The Quincy soldier mysteriously slain by a bullet to the head on a secure Afghanistan airbase feared something might happen to her after discovering “something she didn’t like,” her devastated family revealed.

Massachusetts National Guard Spc. Ciara Durkin, 30, was found with a single gunshot wound to her head behind a building at Bagram Airbase on Sept. 27.

“The last time she was home she said she had seen things that she didn’t like and she had raised concerns that had annoyed some people,” said Durkin’s sister Fiona Canavan, 44, of Quincy.

The US administration has shifted strategy and is drawing up plans for possible air strikes against Iran’s Revolutionary Guard instead of the country’s nuclear sites, the New Yorker magazine reported on Sunday.

President George W. Bush has requested the Joint Chiefs of Staff revise plans for a possible attack on Iran, with the focus on “surgical” raids against the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps which Washington accuses of targeting US forces in Iraq, the magazine wrote.

Read the full New Yorker article here

Six years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the entity known as al-Qaeda remains largely a mystery: its intent, its ideology, its leadership, and its inner workings are all largely unknown to the American people. Experts study them and interpret the arcane meanings of their utterances in light of Koranic verses. The president of the United States and his allies aver that they hate us because we’re so free, so prosperous, so utterly fabulous – yet still al-Qaeda is, at least in the popular mind, an army of shadows, in the sense that they don’t seem quite real.

One after another, the men and women who have stepped forward to report corruption in the massive effort to rebuild Iraq have been vilified, fired and demoted.

Or worse.

For daring to report illegal arms sales, Navy veteran Donald Vance says he was imprisoned by the American military in a security compound outside Baghdad and subjected to harsh interrogation methods.

The Internet is the new battleground against Islamist extremism because it provides ideology that could radicalize Westerners who might then initiate home-grown attacks, New York police commissioner Raymond Kelly said on Wednesday.

“The Internet is the new Afghanistan,” Kelly said, as he released a New York Police Department (NYPD) report on the home-grown threat of attacks by Islamist extremists. “It is the de facto training ground. It’s an area of concern.”