Summary: Despite Pakistani protest, the Obama administration is ramping up its missile campaign against insurgent targets in North Waziristan along Pakistan’s northwest frontier with Afghanistan, where al-Qaida’s top leadership, possibly including Osama bin Laden himself, have taken refuge. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on January 17, 2009, Aubrey Immelman reported that by actually putting into practice the Neo-Conservative theories of pre-emptive war and unilateralism, George W. Bush demonstrated their failure more persuasively than could the most articulate critic.

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Summary: Spanish lawmaker Gaspar Llamazares was horrified to learn that the FBI used an online photograph of him to create an age-enhanced image showing what Osama bin Laden might look like today. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on January 16, 2009, Aubrey Immelman reported that Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), talking about the recount in the Coleman-Franken U.S. Senate race in an interview on Fox News Channel’s “FOX & Friends,” besmirched the integrity of Minnesota’s election system by alleging that “a lot of irregularities occurred during the voting process.”

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Summary: A group of prominent Muslim clerics, led by Sheik Abdul-Majid al-Zindani, warned they will call for jihad, or holy war, if the U.S. sends troops to fight al-Qaida in Yemen. … Taliban suicide bombings and other attacks caused Afghan civilian deaths to soar in 2009 to the highest annual level of the war, a U.N. report has found, while deaths attributed to allied troops dropped nearly 30 percent — advancing a key U.S. public diplomacy goal for winning over the Afghan people. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on January 14, 2009, Aubrey Immelman reported that Iranian demonstrators, waving Palestinian flags and chanting “Death to Obama,” burned photographs of Barack Obama in Tehran a week before his inauguration as president as they protested against America’s inaction over Gaza.

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Summary: Thousands of Somali boys and teenagers fleeing war and chaos at home are sailing to Yemen, where officials worry that the new arrivals could become the next generation of al-Qaida fighters. U.S. and Yemeni authorities also fear that Islamist fighters from Somalia could slip into the country among the throngs of refugees, deepening ties between al-Qaeda leaders in Yemen and the particularly hard-line al-Shabab militants of Somalia. … Massoud Ali Mohammadi, a nuclear physics professor who publicly backed Iranian opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi in the disputed June 2009 presidential election, was killed when a bomb-rigged motorcycle blew up outside his home in Tehran. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on January 12, 2009, Aubrey Immelman reported that security forces used tear gas and batons to repel anti-Israel protesters who tried to attack a U.S. consulate in Pakistan as tens of thousands of people demonstrated worldwide against Israel’s offensive in the Gaza Strip. He also reported that seven years after the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan routed the Taliban regime, hard-line Islamic fighters who had scattered under massive bombardment to their villages and rear bases in Pakistan once again govern large swaths of Afghanistan and are dug in across regions that surround the capital Kabul, saying they welcome the U.S. military’s proposal to send as many as 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan by summer 2009 because it will give them more chances to kill “infidels.”

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Summary: Sequence of events in the Dec. 30, 2009 suicide bombing that killed seven CIA personnel and contractors at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost, Afghanistan. … CIA bomber Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, in a videotape released posthumously by the Pakistani Taliban, called on Muslim jihadists worldwide to avenge the death of former Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud last August in a U.S. missile strike, by attacking U.S. targets. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on January 10, 2009, Aubrey Immelman reported that President-elect Barack Obama, in announcing his nomination of Leon Panetta as CIA director and Adm. Dennis Blair as national intelligence director, said his administration would not compromise its ideals to fight terrorism and that he had instructed his nominees to honor the Geneva Conventions.

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Summary: While ramping up the fight against al-Qaida with U.S. help, the Yemeni government has also escalated its own internal conflicts with Shi’ite rebels in the north and Sunni secessionists in the south, threatening to throw the fractured country into greater chaos and nourish the growth of al-Qaida. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on January 9, 2009, Aubrey Immelman reported that anti-U.S. cleric Muqtada al-Sadr had called on the Iraqi resistance to stage “revenge operations” against American forces to protest Israel’s Gaza offensive.

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Summary: Rudy Giuliani falsely claims no domestic terrorist attacks under George W. Bush — Media Matters for America, a Web-based research and information center dedicated to monitoring, analyzing, and correcting misinformation in the U.S. media has good reporting and analysis of misguided attempts to rewrite history for political gain by erasing the Bush administration’s responsibility for failures leading up to 9/11. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on January 8, 2009, Aubrey Immelman reported that Iraq remained the deadliest country for journalists in 2008, followed by India and Mexico.

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Summary: Intelligence lapse: Dr. Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, the 32-year-old Jordanian physician who turned against his Jordanian intelligence recruiters and struck the CIA’s Camp Chapman forward base in Khost province near the Afghan-Pakistan frontier on December 30, 2009 killing seven Central Intelligence Agency employees and his Jordanian recruiter, matched the psychological profile of a suicide bomber. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on January 5, 2009, Aubrey Immelman reported that Vice President Dick Cheney, in an exit interview on CBS “Face the Nation,” defended the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, of which he was a key proponent and architect.

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Summary: White House aide John Brennan, President Barack Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, says U.S. intelligence agencies did not miss a “smoking gun” that could have prevented the attempt by radical Islamic fundamentalist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to blow up a U.S. airliner on Christmas Day. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on January 3, 2009, Aubrey Immelman reported that tensions were mounting between Sunni Arabs and Kurds in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, where political violence was increasing ahead of provincial elections.

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Summary: In the latest sign that Yemen — the country where Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the suspect in the attempted Christmas Day airliner bombing recently spent some time — is becoming a focus for both the West and extremists, Britain announced that it and the U.S. have agreed to fund a counterterrorism police unit there. Meanwhile, Somalia’s Islamist rebel group al-Shabab said it was ready to send reinforcements to al-Qaida in Yemen should the U.S. carry out retaliatory strikes, and urged other Muslims to follow suit. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on January 2, 2009, Aubrey Immelman reported that South African anti-apartheid icon Helen Suzman, one of the first white lawmakers to fight against the injustices of whites-only rule in that country, died on Thursday, January 1, 2009 at the age of 91.

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