The Daily Omnivore

Weatherman, known colloquially as the Weathermen and later the Weather Underground Organization (WUO), was an American radical left organization. It originated in 1969 as a faction of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Their goal was to create a clandestine revolutionary party for the violent overthrow of the US government and the establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat. With leadership whose revolutionary positions were characterized by Black separatist rhetoric, the group conducted a campaign of bombings through the mid-1970s, including aiding the jailbreak and escape of Timothy Leary.

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Unit 8200 is an Israeli Defence Force (IDF) Intelligence Corps unit, responsible for collecting signal intelligence and code decryption. It is the largest unit in the IDF, with several thousand soldiers. It is comparable in its function to the United States’ National Security Agency, except that it is not a separate civilian body.

In March 2004, The Commission to investigate the intelligence network following the War in Iraq recommended turning the unit into a civilian National SIGINT Agency, as is largely the case in other Western countries, but this proposal has yet to be implemented. Urim SIGINT Base is the most important signal intelligence-gathering installation operated by Israel’s military and is part of Unit 8200. The Urim base is located in the Negev desert approximately 30km from Beersheba.

The Reagan Doctrine was a strategy orchestrated and implemented by the United States under the Reagan Administration to oppose the global influence of the Soviet Union during the final years of the Cold War. While the doctrine lasted less than a decade, it was the centerpiece of United States foreign policy from the early 1980s until the end of the Cold War in 1991. Under the Reagan Doctrine, the U.S. provided overt and covert aid to anti-communist guerrillas and resistance movements in an effort to ‘rollback’ Soviet-backed communist governments in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Most notably, the mujahideen in Afghanistan and the contras in Nicaragua.

The doctrine was designed to serve the dual purposes of diminishing Soviet influence in these regions, while also potentially opening the door for capitalism (and sometimes liberal democracy) in nations that were largely being governed by Soviet-supported socialist governments. However, since the September 11 attacks, some critics have argued that, by facilitating the transfer of large amounts of weapons to various areas of the world and by training military leaders in these regions, the Reagan Doctrine actually contributed to ‘blowback’ by strengthening some political and military movements that ultimately developed hostility toward the United States, such as al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.