Multiple terrorist teams have arrived and are in position in Europe and are believed to have received go-ahead commands to carry out “Mumbai-style” attacks in Germany, France or other locations. Pre-security areas in airports are thought to be likely targets.
Mounting ‘Chatter’ by Jihadi Extremists Has Law Enforcement Nervous
Among the possible targets in the suspected European terror plot are pre-security areas in at least five major European airports, a law enforcement official told ABC News. Authorities believe terror teams are preparing to mount a commando like attack featuring small units and small firearms modeled after the Mumbai attack two years ago.
The State Department issued a highly unusual “Travel Alert” Sunday for “potential terrorist attacks in Europe,” saying U.S. citizens are “reminded of the potential for terrorists to attack public transportation systems and other tourist infrastructure.”
One scenario authorities fear is a repeat of the 1985 attack on the Rome and Vienna airports, when Palestinian extremists threw grenades and opened fire on travelers waiting at ticket counters injuring 140 and killing 19, including a small child. …
Authorities have detected a dramatic increase in online chatter among jihadist websites the last week, in what experts believe could be other terrorists banning together in anticipation of terror attack plans in Europe and hoping to engage themselves in prospective plots.
The escalating discussions in the virtual meeting rooms for al Qaeda supporters have praised terror attacks plan and suggested targets, communicating with fellow believers just as the terrorist teams at the center of the current suspected plots likely did, experts said.
A leak by US Intelligence Officials to Some News Agency reveals that in 2008 three of the subway bomb plotters traveled to Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier tribal areas where one of them, possibly all three, met with Adnan el Shukrijumah, the prominent al Qaeda figure known to have been the leader of the failed “Second Wave” attack following 9/11 involving the detonation of a dirty bomb in a major US city, whose target is generally believed to have been Los Angeles.
Shukrijumah was long suspected to have been operating from somewhere in Latin America, but this evidence places him in Waziristan in 2008.
U.S. counterterrorism officials have linked one of the nation’s most wanted terrorists to last year’s thwarted plot to bomb the New York City subway system, authorities said Wednesday.
Current and former counterterrorism officials said top al-Qaida operative Adnan Shukrijumah met with one of the would-be suicide bombers in a plot that Attorney General Eric Holder called one of the most dangerous since the 9/11 terror attacks.
Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn have named Shukrijumah in a draft terrorism indictment but on Wednesday the Justice Department was still discussing whether to cite his role. Some officials feared that the extra attention might hinder efforts to capture him. …
Current and former counterterrorism officials discussed the case on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about it.
Shukrijumah, 34, has eluded the FBI for years. The Saudi-born terrorist studied at a community college in Florida, but when the FBI showed up to arrest him as a material witness to a terrorism case in 2003, he already had left the country. The U.S. is offering a $5 million reward for information leading to his capture.
Intelligence officials began unraveling the subway plot last year, when U.S. intelligence intercepted an e-mail from an account that al-Qaida had used in a recent terrorist plot, officials said. The e-mail discussed bomb-making techniques and was sent to an address in Denver, setting off alarms within the CIA and FBI from Islamabad to the U.S.
Najibullah Zazi and two friends were arrested in September 2009 before, prosecutors said, they could carry out a trio of suicide bombings in Manhattan. Zazi and Zarein Ahmedzay have pleaded guilty and admitted planning to detonate homemade bombs on the subway during rush hour. A third man, Adis Medunjanin, awaits trial.
A fourth suspect, a midlevel al-Qaida operative known as Ahmed, traded the e-mails with Zazi, who was frantically trying to perfect his bomb making recipe, officials said. The U.S. wants to bring the Pakistani man to the U.S. for trial on charges that are not yet public.
Pakistani officials also have arrested a fifth person, known as Afridi, who worked with Ahmed, officials said.
The theory that bin Ladin is being sheltered by Iran is not impossible to believe, and stories of nefarious meetings between Middle Eastern sheikhs and terrorist leaders occurring in the desert at falconry camps has considerable romantic appeal.
The sole informant behind all of this however, is “one of the world’s foremost falconers:” a fellow named Alan Parrot (pronounced “Per -oh”), the son of a leading Bangor, Maine physician and Middlesex preppie, who ran off to the Middle East instead of attending college, where he learned Arabic, allegedly “served as the royal falconer for various Arab leaders for two decades,” and became a Sikh.
Despite his intimacy with various Middle Eastern ruling families, his chauffer-driven Mercedes, and the honor of having been admitted the inner circles of Arabic falconry, Parrot broke with his sponsors and employers to found a conservation organization devoted to a) enforcing international trade restrictions on the traffic in raptors, and b) banning captive breeding and use of captive bred falcons.
If falconers are to be permitted neither to purchase or use wild-caught birds or domestically-bred birds, it seems to me that this is bound to have a serious negative impact on falconry.
By 2006, despite describing himself as having been treated like a son by the president of the United Arab Emirates, Parrot was offering the same storyline about clandestine meetings between al Qaeda and Arab financiers of terrorism at falconry hunting camps with the UAE, instead of Iran, at the center of the story. This was back at the time when Dubai Port World, a UAE company, was attempting to purchase port management businesses in six US ports.
February 24, 2006 Big Story with John Gibson interview with Alan Parrot 4:43 video
Stephen Colbert (ashes from Ash Wednesday Roman Catholic ceremonies on his forehead) mocks John Gibson’s interview with Alan Parrot video
The most prominent falconers I know seem to be skeptical of Parrot’s claims to rank among the world’s foremost practitioners of the sport. With good reason, he has written no book on falconry that I’m aware of.
Press coverage of “Feathered Cocaine” provoked an indignant outburst from some unclear combination of Matt Mullenix and Steve Bodio.
They know all about Parrot, and mention that in US falconry circles he is commonly referred to jocularly as “Hari Ha Ha,” in a take off of his adopted Sikh name: Hari Har Singh Khalsa (Note comments).
Bodio/Mullenix have big problems with the kinds of figures for falcon purchases being thrown around.
$5000 is HIGH these days (except possibly– the story goes–for four or five individual unusual–for reasons more superstitious than scientific– smuggled birds a year that seem to go to certain Arabian families again and again). And six figures would be an unlikely high figure for even these.
From his reputation in falconry circles and his extravagant personal claims, it seems only too evident that Mr. Parrot (or Mr. Khalsa) is not a very credible source.
In press accounts, for instance, he is described as a resident of Iran and of Kuwait, while this profile says he has lived in Hancock, Maine since 1991.
Last year, we learned on Huffington Post, that the ever intrepid Parrot was still hot on Osama’s trail:
Encouraged by president-elect Barack Obama’s statement on January 14, in an interview with CBS News anchor Katie Couric, that his “preference obviously would be to capture or kill him [Bin Laden]”, Parrot sent a letter to the Rewards for Justice program at the State Department detailing his efforts to track Bin Laden and providing information of bin Laden’s whereabouts. Parrot also noted that he had discussed the matter with Iranian officials and that “a negotiated and political (i.e. not-military) solution is available” with the Iranian leadership. The letter was sent on January 20, but Parrot has yet to hear from Washington.
Parrot claims that he has negotiated with Iranian officials the transfer of bin Laden from Iran “to the custody of the Saudi Minister of Foreign Affairs Prince Saud al Faisal, whom I know personally,” he said.
Extravagant, messianic claims on the part of a drop-out claiming a personal mission to protect charismatic wildlife, over which he unilaterally asserts personal responsibility, while operating his own private “conservation organization” and soliciting contributions from concerned animal lovers, sound familiar? What we have here is essentially the Timothy Treadwell of falconry.
Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Osama bin Laden, Ramzi Binalshibh and Mohammed Atta
All poor Mohamedou Ould Slahi did was recruit Mohammed Atta, Marwan al Shehhi, and Ziad Jarrah, the suicide pilots of American Airlines Flight 11, United Airlines Flight 175, and United Airlines Flight 93, for their mission on September 11, 2001.
Mr. Slahi and his defense team allege that he was tortured, i.e., beaten, exposed to uncomfortable temperatures, threatened, frightened by threats against his family, and sexually taunted by female interrogators. A DOD inquiry failed to confirm most of these allegations, but they were obviously credited, and considered to constitute torture, by the officer in charge of prosecution.
Although the treatment apparently induced Mr. Slahi’s compliance, the military prosecutor, Marine Lt. Col. V. Stuart Couch, determined that it constituted torture and evidence it produced could not lawfully be used against Mr. Slahi.
Col. Couch, in a March 31, 2007, Page One story in The Wall Street Journal, cited legal, professional and moral reasons for declining to prosecute.
Mr. Slahi, who was then viewed as a cooperator by interrogators, was granted various privileges at Guantánamo Bay, including his own quarters and garden to tend.
Col. Couch, now in private practice in North Carolina, said Monday’s order “is one of the consequences that the decision-makers should have foreseen when they decided to adopt a policy of cruelty, and the interrogation techniques that flowed from it.”
The same Journal article informs us that he is consequently being freed to resume his former activities.
A suspected al Qaeda organizer once called “the highest value detainee” at Guantánamo Bay was ordered released by a federal judge in an order issued Monday.
Mohamedou Ould Slahi was accused in the 9/11 Commission report of helping recruit Mohammed Atta and other members of the al Qaeda cell in Hamburg, Germany, that took part in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Military prosecutors suspected Mr. Slahi of links to other al Qaeda operations, and considered seeking the death penalty against him while preparing possible charges in 2003 and 2004.
U.S. District Judge James Robertson granted Mr. Slahi’s petition for habeas corpus, effectively finding the government lacked legal grounds to hold him. The order was classified, although the court said it planned to release a redacted public version in the coming weeks.
Mr. Robertson held four days of closed hearings in the Slahi case last year. Mr. Slahi testified via secure video link from Guantánamo Bay, said his attorney.
“They were considering giving him the death penalty. Now they don’t even have enough evidence to pass the test for habeas,” said the attorney, Nancy Hollander, of Albuquerque, N.M.
Spiegel did a major article in October of 2008 on Slahi.
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What can one possibly say about the kind of stupidity that equates misinforming, threatening, taunting, scaring, and even roughing up or inflicting some discomfort on a mass murderer with torture? Or about the legal acumen of jurists who award habeas corpus protection to unlawful belligerents apprehended overseas during time of war?
Do you suppose they can quote “Quos Deus perdere, dementat” [Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad] in Arabic?
Last week, a predator drone strike in Waziristan sent a number of al Qaeda militants to the Prophet’s Paradise, including a top trainer who helped arrange the suicide bombing at a CIA post in Afghanistan last December.
Bill Roggio reports.
The US killed a key al Qaeda operative involved in the network’s external operations during an airstrike last week in the Taliban-controlled tribal agency of North Waziristan.
Sadam Hussein Al Hussami, who is also known as Ghazwan al Yemeni, was killed during the March 10 airstrike in the town of Miramshah, according to a statement released on a jihadist forum.
The March 10 airstrike was carried out by unmanned US attack aircraft and targeted two terrorist compounds in the middle of a bazaar in the town. Six Haqqani Network and al Qaeda operatives were reported killed.
Three other al Qaeda operatives, identified as Abu Jameelah al Kuwaiti Hamed al Aazimi, who served with slain al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al Zarqawi; Abu Zahra al Maghrebi; and Akramah al Bunjabi al Pakistani, were killed with Hussami, according to a translation of the martyrdom statement released on March 12 by Abu Abdulrahman al Qahtani, who is said to be based in Waziristan. The statement was posted on the Al Falluja Forum and a translation is provided by Global Terror Alert. [For more information on Aazimi, see Threat Matrix report, “Al Qaeda operative killed in Pakistan linked to Zarqawi.â€]
Hussami “was involved in training Taliban and foreign al Qaeda recruits for strikes on troops in Afghanistan and targets outside the region,†The Wall Street Journal reported. He “was also on a small council that helped plan†the Dec. 30, 2009, suicide attack at Combat Outpost Chapman that killed seven CIA officials and a Jordanian intelligence officer. The slain intelligence operatives were involved in gathering intelligence for the hunt for al Qaeda and Taliban leaders along the Afghan-Pakistani border.
“Hussami was a skilled operative high up in al Qaeda’s external operations network,†a US intelligence official told The Long War Journal. “He also has direct links to al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,†the terror branch that operates in Yemen and Saudi Arabia.
“He was sorely wanted for his involvement in the COP Chapman suicide attack,†the intelligence official continued. Hussami is said to have been instrumental in helping the Jordanian suicide bomber Humam Khalil Muhammed Abu Mulal al Balawi, who is also known as Abu Dujanah al Khurasani, plan and execute the attack.
Hussami is the first al Qaeda operative killed by the US who is directly linked to the suicide attack at Combat Outpost Chapman. The US has been hunting Hakeemullah Mehsud, the leader of the Movement of the Taliban in Pakistan, after he appeared on a videotape with Khurasani.
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Hussami’s death was considered sufficient cause for Leon Panetta to indulge in a certain amount of public self congratulation on behalf of the Agency and the current administration.
Aggressive attacks against al-Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal region have driven Osama bin Laden and his top deputies deeper into hiding and disrupted their ability to plan sophisticated operations, CIA Director Leon Panetta said Wednesday.
So profound is al-Qaeda’s disarray that one of its lieutenants, in a recently intercepted message, pleaded with bin Laden to come to the group’s rescue and provide some leadership, Panetta said. He credited improved coordination with Pakistan’s government and what he called “the most aggressive operation that CIA has been involved in in our history,” offering a near-acknowledgment of what is officially a secret war.
“Those operations are seriously disrupting al-Qaeda,” Panetta said. “It’s pretty clear from all the intelligence we are getting that they are having a very difficult time putting together any kind of command and control, that they are scrambling. And that we really do have them on the run.” …
t he said the combined U.S.-Pakistani campaign is taking a steady toll in terms of al-Qaeda leaders killed and captured, and is undercutting the group’s ability to coordinate attacks outside its base along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
To illustrate that progress, U.S. intelligence officials revealed new details of a March 8 killing of a top al-Qaeda commander in the militant stronghold of Miram Shah in North Waziristan, in Pakistan’s autonomous tribal region. The al-Qaeda official died in what local news reports described as a missile strike by an unmanned aerial vehicle. In keeping with long-standing practice, the officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because the CIA formally declines to acknowledge U.S. participation in attacks inside Pakistani territory.
Hussein al-Yemeni, the man killed in the attack, was identified by one intelligence official as among al-Qaeda’s top 20 leaders and a participant in the planning for a Dec. 30 suicide bombing at a CIA base in the province of Khost in eastern Afghanistan. The bombing, in which a Jordanian double agent gained access to the CIA base and killed seven officers and contractors, was the deadliest single blow against the agency in a quarter-century.
This is the same Central Intelligence Agency that is winning on Wednesday that includes elements who leaked to the New York Times for publication two days earlier a story alleging that private contractor efforts which seem to have been succeeding rather well in identifying enemy targets have been conducted in contravention of unspecified Intelligence statutes and International Law, and represented a fraudulent diversion of funds.
If I were Mr. Panetta, I’d be doing something about some of my own internal adversaries, those in the habit of employing leaks and innuendo to undermine Agency efforts in the field. It is also essential to do something to terminate the enthusiastic cooperation of their establishment media allies and enablers. Putting a Hellfire missile into certain offices at the New York Times and the Washington Post may be off-limits, but there is still on the books an Intelligence Act of 1917, which makes it a crime to convey information with intent to interfere with the operation or success of the armed forces of the United States or to promote the success of its enemies, punishable by death or by imprisonment for not more than 30 years.
If the private contractor operation mentioned by the Times on Monday really was, as seems most probable, a legitimate US Intelligence covert operation, Messrs. Dexter Filkins and Mark Mazetti of the New York Times and their informants could very well be guilty of producing “false reports or false statements with intent to interfere with the operation or success of the military or naval forces of the United States or to promote the success of its enemies and whoever when the United States is at war.” False reports or statements in such a case would be punishable by a fine and 20 years in prison.
The Bush Administration chickened out on prosecuting its leakers, and the result has been a dysfunctional situation in which certain members of the Intelligence community are permitted to exercise their own liberum veto over policies and operations.
The Washington Post is reporting that Obama Administration policies are having precisely the result that critics like MacRanger predicted long ago: [L]ook for many terrorist suspects not to get to the interrogation stage as they will most likely be “dispatched†in the field.
It’s inevitable. There is nowhere uncontroversial to imprison them. Presumably they will all be Mirandized now and given civilian trials, and even mildly coercive interrogation techniques have been absolutely ruled out. A captured terrorist leader is now never going to be a useful source of intelligence and, on the other hand, he is highly likely to become a political embarrassment. The choice becomes obvious.
The Obama administration has authorized [lethal] attacks more frequently than the George W. Bush administration did in its final years, including in countries where U.S. ground operations are officially unwelcome or especially dangerous. Improvements in electronic surveillance and precision targeting have made killing from a distance much more of a sure thing. At the same time, options for where to keep U.S. captives have dwindled.
Republican critics, already scornful of limits placed on interrogation of the suspect in the Christmas Day bombing attempt, charge that the administration has been too reluctant to risk an international incident or a domestic lawsuit to capture senior terrorism figures alive and imprison them.
“Over a year after taking office, the administration has still failed to answer the hard questions about what to do if we have the opportunity to capture and detain a terrorist overseas, which has made our terror-fighters reluctant to capture and left our allies confused,” Sen. Christopher S. Bond (Mo.), the ranking Republican on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said Friday. “If given a choice between killing or capturing, we would probably kill.”
Some military and intelligence officials, citing what they see as a new bias toward kills, questioned whether valuable intelligence is being lost in the process. “We wanted to take a prisoner,” a senior military officer said of the Nabhan operation. “It was not a decision that we made.”
Even during the Bush administration, “there was an inclination to ‘just shoot the bastard,’ ” said a former intelligence official briefed on current operations. “But now there’s an even greater proclivity for doing it that way. . . . We need to have the capability to snatch when the situation calls for it.”
One problem identified by those within and outside the government is the question of where to take captives apprehended outside established war zones and cooperating countries. “We’ve been trying to decide this for over a year,” the senior military officer said. “When you don’t have a detention policy or a set of facilities,” he said, operational decisions become more difficult.
The administration has pledged to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; Congress has resisted moving any of the about 190 detainees remaining there, let alone terrorism suspects who have been recently captured, to this country. All of the CIA’s former “black site” prisons have been shut down, and a U.S. official involved in operations planning confirmed that the agency has no terrorism suspects in its custody.
Forbes reports that US success in disrupting al Qaeda’s financing has forced the organization to decentralize and caused it to turn to kidnapping and the drug trade to finance its terrorist activities. Al Qaeda’s Indian subcontinent affiliate Lashkar-e-Taiba is still proving very effective at fund raising and delivery, and the US has yet to secure strong cooperation in suppressing contributions to jihadism in Kuwait and other Gulf states.
Al Qaeda is much less of a top-down organization than it once was, when it called the shots and funded terrorist operations from Afghanistan. Then, it told operatives to focus on assignments and not to worry about how to subsidize them. Today it’s a much looser organization of affiliates–more of a McDonald’s, if you will, than a General Motors. Its decentralized partners and cells around the world pick their own targets, concoct their own strategies and raise their own funds. They may draw inspiration from al Qaeda headquarters somewhere in the Chitral region of northwest Pakistan, even kick back money to the leadership. But, like franchisees, they are largely on their own.
The change, U.S. officials like Cohen say, is a direct result of the pressures the U.S. government has placed on terrorist money men. That has forced al Qaeda to go underground. While it still relies on individual donations from the Persian Gulf region, these contributions now move outside the formal financial system, through cash couriers and informal money transfer shops known as hawalas. In addition, the network seems to be turning to organized crimes like kidnapping and drug running. The shipment of cocaine from Latin America to Europe is a source of funding.
Fundraising efforts have also embraced new technologies–like the bit of telemarketing by Ayman al Zawahiri, al Qaeda’s second-in-command, who solicited donations through cell phone recordings that were distributed in 2008. Last June Abu al Yazid, a former al Qaeda money man who now runs its Afghan operations, made his pitch on a Web site controlled by al Qaeda leaders: “If a holy fighter does not have the money to get weapons, food, drink and the materials for jihad, he cannot fight jihad.” The Internet, of course, is a terrorist’s best friend when it comes to recruiting. Not that they’ve given up on old-school methods like extortion. “A broader trend that shows their financial troubles is they are shaking down recruits for money,” says Michael Jacobson, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, who specializes in terror financing. A handful of people, arrested in 2008 by French and Belgian authorities, had traveled to Pakistan for al Qaeda training–and were forced to cough up euros for courses, a room and weapons.
Clearly the money hasn’t stopped; it is coming in smaller dollops via other channels. …
The criminal filings also indicate that al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb had recently nabbed Belgian citizens and collected a big ransom. Richard Barrett, who keeps an eye on al Qaeda for the U.N., says kidnapping has been the biggest moneymaker for Islamic Maghreb. “Hostage taking has proved lucrative for them,” he says, adding the group is currently holding seven foreigners and ransomed others for $3 million each. “You can keep going for a long time down there with that kind of money.”
While kidnapping is probably as old as warfare, its latest incarnation owes much to al Qaeda in Iraq, a now largely defanged affiliate. It made piles of cash grabbing foreigners a few years ago and supplemented that income with extortion rackets and black market oil sales. The group became so rich that its leader at one point got a letter from al Qaeda’s number two, Zawahiri, requesting a substantial sum. …
Officials across the U.S. government insist they have no proof that al Qaeda’s leadership is involved in the drug trade. But Michael Braun, chief of operations at the DEA until 2008, says they are in denial. “There is more clear evidence showing al Qaeda’s growing involvement in the Afghan heroin trade on the Pakistan side of the border–al Qaeda proper,” says Braun, now a managing partner at Spectre Group International, a security firm in Alexandria, Va. “There are growing numbers of investigative leads headed in that direction.”
Al Qaeda’s association with big-time criminal groups is undeniable. Dawood Ibrahim is one of the world’s most infamous gangsters, operating a 5,000-member criminal syndicate that engages in everything from narcotics to contract killing, working mostly in Pakistan, India and the United Arab Emirates. Ibrahim shares smuggling routes with al Qaeda, says the U.S. government, and has collaborated with both al Qaeda and its South Asian affiliate, Lashkar-e-Taiba, which pulled off the November 2008 Mumbai attacks, possibly with Ibrahim’s help.
The $3.4 billion Afghan heroin trade is a critical source for the well-financed Taliban, which has also developed a rich donor network. The Taliban encourages and taxes poppy farmers and collects transit and protection fees related to the drug trade. How does al Qaeda benefit? At the very least the drug trade helps the Taliban create safe havens for al Qaeda fighters.
Some counterterror officials see an opportunity in the convergence of crime and terrorism. They point out that police in most countries are mobilized to tackle the drug trade, making it more likely that a terrorist who also runs narcotics will get caught by the cops. But the flip side is that crime, particularly the rich drug trade, could help sustain terror groups for years. …
Yemen is an epicenter of what is brewing. The affiliate there, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, claimed responsibility for the botched Christmas Day plane attack. Not particularly well financed, according to a U.S. official, the group is resorting to crime. Some al Qaeda members there reportedly tried their hand at bank robberies and considered going into the kidnapping business. For now its chief source of funds is cash contributions from donors in Yemen and the Arabian Gulf. Couriers are still able to move easily in much of the area–in one example last September agents carrying tens of thousands of dollars for al Qaeda were stopped in Kuwait, says the U.N.’s Barrett.
Yet, to the dismay of the U.S., Kuwait has done little to crack down on such donations, even resisting basic terror finance laws. In 2008 the U.S. highlighted the role the Revival of Islamic Heritage Society, a prominent Kuwaiti charity, played in funding al Qaeda’s network. The group has denied any terror ties and continues to operate. Couriers carry as much as $100,000 per trip between Afghanistan and the Gulf, the funds coming from legitimate commerce as well as from heroin trafficking. Hawalas also rely on couriers to settle up paper transactions with fellow money transmitters. It is easy for al Qaeda or Taliban donations to get mixed in. “The difficulty is trying to identify the part of that which is illicit,” says Treasury’s Cohen. …
Al Qaeda has reaped direct benefits from Lashkar’s ability to raise and move funds. As recently as 2008 Fazeel-A-Tul Ameen al Peshawari, a Lashkar fundraiser and recruiter, was providing financial aid to al Qaeda, says the U.S. government. Arif Qasmani, a chief Lashkar coordinator who has raised funds from crime boss Ibrahim, has been providing al Qaeda with supplies and weapons. In return al Qaeda loaned to Lashkar operatives who helped carry out the 2006 train bombings in Mumbai. Raising funds was so easy for Lashkar that in 2004 its finance chief, Haji Ashraf, traveled to the Middle East to collect donations and manage financial networks in Saudi Arabia.
But Ashraf probably isn’t collecting as many frequent-flier miles these days. The Saudi government finally cracked down on terrorist financiers after it became alarmed by homegrown insurgents and those arising next door in Iraq. In 2007 the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia urged citizens not to finance terrorism and to be mindful of how their charitable contributions were being distributed. A 130-man Saudi financial investigative unit has been set up, and 96 suspected terrorist financiers have been arrested. Getting Saudi officials on board is a big victory. But the kingdom’s charities are another matter. “There continues to exist a pool of donors who are ready, willing and able to contribute to al Qaeda,” says Treasury’s Cohen. “We have at least temporarily disrupted some” of them.
Apparently, Osama’s sons were not interested in volunteering to be suicide bombers.
Osama bin Laden’s son has a chilling warning for those who are hunting his father with drones, secret agents and missile strikes.
From Omar bin Laden’s up-close look at the next generation of mujahideen and al Qaeda training camps he says the worst may lie ahead, that if his father is killed America may face a broader and more violent enemy, with nothing to keep them in check.
“From what I knew of my father and the people around him I believe he is the most kind among them, because some are much, much worse,” Omar bin Laden, who was raised in the midst of his father’s fighters, told ABC News in an exclusive interview. “Their mentality wants to make more violence, to create more problems.” …
And despite the $25 million bounty on his father’s head and the ever-searching drones, Omar is confident that his father won’t be caught and that no Afghan will turn him in.
“It’s been 30 years now since he started fighting there. Who could catch him? No one…. This is the country that whoever gets in is stuck, be it the armies or the mujahideen,” he said. Omar says even he does not know where his father is. …
Osama bin Laden raised his family of five wives (plus one marriage that was annulled) and more than a dozen children in a way meant to make them tough and ready for the rigors of war. He shunned air conditioning and refrigerators in the desert heat, banned toys and the kind of laughter that showed too many teeth, refused to wince when his men used Omar’s puppies as the victims in chemical weapons tests. He would cane his children for the slightest misbehavior, at times hitting them so hard the stick would break.
Osama Bin Laden Urged His Sons to Be Suicide Bombers
“He didn’t treat us differently than any of his followers. He just expected us to act like everyone else, because he was the leader,” said Omar. He and his brothers were given weapons training. In a breaking point between them, Osama encouraged them to sign up for suicide missions, volunteering to blow themselves up.
“We were shocked. Why would our father say something like this to us? After he went away we just talked about it and said this was never going to happen, this was not our way.” Omar found the rare and substantial nerve it took to talk back.
“I objected, and said why did you do this? What is the point? He didn’t respond. We were not more important than his big goal…and nothing would stop him from this.”
The Obama administration’s top intelligence officials on Tuesday described it as “certain” that al-Qaeda or its allies will try to attack the United States in the next six months, and they called for new flexibility in how U.S. officials detain and question terrorist suspects.
The officials, testifying before the Senate intelligence committee, also warned of increased risk of cyber-attacks in the coming months, saying that the recent China-based hacking of Google’s computers was both a “wake-up call” and a forerunner to future strikes aimed at businesses or intended to cause economic disruption.
“Al-Qaeda maintains its intent to attack the homeland — preferably with a large-scale operation that would cause mass casualties, harm the U.S. economy or both,” Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair told the committee in a hearing convened to assess threats against the country.
Blair and CIA Director Leon Panetta warned of new threats from al-Qaeda’s regional allies, such as al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
Several groups appear increasingly intent on attacking U.S. and other Western targets, even as al-Qaeda’s core leadership struggles to regain its footing after repeated setbacks and eroding popular support in the Muslim world, the officials said.
“They are moving to other safe havens and regional nodes such as Yemen, Somalia, the Maghreb and others,” Panetta said. He said al-Qaeda-inspired groups had successfully “deployed individuals to this country,” citing recently disrupted terrorist plots in Colorado and Chicago.
Britain is facing a new Al Qaeda terror threat from suicide ‘body bombers’ with explosives surgically inserted inside them.
Until now, terrorists have attacked airlines, Underground trains and buses by secreting bombs in bags, shoes or underwear to avoid detection.
But an operation by MI5 has uncovered evidence that Al Qaeda is planning a new stage in its terror campaign by inserting ‘surgical bombs’ inside people for the first time. …
A leading source added that male bombers would have the explosive secreted near their appendix or in their buttocks, while females would have the material placed inside their breasts in the same way as figure-enhancing implants.
Experts said the explosive PETN (Pentaerythritol Tetranitrate) would be placed in a plastic sachet inside the bomber’s body before the wound was stitched up like a normal operation incision and allowed to heal.
Umar Farouk Abdulutallab
Failed attempt: Abdulmutallab tried to detonate a bomb sewn into his pants
A shaped charge of 8oz of PETN can penetrate five inches of armour and would easily blow a large hole in an airliner.
Security sources said the explosives would be detonated by the bomber using a hypodermic syringe to inject TATP (Triacetone Triperoxide) through their skin into the explosives sachet.
Western security measures can never be 100% effective against the efforts of suicidal fanatics to destroy innocent lives. The real answers lie in eliminating funding for terrorism, and by applying a principle of reciprocity to discourage attacks on non-combatants. The West needs, first, to destroy the OPEC oil cartel and remove the economic surplus from Islamic hands. Secondly, Western governments should promise that any new successful mass attack on civilian populations in Europe or the United States will result in a retaliatory attack on a target as valuable in the eyes of our barbarous and fanatical adversaries as innocent lives are to us. We should take the advice of Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo, and promise that, if another mass attack on the West occurs, we will permanently destroy the Muslim holy site of Mecca.
Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, currently a Senior Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, previously Director of Intelligence and Counterintelligence at the U.S. Department of Energy and Chief of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Department for the CIA, has published a 32-page report, Al Qaeda Weapons of Mass Destruction Threat: Hype or Reality?, which asks the obvious question:
Why hasn’t there been an attack up to now by al Qaeda utilizing WMD?
To date, al Qaeda’s WMD programs may have been disrupted. This is in fact one likely explanation, given a sustained and ferocious counterterrorist response to 9/11 that largely destroyed al Qaeda as the organization that existed before the fateful attack on the US. If so, terrorists must continue to be disrupted and denied a safe haven to reestablish the ability to launch a major strike on the US homeland, or elsewhere in the world. …
Or perhaps, al Qaeda operational planners have failed to acquire the kind of weapons they seek, because they are unwilling to settle for anything other than a large scale attack in the US. …
[I]f Osama bin Ladin and his lieutenants had been interested in employing crude chemical, biological and radiological materials in small scale attacks, there is little doubt they could have done so by now. However, events have shown that the al Qaeda leadership does not choose weapons based on how easy they are to acquire and use. …
An examination of the 9/11 attack sheds light on al Qaeda’s reasoning behind the selection of specific weapons, and how that may apply to the role WMD plays in their thinking. Al Qaeda opted to pursue a highly complex and artfully choreographed plot to strike multiple targets requiring the simultaneous hijacking of several 747 jumbo passenger aircraft, because using airplanes as weapons offered the best means of attacking the targets they intended to destroy. If conventional wisdom on assessing WMD terrorism threats had been applied to considering the likelihood of the 9/11 plot, analysts may well have concluded it never would have happened; at the time, it was simply hard to believe any terrorist group could pull off such an elaborate plot utilizing novel, unpredictable weapons that were so difficult to acquire.
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Mowatt-Larssen presents a detailed 15-year (unclassified) chronology of efforts by al Qaeda to acquire WMD.
Graham Allison summarizes the evidence of that chronology in a forward to the report:
This chronology teaches us four important lessons. First, al Qaeda’s top leadership has demonstrated a sustained commitment to buy, steal or construct WMD. In 1998, Osama bin Laden declared that “acquiring WMD for the defense of Muslims is a religious duty.†In December 2001, bin Laden’s Deputy Ayman Zawahiri stated, “If you have $30 million, go to the black market in the central Asia, contact any disgruntled Soviet scientist and a lot of dozens of smart briefcase bombs are available.†A few months later, al Qaeda announced its goal to “kill four million Americans.â€
Second, al Qaeda was prepared to expend significant resources to cultivate a WMD capability even during the planning phases of 9/11. In the years leading up to September 2001, we see that bin Laden’s organization never lost its focus on WMD, even while coordinating the 9/11 attacks, orchestrating the simultaneous bombings of the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998, and successfully striking the U.S. warship (USS Cole) in 2000.
Third, a clear hallmark of al Qaeda’s WMD approach is to pursue parallel paths to procure these deadly materials. Multiple nodes of the network were assigned to different tasks of the overall WMD effort, acting and reporting independently, ensuring that failure in one cell did not jeopardize the entire operation. By taking into account possible operational set-backs and intelligence breaches, al Qaeda has displayed deliberate, shrewd planning to acquire WMD.
Fourth, al Qaeda has taken part in joint development of WMD with other terrorist groups. This collaboration between the most senior members of separate organizations demonstrates that interest in and motivation to possess WMD are not limited to a single group.
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The single most alarming detail must be:
Pakistani humanitarian NGO Umma Tameer e Nau (UTN), which was founded by Pakistani nuclear scientists with close ties to al Qaeda and the Taliban. UTN was headed by Bashiruddin Mahmood, who had been chief of Pakistan’s Khushab plutonium reactor. … Sometime before August 2001, UTN CEO Bashiruddin Mahmood offer[ed] to construct chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs for al Qaeda and Libya, in two separate, discreet approaches. …
Mahmood confesses that he was introduced to al Qaeda seniors in Afghanistan in summer 2001, met with Osama bin Ladin around a campfire, and they discussed how al Qaeda could build a nuclear device. Mahmood drew a very rough sketch of an improvised nuclear device. When Mahmood advised Osama bin Ladin that it would be too hard for his group to undertake a nuclear weapons program and develop the billion dollar infrastructure for weapons-usable materials, bin Ladin queries, “What if I already have it? (the nuclear material)â€
Edward Jay Epstein, in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, explains that the Anthrax spores used in postal attacks around the time of 9/11 had been weaponized by a coating of silicon greatly enhancing their effectiveness as an aerosal. Over 100 scientists had had access to the particular strain of Anthrax, and the FBI’s ham-handed investigative efforts applied such intense scrutiny, pressure, and public accusations that they resulted in two suicides and a public apology including a $5.8 million settlement with no actual resolution.
The crux of the investigative problem is the silicon. None of the scientist suspects or the laboratories they had access to possessed either the specialized equipment or expertise needed to weaponize the Anthrax. Over 8 years later, the case remains open.
The Epstein editorial came to mind this morning, as I was looking through the Memeorandum aggregator page and found a link to this sneering hit piece by Justin Elliott, one of Talking Points Memo’s little leftist elfs.
Elliott is busily trying to marginalize Laurie Mylroie, a Harvard-educated Arabist, who has served on the faculty of Harvard and the Navy War College and as an advisor to Bill Clinton, identifying her as a “crackpot” and conspiracy theorist. I had not been previously familiar with Dr. Mylroie, her books, or opinions, but looking into all this, it is very clear that she has taken a position very much at odds with the prevailing consensus of the foreign policy and intelligence establishments and the media, one attributing a far more significant ties between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda and an active role on the part of the Iraqi regime in both the first WTC bombing and 9/11.
I don’t own her books (I just ordered two of them), so I don’t know if I agree with her, find any of her evidence persuasive or her reasoning credible, but I am interested in seeing what she has to say. Thank you, Mr. Elliott. Whenever I see the left performing one of their little excommunication-on-the-basis-of-thought-crime ceremonies, I always develop the suspicion that the target of such attention may be perfectly correct.
The TPM hit piece notes that the Department of Defense’s Office of Net Assessment (an internal Pentagon think tank) was employing Dr. Mylroie as recently as 2007 as a consultant to produce reports on Saddam Hussein’s strategy for dealing with UN inspections and his intelligence service. She had previously written in 2005 a History of Al Qaeda. I plan to read it carefully.
The popularly prevailing theory, completely excluding state support for al Qaeda’s terrorist activities, is very useful if you are interested in asserting Iraqi innocence in order to indict Bush, but it does leave a number of important problems unanswered, like where did those weaponized Anthrax spores come from?
