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Who is Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the man who leads Hezbollah, who controls what some have called the world's best irregular army, who has moved Hezbollah from a purely terrorist organization to a Lebanese political party with two seats in the nation's cabinet?
What he may be is the next generation of Shiite leaders -- a man capable of leading a state within a state, a transitional figure between Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomenei, and Moqtada al Sadr, the leader of Baghdad's three milliion Shiites, and a man still capable of reminding Americans who first used car bombs against U.S. targets.
Discuss (40 comments) 
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Link to thisWhat levers does the U.S. possess to pressure Israel -- if indeed it wanted to? The list is long -- from weapons deals to direct financing of Israel's military spending to special foreign aid packages.
The authors of a report (.PDF link) issued last week by the World Policy Institute (WPI) lays it out simply: "The billions of U.S. arms and aid it provides every year gives the Bush administration substantial leverage in pressing Israel for a cease fire in its attacks on Lebanon," notes William D. Hartung, a senior fellow at the WPI in New York.
Discuss (202 comments) Email this | Link to thisThis is the 14th audio or video tape released this year by Ayman al-Zawahri or Osama bin Laden and the ninth by Zawahri.
Senior U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism officials tell NBC News that while the production -- and even promotional -- apparatus has grown increasingly sophisticated, the main point of the messages remains the same as it has been for the past several years: Al-Qaida wants to show themselves as relevant within the jihadist movement by commenting on any major event in the Muslim world, whether it be a new French law outlawing head scarves or a war between Muslims and Israelis in Lebanon.
Discuss (8 comments) Email this | Link to thisSenior U.S. counterterrorism officials say they are "mindful of and thinking about" the possibility that Hezbollah could reach out beyond Israel and attack Israeli -- and even Jewish -- interests around the world.
And should things become desperate, attacks against the United States and its interests could also be possible.
Discuss (6 comments) Email this | Link to thisEditor’s note: Much of the information here was first published in “Critical Mass: The Dangerous Race for Superweapons in a Fragmenting World,” by William E. Burrows and Robert Windrem.
Israel is the victim of the changing nature of war.
For decades, it prepared for the apocalypse, building a nuclear deterrent force the equal of a superpower, only to have its national security threatened by a few thousand guerilla armed with small arms and short-range rockets.
Israel is believed to have more than 200 nuclear weapons, made up of five different classes of weapons -- missile warheads, aerial bombs, nuclear landmines, etc. Israel built its first two bombs in late 1966, according to "Israel and the Bomb," a new book by Israeli political scientist Avner Cohen.
Discuss (8 comments) Email this | Link to thisOne thing U.S. officials say that has not been given much attention is the strategic advantage Israel could gain from taking out Hezbollah.
If Israel wants the option of taking out Iranian missile/nuclear facilities, it has to know that in response, Iran would unleash Hezbollah -- that is, play the terrorism card.
Discuss (2 comments) Email this | Link to thisA senior U.S. intelligence official says that Hezbollah has enough rockets to keep up the current pace "for a considerable amount of time, many weeks, possibly months" without resupply from Iran. The numbers, he said, will depend on how many rockets Hezbollah fires as well as how many the Israelis can take out. The official said the stockpile is not being resupplied. Israel took out the runways at Beirut International Airport, smaller airfields, as well as highways and bridges to prevent such resupply. Asked about Israeli reports that Hezbollah had a stockpile of 13,000 rockets -- including shorter range Katyushas and medium range Fajr-3 -- the official declined to comment, but would not dismiss a suggestion that the number is in the thousands. They are "knee deep in rockets," he said.
Discuss (5 comments) Email this | Link to thisAfter Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the most sought-after terrorist is Imad Mugnyiah, a Lebanese Shi'ite who lives in Beirut. NBC News has learned that U.S. counterterrorism agencies -– the CIA, DoD, FBI -- are constantly pursuing Mugniyah, who until Sept. 11 was the terrorist responsible for more American deaths than any other. Mugniyah is no doubt one of the targets of the Israeli attacks, said one U.S. official.
A little-known but powerful Hezbollah leader, Mugniyah moves freely around Beirut. But on occasion, he travels outside Lebanon and the U.S. tries to keep close tabs on him, even though he uses phony passports and aliases when he travels.
Discuss (18 comments) Email this | Link to thisAnalysts say there are two possible reasons and they are not mutually exclusive. Israel wants to keep Iranian arms from getting in and Israeli captives from being flown out.
Beirut Airport has long been key to Iran's supply of all kinds of material to Hezbollah. Iran's Revolutionary Guard has supplied Hezbollah with more than $1 billion of supplies over the past 25 years, say U.S. intelligence officials, as much as $150 million a year during tense times. The majority of it is flown in on an Iranian 747 cargo jet that unloads at Beirut Airport, where Hezbollah agents pick it up and drive it to the Bekkah valley south of the Lebanese capital. Anti-aircraft batteries, Katyusha rockets, armored vehicles, small arms, anti-tank missiles, etc. have all been sent. Beirut is the only airport in Lebanon capable of handling that 747. The initial deployment was in 1982 with planes bringing in supplies as needed. By the 1990s the flights had fallen to a quarterly routine. With Hezbollah under fire in Israel, now would be a time to resupply.
Discuss (1269 comments) Email this | Link to thisMany of the men who were arrested this weekend in southern Ontario met in Internet chatrooms. Some, officials say, had met only online and others had extensive dealings with like-minded Islamic radicals around the world -- again online. How does this happen?
A few years ago, an intelligence official told me that al-Qaida was using sports chatrooms to communicate. It seemed bizarre until I decided to join a couple to see just what opportunities there were out there.
It didn't take long for me to be drawn into a larger online community, this one focused on the New Jersey Nets, the NBA team in my home state. I didn't want to join a chatroom that might present a conflict for me. I didn't want, for example, to be tempted into using some material I had obtained for NBC in order to win an argument and I didn't want my personal opinions confusing my objectivity.
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