Showing posts with label Osama bin Laden. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Osama bin Laden. Show all posts

Thursday, May 21, 2015

Oh, The Poor Terrorist...

May 21, 2015 Guy Taylor , Osama bin Laden 0 Comments
Osama bin Laden Was Frustrated, Isolated 

By Guy Taylor - The Washington Times - Wednesday, May 20, 2015

Al Qaeda mastermind Osama bin Laden spent his final years pleading with followers to stay focused on the goal of large-scale attacks against Americans, and avoid getting sucked into the regional wars and Muslim-on-Muslim violence that have come to define so much of the global jihadi narrative since his death.

While U.S. intelligence officials say the trove of bin Laden files declassified Wednesday represent only a fraction of what Navy SEALs retrieved from the terror leader’s Pakistan lair in 2011, the documents appear to show a terrorist leader so isolated in hiding that he was losing control of his flock.

Letters and memos show bin Laden pushing back against jihadi offshoots impatient to form an Islamic state and warning that small wars to topple governments in the Middle East would distract from the big-picture goal — striking the United States.

Read the full story: www.washingtontimes.com

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Sunday, May 10, 2015

Were We Lied To?

May 10, 2015 Osama bin Laden , President Barack Obama 0 Comments
Report: Obama lied about bin Laden raid

By Mark Hensch, May 10, The Hill

An expose published on Sunday alleges that President Obama deceived Americans with his narrative of the 2011 assassination of Osama bin Laden.

Author Seymour M. Hersh accuses Obama of rushing to take credit for the al Qaeda leader's death.

This decision, Hersh argues in the London Review of Books, forced the military and intelligence communities to scramble and then corroborate the president’s version of events.

“High-level lying nonetheless remains the modus operandi of U.S. policy, along with secret prisons, drone attacks, Special Forces night raids, bypassing the chain of command, and cutting out those who might say no,” Hersh wrote of the Obama administration’s counterterrorism policies.

Hersh based his report on a single, anonymous source. This individual, he said, is a “retired senior intelligence official who was knowledgeable about the initial intelligence about bin Laden’s presence in Abottabad.”

Hersh’s source alleged that the Pakistani government had an active role in approving and implementing the raid on bin Laden’s compound.

Read the full story:  www.thehill.com

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Thursday, March 26, 2015

"...embodied a killing-centric approach to counter­terrorism"

March 26, 2015 CIA’s Counter­terrorism Center , Greg Miller 0 Comments
CIA Official Who Directed Hunt For Bin Laden Is Being Removed From Post

By Greg Miller, Mar. 25, 2015, WashingtonPost.com

The head of the CIA’s Counter­terrorism Center, who presided over the agency’s drone campaign and directed the hunt for Osama bin Laden, is being removed from his post, officials said, a watershed moment as the CIA turns its focus to a new generation of extremist threats.

The move, part of a major reorganization under CIA Director John Brennan, ends a nine-year tenure during which the center was transformed into a paramilitary force that employed armed drones to kill thousands of suspected terrorists and militants but also killed an unknown number of civilians.

As the architect of that campaign, the CTC chief came to be regarded as an Ahab-like figure known for dark suits and a darker demeanor. He could be merciless toward subordinates but was also revered for his knowledge of terrorist networks and his ability to run an organization that became almost an agency unto itself. He embodied a killing-centric approach to counter­terrorism that enraged many Muslims, even though he is a convert to Islam.

Read the full story:  www.washingtonpost.com

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Sunday, December 28, 2014

New book says President wanted a trial--Why?

December 28, 2014 al Qaeda , Barack Obama 0 Comments
Barack Obama 'Hoped To Put bin Laden On Trial'

Telegraph, Oct. 4, 2012

"Frankly, my belief was if we had captured him, that I would be in a pretty strong position, politically, here, to argue that displaying due process and rule of law would be our best weapon against al-Qaida, in preventing him from appearing as a martyr," Obama is quoted saying in an interview with Bowden.

Read more: www.telegraph.co.uk

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Sunday, November 2, 2014

Snowden's seen it

November 02, 2014 Fox News , Navy SEAL 0 Comments
Despite Pentagon Objections, FOX Will Air Interview With SEAL Who Killed Bin Laden

Paul Bond, Oct. 31, 2014, The Hollywood Reporter

Insiders at Fox News Channel said Friday that a two-day documentary featuring an interview with the Navy SEAL who killed Osama Bin Laden will air as scheduled despite objections from the Pentagon.

On Wednesday, Fox News announced that a show called The Man Who Killed Osama Bin Laden hosted by Washington correspondent Peter Doocy was scheduled for Nov. 11 and Nov. 12, but on Friday the Pentagon told Business Insider that the SEALs and former SEALs who were participants do not have permission to discuss the classified 2011 mission.

Read more: www.hollywoodreporter.com

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Tuesday, September 23, 2014

Not long enough

September 23, 2014 al Qaeda , CBS New York 0 Comments
Osama Bin Laden's Son-In-Law Gets Life Prison Term In NY

Osama Bin Laden and son in law Sulaiman Abu Ghaith
Source:  CBS New York / AP / Getty
By CBS/AP, Sept. 23, 2014, Cbsnews.com

NEW YORK -- Osama bin Laden's son-in-law was sentenced Tuesday to life in prison for acting as al Qaeda's spokesman after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

Sulaiman Abu Ghaith was the highest-ranking al Qaeda figure to face trial on U.S. soil since the attacks. The Kuwaiti cleric became the voice of al Qaeda recruitment videos after the 2001 attacks. He testified at trial that his role was strictly religious.

Abu Ghaith was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, who said he saw "no remorse whatsoever" from the 48-year-old imam.

"You continue to threaten," the judge said. "You sir, in my assessment, still want to do everything you can to carry out al Qaeda's agenda of killing Americans."

Defense attorney Stanley Cohen asked the judge to impose a 15-year sentence. A prosecutor called for life in prison.

Abu Ghaith was convicted in March on conspiracy charges that he answered Osama bin Laden's request in the hours after the attacks to speak on the widely circulated videos used to recruit new followers willing to go on suicide missions like the 19 who hijacked four commercial jets on Sept. 11.

"The storm of airplanes will not stop," the Kuwaiti imam warned in an October 2001 video that was played for the jury.

Jurors also saw frames of a video made Sept. 12, 2001, in which Abu Ghaith was seated next to bin Laden and two other top al Qaeda leaders as they tried to justify the attacks.

Taking the witness stand in his own defense, Abu Ghaith calmly denied he was an al Qaeda recruiter and claimed his role was a religious one aimed at encouraging all Muslims to rise up against their oppressors. He insisted he agreed to meet with bin Laden in a cave on the night of Sept. 11, 2001, out of respect for bin Laden's standing as a sheik.

Read the full story:  www.cbsnews.com

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Wednesday, September 3, 2014

Meanwhile, in Libya...

September 03, 2014 9/11 , Jet Liners 0 Comments
11 Jetliners 'Missing' After Islamist Takeover Of Airport

Credit:  Masatomo Kuriya / Corbis
Source:  www.scolastic.com
By WND.com, Sept. 1, 2014

Eleven commercial jets have reportedly been stolen in recent weeks in Libya, and Western intelligence agencies have begun warning they could be used in terror attacks on Sept. 11, the anniversary of the devastating Osama bin Laden-orchestrated attacks on New York and Washington that left nearly 3,000 dead.

According to a report in the Free Beacon, the jets were taken by Islamist militias in Libya, and reports distributed within the U.S. government “included a warning that one or more of the aircraft could be used in an attack … on the date marking the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks …”

One official in the report assembled by the highly respected Bill Gertz said, “There are a number of commercial airliners in Libya that are missing. We found out on September 11 what can happen with hijacked planes.”

Gertz now is senior editor of the Free Beacon, but he built his career during 27 years as reporter, editor and columnist with the Washington Times. He’s also authored six books and his online biography reveals the state-run Xinhua news agency in 2006 identified him as the No. 1 “anti-China expert” in the world.

His report about the missing jetliners notes authorities have a high level of concern because of the convergence of the cases of missing airplanes and the 13th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

It also is just two years after the Sept. 11 terror attacks on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya, a scandal that still is reverberating through the Obama administration and threatening to become a game-changer for the 2014 elections.

Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed in that attack.

Read the full story:  www.wnd.com

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Monday, August 11, 2014

"The border fence is a joke"

August 11, 2014 Dailymail.co.uk , Illegal Immigration 0 Comments
Filmmaker Crosses From Mexico To U.S.--Dressed As Osama bin Laden

James O'Keefe dressed as Osama bin Laden
By David Martosko, Aug. 11, 2014, Dailymail.uk.co

A flamethrowing American conservative activist raised eyebrows in the U.S. on Monday by releasing a video of himself crossing the Rio Grande River from Mexico into Texas, dressed as the late al-Qaeda terror mastermind Osama bin Laden.

Guerrilla documentarian James O'Keefe's footage comes at a time when Americans are engaged in a national debate about border security. Tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors from Central America have entered the U.S. illegally in recent months, drawn by a confusing White House policy that appears to offer amnesty for those who make it safely.

In Monday's video release, O'Keefe focuses on the implications for national security: He illegally crosses into Mexico twice and returns – first in street clothes and again in army fatigues, wearing an Osama bin Laden Halloween mask

Read the full story:  www.dailymail.co.uk

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Thursday, July 31, 2014

No, you chose to ignore OBL, had several chances

July 31, 2014 9/11 , Afghanistan 0 Comments
Bill Clinton On 9/10/01: ‘I Could Have Killed’ Bin Laden

Former President Bill Clinton
By Tristyn Bloom, Jul. 31, 2014, Dailycaller.com

Just hours before the planes crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, former president Bill Clinton was in Australia telling businessmen that he “could have killed” Osama Bin Laden during his presidency, but chose not to, MSNBC reports.

“I nearly got him,” he says on newly-released recordings of the September 10 meeting. “And I could have killed him, but I would have to destroy a little town called Kandahar in Afghanistan and kill 300 innocent women and children, and then I would have been no better than him. And so I didn’t do it.” (RELATED: Bill Clinton Sent Handwritten Note To al-Qaida Mosque)

Michael Kroger, one of the businessmen in the meeting who released the recording on Wednesday, said the audio had simply been forgotten about until now.

Read the full story:  www.dailycaller.com

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Sunday, June 15, 2014

FLASHBACK (2009): Does Iraq Make Bush a ‘Failed President’? By Larry Elder --Suppose Saddam had remained in power?

June 15, 2014 al-Qaeda , Articles by Larry Elder 0 Comments
Saddam Hussein
By Larry Elder, Jan. 15, 2009

In his final press conference, President George W. Bush called failing to find WMD in Iraq a "disappointment."

For many historians — not allowing a little history to pass before rendering judgment — this makes him a "failed president." In a 2006 survey of 744 history professors, 82 percent rated President Bush either below average or a failure. Last April, in an informal poll of 109 historians by George Mason University, 98 percent considered him a failed president, and 61 percent judged him one of the worst in American history.

His "crime"? For most of these historians, Bush led the country into an "unnecessary war."

Return to the bad old days immediately following Sept. 11, 2001, when terror attacks killed 3,000 on American soil. Eighty to 90 percent of Americans expected another attack — on American soil — within six months to a year. Critics called Bush asleep at the wheel, that he failed to "connect the dots." Never mind that the 9/11 Commission said that former President Bill Clinton blew several opportunities to kill or capture Osama bin Laden.

Let us recall Saddam Hussein, the "Butcher of Baghdad."

Under President Clinton, Congress voted for — and he signed — the Iraq Liberation Act, calling for "regime change." Saddam Hussein stood in defiance of several United Nations resolutions calling for him to fully account for his weapons of mass destruction. He certainly possessed WMD, having used them against his enemies and his own people. He continually fired at the American and British planes patrolling the southern and northern "no-fly zones" set up to prevent genocide against fellow Iraqis. In addition to stealing billions from the "oil-for-food" program (to what end?), he sent $25,000 apiece to families of homicide bombers who attacked Israelis. Following Saddam's 1990 invasion of Kuwait and the U.S.-led coalition's subsequent expulsion of him, we found Saddam much closer to developing a nuclear weapon than our intelligence community assumed. He later attempted to assassinate former President George H.W. Bush. Estimates vary, but Saddam killed, during his 25-year reign, between 300,000 and 1 million Iraqis.

In the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, all 16 U.S. intelligence departments concluded — with the highest possible level of certainty — that Saddam still possessed stockpiles of chemical and biological WMD. British intel reached the same conclusion. According to former CENTCOM commander Gen. Tommy Franks, officials in Egypt and Jordan told him that they believed the dictator still possessed WMD.

Bush retained the same CIA director, George Tenet, who served under Clinton. Tenet described the case for assuming the dictator possessed WMD a "slam-dunk." After the invasion of Iraq, Clinton publicly said he thought Saddam still had the weapons. A few months after the Iraq invasion, the former president visited Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Manuel Durao Barroso, who later said, "When Clinton was here recently, he told me he was absolutely convinced, given his years in the White House and the access to privileged information which he had, that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction until the end of the Saddam regime."

True, "weapons hunter" David Kay, sent to Iraq to find the stockpiles, found no WMD. But Kay said that Saddam retained the capacity and the intent to restart his program.

Now let's play suppose.

Bush ignores the nearly unanimous intelligence community. He takes no action against Saddam. The dictator remains in power. The sanctions end. He restarts his WMD program. We experience another 9/11 or worse on American soil. Our intel traces the attack back to Saddam. Congress demands investigations for Bush's "failure to heed the clear consensus of the intelligence community and to take appropriate action." Democrats and many Republicans push for impeachment, based on negligence and malfeasance.

Angry members of Congress quote the February 1998 words of the secretary of State under Clinton, Madeleine Albright: "Iraq is a long way from (here), but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risks that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face."

What if we had known before we got there that he possessed no stockpiles of WMD? Would we have invaded? A better question is as follows: Given what the President reasonably thought and the consequences of doing nothing, did he do the right thing?

Osama bin Laden called Iraq the "central front in the war" against the infidels. Gen. Franks said: "The global war on terrorism will be a long fight. But make no mistake about it. We are going to fight the terrorists. The question is: Do we fight them over there, or do we fight them here?"

Support for homicide bombing has fallen dramatically from 2002 to 2007 in seven of eight Muslim countries surveyed — as much as 74 to 34 percent in Lebanon, and 33 to 9 percent in Pakistan. And support for the extreme "Islamist" parties in Muslim countries, with some exceptions, has also declined. Iraq — alone among Muslim Middle Eastern countries — now has a fledgling democracy.

One more thing. We haven't been attacked on American soil since 9/11.

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Monday, June 9, 2014

Obama To Free Gitmo Terrorist ‘Because He Took Up Yoga’ --???

June 09, 2014 Guantanamo Bay , Obama Administration 0 Comments
Inmates at Guantanamo Bay prison
By Paul Sperry, Jun. 7, 2014, Nypost.com

If you thought President Obama’s release of five top Taliban commanders in exchange for POW Bowe Bergdahl was bad, wait until you see what his Gitmo parole board plans.

Desperate to empty the Guantanamo Bay prison by the end of his term, Obama quietly is giving “get out of jail free” cards for the flimsiest of excuses.

One al Qaeda suspect captured in Afghanistan is considered reformed because he took up yoga and read a biography of the Dalai Lama. Another is eligible for release because of his “positive attitude.”

And one longtime detainee, a former bodyguard for Osama bin Laden, is now harmless because he’s going to start a “milk and honey farm.”

The Periodic Review Board already helped clear 78 of the remaining 149 prisoners for release, documents show, and has scheduled more hearings for this summer.

Many of these men were dubbed “forever prisoners” because of the threat they posed to the US — with intelligence officials warning that, if free, they would return to the jihad to kill Americans.

Based on past cases, that’s a good bet.

In a report on detainee recidivism, Obama’s own director of national intelligence this year documented that 178, or 29 percent, of the 614 prisoners already transferred from the prison have been confirmed to have, or are suspected of having, re-engaged in terrorism.

That means for every three freed from Gitmo, one has rejoined the war against us. Intelligence analysts admit their ability to track all former detainees is limited, so the recidivism rate may, in fact, be much higher.

A detainee in an orange jumpsuit is led by US military police at Guantanamo.

One notorious recidivist, Abdullah Gulam Rasoul, became the Taliban’s operations commander in southern Afghanistan soon after his 2007 release from Gitmo. He was blamed for masterminding a surge in roadside attacks against American troops and organizing assaults on US aircraft in Afghanistan.

Another repeat terrorist is Said Ali al-Shihri, who after his 2007 release ran al Qaeda’s Yemeni branch and helped plan the deadly bombing of the US Embassy there.

Already, one of the five Taliban leaders freed last week in exchange for Bergdahl — Mullah Noorullah Noori — has pledged to return to fight Americans in Afghanistan.

Obama’s terrorist parole board was established in 2011. He appoints its members — officials from the Justice Department, Pentagon, State Department and Homeland Security — without a congressional confirmation process. It is secretive and lacking in accountability.

In setting up the Periodic Review Board, meanwhile, Obama prohibited members from relying on information that has been obtained as a result of “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment (in order) to support a determination that continued law of war detention is warranted for a detainee.”

The bias against interrogation evidence potentially opens up the release of some of Gitmo’s hardest cases, including al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah, 2002 Bali bombing mastermind “Hambali,” and Mohammed al-Qahtani, the suspected 20th hijacker of the 9/11 attacks.

But these releases won’t cause the same outcry, because it’s being done in virtual secrecy. Already, more than 600 prisoners have been transferred out of Gitmo with little fanfare. Two hundred of them were sent back to Afghanistan.

As defense lawyer David Remes explained to Al Jazeera news network, “The Periodic Review Board is likely to be predisposed to approval to transfer because the idea here is to close down Guantanamo.”

The inmates slated for release include:

GHALEB NASSER AL-BIHANI, 34

Ghaleb Nasser al-Bihani

“He loves yoga”

What he did: Classified as an “indefinite detainee” in 2010 because of the danger he posed to the US. The Yemeni national was captured in 2001 fighting in Afghanistan. The military said he was a troublemaker while in custody, even inciting riots. He was uncooperative in interviews, showing “ill intentions toward the US.” One of his brothers in Yemen is a leader in al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the terror group’s most lethal branch. ...

Read the full story:  www.nypost.com

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