Al-CIA-duh

"Fake terror plots, paid informants: the tactics of FBI 'entrapment' questioned"

2011-12-06T04:37:00.000-08:00

The FBI is good at creating terrorism cases and then busting them up.

Pentagon's Fake Jihadists = al-CIA-duh

2011-08-20T13:53:00.000-07:00

Or consider what American computer specialists are doing on the Internet, perhaps terrorist leaders’ greatest safe haven, where they recruit, raise money and plot future attacks on a global scale. American specialists have become especially proficient at forging the onscreen cyber-trademarks used by Al Qaeda to certify its Web statements, and are posting confusing and contradictory orders, some so virulent that young Muslims dabbling in jihadist philosophy, but on the fence about it, might be driven away.

And in a classified tactic used multiple times across the Middle East, American military and intelligence officers have hacked the cellphones of terrorist leaders using computer code, to lure them into an ambush or spread the word that fellow cell members were embezzling money or plotting against their comrades. Distrust of secure communications disrupts and even deters action.

So, yeah. Sure, this just started after 9/11. Riiight. Also, is there any doubt that this set-up is fucking asking for trouble, and is just made to inspire terrorist attacks????

Intel Center and Al-CIA-duh Video

2011-06-19T05:56:00.000-07:00

Krawetz was also able to determine that the writing on the banner behind al-Zawahiri’s head was added to the image afterward. In the second picture above showing the results of the error level analysis, the light clusters on the image indicate areas of the image that were added or changed. The subtitles and logos in the upper right and lower left corners (IntelCenter is an organization that monitors terrorist activity and As-Sahab is the video production branch of al Qaeda) were all added at the same time all have the same error level, while the banner writing was added at a different time has a different error level, likely around the same time that al-Zawahiri was added, Krawetz says. (See 2nd update below.)

Even more interesting is the analysis he conducted on another 2006 video image of Azzam al-Amriki showing him in a white room with a desk, computer and some books in the background. Error level analysis shows that the books in the lower right-hand corner of the image have a different error level than the items in the rest of the image, suggesting they were added later. In fact the books register the same error level as the subtitles and As-Sahab logo.

Further analysis also shows that the books have a different color range than the rest of the image, indicating that they came from an alternate source. Krawetz wasn’t able to determine what the books were but says if they were religious books, they might have simply been added to lend authority and reverence to the video. It’s also possible, he says, that such details could be added to a picture to send a message in code to al Qaeda operatives.Azzam_alamriki_3

UPDATE: For those of you who asked for Krawetz’s program, you can view the source code here.

You can also view his BlackHat presentation here (PDF). For those of you who think the software is better used to catch media manipulations of photos and video, Krawetz did present examples of these in his talk.

And to "Ann" who commented that she doubts al Qaeda would put subtitles on a video, As-Sahab, the logo in the lower left corner of the two al Qaeda videos is the production arm of al Qaeda. Yes, the organization has its own media production team.

2ND UPDATE: I quoted Krawetz as saying that the evidence indicates that the IntelCenter and As-Sahab logos were added to the al-Zawahiri video at the same time. Ben Venzke of IntelCenter says his organization didn’t add the As-Sahab logo. He points out that just because the error levels are the same for two items in an image, that doesn’t prove they were added at the same time, only that the compression was the same for both items when they were added.

3rd UPDATE: I was finally able to reach Neal Krawetz at the BlackHat conference to respond to the questions about the IntelCenter and As-Sahab logos (Krawetz doesn’t have a cell phone on him so finding him at the conference took a while). He now says that the error levels on the IntelCenter and As-Sahab logos are different and that the IntelCenter logo was added after the As-Sahab logo. However, in a taped interview I conducted with him after his presentation, he said the logos were the same error levels and that this indicated they were added at the same time. Additionally, after I’d written the first blog entry about his presentation, I asked him to read it to make sure everything was correct. He did so while sitting next to me and said it was all correct. He apologizes now for the error and the confusion it caused.

All just a silly mistake, riiiight. Comments are again, more honest than the actual piece.

Why Are the Feds Cultivating Their Own "Homegrown Terrorists"?

2010-12-21T07:10:00.000-08:00

The FBI caught another homegrown terrorist this week, except like many recent plots the agency has “uncovered,” the attack was a plant, a plan concocted by the FBI itself. It’s the latest in a growing number of terrorism plots that the FBI stirs up by infiltrating communities and helping to devise attack plans. The practice raises serious questions about the government’s implementation of it’s ongoing war on terror.

Mohamed Osman Mohamud

2010-11-29T06:44:00.000-08:00

"FBI stopped Portland bomb suspect from taking job before sting"

It may very well be that the FBI successfully and within legal limits arrested a dangerous criminal intent on carrying out a serious Terrorist plot that would have killed many innocent people, in which case they deserve praise. Court-approved surveillance and use of undercover agents to infiltrate terrorist plots are legitimate tactics when used in accordance with the law.

But it may also just as easily be the case that the FBI -- as they've done many times in the past -- found some very young, impressionable, disaffected, hapless, aimless, inept loner; created a plot it then persuaded/manipulated/entrapped him to join, essentially turning him into a Terrorist; and then patted itself on the back once it arrested him for having thwarted a "Terrorist plot" which, from start to finish, was entirely the FBI's own concoction.

Ya think?

The Greenwald piece on this is worth reading in entirety.

David Headley-- DEA-Paid Terrorist

2010-11-14T08:03:00.001-08:00

The DEA "ignored" signs that their informant David Headley, plotter of the 2008 Mumbai attacks was becoming an Islamic radical.

Pentagon Lunch for Anwar al-Awlaki

2010-10-23T16:45:00.001-07:00

So what exactly did they serve at this "lunch"?

A US citizen linked to Al Qaeda who is being targeted for extra-judicial killing by the CIA lunched at the Pentagon several months after the 9/11 attacks, news sources confirmed Wednesday.

Anwar al-Awlaki, a Muslim cleric born in New Mexico who is now believed to be in Yemen, was invited to have lunch at the Pentagon shortly after 9/11 as part of the military's outreach effort to Muslims, officials confirmed to NBC News.

"It's clear at the time (when the Pentagon was reaching out to Muslims) that no one here knew of any terrorist ties Awlaki may have had," an unnamed "senior Pentagon official" told NBC.

But the FBI evidently did know. NBC News reports that al-Awlaki was actually interviewed three times by the FBI shortly after the 9/11 attacks, as he had been in contact with three of the alleged hijackers. Fox News reports that three were Nawaf al-Hazmi, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Hani Hanjour, all of whom were aboard Flight 77.

But at the time the Pentagon saw al-Awlaki as "an 'up and coming' member of the [moderate] Islamic community. After ... vetting, [Awlaki] was invited to and attended a luncheon at the Pentagon in the secretary of the Army's Office of [General] Counsel," according to documents obtained by Fox.

Al-Awlaki has been linked to no less than three recent terrorist plots or attacks on US soil. His name first rose to prominence in the US last year, when it was alleged that accused Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan emailed the cleric.

This guy screams "al-CIA-duh".

Ali Mohamed: an Al Qaeda/FBI Operative in the US Military Command

2010-06-05T07:17:00.000-07:00

An al Qaeda operative at Fort Bragg

By JOHN SULLIVAN AND JOSEPH NEFF, Raleigh News & Observer

FORT BRAGG, N.C. -- A former sergeant at Fort Bragg who became a close adviser to Osama bin Laden obtained sensitive documents describing how U.S. special operations units function.

Ali A. Mohamed, a trusted trainer in bin Laden's al Qaeda network, walked the halls of the U.S. military's top warfare planning center at Fort Bragg for more than two years as an Army sergeant.

From 1987 to 1989, he acquired sensitive documents describing how special operations units work and a detailed plan for a special operations training exercise, court documents say. The exercise was for an attack on Baluchistan, a part of Pakistan wedged between Afghanistan and the Arabian Sea.

From 1981 until his arrest in 1998, Mohamed was a key member of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and he belonged to al Qaeda through the 1990s. He is in prison in an undisclosed location awaiting sentencing for his role in planning the 1998 car bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kenya, which killed 224 people and injured 4,500. Among those who served at The John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School while Mohamed was there, there is disagreement over the quantity of the documents he obtained and over the extent to which that information may compromise the U.S. military effort in Afghanistan.

But court files make clear that Mohamed did obtain numerous documents from Fort Bragg, including some labeled "top secret."

In 1990, the FBI found Army documents that Mohamed gave to an Islamic extremist later convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing conspiracy. Included were top-secret documents identified as belonging to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Commander in Chief of the Army's Central Command, according to an FBI inventory. "There is no doubt that his proximity, in hindsight, was very harmful," said one former Special Forces officer who spoke on the condition that he not be identified. "Does this hurt our efforts now? Absolutely."

But another officer who worked on the Baluchistan exercise said he didn't think knowledge of the late-1980s training exercise or documents used to plan it would jeopardize the U.S. military.

"We pulled that exercise out of the air," said retired Lt. Col. Lonnie R. Poole, who lives in Stockdale, Texas. "You can get more accurate information by going off post and buying a training book."

Mohamed's background made him an ideal spy for Islamic extremists at Fort Bragg. As a major in the Egyptian military's special operations forces, he took an officer training course for Green Berets at Fort Bragg in 1981. The U.S. military offered the course to dozens of foreign soldiers each year.

About the same time, he joined Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a group dedicated to overthrowing the government of Egypt and responsible for the 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.

In 1984, after obtaining a degree in psychology, Mohamed immigrated to the United States, joined the U.S. Army and was attached to the Fifth Special Forces -- presumably because of his fluency in Arabic and familiarity with the Middle East. Though he was not a member of the Special Forces, he spent much of his time teaching Green Berets and others in special operations.

From 1981 until his arrest in September 1998, Mohamed was in contact with the U.S. government. He tried, without apparent success, to sign up as a CIA operative. "He was an active source for the FBI, a double agent," said Larry Johnson, a former CIA agent and director of counterterrorism at the State Department during the first Bush administration.

For a military spy such as Mohamed, there would be few better places to be than the JFK School in the late 1980s. At the time, the U.S. military was combining the special operations units from all service branches under one command. For months, planners at Fort Bragg worked to create the new command structure. "The JFK School was the architect for the structure --how it would operate the missions it would undertake and how it would train," said retired Gen. David J. Baratto of Alexandria, Va., who was in charge of developing the command.

Several officers recalled that Mohamed showed a keen interest in the Baluchistan training exercise, called the Special Operations Staff Officer Course Command Post Exercise, or SOSOC CPX. The exercise was designed to help Special Forces officers learn how to fight a guerrilla leader staging an insurgency in Baluchistan. The scenario had the leader taking over the region and threatening U.S. interests. "The exercise was designed to use Special Forces, Psychological Operations and Civil Affairs," Poole said.

Baratto and others disagree on the value of the information. He said the guidelines for how the forces operate would not change, but much else would. "I know as much about Special Forces as anyone, and I could not lay out for you a scenario with any accuracy about what is being done in Afghanistan today," he said. Baratto acknowledged that the exercise serves as the foundation for off-the-shelf plans, and that means much of the way the military operates in them would be the same in the exercise as in the plan.

Chester Richards, a retired Air Force Reserve colonel and military strategist, said bin Laden's forces would love to get their hands on a Command Post Exercise or the documents that go into one. "It would be out of date," Richards said, "but it would be quite valuable and give him some insight, allow him to get inside our minds and how we do battle."

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)

Also--

Last year, a former U.S. Army sergeant, Egyptian-born Ali Mohamed, admitted that he had been involved in the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Africa that were blamed on Osama bin Laden. Mohamed told a New York court that he helped train members of bin Laden's terrorist organization, Al-Qaeda.

A book originally published abroad, "Dollars for Terror," by Swiss television journalist Richard Labévière, suggests that Ali Mohamed was an active agent of U.S. policy who trained bin Laden's agents in the New York area.

Labévière, who conducted a four-year investigation, concluded that the international Islamic networks linked to bin Laden were nurtured and encouraged by elements of the U.S. intelligence community, especially during the Clinton years.

Labévière's thesis strikes some as too outlandish to accept, but Larry Johnson, a former deputy director of the Office of Counterterrorism at the State Department who had previously worked for the CIA, confirms it at least in part.

He told the San Francisco Chronicle that the CIA had a brief relationship with Ali Mohamed after he offered in 1984 to provide information about terrorist groups in the Middle East.

In 1981, the year in which Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was assassinated by army officers who belonged to the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Mohamed joined that terrorist group. Seven years later he told Lt. Col. Robert Anderson, "Anwar Sadat was a traitor, and he had to die."

Larry Johnson told the Chronicle that the CIA had ended its relationship with Mohamed because they found him unreliable, but he said the FBI later used him as an informant. Johnson said the FBI should have recognized that he was a terrorist who was plotting violence against the U.S. "The FBI assumed he was their source," Johnson said, "but his loyalties lay elsewhere."

Ali Mohamed was sent to Ft. Bragg in 1981 to train with the Green Berets for four months. Returning to Egypt, he spent three more years in the Egyptian army with the rank of major. He quit in 1984 and took a security job with Egypt Air. That was when he approached the CIA.

In 1985, Mohamed obtained a U.S. visa. He came here in 1986, enlisted in the U.S. Army at age 34 and was assigned to Special Forces at Ft. Bragg as a supply sergeant. Lt. Col. Anderson thought it strange that a major in the Egyptian army unit that killed President Anwar Sadat would be given a visa to come to the U.S. and that he would be accepted by our Army and assigned to Special Forces.

Anderson assumed that Mohamed was sponsored by the CIA, but Larry Johnson told the Raleigh News & Observer, "He was an active source for the FBI, a double agent." Johnson charged that the FBI "did a lousy job of managing him. He was holding out on them. He had critical information years ago and didn't give it up."

That probably explains why Ali Mohamed's plea agreement was sealed by the court and remains so until this day. The other four defendants, all of whom were foreign nationals, testified at the trial, and all were convicted.

Mohamed did not testify for reasons which have yet to be explained. He and his attorney have not been available for interviews. It appears that the secrecy was invoked to spare the FBI and the Army painful embarrassment.

In 1988, while still on active duty, Mohamed took leave to go to Afghanistan and fight the Russians. Lt. Col. Anderson told the Chronicle this was "contrary to all Army regulations." He said he wrote reports to get Mohamed investigated, court-martialed and deported, but no action was taken.

The News & Observer says that near the end of his tour at Ft. Bragg, Mohamed would go to New Jersey on weekends to train Islamic fundamentalists in surveillance, weapons and explosives.

This Egyptian terrorist was honorably discharged in 1989 with commendations for "patriotism, valor, fidelity and professional excellence." He later became an American citizen.

Mohamed traveled abroad to meet with bin Laden and his operatives. He helped move him from Afghanistan to Sudan, and in 1996 he helped him and his aides move back to Afghanistan.

He handled sensitive security matters for bin Laden, trained his bodyguards and his fighters in Afghanistan and translated training manuals from English to Arabic.

He cased the American Embassy in Nairobi for bin Laden, helping plan the bombing that killed 224 people and wounded over 4,500. And all this time he was a trusted FBI informant.

No wonder bin Laden thought his audacious terrorist attack of September 11 could succeed.

Clear Saudi Link to al Qaeda/al-CIA-duh

2010-06-05T05:23:00.000-07:00

The King of Saudi Arabia has strongly criticized the country's intelligence officials for disclosing a secret document, which shows Riyadh has links with terrorist activities carried out by al-Qaeda in Iraq.

According to a report by Iraq's Buratha news agency on Friday, King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz ordered a special committee to investigate the intelligence leak and inform him about those liable in the case.

Some 37 members of Saudi's intelligence service, accused of being behind the leakage of the confidential document, were also reported to have been arrested.

The condemnation by the Saudi monarch comes as the Iraqi news agency disclosed the amount of money transferred by Saudi government officials to al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Saudi officials are also reported to send explosives and weapons to the terrorist groups.

Meanwhile, Secretary General of the Saudi National Security Council Prince Bandar Bin Sultan Bin Abdul Aziz is said to be the main guilty behind the case.

The report came as earlier last week, Saudi army officer Abdullah al-Qahtani was arrested in Iraq over charges of planning a terrorist attack during the upcoming FIFA World Cup in South Africa.

The Saudi national entered Iraq in 2004 and was involved in militant operations carried out by al-Qaeda.

The Highly Suspicious Story of "Revolution Muslim"

2010-04-25T07:30:00.000-07:00

The "radical Islamic" website is almost certainly a CIA job.

Here We Go Again-- Intel Agencies "Knew" of the Bombing Plot, But Failed to "Connect the Dots"

2009-12-31T04:45:00.001-08:00

The National Security Agency four months ago intercepted conversations among leaders of Al Qaeda in Yemen discussing a plot to use a Nigerian man for a coming terrorist attack, but American spy agencies later failed to combine the intercepts with other information that might have disrupted last week’s attempted airline bombing.

The electronic intercepts were translated and disseminated across classified computer networks, government officials said on Wednesday, but analysts at the National Counterterrorism Center in Washington did not synthesize the eavesdropping intelligence with information gathered in November when the father of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, now accused of the attempted bombing, visited the United States Embassy in Nigeria to express concerns about his son’s radicalization.

The father, a wealthy Nigerian businessman named Alhaji Umaru Mutallab, had urgently sought help from American and Nigerian security officials when cellphone text messages from his son revealed that he was in Yemen and had become a fervent radical.

A family cousin quoted the father as warning officials from the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency in Nigeria: “Look at the texts he’s sending. He’s a security threat.”

The father of terrorism suspect Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab talked about his son's extremist views with someone from the CIA and a report was prepared, but the report was not circulated outside the agency, a reliable source told CNN's Jeanne Meserve on Tuesday.

So-- HOW LONG ARE PEOPLE GOING TO PUT UP WITH THIS BULLSHIT AND NOT SEE WHAT IT GOING ON? AND REALLY, JUST *FUCK* THE IDIOTIC POLITICIANS, MAKING THIS A PARTISAN ISSUE WHEN IT IS SO MUCH DEEPER AND THEY SHOULD KNOW BETTER.

Tipping Off the Assets

2009-12-26T14:50:00.000-08:00

A story from about a week ago, but still important:

WASHINGTON – Insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan have intercepted live video feeds from Predator drones, a key weapon in a Pentagon spy system that serves as the military's eyes in the sky for surveillance and intelligence collection. (snip) Obtaining the video feeds can provide insurgents with critical information about what the military may be targeting, including buildings, roads and other facilities. (snip) The interception, first done there at least a year ago, was possible because the remotely flown planes had unprotected communications links.

Within the last several months, the military has found evidence of at least one instance where insurgents in Afghanistan also monitored U.S. drone video, a second defense official said.
(snip) The Predator, also currently used in the hunt for al-Qaida and other militants in Pakistan, Somalia and elsewhere, can fly for hours remotely controlled by pilots thousands of miles away. It can fly armed or unarmed, and is part of a growing arsenal of such craft that includes the Reaper and Raven as well as a new, high-tech video sensor system called the Gorgon Stare, being installed on Reapers.

The military has known about the vulnerability for more than a decade, but assumed adversaries would not be able to exploit it.

Weren't these used to look for "al Qaeda" several years before 9/11? And how freaking hard is it to encrypt a video feed?

It seems the obvious conclusion is that someone in the military/CIA wanted the feeds to be hacked, in order to tip off the terrorist assets where the drones were.

Pakistani Journalist Dares to Ask Hillary Clinton If Drone Attacks Are a Form of Terrorism

2009-10-30T10:01:00.000-07:00

How DARE they!

During an interview with Clinton broadcast live in Pakistan with several prominent female TV anchors, before a predominantly female audience of several hundred, one member of the audience said the Predator attacks amount to ''executions without trial'' for those killed.

Another asked Clinton how she would define terrorism.

''Is it the killing of people in drone attacks?'' she asked. That woman then asked if Clinton considers drone attacks and bombings like the one that killed more than 100 civilians in the city of Peshawar earlier this week to both be acts of terrorism.

''No, I do not,'' Clinton replied.

Of course, you gotta love the message (bombing) sent by al-CIA-duh that coincided with Clinton's visit. One would think that real jihadist enemies of America would have targeted Clinton's entourage instead of Pakistani Muslims. The symbolism is clear though: when the US visits, terrorism visits too.

Zazi and Other Recent Domestic Terrorists

2009-09-27T08:54:00.000-07:00

Because of the great hype around this case, calling it the most serious US plot since 9/11, I have been trying to get a handle on it.

First off, the threat from these home-made beauty store-ingredient bombs was just not that significant:

In the chapati flour and peroxide bomber case, the prosecution took pains to convince that the bombs, which fizzled, were deadly. In this, a variety of experts were trotted out to make statements to point in this general direction. They were never particularly convincing, except as arguments from authority, asserting that cobbled-together soggy things consisting of flour and an indeterminate concentration of store bought hydrogen peroxide would be dangerous without explaining how or why.

The more accurate picture was that the bomb-makers were yet another dismal collection of stupid al Qaeda men, in contravention of the usual received wisdom in the media that jihadists are Islamo-MacGyvers, always well-trained, efficient, smart and capable of whipping up a batch of death from anything.

Indeed, it is a bit hard to see how diluted impure components are going to give an effective bomb. And as to Zazi's mental capacity, a relative quoted in this article said he was simply dumb.

The next point is that this was a non-US citizen initially from Afghanistan, who traveled regularly to Pakistan. Is there any doubt he was under complete surveillance for some time? Notably, none of the articles I found mentioned exactly how the feds closed in on him-- what first tipped them off to his activities. I imagine they were watching him for years.

It is interesting and probably significant that Zazi attended the 33rd Street mosque in NYC.

This WaPo article is freaking some people out as it says his associates are still unknown and at large. Be afraid, very afraid!

Interesting that there were some other terror cases busted around the same time, though they weren't as "scary". One of them, Hosam Maher Husein Smadi, who wanted to blow up a building in Dallas, was supplied by the FBI with a fake truck bomb as part of the sting. Somewhat, reminiscent of the first WTC bombing story.

Here are some other links on the Zazi case:
The NYC Terror Plot: What Do We Know?
Alleged Terror Plotter Indicted.
Feds: Zazi Bought Beauty Products To Build Bomb.

The bottom line is, despite the hype, it seems fairly clear these terror cases were controlled from the get-go. With the Zazi case, there are still unnamed associates, and who wants to bet one or more of the them is a govt informant or intel agent?

al-CIA-duh Odds and Ends, Part 2

2009-07-05T16:14:00.000-07:00

The CIA commander in charge of the capture of Bin Laden during the invasion of Afghanistan said that the U.S. let Bin Laden escape from Afghanistan
A retired Colonel and Fox News military analyst said:
"We know, with a 70 percent level of certainty — which is huge in the world of intelligence — that in August of 2007, bin Laden was in a convoy headed south from Tora Bora. We had his butt, on camera, on satellite. We were listening to his conversations. We had the world’s best hunters/killers — Seal Team 6 — nearby. We had the world class Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) coordinating with the CIA and other agencies. We had unmanned drones overhead with missiles on their wings; we had the best Air Force on the planet, begging to drop one on the terrorist. We had him in our sights; we had done it ....Unbelievably, and in my opinion, criminally, we did not kill Usama bin Laden."

French soldiers insist that they easily could have captured or killed Bin Laden, but that the American commanders stopped them
In other words - as demonstrated above - the U.S. did not really try to capture Bin Laden.

And remember that the Congressional Joint Inquiry into 9/11 discovered that an FBI informant had hosted and rented a room to two hijackers in 2000 and that, when the Inquiry sought to interview the informant, the FBI refused outright, and then hid him in an unknown location, and that a high-level FBI official stated these blocking maneuvers were undertaken under orders from the White House (confirmed here by the Co-Chair of the Joint Inquiry and former Head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Bob Graham; and see this Newsweek article).

And that a key Al Qaeda trainer actually worked with the Green Berets and the CIA and was an FBI informant.

And that the CIA may have helped most of the 9/11 hijackers get their visas to the U.S.

And that CIA agents allegedly met with Bin Laden two months before 9/11, when he was already supposedly wanted for the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, and when it was obvious to the intelligence services that he was supposedly planning 9/11.

Via.

Whistleblower Who Linked “Taliban” Leader To US Intelligence Is Assassinated

2009-06-27T05:52:00.000-07:00

A whistleblower who defected from the Pakistani Taliban has been assassinated just days after he claimed that the group was working with US intelligence to destabilize the country.

Qari Zainuddin, a tribal leader of the South Waziristan region in Pakistan was shot dead on Tuesday by a gunman said to be loyal to Pakistani Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud.

Analysts said that Mr Zainuddin’s murder was a serious blow to the military campaign against the militants, as support of his faction was considered crucial, reports the London Times. “[It] is a warning to other pro government tribal commanders,” said Mahmood Shah, a retired brigadier who had served as top official in the tribal region.

Another al-FBI-duh Plot

2009-05-23T05:13:00.000-07:00

Four men were arrested on charges linked with planning attacks against a Jewish synagogue and US warplanes based at a New York military base, prosecutors said.

The men, who according to a US congressman were all born in the United States, were arrested “on charges arising from a plot to detonate explosives near a synagogue in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, New York,” according to the complaint filed at a White Plains, New York federal court.

The group, residing in New York, where Al-Qaeda extremists with hijacked commercial airliners destroyed the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001, also “planned to shoot down military planes located at the New York Air National Guard Base at Stewart Airport in Newburgh, New York, with Stinger surface-to-air guided missiles,” officials said.

Gee, I wonder if an FBI informant played any role in this plot...

The suspects — identified as James Cromitie, also known as Abdul Rahman; David Williams, also known as Daoud or simply DL; Onta Williams, also known as Hamza; and Laguerre Payen, also known as Amin and Almondo — had been tracked for over a year, officials said.

In the major part of the plan, to obtain weapons for the attack, the defendants dealt with an FBI informant who provided the group “with an inactive missile and inert explosives.”

D'oh!

But there's more--

... it's not clear whether these men would have carried out any terror plot without encouragement and material support from an FBI informant. The New York Times reports that "a federal law enforcement official described the plot as "aspirational" -- meaning that the suspects wanted to do something but had no weapons or explosives."

Indeed, the complaint paints a picture of a plot in which the FBI informant played a central role from the start. The informant met Cromitie, the apparent ringleader of the plot, last June at a Newburgh mosque. Cromitie told the informant that his parents had lived in Afghanistan, that he was upset about the US killing Muslims in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and that he would like to do "something to America." Soon after, the informant falsely told Cromitie that he (the informant) was a member of the Pakistan-based terror group Jaish-e-Mohammed. Cromitie said he too would like to join, in order to "do Jihad."

From there, the plot began to slowly take shape, with the informant playing a central role throughout. The informant helped to procure fake homemade bombs, and accompanied the men in obtaining a surface-to-air guided missile system and three IEDs. The informant also accompanied the men in buying handguns for use in the plot.

Group leader Cromitie a "pothead".

More on the group here. About the FBI Informant and the summary:

The Informant
- An upstate motel owner, identified by the New York Post as Shahed Hussain, 52, he became a government informant in 2002, after he was busted for helping immigrants cheat on drivers tests while working as a DMV translator. He was hoping to win leniency in his sentencing and avoid being deported to Pakistan. (It's unclear how the Post got Hussain's name. A spokeswoman for the US attorney's office told TPMmuckraker it was not released by the government).
- He started showing up at the Newburgh mosque, where all four men attended services, around 2007. An imam at the mosque said he invited other worshipers out for meals, and talked about Jihad. "There was just something fishy about him," said the imam, saying that some members "believed he was a government agent."
- The imam also said he had been told that Hussain offered at least one member of the congregation a substantial amount of money to join his "team."
- The owner of a local restaurant (either Denny's or Danny's -- reports differ) where the Newburgh Four would regularly eat rice and beans said that a few months ago, a fifth man starting showing up. He appeared to be of South Asian descent and would usually pay for the meal. The restaurant owner said he thought the man was the boss.
- This isn't his first sting operation. A few years ago, he posed as an arms dealer who had sold a shoulder-launched missile to be used to kill a Pakistani envoy. Two Albany men, Mohammed Hossain and Yassin Aref, helped him launder money from the supposed sale, and were convicted and sentenced to fifteen years in prison.

It's easy to laugh at this gang of goons -- and we've done our share of that. But, frankly, it's also hard not to feel some compassion for what looks like a group of struggling, credulous, under-educated men, existing on the fringes of society, who lacked the intelligence or willpower to avoid getting taken in by a government informant anxious to mitigate his own situation, and by their own vague understanding of radical Islam and the hole it might fill in their lives.

And as for what this might say about the threat of home-grown terror, it's almost reassuring that the biggest terror bust we've seen in a while has this sad-sack group at his center.

MI5 Blackmails British Muslims to be Agents

2009-05-23T05:08:00.000-07:00

Recruiting terrorists:

Five Muslim community workers have accused MI5 of waging a campaign of blackmail and harassment in an attempt to recruit them as informants.

The men claim they were given a choice of working for the Security Service or face detention and harassment in the UK and overseas.
They have made official complaints to the police, to the body which oversees the work of the Security Service and to their local MP Frank Dobson. Now they have decided to speak publicly about their experiences in the hope that publicity will stop similar tactics being used in the future.

Related articles

Home Secretary was warned of MI5's 'blackmailing of Muslims'
Pauline Neville-Jones: MI5 must use persuasion – not coercion
Bombings spooked security services

Intelligence gathered by informers is crucial to stopping further terror outrages, but the men's allegations raise concerns about the coercion of young Muslim men by the Security Service and the damage this does to the gathering of information in the future.
Three of the men say they were detained at foreign airports on the orders of MI5 after leaving Britain on family holidays last year.
After they were sent back to the UK, they were interviewed by MI5 officers who, they say, falsely accused them of links to Islamic extremism. On each occasion the agents said they would lift the travel restrictions and threat of detention in return for their co-operation. When the men refused some of them received what they say were intimidating phone calls and threats.
Two other Muslim men say they were approached by MI5 at their homes after police officers posed as postmen. Each of the five men, aged between 19 and 25, was warned that if he did not help the security services he would be considered a terror suspect. A sixth man was held by MI5 for three hours after returning from his honeymoon in Saudi Arabia. He too claims he was threatened with travel restrictions if he tried to leave the UK.
An agent who gave her name as Katherine is alleged to have made direct threats to Adydarus Elmi, a 25-year-old cinema worker from north London. In one telephone call she rang him at 7am to congratulate him on the birth of his baby girl. His wife was still seven months' pregnant and the couple had expressly told the hospital that they did not want to know the sex of their child.
Mr Elmi further alleges: "Katherine tried to threaten me by saying, and it still runs through my mind now: 'Remember, this won't be the last time we ever meet.' And then during our last conversation she explained: 'If you do not want anything to happen to your family you will co-operate.'"

Released Gitmo Detainees: al-CIA-duh Alert

2009-05-22T05:04:00.000-07:00

Marcy Wheeler makes a good catch:

What are the chances that some, or even most, of these "recidivist" terrorists are actually men we recruited to spy for us? That is, they may have "returned to terrorism or militant activity," but did so with our blessing, with the understanding they'd send back information on what those militant groups were doing.

We do know the US and its allies were using those captured as spies of a sort. Just last weekend, for example, newspapers in the UK reported that an "Informant A" was used by the Brits and Morrocco to try to get Binyam Mohamed to "cooperate" with his captives.

Mohamed, 31, says that in September 2002, after his 'extraordinary rendition' to North Africa, an agent known only as Informant A told him the torture would stop if he gave intelligence to the British.

The offer from the agent, a UK citizen of Moroccan descent, suggests that British security forces had the power to end his treatment, Mohamed's lawyer claims.

Mohamed already knew the agent from London.

[snip]

Clive Stafford Smith said: 'The Moroccans told Mr Mohamed that Informant A was working with the British Government and pressed Mr Mohamed to do the same if he wanted to end his torture.

[snip]

Informant A is said to have fought alongside Osama Bin Laden in the caves of Tora Bora.

He was said to have been captured and held at a U.S. base in Afghanistan in 2002, when he agreed to turn informant.

Terek Dergoul, held at the same base, said: 'One of the guards was saying, "We've got another 007".'
The language here is particularly interesting: the reference to Informant A as "another 007" and the suggestions that Mohamed should "work with the British Government." If Binyam Mohamed had agreed to spy for the Brits, would he have avoided all that horrible torture he suffered?

The possibility that these "recidivists" are actually our recruits spying on Islamic extremists for the Americans might explain a few details about the report. For example, the report only lists 29 of the 74 purported "recidivists" by name. It doesn't mention the others "because of national security and intelligence-gathering concerns." Sure, that might reflect a desire not to alert militants to our intelligence channels. It might also reflect a desire to protect our spies in the field.

And the possibility that at least some of these "recidivists" are now our spies might explain the hold-up on the release of the document.

This points out an important reason for torture: to turn captives into OUR terrorists!

Of course the Wheeler and the liberals at that blog never seem to make the obvious connection that 9/11 was (at minimum) done by "our" terrorists. I still can't figure whether most of these people are intel plants are just maddeningly dumb.

But in any case, here are the four main reasons I can figure for capturing foreigners and then torturing them:

1) to obtain false confessions to support whatever official story has been decided upon

2) to brainwash innocents into becoming terrorist-agents for us

3) to brainwash our terrorists to cover up what they have done for us

4) to anger captives into eventually taking up arms against the US (much like what happens when we bomb civilians-- innocents are angered into taking arms against the US)

Pakistani President Says Osama a US Operative

2009-05-10T18:28:00.001-07:00

While the headline is about whether Osama is dead or not (of course he isn't-- he can't be allowed to die!), the more notable thing is what Zardari says after stumbling around for a bit in this video. 36 seconds in: "We knew that he was your operator". Of course, David Gregory immediately changes the subject.

Smoking Gun

2009-05-07T04:49:00.001-07:00

Via "Emptywheel":

I just happened to find Dougie Feith's responses to Questions for the Record the Senate Intelligence Committee asked him in 2003. They wanted to know how his little intelligence shop at DOD--the Policy Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group (PCTEG)--bridged the line between intelligence and policy.

He said his little intelligence shop helped formulate policy on:

DoD response to the presence in Iraq of the al-Qaida affiliated Ansar al-Islam terrorist group.
DoD response to the presence in Iraq of al-Qaida operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his CB W network.
Helping to formulate requirements for the debriefings of al-Qaida fighters detained at Guantanamo and Bagram.
"Helping to formulate requirements for the debriefings of al-Qaida fighters?!?!?!?!"

DEBRIEFINGS OF AL-QAIDA FIGHTERS?!?!?!?!

Errr... doesn't "debriefing" refer to guys on OUR SIDE????

UK ‘Terror Plot’ Led by Man US Claimed to Kill Months Ago

2009-04-13T07:02:00.000-07:00

In November 2008, one of the many US drone strikes in North Waziristan killed five people. This was not unusual. What was is that the US claimed the killing of British citizen Rashid Rauf in the attack. Rauf was previously arrested in 2006 in connection with the “liquid explosives” plot in Britain.

Now, Britain’s MI5 is calling Rauf al-Qaeda’s “Director of Operations” in Europe and claims he was behind a reported plot to bomb shopping centers in Manchester, England.

This would seem to discount the official story behind the drone attack - one of the few times the United States has claimed to kill a target of any serious value in its scores of attacks on Pakistani soil.

"Al Qaeda" strikes even from the dead!

Never mind how someone arrested in 2006 for a terror plot got to Pakistan in the first place!

Pakistan's ISI still linked to Al-CIA-duh

2009-03-29T05:21:00.000-07:00

Like duh:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States has indications that elements of Pakistan's ISI military intelligence agency provide support to Taliban or al Qaeda militants, senior U.S. military officers said on Friday.

Navy Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Army General David Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command, said the agency must end such activities.

The officers made their remarks as the United States unveiled a new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, which promises more aid for Pakistan but seeks increased cooperation in the fight against al Qaeda and Taliban militants in return.

Mullen noted Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence service had links to militants on both its western border with Afghanistan and its eastern border with India.

"Fundamentally, the strategic approach with the ISI must change and their support ... for militants, actually on both borders, has to fundamentally shift," he told CNN television's "Situation Room" program.

Asked if there were still elements within the ISI who sympathized with or supported al Qaeda and the Taliban, Mullen said: "There are certainly indications that that's the case."

Although links between the ISI and Islamist militants are widely suspected, it is rare for senior U.S. officials to talk publicly about them, for fear of damaging possible cooperation with Pakistani authorities.

The New York Times, citing anonymous U.S. officials, reported on Wednesday that the Taliban's widening campaign in southern Afghanistan was made possible in part by direct support from ISI operatives.

A senior U.S. intelligence official, asked on Friday to describe the problem of ISI information-sharing with militants, said, "too big, too often."

He said Pakistan had in the past failed to act on "actionable intelligence" that could lead to a strike against militants.

What would be more interesting is a piece describing the links between the CIA and the ISI...

Outsourcing the War on Terror

2008-12-28T19:19:00.000-08:00

Peter Chamberlin:

Basically, the Pentagon and the CIA are working in tandem to force targeted nations like India and Pakistan to accept the decision which has been made to "outsource" the terror war to them and other patsy nations like them. Agency contract hits like the Mumbai attack and bombings in FATA are blamed on "al Qaida" by the government-controlled media in the West and in the media controlled by the "patsy" foreign governments. Biased, hate-based reporting serves to drive patriotic fervor to a frenzied state. The duplicitous leaders in those countries then carry-out America's will, to set them upon a path to war, in effect, driving their own people into a "kill trap" where unwanted war is forced upon them. This pattern prevails all over the earth, wherever the US has imperial designs. We are all being herded into a global war trap, some call it world war III.

American mini-dictator generals and crime bosses knew that their global war plans would require massive numbers of committed killers, a goal that a volunteer force could not fulfill. A conscripted army of unwilling, underpaid, over-committed soldiers, who might follow orders to commit genocide, would be unsatisfactory for the task, especially when the focus of the killing turns to their own homelands. No, the committed killers who have volunteered to be underpaid and overworked in order to gain the right to kill were too few in number, so they had to be supplemented. This is the reason that the US has created massive armies and navies of high-paying "civilian" contract killers (mercenaries).

But even the combination of federal troops and private armies is not great enough to fulfill the mission of global conquest. This is where the plan incorporates co-opted foreign armies, like those of India and Pakistan. Where NATO has failed to serve as a second American force, to command at will, these co-opted foreign armies under indirect US control are meant to fill the gap.

The CIA is using all the tricks of its dark and bloody trade to harness these foreign forces.

It continues to carry-out the trademark of its craft, the creation and arming of local warlords, criminal gangs and militias, to commit the acts of terrorism that will justify the government crackdown and drive the local population to support it. In the conflict building between India and Pakistan, American patsies on both sides are driving the two nations to serve America's violent interests in the region, that of containing both China and India, eliminating the "Islamic bombs" held by Pakistan, seizing pipeline routes and setting the stage for the next phase of the war plan, countering Russia and Iran.

American foreign aid and military assistance are twin traps for erasing national sovereignty and entrenching US interests within the aid-receiving governments. Targeted governments, like India and Pakistan are made so dependent upon the inflow of US dollars that they see the cut-off of that aid as an existential threat to their existence, equal to or surpassing the threat of war. What these leaders (who have all grown wealthy from skimming these dollars) either fail to realize or to consider at the cost of losing that wealth, is that the aid itself represents the greatest threat that their nations have ever faced. Their leaders, just like our leaders, whom they emulate, represent only themselves, as they continue to hoard the lifeblood of our nations.

American leaders and all the foreign leaders who work with them represent the greatest evil that this world has ever known. They are carrying-out and cooperating with the bloodiest, most devious plan ever devised by human minds, to grab all the wealth from all nations, regardless of the cost in human and animal life. Hitler and Stalin were mere "pikers," compared to our neocon/Zionist overlords. No previous tyrant or would-be dictator ever came as close to snuffing-out human freedom and individualism as these "Neo-American" dreamers have positioned themselves to do.

Collective human nature has never been so ready to surrender all rights for the privilege of working, eating or obtaining health care as it now stands prepared to do. Desperation remains the key to the warlords' success. The more desperation spreads, and the more desperate that people become to obtain the most basic of human needs, the more easily they will volunteer to become killers and to forsake all those insignificant things like human rights and morality that all of us resisters consider sacred.

What's at stake, besides the massive loss of life, is the massive reversal of all the gains and inroads made by human rights advocates throughout history and the complete elimination of the concepts of freedom and inalienable rights professed by America's founding fathers, for the sake of preserving the profit margins of today's robber barons.

Fort Dix Plot Conviction

2008-12-26T11:24:00.000-08:00

CAMDEN, New Jersey (Reuters) - Five men were convicted on Monday of conspiracy to kill U.S. soldiers in a planned attack on an Army base in New Jersey that prosecutors described as a bid to wage Islamist holy war against America.

The U.S. attorney said he would seek life sentences for the five foreign-born defendants, who were also found not guilty on charges of attempted murder after an eight-week trial.

Prosecutors had told the court the defendants were inspired by al Qaeda. Defense attorneys had argued that while the men talked the talk of militancy, it was all bravado and they had no real intention of carrying out the attack on Fort Dix army base, which was never executed.

Family members and defense lawyers said they believed the verdicts were influenced by suspicion of Muslims since the September 11 al Qaeda attacks.

The defendants, all born outside the United States, are ethnic Albanian brothers Shain, Dritan and Eljvir Duka who together ran a roofing business in Cherry Hill, New Jersey; Serdar Tatar, a convenience store clerk who was born in Turkey; and Mohamad Shnewer, a Jordanian-born taxi driver from Philadelphia. They are aged 23 to 30.

Acting U.S. Attorney Ralph Marra said prosecutors will press for sentences of life in prison without the possibility of parole. Sentencing was set for April 22-23.

Dritan and Shain Duka were also found guilty of possessing weapons to be used in the planned attack.

The five defendants smiled as they entered the court but did not react visibly when the verdicts were read. Defense lawyers said they would consider an appeal after sentencing.

FBI MOLES TAPED PLOTTERS

The men were arrested in May 2007 after a 14-month investigation in which two people working for the FBI infiltrated the group and obtained hundreds of hours of audio and video recordings of the men plotting an attack.

The probe was launched when an electronics store clerk went to the police after being asked by one of the men to copy a tape containing scenes of militants firing guns into the air.

As well as planning to attack Fort Dix, about 40 miles east of Philadelphia, prosecutors said the men discussed attacks on other military targets including Dover Air Force Base in Delaware and the U.S. Coast Guard in Philadelphia.

Serpil Tatar, sister of defendant Serdar Tatar, called the conviction "a big lie" that had undermined her faith in the United States. She denied her brother was a terrorist, saying: "My brother was crying for the people who died on September 11."

Attorney Richard Sparaco said Tatar's Muslim religion "seriously counted against him" in the trial.

Michael Riley, attorney for Shain Duka, said there was a danger people would accept the government's charges of terrorism too readily in the wake of the September 11 attacks.

"We can't accept whatever our government says at face value," Riley said.

Jurors said they did not reach their verdict lightly.

"This has been one of the most difficult things that we have ever had to do," the members of the sequestered jury said in a statement read to the court by U.S. District Judge Robert Kugler after six days of deliberations.

Conviction in British Terror Plot

2008-12-19T18:09:00.000-08:00

LINK

British Doctor Is Convicted in Failed 2007 Car Bombings

By JOHN F. BURNS

Published: December 16, 2008

LONDON — A terrorism trial centering on the use of a bomb-laden Jeep to crash into the main doors of Glasgow’s airport terminal on a Saturday afternoon in June 2007 ended on Tuesday with the conviction of a 29-year-old British doctor with family roots in Iraq who was one of the two men who mounted the attack.

Metropolitan Police, via European Pressphoto Agency

An undated photograph released by the London Metropolitan Police showing Bilal Abdulla with a gas canister in B&Q, a British home improvement store.

Metropolitan Police, via Associated Press

Bilal Abdulla

A jury found the man, Bilal Abdulla, a passenger in the Jeep Cherokee, guilty of two charges of conspiracy to commit murder and conspiracy to cause explosions in a series of three bungled car bombings in Glasgow and London over a 24-hour period. The judge in the case, Sir Colin Crichton McKay, will sentence Dr. Abdulla on Wednesday. Both charges carry potential life sentences.

The Jeep driver, Kafeel Ahmed, a 28-year-old Indian-born doctoral candidate in engineering who assembled the bombs, died a month later of severe burns received in the airport attack, which failed when gasoline canisters did not ignite propane gas cylinders in the Jeep’s trunk.

The day before, Dr. Abdulla and Mr. Ahmed drove to London’s West End theater district in two Mercedes-Benz sedans, primed with bombs similarly constructed from gasoline canisters and propane cylinders, along with 2,000 nails to serve as shrapnel. The cars were left parked outside a nightclub and beside a busy bus stop, while the two attackers waited nearby with mobile phones used as electronic detonators.

But evidence at the trial said the two vehicles failed to explode despite repeated signals from the mobile phones because of faulty assembly of the so-called fuel air bombs involved. Prosecutors said that a laptop owned by Dr. Abdulla — found in the Jeep that crashed into the air terminal — showed that the two men had studied blueprints for the bombs that they found on extremists’ Web sites.

In lengthy testimony at the trial, Dr. Abdulla said he intended only to give people in Britain “a taste of fear” and a “scare” with the bombings, not to kill people. But the chief prosecutor, Jonathan Laidlaw, said the timing of the attacks, at the height of Friday night crowds in central London, and on Glasgow airport’s busiest day of the year, showed the attackers aimed at “committing murder on an indiscriminate and wholesale scale.”

A third man, Mohammed Asha, 28, a Jordanian-born trainee neurosurgeon who, like Dr. Abdulla, was employed in Britain’s National Health Service, was acquitted of all charges. Dr. Asha had been accused of providing cash and advice to Dr. Abdulla, but his defense counsel said that he was a “pacifist” who had been duped into cooperating with the two bombers and that it was Dr. Abdulla who loaded documents suggesting terrorist sympathies onto Dr. Asha’s laptop computer.

Dr. Abdulla, who left Britain with his parents at the age of five and earned his medical degree at a university in Baghdad, is likely to receive at least a 30-year prison sentence, according to legal experts. As the guilty verdicts were read, he shook Dr. Asha’s hand in the dock. The Jordanian now faces a battle to avoid deportation, though the judge told him he hoped he would be able to remain in Britain to continue his training.

The trial, at Woolwich Crown Court in London, was one of a series of sensational terrorism trials in the past two years that have combined to foster widespread public anxiety in Britain about the risk of a major terrorist attack succeeding. Only one such attack, the quadruple suicide bombings on London’s transit system in July 2005, succeeded, killing 56 people, including the four bombers. But Britain’s intelligence agencies have repeatedly warned that the country remains at high risk of new attacks.

A notable feature of the trial was that it did not directly involve Islamic militants with a history of family ties or training in Pakistan, in the pattern of many of recent terrorist trials in Britain. Prime Minister Gordon Brown said during a weekend visit to the Indian subcontinent that three-quarters of all terrorist plots investigated by Britain’s intelligence and security agencies involved links to Pakistan, the ancestral homeland of about two-thirds of Britain’s Muslim population, which has been estimated at between 1.5 million and 2.5 million people.

The 2005 London transit bombings, as well as an alleged plot in 2006 to bomb at least seven trans-Atlantic airliners in midair with liquid bombs disguised in soft-drink bottles, involved extensive ties to Pakistan. The airliner bombing trial ended in September with a jury, also sitting at the Woolwich court, convicting three men of conspiring to commit mass murder through suicide bomb explosions, but failing to reach verdicts on charges that the men conspired to attack aircraft.

A new trial on those charges will begin early in 2009.

In the case of the Glasgow and London attacks, the plot had its origins in Iraq. Dr. Abdulla, identified by prosecutors as the plot’s mastermind, said he had deep affection for Britain, where his father, also a doctor, was working when he was born. But he said he resolved to strike out at Britain to draw attention to the suffering of Iraqis at the hands of coalition troops in Iraq, and what he described as the worldwide mistreatment of Muslims.

He said he became angry when, as a medical student, he experienced the sharp deterioration in hospital conditions in Baghdad under Western-supported economic sanctions in the 1990s, and later when he saw the suffering that allied bombing and occupying troops imposed on Iraqi civilians in the war that began in March 2003.

The prosecution said Dr. Abdulla had contacts with the Sunni insurgency in Iraq that began shortly after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and introduced as evidence entries in a diary he had kept during the period when he was planning the bombings. “The soldiers killed the young and the old,” he wrote, speaking of allied troops. “They do not discriminate between men and women, so why should we?”

Evidence at the trial showed that Britain’s intelligence services had warned the government about the risk that Sunni extremists in Iraq might seek to launch terrorist attacks in Britain. In 2004, a warning that some Iraqi militants “will come to the U.K.” to launch terror attacks was given by the Joint Intelligence Committee, a powerful coordinating body that reports to the prime minister.

At the trial, prosecutors noted that all three men implicated in the London and Glasgow bombings were middle class, with professional educations, and not from the poorer backgrounds common among many of the Islamic militants who have engaged in terrorist plots in Britain.

Jonathan Laidlaw, the chief prosecutor, told the jury that it might find it hard to believe that doctors dedicated to preventing suffering could become terrorists. “Frankly, who would have believed that doctors would involve themselves in this sort of murderous activity on the streets of this country?” he said.

Dr. Abdulla was a junior doctor at a state-run hospital in Paisley, a Glasgow suburb only a few miles from the airport at the time of the attack.

Mr. Ahmed was the son of two Indian doctors who migrated to Saudi Arabia, and was studying for a doctorate in computational fluid dynamics at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge at the time of the attacks. It was there that he met Dr. Abdulla, who had returned to Britain in 2004. Dr. Asha, found not guilty on Tuesday, was a trainee at a state-run hospital in Newcastle-under-Lyme in the British midlands.

“This case demonstrates, does it not,” Mr. Laidlaw told the jury, “that nothing can be taken for granted when you are dealing with extremists of this sort?”

Seeveral Gitmo "War Crimes" Trials Falling Apart

2008-10-21T20:01:00.000-07:00

The U.S. military abruptly dropped charges against five Guantanamo Bay detainees, including one who allegedly plotted to detonate a "dirty bomb" in the U.S., after a prosecutor accused the military of suppressing evidence that could have helped clear them.

But despite the decision, announced Tuesday, there are no plans to free the men. New trial teams are taking another look at the evidence, the military said, and after consulting with intelligence agencies will recommend whether to reinstate charges.

That means the administration of the next U.S. president will probably get to decide what to do with the cases, including that of Binyam Mohamed, accused of plotting with U.S. citizen Jose Padilla to set off a radioactive bomb and fill apartments with natural gas to blow up buildings.

Padilla was sentenced in Miami to more than 17 years in prison on charges of supporting terrorism after the "dirty bomb" allegations were discarded.

Lawyer Clive Stafford Smith has gone to U.S. and British civilian courts to obtain evidence that Mohamed, an Ethiopian who moved to Britain as a teenager, was tortured and falsely admitted to crimes to halt his agony.

Last month, Army Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, the prosecutor in all five cases, said the military was withholding evidence that could have helped clear the defendants. He resigned in what he called a crisis of conscience.

Stafford Smith said Vandeveld's accusations led to the dropped charges, though he added that the military has already said it plans to file new charges against Mohamed within a month.

"Far from being a victory for Mr. Mohamed in his long-running struggle for justice, this is more of the same farce that is Guantanamo," Stafford Smith said.

But the Pentagon denied Vandeveld's testimony had anything to do with the charges being dropped. The Pentagon reports recommending dismissal said only that the new prosecution teams taking over the cases needed more time to evaluate them.

"I find the prosecution has been unable to complete its preparation for this case," Pentagon legal adviser Michael Chapman concluded in two of his reports, copies of which were obtained by The Associated Press.

He recommended that the Pentagon official who oversees the tribunal system, Susan Crawford, dismiss the charges without prejudice, meaning they can be refiled later. She accepted the recommendations Monday.

Sixteen of the 255 men at Guantanamo Bay, a U.S. military base in southeast Cuba, now face charges in the first American war-crimes trials since the end of World War II. The military had previously dropped charges against a Saudi who allegedly had hoped to become a Sept. 11 hijacker.

al-CIA-duh in Iraq

2008-10-21T19:54:00.000-07:00

Where did they go wrong?

... the al-Qaeda model of 4GW may be failing for inherent reasons, i.e., for reasons it cannot fix. "Tom Ricks's Inbox" in the Oct. 19 Washington Post offers some confirmation of that assessment. Ricks writes:

"Where did al-Qaeda in Iraq go wrong? In a paper prepared for the recent annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, the Australian political scientist Andrew Phillips argues persuasively that, by their nature, al-Qaeda affiliates tend to alienate their hosts…."

He then quotes Phillips at some length:

"In successive conflicts ranging from Bosnia to Chechnya to Kashmir, the jihad jet-set has rapidly worn out its welcome among local host populations as a result of its ideological inflexibility and high-handedness, as well as its readiness to resort to indiscriminate violence against locals at the first signs of challenge…. That this pattern has so frequently been repeated suggests that the underlying causes of al-Qaeda's defeat in Iraq may transcend the specific circumstances of that conflict. Baldly stated, the causes of al-Qaeda's defeat in Iraq can be located in its ideological DNA."

In my view, the "DNA" to which Phillips refers is the type of people drawn to al-Qaeda and other Fourth Generation entities modeled on al-Qaeda. They are mostly religious fanatics of the most extreme varieties, similar to the Levellers and Diggers of the English Civil War. Regardless of what their organization's leadership may enjoin, they will treat any locals they regard as religiously "lax" with severity. They cannot do otherwise without becoming "impure" themselves. It is useful to remind ourselves where the word "Puritan" comes from.

I suggest the reason al-CIA-duh-- TO THE EXTENT THAT IT EVEN REALLY EXISTS AS A SIGNIFICANT ORGANIZATION (!!!)-- alienates its host is because it is clearly a foreign, alien entity, controlled by foreign powers such as MI6 and the CIA.

Pakistani ISI and Terrorism

2008-08-02T19:45:00.000-07:00

The New York Times reported that American intelligence agencies have concluded that members of Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence were involved in the July 7 attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul.

The report cited unnamed U.S. government officials. It said the conclusion was based on intercepted communications between Pakistani intelligence officers and militants who carried out the attack.

Pakistan's Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammed Sadiq described the report as "total rubbish," saying there was no evidence of ISI involvement.

"The foreign newspapers keep writing such things against ISI, and we reject these allegations," he said by telephone from a summit of South Asian leaders in Sri Lanka.

Government spokeswoman Sherry Rehman also said there was "no proof" of ISI involvement in the bombing.

However, she said that there were "probably" individuals in the ISI working against official policy — the first acknowledgment from Pakistan's new government that Taliban sympathizers may lurk in the agency.

Authorities "need to identify these people and weed them out," Rehman said.

Afghanistan has long accused the ISI of backing the Taliban-led insurgency wracking the country, despite Pakistan's support of the U.S.-led war on terror. The embassy bombing was the deadliest in Kabul since the 2001 ouster of the Islamist regime in a U.S. invasion.

Failed Attempt At A Psy-Op?

2008-05-11T17:50:00.000-07:00

Piglipstick: Failed Attempt At A Psy-Op?

The last time the military dangled this guy at us, when they offed the magnified persona of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, it blew up in their faces when reports surfaced that he was in an Egyptian jail. Or dead.

It's always dangerous when the propagandists play with their non existent creation "Al Qaeda in Iraq". The Iraqis certainly know the truth that AQ is a mythical organization, and now it's slowly seeping into the american consciousness that all our supposed enemies - Hezbollah, Iraqi resistance, Iran, all are fighting "Al Qaeda" too, reason being that AQ is the CIA and a few hired thugs pretending to be a terror group. So it seemed someone wasn't completely on the same page when he decided to drag this guy into the picture once again to make us believe their fairy tales, when it's so demonstrably evident that facts speak otherwise. In any event they quickly backed off the claim that he was captured.

Ayyub al-Masri was in an Egyptian prison and was killed last year and has now been arrested

What they have to do on occasion is slap a face on the bogus terror that we're supposed to fear so much. It's an old propaganda technique, refined over years of use in bringing the people to the point of supporting their war schemes. Each face becomes the new villain du jour, the sudden and dangerous enemy that we should all rally behind our leaders to defeat.

"It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the RECORDS DEPARTMENT, they were dragging the chairs out of the cubicles and grouping them in the centre of the hall opposite the big telescreen, in preparation for the Two Minutes Hate.... (...)
The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party's purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even - so it was occasionally rumoured - in some hiding-place in Oceania itself."

posted by nolocontendere at 7:12 AM

Liberty City 7 Prosecution Falls Apart

2007-12-15T15:39:00.000-08:00

A jury in Miami has cleared one man of trying to blow up America's tallest building, the Sears Tower in Chicago, as part of a holy war.

The jury was unable to reach a verdict on six other defendants, and the judge declared a mistrial. Prosecutors say they plan to try them again next year.

The jury spent more than week considering their verdicts.

The defendants were known as the Liberty City 7 after the poor area of Miami they operated in.

The acquitted man, Lyglenson Lemorin, buried his face in his hands when the verdict came in.

The government had presented the arrests of the defendants as an important victory in its war on terror.

Al Qaeda oath

They faced up to 70 years in jail after facing charges on four counts, including taking an oath of allegiance to al-Qaeda.

The prosecution said they had hoped to forge an alliance with al-Qaeda to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago and FBI offices in Miami and elsewhere.

But they succeeded only in contacting a paid FBI informant, rather than al-Qaeda itself.

"Little evidence of jihadists in the U.S."

2007-10-16T05:25:00.000-07:00

NEW YORK (CNN) -- Six years of investigations and prosecutions have turned up little evidence of Islamic jihadists at work in the United States, according to a study released Monday.

The study, conducted by New York University's Center on Law and Security, tracked 510 cases billed as terrorism-related when arrests were made.
But it found only 158 of those people arrested since al Qaeda's September 11, 2001, attacks were prosecuted for terrorism.
In a statement issued Monday afternoon, the Justice Department said the report "reflects a serious misunderstanding" of anti-terrorism efforts and includes "wildly inaccurate" statistics.
The study found only four people -- including confessed al Qaeda operative Zacarias Moussaoui and "shoe bomber" Richard Reid -- were convicted of planning attacks within the United States.
"The vast majority of cases turn out to include no link to terrorism once they go to court," the report found. The analysis "suggests the presence of few, if any, prevalent terrorist threats currently within the U.S."
The report questioned the usefulness of the anti-terrorist USA Patriot Act, passed after the September 11, 2001, attacks, finding prosecutors relied primarily on previous laws.

U.S. Aborted Raid on Qaeda Chiefs in Pakistan in ’05

2007-07-08T08:32:00.000-07:00

Though perhaps al-CIA-duh isn't the best term in this case:

WASHINGTON, July 7 — A secret military operation in early 2005 to capture senior members of Al Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal areas was aborted at the last minute after top Bush administration officials decided it was too risky and could jeopardize relations with Pakistan, according to intelligence and military officials.

The target was a meeting of Qaeda leaders that intelligence officials thought included Ayman al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden’s top deputy and the man believed to run the terrorist group’s operations.

But the mission was called off after Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, rejected an 11th-hour appeal by Porter J. Goss, then the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, officials said. Members of a Navy Seals unit in parachute gear had already boarded C-130 cargo planes in Afghanistan when the mission was canceled, said a former senior intelligence official involved in the planning.

NY Times Alludes to Fake Terrorism in Op-Ed?

2007-06-06T11:48:00.000-07:00

The Guantánamo camp was created on a myth — that the American judicial system could not handle prisoners of “the war against terror.” It was built on a lie — that the hundreds of detainees at Gitmo are all dangerous terrorists. And it was organized around a fiction — that Mr. Bush had the power to create this rogue system in the first place.

The Kennedy Airport Plot

2007-06-06T07:42:00.001-07:00

Putting the "duh' in al-CIA-duh!

Fort Dix Six Start to Smell

2007-05-11T11:01:00.000-07:00

Did informant’s actions aid Fort Dix plotters?

The same documents that prosecutors used to build a case against the suspects also depict them as somewhat disorganized, lackluster plotters. And clumsy and amateurish, too: The FBI learned of the alleged plot when the men went to a Circuit City store and asked a clerk to transfer a jihad training video of themselves onto a DVD. Also, they mistakenly thought an AK-47 costs $500, instead of $1,500 to $3,000.

Also, one of the men, Tatar, called a Philadelphia police officer in November, saying that he had been approached by someone who was pressuring him to obtain a map of Fort Dix, and that he feared the incident was terrorist-related, according to court documents.

And Josh Marshall:

Ahhh, the Fort Dix Six may not quite rise to the level of the take-down of the 'Seeds of David' non-Muslim jihadist goofball cult in Liberty City, Florida last year. But it may not be far off the mark either.

Fort Dix Suspect Profiles

2007-05-10T07:23:00.000-07:00

NYTimes:

One day after the men were arraigned in United States District Court in Camden, a portrait is emerging of the five who face charges of conspiring to kill American military personnel, which could send them to prison for life. Much less is known about the sixth, Agron Abdullahu, 24, who the authorities say was a sniper in Kosovo but who faces lesser charges, carrying up to 10 years.

Serdar Tatar, 23, a Turkish immigrant who lives in Philadelphia, had grown so religious over the last two years that his father, Muslim Tatar, said they had become estranged. Serdar’s Russian-born wife, who is pregnant with twins, said he was so busy working that he rarely went to the mosque, but sometimes read the Koran and helped her 11-year-old son with his homework.

Mohamad Ibrahim Shnewer, 22, a Palestinian born in Amman, Jordan, had for the last year kept up an exhausting routine of work, sleep and prayer, according to his mother. He drove a cab at night in Philadelphia, had recently dropped out of Camden County Community College to help the family pay two mortgages and attended services occasionally at the Al-Aqsa center.

And there were the Dukas, ages 23, 26 and 28, who came to this country illegally, more than a decade ago. The brothers, like many of their relatives and fellow ethnic Albanian immigrants in the area, have worked in roofing, coming to own two companies, in addition to a pizzeria. They are not from an Arabic-speaking nation — though one is married to a woman from Jordan — but they sometimes used Arabic names for their roofing businesses: Qadr, which in Arabic means destiny, and Inshala, an unusual spelling for a commonplace expression that means “if God wills it.”

It is not fully known how the Dukas met the other defendants, but their lives began to intersect as early as 1999, when Mr. Tatar, Mr. Shnewer and Eljvir Duka, known as Elvis, were all enrolled at Cherry Hill West High School.

One of Mr. Shnewer’s five sisters married Eljvir Duka and is now pregnant. On Wednesday, Lamese and Israa Shnewer, ages 12 and 14, stood in the threshold of their house in Cherry Hill, holding tabloid newspapers with their brother’s picture splashed across the front. Cars slowed down as they passed. People snapped pictures with their cellphones.

Israa pointed to a neighbor’s house and said, “They hated us to begin with.”

The criminal complaint filed against the suspects on Tuesday portrayed Mr. Shnewer as the leader of the group, speaking most frequently in taped conversations about tactics. But his mother, Faten Shnewer, said in an interview that the charges “made no sense.”

She said that televised images from the war in Iraq had angered him, and wondered whether, while he was watching the news, he had said something that was misinterpreted by the authorities. When the authorities searched the family’s home, they took a Koran, along with the mortgage bills and other household items, Mrs. Shnewer said.

Fort Dix Plot

2007-05-08T07:55:00.000-07:00

MOUNT LAUREL, N.J. (AP) -- Six men from the former Yugoslavia were arrested on charges they plotted to attack the Fort Dix Army base and ''kill as many soldiers as possible,'' federal authorities said Tuesday.

The suspects were described as ''Islamic radicals,'' said U.S. Attorney's Office spokesman Greg Reinert.

They were scheduled to appear in U.S. District Court in Camden later Tuesday to face charges of conspiracy to kill U.S. servicemen, said Michael Drewniak, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's Office in New Jersey. Five of them lived in Cherry Hill, he said.

''They were planning an attack on Fort Dix in which they would kill as many soldiers as possible,'' Drewniak said.

A law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity because documents in the case remain sealed, said the attack was stopped in the planning stages.

Authorities believe the men trained in the Poconos for the attack and also conducted surveillance at other area military institutions, including Fort Monmouth, the official said. The official said that the men had lived in the United States for some time.

The six were arrested trying to buy automatic weapons in a sale set-up by law enforcement authorities, the official said.

State Police Capt. Al Della Fave said Tuesday that the investigation had been in the works for about a year. The arrests were first reported by WNBC-TV in New York.

Al-MI5-duh

2007-05-01T07:50:00.000-07:00

5 Britons Guilty; Tied to 2005 London Bombers

By JANE PERLEZ and ELAINE SCIOLINO
LONDON, April 30 — A jury found five British Muslim men guilty on Monday of planning fertilizer-bomb attacks around London, ending a yearlong trial that linked the plotters with two of the four men who blew themselves up on London’s transit system in July 2005.

According to the evidence, revealed during the trial but made public for the first time on Monday, authorities had closely monitored meetings in 2004 between members of the two plots but never fully investigated the men who pulled off the transit attacks, which killed 56 people. To ensure a fair trial, the judge had ordered the news media not to make the information public until after the verdict.

The disclosure turned a victory for British authorities into a day of hand-wringing and recriminations over whether they had missed an opportunity to prevent the deadliest terrorist attack in the country’s history.

(snip)

The connection between the two groups, both in Britain and Pakistan, pointed to a level of organization among terrorist cells here that initially had been seen as “homegrown” and independent.

The two 2005 suicide bombers, like four of the five men convicted Monday, were British citizens of Pakistani origin. At least some of the men in both plots were trained at military camps in Pakistan that were suspected of having connections to Al Qaeda operatives.

(snip)

For its part, MI5, the domestic intelligence agency, a famously secretive organization, went public to defend itself, saying on its Web site on Monday that it had never been “complacent” in investigating the 2005 transit attacks.

Last week, the head of MI5, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, retired and was replaced by Jonathan Evans, a Qaeda specialist. The agency said the change was unrelated to the disclosures from the investigation, which the authorities named Operation Crevice.

That law enforcement authorities knew of a connection between the two groups is especially embarrassing because three days after the 2005 attacks, Charles Clarke, then the Home Secretary, said they “simply came out of the blue.”

(snip)

The ringleader, Omar Khyam, 25, an ardent cricket player, grew up in a secular Muslim household in West Sussex, just outside London. He turned to radical Islam in high school and trained in guerrilla warfare in Pakistan. He was said by the prosecution’s star witness to have bragged about working for a senior Al Qaeda figure.

Also found guilty in the conspiracy were Anthony Garcia, 24; Waheed Mahmood, 35; Jawad Akbar, 23; and Salahuddin Amin, 32.

(snip)

The surveillance evidence brought to light in the trial — including hours of audio tapes — showed that Mr. Khyam, the leader of the plot, had met several times with the leader of what have become known as the 7/7 attacks, Mohammad Sidique Khan.

According to court papers, four Crevice defendants, including Mr. Khyam, trained at the same camp in Malakand, Pakistan, as did Mr. Khan. Initially driven to raise money and fight for the cause of jihad on faraway battlefields like Kashmir or Afghanistan, the Crevice plotters ended up planning attacks at home, prosecutors charged.

Mr. Khyam said Pakistan’s intelligence agency was involved in running training camps focusing on Kashmir that he attended in 2000. In one of the trial’s most dramatic moments, Mr. Khyam abruptly broke off his testimony to say that Pakistan’s intelligence agency had contacted his family in Pakistan and intimidated them. He did not offer any proof.

That organization, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, is supposed to be one of Pakistan’s crucial organizations in helping the United States hunt down Al Qaeda.

Another Crevice defendant, Salahuddin Amin, told the jury that he had been held for 10 months by the Pakistani intelligence agency and subjected to torture.

He confessed only after being physically and mentally abused by the Pakistanis, he said. A videotape was played during the trial of Mr. Amin telling the British police of the Crevice plot immediately after he was brought back to Britain from Pakistan.

Overall, Scotland Yard said the Crevice operation involved thousands of police and intelligence officers and a huge effort of telephone bugging, human surveillance and videotaping.

It was that surveillance web that also picked up the two July 7 plotters: Mr. Khan and Shehzad Tanweer. Britain’s MI5 domestic intelligence service followed the two men, photographed them and even listened in on Mr. Khan’s conversations.

But the agents never fully investigated either of them, deciding they were not a terrorist threat but rather “petty fraudsters in loose contact with members of the plot,” MI5 said Monday on its Web site.

On a number of occasions in February and March 2004, MI5 agents monitored Mr. Khan and Mr. Tanweer interacting with the Crevice suspects, according to pretrial closed testimony and the judge’s ruling.

Investigators monitored the Crevice suspects so closely that they had placed a bug in Mr. Khyam’s car.

In the most telling conversation in Mr. Khyam’s car, on Feb. 21, 2004, Mr. Khan gave the impression that Mr. Khyam was a more senior operative than he.

“Are you really a terrorist?” Mr. Khan asked Mr. Khyam, according to a transcript of the conversation read in court.

Mr. Khyam replied, “They are working with us.”

To that, Mr. Khan asked again, “You are serious, you are basically?”

“I am not a terrorist; they are working through us,” Mr. Khyam said.

Mr. Khan replied, “Who are? There is no one higher than you.”

The exchange has raised questions about whether the group was receiving guidance and support from another group or individuals, perhaps Al Qaeda operatives based in Pakistan.

(snip)

After the Crevice arrests, Mr. Khan attended two other military training camps in Pakistan before carrying out the 2005 bombings. But since he was not under surveillance, his movements went unnoticed.

The prosecution’s star witness in the Crevice trial was Mohammed Junaid Babar, a Pakistani American who was arrested in New York and agreed to a plea bargain in exchange for his testimony.

He told the court that he was present at the Malakand camp with the Crevice defendants and Mr. Khan. But he testified that he was shown a photograph of Mr. Khan after the July 7 bombings and told the police he recognized him as “Ibrahim” from the Malakand camp.

During his testimony, Mr. Babar, who was attacked as a liar by the defense, said that Mr. Khyam had told him that he and the other “brothers” were not just a local operation but that they reported to a man he described as the No. 3 in Al Qaeda, Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi.

American officials said it was possible that he is the same man who they acknowledged last week was in custody at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. It was plausible, they said, that he had met some of the Crevice plotters when they visited training camps in Pakistan. But the officials said it was unclear exactly what role, if any, Mr. Iraqi had played in planning either the Crevice plot or the 2005 attacks.

Mr. Babar said that Mr. Khyam told him that Mr. Iraqi gave the orders on how they should behave on their Malakand pilgrimage. The camp was a formative experience, he said. “Prior to the camp, the guys were joking around and using slang,” he said. “After the camp, the guys were talking jihad, praying and quoting the Koran. They were saying, ‘Let’s go kill’ ” the infidel.

5 Britons Convicted

2007-04-30T08:49:00.000-07:00

London, April 30 — A British court today found five men guilty of a conspiracy to use fertilizer bombs to blow up targets — including, perhaps, a nightclub, a shopping mall and an electric power grid — after a yearlong trial and record jury deliberations of nearly a month.

All five of the convicted men were British citizens, four of them of Pakistani descent, who made trips to Pakistan to learn about explosives and terror techniques at a camp that the court heard was connected to Al Qaeda. Two other defendants in the case, also Britons of Pakistani descent, were acquitted.

Omar Khyam, 26, Waheed Mahmood, 34, Anthony Garcia, 24, Jawad Akbar, 23, and Salahuddin Amin, 31, were convicted of conspiring to cause an explosion likely to endanger life, the Home Office said. The judge, Sir Michael Astill, sentenced the five men to life imprisonment.

(snip)

The trial court heard the first concrete evidence to surface that some of the conspirators had met with two of the men who later went on to blow themselves up in an attack on London’s transit system in July 2005, the deadliest terror attack in Britain’s history.

At the time of the police surveillance of Mr. Khyam, who was convicted today, together with two of the transit bombers in early 2004, the British authorities judged that the two men who went on to become suicide bombers were not dangerous enough to pursue further, according to a 2006 parliamentary report and court evidence.

The two men went on to take part in the 2005 transit attack, which killed 52 people.

Within an hour of the verdict this morning, the opposition Conservative Party, survivors and relatives of victims of the July 2005 transit attack called for an official inquiry into why the authorities missed an opportunity to prevent the atrocity.

The Home Secretary, John Reid, put the best face on the growing controversy, saying in a statement that the law enforcement agencies could never guarantee “100 percent success” in combating terror.

Sir Michael, the judge, told defense lawyers this morning that “all of these are radicalized young men, all of these young men have been radicalized by others. They are the people who take the punishment.”

The lawyer for one of the defendants, Mr. Amin, had told the jury that Mr. Amin had been tortured after being arrested by the Pakistan intelligence authorities. The judge today said that Mr. Amin had been treated in a “completely unacceptable” way in Pakistan.

More on Christopher Paul

2007-04-13T10:30:00.000-07:00

Resort bomb plot suspect pleads innocent

By JOHN McCARTHY Associated Press Writer
© 2007 The Associated Press

COLUMBUS, Ohio — An Ohio man pleaded not guilty Friday to federal charges that he joined al-Qaida and conspired to bomb European tourist resorts and U.S. military bases overseas.

Christopher Paul, 43, a U.S. citizen living in Columbus, did not ask to be released on bond.

Paul had learned hand-to-hand combat and how to use grenades and assault rifles at an al-Qaida camp in Afghanistan in the early 1990s, according to a federal grand jury indictment announced Thursday. He then joined the terrorist group in Pakistan and told al-Qaida members he was dedicated to committing violent jihad, prosecutors allege.

When U.S. District Judge Gregory Frost asked for his plea, Paul said "not guilty."

"And that is to all three counts, correct?" Frost said.

"Yes, sir," Paul replied.

Prosecutors and his defense attorney declined to comment after the hearing.

Paul, arrested Wednesday at his apartment, is charged with providing material support to terrorists, conspiracy to provide support to terrorists and conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction, which carries the most serious penalty of up to life in prison.

Court records also show links between Paul and two other Columbus men previously charged with terrorism.

One of the men, Nuradin Abdi, was accused of plotting to blow up a Columbus-area shopping mall and is awaiting trial on charges including conspiring to aid terrorists. A laser range finder and a night vision scope seized from Paul's residence are listed among items that the government intends to use as evidence in Abdi's case. Abdi also listed Paul as a reference on a government employment application, records show.

Paul was friends with the other man, Iyman Faris, who was sentenced in 2003 to 20 years in prison for a plot to topple the Brooklyn Bridge. The two attended the same mosque, Faris' attorney, David B. Smith, told The Columbus Dispatch.

The investigation into Paul spanned four years, three continents and at least eight countries, FBI agent Tim Murphy said.

The indictment says Paul traveled to Germany in 1999 to train co-conspirators to use explosives to attack European and U.S. targets and plotted to bomb government buildings in Europe and vacation spots frequented by American tourists.

A fax machine in his home contained names, phone numbers and contact information for key al-Qaida leadership and associates, according to the indictment.

Paul also sent $1,760 by wire transfer to an alleged co-conspirator in Germany, prosecutors allege.

Iraqi Parliament Attacked

2007-04-12T11:47:00.000-07:00

Trouble:

Apr 12, 2007, 17:23 GMT
Washington - An al-Qaeda controlled group, Islamic State in Iraq, has claimed credit for Thursday's penetrating blast at the Iraqi Parliament that killed at least seven people, according to the US weekly magazine Time.

The magazine said the group posted a message on a 'prominent' militant website, muslm.net, which called the attack a warning to anyone who cooperates with 'the occupier and its agents.'

'We will reach you wherever you are,' the magazine quoted the message as saying.
The seven dead at the Parliament cafeteria included three members of Parliament. The blast occurred during lunchtime. In addition, at least ten people were killed and a number of people were missing after a near simultaneous explosion at a bridge over the Tigris River in Baghdad.

Parliament is located in the nearly impenetrable Green Zone, the heavily-guarded diplomatic and government area of closed-off streets in central Baghdad, former presidential grounds that include the main palaces of former president Saddam Hussein.

An interior ministry official told Time magazine that the bomber wore a suicide vest and was a guard for a member of Parliament.

The official told Time that the metal detectors at the entrance to the site were not operating Thursday.

US military officials were unable to explain the security breech. Lieutenant Colonel Chris Garver, a US military spokesman in Iraq, told CNN that the international zone is 'safer than many places in Baghdad,' but added: 'We live under the threat of people trying to come in and attack.'

Germany, 1999, eh?

2007-04-12T07:38:00.000-07:00

Funny that we never heard of this before. Intriguing story:

U.S. citizen charged with terror plots
Ohio man allegedly joined al-Qaida, eyed bombing of tourist resorts
The Associated Press
Updated: 9:22 a.m. ET April 12, 2007
COLUMBUS, Ohio - A federal grand jury indicted a U.S. citizen on charges of joining al-Qaida and conspiring to bomb European tourist resorts and U.S. government facilities and military bases overseas.

Christopher Paul, 43, of Columbus, trained with al-Qaida in the early 1990s, the indictment issued Wednesday says. The indictment says he told al-Qaida members in Pakistan and Afghanistan that he was dedicated to committing violent jihad.

Paul is charged with providing material support to terrorists, conspiracy to provide support to terrorists and conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction.

Fred Alverson, spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Columbus, said Thursday that he couldn’t comment further on the case.

Federal prosecutors planned to hold a news conference later Thursday.

Behind bars
Paul was in the Franklin County Jail late Wednesday after a U.S. District Court hearing was postponed until his attorney, Don Wolery, could be present. Wolery did not immediately return a message seeking comment Thursday morning.

The indictment says Paul traveled to Germany about April 1999 to train co-conspirators to use explosives to attack European and U.S. targets, including government buildings and vacation spots frequented by American tourists.

It does not address specific resorts or buildings that might have been targeted, but it gives U.S. embassies, military bases and consular premises in Europe as examples.

Paul was born Paul Kenyatta Laws. He legally changed his name to Abdulmalek Kenyatta in 1989, then to Christopher Paul in 1994, according to the indictment said.

Two other Columbus men have been charged in federal investigators’ terrorism investigation. Iyman Faris was sentenced in 2003 to 20 years in prison for a plot to topple the Brooklyn Bridge. Nuradin Abdi, accused of plotting to blow up a Columbus-area shopping mall, is awaiting trial on charges including conspiring to aid terrorists.

US Military Jails in Iraq

2007-04-09T07:55:00.000-07:00

are terrorist training camps.

Another Kooky British Plot

2007-01-31T09:20:00.001-08:00

BIRMINGHAM, England (CNN) — A major anti-terrorism raid in the UK was intended to foil a plot to kidnap a Muslim soldier serving in the British Army, and behead him, according to a security source.

Police arrested eight people during a series of early-morning raids in Birmingham, central England, early Wednesday, according to statements released by police and the Home Office.

The Home Office said the eight were arrested in Birmingham by West Midlands police under the country's anti-terrorism laws.

The arrests did not involve a plot to cause mass casualties, but instead the kidnap of a British Muslim soldier who has served in Afghanistan, a senior security source told CNN.

Once kidnapped, the attackers allegedly planned to videotape the torture and execution of the soldier for later publication on the Internet.

Police came across July 21 'bomber' three times, court hears

2007-01-18T01:40:00.000-08:00

Scotland Yard anti-terror detectives crossed paths with one of the alleged July 21 suicide bombers three times in the months leading up to his failed attack on a London bus but never detained him for longer than a few hours, a court heard today.

Muktar Said Ibrahim was photographed by Metropolitan Police surveillance officers at a camping trip in the Lake District along with four of his alleged co-conspirators in May 2004, almost 15 months before their attempted suicide attacks, Woolwich Crown Court was told.

Photographs and footage of the five men at the alleged training camp were shown to the jury and later released by the police.

A few months later, in October that year, Mr Ibrahim was arrested outside Debenhams on London's busy Oxford Street for distributing inflammatory Islamic literature.

Then in December 2004, he was questioned by Special Branch officers at London's Heathrow Airport on his way to Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, the court heard.

Revelations that Mr Ibrahim, 28, was under surveillance for months leading up to the alleged suicide attacks in London on July 21, 2005 in London were made on the third day in a trial of six men on charges of conspiracy to murder and conspiracy to cause explosions likely to endanger life at Woolwich Crown Court.

The failed attacks took place exactly two weeks after the 7/7 attacks, in which four suicide bombers killed 52 London commuters. In the event, all of the homemade bombs the conspirators used, made of a mixture of hydrogen peroxide and chapatti flour, failed to go off and the would-be suicide terrorists attempted to flee.

Three of the alleged bombers on July 21 tried to blow themselves up on the tube and one on a bus, the court heard. The fifth man failed to go through with the plan and dumped his explosives in west London, while a sixth had already left the country.

'London bomb plot was just a hoax'

2007-01-18T01:38:00.000-08:00

One of the defendants in the London "bomb plot" trial, Hussein Osman, was arrested in Rome and interviewed at length by police.

He is said to have told officers after his arrest he and his co-accused had been making a political point and the devices they carried were never meant to explode.

Nigel Sweeney QC, prosecuting, told Woolwich Crown Court, Mr Osman had admitted to police that his real name was Hamdi Isaac and he was born in Ethiopia in 1978.

Mr Osman was said to have told police he had moved to Italy in the early 1990s and to the UK in the late 1990s where he adopted the identity Hussein Osman.

He also said he had pretended he was Somali because he thought it would make it easier to claim asylum.

He said he met Muktar Ibrahim, Yassin Omar and Ramzi Mohammed at a mosque and had known them for two years, the court was told.

They played football together and went on camping expeditions to Scotland and Kent and had been to Speaker's Corner in London's Hyde Park to talk about religion, Mr Osman is said to have told police.

Explosives 'not real'

Mr Sweeney said Mr Osman told police they first decided to carry out a "demonstration" about a week after the 7 July attacks on London.

Al Qaeda Who?

2006-12-16T19:48:00.000-08:00

Associated Press. Published: December 16, 2006 12:15 PM ET WASHINGTON. The Pentagon called them "among the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the Earth," sweeping them up after Sept. 11 and hauling them in chains to a U.S. military prison in southeastern Cuba.

Since then, hundreds of the men have been transferred from Guantanamo Bay to other countries, many of them for "continued detention."

And then set free.

Decisions by more than a dozen countries in the Middle East, Europe and South Asia to release the former detainees raise questions about whether they were really as dangerous as the United States claimed

Al-MI5-duh

2006-11-10T13:33:00.000-08:00

Blair backs MI5 terrorism warning-- Tony Blair said the terror threat had been building for some time.

Tony Blair has said he supports MI5's assessment that Britain is facing the threat of multiple terror plots.

He said the dangers were "very real" and he spoke of "poisonous propaganda" warping the minds of young people.*

MI5's boss has said she knows of 30 terror plots threatening the UK and revealed that her staff had 1,600 individuals under surveillance.

Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller said attacks could be chemical or nuclear and al-Qaeda was linked to many plots.

The prime minister said the threat had "grown up over a generation" and Dame Eliza warned that it was "serious" and "growing".

*I initially thought he was referring to "conspiracy theories" but now I see he may be referring to radical Islamic-- not clear though.

Why the Recent Airline Bombing Plot Was Most Likely Bogus

2006-08-12T10:55:00.000-07:00

Small amounts of liquid explosive smuggled on board via carry-on luggage?

Please.

It is no secret that checked luggage is barely scrutinized at all.

Wouldn't serious terrorists utilize this fact?

As someone pointed out on the Diane Rehm radio show this morning, it is amazing no one has repeated a Pan Am 103 style bombing in the 18 years since that attack occurred.

My guess was that this recent plot was had real suspects but was partially staged-- and was done primarily to show that the authorities are doing their job.

Another reason to doubt the veracity of the plot is the fact that the airport shutdown and change in carry-on luggage screening occurred only after the plot was supposedly broken up and suspects were arrested. If the terrorists had been under surveillance for months, and the authorities knew this was going to happen, wouldn't they have started checking carry-on liquids earlier?

They Have a New TV Studio!

2006-07-28T15:52:00.000-07:00

Pretty fancy:

As Atta J. Turk says-- it looks more like "the set of 'Iron Chef'".

America's No. 1 terror target: Indiana

2006-07-16T12:37:00.000-07:00

8,591 'assets', such as an Amish popcorn plant, landed the state at the top of the government's watch list.

Further on Zarqawi

2006-06-08T20:03:00.000-07:00

Some observations:

1. The phrase, repeated endlessly from Tony Snow, the generals in Iraq, and Preznit Bush: "What the American people need to understand is ..." (or its variations, "What people need to understand is ..."; "You need to understand that ..." and "What you have to realize is that ..." -- implying (at least to my mind) that we don't get it, and it (whatever IT is they would prefer to be the prevailing perception) must be constantly verbally reinforced.

2. CNN had Michael Berg (whose son was beheaded by Zarqawi in Iraq) on several times today, but in one segment, when he began calling for the impeachment of George Bush, he was very abruptly cut off, before he finished his sentence.

3. There was frequent footage of the bombed out house where the 500-lb bombs killed Zarqawi. Piles of rubble and twisted metal, no sign of "the house," just blasted stone and debris. How did Zarqawi's body come out of this so relatively unscathed, so that they were able to retrieve him immediately, clean him up, take identifying photos of his face, take fingerprints, have a DNA sample ready to test and promise the results so quickly? In applying for permanent residence, I had to have my fingerprints taken five times, because they couldn't be "read" due to minor abrasions on the skin on several fingertips. Are we to understand that Zarqawi's fingers were undamaged in the 500-lb bomb blast that obliterated the destroyed house? One reporter said they examined "what was left of him." How very fortunate that two major identifying body parts--his head and his fingers--were not damaged in the blast.

4. It was reported that a woman and child were among those killed in the house where Zarqawi and some high-level Al-Qaeda operatives were staying, but nothing about whose house it was, who was the woman, and how old was the child.

5. Officials appeared miffed at reporters' or viewers' questions about the timing of this positive big news

Islamic Terrorists

2006-06-08T10:02:00.000-07:00

are everywhere!

Zarqawi Finally Dead?

2006-06-08T09:07:00.001-07:00

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the most-wanted terrorist in
Iraq with a $25 million bounty on his head, was killed when U.S. warplanes dropped 500-pound bombs on his isolated safehouse northeast of Baghdad, coalition officials said Thursday. His death was a long-sought victory in the war in Iraq.

Al-Zarqawi and several aides, including spiritual adviser Sheik Abdul Rahman, were killed Wednesday evening in a remote area 30 miles from Baghdad in the volatile province of Diyala, just east of the provincial capital of Baqouba, officials said.

"Al-Zarqawi was eliminated," Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said.

The U.S. military showed a picture of al-Zarqawi with his eyes closed and spots of blood behind him after he was killed by an air strike north of Baghdad.

U.S. military spokesman Maj. Gen. William Caldwell displayed the photo during a news conference in Baghdad.

Caldwell also showed a videotape of the attack in which he said F-16 fighter jets dropped two 500 pound bombs on the site. He said Iraqi police were first to arrive on the scene, followed by coalition forces.

Al-Zarqawi's body was found and moved to a secure location, where it was positively identified at 3:30 a.m. Thursday, Caldwell said, adding that the confirmation was made with scars, tatoos and fingerprints known to be al-Zarqawi's.

He also said a DNA analysis was being performed to be absolutely sure, but he expressed no doubt that the terror leader was in the house that was hit.

He also said al-Zarqawi's spiritual adviser Abdul Rahman al-Iraqi was at the site.

"We had absolutely no doubt whatsoever that Zarqawi was in the house," Caldwell said.

At the White House, President Bush hailed the killing as "a severe blow to al-Qaida and it is a significant victory in the war on terror."

But he cautioned: "We have tough days ahead of us in Iraq that will require the continuing patience of the American people."

(story has been expanded since I first linked to it) More here, here, here, here, here and here.

I think the thing that is suspicious is how the guy comes out with a video just a month or so ago, and now he's dead. Basically, as if they presented some new patsy as "Zarqawi" in the video, only to later kill him...

Of course, it needs to be pointed out that initially Bushco avoided killing Zarqawi...

Same guy?

More thoughts:
1) I'm glad if they got a real bad guy, though would have been nice to put him on trial
2) this surely won't end the Iraq violence, could even make things worse
3) was there anything to the timing of this? Did Bush just need a bump or is there some bad news they are covering up, or distracting from (certainly the Haditha massacre springs to mind)?

US 'allowed Zarqawi to escape'

2006-05-01T07:13:00.000-07:00

The United States deliberately passed up repeated opportunities to kill the head of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Jordanian-born terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, before the March 2003 US-led invasion of that country.

This is not really "new" news. I read about this before the Iraq war started. But it is a great example of how the US sanctions terrorism, in the most hypocritical possible way-- considering Zarqawi is now officially the head of Al-CIA-duh in Iraq.

Zarqawi the Big Phony

2006-04-10T06:28:00.000-07:00

The U.S. military is conducting a propaganda campaign to magnify the role of the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, according to internal military documents and officers familiar with the program. The effort has raised his profile in a way that some military intelligence officials believe may have overstated his importance and helped the Bush administration tie the war to the organization responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Synthetic Terror in Iraq

2006-02-26T08:13:00.000-08:00

The bombing of the Golden Mosque in Iraq-- who benefits?

British Prime Minister Tony Blair stated that those who committed the attack on the Golden Mosque “have only one motive: to create a violent sedition between the Sunnis and the Shiites in order to derail the Iraqi rising democracy from its path.”

Well said Mr. Blair, particularly when we keep in mind the fact that less than a year ago in Basra, two undercover British SAS soldiers were detained by Iraqi security forces whilst traveling in a car full of bombs and remote detonators.

Jailed and accused by Muqtada al-Sadr and others of attempting to generate sectarian conflict by planting bombs in mosques, they were broken out of the Iraqi jail by the British military before they could be tried.

The bombing came shortly after the Abu Ghraib scandal popped up again. The Abu Ghraib crimes helped solidify sentiment against the US. An Iraq united against its American and British occupiers is trouble. A divided, bloody Iraq, while ugly and a PR problem, nevertheless helps the occupiers stay entrenched. This of course is the old British divide-and-conquer strategy.

Could it be any more obvious what is going on here?

Cartoon Terrorist Releases More Propaganda

2006-02-20T10:06:00.000-08:00

Osama bin Laden vowed never to be captured alive and said the U.S. military had become as "barbaric" as Saddam Hussein in an audiotape reposted on a militant Islamic Web site after first being broadcast last month.

Let's see, Osama says it, so we can't believe it-- so it must be that the US military is not barbaric at all!!!

Oy.

Interesting Article on Yemen and the Al CIA Duh Prison Esacpe

2006-02-19T19:49:00.000-08:00

Facts, Rumors and Theories.

Big Phony

2006-02-16T19:10:00.000-08:00

"Bin Laden tapes are as phony as Sept. 11's connection to Islam"

The Capital Times/Kevin Barrett | February 16 2006

As a Ph.D. Islamologist and Arabist I really hate to say this, but I'll say it anyway: 9/11 had nothing to do with Islam. The war on terror is as phony as the latest Osama bin Laden tape.

It's a tough thing to admit because I know on which side my bread is buttered and dropping Islam from the 9/11 equation is dropping my slice of bread butter-side-down. The myth that 9/11 had something to do with Muslims has poured millions, if not billions, into Arabic and Islamic studies. I finished my Ph.D. last year, so all I have to do is keep my eyes in my pocket and my nose on the ground, parrot the party line, and I'll be on the fast track to tenure track.

The trouble is, it's all based on a Big Lie. Take the recent "bin Laden" tape please! That voice was no more bin Laden than it was Rodney Dangerfield channeling my late Aunt Corinne from Peoria. I recently helped translate a previously unknown bin Laden tape, a real one from the early '90s, back when he was still alive. I know the guy's flowery religious rhetoric. The recent tape wasn't him.

The top American bin Laden expert agrees. Professor Bruce Lawrence, head of Duke University's religious studies department, has just published a book of translations of bin Laden's speeches. He says that the recent tape is a fake and that it is possible bin Laden is not even alive.

Fake bin Laden tapes, "verified" by the CIA, are nothing new. Every supposed bin Laden statement since 2001 has been blatantly bogus. The last we heard from the real bin Laden came in his post-9/11 statements to Pakistani journalists: "I stress that I have not carried out this act, which appears to have been carried out by individuals with their own motivation. ... I have already said that I am not involved in the 11 September attacks in the United States. ... I had no knowledge of these attacks."

Then on Dec. 13, 2001, as George Bush was whining about the "outrageous conspiracy theories" that were spreading like wildfire, the first and shoddiest of the "bin Laden speaks from beyond the grave" tapes appeared. The video's sound and picture quality were horrible. It showed a big guy with a black beard, doing a passable imitation of bin Laden's voice, claiming foreknowledge, if not responsibility, for the 9/11 attacks, and chortling over their success. The trouble was, the big guy clearly was not bin Laden. He was at least 40 or 50 pounds heavier, and his facial features were obviously different.

The "Fatty bin Laden" tape was widely ridiculed, and I have yet to meet an informed observer who considers it authentic. (If you haven't figured this out yet, go back and look at the images from the tape and compare them to other images of bin Laden.) But the media let the fraud pass without asking the hard questions: Why was the U.S. government waving this blatantly fake "confession" video in our faces?

Perhaps due to the widespread hilarity evoked by "Fatty bin Laden," the next Osama from beyond the grave message had no images it was an audiotape delivered to al-Jazeera in fall 2002. The CIA verified it as authentic and then got a rotten egg in the face when the world's foremost voice identification experts in Switzerland reported that "the message was recorded by an impostor."

Every bin Laden message since then has been equally phony. They are released at moments when the Bush regime needs a boost and the American media go along with the fraud. Remember the bogus bin Laden tape that made headlines right before the 2004 presidential election? If you didn't figure out that it was a CIA-produced commercial for George Bush, I have some great bridges to sell you. Walter Cronkite, bless his heart, opined that Karl Rove was behind that tape. But the rest of the media just kept pretending that the emperor was clothed.

And the fraud continues. The most recent alleged bin Laden tape has been ridiculed by America's top bin Laden expert, yet the U.S. media keep right on holding a transparent fig leaf in front of the emperor! Professor Lawrence believes that this phony tape was designed to distract world opinion from the horrific massacre of Pakistani civilians by an errant CIA drone. But it may have another, more sinister purpose: to prepare public opinion for another false 9/11-style attack designed to trigger a U.S.-Israeli nuclear attack on Iran.

The real bin Laden, who insisted that he had nothing to do with 9/11, has been dead since late 2001 or early 2002. The fake messages have been fabricated by "al-CIA-duh" to support the Bush regime and its phony "war on terror." It is time for Americans to rise up in revolt against the fake terror masters who are looting U.S. taxpayers, torching our Constitution, destroying our economy, and threatening nuclear Armageddon.

AL-CIA-DUH!

2006-02-09T19:33:00.000-08:00

Most harebrained plot EVER!:

He said that Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks who was captured in 2003, had already begun planning the West Coast operation in October, just after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. One of Mohammed's key planners was Hambali, the alleged operations chief of the al-Qaida related terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyah. Instead of recruiting Arab hijackers, Hambali found Southeast Asian men who would be less likely to arouse suspicion and who were sent to meet with Osama bin Laden, Bush said.

Under the plot, the hijackers were to use shoe bombs to blow open the cockpit door of a commercial jetliner, take control of the plane and crash it into the Library Tower in Los Angeles, since renamed the US Bank Tower, Bush said.

How stupid can you get? Even the White House press picked up on how stupid this is:

Q Scott, I wanted to just ask a follow-up about the LA plot. Is there something missing from this story, a practical application, a few facts? Because if you want to commandeer a plane and fly it into a tower, if you used shoe bombs, wouldn't you blow off the cockpit? Or is there something missing from this story?

MR. McCLELLAN: I don't know what you're referring to about missing. I mean, I think we provided you a detailed briefing earlier today about the plot. And Fran Townsend, our Homeland Security Advisor, talked about it. So I'm not sure what you're suggesting it.

Q Think about it, if you're wearing shoe bombs, you either blow off your feet or you blow off the front of the airplane.

MR. McCLELLAN: There was a briefing for you earlier today. I think that's one way to look at it. There are a lot of ways to look at it, and she explained it earlier today, Alexis, so I would refer you very much back to what she said, what she said earlier today.

Most idiotic White House ever, as well.

Imagine That

2006-02-07T18:49:00.000-08:00

An al-Qaida operative sentenced to death for plotting the
USS Cole bombing that killed 17 sailors in 2000 was among a group of convicts who escaped from a Yemen prison last week, Interpol said Sunday in issuing a global security alert.

(snip)

The convicts escaped via a 140-yard-long tunnel "dug by the prisoners and coconspirators outside," Interpol said. The Yemeni official said the prison was at the central headquarters of the country's military intelligence services in a building in the center of the capital.

That sure is some "intelligence service" they have there in Yemen.

Unless... nah, it couldn't be... I don't suppose they WANTED these guys to escape, did they?

Al Qaeda Detainee's Mysterious Release

2006-01-30T07:48:00.000-08:00

Tabarak's odyssey from Afghanistan to Guantanamo and back to his native land illustrates the grit and at times fanatical determination of one bin Laden recruit. Yet his story also shows how little is known publicly about al Qaeda figures who were captured after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and the Pentagon. Major gaps remain in his account, and terrorism experts and intelligence officials continue to debate whether he was a member of al Qaeda's inner circle or its rank and file.

His case also highlights mysteries of U.S. priorities in deciding who to keep and who to let go. As the Pentagon gears up to hold its first military tribunals at Guantanamo after four years of preparations, it has released a prisoner it called a key operative. At the same time, it retains under heavy guard men whose background and significance are never discussed

I can only assume that Tabarak is under complete control by the CIA, is a prized asset, and is not a "worry" to them that he will say the wrong thing. He probably compltely accepts the official 9/11 story as the truth.

Al Qaeda -- the Database

2006-01-30T07:47:00.000-08:00

Shortly before his untimely death, former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told the House of Commons that "Al Qaeda" is not really a terrorist group but a database of international mujaheddin and arms smugglers used by the CIA and Saudis to funnel guerrillas, arms, and money into Soviet-occupied Afghanistan.

Al-CIA-duh

2006-01-30T07:42:00.000-08:00

This blog will collect articles that pertain to the idea that Al Qaeda (or Al-Qaida, Al Qeida, Al Q'aida), henceforth known here as Al-CIA-duh, is an essentially bogus organization created by the US CIA and other intelligence agencies.