The Daily Nightly began on May 31, 2005. As Brian wrote in his first post it aims to provide a narrative of the broadcast day and a window into the editorial process at NBC Nightly News. Brian weighs in every weekday and NBC News correspondents and producers post regularly.
Brian Williams became the seventh anchor and managing editor in the history of NBC Nightly News on December 2, 2004. Read his full biography.
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Yesterday’s White House visit by Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, leader of Iraq's Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, points up once again the role Iran could play in Iraqi affairs. Like so many of Iraq's leaders, many of Iraq's political leaders spend years in exile in Iran, escaping the horrors of Saddam Hussein's prosecution of Shi'a and Kurd alike.
And while the U.S. isn't about to publicize the friendly ties between Iraq's leaders and Iran's, the President of Iran has no problem talking about them.
In his interview with Brian Williams in September, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad happily described his good relations with the Iraqi power structure. (Click to watch the interview from NBC Nightly News on Sept. 19.)
"The Iraqi President (Jalal Talibani) is an old friend of mine," Ahmadinejad told Williams. "The head of the state, the Prime Minister (Nouri al-Maliki) is a very close friend of mine too. And the head of their parliament, the parliamentary speaker (Mahmoud al-Mashhadani), is a good friend of mine too, so we're all friends."
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Link to thisA source inside the Joint Chiefs of Staff tells our NBC News military analyst Bill Arkin that there was a fight between Vice President Dick Cheney and President Bush's political team prior to the election. Cheney said Rumsfeld should stay. Political types, led by White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten, wanted him gone.
The decision was made to delay the decision until after the election. Then, based on how the GOP did, it would be the president's decision. After the Republicans lost the House and may lose the Senate, President Bush agreed that Rumsfeld should go. According to Arkin's source, Cheney fought a second battle on the replacement. He thought they needed someone strong, someone ideological. He lost again.
Discuss (56 comments) Email this | Link to thisA senior U.S. intelligence official tells NBC News that the U.S. believes Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque's comments about Fidel Castro constitute "expectations adjustment" on Castro's health.
Perez Roque had been optimistic about Castro being present for his postponed 80th birthday celebration on December 2, but in an interview today with The Associated Press, he stepped back from any guarantees, saying the important thing is that Castro's recovery is "advanced." U.S. and other officials have been anticipating the Dec. 2 event, believing it would be an indicator of just how healthy the Cuban president is, following his emergency abdominal surgery in late July.
Discuss (0 comments) Email this | Link to thisIn a country of abject poverty, where millions have died of malnutrition and starvation and where large concentration camps can be found, North Korea's "Dear Leader" Kim Jong Il lives well. Outside Pyongyang, a facility known as "Residence No. 55" is the official residence of North Korea's president. While Kim has other residences, this, say U.S. and Japanese officials, is the main one.
Satellite photo provided to NBC News by GeoEye.
Discuss (8 comments) Email this | Link to thisNorth Korea is a notoriously closed society, so how is it we know when they've tested a nuclear weapon? The Internet, of course. The U.S. Geological Service's Earthquake Information Center keeps an automated, up-to-the-minute, list of seismic events of more than 2.5 magnitude on its Web site. The page does not automatically refresh, so hit F5 on your keyboard to get the latest list if you leave the site up for an extended period of time. The data from the quake, including its magnitude, time, and very specific location are recorded automatically.
The first North Korean test on Oct. 8, although small by nuclear weapons standards (about 1/12th of the Hiroshima bomb) still registered as a 4.2 magnitude seismic event. It showed up within minutes. Similarly, when the Japanese broadcast network NHK reported last week that North Korea may have detonated a second nuclear weapon, we were able to go to the site, and seeing no evidence of seismic activity, question the report.
Of equal importance is the location data. It is very specific. Using either Google Earth or satellite photos provided to our graphics department, we can determine the precise location very quickly.
Discuss (0 comments) Email this | Link to thisU.S. officials say that we should expect a series of tapes this week from al-Qaida, leading up to a message, probably from Osama bin Laden himself, just before the anniversary.
Citing analysis rather than intelligence, the officials say that today's tape followed by four days the Ayman al-Zawahri/Adam Gadahn tape on Saturday. "It's a logical progression from this to a message on or just before the anniversary," said one official.
Either Bin Laden or Zawahri has posted a message on or just before every anniversary since 2002 and with this being the fifth anniversary, we should expect more, said the official.
Today's tape is the most elaborate since the first anniversary, when the al-Qaida production company, al-Shahab, released video of the 9/11 plotters going over airline schedules prior to the attacks.
Another official noted the tapes are directed primarily at the U.S. audience, not an Islamic audience, noting the use of Gadahn, an American, on the weekend tape and the use of English subtitles in today's tape.
Discuss (3 comments) Email this | Link to thisThe basketball boards around the Internet are buzzing today with anger and confusion. American fans are in a deep funk about the U.S. loss to Greece in the semifinals. "Greece!" they say. "Greece? They don’t play basketball in GREECE!"
Oh yes, they do.
Greece is the reigning European champion and their teams in the Euroleague -- world’s second-best professional league after the NBA -- are always among the top five.
But the posters and bloggers analyzing and criticizing are all in denial, if you ask me.
Discuss (53 comments) Email this | Link to thisA news story that hit the wires this weekend with little notice may in fact signal an uptick in the strategic chess game that is the Middle East.
Iran announced that it had fired an “anti-ship missile” from one of its Kilo-class submarines during a military exercise in the northern Arabian Sea not far from the Strait of Hormuz, the entrance to the Persian Gulf.
Discuss (7 comments) Email this | Link to thisIts seems everyone today has a blog, from lonely teenagers to hyperbolic sports fans to esteemed anchors of evening news broadcasts.
But one of the newest blogs takes the phenomenon one step further. Mahmood Ahmadinejad, his excellency the President of the Islamic Republic of Iran, has in the past few weeks set up a blog of his own, in four languages. The blog seeks comments from around the world and has pages in Farsi, Arabic, English and French. It features a photo of the Iranian president, an engineer and scientist by training, writing at a desk and offers typical blog fare: a welcoming statement, a question of the day and a space for comments.
Not surprisingly, the English page has had few viewers. Hani A. asks" "Al Salam Alaikum, I hope you could make the font of the words little bigger so that reading could be easier. Salem, Hani."
Discuss (4 comments) Email this | Link to thisThe scenes of devastation in Beirut and southern Lebanon are likely to increase the perception among Arabs and Muslims that they are under attack, that recent history is not about being “humiliated” or “impoverished” but instead about being the subject of genocide.
It is a common theme among radical Islamists: that the West is bent on eliminating Muslims everywhere -- a Muslim Holocaust, if you will, akin to what happened to the Armenians at the hands of the Turks or what happened to the Jews at the hands of the Nazis.
It is their justification for much of what the West sees as terrorism, but what the radical Islamists see as war.
It is also, in fact, a reference increasingly finding its way into the Muslim consciousness. And while the West may see the number of dead across the Islamic world as evidence of disparate wars or sectarian violence or in some cases, war crimes, the Muslim perspective, whether moderate or radical, is quite different.
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