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Terry Lee Loewen is an unlikely jihadi—white, middle-aged and from Wichita. Yet he said some damning things in online chats with what the government says he thought were fellow future martyrs. Instead, they were undercover FBI agents who lured him into a plot they cooked up to bomb Wichita’s airport. Was it vigilance or entrapment?
The Secret Service cordon around President Obama is looking more like a sieve after two security breaches in as many days. The most serious one involved a former soldier getting into the front door. He’d already been stopped outside the White House a month before—carrying a hatchet. Is he another “lone nut” to be dismissed reflexively or a sign of something else?
The Western rhetoric against Russia’s involvement in Ukraine has been nothing short of bellicose. Yet Moscow’s apparent aggression may be designed to forge the peace Russia wants.
Images from Ferguson, Missouri, underline disturbing parallels between unrest in the US, the Middle East or elsewhere in a world where attitudes toward “people power” depend on who the people are and who is in power.
When a man like Louis Freeh has a car crash, it may be a plain old accident. And then again, it may not be.
Can a piece of the continuing 9/11 mystery be resolved by a local ballot initiative? One man and his hardy band think so.
Who can forget the subprime economy that launched the Great Recession? Don’t worry if you have—it’s back again, with a different face. Wall Street has found rich pickings in the financial ruins from the last crash. Here’s how the new subprime economy is growing from the struggle to make ends meet and the mountain of debt affecting more than one in three Americans
There’s a rush to judgment about who shot down Malaysian Airlines Flight 17. That’s clearly dangerous with Ukraine a flashpoint in what appears to be turning into a new Cold War. Here are some things to think about as we try to separate fact from speculation and even outright fiction.
Here’s a repost of one of our most popular—and explosive—pieces of original reporting for your enjoyment: WhoWhatWhy Editor-in-Chief Russ Baker’s scoop about how the FBI knew for a decade about connections between powerful Saudi interests and the 9/11 hijackers, and lied about it in the name of national security.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie just pulled the plug on a bipartisan pension funding deal he’s been touting as the kind of solution he’d bring to America. So is what’s good for New Jersey good for the rest of the country? And has it been so good to New Jersey? WhoWhatWhy investigates.
Something strange is going on between the FBI and the defense team that represents Guantanamo inmates who are being prosecuted in connection with 9/11.
In this repost of a story we first ran last year, Douglas Lucas and Russ Baker examined exclusively obtained documents that suggest CIA Director David Petraeus may have been given a push to start his fall from grace. A relevant story now, given where the general has landed on his feet.