across the Middle East that have taken the lives of dozens of people. Now, the strife is manifesting itself in the form of cyber war waged against America at home.

Over the course of this week, three major U.S. financial institutions have seen their web infrastructure targeted in technical attacks. On at least two occasions, groups or individuals claiming to be aligned with Muslims said the attacks were a reprisal for the ”˜Innocence of Muslims’ trailer that ridiculed the Prophet Mohammad.

Read it all.

So let’s get this straight: In the consensus view of modern American liberalism, it is hilarious to mock Mormons and Mormonism but outrageous to mock Muslims and Islam. Why? Maybe it’s because nobody has ever been harmed, much less killed, making fun of Mormons.

Here’s what else we learned this week about the emerging liberal consensus: That it’s okay to denounce a movie you haven’t seen, which is like trashing a book you haven’t read. That it’s okay to give perp-walk treatment to the alleged””and no doubt terrified””maker of the film on legally flimsy and politically motivated grounds of parole violation. That it’s okay for the federal government publicly to call on Google to pull the video clip from YouTube in an attempt to mollify rampaging Islamists. That it’s okay to concede the fundamentalist premise that religious belief ought to be entitled to the highest possible degree of social deference””except when Mormons and sundry Christian rubes are concerned.

Read it all.

Less than a week after this grim conversational bidding war, the district of the capital where these women and their children had been taken in was shelled, then raided by government forces.

Not surprisingly, the regime’s iron-fisted approach has made real what had merely been a nightmarish fantasy. From the start it portrayed the revolutionaries as bands of heavily armed Sunni Muslim fanatics, funded and directed by Syria’s enemies. The charge was laughable a year ago, when by all accounts there were simply no guns in opposition hands at all. Even by February, after eleven months of unrest, a trophy table of captured “terrorist” weapons displayed for journalists at an army club in Deraa, the battered city near the Jordanian border where protests first began, proved embarrassingly puny. Amid rusted pistols and primitive pipe bombs, the only serious weapon was a Stalingrad-vintage Bulgarian-made sniper rifle.

Only recently has the Free Syrian Army, the loose coalition of local fighting groups that emerged last fall, begun to wield much firepower. Despite talk of large-scale aid from sympathetic Sunni Muslims in the Persian Gulf, and in particular the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, the flow of money did not pick up until this spring, while the flow of weapons from outside Syria even now remains a trickle.

Read it all.

After a week of deadly international protests against an anti-Islam film, a French satirical magazine is pouring oil on the fiery debate between freedom of expression and offensive provocation.
The magazine Charlie Hebdo, which is known for outrageous humor, published cartoons featuring a figure resembling the Prophet Mohammed on Wednesday.
The issue hit the stands eight days after a video mocking the Muslim prophet triggered angry protests, including one that led to the death of the U.S. ambassador to Libya.

Read it all.

Islamists almost by definition have a vested interest in continuously fanning the flames of Muslim victimhood. For Islamists, wrath against the West is the basis for their claim to the support of Muslim masses, taking attention away from societal political and economic failures. For example, the 57 member states of the Organization of Islamic Conference account for one-fifth of the world’s population but their combined gross domestic product is less than 7% of global output””a harsh reality for which Islamists offer no solution.

Even after recent developments that were labeled the Arab Spring, few Muslim-majority countries either fulfill””or look likely to””the criteria for freedom set by the independent group Freedom House. Mainstream discourse among Muslims blames everyone but themselves for this situation. The image of an ascendant West belittling Islam with the view to eliminate it serves as a convenient explanation for Muslim weakness.

Once the Muslim world embraces freedom of expression, it will be able to recognize the value of that freedom even for those who offend Muslim sensibilities. More important: Only in a free democratic environment will the world’s Muslims be able to debate the causes of their powerlessness, which stirs in them greater anger than any specific action on the part of Islam’s Western detractors.

Until then, the U.S. would do well to remember Osama bin Laden’s comment not long after the Sept. 11 attacks: “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse.” America should do nothing that enables Islamists to portray the nation as the weak horse.

Read it all.

BOB ABERNETHY, host: Joining me now to talk about some of the major news of the week are Kim Lawton, managing editor of this program, and Kevin Eckstrom, editor-in-chief of Religion News Service. So, Kevin, a fourteen-minute video is posted on YouTube and triggers violence all over the Muslim world, demonstrations resulting in the death of the U.S. ambassador to Libya. What are the messages from all that, especially the religious messages?

KEVIN ECKSTROM (Editor-in-Chief, Religion News Service): Well, I think, you know, we live in this increasingly smaller world, interconnected world, and things that happen in one place instantaneously affect things in another place, and religion obviously is playing a larger and larger role in global affairs, and what you’ve seen, I think, this week is that one of the greatest barriers to interfaith understanding is actually technology and the ability to get these messages out. You know, five years ago, ten years ago, somebody could have made a video like this and nobody ever would have seen it, but now you can post it on YouTube or you can put it on Twitter or Facebook, and it’s around the world instantaneously, and it automatically pits one religion against another, and that’s a huge challenge that nobody, I think, has quite figured out how to deal with just yet.

Read or watch it all.

When history books trace the evolution of the euro crisis, September 2012 will mark the beginning of a new chapter. Recent days have seen decisive moves from Europe’s notoriously incremental policymaking machinery. On September 12th Germany’s constitutional court backed the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), the euro zone’s permanent rescue fund, removing the last big hurdle to its launch. The same day, the European Commission laid out a blueprint for joint European banking supervision, the first step to a banking union. Days earlier the European Central Bank (ECB) announced that, under certain conditions, it would buy unlimited amounts of the bonds of troubled euro-zone countries.

Taken together, these actions mark a big change. At best, they constitute the foundations of a more sustainable monetary union. The euro zone now has a plan for bank supervision. It will be haggled over and watered-down, but the record of European diplomacy suggests that once proposals exist, something, eventually, tends to be agreed on…. Most important, the euro zone now has a central bank committed to being a lender of last resort. Yes, the commitment is conditional on countries securing help from, and adhering to, a rescue plan. But the ECB has made clear, for the first time, that it is willing to intervene without limit if need be.

Read it all.

The mobs that killed the US ambassador to Libya and assaulted the US Embassy in Egypt may have been provoked by a blasphemous portrayal of the prophet Muhammad, but Muslim scholars and analysts alike say the attacks have little justification in Islamic theology. Instead, they reflect societies roiled by power struggles and competing ideologies ”“ in which Muslims are used as pawns for political gain.

“The punishment for blasphemy and even the definition for blasphemy is not in the Quran. There are some hadiths that address it, but it’s ambiguous,” says Nina Shea, director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom in Washington. “So it’s very vague and ”¦ it’s manipulated by those who want to raise a mob and wield power within a society.”

She cites other recent examples of blasphemous incidents being exploited for political purposes, including the protests in Afghanistan and Pakistan over Florida pastor Terry Jones burning the Quran, fanned by the Taliban, and a Danish newspaper’s denigrating cartoons of the prophet Muhammad, exploited by Arab governments upset with the Bush administration’s push for democracy in the Middle East.

Read it all.

Pope Benedict XVI will arrive in Lebanon on Friday for a three-day visit that he labeled a “peace pilgrimage” at a time when the region and its people are facing anguish, from war in Syria to violence in Libya.

Ahead of the trip, a senior Vatican official said Thursday he didn’t expect the pope to make specific remarks about the violence against U.S. embassies in the area, or the online video that many protesters said had sparked it, during his visit so as not to risk angering the Muslim street and inflaming the crisis.

The trip “was already a minefield. Now a few more mines have been tossed in,” the official said.

Read it all.