Ibrahim al-Rubeish

WASHINGTON — An American drone strike has killed a top ideologue and spokesman for Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen, the terrorist group announced Tuesday. The spokesman, Ibrahim al-Rubeish, a 35-year-old Saudi citizen, had been held for five years in the United States military prison at Guantánamo Bay.

A statement from Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, posted on Twitter, said that Mr. Rubeish was killed Monday in what it called a “hate-filled Crusader strike” near Al Mukalla, a city on Yemen’s southern coast.

Since 2009, Mr. Rubeish has been the group’s voice in many important pronouncements, including a video eulogy for Anwar al-Awlaki, the American cleric killed in a drone strike in 2011.

(snip)

For several years, American counterterrorism officials have seen Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula as the terrorist group posing the greatest threat to the United States. It was responsible for two failed plots to blow up United States-bound airliners: one in 2009 that used explosives hidden in a bomber’s underwear, and a foiled attack in 2010 using bombs hidden in printer cartridges addressed to Chicago and sent aboard cargo planes.

The life and death of Mr. Rubeish reflected several stages in the struggle of the United States to deal with terrorist suspects since 2001, including his imprisonment at Guantánamo and his participation in a Saudi rehabilitation program for militants, which evidently failed.

According to a biography prepared by officials at Guantánamo, Mr. Rubeish was born into a wealthy Saudi family and earned a certificate in Islamic law. He wanted to join the fight against Russian forces in Chechnya, but after traveling to Pakistan for training he was directed to a Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan in May 2001, when he was about 22.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, he fought at Tora Bora in Afghanistan and was captured by Pakistani forces and turned over to the United States, arriving at Guantánamo in January 2002. A 2005 assessment judged that he was a member of Al Qaeda who posed a “medium” risk and said that he had “some type of leadership role among detainees and strongly influences them.” He contributed an “Ode to the Sea” to a collection of poems by Guantánamo prisoners published in 2007.

Earlier in 2005, Mr. Rubeish was among several Guantánamo detainees to challenge their detention with a habeas corpus petition in federal court in Washington. The petition was denied, but in December 2006, the George W. Bush administration sent Mr. Rubeish home to Saudi Arabia on the condition that he enter the rehabilitation program.

That program generally has a good reputation among counterterrorism experts, but among its most prominent failures were militants who helped form Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in 2009.

The former deputy leader of that Qaeda branch, Saeed al-Shihri, followed the same path from Guantánamo to the Saudi rehab program and then to Yemen, where he died in a drone strike in 2013.

Cash for Qlunkers

Whoopsie!

C.I.A. Cash Ended Up in Coffers of Al Qaeda

Imagine that! Shocker! I'm sure it was totally unintended!

WASHINGTON — In the spring of 2010, Afghan officials struck a deal to free an Afghan diplomat held hostage by Al Qaeda. But the price was steep — $5 million — and senior security officials were scrambling to come up with the money. They first turned to a secret fund that the Central Intelligence Agency bankrolled with monthly cash deliveries to the presidential palace in Kabul, according to several Afghan officials involved in the episode.

The Afghan government, they said, had already squirreled away about $1 million from that fund. Within weeks, that money and $4 million more provided from other countries was handed over to Al Qaeda, replenishing its coffers after a relentless C.I.A. campaign of drone strikes in Pakistan had decimated the militant network’s upper ranks.

“God blessed us with a good amount of money this month,” Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, the group’s general manager, wrote in a letter to Osama bin Laden in June 2010, noting that the cash would be used for weapons and other operational needs. Abdul Khaliq Farahi, who was kidnapped by Al Qaeda in 2008.

Bin Laden urged caution, fearing the Americans knew about the payment and had laced the cash with radiation or poison, or were tracking it. “There is a possibility — not a very strong one — that the Americans are aware of the money delivery,” he wrote back, “and that they accepted the arrangement of the payment on the basis that the money will be moving under air surveillance.”

The C.I.A.’s contribution to Qaeda’s bottom line, though, was no well-laid trap. It was just another in a long list of examples of how the United States, largely because of poor oversight and loose financial controls, has sometimes inadvertently financed the very militants it is fighting.

Uh huh, shuurrre.

And how charming is this fake bin Laden anyway? He sure played his role well.

Shilling by the NYTimes...

The NYTimes hires the most clueless (or disingenuously clueless) reporter ever to write about how the Pakistani ISI knew about and/or worked with bin Laden. Of course, the piece never once mentions ties of the CIA to the ISI, or anything else that would make you question the war on terror.

Benghazi

So the Benghazi consulate was a CIA operation, and there was an even larger CIA operation nearby--

Overall, the CIA’s depiction of the events that led to the death of Ambassador Christopher Stevens offers new insight into US operations in the eastern Libyan city. It suggests that the small and lightly secured diplomatic mission served as a kind of cover for a larger but covert US intelligence presence, centered in an “annex” located about a mile from the consulate. This intelligence-gathering was focused on an area where Islamist extremists and Al Qaeda-affiliated militants were known to operate.

Well, this brings the attack on the compound that killed 4 new Americans, including the Libyan ambassador, into a whole new light, and explains some of the reasons for the shifting storyline.

I can think of several possible explanations for the attack now:

1) classic revenge-type anger blowback by the militants on to the CIA, if the CIA was trying to control the militants

2) an attack by the militants on the CIA faction as part of a cover-up by the CIA. Possibly the Ambassador was being tipped off on al-CIA-duh activities by the CIA contractors who were killed.

3) a deliberately instigated attack by militants at the behest of the CIA, to create some sort of October-surprise incident to influence the presidential election

4) some combination of 1 and 3 or 2 and 3

Abu Zabaydah

This is just so fucking outrageous, and just goes to show how flimsy the official 9/11 story is--

Now that the US government has admitted that it has no case against Abu Zubaydah and that he was never associated with al Qaeda, will they release him?  As attorney Mickum requested, will his client be allowed to tell his own story?  More importantly, will the official accounts of 9/11 be reviewed to extricate claims allegedly made by and about Zubayda so that those false claims do not to provide additional false direction in War on Terror?

No, almost certainly not.

As with the court order to classify “any statements made by the accused” in the trials of KSM and other suspects,[51] if this man is allowed to speak we may find that his mind has not been completely obliterated through the torture we inflicted upon him.  And we may find that the official myth of 9/11 and al Qaeda will not hold up against the open and un-tortured testimony of the people alleged to have committed the crimes of 9/11.  In the end, it seems that the Zubaydah case is a threat to al Qaeda itself as well as a public admission that some lies must be kept under wraps in order to maintain the overall deception that supports the War on Terror.

Considering how extensively Abu Zabaydah was tortured, and how innocent he was, it is just sickening how much of a lie the govts case was.

This almost completely obscure episode-- which I only learned recently-- totally blows away the official story of al Qaeda, and reveals the massive evil charade run by the CIA.

Al-CIA-duh Watch-- New Underwear Bomb Plot

Jeez, could it get any more obvious?

An insider, working with the United States and an allied security service, thwarted the al-Qaida bomb plot hatched in Yemen and provided information that allowed the U.S. to launch a Predator drone strike that killed the group’s operations chief, senior U.S. officials tell NBC News. "It was managed so that it was not a threat," said one senior Obama administration official, who like the others spoke on condition of anonymity. “We were confident that we had inside control over any plot that might have been associated with this device. “The device never got near an airplane. To our knowledge, it never got near an airplane or airport.” The bomb -- a refined version of an “underwear bomb” used in two previous failed terror plots -- was driven out of Yemen by the insider into Saudi Arabia. It is now in the hands of U.S. bomb experts at the FBI labs in Quantico, Va., where experts have been examining it for a week, the officials said. The infiltrator also is safely out of Yemen.

I guess the CIA wants to get in on the FBI's action of breaking up terror plots that it itself creates.

FBI Breaks Up Latest Terrorist Plot That It Created...

Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god!!!!!

A 29-year-old Moroccan man who believed he was working with al-Qaida was arrested Friday near the U.S. Capitol as he was planning to detonate what he thought was a suicide vest that undercover operatives gave him, officials said. Amine El Khalifi of Alexandria, Va., was taken into custody with a gun that didn't work and inert explosives, according to a counterterrorism official. He arrived near the Capitol in a van with the two undercover operatives, and walked toward the building, according to court papers. He was arrested before he left the parking garage. El Khalifi made a brief appearance on Friday afternoon in federal court in Alexandria, where a judge set a bail hearing for Wednesday. After his arrest, FBI agents raided a red brick rambler home in Arlington, Va. A police car blocked the entrance.

A criminal complaint charges him with knowingly and unlawfully attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction against property that is owned and used by the United States. The charge carries a maximum penalty of life in prison.

El Khalifi, who was under constant surveillance, expressed interest in killing at least 30 people and considered targeting a building in Alexandria and a restaurant, synagogue and a place where military personnel gather in Washington before he settled on the Capitol after canvassing that area a couple of times, the counterterrorism official said. During the investigation, El Khalifi went with undercover operatives in January to a quarry in West Virginia to practice detonating explosives, according to court documents. He believed he was working with an al-Qaida operative on the plot, according to an affidavit.

Be very afraid!

Of course the media fall so dumbly for it... and also important to note that this is occurring in the context of the drumbeats of war with Iran.

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

The FBI is creating terrorism cases and then busting them up. "Critics say bureau is running a sting operation across America, targeting vulnerable people by luring them into fake terror plots"