Obama State Department Invited American Terrorist to Embassy

As you soak in the headline, be reminded that this is the same terrorist for whom President Obama authorized a kill order without due process, despite the fact that he was a United States citizen.  While I personally think such an order was warranted, it’s a move that contradicts every criticism he made of the Bush Administration’s approach to terrorists.  He essentially condone killing US citizens without due process in the courts while condemning what he inaccurately described as “torture.”  — AA

By Tom Fitton

One of the main arguments against the Obama plan to close the Guantanamo Bay detention camp and the president’s attempts to bring “justice” to terrorists in the civilian courts is that upon release, these individuals become doubly dangerous. (We know this from Bush era records we obtained from the Obama administration.)

 

According to records recently obtained by Judicial Watch, one of the beneficiaries of the government’s “catch and release” program for terrorists was none other than Anwar al-Aulaqi, the U.S. citizen assassinated by a U.S. drone on September 30, 2011.

You may recall that in 2010, President Obama reportedly authorized the assassination of al-Aulaqi, the first American citizen added to the government’s “capture or kill” list, describing the radical Muslim Cleric as “chief of external operations for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).” (The Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice had previously determined that targeting and killing of U.S. citizens overseas was legal under domestic and international law.)

The heavily redacted documents received in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by Judicial Watch on September 30, 2011, show that the known terrorist had been in custody and that the Obama State Department hatched an incredible plan to invite him to one of our embassies. The following are highlights from the records:

 

• The U.S. Embassy in Sanaa, Yemen, was asked on March 24, 2011, to issue a communication to al-Aulaqi, requesting him to “appear in person” to pick up an important letter at the “post.” The letter issued by the embassy, which included a partial address for al-Aulaqi, was a revocation of his passport: “The Department?s [sic] action is based upon a determination by the Secretary that Mr. al-Aulaqi [sic] activities abroad are causing and/or likely to cause serious damage to the national security or the foreign policy of the United States.” The embassy was instructed not to inform al-Aulaqi when he came to the embassy that the “important letter” was a passport revocation.

 

• The documents include two “Privacy Act Release Forms” issued by the U.S. Embassy in Sanaa, Yemen, signed by al-Aulaqi. One was dated November 14, 2006, and the other July 2, 2007 –which indicates that he was held for at least eight months. (Press reports had indicated that al-Aulaqi’s arrest was in relation to an al-Qaeda plot to kidnap a U.S. government official.) The documents do not show how long al-Aulaqi was detained or why he was released.

 

• A September 30, 2011, email from Stephanie A. Bruce, Consular Section Chief at the U.S. Embassy in Sanaa to Elizabeth L. Perry, Team Lead for CA/OCS/ACS/NESCA at the State Department, included the following statement: “Elizabeth, I wanted to let you know that the Yemeni Defense Ministry reported that AMCIT Anwar al-AwLaki [sic] was killed in Yemen today.” Except for the added observation, “The statement is being cited in international and regional press reports,” the rest of the email is redacted.

 

• Documents from a related FOIA request that was submitted on October 26, 2011, include records concerning the death of Abdulrahman al-Aulaqi, Anwar al-Aulaqi’s son, who was killed on October 14, 2011. Abdulrahman al-Aulaqi’s death certificate was recorded on November 14, 2011. He is noted on the death certificate as being the 16-year-old son of Anwar al-Aulaqi. The documents also include a “Report of Death of American Citizen Abroad” dated December 20, 2011. The cause of Abdulrahman al-Aulaqi’s death on the form is “unknown.” Press reports indicate Abdulrahman al-Aulaqi was born in Denver, Colorado, and was killed by a U.S. drone strike two weeks after his father was killed.

 

In addition to the arrest noted by the documents in 2006 and 2007, Anwar al-Aulaqi was detained at New York’s JFK airport on October 10, 2002, under a warrant for passport fraud, a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison. However, the FBI ordered al-Aulaqi’s release, even though the arrest warrant was still active at the time of his detention as reported by the Fox News Channel’s Catherine Herridge. Once released, al-Aulaqi then took a flight to Washington, DC, and eventually returned to Yemen.

 

And how dangerous was he?

 

Since September 2009, according to the James Baker III Institute for Public Policy, 26 terrorism cases have been tied to al-Aulaqi, including an association with blind sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, currently in prison for his role in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. Anwar al-Aulaqi was also known to have been in email contact (19 email exchanges) with Major Nidal Hasan, charged with 13 murders during the Fort Hood massacre on November 5, 2009, and allegedly had contacts with at least three of the terrorists who carried out the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States.

 

So allow me to sum up what these records and reporting detail. The Bush administration had Anwar al-Aulaqi in custody. Then it released him. The Obama administration tried to revoke his passport and concocted some Keystone Cop scheme to get him to come to the embassy for notification. (I mean, the idea of inviting al-Aulaqi – a known terrorist – to our embassy in Yemen in order to revoke his passport is beyond belief.) Then President Obama makes the unprecedented decision to assassinate him via drone, later killing his son as well.

 

Look, there aren’t many people who will mourn the killing of this terrorist. But that’s not the point of this story. The point is that the federal government (under both Bush and Obama) bungled attempts to bring justice to terrorists, placing the American people at risk.

 

Anwar al-Aulaqi is just one high-profile example. How many other terrorists have benefited from the incompetence and permissiveness of our government? How many more drones will have to be sent to clean up the mess?

 

Again, we should all give kudos to Catherine Herridge of the Fox News Channel for some excellent reporting on al-Aulaqi, a topic that has been largely ignored by other so-called mainstream press outlets.

 

Our disclosures this week led to some tough questions for the Obama State Department.  According Josh Gerstein of Politico:

 

State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland indicated Wednesday that the embassy did reach out to Al-Awlaki, but he never responded.

 

“He chose not to answer our request for him to come to the embassy,” Nuland said at the daily press briefing. She said that had he come in officials planned to offer him a “one-way passport back to the United States” to face criminal charges. She didn’t specify the charges.

 

Nuland did not respond directly to a provocative question from the Associated Press’s Matthew Lee about whether the U.S. believes it would have had the legal right to kill Al-Awlaki on the spot.

 

“Are you obligated not to kill someone who is responding to such an invitation?” Lee asked.

 

“I’m not going to entertain the notion that we would be calling him to the embassy for that purpose,” Nuland replied.

(Breitbart.com)

 

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Feds arrest four Southern Calif. men in terror plots

LOS ANGELES Four Southern California men have been charged with plotting to kill Americans and destroy U.S. targets overseas by joining al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, federal officials said Monday.

The defendants, including a man who served in the U.S. Air Force, were arrested for plotting to bomb military bases and government facilities, and for planning to engage in “violent jihad,” FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller said in a release.

A federal complaint unsealed Monday says 34-year-old Sohiel Omar Kabir of Pomona introduced two of the other men to the radical Islamist doctrine of Anwar al-Awlaki, a deceased al Qaeda leader. Kabir served in the Air Force from 2000 to 2001.

The other two — 23-year-old Ralph Deleon of Ontario and 21-year-old Miguel Alejandro Santana Vidriales of Upland — converted to Islam in 2010 and began engaging with Kabir and others online in discussions about jihad, including posting radical content to Facebook and expressing extremist views in comments.

They later recruited 21-year-old Arifeen David Gojali of Riverside.

Authorities allege that in Skype calls from Afghanistan, Kabir told the trio he would arrange their meetings with terrorists. Kabir added the would-be jihadists could sleep in mosques or the homes of fellow jihadists once they arrived in Afghanistan.

The trio made plans to depart in mid-November to carry out plots in Afghanistan, primarily, and Yemen, after they sold off belongings to scrape together enough cash to buy plane tickets and made passport arrangements.

In one online conversation, Santana told an FBI undercover agent that he wanted to commit jihad and expressed interest in a jihadist training camp in Jalalabad, Afghanistan.

The complaint also alleges the men went to a shooting range several times, including a Sept. 10 trip in which Deleon told a confidential FBI source that he wanted to be on the front lines overseas and use C-4, an explosive, in an attack. Santana agreed.

“I wanna do C-4s if I could put one of these trucks right here with my, with that. Just drive into, like, the baddest military base,” Santana said, according to the complaint.

Santana added he wanted to use a large quantity of the explosive. “If I’m gonna do that, I’m gonna take out a whole base. Might as well make it, like, big, ya know,” he said.

According to the complaint, at the shooting range that day both Santana and Deleon told a confidential FBI source they were excited about the rewards from becoming a shaheed, which is Arabic for martyr.

Ten days later, during another trip to the shooting range to fire assault-style rifles, Santana told the source he had been around gangs and had no problem taking a life.

On Sept. 30, Gojali was recruited to the plot after he was asked if he had it in him to kill in jihad. Gojali answered, “Yeah, of course.”

“I watch videos on the Internet, and I see what they are doing to our brothers and sisters. … It makes me cry, and it gets like I’m, like, so angered with them,” Gojali said, according to the complaint.

The men wiped their Facebook pages of radical Islamist content and photos of themselves in traditional Muslim attire, and devised a cover story that they were going to Afghanistan to attend Kabir’s wedding.

Federal authorities said the trio and the FBI’s confidential source bought airplane tickets last week for a Sunday flight from Mexico City to Istanbul, with plans to later continue to Kabul.

After Kabir began talking to him about Islam, Santana said he “accepted Islam without knowing anything about it besides it being the truth” and that he believed the religion would help him “fit in and actually be able to fight for something that’s right,” according to the complaint.

If convicted, each defendant faces a maximum of 15 years in federal prison.

Kabir is being detained in Afghanistan. The other three appeared for a detention hearing Monday in Riverside, and all but Gojali were remanded to federal custody with no bail. His detention hearing was delayed.

After-hours calls left for the men’s attorneys were not immediately returned Monday.

A preliminary hearing is slated for Dec. 3, and an arraignment is set for Dec. 5.

Kabir is a naturalized U.S. citizen who was born in Afghanistan. Santana was born in Mexico, while Deleon was born in the Philippines. Both are lawful, permanent U.S. residents. Gojali is a U.S. citizen.

© 2012 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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The Charming Ayman al-Zawhiri Calls for the KIdnapping of Westerners

(CNN) — Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri is calling on Muslims to kidnap Westerners, citing the success in the abduction of American aid worker Warren Weinstein in Pakistan.

In a two-part, more than two-hour video posted on jihadist websites, al-Zawahiri called for the abductions as part of a vow not to “spare any efforts” to free Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, the mastermind behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

“God the great and almighty granted us success to capture the Jewish American Warren Weinstein,” al-Zawahiri said in the video posted Wednesday, according to the terror monitoring group SITE Intelligence.

“We are seeking, by the help of God, to capture others and to incite Muslims to capture the citizens of the countries that are fighting Muslims in order to release our captives.”

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‘9/11 the Second’: Jordan busts 11 suspected of planning mass terror attack

NEW YORK POST: Jordanian security officials yesterday arrested 11 al Qaeda linked suspects believed to be planning what they had dubbed “9/11 the Second” — the bombing of shopping centers and Western diplomatic buildings in Jordan.

“They sought to destabilize [the nation],” said a government spokesman.

They had amassed a cache of arms from Syrian battlefields and planned to use military-style tactics, he added.

The shopping-center hits were to divert attention from the main targets — including US embassies, authorities said.

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9/11 Villains Appear Before Tribunal

USA TODAY

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba (AP) — Five Guantanamo prisoners charged in the Sept. 11 attacks returned before a military tribunal Monday, forgoing the protest that turned their last appearance into an unruly 13-hour spectacle.

But the apparent cooperation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who has said he masterminded the worst terror attack on U.S. soil, and four codefendants did little to speed up proceedings that have stuck in a legal and political morass for years.

Prosecutors and lawyers spent hours arguing the most preliminary of issues, including whether the defendants have to be in court at all, with one attorney saying the hearings may dredge up bad memories of their harsh treatment in CIA detention.

“Our clients may believe that … I don’t want to be subjected to this procedure that transports me here, brings up memories, brings up emotions of things that happened to me,” said Jim Harrington, who represents Ramzi Binalshibh, accused of helping to provide support to the hijackers who crashed planes into the World Trade Center, Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania on Sept. 11, 2001.

The five men sat quietly at the defense tables under the watchful eyes of military guards and several 9/11 family members at the U.S. base in Cuba. Mohammed, his beard dyed a rust color with henna, serenely read legal papers. Two others responded politely to the judge when asked.

All seemed to cooperate with their attorneys in a specially designed high-tech courtroom that allows the government to muffle sounds so spectators behind a glass wall cannot hear classified information.

The orderly scene was in stark contrast to their arraignment in May on charges that include terrorism and murder. At that session, one prisoner was briefly restrained for acting out, Binalshibh launched into an incoherent rant, the men generally ignored the judge and refused to use the court translation system, and two stood up to pray at one point.

Harrington told the court that the defendants may want to boycott future court sessions because they don’t recognize the U.S. government’s authority, or because their transportation from their high-security cells may remind them of the harsh treatment they endured when confined in the CIA’s overseas network of secret prisons before they came to Guantanamo in September 2006.

Prosecutors want the men to be required to attend court sessions. The military judge, Army Col. James Pohl, is weighing several options, including allowing them to skip months of pretrial sessions but requiring their presence at the trial. He had not ruled on the issue before the court adjourned Monday for lunch and a prayer break.

Pohl is presiding over a weeklong hearing to consider about two dozen preliminary legal issues. An eventual trial is likely at least a year away.

The focus of the week’s hearings include broad security rules for the prisoners, including measures to prevent the accused from publicly revealing what happened to them in the CIA prisons.

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Grinnin’ Joe Biden adds more confusion to Libya story with debate claim on security

Vice President Biden’s claim at Thursday’s debate that the administration wasn’t told of requests for more diplomatic security in the run-up to the Libya terror attack added only more confusion to an already muddled narrative.

In addition to raising eyebrows over that comment, the vice president went a step further and threw the intelligence community under the bus — putting the blame squarely on their shoulders for the faulty narrative, pushed for more than a week by the administration, that the attack was a protest spun out of control.

The exchange on Libya, which opened the debate in Kentucky, was among the toughest in a persistently confrontational face-off. But Biden’s comment on security was drawing widespread condemnation from Republicans Friday, with Romney adviser Dan Senor saying Biden “continued the administration’s pattern of misleading” on Libya.

Biden referenced the security when pressed about earlier criticism from Republican running mate Paul Ryan about the protection of diplomatic posts in Libya.

“Well, we weren’t told they wanted more security there. We did not know they wanted more security again,” Biden said.

However, State Department officials who testified Wednesday before a House committee acknowledged there were indeed earlier requests for more security staffing — though they also suggested more staffing would not have prevented the Sept. 11 tragedy in Benghazi.

Two former security officers who testified at that hearing, including former top security official Eric Nordstrom, expressed frustration at how their appeals for more resources were rebuffed.

“We were fighting a losing battle. We couldn’t even keep what we had,” said Lt. Col. Andrew Wood, former head of a 16-member U.S. military team that helped protect the embassy in Tripoli.

During the debate, Ryan later challenged the vice president on his comment.

“There were requests for extra security; those requests were not honored,” he said, adding that there should be Marines in Benghazi.

Biden also stated definitively Thursday that it was the intelligence community that originally surmised the attack was just a protest spun out of control — rather than a coordinated terror strike.

“That was exactly what we were told by the intelligence community. The intelligence community told us that. As they learned more facts about exactly what happened, they changed their assessment,” Biden said.

State Department officials who testified Wednesday suggested as well that when U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice claimed the Sunday after the attack that protests over an anti-Islam film were to blame, she was merely basing her comments on the intelligence at the time.

However, lawmakers by that point had been publicly challenging the notion that the protests were a factor. And sources have since confirmed that some in the intelligence community were pointing to terrorism within 24 hours of the attack.

Fox News

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Al Qaeda Still Dangerous 11 Years Later, No Thanks to Assad

From GerardDirect

al Qaeda-led Rebels Capture Assad Missiles

By Ilana Freedman – September 10, 2012

_______________________________________________________________________________

For many weeks, leaders in the West have been openly concerned about the possibility of Syria’s large stores of chemical and biological weapons falling into the wrong hands. There is considerable disagreement, however, about what constitutes the “wrong hands”, since the West is openly embracing the “opposition forces” and the Syrian Free Army (SFA), which are increasingly dominated by al Qaeda and the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood.

According to a Reuters report at the end of July, the SFA has received dozens of surface-to-air missiles (MANPADS), transported to them through Turkey, whose government supports the rebels. There is alarming photographic and video evidence that the rebels also captured a Syrian arms depot in Damascus, and acquired an unknown quantity of missiles, a development largely ignored by the Western media. ArabNews.com reported the seizure, and the event was caught on amateur video (watch the video at the bottom of our Home Page here), which shows the rebels celebrating around the captured missile containers, amid shouts of “Allah hu Akhbar!” (Allah is great!)

Since the rebel forces are now largely controlled by al Qaeda and the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, the looming question is how will the new supply of weapons affect the balance of power in the war in Syria, whose death toll now approaches an estimated 20,000.

No less important than the capture of the large store of Syrian missiles is the concern that the al Qaeda/Muslim Brotherhood alliance may also obtain possession of Assad’s large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapon. According to a Washington Post article, dated September 6, the “Syrian arsenal contains several hundred tons of chemical weapons and precursors, including sizable quantities of battlefield-ready sarin gas, a deadly nerve agent . . . . scattered among as many as 20 sites throughout the country”.

Is the US Supporting Terror?

How much support the US is providing to the “opposition forces” is not clear.
On August 1, Reuters reported, “President Barack Obama has signed a secret order authorizing US support for rebels seeking to depose Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his government . . . .

“Obama’s order, approved earlier this year and known as an intelligence “finding,” broadly permits the CIA and other U.S. agencies to provide support that could help the rebels oust Assad.”

The US Treasury has confirmed that it granted authorization to the Syrian Support Group, a Washington representative of the Free Syrian Army (one of the most active rebel factions), to conduct financial transactions on the rebel group’s behalf. The authorization was first reported on Friday by Al-Monitor, a Middle East news and commentary website.

In an article dated July 26, they reported that “OFAC letter allows for providing financial, communications and logistics support to the FSA”, which could include paying for FSA salaries and provisions, as well as “communications equipment, satellite imagery, paying for satellite imagery, logistical support for transport, which could mean everything from buying a 4×4 to supporting someone’s travel to Turkey.”

The State Department also confirmed that $25 million for “non-lethal” assistance has been set aside by the US government to support the Syrian opposition for communications equipment and other “non-lethal” support.

Not unlike our support of rebels in Libya, the US has taken the side of a force heavily infiltrated with Islamist, anti-American fighters. Washington is now overtly providing them with support in their fight against the Assad government, who will gladly take our money and other support until they succeed and do not need us anymore. Just as Libya and Egypt fell to the Islamist forces, so, with the assistance of the US, Syria is likely to fall. The end result will be that, just as happened in Libya and Egypt, with the end of Assad’s regime, Syria’s historical character as a secular nation will fall to an Islamist government that will impose Shariah law. The result of our handiwork will be that the so-called “democratic revolution” will succeed, and Syria will pass from one form of tyranny to another.

Iran, Syria’s most ardent ally, is already making contingency plans for the demise of the Assad government. Hezbollah’s leader in Lebanon, Hasan Nasrallah, has been informed by Teheran that should the Assad government fall, he is to go immediately to Teheran. Even Iran sees that its desperate efforts to prop-up the faltering Assad regime may not be enough to stop the forces of Sunni Islamist ambitions.

There is deadly irony in the fact that while the Taliban continues to kill our soldiers in Afghanistan, we are providing support their ideological brothers-in-arms in Syria. In the US conduct of its foreign policy, is it really acceptable to support one evil against another?

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Spain arrests three Al Qaeda suspects

Madrid

Spanish authorities have arrested three suspected Al Qaeda militants who were allegedly planning an attack in “Spain and/or other European countries” and confiscated enough explosives “to destroy a bus,” Interior Minister Jorge Fernández Díaz said today in a press conference.

“It’s one of the most important international [operations] against Al Qaeda,” Mr. Fernández Díaz said. “According to the information from allied intelligence services that are helping in this operation, I can confirm that there are clear indications that these people were planning” a terrorist attack, he said.

Western security officials have grown more concerned about the terrorist threat posed by so-called lone wolves – people who have sympathies with Al Qaeda but act alone or as a small cell, without direction from an organizational authority. Intelligence services suspect there are dozens of such militants in Europe. They are harder to trace or identify than organized groups, as they usually remain inoperative for years.

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CIA Infiltrated Al Qaeda Cell to Stop Bomb Threat

One of the chief complaints about the nation’s counter-terrorism program after 9/11 was the lack of HUMINT.  This is an important coup for the CIA. –AA

By RICHARD ESPOSITO, RHONDA SCHWARTZ and BRIAN ROSS | ABC New

Seal of the C.I.A. – Central Intelligence Agency of the United States Government (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In a stunning intelligence coup, a dangerous al Qaeda bomb cell in Yemen was successfully infiltrated by an inside source who secretly worked for the CIA and several other intelligence agencies, authorities revealed to ABC News.

The inside source is now “safely out of Yemen,” according to one international intelligence official, and was able to bring with him to Saudi Arabia the bomb al Qaeda thought was going to be detonated on a U.S.-bound aircraft.

The bomb, a refined version of the so-called underwear bomb used in a failed attempt on a Detroit-bound flight on Christmas Day 2009, is now at the FBI crime laboratories in Quantico, Virginia.

U.S. officials said they felt confident throughout the operation that the bomb was not an actual threat because the inside source had “control.”

White House counter-terrorism advisor John Brennan reiterated on ABC News’ “Good Morning America” today that the bomb was not an “active threat,” which is why the public was told repeatedly by top administration officials, including Brennan, that there were no known active plots surrounding the anniversary of bin Laden’s death.

Brennan would not discuss the status of the would-be bomber, citing operational security, and declined to say whether the insider had himself been tapped to carry out the plot.

“The means that we were able to get this device, we’re trying to make sure we protect, again, the equities that are involved with it,” he said.

READ: Top Counter-Terrorism Official: No Further Threat From Bomb or Attempted Bomber

Brennan also said he could not say whether there were other bombers still at large.

“You never know what you don’t know,” Brennan said. “I think people getting on a plane today should feel confident their intelligence services are working day in and day out to stop these IEDs [improvised explosive devices] from getting anywhere near a plane, but also I think when they go through the security measures at airports, they understand why they’re in place.”

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al Qaeda’s FUTURE WORKS

pkg-robertson-al-qaeda-documents-combined.cnn

Another must-see report on terrorism from CNN’s best reporter, Nic Robertston- AA

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